by Allen Steele
Betsy winced at the recollection. “You know, there’s almost two hundred children on the Moon now, and a lot of ’em are dumb as a stump…believe me, I’ve met ’em. Spoiled little brats. And then you get my child, whom we’ve had to get the ship’s tutorial system to graduate to high school level before she’s ten…and some assholes didn’t want her to be born because Jeff and I were Chicago kids.”
“She’s very smart.”
Betsy glanced sharply at me, picking up the guarded tone in my voice. “Yeah,” she said, “I know she’s a pain in the ass sometimes. Sometimes pretty arrogant, too. Last night at dinner she told everyone at the table about cutting your hair yesterday, and then she said, ‘I thought writers were supposed to be intelligent.’”
Young Bill hid his face within his hands, trying to disguise his hysterics as a coughing fit. My face felt hot enough to fry eggs upon; Betsy simply looked at me with a well-worn look of sympathy. “Please don’t strangle her,” she said, smiling benignly. “She’s only nine.”
“I can show you where the emergency airlocks are located,” Bill managed to gasp. “One little shove…”
“No thanks.” I was tempted to ask permission to turn her over my knee instead; since I was a guest on the ship, though, that might not have been a proper request. Yet it did raise another question…“How is it, raising a kid on a spacecraft? It’s not a normal sort of childhood.”
Betsy shrugged offhandedly. “For her, it’s normal,” she said easily. “Wendy was born on the Moon, after all. She’s never been to Earth, so…”
“Never?”
Her mother shook her head. “And probably won’t, or at least not for a few more years. Of course, she wants to visit Earth. Now that she’s decided to be a hydroponicist when she grows up…Lynn got her into that…she really wants to see what a real, natural garden looks like. But it’s going to take a while before she can go. She’s in pretty good physical shape, especially for the offspring of two polio survivors, but she will need extensive conditioning before her muscles can take the higher gravity.”
“Ditto for all the inoculations she’ll have to receive.” Young Bill pulled his mouth away from the straw of his squeezebulb. A tiny brown sphere of coffee leaked from the bulb; he smacked it out of midair with his left hand and absently wiped his palm across an armrest. “Compared to the biospheres where she’s been raised, Earth is like crawling into our septic tank. It takes a while for the body’s immune system to cope. When I was ten and went down for the first time, I was sick for the first two weeks, just from breathing the air.”
Betsy nodded. “She’s also going to have get used to a lot of social differences between spacers and Earth-folk…like, for instance, the fact that extended families are scarce down there, so an ‘uncle’ or ‘aunt’ to someone else is not the same as one of her own uncles or aunts.” She smiled coyly. “So it’s not nice to ask someone if their mother is sleeping with their uncle.”
That remark raised yet another question. “ConSpace has received a lot of negative publicity when it chose to put extended families on the Jupiter run. The Christian Defense League, for instance, has called upon clergymen to issue a blanket condemnation of ConSpace and its shareholders. How do you feel about that?”
Betsy and Bill shared a sour look; Bill coughed into his fist while Betsy heaved a great sigh. “‘How do you feel about that?’” Bill repeated. “Like I really give a damn what a bunch of fanatics say about…”
“Bill.” Betsy’s voice was soft yet admonishing. Young Bill looked away from us and muttered under his breath. “For one thing,” she went on, “the CDL didn’t say anything about the extended families which have been on the Moon and Clarke County for the past thirty years. Even though Geoff and I aren’t particularly religious and neither are Leslie or Yoshio, Lynn and Old Bill are devout Mormons. Their church came around almost ten years ago, and that’s one of the strictest Christian sects. So bringing up the issue now is a little late, don’t you think?”
“Nonetheless…”
“Nonetheless, the issue has been raised.” Betsy sighed again and folded her hands together in her lap. “Look, the gist of it is that the CDL believes that we’re living in a state of sin, that we’re teaching our children about sexual promiscuity, blah blah and so forth. My response…if I’m going to stoop to responding to Reverend Haynes and his followers…is that these are a bunch of dirty-minded people prying into my private business, and that how we raise our kids is our own affair. Period.”
Young Bill seemed anxious to put forth his opinion; I only had to glance toward him for the teenager to eagerly jump in. “I can’t believe some of the things I’ve read about us,” he said heatedly. “These yahoos seem to think that we’re all out here having mass orgies, parents molesting their kids, all that shit.” He laughed, but with scarcely any humor. “If that were true, I wouldn’t still be a virgin, for Christ’s sakes!”
Betsy’s face turned bright red, but she said nothing. If his parents were devout Mormons, their beliefs obviously hadn’t influenced their first-son very much. “Aunt Betsy’s right,” he went on. “It ain’t nobody’s business but ours…but if I could get my hands on Haynes and his crew, I’d…”
“Bill…” his aunt said again.
He held up his hands. “Okay, okay.” He took a deep breath, getting his temper back under control. “But do you see what it’s like, growing up in an environment like this? If it weren’t for the fact that this is my family, I’d…”
It was at that moment when the reflective calm of the fourth watch was shattered.
A sharp electronic buzz from across the command center brought the conversation to an abrupt halt. For an instant, both crewmen froze in their seats…
“Ah, shit,” Young Bill murmured as he fumbled for the release catch of his seat belt. Betsy had already unsnapped her own belt and launched herself out of her chair. She quickly maneuvered along ceiling rungs until she reached the communications station on the opposite side of the bridge. Her speed was phenomenal; before Bill made his way across the deck and I clumsily followed them both, Betsy had strapped herself into Geoff s chair and had pulled a headset over her ears.
“Jupiter station, this is one-twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska,” she said tersely, her fingers moving quickly across the keypad in front of her as she typed in a set of commands. “Jupiter station, this is one twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska, DSV Medici Explorer. Do you copy? Please identify yourself, over.”
Young Bill reached the com station and held onto the back of the chair, staring over her shoulder at the computer displays. “That’s the signal for an SOS,” he said quietly to me. “Can’t be from anywhere else except somewhere in Jupiter space.”
It takes almost an hour for a radio transmission to reach the Jovian system from the inner planets; by then, whatever emergency that might have taken place on Earth, the Moon, or Mars would have already passed, even if the Medici Explorer had been close enough to render assistance. Nonetheless, the ship was just within the outer belt of Jovian moons; getting a strong fix on the radio signal through Jupiter’s electromagnetic fuzz and clatter was like trying to locate the source of a fleeting searchlight through a dense ocean fog.
Betsy listened intently to the carrier-wave static, repeating the ship’s call-sign over and over as she scanned the radio hands. Ten minutes passed before she succeeded in getting a clear fix on the incoming signal and locked on with the transceiver. “We copy, four-fifteen Delta Tango Romeo,” she said. “This is one-twelve Whiskey Bravo Nebraska, Medici Explorer. Please repeat your message, over.”
Again, she listened closely. Although her face remained calm, her eyes widened slightly as I overheard a tinny, indistinct voice through her headset. “We copy and confirm, four-fifteen Delta Tango Romeo,” she said at last. “Please relay your coordinates and we’ll assist. Over.”
She pushed aside the right cup of her headset and looked up at Young Bill. “Better wake up your dad, Uncle Geoff, Uncle Yoshio, an
d the skipper,” she said. “A boat from Valhalla Station has gone down on Amalthea. One dead, one wounded, and one on the rocks.” She shook her head as she refastened the headset to her ear. “Looks like we might to have to send someone in. Damn.”
“I’m on it.” Bill peered more closely over her shoulder at the screen, his lips moving silently as he quickly committed a series of numbers to memory, before he vaulted toward the captain’s station.
“If you were hoping for a boring story,” he said to me in midflight, “you’ve come to the wrong place.”
4. FATHERS AND MOTHERS
By the time fourth watch ended, most of the crewmembers were already awake and had been summoned to the bridge, where Betsy and Young Bill continually monitored the emergency on Amalthea. Wendy Smith-Makepeace, sleepy-eyed but nonetheless eager to help, was sent to the galley on Deck 1-F to fetch an early breakfast; she returned carrying a bag of English muffins and dried fruit, which the adults consumed at their consoles. There was no time this morning for a sit-down meal in the wardroom.
There was little I could do besides brew coffee and refill squeezebulbs, yet no one objected to my presence on the bridge, although William Smith-Tate was clearly unhappy about my hanging around the command center. He didn’t say anything to me, but his chill demeanor expressed his unspoken opinion that the bridge was no place for passengers during an emergency, especially not when they’re journalists. However, the fact that Saul Montrose hadn’t thrown me out of was a clear demonstration that he wanted to have me around; he was the captain, after all, and his word was law. “If you’re going to write about what we do,” Saul told me during a slow moment, “you might as well see what it’s like when we’ve got a crisis situation.”
And the situation was critical indeed. Once Geoff took over the com station from his wife, he eventually gleamed further details through garbled communications with both the downed ship on Amalthea and, later, Callisto Station. Four-one-five DTR was the radio call-sign for the JSS Barnard, a short-range shuttle that flew sorties within the Jovian system; it had crashed on Amalthea while attempting take-off from the tiny moon. There were three persons aboard the Barnard: pilot Wayne Reese, co-pilot Marlon Bellafonte, and an engineer, Casey Nimersheim. Reese had been immediately killed in the crash and Bellafonte has suffered massive internal injuries, leaving Nimersheim the only person capable of talking to anyone. She had done well to patch things together as best she could, but the audible quaver in her voice showed she was frightened by what had happened and confused about what to do next.
Amalthea is the second-innermost of Jupiter’s satellites, a potato-shaped rock only 280 kilometers in length, located scarcely 181,000 klicks from the planet. Amalthea’s period and close proximity to Jupiter makes it an excellent site for an automatic relay station between the Prometheus-1 helium-3 factory floating and Callisto Station; since the moon orbits its primary once every twelve hours, it’s almost perpetually above Prometheus-1, allowing controllers on Callisto to maintain near-continuous telemetry with the Jovian atmospheric factory.
A tiny, unmanned installation had been placed within Pan Crater on Amalthea. It was serviced by several AI’s and under normal circumstances operated smoothly, but there were frequent breakdowns, usually caused by deterioration of electronic components by intense radiation. Amalthea is buried deep within Jupiter’s harsh magnetosphere and plasma torus; as such it’s located within one of the most hostile zones in the solar system, and because of this the automated outpost was prone to malfunctions.
In this instance (we were finally told by Callisto Station, which seemed to have trouble getting someone knowledgeable on-line) three of Pan Base’s six computers had suffered concurrent hardware failures that could not be easily fixed by its robots. Callisto Station was forced to send a repair mission down to Amalthea so that Nimersheim could replace vital modules in the three stricken computers. The mission had gone well, and the engineer successfully made the repairs, but when the Barnard attempted to lift off from Pan Base, something went wrong during launch that caused the shuttle to not achieve escape velocity. Instead, it had lost altitude and crashed bow-first into the crater wall.
The pilot was killed instantly when the fuselage of the cockpit module caved-in on impact. The co-pilot was critically injured and was now in shock and unconscious; it was only because Nimersheim was in the rear passenger seat that she escaped harm. Although the cockpit hull had been breached, all three persons were wearing hardsuits during takeoff; Nimersheim reported that she had patched oxygen lines from Bellafonte’s suit and her own into the Barnard’s life-support system. Air supply was not an immediate problem, nor was radiation exposure—the shuttle had a seventy-two hour emergency reserve, and the craft’s radiation shields were still intact—but Bellafonte’s injuries made swift rescue a high priority.
Because Amalthea had been on Jupiter’s solar nearside when the distress signal was sent from the Barnard, and Callisto was on the far side, the Medici Explorer was the first station to pick up Casey Nimersheim’s mayday. There are two relay outposts on Io and Europa, but bouncing transmissions between four moons and the Medici Explorer still took considerable effort, much like playing billiards on a table whose pockets are in constant motion. It was almost two hours before Geoff and Saul could establish a reliable three-way line of communication between Callisto, Amalthea and the Medici Explorer.
During this time, Yoshio conversed with Nimersheim on one channel, calming down the panicky scientist and talking her through in-suit first-aid procedures for Bellafonte. Meanwhile, on another channel, Old Bill was in constant communication with two controllers at Callisto Station, trying to get an accurate assessment of their situation, while simultaneously working with Betsy to run complex orbital-mechanics problems through the bridge computers. Leslie used Nimersheim’s blurry, disjointed descriptions of the Barnard’s condition to gauge the full extent of the damage suffered and, most importantly, deduce how much longer the shuttle’s emergency life-support systems would hold up. Young Bill temporarily assumed the captain’s chair, where he monitored the Medici Explorer’s vital signs, while Saul himself struggled to coordinate everything at once.
Everyone was talking. Three-dimensional displays appeared and vanished from computer screens with bewildering swiftness; data was input, output, considered and reconsidered, alternatives quickly accepted or rejected. The scene resembled the ship’s launch from lunar orbit nine months earlier, except this time the stakes were much higher: the lives of two people hung upon minute-by-minute decisions.
It became apparent that Callisto Station was expecting Medici Explorer to perform the rescue mission almost single-handedly, as if the lucky accident of having received the first SOS from the Barnard has shifted the responsibility for the rescue operation to the crew of an incoming vessel. Instead of arguing with Callisto, though, the crew decided, without any real discussion, to take the weight upon their own shoulders.
As Betsy, Saul, and Old Bill began to hash out the details of the rescue mission, I wandered over to the captain’s station, where Young Bill was running a diagnostics check on the main computer bus. “I don’t get it,” I said, pointing to a flatscreen displaying a halo chart of the Jovian system. “We’re nearly ten million kilometers from Amalthea, but Callisto is only about two million klicks away. Why can’t they rescue their own people?”
The kid didn’t look up from his work. “Believe me,” Young Bill said softly, “if you were stranded down there and had a choice between us or them to save you, you’d rather have us. Chances are the shuttle went down because some idiot wasn’t maintaining the engines properly…and if that’s the case, there’s no guarantee the other boats aren’t screwed up the same way.”
“You’re kidding.”
Bill shook his head. “You’ll see what I mean when we get there. The whole base is held together with duct tape and solder.” He glanced over his shoulder, giving the bridge a quick scan to see if anyone was overhearing our discussion. �
��We might be farther out,” he murmured, “but we’re the best chance those poor suckers have. We know it and Callisto knows it, even if they won’t come right out and admit it.”
He hesitated. “Besides, my dad wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s done this kind of thing before.”
Before I could ask what he meant, Young Bill returned his attention to his job, hunching over the keyboard as he concentrated on the diagnostic chart.
The kid didn’t want to talk, and I was too tired to question him further. My eyelids were beginning to feel gritty; it had been many hours since I last slept, and despite the circumstances, I realized that it would still be many hours before the rescue operation got underway. Noticing my exhaustion, Saul relieved me from duty. “Go below and get some winks,” he said. “I’ll call you when things change.”
I didn’t argue with him. I left the bridge and made my way through the ship to the passenger quarters in Arm One. It was the first time I’ve seen my cubicle since the Medici Explorer was in orbit above the Moon. I didn’t even bother to undress before I dimmed the lights and lay down on the bunk. Yet, even as my weary eyes were closing of their own accord, I caught a last glimpse of Jupiter floating past the window.
The planet was now the size of a soccer ball, its thin ring visible in the weak light of the distant sun. It disappeared from sight, and I fell asleep wondering how Jupiter must look through the shattered cockpit windows of the Barnard, crashed on a tiny captured asteroid deep within the planet’s lethal radiation belts.
My last waking thoughts were an agnostic’s prayer for the frightened young woman who was marooned on Amalthea.
I slept only six hours, but it seemed like much longer by the time Betsy chimed my intercom to tell me that the captain is ready to brief me about the rescue mission.
The first thing I noticed upon crawling out of the bunk was that the window had been opaqued by metal shutters; now that the vessel was deeper in-system, the arm windows had been irised shut to lessen radiation exposure. It was my first clue as to how dangerous the operation would be.