explanation.”
The room was quiet. Everyone was watching the screen. Blue lines crept out from Jupiter again.
“What could possibly cause it?” I said.
Dr. Kadin narrowed his eyes as he studied the lines.
“Let us go and find out,” he said.
Chapter 15
I was on an emotional roller-coaster, of course. I had been for days, without really realizing it.
Soon Dr. Kadin fell into conversation about how to investigate J-11 and J-12. I sat and listened and slowly, slowly, the tension drained out of me. The room got very clear and bright. My arms and legs felt warm and tingly. The things people were saying were very interesting and I followed the conversation closely. But somehow I couldn’t understand. The words were there, sure…but making the connections got harder…and harder. My eyes were sandy…and my eyelids kept creeping down.
I woke up the next morning. In my own bed.
I lay there for a while, feeling lazy and warm and letting my body drift. I thought about all that had happened. So much had come about by accident, the random collisions between people and events. Or it seemed random…
I mused about that for a while and then I got up. No point in lying around forever. Mom and Dad had already left for work. They left me a note on the newspad, telling me to take it easy and rest up. So I went for a walk, of course.
In the corridors outside, as I walked, I watched the faces. They were intent, but the mood was different from…was it only yesterday? People bustled along with fresh energy. A few recognized me. They stopped and slapped me on the back and said boisterous things. I smiled and told them it was just luck, nothing more, because that was the truth.
Zak was punching into a cubbyhole terminal near the comp center. He was frowning and typing as fast as he could. He looked over and saw me. His eyebrows shot up and he typed faster. In a minute he had cleared his program and gave up the terminal. “Matt-o!” He jumped up and came over to me. “I thought you’d be sipping champagne with the Commander.”
“I’d settle for a bowl of cereal.”
“I suppose you know you’re the man on the white horse around here.”
“Dumb luck.”
“Don’t fight it. People need heroes.”
I grunted. Somehow I knew I wasn’t going to like being the center of attention. “What’s the update?” I asked.
“You don’t know? The
“Really? He’s moving fast.”
“Aarons wants to follow up your discovery, pronto. The way I figure it is, he doesn’t want to give ISA time to react.”
“Why not?”
“They’ll advise extreme caution—you know bureaucracies. And some factions will say we’re faking it, as a last-ditch measure to keep the Can alive.”
“Jeee-sus.”
“Welcome to the real world.”
“So Aarons is going for J-11. What about probing Jupiter’s atmosphere near the poles?”
Zak shrugged. “Most of the bio boys say that stuff you found comes from deep down—too deep for us to reach.”
“Ummm. Hey, you said the crew’s been selected?”
“Yeah. Aarons said—oh, I get it.” He grinned. “You want to go.”
“Sure. Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, yeah, but…” He scowled. “My stock’s not so high right now, anyway.”
“Huh? Why not?”
Zak smiled wryly. “It’s because of you, basically. You remember how Kadin got all fired up about those meteor swarm orbits?”
“Yeah.”
“He assigned a couple of numerical specialists to comb back through the deep-memory storage and get all the records we had. That’ll give us a history of the activity, Kadin thought. Maybe the early automated satellites— the post-Voyager craft—had picked up some odd stuff. So these numerical types went in and got everything out of storage, even the post-Voyager stuff, and started going through it, and…”
He paused significantly. A suspicion blossomed in my mind. “And
Zak nodded sourly.
“You said you had a foolproof place to store ’em.” I couldn’t help laughing.
“No need to cackle with glee,” Zak muttered.
“And it had your ident code, right? So they knew right away whose it was.”
“I never thought anybody’d go back into that old crap.”
“Who nailed you?”
“Aarons called me in. Christ, I didn’t think it would be that big a thing. I mean, with all that’s going on —”
“What’d he say?”
“He gave me a long look and said something about improper use of facilities, and how I’d have a watchdog program on all my work from now on.”
“You got off easy.”
“Yeah. I guess. But I’m not any fair-haired boy, I can tell that. The comp center people keep laughing behind my back.”
“Laughing?”
“Yeah. They seem to find some of what Rebecca and Isaac did, well, amusing.”
“Ummm. Not, uh, exciting?”
“I guess not.” Zak looked sour. I could tell he was more bothered by the laughter than the watchdog program. I mean, to have your sexual fantasies taken as inept comedy…
I suppressed a smile and slapped him on the back. “Come on and have some breakfast.”
“Don’t you want to see the crew manifest for
“Oh yeah.” Zak handed me a disposable printout. I scanned the names. Military people, mostly.
“Going to be some trip, all right,” Zak mused.
“Yeah.” Suddenly I wanted to go. To trace the swarms to their origin.
Zak could read my face. “Come on,” he said. “Forget it. You may be the accidental savior, but you’re still a kid.”
We had breakfast. Zak didn’t mind wolfing down a second; it helped console him. I was kind of quiet, thinking about J-11. Zak scooped up the tofu eggs and grumbled over his bad luck.
“You know,” he said at last, “maybe I should’ve stuck to real life. Forget Rebecca and the business angle.”
“Meaning what?”
“I should’ve put my effort into finding Lady X.”
“You’ll never learn, Zak.”
Zak had a shift to work, so I wandered around for a while at loose ends. I wound up in the inner levels, near Hydroponics, and decided to put in some of my chore time there. Everybody has to do twenty hours a month of
