Dark as Day

by Charles Sheffield

  Close to the lock, the ground, worn down by the passage of many people and vehicles, had taken on the texture of fine sand. Flecks of ice and mica at Jan’s feet glittered in the light of the distant Sun. Farther off, to her left, she saw sunglint on jagged ridges and icy pinnacles. She knew their name—those were the Sabine Hills—but she felt no desire to explore them. A brief pang of homesickness for the soft and rounded contours of Earth came and went. She told herself that the Outer System was home now. She had better get used to the idea. This world and this scenery possessed its own stark splendor.

  It was not until she found herself walking steadily west, toward an array of gantries and scaffolds rising into the black sky like the glittering spires of an alien city, that she finally realized what she was doing. Ahead of her lay one of Ganymede’s main spaceports, the home for hundreds or thousands of vessels ranging in size from single person space-hoppers to full-sized interplanetary liners. In the latter class—she could not see it yet, but already she was looking—was the OSL Achilles, being prepared for its next flight from Ganymede to the Inner System. Paul Marr had told Jan that although he was on leave, he stopped by the ship every day to see how preparations were coming along.

  Jan halted, stared up to the steady stars, and wondered if she should go no farther. Spending his off-duty hours with Paul was one thing, behaving like a fool and interfering with his work was another. But as she looked again to the spidery derricks and gantries, she recognized the solid outline of the Achilles. Her steps, taking orders from somewhere other than her conscious mind, led Jan in that direction.

  Security at the ship—indeed, everywhere on the surface—seemed casual to nonexistent. Jan was able to approach the Achilles, operate the elevator on the scaffold surrounding the ship, and enter an airlock unimpeded and apparently unobserved. It was a shock to emerge from the inner lock and find herself face to face with Captain Kondo.

  He inclined his head to her politely. “It is nice to see you again, Ms. Jannex. How may I help you?”

  Did he have one of those phenomenal memories, which could store away the name of every passenger who ever traveled on the Achilles?

  Kondo’s next words eliminated that idea. “If you are seeking my first officer, you are fortunate in your timing. He is in the engine room, far aft, but he is preparing to leave momentarily. Although you know the way there, I would much prefer you to remain in this location. I will make him aware of your presence.”

  His tone was formal, but as he turned away the captain added, “I feel I am much indebted to you, Ms. Jannex. Many times I have urged Paul to enjoy himself and to take more relaxation between trips, but always to no avail. It seems that you have succeeded where I failed. Have fun with my first officer—but please bring back enough of him to fly the Achilles.”

  After that parting dig he left Jan to wait alone. She stood by the airlock exit, glad that Captain Kondo would not be present to observe her interaction with Paul—whatever it might be.

  Paul appeared a few minutes later. He said, “Jan!”

  It was impossible to tell from the one word of greeting if he was actually pleased to see her. Her suit ruled out a hug or other gesture of affection.

  “I’m sorry, Paul. I wasn’t planning to come up here at all, but then they started the sluicing operation on Sebastian, and it made me feel really uneasy, and I know it’s supposed to be harmless and painless, but he’s going to run a fever, and somehow …” Her voice trailed away.

  “I understand. How long will the operation take?”

  “No one seems sure. Three days, maybe four.”

  “Then the worst possible thing that you could do is hang around all the time with nothing to do but worry. Do you have to be anywhere special for the next few hours?”

  “No.”

  “Then come with me. I guarantee something to take your mind off Sebastian for awhile.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Paul pointed a finger upward, and grinned when he saw Jan’s expression. “No, I don’t mean the forward observation chamber of the Achilles. We’ve been there, done that—or tried to. I knew I would be in the spaceport today, so I booked myself for a space-spin. I asked for a single-seater, but I’ll call and change it to a side-by-side with dual controls.”

  “I’m going to fly a spaceship?”

  “No, you’re not. Another day, maybe, but not today. Division of labor. I do the flying, you do the sight-seeing.”

  Jan had not agreed to go, but apparently refusal was not an option. Paul said, “Give me a minute to get my suit on. Good thing you are all set,” and popped into an adjoining cabin before she could speak.

  Again Jan was left standing alone. She felt much better. There were times when it was good to have someone else making the decisions.

  * * *

  Suited and outside the Achilles, Paul led them across an open expanse of the surface dotted with small spacecraft. Here and there, bright red shields against the solar hail of high-velocity protons hid whatever sat beneath. There were too many ships to count and to Jan the place was a maze. Paul obviously knew exactly where he was going. Fifteen minutes later he halted by a blunt-nosed oddity that reared high on six skinny legs. To Jan’s earth-trained eye it resembled a giant blue dragonfly. Paul patted the side as they came up to it. A hatch in the side promptly opened and deployed a narrow ladder.

  “Don’t you have to make arrangements in advance for this sort of thing?” Jan asked, as they climbed up and dropped into massive cushioned seats. Jan’s at once adjusted to her size.

  “You might think so.” Paul was checking read-outs. “And the average person couldn’t take a ship without special notice. But I’m in the business. It’s one of the perks. A lot of crew become planet-crazy if they’re stuck below surface between flights, so we can fly anytime we want. Ready to go?”

  It was a rhetorical question, because Jan’s weight had suddenly become immense. The dragonfly was rising and rotating, her stomach was turning with it, and the surface of Ganymede dropped away with dizzying speed.

  She said, through clenched teeth, “What’s our acceleration?”

  “One gee.” The cabin had pressurized and Paul was opening his helmet. “I thought I ought to make you feel at home.”

  This was one Earth gravity? But then, before she had time to ponder how quickly the familiar became unfamiliar, she had something else to think about. Another ship, this one ten times their size, flashed by in front of them. Jan saw a line of portholes and people’s heads, and knew that they had missed each other by a few tens of meters.

  “Perfectly safe.” Paul must have heard her gasp. “We’re in the arrival zone, relative positions are controlled to within millimeters. Once we’re clear of this I doubt you’ll see another ship until we come back in to land.”

  “Where are you taking us?”

  “Wherever you’d like to go.”

  “How about Io? I’ve heard it’s spectacular.”

  “It sure is. Spouting volcanoes and lava and flaming sulfur pits. I’ve tried to paint that scene a hundred times, but I’ve always thrown away the result. I can’t even get close to the reality. Whenever I read a description of Hell, I think of Io. But we can’t go there today.”

  “Power limitations?”

  “No. The Moby will run forever. But Ground Control doesn’t want crew members joyriding out to Uranus or Neptune, so they’re stingy on volatiles for reaction mass. Anyway, a round trip to Io is a full day’s ride at our acceleration. We’ll just ride around a bit.”

  Perhaps they would, but at the moment the dragonfly ship seemed to be plunging straight for the center of cloud-racked Jupiter. The planet was swelling visibly, at least in Jan’s imagination. She recalled their last encounter with the planet, and the Achilles’ near-fatal swingby. What on earth had Sebastian been trying to accomplish when he fiddled with the locks? He had never answered her when she asked him that. Jan had never admitted it to Valnia Bloom—in fact, she had insisted on the
exact opposite—but Sebastian’s behavior was becoming steadily more peculiar. Although he still stared endlessly at images of Jupiter and Saturn, he no longer drew their cloud patterns. He no longer seemed to do anything at all. Anyone examining him would conclude that he was half-witted or drugged. He had not always been like that—if he had, he would never have passed the tests, and he and Jan would still be back on Earth. But in his present condition, where in the System could Sebastian possibly be allowed to go next?

  “Mind if I talk?” Paul broke into her thoughts. “You seem a bit out of it.”

  “I’m all right.” Jan could detect a slight change in heading, they were no longer plunging straight for Jupiter. “The view reminded me of … something.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” Paul swiveled his seat to face her. “I was surprised to see you board the Achilles today—surprised, but pleased. Because there’s been something I wanted to say to you, and I’ve been putting it off.”

  What was coming? Jan stiffened in her chair as Paul went on, “We’ve had a great time these past few weeks—at least, I have. But in six days the Achilles will be gone, and I’ll be gone with it. Now, I’m a sailor and I’m probably a typical one. If it hasn’t quite been a girl in every port, it has been a different companion on every trip. Two or three weeks were just enough time to start something going, then when you arrived at your destination you went your separate ways with everything tied off neat and civilized. I won’t lie to you, Jan, I’ve had a hell of a time doing that and there were never any regrets.

  “So I ought to be the last man in the System with any right to complain when something cools off. Except it hasn’t been like that with us. We were really intense on the way out to Ganymede, and again after we arrived until you went off to see how things were with Sebastian. I thought that was it, things were over between us. But you came back and we were hot as ever. I was starting to imagine that we might be something special for the long-term. Then Sebastian had to have this weird operation done, and away you went again.

  “Now, I don’t want you to think I’m jealous of the poor bastard. I’m not. I’m sorry for him, because in my opinion—don’t get mad—he’s not firing on all neurons. But it seems like whenever he’s in trouble, I disappear off the screen so far as you are concerned. Like today. You come aboard the Achilles, and I get a big lift just out of seeing you. Only it turns out you didn’t really come to visit me at all. You came because you were worried about Sebastian. So I bring you up here, thinking this will take your mind off him. But after take-off, you went away somewhere inside your head. Tell me the truth. Were you thinking about Sebastian just now?”

  Jan paused, then reluctantly nodded.

  “Do you wonder if I can’t see any sort of future for the two of us? What do you want, Jan?”

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “I have to leave. The Achilles lifts off in six days.”

  “I know. I didn’t mean that. Look, Sebastian’s operation will be finished in three days. Will you wait that long, then ask me again what I want?”

  “If it has to be that way.” The ship had been following a long curved arc while they talked. Jupiter’s great orb had vanished, and the frosty glitter of Ganymede lay dead ahead. Paul turned to face away from Jan. “I will ask again. But I’m afraid I already know what you’ll say. We’d better close our suits, we’ll be landing in five minutes.”

  “That would be good. I have to get back to the research facility.”

  Jan listened to her own words, and she couldn’t believe she had spoken them. They confirmed all Paul’s worries and doubts. She wished they could ride out, just the two of them, and never come back.

  Except that it wouldn’t work. Her ties to Sebastian were too strong. The hell of Io was nothing compared to the hell that was Ganymede.

  * * *

  Jan had been away for more than three hours. In that time Sebastian, so far as she could tell, had not moved a millimeter. He sat on his bed staring at the false-color display of Jupiter that covered one whole wall. The centuries-long hurricane that formed the Great Red Spot was muted to dull orange. Curling white vortices of ammonia, each one the size of Earth, spun away from its western edge.

  “Sebastian?”

  He did not respond. Jan went across to him and put her fingers to his forehead. Her own hands felt icy, but he was surely warmer than usual.

  “Thirty-eight point two degrees,” said the disembodied voice of Valnia Bloom. “A little fever, but nothing to be concerned about. Don’t worry, I have his bedroom continuously monitored. Everything is going according to plan.”

  “I’d like to stay for awhile.”

  “There’s no problem with that. We can give you your own room, you can spend as much time in it as you like. I’ll make it so you can monitor the bedroom, too.”

  “That would be perfect.” Jan moved to stand directly in front of Sebastian. “How do you feel?”

  “Good.”

  “Not too hot?”

  “No.”

  “Or hungry?”

  “No.” The moon face was impassive. His eyes never left the display.

  Jan recalled the way that he had been on Earth, with his talk of strato-cumulus and cumulo-nimbus cloud layers. Now it was hard work to wring a monosyllable out of him. She had to get him moving, make him think about something more than the damned clouds.

  “Sebastian, do you know where I’ve been? I think you would love it.” She described her trip to the surface, the suited walk across icy rock beneath the unblinking stars, and the wild space-spin with Paul Marr. She gave lots of details and tried to make it sound as exciting as possible. Sebastian did not look at her, but he was certainly listening. Once or twice he nodded.

  At the end Jan said, “Maybe you and I can take a ride together, as soon as the sluicing is finished? We could fly all the way in and swing by Io.”

  That ought to grab him. Back on Earth, Sebastian had been a far better pilot than Jan—an absolute natural, according to the Global Minerals’ sky chief.

  “Maybe.”

  But his flat, neutral voice said, I don’t think so. In spite of anything that Valnia Bloom and Hal Launius might say, or even believe, Jan was profoundly worried.

  A space ride together, to view Io or some other world of the Jovian system? Not unless he changed a lot from his present condition. As he was, Sebastian was not likely to be going anywhere. Ever.

  30

  Contrary to widespread opinion, Bat was not a misogynist. True, he did not enjoy the company of women, but neither did he care for that of men. He tolerated the presence of a select few humans; beyond that he saw no need to venture.

  Nor was he unsympathetic to youth. His own adolescence had been a period of extreme trauma in which he felt at war with the rest of the universe, so he was sympathetic to anyone who had recently endured the same travail.

  The glare with which he greeted the young woman who entered his cubicle therefore had nothing to do with gender or age. It was late at night, he was awaiting the arrival of Alex Ligon, and a closed door should be enough to guarantee privacy. In addition, he had been interrupted while pursuing a difficult and abstract line of thought on the SETI problem.

  The intruder was saved from Bat’s righteous wrath not by anything she said, but by what she did. As she came in she stared at the brown crockpot. Her glance finally moved to the seated figure, but Bat had caught her expression long before that.

  He recognized that look and sympathized with it. The newcomer was hungry, starved-wolf hungry. Such a need excused almost every form of improper behavior.

  Moreover, its satisfaction must not be delayed by the conventional niceties of formal introduction. Bat waved a hand toward the food stand. “Bowls are on the lower rack. Help yourself. Eat, and enjoy.”

  The woman nodded and grabbed the ladle, but she stared round-eyed at Bat as she filled a bowl with herb risotto. Thirty years of rude stares had accustomed him to such a reaction. He s
aid, “When you have taken as much food as you want, I request that you leave. I am expecting a visitor, and you are greatly disturbing my work.”

  The woman mumbled something unintelligible through a mouthful of hot rice, but rather than leaving she swallowed and said, “I’m sorry I came in without asking. Are you Megachirops—the Great Bat?”

  “That is my name within the Puzzle Network. This section is dedicated to Puzzle Network activities. Others are not supposed to be here.”

  Still she did not move, except to continue gobbling the result of Bat’s culinary labors so fast that he knew she could not possibly savor the delicate balance of flavors. Finally she paused between mouthfuls to say, “This tastes wonderful. It’s saving my life. My name is Milly Wu.”

  “Of the Wu-Beston anomaly?” Her presence in the analysis center at last made sense.

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you have a message waiting for you. It came in a few minutes ago from the Argus Station at Jovian L-4. It contains a privacy tag, which means that it can only be read using a cubicle code.” Bat saw no reason to add that privacy tags were no challenge, he had read the message, and the sender had cagily offered no details except to request a return call. He went on, “But there is no cubicle set aside for Milly Wu, and no cubicle code.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I gave you my name but not my Puzzle Network name. I go by Atropos, and I’m in Cubicle Twelve.”

  Few things in the System impressed Bat. When one did he took care not to let it show. This was Milly Wu, discoverer of the Wu-Beston anomaly. And she was Atropos, a journeyman triple champion in the Network. Such talent could be expelled from the room, but not precipitately.

  He asked a polite question, expecting a negative answer. “You must have arrived only recently. Are you making progress in deciphering elements of the SETI signal?”

  Her response made Bat feel that he had made an awful mistake. She crashed the bowl down half-empty on the stand and exclaimed, “Yes! Yes!”