“Perhaps,” Grant said.
He shook hands with the minister and turned to walk up the aisle and out of the chapel, thinking, The Lord helps those who help themselves. But what can I do to help myself? What can I do when Dr. Wo is against me?
EXPERIMENTAL ANIMALS
For weeks Grant toiled away in menial drudgery, cleaning glassware in the bio labs, looking up references for the biologists, running their tedious and often incomprehensible reports through computer spellcheck and editing programs, and even scrubbing out the fish tanks in the station’s extensive aquarium.
He quickly found that his major function was repairing old and faulty equipment. From laboratory centrifuges to a wallscreen that had developed a maddening flicker, Grant’s most intellectual pursuit was reading instruction manuals and trying to make sense of them. One whole afternoon he spent trying to free up a stubbornly stuck drawer in a biochemistry department file cabinet. He finally got the drawer open, but his fingers were battered and the knuckles of both his hands were raw and bleeding.
It was mindless work, sheer dumb labor that a trained chimpanzee could have done. Grant realized that much of the station’s equipment was outmoded and long due for replacement. Like the furniture in the living quarters, like the cafeteria and the threadbare carpeting along the main corridor, the laboratory equipment was shabby.
His schedule seemed to be at odds with those of the few friends he had made. Only rarely did he see Karlstad or Muzorawa or any of the others he knew, and when they did manage to sit together in the cafeteria, they discussed their work, the scientific problems they were struggling with. All Grant could talk about was his hours of sweatshop labor.
Muzorawa introduced him to two more members of the small team focused on Jupiter itself: Patricia Buono was a medical doctor, short, plump, with curly honey-blond hair so thick and heavy that Grant wondered how she could keep her head up under the load. Kayla Ukara was from Tanzania, her skin even darker than Zeb’s, her eyes seething with a fierce emotion that Grant could not fathom; she seemed perpetually on guard, always ready to snap or snarl.
Karlstad grinned when Grant told him he had met the two women.
“Patti and Kayla,” he said, with a knowing air. “The butterball and the panther.”
“Panther,” Grant mused. Yes, it suited Ukara, he thought. A prowling black cat, sleek and powerful and dangerous.
“Know what Patti’s name translates to?” Karlstad asked, still grinning.
“What?”
“Patti Buono … it means ‘pat well.’”
Grant shook his head. Dr. Buono seemed more motherly than sexy. “She’s not my type,” he said.
“Mine, neither. I like ’em long and lean, like Lainie.”
Grant attended chapel services most Sundays, but the people he met there seemed totally indifferent to him. A newcomer, he was not part of their social life. And he didn’t know how to break into their cliques and make friends with them.
Then, one Sunday, he saw Tamiko Hideshi at the worship service. Delighted to see a familiar, friendly face, Grant slipped out of his pew to sit next to her.
“I didn’t know you were a Presbyterian,” Grant said as they left the chapel together.
“I’m not,” she said with a toothy grin. “But they don’t have any Shinto services, so I rotate among the services that are available. Today is my Presbyter Sunday.”
“You go to all the services?”
“Only one per week,” she said. “It’s like being a spy, sort of: checking on the competition.”
Grant’s breath caught when she said
He bumped into Lane O’Hara now and then, mostly in the aquarium, but she was strictly business, a staff scooter telling a grad student which chore had to be done next. Now and then he saw her swimming in the tank with the dolphins, a sleek white wetsuit covering her completely yet revealing every curve of her lean, lithe body. She swam among them happily, playfully, as if she were at home with the dolphins, glad to be with them in their element, much friendlier to them than she was to Grant.
Every night Grant prayed for release from his slavery. How am I going to get a doctorate when I’m stuck washing glassware and fixing broken-down equipment?
He felt so depressed, so ashamed of how low he had fallen, that he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it in his messages to Marjorie. Guardedly, he told his parents about the situation. His mother was nearly in tears when she replied; his father counseled patience.
“They’re just testing you, I’m certain. Do your best and soon enough they’ll see that you’re too talented to remain a lab helper. This is a test, you’ll see.”
Grant hoped his father was right but didn’t believe a word of it. He begged his parents not to reveal his problem to Marjorie.
He tried to be upbeat and smiling when he spoke to his wife, avoiding any mention of the work he was doing. Worst of all, he realized he was not accomplishing one iota of progress toward his doctorate in astrophysics. There wasn’t even another astrophysicist in the station to serve as his mentor-assuming he had time to continue his studies.
Marjorie’s messages to him became rarer, as well. She was obviously busy and immersed in her work. She still seemed cheerful and energetic, smiling into the camera for him even when she looked tired and sheened with perspiration. Often she appeared to be in a tent or in some clearing in a tropical forest. Once he saw a raging fire behind her, hot flames licking angrily through the trees and thick oily black smoke billowing skyward, while heavily armed troops in the sky-blue helmets of the International Peacekeeping Force prowled past. Yet she always seemed chipper, enthusiastic, telling Grant excitedly of their success in tracking down hidden drug factories or caches of biological weapons.
Yet Grant saw something in Marjorie’s bright, joyful face that puzzled him. For weeks he tried to determine what it was. And then it hit him. She was pleased with herself! She was delighted with the work she was doing, excited to be helping to make the world better, safer— while all Grant was doing was janitorial work in a remote station hundreds of millions of kilometers from home.
And he realized one other thing, as well. Marjorie no longer ended her messages with a count of the hours until they would be reunited.
I’ve lost her, Grant told himself. By the time I get back to Earth we’ll be strangers to each other.
Still he could not bring himself to mention his fears to Marjorie. He could not tell her of his loneliness, his weariness, his growing desperation. He tried to be cheerful and smiling when he spoke to her, knowing that she was doing the same in her messages to him. Is she trying to keep my spirits up? Grant asked himself. Or is she just being kind to me? Does she still love me?
Then he wondered if he still loved her, and was shocked to realize that he did not know whether he did or not.
He saw Sheena often enough, shambling through the narrow corridor of the aquarium or sitting quietly in her glassteel pen, munching on mountains of celery and melons. The gorilla was like a two-year-old child: Her repertoire of behaviors was quickly exhausted and her conversation was limited to a dozen simple declarations. In the back of his mind Grant marveled at the fact that he could accept a talking gorilla as commonplace.
On the other hand, Sheena was so massive and strong that she frightened Grant, even though she showed no indication of violence. But every time he looked into the gorilla’s deep brown eyes he saw
