Almost Complete Short Fiction, page 38
“Lu Sin was one of my students, Rik.” There was obviously more to it than that, but other people were around, and there was much to do.
But Father’s off-color comment on ammonia sources started me thinking about other liquids.
25 milligauss.
“In the first place,” the Callisto Equilateral engineer was saying, “the Billybrown was never meant to land anywhere. The hull’s okay, but the ion rockets would get bent. Secondly, the cluster ion generators are not designed to work with water. Water, believe it or not, is a very corrosive material. Ah, tanks, valves, microscopic jets, they could all become clogged. The cluster formation hardware isn’t designed for water. . . .”
“Has it ever been tried?” I was getting impatient and overrode the incoming transmission. He’d get the interruption in six seconds.
“. . . no one would be stupid enough to risk equipment on such a harebrained idea. Um, over.”
“Callisto E. My life is at stake here, as well as the lives of thirty other people. Over.” He knew that, but I was angry now. This was the kind of mentality that got us into this mess in the first place by shutting down the Callisto Equilateral reactor. I stewed for a dozen seconds.
“Billybrown. That doesn’t change the engineering. Ah, but it does change the priorities. We can jury-rig a test to feed water to some spare thrusters. Ah, how much time do we have? Over.” Seconds went by. It’s hard to be sarcastic with a ten second delay, but I managed.
“Callisto E. If you guys don’t know, who does? The rate of magnetic field increase has leveled off so maybe we have more time than we thought. But it’s not healthy even at this level. The sooner we get out of here, the better. End.”
My father was motioning that he wanted to talk to me. I gave the comm panel a shove and floated over to him. Lu Sin and the others were outside working on the fuel transfer.
“We’re playing this as if it were going to work,” he said. “Everyone on the station is ready to go. Uh, about your mother. . . .”
I cut him off. “Supposing we can run the clusterjets on water, how are we going to get the water to the Billybrown! We’ll need at least thirty tonnes to get to Callisto orbit, forty to get there as fast as we came, which might be a good idea considering the radiation build-up. That’s a lot of ferry flights. Can we bring the spacecraft to the ground station?” The station was on the north rim of Pan crater, about halfway around the tiny moon from the peak of Mt. Barnard.
The old man got tense, and looked at me as if he were going to challenge my change of subject. Too bad. With a chance to get out of this alive, I could postpone the family history. He shrugged his shoulders and answered my question.
“Our surface gravity at Pan’s rim is about half a percent. Can you hover in that with loaded tanks on one megawatt? Callisto Equilateral will be below our horizon for the next five hours, and the station antenna wouldn’t be able to get a direct shot at you, so I’m not sure we’d be able to deliver that much power.”
Not by microwave link, but . . .
“Dad, what’s the output of your powerplant, total, not just what you can feed into the radar?”
“Um, about a hundred megawatts. Why?”
“Do you have a cable reel and a power line running out to Mt. Barnard?”
70 milligauss.
Lu Sin and I had been awake for two universal days and had to sleep, radiation or not. The station personnel could handle the preparations. She went to the station, to sleep underground. I stayed with the ship.
When I woke up five hours later, and played back the overnight reports, it looked like old Jove really meant it. Callisto Equilateral reported that a magnetic bow shock had reformed off Jupiter, and the radiation level around here was getting definitely unhealthy. Fortunately, just about anything stops low energy sulfur nuclei, so things weren’t quite as bad as the particle flux display was indicating, but the high energy proton population was way up, too.
Jupiter’s bands were joining in too, displaying more color. I could see that through the skylight. And it had a new red spot, in the north tropical zone, though how this was connected with the return of the magnetic field, no one understood. The best answer I got was from one of Father’s astrophysicists, who told me to think of Jupiter as a miniature sun in slow motion.
The Callisto Equilateral engineer called in with what he thought was bad news. Their tests showed that if we ran the clusterjets on pure water, they’d probably fail after a hundred hours. A water ammonia mixture would be better.
I politely reminded him that I only needed about eight hours of thrust, and that I would turn the ship in for refit as soon as I got home. I think he was still unhappy about the insult to the equipment.
Father and Lu Sin arrived soon after I ended the contact, looking smug about something.
“Everyone’s ready at the base, their personal effects are packed to be picked up by robots later.” Father announced. “What about the ship?”
“It should run okay with water mixed in with our remaining ammonia.”
Bringing the Billybrown in over the north rim of Pan was one tricky operation. The jokes about extension cords for electric rockets go back to the twentieth century, but this is the first time I think one has ever been used. We hovered directly over the radar antenna while the power cable was lofted and quickly welded onto the leads we had exposed. Thus freed from beamed power, the ship, followed by the cable reel on the ground, floated over to the station tank farm, where a hose was fitted.
There were a hundred problems: fused circuit breakers, hose coupling sizes, ion jet splash effects, to name a few; and a hundred solutions to go with them. It was done in a day.
Then the station cameras captured one of the stranger sights in the history of astronautics and electric rockets. Carrying the scientists, their families, and as much water as it could, the Billybrown, its rectenna looking like a big floppy hat brim, floated over the Amalthean landscape and up Mount Barnard, trailing the powerline behind it. We ramped the exhaust velocity of our clusterjets up toward maximum fuel economy as Amalthea’s surface gravity dropped off to about a milligee approaching the top of the mountain. Soon we were back in free fall.
I found out too late that someone had to stay behind to cut the power. The connection at the spacecraft end was a hurriedly welded kludge, and one doesn’t simply pull the wire off a hundred megawatt lead; the arc explosion would be like setting off dynamite. Things were so hectic that I didn’t notice who stayed until it was too late.
“Dad, damnit! Why you?” Dad was down there on the surface alone. The nearest transport was back at Pan’s Rim, a hundred kilometers away. You don’t maneuver something the mass of the Billybrown like a helicopter, and even in milligravity, the flimsy rectenna would droop to the ground without the support of the clusterjets.
“Someone had to, son, and I’m an old man. Besides, I always wanted to be in charge of a world, and now I am. This is the ringside seat for the magnetosphere turn-on, and I’m not going to miss the show.” What nonsense!
“Dad!” I protested. “There’s nothing to see; the only way you could know the magnetosphere is there is by watching the instruments like the rest of us, and by getting a fatal dose of radiation sickness.”
“Leon!” Lu Sin interjected, displaying emotion for a second time in my memory, but economically. It was the first time I could remember her calling him by his first name. She seemed more irritated than worried.
“Oh, well. If you insist. Rik, how long until perijovian?”
“Huh? About half an hour?”
“That should be close enough. If you have a telescope, you can watch me jump.”
“Dad, you can’t jump off a moon this big. Escape velocity is . . .”
“You’re the big pilot? You should check your orbit mechanics. Here I come.”
Lu Sin looked surprised for a moment, then grinned. The two of them looked like a couple of doting parents who had just hidden an Easter egg and were waiting for me to find it. I shook my head, maintained my dignity, and waited to see what would happen.
Lu Sin had the Billybrown point the docking camera down at Father’s position on the mountain peak. There was a brilliant flash a hundred meters north of him and our power meter went back to zero: Father had severed the powerline at the surface with an explosive charge. We waited. We were already three kilometers out, so all we could see of Dad was a white dot. But yes, he started getting larger. Soon we could see a figure in vacuum gear floating along, guiding himself on what was left of the power cable. In half an hour, there was a knock on our airlock door.
“So,” Lu Sin said, once we were settled. “The peak of Mt. Barnard actually sticks beyond its LI point at perijovian.”
“On the high side of its orbital eccentricity cycle, anyway. Which is where we are now. Why do you think the summit is so clean?” Father rumbled. I felt like an idiot. “Jupiter pulls the dust off! Come on, son, have a sense of humor!”
I should have felt embarrassed, humiliated, or something. But what I got was a funny kind of pride instead. That was my dad who jumped off a moon! A few minutes before he would have fallen off, anyway. I found a laugh, hesitant at first, then full-bodied. Even Lu Sin joined in.
We still had to wait a tense half an hour for Callisto Equilateral to come out from behind Jupiter. Protons at these energies went right through our ship’s hull and my accumulated dose was over a rad. Everyone else, except Lu Sin, had received more.
The children had been housed underground, for the most part, at the science station, since the magnetosphere started coming back on, but now they were exposed. Their only hope was speed and distance.
210 milligauss.
The magnetic field strength at the Jovian cloudtops was approaching that found at Earth’s surface. Jupiter’s magnetosphere was back in force, and growing, already roughly a thousand times the volume of Earth’s. Beyond Europa, we were out of the woods for the moment, but like in Macbeth, the woods were chasing us; Jupiter’s new outer Van Allen belt was expanding toward the orbit of Ganymede faster than we were coasting out. Nothing we could do about that; our water reaction mass was gone; we saved only what we needed for minimum life support.
The cabin was a crowded inferno. At about forty Celsius, the fourth power law of thermal radiation, as applied to the skin of the Billybrown’s cabin, saved us from cooking ourselves with our own body heat, but it was not comfortable. Most of the thirty people preferred to remain in their hammocks, hooked up to the overloaded air system, trying to sleep the ordeal away. But there were six children to contend with, two of them too young to understand what was happening. The zero-gee toilet had given up, and we were down to sharing relief tubes. In twenty years, perhaps, we’d laugh about all that. Perhaps.
Guts don’t sag in zero gravity; they sit up high and impressive, especially when attached to a chest of matching expanse. Close up, my father’s magnificent belly eclipsed the rim of his shorts. He was that close so that he could speak privately. Curiously, a private conversation was now a possibility because of the din around us.
“Rik. Look, Marienne had reasons for leaving me. At least she felt so. She was beautiful, but within a year of our marriage, I was seeing other women; colleagues, students, who had a lot more to offer in intellectual companionship. She couldn’t handle it. Maybe she would have, except that one of these other ladies had an accident which I had to take care of.”
“Lu Sin?” I asked, not really wanting to believe it. “I could see there was something between you.”
“Lu Sin came from an unsophisticated culture, Rik. She was a good engineering student, but very naive about . . . relationships. By the time she stopped trying to deny it to herself, it was too late for an abortion. We had an unplanned child.”
“Where is this going? What does this have to do with me? Lu Sin is special to you, I understand. Do I have another brother or a sister somewhere? Are you going to marry her?”
He raised an eyebrow and shrugged. “If we survive, perhaps. But . . .” then he looked straight at me, challenging, unapologetic. “Rik, you were that child. Marienne raised you as if you were her own for ten years. Then, well, it got to be too much for her. She didn’t handle it well, but I can forgive that.”
I had older brothers that I always thought got more of Mom’s affection. I’d always put that down to sibling rivalry. Somehow the news didn’t bother me that much, as if I’d been expecting something like that. But Lu Sin! What we’d almost shared made my blood run cold now.
“Lu Sin is my biological mother? Does she know?”
“I think so.” What does it take, to watch from afar so long, and be silent. To embrace, and be silent. “She was so young, Rik.” He smiled. “Do you know, I think she can still have children!”
No, Dad. You can’t mean that.
My father is not a conventional man, and I still have problems dealing with the insatiable Don Juan that resides in the same body with that towering intellect and unconquerable will. Perhaps I am being taught how to love without judgment. And if I learn that lesson, perhaps I will not live the rest of my life alone.
4200 milligauss.
No one is really sick yet, but it doesn’t look good. Jupiter’s new magnetosphere is not a carbon copy of its old one; more tilt, more field, more radiation. Even Callisto orbit won’t be safe.
We arrived at Callisto Equilateral with about a year’s worth of allowed cumulative dose under our belts, sustained in a week. Refugees were straggling in from Io, Ganymede, and Metis. The Europa station has gone underwater in hopes that they can survive long enough for shielded transport to be developed. A small fleet is on the way from Earth. It should get here in a year. They have some new antiradiation drugs.
The main part of Callisto Equilateral is a wheel with life support for a nominal three thousand people. There are now about 4200 present, and interplanetary transport for maybe five hundred. The hope now is that the Himalia base can be made self sustaining and expanded, and we’re using the transport to shuttle back and forth. Eventually, the whole wheel will be moved out to that orbit; but that, too, will take years. Chunny and Dad think it can be done; the rest of us are believing, hoping, working our tails off. Maybe, just maybe. Meanwhile, I have my first command in sight.
I’ve been appointed first officer on the Glasser, evacuating the pregnant women and younger children to the outer moon, Himalia. Lu Sin is in command on the trip out, but someone has to bring it back, and I’m in line for that.
Lu Sin is the most disciplined, logical person I know, and her pregnancy is the craziest, most illogical thing any person I know has ever done. It was as if she felt she had made a pact with the universe whereby if it bowed to her will for three hundred and sixty-four days, she would surrender on the three hundred and sixty-fifth, no questions asked. It’s either that or it’s the exact opposite; maybe having a child is a woman’s way of spitting in the face of eternity when it crowds her. Anyway, no one questions a heroine. I don’t think any genetic tests will ever be made. Dad is sure the baby is his, and that’s the way it’s going to be.
So, I’ve got a sister on the way. I look at Lu Sin and think she will be very, very beautiful.
“Let’s have you take the con, Rik. I’m going to sit back and watch, unless you blow it.”
I nod and run through the checks. The ship is clean and bright inside, structurally the same as the Billybrown, but with all the panels, lights and creature comforts intact. Kids play vacuum tag in a net cage while their mothers and aunts discuss setting up new households with the adventurous spirit of pioneers. Someone made a sign which hangs from the big cargo cage bolted on behind us. Himalia or Bust, it says. I’ve checked everything that can be rechecked.
“Ready, Mom?”
She nods sharply, professionally.
“Glasser, start thrust,” I command. The acceleration warning tone chimes.
“Roger. Prepare for 1 percent gravity, five seconds.”
The caged children drift gently to the floor with cries of protest as thrust begins, the first of many insults to their so-far idyllic childhoods in a scientific Eden.
“Dr. Kolentz sends his wishes to everyone for a good voyage,” the ship told us. Dad is in charge of Himalia now. The best person in the Jovian system to bluster the place together, so everyone thinks, so I think. The more things change . . . When I look at Lu Sin, whatever is supposed to kick in to prevent me from feeling that way about her because I know that she is my biological mother, doesn’t kick in. Not at all. But there is nothing whatever to do or say about that, either.
Outside, a major part of the solar system is returning to normal, complete with its rules and its deadly radiations. But, when we touch, I remember, and so does she.
Tin Angel
When does a tool become a colleague?
They both heard the sirens.
Angel’s eyes went wide. “Automobile accident, drunk driver uninjured in custody, man dead at the scene, pregnant woman, coming here, possible internal injuries, unconscious.”
Dr. C. Thornhart Benson looked sharply at his new protegee, momentarily surprised. She grinned and pointed a finger to her eyes. He smiled in spite of himself. Her eyes were infrared as well as optical receivers, and she was, of course, linked into every digital device in the hospital, including the comm net. He wouldn’t have to wait for the call. Too bad about whoever it was, but this was an opportunity to see what Angel could do.
“Let’s do it,” he said. They had been about to leave his stuffy, cluttered third-floor office at the medical center after a few minutes of paperwork and decompression following evening rounds on his patients. Instead, he put down his journal, Angel put down a half-finished stocking cap she was knitting, and they headed toward the emergency room.
He wanted to be there when the patient came in, not only to do what he could to help, but also to see how Angel would handle the situation. If the experiment called Angel was to work, she’d have to learn this side of the business.
