Jupiter Project (21 page)

I watched the huge whirlpools catch up and pass below me. At their centers I could see dark blotches—methane? frozen water?—swirling in a grand, lazy dance. It was hard to believe those blemishes were larger than the Pacific Ocean.

Jupiter filled the sky. This close it is more like an infinite plain than a planet and you can’t really be convinced that you aren’t going to fall into it. Beyond the terminator, in what should have been blackness, I could see thin fingers of yellow lightning playing in cloud banks.

Perhaps Jupiter was the home of the gods and the storms were merely giant tournaments; Jove throwing his thunderbolts…

I caught myself right there. Men have been hypnotized by Jupiter’s vastness before me and I recognized the symptoms.

I gave myself some rations, savored them to stretch out the time, and busied myself by climbing around the
Roadhog
and looking her over. The superconductor fields were working okay. Because of them I couldn’t climb over the side and inspect the undercarriage. I called the Can a few times. After a few tries at persuading me to come back, the bridge officer gave me radiation level readings. They matched pretty closely to mine.

I didn’t think very much about the radiation. I was getting a little more than the “acceptable” dose, but that was just an average worked out for people in all sorts of jobs. If I got a lot there were treatments that would help.

Even if I didn’t make it—so what? Nobody lived forever. I wouldn’t live to see the first star ship leave; I’d never know if there were intelligent life forms living near the Centauri system, or Tau Ceti, or…

I caught myself again. No use getting morbid.

Minutes crawled by, then hours. I dozed.

My radio emergency light was blinking an angry red when I woke up. I ignored it and checked the time. Rendezvous should be coming up.

I looked around to orient myself. Jupiter was still a striped custard below; now I could see a purple darkening toward the pole.

In a few minutes I picked out a white dot that seemed a likely candidate. It grew. I matched velocity and watched Satellite Fourteen resolve itself into an overweight basketball.

I coasted over. The Faraday cup didn’t show any damage; everything looked just the way I had left it.

I disconnected it from the satellite’s electrical system and checked carefully over the outside. Nothing wrong. The heart of a Faraday cup is the grid trapping mechanism. I would have to open it up to get a look at that.

I unclipped a no-torque screwdriver from my suit belt and took the cover off the cup. Everything still looked okay. I removed the backup shields and slid the center of the cup out. It was just big enough to hold in one hand.

The final cover came off easily. Then I saw what was wrong.

The space between anode and cathode was filled with some sort of oil.

I thought back. Oil? That didn’t make sense. I was sure it wasn’t there when I installed the cup. It wasn’t oil, anyway. It was more like sticky dust. I poked a finger into the gap. Some of the stuff stayed on my glove; some more drifted away into space.

I swore. An electrical failure I could understand, but this was out of my department.

What about that old Faraday cup I’d replaced? I hadn’t even looked at it. I’d just let it drift away from the satellite, since I didn’t have any further use for it. Maybe that one had this gunk in it, too.

One thing was certain: I wasn’t going to fix it out here. I took out a plastic sheet and wrapped up the part, dust and all.

I got back in the
Roadhog
, waved good-bye to Fourteen and fired the ion engine.

The work had made me hungry again. I ate some rations and then finally answered my radio.

“Matt?” It was Mr. Jablons.

“Who else?”

“I thought you might like to know that Satellite Seventeen’s cup cleared up a while ago. There appears to be some saturation phenomenon operating.”

“Oh, great. You mean if I’d left the cup on Fourteen alone it would fix itself?”

“Probably. Are you bringing it in?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll need a look at it anyway. A device that fails only when you need it isn’t much use. I’ll meet you at the lock and get right on the problem.”

“Fine.”

After some chatter about the radiation, which was rising again, I switched over to the bridge. They estimated that if the storm followed the same pattern as it had earlier, I wouldn’t get too much of a dosage.

It was a race to get me back to the Can as soon as possible. I was in the fastest possible orbit right now, so there wasn’t much to be done.

“Connect me with Zak Palonski, would you?” I said. While I waited, my headphones beeping and clicking, I reviewed what I’d been thinking about the last few hours. This wasn’t going to be easy to say.

“Matt? Boy, when you go overboard you do it in a big way.”

I grimaced. “Yeah. I—I went
crazy
back there, Zak. Once I got away from the Can and cooled off, I could see that. And why. It’s related to something you told me, once.”

“You mean about that fight back when you were a kid? And Yuri?”

“Right. I’ve gotten them all scrambled up, Zak. That eight-year-old Matt Bohles got so damned scared he was frantically
glad
to get away from Earth. I mean, I must’ve identified those bullies with the way
all
Earthside was going to be. I cried every night for weeks after that fight, you know.”

“So the little kid thought all the rest of life was going to be getting pushed around, bullied.”

“Yeah.” I smiled to myself, thinking back. “Yeah, I can still remember some of those feelings, now that I understand. When we got out to the Can it was—wow!—like being reborn. Everybody was nice. The bigger kids didn’t gang up on me.”

“You could be the smart guy without getting punished for showing off. You didn’t have to be a phony tough guy.”

“Yeah—say! How come you know all that?”

“Hell, you think you’re so different? We’re all kids from pretty highbrow families. We all had those fears.”

“Then why—?” I sputtered.

“I noticed some funny symptoms when Yuri started hassling you. I mean, I figured we kids were all over that stuff by now—but you didn’t seem to be. The way I see it, something about Yuri—his size, maybe—made you regress, go back to the behavior pattern you had in that Earthside playground. You couldn’t deal with him. You retreated into—”

“Dammit! Why didn’t you tell me? I—”

“I didn’t
know.
It was just a hunch. Young Freud, remember? I had to give you a chance to work it out yourself, even though I could see something was bothering you, and it was getting worse. Just telling you wouldn’t have worked either. You had to come on it yourself or it wouldn’t ring true. Remember when you had that dream on Ganymede and I started in on you?”

“Zak the head-shrinker, yeah.”

“You brushed me off.”

“Yeah.” I said quietly.

We were silent for a moment. I could hear Zak breathing into his mike. “Hey, look,” he said awkwardly. “What was it some philosopher said?—‘Self knowledge is usually bad news.’ But that’s not necessarily so.”

I nodded. “Right. Right. Now that I see it. I think I can deal with it. I’m
scared
of going Earthside. I like it out here. It’s
safe.
” I laughed recklessly. “No schoolyards for the big kids to beat me up in.”

“I figure you’ll make it, Matt,” Zak said warmly. “I really do.”

“I’d better.” My sudden elation fizzled out. “Aarons will ship me Earthside for sure.”

“Huh? Why?”

“I went berserk. Zak. Crazy. Unstable. I swiped this shuttle, risked my life, broke regs, beat up Yuri… God, that felt good…”

“I see your point.” Zak said sadly. “
I
know you’ll be okay now, but Aarons doesn’t have any choice.”

“Yeah,” I said. I looked down at Jupiter, endlessly spinning, and felt a bone-deep weariness. “I’m washed up, Zak. This time I’m really finished.”

“Matt?”

“Huh?” I felt drowsy. “Yes?”

“We’ve got trouble.” It was Dad.

“I’m only thirty-three minutes from ETA. What could—”

“That’s the point. We’ve just picked up a big flare on the south pole. Some extraordinary activity.”

“Meaning—?”

“Looks like a burst of high energy stuff, headed out along the magnetic field lines. The whole Jovian magnetosphere is alive with radio noise. And higher than the normal radiation flux, of course.”

“Will it catch me?”

“Looks like it.”

“Damn.” I bit my lip.

“Your fuel is—”

“I’ve already checked. Just enough to brake, maybe a fraction over.”

“I see.” A silence.

I frowned, calculating. I gave the idea about five seconds of solid thought, and then I knew: “Give me a new orbit, Dad. I’m firing along my present trajectory, as of—” I punched the stud—“now.”

A solid kick in the small of my back.

“Wait, Matt, we haven’t computed—”

“Doesn’t matter. Sooner I get going, the more seconds I’ll shave off my arrival time.”

“Well…yes.” Dad said slowly.

I held my thumb on the button, eyeing my fuel tank. Burn, baby. Go! But not too much—

I raised my thumb. The pressure at my back abruptly lifted. “What’s my mid-course correction?” I barked.

“We—we plot you into a delta-vee of zero point three seven at five minutes, forty-three seconds from now.” Dad’s voice was clipped and official. “Transmitting to your inboard on the signal.”

I heard the
beep
a second later. I was on my way. The new course correction would bring me into the Can with minimum time.

“How much did I pick up?”

“I make it seven, no, seven point four minutes.”

“That enough?”

“It’s close. Damned close.”

“Better than frying.”

“Yes, but…”

“Yeah. I know. What’s my reserve?”

“None.”

“What?”

“None. It will take just about every gram of fuel to get you to the top of the Can, instead of flying by at several klicks further out. You may have a few seconds of juice left at the bottom of the tank, but it can’t be more than a small fraction of what you need.”

“Geez.”

“Son. you’ll come into the top pancake.”

“With no brakes.”

“Right.”

“Damned magnetosphere. What’s
causing
all this, Dad? I mean—” I pounded my gloves on the steering column—“why in
hell
does the solar flux have to stack up on us just when Jupiter is throwing out this crap? What’s happening at the poles?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never seen—”

“I
know
that. But, but—” Then I shut up. I was just whining, and I knew it. The universe plays for keeps. It doesn’t give a damn if you’re a screwed-up kid who has gone off on a dumb stunt. Whining wouldn’t help.

The minutes crawled by I made the course correction and watched the Can grow from a bright dot into a slowly spinning target. I fidgeted. I planned. I talked to Dad, but there wasn’t much to say.

I had somewhere between zero and maybe ten seconds of burn time left. Not enough to slow me down much.

I climbed over the rig, detaching every unit and pouch and box that I could shove overboard. The less mass I had, the more braking I could get out of those few seconds of impulse.

I took the Faraday cup and put it in my carry-bag, tucked on the inside of my left leg so nothing could easily bump it. They’re mechanically pretty strong, anyway.

Then I looked at the stars for a moment, trying to think. I had to stay calm and I would have to move fast. I kept thinking that there had to be some way out of this.

The bridge was sending a team out to help. There wasn’t much they could do, of course. There wasn’t much time to deploy a shuttle and boost it out to meet me, match velocities and make a pickup.

The Can arced across from my left, swelling. I swung my scope forward. I could make out the pancake. I was coming in almost edge-on. Were those specks moving? Maybe they were the team that was waiting for me. Or maybe just my imagination.

“Thirty seconds.” Dad’s voice was stiff, tight.

The silvery skin of the Can looked like a Christmas tree ornament. Funny, how I’d never noticed that before. The big cylinder grew and grew against the flat black of space. Stars beamed silently at me. The pancake was spinning serenely, faster than the Can. It was just a big bag of water, but at these speeds—

I saw the idea at the last possible moment. If I ran into the right side of the pancake, its spin angular momentum would be directed against me. But on the
left
side, the spin would be
with
me. The relative velocity between
Roadhog
and the pancake would be less. So if I could—

I spun the attitude jets to the right. The pancake was growing, dead ahead. How much should I give it?

Too much and I’d miss entirely. Miss, and shoot past the Can. And the radiation would
fry
me. When they finally fetched me back home and cracked my suit, I’d look like a potato chip.

But if I gave it too little, the shock of impact would shatter
Roadhog
and me along with it.

I fired the jets. One second, two, three—

I cut it off. We glided leftward. The pancake was a huge spinning sack of water, and I was flying toward it and now laterally across it, closing fast—

—too fast—

I saw specks of light. People. Waving. The pancake became a vast spinning plain. I came shooting toward the edge of it. I could see the thick organiform skin sliding away below me, moving the same direction as
Roadhog,
but slower. We were vectoring down into the plane, like a needle falling toward a spinning record—

There was shouting in my suit phones. I ignored it. I had been so worried about hitting the pancake, but now I
wanted
to hit it, wanted it so bad I could taste it.

I had the engine into braking mode already. But when should I fire? Distances were hard to judge. I could see stenciling on the pancake’s skin now, numbers shooting by below. Closer. Closer—

I jammed a thumb down on the firing stud. One, two…five seconds. The silvery wall of the pancake edge rose up before me. blotting out the stars. Seven—Eight—