Jupiter Project jp-1

by Gregory Benford

  “There isn’t any answer, no matter what people like Bohles think,” Yuri said, jutting out his jaw.

  “Okay,” I said, “give us a hard one.”

  “I would like to hear about it,” Jenny said, turning on a brilliant smile.

  So Yuri launched into a song and dance about the incredible hardships his group worked under, and how his father in BioTech was shouldering a staggering, superhuman work load—well, that was the implication, anyway. He gave us a lot of facts and figures to go with it, and those were interesting stuff, the straight scoop. As I listened it dawned on me that Yuri was going to be stiff competition for a staff position in the Lab. Commander Aarons and the others were going to be weighing him against me…

  I focused my attention back on the conversation. Yuri was describing their latest descent, the one that malfunctioned from pressure overload.

  “Meaning, it got squeezed to death,” Zak put in.

  “—before it could report on its experiments to find life. But the package of instruments did show that deep in the methane and ammonia there is water and it is warm, as warm as this room is now. All the conditions necessary for life are satisfied.”

  “Then why haven’t you found any?” Jenny asked innocently.

  Yuri pressed his lips together. “We don’t know.”

  “Yuri, you help put together the rockets that drop instrument packages into Jupiter. It’s not your fault if they don’t turn up anything.” Jenny said comfortingly.

  “Right,” Zak murmured.

  “What puzzles me is that your probes go deeper and deeper, until the pressure crushes them, and they still don’t find any living matter. No airborne spores, no bacteria, nothing,” I said.

  “We’ll find some. Bohles,” Yuri said, with a sudden flash of anger. “Just give me elbow room. You will see results.” And with that he got up and left the room.

  “Well, all this outdoorsy stuff didn’t calm him down any,” Zak said. “So much for the healing effects of bird songs.”

  “Yeah,” I murmured, “he was going along fine for a while there, I guess we just reminded him of his problems and he covered up his worries by getting mad at us.”

  “Pretty deep analysis, doctor,” Zak said.

  “Go on, you two,” Jenny said. She got up and palmed the room lights down, and then left.

  “I cast off for Ganymede tomorrow,” I said, “should do me good to get away from Yuri.”

  “You can count me in as well,” Zak said.

  “You’re going?”

  “I don’t much want to, but the psych people say I should,” Zak shrugged.

  We watched Jenny walk down the corridor and out of sight. Skirts are even more impractical in low gravity than they are on Earth—harder to keep from creeping up, for one thing—so everybody wears pants. But there’s no way to disguise a woman when she wants to be noticed, and Jenny departing was far more pleasant and interesting a view than the fake countryside of the meeting room.

  “I think she’s a little miffed that her peacemaker attempt between you and Yuri fell flat. She’ll be okay by tonight.”

  “Sure. See you at 1900 hours? Got to go practice my guitar.”

  1900 hours meant a small party at Ishi’s apartment. Ishi’s parents maintain as much of the traditional Japanese life as they can, living 390 million miles from Nippon. They sit cross-legged on the floor, on tatami mats, and have delicately shaded woodblock prints on their walls. In the air hangs a faint background smell of rice and the salt tang of fish. It all blends together into a warm feeling of home.

  Zak, Jenny, and I sat in Buddha position and took part in the ancient tea ceremony, exchanging small talk with Ishi and his parents. (My back ached, but I like the mild green tea.) Ishi didn’t seem bothered by the speculation over sending us Earthside. But then, nothing ever seems to disturb Ishi.

  I didn’t mention his Lady X to him, even though I sort of wanted to. I didn’t have any specific questions in mind, but still… The best way I can explain it is that Ishi had been there. and I hadn’t. And it really was true, what Zak said about how a kid should spend his summer vacation trying to get laid.

  It was a quiet evening. After the party broke up I walked Jenny home. Making our way through the hushed corridors, with only the whirr of the air circulators, I noticed that I did feel kind of uneasy with Jenny. She was more like a buddy to me than a, well, a woman. Females have a clear moment when they change from girls to women, at least in the biological sense. Males don’t have that. I wondered if it explained some of the way I was feeling. Boys had no way to tell they were men. I mean, nobody pinned a badge on you or anything. So maybe in the back of our heads all the guys I knew in the Can were still boys, without that magic touch. Getting Laid was for sure one signpost, though. There just didn’t seem to be any easy way to do it. Society sure as hell didn’t help. And the whole damned business seemed so irrational, too. Why should I keep feeling that odd, diffused affection for Jenny? Maybe Zak’s kibbutzim analogy was right after all.

  Anyway, when we stopped outside her door. I leaned over and kissed her. The idea seemed to go over. She put her arms around my neck and the ol’ pulse rate picked up a bit. But then she let go and smiled and stepped back and murmured something nice and that was it. I made a grin I could tell looked awkward and foolish.

  I felt confused on the way home. I wasn’t very good at figuring out the swirl of emotions I had inside me. But then I shrugged. Forget it, I told myself. Concentrate on the problem in front of you; that’s always a good rule. Take ’em one at a time. In the morning I was bound for Ganymede, the fourth moon of Jupiter. I forgot about Jenny and Zak and Ishi and Rebecca the passionate, and went on home to get some sleep.

  Chapter 5

  We assembled near the axis of the Can, already suited up. All Laboratory vehicles, from the small one-man shuttles Jenny and Ishi used, to the ion cruiser used on the Ganymede run, are kept in the center of the Can.

  As I said before, the Can is a big rotating drum. Most of that drum is empty. The middle of the Can, except for the axial cylinder and the connecting spokes, is open to free space. Our cruiser was parked there and we had to go out and board her.

  Captain Vandez stood at the air lock, checking over each of us to be sure we had all our suit vents closed, hadn’t put our helmets on backwards, or something equally stupid. It’s in the regs; he has to do it. A technician who never goes outside can forget a lot in the nine months between mandatory “vacations” on Ganymede. Anything overlooked in free space can be fatal.

  “Sing out when I call your name.” the Captain shouted. “Williams! Kandisi! Bohles!”

  I answered and turned to look at the rest of the party. Zak waved from the other side of the tube, where he was holding onto an inset ladder. We were in very light gravity, almost at the axis. Orange signs reading ANCHOR YOUR LIFELINE—ALWAYS! jumped out at you from the white walls.

  “Sagdaeff!”

  Yuri answered “Yo!” I twisted around; he was ten meters behind me. I had a funny empty feeling.

  In a moment Captain Vandez said. “You have all been on this milk run before, so I will not make a big speech about being careful. Remember, the Sagan is an ordinary cruiser. She’s adequately shielded against high energy particles but we can’t carry the mass to stop big chunks of rock, or even little ones. That means everybody stays in their suits, with helmets in place and ready to seal, always. Anybody violating the rules will have to deal directly with me, and that can be unpleasant. All right, into the lock!”

  We filed in. We were exiting through one of the personnel locks and there were handholds everywhere. I felt a thrumming vibration through the soles of my suit as the pumps sucked the air out of the crowded lock. My suit limbered up and my arms and legs became easier to move. I read the meters and colored displays set below the edge of my viewplate, to be sure my suit was feeding air properly, balancing my temperature and perspiration, etc. The air tasted a little oily, but then, it always does. Ther
e are some things engineering never does get around to solving.

  The vibration stopped, a red light winked over to green above the big door, and the outer hatch came free. Captain Vandez pushed it open himself. He gestured at a silvery thread fastened to the edge of the lock. It snaked away beyond view. The fellow in front of me leaned forward and snagged it. He climbed along it, hand over hand.

  I was next. I clamped a sliding fastener to the line and cast off gently from the lock with a kick.

  Every time you go out, it hits you hard. I was coasting along toward the “top” of the Can. The “lid” was pulled aside, to let the Sagan out. It looked like I was gliding toward an ocean of stars, down a bright metal tube. The safety line ended by a lock in the side of a spiderlike fusion cruiser, the Sagan. She was moored near the very top of the Can, against that awesome backdrop of stars.

  The thing I tike best about open space is the feeling of complete, utter freedom. It’s as if I was a bird, able to fly straight and true.

  Part of all this poetry comes from the feeling of weightlessness. Zero-g is pleasant enough inside the Can, but out here there’s a sensation of freewheeling liberty. It’s like having a weight lifted from your shoulders that you hadn’t even known you were carrying. I felt great.

  The man ahead of me had reached the cruiser. I watched as the Sagan grew, and I tumbled over just in time to brake my impact. I felt a touch proud of the maneuver; it proved that freefall squash had kept my zero-g reflexes in shape.

  I slipped carefully into the Sagan’s lock. The inner hatch was open. I pulled myself through and found myself in a long room with passenger seating arranged completely around the walls. A man in a ship’s officer’s suit gestured to a seat and I sat down. I clipped my thigh fasteners to the seat and waited.

  The cylinder was filling rapidly. Our luggage had been brought aboard earlier—they didn’t want people trying to carry cases while they negotiated their way across to the Sagan.

  Zak came aboard and clipped in next to me. I noticed he was already eating some of the food rations recessed in his helmet. I hoped I never felt that hungry: the rations are balanced for nutrition and high protein, but they come out of squeeze tubes and I’ve never been able to get over the feeling that I’m eating toothpaste.

  After a while everyone was in and the lock closed. I felt a tug of acceleration as the Sagan nosed out of its mooring point and drifted free of the Can. There wasn’t any way to see this, of course: the passenger cabin was just a concession to us poor cattle and doesn’t have any viewing screens.

  There wasn’t any cheerful speech by Captain Vandez, either, about our destination and flying time and how soon we could expect to be touching down on Ganymede. This isn’t a commercial airline. Instead, after some nudging back and forth by the attitude jets. I felt a sudden kick in the stomach. At least, that’s what it feels like when you aren’t ready for it. The Sagan was accelerating away from Jupiter at about one g. For the first minute or so it felt decidedly uncomfortable. Then my body remembered where it was born and accepted one g as normal; my muscles relaxed a little and my breathing leveled out.

  The odd thing about the Sagan—or any fusion rocket craft—is the silence. I guess I’ve watched too many old-time movies about the adventures of Captain Daring, Space Explorer. In those the rockets always take off with a roar like a lion with a hotfoot. The ship throws flame and sparks everywhere. Captain Daring clenches his teeth as the vibration shakes him, and you would swear that a hydrogen bomb couldn’t make more of a racket.

  Maybe it was like that, once. Now, out in free space, chemical rockets are as outdated as the horse. We use them to brake atmospheric probes as they fall into Jupiter, but that’s because they’re a one-time-only item. Those little one-way jobs are the only ones I know that we use chemical rockets for nowadays. The days of Captain Daring and his thundering jets are gone.

  Still, they might be an improvement over the dead quiet way the Sagan takes off. There’s something kind of creepy about smoothly gliding away from the Can, with no sendoff at all.

  Zak tells me I’m a romantic. Maybe so. Or maybe I just watch more old movies than he does.

  After the acceleration leveled off I leaned my helmet against Zak’s. “Want to see the view?”

  He nodded. I got up and pushed off toward the front of the passengers’ compartment. Captain Vandez hadn’t started spinup or pressurized the ship yet. I met an officer just coming in the hatch and touched helmets with him.

  “Okay if we go forward and watch over a 3D?”

  “Well, Ah suppose so. How many a you? Jest two? Go on, then. Grab a handhold, mind, don’t jest float around. Nevah know when somethin’ might up an’ happen.”

  I waved to Zak and wriggled through the hatch. The next compartment was half-filled with baggage secured in netting. We were in the inner tube that ran down the axis of the Sagan. Around us on all sides were storage tanks. At the moment the tanks were empty; the Sagan was returning to Ganymede for more water.

  Against the walls were several 3D screens. These were the only concessions to the passengers, aside from seats, that the Sagan made. The screens gave front, rear, and several side views. In color.

  Zak bumped into me, but I ignored him. I was busy trying to estimate our trajectory. The rear view was the interesting one.

  No, “interesting” isn’t the right word. Beautiful is more like it. In the center of the screen, directly behind the Sagan, was Jupiter.

  Jupiter. King of the ancient gods. Lord of the Romans. The lion. The giant. The fat man. Jove.

  It filled the screen, striped with horizontal bands of yellowish-brown. The bands churn like thick smoke, each band revolving at different velocities. At the equator the swirling clouds go around Jupiter in just under ten hours.

  That’s what they are: clouds. We’ve never seen the surface of Jupiter, the solid rock and metallic hydrogen, and we never will. We can’t get there. The pressure at the surface is thousands of times larger than the pressure at sea level on Earth. We could never design a ship to go there. Even if we could, there’s nothing to see by. No light. The clouds I was looking at absorb nearly all the sun’s light, or reflect it back into space.

  I strained my eyes, looking at the equator. I could just make out the writhing masses of giant clouds as they boiled over each other, racing around the planet. Below the ammonia clouds I could see were thousands of klicks of methane crystals, hydrogen, ice, sulfur fumes, thunderclaps, and lightning storms as big as the continent of Asia—a cauldron of instant death for any man who went there.

  The lion: Jove contains seventy percent of all matter in our solar system, outside the sun. Even this far out, it filled the sky. Down below the equator churned the Red Spot. A swirling, awesome storm, bigger than a dozen Earths. Each of Jupiter’s bands is a deep layer of gas, spinning at its own speed as the planet whirls. Each has its own grainy, gaudy texture. Here and there a fat storm filled a whole band, rolling like a ball bearing between the bands above and below. Yellow-green lightning forked between purpling clouds.

  “Ahem!” A woman cleared her throat next to my ear. “I don’t think you boys should have the first look at everything.”

  “We got here first,” Zak said reasonably.

  “Rushed up here before we had barely gotten under way, you mean,” the woman said, pushing in front of us at the rear viewscreen. She was as old as my mother and not half as good looking.

  Zak opened his mouth to say something and I muttered, “Come on, it’s not worth it. We’ve got all day.”

  We moved over to the forward viewscreen.

  “Are you boys going to block everything?”

  “We’re watching—” I said.

  “Well, really, I think you should be grateful your parents even let you go on this trip alone. If you can’t keep your manners—”

  “Our parents haven’t got anything to do with it.” Zak said. “It’s Laboratory regs, once we’re above sixteen.”

  “Humf!
We’ll see what the Captain thinks about two young—”

  “Oh. forget it,” I said. “Come on, Zak.” I didn’t know the woman. She must have come in on the Rambler’s last flight.

  On my way back to my seat I noticed the air pressure building and popped my helmet seal. I cocked my helmet back and sat down, wondering what I was going to do until we touched down on Ganymede.

  Zak went in search of something to read; all our study materials were in our luggage. He came back with two chips of Earthside magazines.

  I clicked one in my LCD and read at random. One article was about the staggered working hours in the cities and how much it unsnarls the traffic tie-ups. There was a 3D picture of the subway “packers” of New York—men hired to shove people into the already crowded subway cars, so they can carry a few more. That one earned a double take.

  The next article I read was a fashion tip for men: Handy Hints to Get the Right Tint. It had a 3D of a man wearing a maroon coat with an ascot, painting his fingernails.

  I asked Zak if he thought Commander Aarons edited the copy that came through the laser beam from Earth.

  “Why should he?”

  “Well, it seems to me Earth comes off pretty badly in these magazines.” I said. “I mean. I’d almost suspect somebody was trying to keep us from getting homesick.”

  Zak put aside his poetry magazine. “Just what is it—oh, I see. Painting fingernails is for women, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Why—well, my father doesn’t do it. Neither does yours.”

  “Yes, they are rather conservative, aren’t they? After all. Matt, the Lab is a backwater. An anomaly.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “We’ve got something to do, out here. You follow little green blips in Monitoring, I talk to computers—everybody’s got a job. Even that brat back there—” he gestured behind us, where a baby was yowling—“will have something to do in a few years. Cleaning out the scum in the hydroponics tanks. I hope.”