Jupiter Project Read online

  An idea flickered across my mind and I suppressed it. “He’s an oaf, that’s all.”

  “You reacted as though threatened by him.”

  “He—he tries to intimidate me, lord it over me.”

  “Yuri is a type, that is all. There are many of them in the world.”

  “Not in this world, not in the Can,” I said fiercely. “He’s a type I can do without. I heard through the grapevine that he waited until Mr. Jablons had a heavy work schedule in the low temperature lab. Then Yuri challenged him for the chess championship.”

  “Ah. So Mr. Jablons did not have free time to think over the game between sessions? Ummm.”

  I was glad I’d gotten Ishi off the subject of me and onto Yuri. And Monitoring was nearby, so I mumbled a farewell and ducked down a side corridor. I thumbed through the Caltech booklet to keep busy; there were a lot of 3Ds showing crashing white surf, rugged gray mountains and orange groves. What they didn’t show was the press of people, the pollution, the gang fights in the streets. They didn’t tell you it was a dog-eat-dog world back there, a zoo with all the animals out of their cages.

  I stepped into the small alcove just inside the doorway of Monitoring. There was nobody there, so I dimmed the lights and went through a side door into the Main Station Room—only nobody calls it that, naturally; it’s known locally as the Hole.

  An apt name, too, because it’s utterly dark. I stood for a moment and let my eyes adjust, not daring to move. After a while I could see the dim red lamps spaced evenly between the booths. My booth was the fifth down and I moved toward it at a slow shuffle, being careful not to bump into anything.

  The Hole isn’t very big—no larger than a decent-sized apartment—but it’s crammed with equipment. I could hear someone murmuring from around a corner in the aisle; that meant the required minimum of one man on duty was satisfied. But the voice was just a drone, relaying some numbers to the bridge, so there wasn’t anything urgent.

  I slipped into my booth and my hands fitted automatically into the control slots. I logged in and tried a few practice commands: a view of Europa, Jupiter’s second moon, off the port bow (reddish, ridge-streaked, most of it eaten by shadow); the docking area, from two separate cameras, showing three men maneuvering a storage drum into place; a shot of free space, with an orange rim of Jupiter in one corner. I switched over to radar.

  Then I got down to business. I was sitting in my own separate booth, with my view completely filled by a soft green screen. It looked very much like an old-fashioned radar screen, with one important difference: the blips of detected objects show in three dimensions, since it’s a holographic projection. I could see a jumble of stuff in the center—the Can itself and things parked near it. Then, further out. were tiny points of light that constantly shifted and changed, vectoring in an elaborate dance.

  Every second the pattern changed. Jupiter is a huge, massive planet, with a swarm of junk orbiting around it. The solar system’s asteroid belt lies between Mars and Jupiter; Jove has captured a kind of asteroid belt of its own. Compare Earth: it has Luna, a few pint-sized rocks, and that’s all. Jupiter has thirty-nine moons, three larger than Luna, and enough garbage orbiting it to make a half dozen more. Most of the junk wasn’t discovered until the first expedition came out this way, and it’s been a nuisance ever since.

  I punched a few buttons and, in mathematical language, asked the ballistic computer a few questions. The machine blotted out a small rectangle in my screen and printed its answers:

  NO IMMINENT COLLISIONS RECORDED.

  UNKNOWN OBJECT NOTED 13:45 HOURS. PRELIMINARY CALCULATION INDICATES NO DANGER.

  YOU ARE SECOND WATCH OFFICER.

  I relaxed. There wasn’t going to be much to do on this watch. The chunks of rock and ice that revolve around Jupiter are dangerous—they can zip through the Can in a thousandth of a second, depressurize a level and kill somebody before it’s patched. But there weren’t any of respectable size headed for us.

  Still, I checked out the unknown that had appeared at 13:45 hours. Its orbit showed that it was following an ellipse that crossed over the northern pole of Jupiter. The interesting thing was that the orbit swept right into the upper reaches of Jupiter’s atmosphere—so close that, after a few passes, it would plunge in and burn up from sheer friction. That was unusual. Most of Jupiter’s “asteroid belt” circles around it in the ecliptic plane, far out from Jupiter’s rings and the big moons. This was a good-sized lump, too; radar showed it to be bigger than the Can itself.

  Anyway, it was no danger to us. Possibly it had come in from interstellar space just a few days ago. Or maybe it was just an eccentric bit of matter from the asteroid belt. The computer would store the data, and someday a research student back on Earth would use it in a study of the solar system. That’s one of the reasons we—the Jupiter Project—are out here.

  The computer nudged me: INVENTORY DUE.

  I’d been dawdling, musing about that stray chunk of rock. I thumbed a button and the screen erased. Another button, and I was looking at a set of concentric red circles. The center circle was shaded yellow; it represented Jupiter. Each ring around Jupiter was a survey satellite. Most of them were in close to the top of Jupiter’s atmosphere, orbiting just above the clouds of ammonia. Ammonia is the same stuff used in household cleaners, only in Jove’s chilly upper atmosphere it’s frozen into little crystals.

  I went through the inventory, typing out questions for the computer about each satellite. Some were recharging their batteries from sunlight right now and transmitting engineering data. Others were bleeding off the excess charge they’d accumulated from particles in Jupiter’s radiation belts, so they weren’t working at full power. I had to check all these things and be sure the operation was “normal” for that particular satellite.

  Routine work, but necessary. We get a lot of vital information from the satellites, and they’re the only way we have of knowing what goes on close to Jupiter. The Can itself is a million kilometers further out.

  This time I cleared my board right away. If a satellite had shown a malfunction, though, I’d have to carefully diagnose the trouble and turn the problem over to Jenny or Ishi. A sick satellite is no joke. Whoever was on duty would have to make a house call on the patient and fix the thing on the fly, in free space.

  I thought about that, absentmindedly tapping the console keys. I like working in Monitoring, sure, but it didn’t exactly make my blood sing. With only thirty teenagers in the Can. Commander Aarons has made an Eleventh Commandment that we fill in where needed. So my personal preferences hadn’t mattered when they moved me indoors, off the repair gang, and into Monitoring.

  But I wanted to be working, dammit, using my hands. I could maneuver shuttles and skimmers and one-man jetters—but here I sat on my ass, a clerk.

  I grimaced and glanced over at the Caltech catalog. Inside, outside, Earthside—where was I going?

  Chapter 3

  Zak called me just before I went off shift. He and Ishi were fooling around with nothing much to do. “C’mon over to my place and we’ll goof off,” Zak said. I had some time free, so I went.

  Zak and Ishi were back in Zak’s tiny bunkroom, wedged in like sardines. Zak’s parents weren’t home yet and Zak was messing around with the computer terminal he had installed next to his bunk. “Hey, close the door,” Ishi called to me.

  “You kidding?” I replied. “The three of us packed in here’ll bring on claustrophobia fits.”

  “We want some privacy, Matt old man,” Zak said mysteriously.

  So I closed the door and perched on the edge of Zak’s bunk. “For what?”

  “This,” Ishi said, with his usual eloquence. He flicked on the big display flatscreen on the wall. A black and white picture formed out of a pearly background fog. A woman. Pretty, with long legs. She was peering off to the left. She wore a flowing robe.

  “Who’s she?” I asked.

  “A creation of mine.” Zak said.

  “A sni
p from Earthside 3D?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s how she got started, yeah. You remember me telling you about those new Simulife codes I got?”

  “Sure. For taking a mechanical system and studying the stresses. You start off with a new design for a grappling arm, say, and the computer draws a picture of it for you. Then you give it jobs to do and the computer studies how the thing will move and what strains it will take. You can see the grappler making awkward motions, and redesign it to avoid that. It’s—” I noticed the two of them grinning at me. “Hey…” I said, thinking.

  “You are a quick student,” Ishi said wryly. “Show him, Zak.”

  Zak punched a read-in code. The woman began to move. She stood up. She smiled right at us and I guessed she was about twenty, maybe twenty-five. She had a nice smile. She was still staring toward me as she reached up and her fingers found a clasp at her throat. The robe fell. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. She was, well, spectacular.

  “Damn,” was all I could say.

  “I can tap in for color,” Zak said, and her skin became a rosy tan. Green eyes. Dark black hair, so black it seemed to have traces of blue in it. She began to turn slowly. A little mechanically, I thought. But then I, ah, got more interested in the general effect, and she didn’t seem so awkward anymore.

  “And 3D.” Ishi prompted.

  “Check.” Zak’s fingers talked to the central computer some more and the woman changed from a flat image to one with perspective. Fully rounded, yeah. She had a special luxuriant look about her that…well, bigger and better than life, is the way to put it, I guess. She was certainly better than anything I’d ever seen in the Can. It suddenly struck me that the images of women I’d been seeing on 3D for years were always more spectacular than the women and girls I saw in everyday life. False advertising, sort of.

  “Zak, you’ve got a good thing here,” I said. “You’ve surpassed yourself.”

  Ishi grinned broadly. “Matt, you lack imagination.”

  Zak typed in for a routine he’d obviously set up beforehand. “I call her Rebecca.” he said mildly.

  Rebecca began to dance. She was good. She jiggled in all the right places and I followed her movements intently. It was hard to believe a program designed to test out how machines would function, before they were ever built, could do this. Zak had taken Rebecca off some 3D show and fed her specs into the programming, and here she was, sexy as hell.

  Then a man walked on stage.

  He was naked. And he was visibly interested in Rebecca. Very visibly.

  Zak snickered when he saw the expression on my face. “Here we go, boys.”

  Zak had imagination, that was for sure. He’d named the guy Isaac. Isaac was big and burly and had been around the world. Rebecca was entranced by him. Anything Isaac wanted, he got. They did it in the regular old Missionary Position, and then in a chair, and then standing up. We three sat there and watched. Nobody said anything, even though I knew this wasn’t new to Zak or Ishi. They were still too interested, though, to make any wise-cracks. Some things you don’t get tired of so fast, I guess. And me…well, for me a lot of it was new. Sure. I’d seen the manuals, and gone to the Becoming An Adult 3D courses they imported from Earth, and all that stuff. But to see it…that was something else.

  “What’ll you have next, gents?” Zak asked. Isaac and Rebecca were still going at it in the middle of the screen. Each of them was staring at the other with fixed smiles. I wondered if it was the mechanical programming or whether people were really like that when they, well. Did It. I had no way of knowing, of course. “Uh…” I began, and stopped. I knew my face was turning red again, but there didn’t seem to be anything to do about it. Rebecca and Isaac went on with their relentless energy. I knew there was a certain rhythm you were supposed to hit; the books all talked about it that way. The books had spoken about techniques and methods…

  “Geez, Matt,” Zak said, “you look like you’re doing your homework.”

  Ishi chuckled. I realized I’d been dodging the whole thing by concentrating on the technical points. “Well, maybe that’s the way I am,” I growled.

  “C’mon. relax,” Zak said. He tapped his console. Rebecca and Isaac jerked and moved. They got into a new position. Then they were at it again. Bam, bam, bam.

  “Kind of repetitious, isn’t it?” I murmured.

  “You should’ve been here, a couple of hours ago,” Ishi said. “Ol’ Zak here had them going at it like rabbits. Double the speed, Zak.”

  He did. We all burst out laughing.

  “Not a very dignified act, is it?” I commented.

  “Dignified, schmignified,” Zak said. “It’s the real stuff.”

  “No, it’s just a sim.”

  “I didn’t notice you falling asleep.”

  “Okay, okay, it’s pretty good, in fact, damned good.”

  Ishi asked idly. “I wonder if that’s what those porno movies are like?”

  Zak nodded. “That’s what gave me the idea.”

  “To duplicate pornos?”

  “Sure. Commander Aarons isn’t going to let that kind of thing come in over the 3D tightbeam. But if we can make them here…”

  I started to see it. “Ah. You’re going to sell tapes of your talented Rebecca?”

  “I don‘t see why not.”

  I slapped my brow. “Zak the flak. Geez, you’ll do anything for money.”

  Zak said airily, “ideas have a momentum of their own, Matt-o. That’s one of the lessons of history.”

  “They’ll nail you. They’ll uncover it in the memory files.”

  He arched his eyebrows. “You imagine I would overlook such a vital facet of the problem? I see you have inadequate respect for the jewellike clarity of my mind.”

  “Okay, okay, what’s your out?”

  “I have a storage place they’ll never find. Absolutely safe.”

  “Where?” Ishi asked.

  “Come now. Professional secret.”

  “So you work out a whole set of pornos,” I said, “and then sell the index code, so kids can tap into it?”

  “There will be a random resorting of the index, of course, from time to time. To keep the customers from giving the information away. Only I will know the basic location.”

  Ishi said, “Free enterprise, he calls it.”

  “Look, somebody’s got to do something to liven it up around here.”

  I smiled. “So you think there’ll be a big market for your machine-made porno movies?”

  “Why not? The stuff we get from Earthside is all oatmeal puree. Entertainment for all the family. Boring.”

  “So you figure to sell them to everybody?”

  Zak shook his head. “Why would adults want them? Hell, they’ve got all the sex they need.”

  Ishi laughed. “I think you’re a little naive about your marketing strategy. Zak.”

  “Oh. yeah? Wouldn’t you lay out some coin of the realm to see ol’ Rebecca doing her thing?”

  Ishi nodded. “Maybe. But it would have to be really good.”

  “Look, you guys,” Zak said energetically, “let’s cut the crap. We all know the Can is a tightly run ship, in more ways than one. Here we are, nearly eighteen years old, and not a single one of us has gotten laid. Right?”

  “Right.” I said sourly.

  “That means there’s a lot of repressed impulses floating around.”

  “Which you’ll make a buck out of.”

  “Well…maybe. I’ll tell you one thing, this move of mine has made me think about our tight little tribe here. They give us all these up-to-date courses and we have social mixers and all that, sure. But the plain fact is that we live in each other’s hip pockets. There’s no privacy. Your family is always just around the corner.”

  Ishi said, “Like some incredibly small town.”

  “Check. You know how in schools back Earthside. they give you an essay to write on what you did on your summer vacation?”

  “Yeah.”

>   “Well, what everybody knows is that if you’re older than fourteen, you spend your summer vacation trying to get laid. And if you’re lucky, you make it.

  “You score,” Ishi said.

  “You mean,” I said, “by the time kids Earthside are our age, they’re…”

  “Right, they’re men of the world, compared to us.”

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. Novels and movies are all about that. For Chrissake, it’s a major theme!”

  Ishi chuckled, “You’ve got a point.”

  “I think I know why, too. I mean, why we’re so stifled up here.”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “We’re busy. It’s dangerous out here. Maybe you’ve noticed.”

  “That’s a piece of it. yeah.” Zak said. “I did a little researching, though, and turned up a study. Sexual Suppression in Closed Communities, it was called. It turns out that in places like the Israeli kibbutzim, nobody gets laid either, unless they’re married. There’s a thing called ‘outgroup bonding’ that forms. Like an incest taboo, almost. You get to feeling you can’t have sex or romance with a member of the group you grew up with. The pressure is always on you to defend against some threat, so you get in the habit of thinking about girls as if they’re allies. Not, y’know, potential lovers.”

  “You think that explains it?” Ishi asked.

  “Sure. Hell, the author of the study gave the Can as an example. She said we’ll probably work out the same way as the kibbutzim. I think that’s why the study was done in the first place—to find out what to expect out here.”

  “Ummm,” I murmured. “I dunno…”

  “Say, Ishi. I just remembered something.”

  “Oh?”

  “When I mentioned that nobody got laid around here, you kept quiet.”

  “So I did.”