Europa

by Robert Mills

  Europa

  Robert Mills

  Copyright © 2017 Robert Mills

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 9781788034272

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Europa is one of Jupiter’s moons and is named after a beautiful Phoenician princess of that name. According to Greek mythology, Zeus saw her gathering flowers and immediately fell in love with her. He transformed himself into a white bull and carried her off to Crete where he made her Queen. Zeus later recreated the shape of the white bull in the stars, forming a constellation now known as Taurus.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter One

  Childhood memories are fragmented and highly selective. The summers of my youth consist of long hot days and the winters of bright sun and crisp snow. Little is fully retained, but I do remember the first day I met my cousin Marvin quite well and the weather was, as I recall, dull and overcast but dry. It seems ridiculous that one of my most enduring memories should include the weather, especially as I’ve spent the last forty years living in an environment where the temperature and humidity are carefully controlled and rain, wind and snow simply don’t exist.

  My brother and I had been told of our cousin’s visit several weeks beforehand and had looked forward to the day with great excitement. Our experience of family members prior to this had mainly been confined to aged aunts and uncles, so the prospect of meeting a family member who was roughly our own age was a new experience for us. My father’s younger sister had married a man who worked as a diplomat and had been attached to the European Federation’s embassy in North America for several years. On their return to England they’d decided to set up home in the city of Oakwood, where we then lived. At that time Oakwood was still outside the edge of Greater London, but by the time I left home to go to university it had been swallowed by the encroaching metropolitan sprawl.

  When the day itself came, I woke early and bombarded my mother with questions about the visitors. Our parents hadn’t seen Marvin since he was a baby, so she could do little to satisfy my curiosity. I knew that he was two years older than me and this at the time seemed an enormous difference. For my younger brother Tom, who was three years younger still, it must have appeared to be an unbridgeable chasm. But Tom, always a confident and unflappable child, made little of it.

  The morning seemed to be interminable. We decided to watch a holographic film, but somehow it failed to hold our attention. From time to time Tom would get up and go to a front window to see if the visitors had arrived. I remained in my seat, though I would have liked to join him. At last we heard the high-pitched whine of a vehicle approaching the house and, rushing to the door, saw a small, silver-coloured electric car come to a stop outside. Its doors opened upwards and from the back seat a tall, lanky boy with sandy hair and freckles climbed out. We hurried out to greet the guests and I stepped forwards with an outstretched hand. “You must be Marvin,” I said. “I’m Symon and this is my brother Tom.” The gesture seems ridiculously formal to me now. After all, I was a boy of nine. But I am prone to gestures of inappropriate formality. It is a trait that would manifest itself again many years later in a ‘health club’ on Jupiter’s moon Ganymede, but more of that later.

  Marvin, however, was clearly at ease with my manner. He smiled and shook my hand warmly. “Glad to meet you too,” he said with a reassuring smile.

  By then my mother had realised that the guests had arrived and came out to welcome them.

  “Synthia,” she cooed, “so lovely you could come. And this must be Marvin. My, what a big boy you are. Have you got a kiss for your aunty?” Marvin was clearly embarrassed, but he bravely applied his lips to my mother’s heavily powdered cheek.

  “Do come through,” she continued. “It’s quite warm really, so I thought we could sit in the garden. Is that alright, Synthia? You boys can play on the lawn. Why don’t you have a game of cricket or something?”

  Escaping the malign influence of the adults, we led Marvin to the lawn that stretched from the terrace behind the house down to the vegetable garden and was large and flat enough to accommodate a game of garden cricket. Even at that time having a garden of any kind was a luxury and ours was an oasis in a desert of ultra-high-rise buildings. Some years later my parents were forced to sell the garden for building. They got a good price for it as the demand for land was escalating exponentially as the population of England grew at a frightening rate.

  Fortunately my father was a keen follower of cricket so we were allowed to play on the lawn, a pleasure that was denied to many of my school friends. There were, however, a number of additional rules not laid down by the game’s governing body that my mother insisted on. We had to play with a tennis ball rather than a cricket ball and fielders must take extreme care when retrieving it from the flowerbeds. Constant complaints from my brother had led to the addition of another rule which stated that each player must have equal opportunity to bat, even if Tom was repeatedly dismissed by my beautifully crafted in-swingers.

  Marvin, it turned out, had no talent for cricket. He waved his bat vaguely at my first delivery, which flew harmlessly through into the hands of Tom, who was keeping wicket. The second removed his middle stump as he failed to offer a stroke. Tom took strike and, having survived the rest of my over, faced Marvin’s bowling. The first three balls were well wide of the stumps. Tom tried manfully to pursue them and make contact, but all in vain. The fourth was on line, but slow and straight, and Tom had no difficulty in dispatching it into the middle of the geraniums. The fifth and sixth were similarly punished. I took the ball again and produced a delivery of lively medium pace that pitched just outs
ide the off stump. Tom was tempted to drive but got an edge that should have carried to Marvin, who was standing well back with the wicket-keeping gloves clasped together, but he failed to catch it. I tried my slower ball and Tom obligingly scooped it up so that I could take an easy catch.

  It was my turn to bat. I was a useful all-rounder in those days and would later become a regular member of the first eleven at my secondary school. Neither Marvin nor Tom was able to get me out and I scored freely around the wicket. On the terrace my mother and aunt were enjoying their cold drinks and chattering constantly. Unfortunately, my mother was also keeping an eye on the progress of the game.

  “You’ve been batting too long, Symon, let the others have a turn,” she called. Reluctantly I relinquished the bat and donned the gloves, standing up for Tom’s slow bowling. Soon a thick edge enabled me to take an easy catch as Marvin flailed ineffectively at the ball. Before long the inequality of the contest extinguished our enjoyment and we adjourned to the terrace to collect glasses of Supa-soda, which we consumed in the shade of the enormous ash tree at the very bottom of the garden.

  The clouds had broken to reveal patches of blue sky. We lay on our backs on the soft turf and looked up through the branches. We talked and talked, completely at ease in each other’s company. After all these years, I can’t remember what we spoke about, but I do recall feeling that in Marvin I had found a kindred spirit.

  At length we heard my mother’s voice from the terrace summoning us to lunch. After we’d finished, we ran out to the garden. This time we made up an adventure in which we were fearless space troopers fighting against overwhelming alien hordes. We stormed their stronghold and braved cosmic storms in our spaceship on our return journey to Earth. We were in the middle of re-entry when we were called in for tea. Afterwards it was time for Marvin to go home, the sound of our reluctant goodbyes ringing in his ears.

  This was undoubtedly a turning point in my life. I was, I suppose, already emerging from childhood and moving uncertainly towards adolescence. Childhood had been a secure environment populated with reassuring fantasies. Our house was a world of its own and each room was a country with its own distinctive inhabitants. As I grew older their societies became more sophisticated and complex. I imagined the house to be a system of caves in which the nations of my fantasy world had their towns and cities. If you’d told me then that I was destined to spend a large part of my adult life in an environment similar to the one that I had created in my mind’s eye, I wouldn’t have believed you. But this imaginary world was about to be confined to history as I began to put childish things behind me.

  During the remainder of the summer holidays we saw a lot of Marvin, sometimes at our house and sometimes when we visited the old semi-detached house in a suburb nearer the centre of Oakwood that was his home. A few years later it was the subject of a compulsory purchase order by the local authority and was demolished to make way for an ultra-high-rise block of flats.

  I remember the house fairly well. It was reached along a road that curved and climbed from the nearest transit station. It stood back from the street behind an unruly hedge. The dark hall opened into a formal sitting room, furnished in a rather old-fashioned style. We were generally excluded from this holy of holies, being banished to the kitchen or Marvin’s bedroom. If it wasn’t raining we spent our time in the garden. Ours was dominated by the wide expanse of the lawn, great for games but lacking in mystery. Marvin’s garden was small and somewhat overgrown with a profusion of trees and bushes. It was a garden in which you could lose yourself, a paradise for the fertile imagination of boys such as us. Sometimes in our adventures our enemies were wizards, witches and goblins, and we were a trio of fearless knights who proved to be invincible in the face of their most fiendish assaults. On other occasions we were spacemen tangling with aliens or soldiers fighting the threat of invasion by a foreign power. At first Tom was our constant companion, but he’d always had the knack of making friends of his own age and soon decided that he’d rather spend his time with them. Marvin and I, on the other hand, became almost inseparable. Our imaginations were so completely in tune that we could always make up a game that we would both enjoy.

  Space travel was a subject that fascinated Marvin and his bedroom wall was covered in pictures of different types of spacecraft. I was given a virtual reality game called Space Pilot for my twelfth birthday and Marvin and I decided to try it out as soon as it was unpacked. It was crude by modern standards but wearing the goggles and holding the joysticks provided while sitting on a couple of ordinary chairs you really felt as if you were on the flight deck of a spaceship. Marvin assumed the role of ship’s captain as a matter of right, barking out orders that I was expected to obey. When he was satisfied that all systems were go, he announced our departure by shouting “blast off” and we pulled back on our joysticks. A virtual force pushed us backwards into our seats until the screen in front of us flashed a message saying that we were in orbit. We spent a lot of time in that simulator and made many voyages across the solar system, visiting each planet in turn. On one occasion we even landed on Jupiter’s moon Europa. Through the virtual windows of our spacecraft we could see an icy waste stretching as far as the eye could see. I can remember thinking at the time that it was somewhere I wouldn’t want to live. Little did I know what fate had in store for me.

  Chapter Two

  The first manned mission to Europa took place in that same year, 2141. For Marvin and I it was a source of considerable fascination and we devoured every piece of information about the development of the Jovian colonies we could lay our hands on. At the time of those early missions, spaceships were still relatively primitive. Shuttle vessels had to use solid rocket boosters to escape the Earth’s gravity, and interplanetary cruisers used the first generation of fusion engines. In those days it took six months or more to arrive in the Jovian system, compared to four weeks for the latest Jovian Express craft.

  When the plans for the Jovian colonies were being drawn up, some experts argued that they should begin by establishing a settlement on Europa, but an initial assessment of its environment indicated that building a colony there was fraught with difficulties. Ganymede was considered but, because of the high levels of radiation on its surface, it was rejected. However, because it is rich in valuable minerals, a mining operation was established there later on. It was therefore decided to establish the first colony on Callisto and a manned spacecraft landed there in 2120. Marvin and I weren’t born then of course, but we learned about it at school.

  The crew found what they expected to find: a lifeless world with an ancient surface that had undergone the most ferocious meteorite bombardment of any planet or moon in the solar system. They established a temporary base that was used by subsequent reconnaissance missions, but building didn’t begin on Callisto in earnest until 2122 when it became clear that no more major developments could occur on Mars.

  Callisto rotates synchronously so that the same side of it, known as the Jovian side, always faces Jupiter. A landing site for the first expedition was chosen on one of the cratered planes on the Jovian side and the explorers stepped onto the rocky surface. They took with them vehicles, modified from those used on Earth’s own moon and later on the surface of Mars, and some of them set off to explore further afield. Apart from the many craters, the surface is featureless, being devoid of any mountains or deep ravines. Some areas are covered with huge ice fields, while others are rocky, like their landing site. In the meantime a team of robots constructed a series of small buildings in which the explorers could live and work while they remained on the surface. These structures are considered to be historically important and were therefore covered by a huge transparent dome when the colony itself was built, and now attract many visitors each year.

  Establishing a colony on Callisto presented different challenges to those of Mars. The outer crust is very thick and composed of ice and rock, and the ocean beneath it is ten kilometres d
eep. An underground settlement like that on Mars was therefore out of the question and in any case unnecessary because of the low radiation levels on the surface. In due course construction began in earnest. A series of huge piles were driven deep into the ground, and the buildings that make up the colony were built on these and connected by a system of tubes through which transit vehicles now ferry people between the different parts of the settlement. The buildings had a variety of functions: there were blocks of apartments to house the settlers, hydroponic farms, factories and offices where they would work, schools and a university where their children would be educated, leisure complexes offering restaurants and various forms of entertainment, and shopping malls.

  One ‘day’ on Callisto is equivalent to 16.7 Earth days, which clearly did not suit human physiology. In any case the difference between ‘day’ and ‘night’ is not as great in terms of light levels as it is on Earth. Accordingly, the public areas within the colony were lit with bright lights during the twelve-hour artificial day or ‘activity period’ and with dimmer lighting during the night or ‘rest period’. They adopted the so-called ‘Jovian clock’, which is synchronised with Greenwich Mean Time.

  While teams of robots and their human supervisors worked on the infrastructure of the colony, others applied themselves to providing the essentials of life. At first water came from ice on the moon’s surface, but it was soon clear that this would not be enough. Accordingly bore holes were sunk to tap into the ocean beneath, and huge water treatment plants were built to make it suitable for human consumption.

  By the time the first settlers arrived in 2125 the spaceport on Callisto’s surface, which would later become the terminal for the Jovian Shuttle, was still under construction, but the orbiting transit station, where interplanetary cruisers would be able to offload and take on passengers, was complete and fully functional.