“But once the oil is gone, what do factories use for lubricants? Where is the lode of iron? There simply isn’t any.”
“We’re mining the asteroids,” I said. “It’s not like we’re living during the Breakdown, in 1990 or—”
“Sure, that’s a help. In fact, without it Earth would have to cut back drastically and go without a lot of things.”
“It’s that serious?” Mom said.
“I am afraid it is. We have been isolated out here. Any outpost of humanity has a tendency to think of news from home as rather unreal, after a while. I have been following the news summaries sent out from Earth and it looks to me as though things are pretty bad. That Canadian war didn’t help.”
Mom frowned and tugged at her red hair. I suppose Dad hadn’t mentioned any of this to her either, before now.
“Look, Dad,” I said. “The asteroid mines are paying the way for the space program. Why should ISA’s budget problems affect us?”
Dad smiled ruefully. “We knew when we signed on with the Jupiter Project that this Lab was the poor relation of the asteroid program—right, Leyetta?” Mom nodded. “Well, it seems to me things have gotten worse. ISA knows very well it can get metals and rare minerals out of the asteroids. But what can they get out of us?”
“Why, why—lots of things!” I sputtered. “We’re finding out about Jupiter, the biggest planet in the system.”
“Give that young man a silver dollar—asteroid silver, of course.”
“Huh? Isn’t scientific research worth paying for?” I said.
“Matt, dear,” Mom said. “I think you are underestimating the importance of boredom in human history.” With that she got up and began clearing the table. I helped her in my usual style, balancing a saucer on a glass on a plate.
“Your mother speaks like the Delphic oracle,” Dad said, “but she is, as ever, correct. All those intelligent citizens back on Earth aren’t paying for knowledge. They want romance, adventure—vicariously, of course.”
“Adventure?” I said, putting the dishes into the electrostatic cleaner. “Out here?”
“Adventure is someone else doing something dangerous far away,” Mom said. “The Jupiter Project qualifies on all counts.”
“Aw, it’s not so dangerous.”
“Oh?” Dad said. He had gotten out a deck of cards and the cribbage board and was setting up for our standard three-handed game. “Here we sit, surrounded by the radiation from Jupiter’s Van Allen belts, in absolute cold, high vacuum, far from the sun, the nearest help seven months away at best, without even a planet beneath our feet.”
“Okay, it’s a little dangerous. But so is crossing a city street.”
“Getting hit by a commuter bus is ordinary, Matt,” Mom said, “but a meteorite is another matter.”
“Precisely. The trouble is that we’ve been pretty careful out here and nothing very exciting ever happens. That lets out the adventure part. The only thing left is romance.”
“Romance.” I said, thinking. “Oh, you mean hunting around for alien life forms.”
“Yes,” Mom said. She was straightening up the kitchen and making out a list of groceries to request for tomorrow. There isn’t much storage space so she has to plan ahead every day. She flicked on our stereo and light, mellow music flowed into the room and covered the faint noises from other apartments. She looked up at me. “Your father is something of a pessimist about Man as a political animal. But I do agree with him that the man in the street back home cares only about the chances of finding life on Jupiter, dear, no matter what else the Laboratory can do for science.”
“The only trouble is—woe is us—the Lab has not been able to find life,” Dad said. “I suspect the taxpayer and ISA both are getting tired of waiting.”
I spent a moment sorting out the leftover food from our plates and putting it into the disposal tube. Thirty seconds later it would begin a new career as recycled fertilizer in Hydroponics.
“What bothers me most about this damned business,” Dad went on, “is that some people in the Lab have known about ISA’s doubts for months now. A couple of department heads kept their ears to the ground. They’ve been trying to use that information to enhance their own careers—”
He stopped abruptly. One of Dad’s cardinal rules is, no talk about Lab infighting. Gossip is what people turn to when they run out of good conversation. I can remember him saying that there’s no harm in having nothing to say —just try not to say it out loud.
And Dad had started to violate one of his own rules. It meant he must be more worried than I thought.
Mom put an arm around me and said, “Come on, you two. That’s enough. Politics inhibits the reasoning processes.”
“Correct. Cribbage!” Dad said with new energy. “Sharpens the mind, lightens the soul. You’re three games down, Matt, as I remember. Leyetta, your deal.”
The next morning I spent with Mr. Jablons—the one who lost the chess game to Yuri—learning electronics in his low-temperature laboratory. A lot of our instruction is on a one-to-one basis, by necessity.
Take me, for example. I like electronics. I spent more than a year, back when I was twelve years old, building electronic detectors for our satellites. Kids are pretty good at small handwork like that, if you can get them to sit still long enough to get the job done. My specialty was a little beauty called a Faraday Cup. It measures the total number of charged particles that strike a satellite. They have to be built just right, or they’re worthless.
But after all, how many kids are interested in Faraday Cups? When I was learning about them Jenny was maneuvering skimmers and Zak was talking to computers. I comprised a class of one.
That’s the way I like it, too. Big classrooms with thirty kids crammed in, listening to an adult yak for an hour—well, you can keep it. That sort of education went out with the twentieth century and nobody misses it. I’ve heard they’re trying something like it again, though, back on Earth, because the taxpayers have started squawking about the costs of teaching programs. It’s just one more thing to
When Mr. Jablons was satisfied that I understood the new circuitry he’d explained, he left me alone. I built a simple black-box arrangement, incorporating the new circuit, as an exercise. It filtered radio signals and passed one narrow band of wavelengths. I tried it out by listening in to some of the routine signals coming from our observation satellites near Jupiter, and the darn thing actually worked. I congratulated myself and walked down to the Education Center.
I was supposed to put in some time on a teaching machine, brushing up on differential equations. Instead I hung around outside, reading the bulletin board, until Jenny turned up.
“Say, I thought you were logged for teaching machine time now,” she said.
I made a face. “That’s just what I need, a girl who’ll nag me until I straighten up.”
Jenny tossed her head, sending her brown braids tumbling in the low gravity. “I wasn’t aware that you needed any kind of girl at all.” She gave me a fierce snarl. I made a demon face back at her.
“Attention!” the loudspeaker system said. Heads turned in the corridor.
“I have an announcement,” a deep voice said. It was Commander Aarons’. “The
The loudspeaker went dead with a click. I looked at Jenny. “What does that mean?” she said.
I shrugged. “Not much. We’ll have a little longer to get our reports ready.”
“Why bother to announce it? There’s a thirteen month wait between ships anyway. What difference does a few weeks make?”
“Come on, dummy. There’s a favorable configuration between Earth and Jupiter that opens every thirteen months. If the
“How much more? I mean, if ISA is worried about budget—”
“Come on,” I gestured toward one of the study quads. “We can probably find out from computer retrieval.
