ellipse that crossed over the northern pole of Jupiter. The interesting thing was that the orbit swept right into the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere—so close that, after a few passes, it would plunge in and burn up from sheer friction. That was unusual. Most of Jupiter’s “asteroid belt” circles around it in the ecliptic plane, far out from Jupiter’s rings and the big moons. This was a good-sized lump, too; radar showed it to be bigger than the Can itself.
Anyway, it was no danger to us. Possibly it had come in from interstellar space just a few days ago. Or maybe it was just an eccentric bit of matter from the asteroid belt. The computer would store the data, and someday a research student back on Earth would use it in a study of the solar system. That’s one of the reasons we—the Jupiter Project—are out here.
The computer nudged me: INVENTORY DUE.
I’d been dawdling, musing about that stray chunk of rock. I thumbed a button and the screen erased. Another button, and I was looking at a set of concentric red circles. The center circle was shaded yellow; it represented Jupiter. Each ring around Jupiter was a survey satellite. Most of them were in close to the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere, orbiting just above the clouds of ammonia. Ammonia is the same stuff used in household cleaners, only in Jove’s chilly upper atmosphere it’s frozen into little crystals.
I went through the inventory, typing out questions for the computer about each satellite. Some were recharging their batteries from sunlight right now and transmitting engineering data. Others were bleeding off the excess charge they’d accumulated from particles in Jupiter’s radiation belts, so they weren’t working at full power. I had to check all these things and be sure the operation was “normal” for that particular satellite.
Routine work, but necessary. We get a lot of vital information from the satellites, and they’re the only way we have of knowing what goes on close to Jupiter. The Can itself is a million kilometers further out.
This time I cleared my board right away. If a satellite had shown a malfunction, though, I’d have to carefully diagnose the trouble and turn the problem over to Jenny or Ishi. A sick satellite is no joke. Whoever was on duty would have to make a house call on the patient and fix the thing on the fly, in free space.
I thought about that, absentmindedly tapping the console keys. I like working in Monitoring, sure, but it didn’t exactly make my blood sing. With only thirty teenagers in the Can. Commander Aarons has made an Eleventh Commandment that we fill in where needed. So my personal preferences hadn’t mattered when they moved me indoors, off the repair gang, and into Monitoring.
But I wanted to be
I grimaced and glanced over at the Caltech catalog. Inside, outside, Earthside—where was I going?
Chapter 3
Zak called me just before I went off shift. He and Ishi were fooling around with nothing much to do. “C’mon over to my place and we’ll goof off,” Zak said. I had some time free, so I went.
Zak and Ishi were back in Zak’s tiny bunkroom, wedged in like sardines. Zak’s parents weren’t home yet and Zak was messing around with the computer terminal he had installed next to his bunk. “Hey, close the door,” Ishi called to me.
“You kidding?” I replied. “The three of us packed in here’ll bring on claustrophobia fits.”
“We want some privacy, Matt old man,” Zak said mysteriously.
So I closed the door and perched on the edge of Zak’s bunk. “For what?”
“This,” Ishi said, with his usual eloquence. He flicked on the big display flatscreen on the wall. A black and white picture formed out of a pearly background fog. A woman. Pretty, with long legs. She was peering off to the left. She wore a flowing robe.
“Who’s she?” I asked.
“A creation of mine.” Zak said.
“A snip from Earthside 3D?” I asked.
“Well, that’s how she got started, yeah. You remember me telling you about those new Simulife codes I got?”
“Sure. For taking a mechanical system and studying the stresses. You start off with a new design for a grappling arm, say, and the computer draws a picture of it for you. Then you give it jobs to do and the computer studies how the thing will move and what strains it will take. You can see the grappler making awkward motions, and redesign it to avoid that. It’s—” I noticed the two of them grinning at me. “Hey…” I said, thinking.
“You are a quick student,” Ishi said wryly. “Show him, Zak.”
Zak punched a read-in code. The woman began to move. She stood up. She smiled right at us and I guessed she was about twenty, maybe twenty-five. She had a nice smile. She was still staring toward me as she reached up and her fingers found a clasp at her throat. The robe fell. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. She was, well, spectacular.
“Damn,” was all I could say.
“I can tap in for color,” Zak said, and her skin became a rosy tan. Green eyes. Dark black hair, so black it seemed to have traces of blue in it. She began to turn slowly. A little mechanically, I thought. But then I, ah, got more interested in the general effect, and she didn’t seem so awkward anymore.
“And 3D.” Ishi prompted.
“Check.” Zak’s fingers talked to the central computer some more and the woman changed from a flat image to one with perspective. Fully rounded, yeah. She had a special luxuriant look about her that…well, bigger and better than life, is the way to put it, I guess. She was certainly better than anything I’d ever seen in the Can. It suddenly struck me that the images of women I’d been seeing on 3D for years were always more spectacular than the women and girls I saw in everyday life. False advertising, sort of.
“Zak, you’ve got a good thing here,” I said. “You’ve surpassed yourself.”
Ishi grinned broadly. “Matt, you lack imagination.”
Zak typed in for a routine he’d obviously set up beforehand. “I call her Rebecca.” he said mildly.
Rebecca began to dance. She was good. She jiggled in all the right places and I followed her movements intently. It was hard to believe a program designed to test out how machines would function, before they were ever built, could do
Then a man walked on stage.
He was naked. And he was visibly interested in Rebecca. Very visibly.
Zak snickered when he saw the expression on my face. “Here we go, boys.”
Zak had imagination, that was for sure. He’d named the guy Isaac. Isaac was big and burly and had been around the world. Rebecca was entranced by him. Anything Isaac wanted, he got. They did it in the regular old Missionary Position, and then in a chair, and then standing up. We three sat there and watched. Nobody said anything, even though I knew this wasn’t new to Zak or Ishi. They were still too interested, though, to make any wise-cracks. Some things you don’t get tired of so fast, I guess. And me…well, for me a lot of it was new. Sure. I’d seen the manuals, and gone to the Becoming An Adult 3D courses they imported from Earth, and all that stuff. But to
“What’ll you have next, gents?” Zak asked. Isaac and Rebecca were still going at it in the middle of the screen. Each of them was staring at the other with fixed smiles. I wondered if it was the mechanical programming or whether people were really like that when they, well. Did It. I had no way of knowing, of course. “Uh…” I began, and stopped. I knew my face was turning red again, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it. Rebecca and Isaac went on with their relentless energy. I knew there was a certain rhythm you were supposed to hit; the books all talked about it that way. The books had spoken about techniques and methods…
“Geez, Matt,” Zak said, “you look like you’re doing your homework.”
Ishi chuckled. I realized I’d been dodging the whole thing by concentrating on the technical points. “Well, maybe that’s the way I am,” I growled.
“C’mon. relax,” Zak said. He tapped his console. Rebecca and Isaac jerked and moved. They got into a new position. Then they were at it again. Bam, bam, bam.
