His mind spun. But then, as he walked aimlessly past his own door and continued blindly along the corridor, he realized that Lane had said she’d be interested in him after the mission, after the neurosurgeons had restored her to normal.
She knows I’m married, Grant said to himself. And I kissed her. I wanted her! I would’ve broken my marriage vows. He knew he should feel ashamed, desolated. Infidelity in the mind was almost as bad as actual adultery, he knew.
Yet, instead, he felt strangely excited, almost pleased with himself. That’s wrong, he raged silently. You’re committing a sin.
Three uniformed guards were walking up the corridor toward him, two women and the guard captain, a tall, burly Albanian with a large patrician nose and a graying buzz cut. He had the physique of a weight lifter: muscles bulged beneath his skintight shirt.
“Working late, are you?” asked the captain in an easy, friendly tone. Still, Grant felt a slight hint of menace beneath the words.
“I’m just heading for my quarters,” Grant said.
The three of them glanced at the wet stain on Grant’s slacks. Both women grinned.
Grant felt his cheeks burn. It must look like I’ve wet myself. Or—he reddened even more. My god, what am I going to do? How can I survive here?
DYNAMICS
Grant buried himself in his new job in Muzorawa’s lab. To his happy surprise he found himself becoming truly fascinated by the fluid dynamics of Jupiter’s ocean.
Muzorawa had constructed a computer model of the planet-girdling ocean, based on data from the probes they had sent below the clouds. It was at best a set of rough approximations. Grant was determined to refine them and generate a true picture of how that vast ammonia-laced sea actually behaved.
They worked together in the fluid dynamics lab. Grant thought it was slightly ridiculous to call the cramped little compartment a laboratory. There was no real experimental work going on. The only equipment there was a desktop-size hypersonic wind tunnel, a small shock tube—which looked like nothing more than a narrow length of stainless steel pipe—and a two-meter-tall transparent tank that served as a cloud simulator. There was nothing in the lab that could simulate the pressures and temperatures of the Jovian ocean. Actually, there was no laboratory apparatus in the solar system that could come close to simulating Jovian conditions. So they worked with computer simulations, instead: electronic approximations to reality, programs that accepted what little they knew and played it back to them.
GIGO, Grant thought. Garbage in, garbage out. On outdated computers, at that. Equations were no substitute for real data.
“This research would make a good doctoral thesis,” Muzorawa told him one day as they sat side by side at the computer desk.
“Doctoral thesis?” Grant echoed.
The Sudanese cocked his head slightly, as if thinking about the matter. At last he replied, “Yes, if you don’t mind switching your subject to planetary astrophysics instead of stellar.”
Grant mulled the idea. I could put my time here to good use, he thought. Instead of wasting the four years I could come out of this with a doctorate … and then go on to what I want to do after I get a university post.
“You would have to do all the course work, naturally,” Muzorawa went on in his deliberate, considered manner. “We can get the necessary materials sent from my department at Cairo. I can provide the supervision for it and—”
Grant’s eyes widened. “You’re on the faculty at Cairo?”
“In the physics department,” Muzorawa answered matter-of-factly. “Professor of fluid dynamics.”
“That’s the oldest university in the world,” Grant marveled.
Muzorawa smiled slowly. “Yes, true. Al-Azhar was founded in the tenth century by the Ismali Fatimids. It was co-opted into the University of Cairo somewhat later.” His smile broadened. “The physics department is a comparatively new addition.”
“But what are you doing here if you’ve got a full professorship at Cairo?”
Muzorawa seemed almost surprised by Grant’s question. “I am here to study Jupiter’s interior. It’s the greatest problem in fluid dynamics that is accessible to direct observation.”
“You’re here voluntarily?”
The black man nodded gravely. “I intend to remain here as long as I can. Jupiter’s ocean is the kind of problem that can take a lifetime and more.”
Grant could only shake his head in awe. This is my mentor, he thought with pride. He’s going to be my thesis advisor. It didn’t occur to Grant to wonder about the sanity of a man who willingly chose to live in an orbiting station that never got closer to Earth than six hundred million kilometers.
That night, for the first time in months, Grant sent genuinely happy messages to Marjorie and his parents. He hadn’t heard from his wife in more than a week, but he knew she was busy. She’d looked tired in her last message, weary and apprehensive. Is she ill? He wondered. Is she hiding something from me? Does she still love me?
He wondered about that. How can you stay in love with someone when you’re separated for six years, millions of kilometers apart? He was struggling to keep thoughts of Lane O’Hara out of his conscious mind, out of his dreams, even. Marjorie was surrounded by handsome young military officers and university graduates on their Public Service tours of duty: dozens of them, hundreds of them.
Still, he had good news to tell her for the first time since he’d shipped off Earth, and he kept smiling all through his message to her. It wasn’t until the computer was off for the night and all the lights in his room were turned down and he was alone in bed in the darkness that his fears about Marjorie warped his face into a pained mask of misery. He tried to pray, but the words felt empty, useless.
As the weeks passed, Muzorawa spent more and more of his time training for the coming crewed mission, less and less on the fluid dynamics problem.
“I’m afraid it’s going to be mostly on your shoulders,” Muzorawa told Grant.
“I can handle it.”
“I’m sorry to lay all this work on you,” Muzorawa went on, staring at the graph Grant had put on the wall screen.
“You can’t be in two places at one time,” Grant said.
“Still … I wanted to get this work in better shape before handing it off to you.”
“You’ve done the lion’s share,” Grant assured him. “Setting up the basic equations and all.”
Muzorawa nodded, but his face showed that he was not satisfied with the situation.
Grant was. For the first time since leaving Earth he had some real work to do. A challenge. It wasn’t stellar astrophysics, but it was almost as good. Nobody understood how Jupiter’s interior worked. Nobody! It was unexplored territory and Grant had the opportunity to blaze a trail through the unknown. He intended to make the best of it.
He’d been surprised, at first, when he found that Muzorawa’s fluid dynamics “group” consisted of the Sudanese alone.
“I thought Tamiko worked with you,” Grant had said.
“She did, studying the clouds, mainly,” Muzorawa replied. “But she was reassigned to the problem of Europa’s ocean.”
There had been two other fluid dynamicists, Muzorawa told him.
“Lucy Denova was a fine scientist,” he recalled, “with a first-rate mind. But the instant her tour of duty here ended she fled back to Selene. She’s teaching at the university there now. She still checks in with me now and then.” He chuckled wryly. “But she wants no part of this station. Not at all. She prefers her home on the
