The Jupiter Theft

Chapter 2

Tod Jameson flung up a gauntleted hand to protect his faceplate and yelled: “Wei hsien!”

He grabbed a startled Li Chen-yung by an air hose and spun him around. There was just enough time to plant both boots against Li’s quilted blue spacesuit and give him a mighty shove; then the flat, perforated pad of the landing leg went sailing past his head like a gigantic flyswatter. Its stately slow motion was deceptive. There was enough mass behind the pad to grind him into the hull like a bug. His spine crawling, Jameson saw it crunch its way through several honeycomb layers of the Callisto lander’s skin and embed itself there, trailing springs and broken struts.

He was drifting outward in a direction opposite to the shove he’d given Li. Earth filled the sky, a colossal backdrop of sparkling blue-and-white whorls. Against it was silhouetted the unfinished framework of the Jupiter ship, just a couple of miles off, a spidery wheel with a spear through the hub.

Li’s voice crackled in his helmet. “Thanks, buddy,” he said.

“Hwan-ying,” Jameson replied. He wondered if his Chinese sounded as stilted as Li’s English.

He located Li, a starfish shape floating in emptiness, pinwheeling crazily. As he watched, Li brought the spin under control and fired a short, economical burst from his suit jets that sent him back toward the squat bulk of the landing vehicle.

Jameson aimed himself carefully and fired his own thruster. He braked expertly within reach of a strut and hooked one foot under it. Li was already there, inspecting the mangled locking mechanism of the landing foot that had almost killed them both.

“Missing bolt,” Li said, pointing a sausagelike finger. “Big spring in leg tear loose.”

“K’an-yi-k’an,” Jameson said.

They both looked up at the place where the lander had kicked a hole in its own side. The skeleton leg was sticking out ignominiously, its foot buried in the lander’s aluminum hide. The image was so anthropomorphic that they both laughed.

“What if that happen while we orbit Callisto?” Li said, his broad peasant features suddenly serious inside his fishbowl.

“Bu-hau,” Jameson began. “Bu-dau shem…” He floundered, trying to think of the word for “abort,” and gave up. “We’d have to scrub the mission,” he finished lamely in English.

His suit radio buzzed, and Jameson tongued the switch that put him on closed circuit. “We’re sending a repair crew right away,” Sue Jarowski’s husky voice said. “Are you and your Chinese friend all right?”

“We’re fine,” Jameson said. “No injuries. But it looks as if the lander’s been holed. We’re doing a damage inventory now.”

Li had turned away discreetly so that Jameson wouldn’t see his lips move while he reported on his own scrambled circuit. It was a meaningless courtesy. Both of them knew perfectly well that Li’s people, in the sequestered pod they had attached to the rim of the international space station a few miles away, were busily processing all American message traffic, just as the Americans routinely unscrambled all Chinese transmissions.

The ritual spying had become a way of life during the year-long preparations for the joint Chinese-American Jupiter mission—like the elaborate charade of speaking the other side’s language during mission exercises.

The big prize in the game was the new boron fusion/fission engine that was going to power the Jupiter ship, courtesy of the United States. The Chinese didn’t have one yet, though they were said to be working on it furiously.

Jameson was familiar with the basic principle: You inject a proton into boron 11, with its six neutrons and five protons, and you get an unstable nucleus that explodes into three helium nuclei, with two protons and two neutrons apiece. But it took temperatures in the billions of degrees to start boron fission.

So to get the hot protons needed to trigger the boron reaction, you had to have a fusion reaction first. That was being supplied, courtesy of the Chinese, via a more conventional deuterium-tritium fusion, triggered by carbon dioxide lasers.

The security problems at the interface of the two systems were nightmarish.

The daily American security sweeps constantly uncovered one ingenious Chinese spy device after another hidden in and around the still-empty engine modules. They were deactivated without comment. Both sides pretended they weren’t there.

It was a hell of a basis for traveling to another planet, but it was the only way it was going to get done. America and the China Coalition were the only two political entities that had the resources and the motivation. The European Space Agency was too fragmented by intramural squabbles. Greater Japan stuck pretty close to Earth orbit and applications satellites of a practical nature. And Russia—what was left of it after the Chinese police action of 2003-2008—was no longer a spacefaring nation.

Jameson looked at Li and grinned. It was a good thing that both sides had a healthy share of get-the-job-done types like Li and himself. Best to leave the rest of it to the politicians and the security men.

Li grinned back. “You look more Chinese than I do, old buddy,” he said. “Are you sure we’re not getting to you?”

Jameson knew what he meant. In zero-g conditions, some of the body fluid tends to migrate upward to the face. Jameson’s normally lean face was temporarily puffy, cheeks risen and his gray eyes slitted. He was also an inch taller, thanks to a stretched spine.

“Wo ma?” Jameson said innocently. “Wo pu-shih Chung-gwa-jen.”

Li laughed, a little constrained by all of the listening ears. The two of them pulled themselves from handhold to handhold across the curving surface of the Callisto lander, toward the embedded footpad. There was a lot of debris floating around: pieces of the locking mechanism, fragments of hardened foam insulation. Something the size and shape of a pot lid drifted past lazily. Li made a grab at it, but Jameson netted it first.

He turned it over in his gloved hands, anchoring himself with the toe of a boot. It was a bolt head—the one missing from the locking mechanism.

He saw why it had broken loose: Someone had sawed the head off the bolt and substituted this hollowed-out fake. Inside was something that he guessed was part of an X-ray camera. It seemed to be a lensless system depending on folded optics and a paper-thin electronics sandwich of an image plane that transmitted the pictures on its face through a pea-size FM device. The capsule of radioactives seemed to be missing, fortunately.

He looked reprovingly at Li. Li looked back blandly through his visor, without even the grace to blush. He probably hadn’t known the thing was there. After all, it had almost killed him too.

Why? Jameson wrinkled his forehead and had the answer immediately. The Callisto lander would normally be tucked up in an external module next to an engine pod. The Chinese hoped to get a few pictures that would give an insignificant clue or two to the size and configuration of some component of the boron drive, so they could add the information to all their other pieces. They were capable of going to ridiculous lengths. The other day someone had caught a Chinese engineer with millimeter markings painted on his thumbnail, sneaking a measurement of one of the unconnected fuel pellet delivery pipes.

He stowed the bogus bolt head in a leg pocket of his spacesuit. He’d turn it over to one of the security boys later. No official complaint would ever be lodged. The polite fictions that made the joint mission possible had to be maintained at all costs.

Li had looked away nonchalantly while Jameson pocketed the spy device. He’d be talking to his own security representatives later. Now he said, as if nothing had happened, “Here they come now.”

Jameson craned his neck and saw reflected earth-light glinting off an open tetrahedral framework festooned with clinging objects. It was about a half mile away. Whoever was jockeying the repair rig was good; he’d coasted all the way without correction. Suddenly there were a couple of brief flares of hydrazine jets, and the thing was hanging motionless in reference to the Callisto lander.

Two bulky dolls floated from the cage: the co-foremen. Jameson could make out the American-flag shoulder patch on one and the red-star patch on the other. They conferred briefly, helmets together, and then two repair lobsters detached themselves from the frame, accompanied by a swarm of spacesuited attendants.

Sue Jarowski’s voice sounded in his helmet again. “Mission Control says you and Li can call it a day, Tod. They’re scratching the training exercise until Thursday.”

Jameson conjured up an image of Sue’s face while she talked: dark hair, strong almost-pretty features with wide cheekbones, snub nose, generous mouth. She was crisp and alert, and a damn fine communications officer.

“I think I’ll stick around here, Sue, until they finish the repair. I can borrow a bottle of air from the repair crew.”

Sue hesitated, then said: “Ray Caffrey wants to see you.”

“I’ll bet he does. Tell him I’ll check in with him later.”

Caffrey was the security rep. On the official mission roster he was listed as “Safety Engineer.”

“I understand. I’ll tell Ray.”

Jameson turned back toward the repair rig. The two lobsters, bright orange against blackness, were maneuvering themselves into position, getting a helpful nudge or two from the men swarming around them. A repair lobster was nothing more than a simple cylinder with a plastic bubble for the head of its operator at one end. It got its name from the two big clawlike waldos at the forward end and the twin rows of smaller specialized limbs down its ventral surface.

One of the lobsters anchored itself on the Callisto lander’s hull and grasped the embedded landing foot. It tugged gently, trying to do as little further damage as possible. The leg came free. There was a little frosty explosion of particles of trapped air. A couple of spacesuited men took charge of the damaged leg and ferried it back to the repair frame. One was Chinese, one American. Jameson grinned without humor. Even the garbage detail had to be binational.

There was a frying sound in his helmet, and Li’s voice said: “I be going back to Eurostation now. See you Thursday.”

Li’s stocky figure was already mounting his scooter. He gave it a couple of squirts, aiming it toward the big wheel in the distance.

“You’re not going to watch the repair?” Jameson said in careful Standard Mandarin.

“No. What for?”

Li hunched over the steering bar, and the scooter dwindled against the stars. Jameson watched it until it was too small to see. Li obviously had been recalled to explain why he hadn’t managed to retrieve the spy camera first. Perhaps if those security clowns had had the sense to confide in Li, he would have.

Jameson sighed. It was a sticky business. As co-commanders of the Callisto lander, he and Li would depend on each other utterly when they set down on the frozen surface of the Jovian moon. They had to trust each other without reservation. But Li had his loyalties, just as Jameson did. Jameson shrugged mentally. You had to work within the system.

He gave a start as a pair of mittened paws grasped his upper arms and a helmet clinked against his. He found himself staring into the raw red features of the U.S. repair-crew foreman, a likable, plain-spoken man named Grogan. Grogan was being smart enough not to use his suit radio.

“Beg pardon, sir,” Grogan said, “but what’s going on? We saw the landing leg spring loose through the telescope, but that’s all.”

Jameson pressed his helmet against the other man’s. “Tell you all about it later. For now, just make sure that everything you replace in the locking mechanism is all right. Particularly the bolts.”

Grogan’s corned-beef face split in a grin. “Got you, sir. I’ll check out the replacement parts myself.”

He gave a push and launched himself toward the sleeve of the landing gear. The Chinese foreman was fishing around in the tangled mess and passing broken pieces to a crewman member with a sack. Grogan stationed himself there, the lines of his body looking belligerent even through the bloat of the spacesuit. Jameson relaxed.

The other lobster brought over a replacement leg, an articulated metal lattice five meters long, with the flat mesh pad of the landing foot at one end. Swimming behind it was a four-man crew with laser cutting torches.

Jameson waited until they were finished, then hitched a ride back on the repair frame. Clinging to a crossbar, he watched Eurostation grow in his vision. The great wheel was surrounded by a random collection of orbital constructions and the parked shuttles of half a dozen nations hanging like gnats above its hub. That glittering spider web suspended a couple of kilometers beyond the rim was their radiotelescope, leased to all corners, and the pool of quicksilver trapped in a cage was one of the solar collectors. The spinning cross with the tin cans at the ends of the arms was one of the earlier stations, still in use as an isolation lab.

But it was Eurostation itself, rotating ponderously against the stars, that dominated that floating junkyard. It had been growing for fifty years. The inner rim, only six hundred feet in diameter, had been the original station back in the early decades of the century. Now it was a low-g hospital, among other things. It was connected by six vast spokes to the outer rim, more than a half mile across. Future expansion would have to be done laterally, turning the wheel gradually into a cylinder, unless they wanted to slow the rotation. An exception was the blister the Chinese had attached to the rim—a spartan environment where they could practice their state religion uncontaminated by Eurostation’s amenities.

The hub of the station reared in front of him like a metal cliff. Jameson detached himself from the repair rig and kicked himself toward it. The rig continued on toward the floating corral where the construction equipment was parked.

Jameson’s boots hit the wall of metal and stuck. He found a convenient handhold and looked around for a single-lock. They weren’t going to open one of the yawning docking adapters for one man.

The surface he was clinging to—a flat disk a hundred meters in diameter, painted with bright targets—didn’t share the station’s rotation. Otherwise he’d have found himself sliding inexorably toward the edge and out into space. Actually it was the base of a shallow, truncated cone that floated free within the station’s hub—a little space station in its own right. The station personnel—depending on their origin—called it the Kupplung or the Embrayage or the Clutch.

He crawled toward one of the open manholes, electrostatically sticky, and levered himself inside. He closed the cover behind him and pressed the big red button next to the inner door. Air hissed into the lock. After an interval, the inner door spun open, and a bored attendant with a German-Swiss accent helped him off with his suit. Jameson headed immediately for the men’s showers and peeled off his wilted liner in a cubicle smelling of sweat, steel, and rubber. After six hours in a spacesuit, it was a relief to zip himself into a showerbag set for needle spray. He emerged, refreshed, in a clean singlet and shorts, and joined the crowd of off-shift construction workers waiting in the outer corridor.

If they had been standing instead of drifting in random orientations along the walls, Jameson would have stood half a head above most of them. He was tall for a spaceman, but he made up for it by being greyhound-lean. Actually, he was well within the mass limits. Jameson had the frank eyes and square-jawed good looks that delighted the Space Resources Agency’s pressecs and accredited newsies. He looked the part, hanging casually from a holdbar with one big-knuckled, competent-looking hand and keeping a firm grip on an SRA blue nylon zipbag with the other.

A chime sounded. The drifting men began to settle toward the curving wall as imperceptibly it became a floor. The clutch was matching its spin to that of the station. There was a gentle lurch, and clutch and station mated with a resounding clang that shuddered through the chamber. The row of doors underfoot slid open and the waiting men dropped through. Jameson hurried through with the crowd. He repressed a shiver as he floated past the rubber-gasketed doorframe. The shearing action from a mismatched spin could slice a man neatly in half—but of course it couldn’t happen; the doors wouldn’t open unless the safety locks were firmly engaged.

He sank, feather-light, to the deck, and got a surprise: Caffrey was waiting for him in the reception area.

Jameson tossed the fake bolt head at him. “Here you go, Ray. The latest Chinese contribution to space cooperation.”

Caffrey looked uncomfortable. “I’ll need a report from you,” he said. “Let’s go to my office for a debriefing.”

“Can’t it wait? I’m bushed.”

“Sorry, Commander. You know how it is.”

Jameson grimaced. “Okay. But I can’t add much to what you already saw through my helmet camera.”

He followed Caffrey to a dropcage, bracing his hands against the ceiling as it plunged down its shaft toward the outer rim of the station. Free fall was too slow for the first stage of the trip and too dangerous for the last stages—especially for newcomers. There was one in the cage now, a mousy man in a drab Earthstyle business blouse, who yelped in surprise as he bobbed to the top of the cage and bumped his head. One of the construction men, laughing, pulled him down and warned him about the gradient. Caffrey maintained a tight-lipped silence, his expression discouraging conversation from Jameson. He had the spy camera tucked under his tunic.

They got out at the rim, in the main corridor that circled the station. There was an electric trolley and a carpeted walkway. The carpeting felt luxurious under Jameson’s bare toes. The lighting was soft, and a hidden speaker played an unobtrusive slipbeat: nines against sevens. The European Space Agency did everything up brown for its clients. They kept their big wheel spinning at a comfortable half-g at the rim, which made it easier for people stopping over on their way back from the Moon or Mars to readjust to Earth gravity. The five restaurants were excellent, and the Swiss ran a four-star hotel.

They passed through the American lounge on their way to Caffrey’s office. A clutter of chairs and little tables were arranged around a central well, circled by a low railing, that looked down on the stars. The far wall was a spectacular row of tall, narrow windows that showed the stars streaming slowly by, their flight showing no detectable arc here in this fractional slice of the station’s vast circumference. A couple of dozen off-duty members of the Jupiter crew were there, socializing with construction workers and transients. There were no Europeans there, except for the bartender and a couple of stewards. This part of the wheel was U.S. diplomatic territory for the present.

Mike Berry waved at him from the other side of the room. He was playing a game of low-gravity darts with a rumpled, bearlike man who looked like a construction worker, but actually was the mission geologist, Omar Tuttle. Berry was a physicist, one of the two fusion specialists in charge of the boron drive. He was thin and thirtyish, with unkempt brown hair and a long, homely face animated by boyish enthusiasm. It was his first trip into space, and Jameson had been assigned to him as big brother during his astronaut training.

The moment of inattention cost Berry his point. His dart strayed sideways under the influence of the Coriolis force and missed the target entirely. One of the construction workers heckled him good-naturedly, and Tuttle, sipping his reconstituted beer, smiled in satisfaction.

“Tod…”

It was Sue Jarowski. He’d almost collided with her. She smiled up at him, appealingly gaminelike with her dark, cropped hair and the man’s faded workshirt with pushed-up sleeves she’d borrowed somewhere. Jameson wondered if the shirt were his. He and Sue had spent a couple of sleep periods together, back when the mission personnel were still sorting themselves out, but for some reason they hadn’t seen much of each other since.

“Sue! How goes it?”

She put a hand on his arm. “Are you just going off duty? Why don’t you join Dmitri and me for a drink?”

He looked past her to where Dmitri Galkin, the junior biologist-cum-life-support tech, was sitting on an airpuff, contemplating a lipped cup with some greenish liquid in it. Dmitri met his eye and glanced away, looking miffed.

“I can’t right now, Sue. I’m on my way to Security.”

He shrugged helplessly, and she followed his gaze to where Caffrey was waiting impatiently by the exit.

“Will I see you later?” Sue said. “Why don’t you stop by the lounge when Caffrey’s through with you?”

She gave his arm a squeeze. He smiled back at her.

“I’ll do that.”

When they reached the security rep’s quarters, Caffrey carefully locked the X-ray spy camera away in a cabinet. He indicated a chair. “Sit down, Commander,” he said.

Jameson sat down. Caffrey’s manner was strangely formal. He was usually a fairly regular guy for a security rep. And this wasn’t the comfortable armchair he usually sat in during debriefings. It was a fully equipped interrogation seat, with accessory plugs, ankle and wrist straps, and a head clamp. It tilted and swiveled to give its occupant a sense of psychological helplessness.

“What do you want to know, Ray?” Jameson said.

The security man didn’t answer. He pressed a buzzer on his desk.

“It’s up to the top brass, of course,” Jameson went on, trying to keep his voice conversational, “but maybe this time we ought to lodge a formal protest. Bugging the lander is one thing, but this time it endangered the mission. If that landing leg had given way when we touched down on Callisto, Li and I could have been killed.”

“Don’t say anything yet, Commander,” Caffrey said.

The door opened and a tall, unsmiling man in gray coveralls came through. Jameson didn’t recognize him, but he knew the type. It was some functionary from the Reliability Board.

“This is Commander Jameson, Doctor,” Caffrey said.

Jameson looked up at the RB psychologist and said, in a feeble attempt at a joke, “You going to strap me in, Doc?”

“That won’t be necessary,” the RB man said. There wasn’t a trace of humor in his words. “Just grasp those armrests. That’s right. Now put your head back against the backrest while I adjust it. That’s the way.”

He had Jameson hooked up in a few minutes: skin electrodes, blood-pressure cuff, EEG cap, electromyograph, voice analyzer, and the rest of them. They were all plugged into a little averaging computer marked restricted use. He positioned a little device on a rolling stand in front of Jameson’s face to record changes in retinal color and pupil size, and sat back, waiting for Jameson to utter the first word. It was a familiar RB gambit.

Jameson fought back his anger. “You know, I was checked out thoroughly at the start of the project,” he said. “Everybody was.”

“Nothing to get concerned about, Commander Jameson,” the psychologist said soothingly. “You’ve been working closely with your Chinese counterpart for some time now. This is just a routine attitude test. Everybody’s going to have one.”

It was easy for Jameson. He’d grown up as a Guvie brat. He’d been taking tests since his kidcare days: tests to get into the right schools, tests to qualify for government employment and housing and food chits, tests to get into the Space Resources Academy. It got to be second nature. You learned to give them what they wanted.

“You speak Chinese rather well, Commander. Not just the vocabulary—the four tones seem to come naturally to you. Most Westerners have trouble with them.”

“I just have a good ear, I guess.”

“Do you feel any special affinity for the Chinese?”

He kept his voice carefully neutral “They’re okay.”

“Li Chen-yung in particular?”

“Li’s all right.”

“You’re not being very responsive, Commander.”

“Li’s my partner in this exercise. We have to mesh as a team. Our staying alive depends on our trusting each other. Up to a point.”

“Up to a point?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.” It was impossible for Jameson to read those steely eyes. “Do you feel anger toward Li over the incident with the spy camera?”

“No. Li probably didn’t know it was there.”

The RB interrogator studied the little hooded screen on his computer. He punched for various readings. Jameson knew it was showing his anger and resentment. That didn’t matter; his feelings would be interpreted as anger toward Li and the Chinese. A little anxiety and resentment about being grilled was normal anyway, no matter how reliable you were.

The questioning took about an hour. It was a fairly standard RB mix, with a new version of the authority-acceptance index and the same tired questions on alcohol and drug dependence he’d been answering for twenty years. It ended with a sexual orientation series, complete with flash holos, a needle sampling his blood, and a very uncomfortable metal codpiece with leads hooked to the computer. So far as he could tell, no drugs were being fed into his bloodstream via the needle, so the test was routine. There was no particular reason for it, which made it all the more insulting.

The RB man folded up his instruments and left. Jameson swabbed electrode paste off his forearm with an alcohol-soaked gauze pad. “Finished with me?” he asked Caffrey in a level voice. “Or did you want to do that debriefing?”

Caffrey flushed. “No, you can go now.”

The lounge had emptied out somewhat by the time Jameson returned. Sue was sitting alone at one of the little plastic tables surrounding the central floor well. There was no sign of Dmitri. Jameson drew himself a beer and joined her.

“What was that all about?” she said.

“Reliability test.” He grimaced. “Some arbee I never saw before. I guess they’re worried about my getting contaminated, working with Li.” He drained half his beer and slammed the mug down too hard. The pinkish brew sloshed over the lip of the mug and splashed on the table.

“They’ve got to be careful,” she said reasonably.

“They can be so careful that they’ll endanger the mission. The way Li’s people almost did.”

She looked around uneasily, “You shouldn’t talk like that, Tod. Someone might misinterpret what you said about endangering the mission.”

“Dammit!” he flared. “I’m no Rad! They ought to know that by now. I had my first arbee screening when I was only six years old, when GovCorp transferred my father to another city. I went to Federal schools from kindergarten on. It’s fragging humiliating to be treated like some Privie slob who might have a nuke hidden up his sleeve!”

“My father came from the Private Sector,” she said quietly.

He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I didn’t mean that. I’ve got PriSec blood in my own veins, a couple of generations back. Everybody does.”

“I know,” she said wryly. “We’re the salt of the Earth. At least that’s what the government keeps telling us.”

She gave him a warm smile. He held on to her hand. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. The two of them had meshed well during their brief experiment together during the early days of mission training. It had been the policy of the Space Resources Agency to balance the sexes ever since the scandal of the second Mars mission, early in the century. It was the only sensible way to deal with the inevitable tensions. Even the Chinese paired their crew members, though for public consumption they made much of “comradeship” and “Socialist chastity.”

Neither he nor Sue was attached at the moment if you didn’t count Dmitri. He leaned across the table, her hand warm in his. Her dark eyes looked expectantly at him. “Sue…” he began.

“Hey, we’re not interrupting anything, are we?”

He turned his head and saw Mike Berry standing there, a broken-nailed clump of fingers around a pink beer, the other hand resting on Maggie MacInnes’s shoulder.

Maggie was a computer tech, a lean, freckly woman with an impertinent nose and carroty hair worn a little too long for space. She wasn’t wearing anybody’s shirt, just issue shorts and an improvised crisscrossed halter that tied behind her neck, baring skinny shoulder blades. Her rangy figure made Sue look a little chunky. Jameson didn’t know Maggie very well, but after he and Li finished their current schedule of EVA exercises they would be working with Maggie and her counterpart, Jen Mei-mei, plotting orbits and landing approaches.

“No,” he said reluctantly. “Have a seat.”

Sue unobtrusively pulled her hand away from Jameson’s. She smiled a greeting and pushed over to make room.

Berry kicked a couple of airpuffs over, and he and Maggie plumped down on them. “I hear you’ve got the security types buzzing, old chum,” he said.

Jameson looked up, surprised. “How’d you hear that?”

“Oh, word gets around.” Berry hunched over, looking conspiratorial. He brushed his hair forward and narrowed his eyes, in an uncanny imitation of the RB interrogator Jameson had just left. “What’s that?” he said. “You say this Commander Jameson wants us to lodge a protest with the Chinese over their spy camera? Impossible!”

Jameson laughed. “Mike, you ought to be on holovision.”

Berry held up a hand. He changed his body language and became Caffrey, frozen-faced and wary. “Why impossible?” Instantly he was the RB man again. “Because then the Chinese would lodge a protest with us, over the holo scanner we planted in their dormitory. It’s a fair exchange. They don’t find out about our boron engine, and we don’t find out about their sex lives.”

Maggie was laughing too, but Sue looked uncomfortable.

“But when did you meet—” Jameson began.

“You weren’t alone, old chum. They’re doing everybody. Doctor Von Hotseat just arrived this morning on the Earth shuttle. Tuttle’s in there with him now. If you want to know, they started with me, while you were still floating around outside. Wanted to know if I believed in the free exchange of scientific information and all that.”

“See,” Sue said to Jameson. “I told you not to take it personally.”

Berry raised a bushy eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“Oh, I was just sounding off about Security,” Jameson said. He took a swallow of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Maggie spoke up. “I know what you mean. I never thought I’d get approved for this mission at all. They rescreened me twice. I even had to sign a braindip release.”

Jameson wasn’t surprised. Maggie spoke with an unmistakable Yankee twang. People were more tolerant these days, but when Jameson had been growing up there still had been a lingering bitterness over all the ugliness of the New England Secession, and the loss of so many occupation troops during the pacification. Of course, it had been tough on the New Englanders and eastern Canadians too; particularly the use of nukes. It couldn’t have been easy for Maggie, getting this far in the space program. Since reunification, New Englanders and Canadian annexees were theoretically entitled to full citizenship with all its rights, but there was always that coded notation in their passbooks. There were far fewer restrictions on the children and grandchildren of the Russian refugees of the 2010’s.

Sue changed the subject diplomatically. “Look!” she said. “I’ve never seen Jupiter so bright!”

Jameson looked down into the stars. The splendid gem that was Jupiter had just come into view in the glassed, rail-encircled well set into the carpeted floor of the lounge. It drifted slowly past as the great wheel of the space station turned majestically on its axis. Of all the points of light visible, it was the most brilliant.

The four of them watched it in silence until it disappeared almost beneath their feet. A minute later, the window was full of Earth, blue and dazzling against the threadbare fabric of the night. Beneath the swirling clouds he could make out the brownish outlines of the continents, the elephant wrinkles of mountain chains, the patches of lucent green at the poles, where the Arctic wastes had been planted in snow rice. It all seemed familiar and comforting and close.

“What do you suppose we’ll find when we get there?” Maggie said in a voice that was almost a whisper.

Jameson knew what she was feeling. It got to you every once in a while, that moment of strangeness when you caught a glimpse of that distant spark and realized it was a place. That you were actually going to go there across that enormous dark gulf, with a hundred members of your species, in a fragile hollow ring of drawn metal and spun plastic foam.

Maggie was looking directly at him. He saw her shiver.

“On Io,” Berry said, “sulfur and sodium. On Callisto, lots of pebbles. What else?”

“Why not life?” Sue said. “No, wait minute, listen! After all, Callisto’s got an atmosphere of sorts, and it’s far enough from Jupiter so that it doesn’t get the same dose of radiation as the other three Galilean satellites. Dmitri says that, given ammonia frost and evaporate salts, and the existence of molecular hydrogen…”

In a few moments the four of them were having the usual animated argument about life on the Jovian moons—life on Jupiter itself. It was the major after-hours pastime of the entire Jupiter crew, Americans and Chinese alike. Soon it would be settled once and for all.

“…I see a giant lipid, floating in a pool of methane,” Berry was saying, stroking his scraggly beard and peering into his beer as if it were a crystal ball. He had an exaggerated gypsy accent. “A very complex molecule, like chicken fat. No, no, it’s not a lipid after all! It’s a lipoprotein, in a cloud of sulfur! It’s saying ‘Earth-man beware…’ ”

Jameson stopped listening. He was staring into the bowl of stars at his feet. Earth was gone. Jupiter swung into view again among the wheeling stars. It was clear and steady-bright, and it was half a billion miles away.

Maggie said it for him. She caught his eye across the table and said, “It’s a long way down, isn’t it.”