by Allen Steele
Surprisingly, a smile briefly crossed his face. “You should be happy about this, Mr. Cole. Tiger’s outfitted for VR, so you’ll be able to ride him from up here.” His smile faded again. “Of course, Tiger’s shaped like a spider, but that shouldn’t bother you none. You’re probably used to crawling around like a bug.”
I lowered my notebook. “One more question,” I said, and Old Bill shrugged. “What is it that you have against me?”
The engineer stared back at me for a few seconds, then he said, “Come over here.”
I hesitated, then I walked away from the ladder, crossing the deck to where he sat until I stood in front of him. “Put out your hand,” he said, “like this.”
He raised his right arm so that it was perpendicular to his body, the palm of his hand hovering right side-up above the floor.
I did so, imitating his gesture; as I did, he suddenly grabbed my wrist with his left hand, holding it steady, as his right hand dove into the breast pocket of his vest. Before I could react, he pulled out a small alligator clip of the type used for splicing electrical lines…then he pinched it on the soft bit of skin at the base of my middle finger.
I yelped and tore my hand out of his grasp. The clip sailed off my palm and landed on the deck beneath his stool. “Like I thought,” he said, his voice low and filled with contempt. “You’ve got baby hands. Never done an honest day’s work in your life. Haven’t held anything harder than a pen, have you?”
While I sucked at the tiny red bruise left by the clip, Old Bill reached down and picked it up. As I watched, he calmly and effortlessly snagged it to the identical spot within his own hand, turned his palm upside-down, and wiggled the clip back and forth to demonstrate the toughness of the callus to which the clip was attached.
“When you can do this,” he said as he unclasped the clip and tossed it to my feet, “then you can presume to judge me, my family, or anyone else who works out here. Until then, you’re just another guy who pushes around words and sentences and paragraphs and think they mean something real.”
William Smith-Tate stood up from his stool. “See you later, Mr. Cole,” he murmured. Then, without another word or glance toward me, he opened the hatch and left the deck.
I waited until I was sure he had climbed the Arm Two ladder all the way to the hub before I made my own leave of the hydroponics bay.
I wanted to shout something after him, but for the first time in many years I didn’t know what to say.
5. AMALTHEA
One moment, there was darkness, pitch black and without form or depth, broken only by the sound of my breathing. Then there were pixilated test patterns, like electronic Navajo sand paintings, flashing against the darkness as Saul’s voice spoke in my ears—“Okay, Elliot, here goes”—and in the next instant I was thrown from one plane of existence and into another.
Suddenly, I was in space, as if I had been jettisoned from the airlock of the Medici Explorer. Jupiter loomed before me as an immense sphere that blotted out the stars, streaked by reddish-orange cloud bands which swirled in counterclockwise harmony, its forbidding night side a black pit in which tiny flashes of lightning sparked like distant, silent explosions…
“One-twelve Whiskey Bravo Navajo, this is eight-sixteen Victor X-Ray Hotel.” Old Bill’s voice came through my earphones, scratchy and furred with static. “Down-range ten thousand klicks, bearing X-Ray minus fifty-two, Yankee Minus one-fifteen, Zulu twenty-five. All systems nominal at this time, over.”
It seemed as if I was falling straight into the planet’s violent atmosphere. Forcing my gaze away from the maelstrom, I looked to my right and upward. There, only a few hundred thousand kilometers away, was the pizza-hued orb of Io, the innermost of the Galilean moons, volcanoes spitting hot sulfuric gases above its crimson surface…
“We copy, eight-one-six Victor X-Ray Hotel.” Geoff Smith-Makepeace’s voice was clear and distinct, as if he was sitting just behind me. “On-board telemetry is good and we’ve got you on the scope. You’re clear for initiation of your primary descent sequence, over.”
Vertical bars bordered my focal plane, their hash-marks shifting with each movement of my head, as luminescent digits constantly changed just above my center of vision. I concentrated on them, trying to make my vertigo go away…
“Thank you, Medici.” Old Bill again. “Course corrections entered into primary interface and we’re ready for descent burn on my mark. Five…four…three…two…one…zero and mark.”
All at once, the universe itself seemed to roll over on its side. Jupiter and Io swerved away, and for a brief instant I caught a glimpse of the Medici Explorer, a tiny elongated spot of light moving against the thin band of Jupiter’s ring plane. Then the ship was swept away and I found myself looking at Jupiter again; the planet now was upside-down, the broad off-white patch of its southern pole below me instead of above.
The only thing missing was my stomach: I had left it somewhere behind. Bile rushed up my throat; I choked it down as I reached up and grabbed the smooth plastic sides of the VR helmet between my hands. I managed to yank the helmet off my head before I could vomit. Shutting my eyes, feeling cool air against my sweat-drenched face, I fell out of telepresence and into the chair in which I had been sitting all along.
“You okay?” Young Bill said from behind me. I carefully nodded, still keeping my eyes closed. “All right. Just take it easy. I’ve got a bag here if you need it.”
I swallowed and relaxed in the chair, breathing deeply until the nausea gradually faded and I felt it was safe to open my eyes again. I was back in the bridge of the Medici Explorer, sitting at the engineering station where Montrose and Young Bill had wired me into the VR uplink from the Marius. Although Geoff was hunched over his console and the skipper was paying attention only to his board, Betsy had turned around to look at me with worried eyes. Young Bill was standing next to my chair, his arms folded across his chest, and I couldn’t help but noticed the paper relief bag held almost out of sight in his left hand. Betsy returned her gaze to her screens, murmuring under her breath as she continued to relay information to the others. Saul’s eyes flickered once in my direction, but he said nothing. No one had time to coddle a cybersick passenger.
“Sorry about that.” I swallowed again and wiped cold sweat off my face with my shirtsleeve. “I was doing fine, then…boom, everything flip-flopped on me.”
Young Bill smiled. “Dad rolled the boat over, that’s what got you. Don’t worry about it. Happens to everyone.” He hesitated. “If you don’t want to go back out there…”
I shook my head. “I can handle it. Just need a few minutes to get my act together again.”
Bill didn’t reply. He looked away from me, toward the holoscreens arrayed around the inverted bowl of the bridge. Displayed on a couple of the holoscreens was the same view I had witnessed only a minute ago: the inner Jovian system, as seen through the fiberoptic eyes of Tiger, the ’bot now lashed to the outer hull of the Marius.
When I was kid growing up in a small town in rural Tennessee, there was a German Shepherd named Luke who used to ride on top of his master’s pickup-truck. Not inside the truck’s cab, or even in the bed, but standing on the vehicle’s roof like a giant hood-ornament that had been misplaced. If you were driving along the highway, sometimes you caught sight of Luke as his owner’s truck went past in the opposite lane, his head cocked forward, ears spread back by the wind, all four paws planted firmly on the cab roof. No one, least of all his owner, knew why Luke liked to do this, or how he managed to pull off this stunt, and I often wondered what the dog saw as he rode through the wind and speed.
“Tiger,” Montrose said softly, “let’s see the ship, please.” The robot instantly obeyed, its upper turret rotating a hundred and eighty degrees and angling downward until, many years later, I had an inkling what it must have been like to see the world through Luke’s eyes.
We now saw the boat through from the ’bot’s perspective as the Marius plunged toward Amalthea.
816-VXH was a long, wasp-waisted spacecraft, a workhorse built for function rather than aesthetics. Most of it was comprised of three liquid-fuel rockets; since the craft was too small for it to carry nuclear engines without burdening it with extra shielding, its designers had compensated by devoting more than half its structure to an immense LuneCorp oxygen-hydrogen engine and two outrigger boosters. In essence, the Marius was a collection of engines with a payload section added almost as an afterthought.
As Tiger’s cameras rotated from the pale-blue umbra of the engine exhaust, we could see the long, narrow neck of its midsection, leading straight forward until it ended in the wedge-shaped command module at the bow. Empty bolt holes and small pit-marks along the fuselage showed where Tiger had dismantled cargo trusses, a pair of forward-mounted long-range sensor canards and other unnecessary or redundant equipment before Marius had launched from the Medici Explorer; even its navigational beacons had been removed to lessen the boat’s mass by a few more kilos.
“Eight one-six Victor X-Ray Hotel, this is one-twelve Whiskey Bravo Navajo.” Captain Montrose’s voice was a dull drone above the electronic chitters and beeps of the bridge. “Tiger just gave you guys the once over and you’re looking good. Don’t worry about your hull temp, you don’t see any paint bubbling. Over.”
I picked up a headset and listened to Old Bill through the earpiece: “…Roger that, Medici, and concur with your opinion. Over.” One of the screens showed the boat’s present position below Jupiter’s deadly plasma torus. So far, so good; the Marius hadn’t been affected by the intense ionization of the belt.
Young Bill’s attention was fixed upon the screens. Out there was his first-father, risking his life to save those of two people whom he had never met, and here was his son, left behind to nursemaid a passenger who had trouble keeping dinner in his stomach. The kid was trying to remain cool, but his fists were clenched at his sides, his jaw so tight that his facial muscles twitched. A man-child scared for his father’s life, and helpless to do anything about it except watch from the distance.
I felt the memory of the alligator-clip’s pinch in the palm of my right hand. All I had to worry about was whether I would throw up. I picked up the VR helmet, juggled it reluctantly between my hands, then slid my head once more into its foam-padded maw.
“Okay,” I said. “Ready when you are.”
He gave me a distant glance. “Whoever said I was ready?”
We came in fast over Amalthea, the boat’s engines throttled up to ninety percent as it struggled against Jupiter’s gravity well, Old Bill nursing the maneuvering thrusters as he sought to remain locked on the final approach to the tiny moon. In contrast to Jupiter, Amalthea barely exerted enough gravity to make a landing possible; Smith-Tate had to orbit the potato-shaped rock twice before he was able to bring the Marius down close enough to Pan crater for him to achieve touchdown.
The Marius skirted the western rim of the crater—through Tiger’s eyes I caught the briefest glimpse of the unmanned relay station in the crater’s center as the boat swept over it—and crossed the ninety kilometers to the eastern rim in barely a minute before Old Bill throttled down the engines. I caught a brief glimpse of the Barnard—human-made wreckage lying against the crater wall—then the Marius swerved around in a half-circle and the landing thrusters kicked up a cloud of red sulfuric dust which obscured Tiger’s camera lenses.
It was nearly impossible for me to tell whether we had landed. My only input was Bill’s taut voice: “Twenty meters…fifteen meters…got some dust in the window, radar still operational…ten meters…whoa, watch that boulder…eight meters…thrusters down ten percent…five meters, two…”
The picture inside my helmet jostled a little, static lines creasing the screen…“Okay, touchdown. Engine arm off, grapples deployed and holding, computer reset. One-twelve, this is Marius six-eighteen, we’re down and looking good. Over.”
Through my helmet, I heard the faint sound of cheering in the bridge. “Roger that, Victor X-Ray Hotel eight-sixteen,” Captain Montrose said through the comlink. “Thanks, Bill, we were about to have heart attacks up here. Over.”
Yoshio Smith-Tanaka’s voice: “Sorry, Saul, but the doctor’s on house-call right now. Take two aspirins and call me in the morning. Over.”
Relieved laughter over the comlink. Old Bill started going through the post-landing checklist. The dust gradually settled and I was able to take my first good look at Amalthea. The floor of Pan Crater stretched away before me, its western rim lost beyond the short horizon, the relay station a barely distinguishable huddle of domes and antennae in the far distance. All around us were tiny impact craters and pulverized boulders, tinged a dull scarlet by ejecta from Io’s volcanoes; the surface vaguely resembled the Martian landscape at twilight.
Amalthea was a cold, ugly little world, precipitously hovering at the edge of its own personal doomsday in Jupiter’s gravity well, yet the scenery wasn’t what immediately caught my attention. Beyond the horizon, Jupiter itself was an immense black wall across the sky, more vast than anything human eyes had ever seen before. Across its benighted hemisphere, I could see dozens of lightning flashes erupting as giant storms silently thundered within its dense atmosphere, tiny spots which look insignificant until one realizes that each unleash enough energy to level entire cities on Earth.
Most frightening of all, the planet looked as if it was falling toward us. Even though I cognitively knew that this was an optical illusion caused by Amalthea’s slow rotation and that I was in no immediate danger, I had the impulse to flee, to run from that staggering black mass in the sky…and yet, like a deer on a country highway transfixed by the headlights of an approaching vehicle, I could not turn my eyes away.
Such was my fascination that I didn’t realize that I was being spoken to until Old Bill whistled sharply. “Hey, Cole!” he snapped. “Stop sight-seeing! We got a job to do down here!”
I shut my eyes, making a conscious effort to break the spell. “I’m here,” I said. “Sorry. What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing except stop playing with my robot.” He paused, then I heard him murmur as if he was speaking to Yoshio, “Drat, I knew it was a bad idea to let him run Tiger…”
Saul’s voice broke into the comlink. “Elliot, we need to disengage you from active control of Tiger. You’ll still be able to monitor, but Bill’s going to take control of the ’bot while he inspects the Barnard.”
Smith-Tate’s voice again: “Hey, skipper, whatever we’re going to do, we better do it quick. My computer says we’re going to lose telemetry in fifteen minutes when you guys begin the slingshot. Over.”
A short pause, then Montrose’s voice returned. “Damn, you’re right. I thought we had more time than that. What happened to our window? Over.”
Old Bill: “Dad-gum landing was trickier than we thought, that’s what happened. Lost time on those flybys. Like I said, we got about fifteen minutes until you begin your periapsis maneuver and we lose your signal. I could handle Tiger from down here, but it would just tie me up and I’d lose EVA time. Rather you did it from up there. You copy? Over.”
Another pause, then Montrose’s voice returned: “We copy, Marius, and we’re on the case. Geoff s going to run Tiger from up here. Elliot, you’re out of the loop as of now. Over.”
“Right,” I said, “I understand.” By then a red bar had appeared across the top of my screen: MANUAL DISENGAGE / 19:24:36 / 103692. A few seconds later the robot’s head revolved of its own accord and I found myself looking at the wreckage of the Barnard.
The Marius had touched down barely thirty meters from the Barnard—a considerable feat on Old Bill’s part, considering the difficulties he had encountered just getting to Amalthea in the first place. The Barnard was a near-duplicate of the Marius, and it was remarkable that any of its crew had survived the crash: the craft looked like a toy spaceship that had been trampled during a sandbox tantrum by an angry brat. Although the command module remained intact, the shuttle�
�s spine was broken, its outrigger rockets sheared away and its landing skids were twisted almost beyond recognition. Worst of all, the main airlock hatch was buried beneath the debris; it was apparent that the emergency escape hatch atop of the command module would have to be used.
“Okay, one-twelve, I’m suiting up now,” Old Bill said. “Yoshio’s decompressing the airlock and standing by to assist the survivors. Send Tiger in. Over.”
“We copy, eight-sixteen, over.” This time it was Geoff Smith-Makepeace’s voice over the comlink. There was another brief pause, then Tiger began to move, its claw manipulators unsnapping the cables which had secured it to the boat’s fuselage. Once that was done, Tiger walked down the length of the Marius until it reached the starboard-bow landing gear. I grabbed the armrests of my seats, instinctively holding on against its lurching gait.
It took a couple of minutes for Geoff to guide Tiger down the leg of the landing gear; the robot had been principally designed for zero-gee activity, so even Amalthea’s weak gravity gave it some problems. Once it reached the ground, though, it scuttled quickly across the rocky surface until it reached the Barnard.
It didn’t take Tiger long for it to clamber onto the shuttle’s upper fuselage, but once it reached the escape hatch another problem was encountered: its handle was broken, making it impossible for Tiger to open the hatch from the outside. Montrose talked to Casey Nimersheim and instructed her how to fire the pyros which would blow the emergency hatch, yet when the scientist repeatedly toggled the switch, nothing happened. Bill and Geoff decided to have Tiger cut through the hatch. Tiger’s blunt laser-arm swung into position above the hatch, then tiny globules of melted alloy spurted away as the invisible beam lanced into the groove between the hatchcover and the fuselage.
At the periphery of my vision, I could see the dull gleam of emergency lamps through the shattered windows of the cockpit. The windows were much too narrow for anyone to crawl through, but I caught a glimpse of a spacesuited figure looking out for a moment, taking a quick peek at Tiger—and, by extension, me—until it retreated into the command module’s shielded interior from the lethal radiation outside the shuttle.