Gregory Benford - Jupiter Project

The gravel slipped under my boot and I nearly lost my balance. A small landslide eroded away the footing I had. I couldn’t stop to rest—I had to keep moving up the slope, even though my breath was ragged and I was sweating.

Seven klicks, yeah. A short hop. I felt like it had been seven years since I left the Cat, and still I hadn’t started down the incline onto the plain.

I struggled up the side of what seemed to be a sand dune, my breath tearing at my throat. The streambed shown on my map had vanished and I was pushing on over broken, hilly terrain. Every fifteen minutes I checked in with Yuri, but I was damned if I was going to ask him for help. Pride goeth before a fall, ha ha. And my throat hurt, my nose dribbled, my eyes stung. Everything tasted oily—air, rations, water.

The stones and sand gritted against my boots, slipping away, robbing me of balance and speed. I toiled up the incline, angling across. A few boulders buried in the silt helped. I could pull myself up with them for support. The gray line that was the top drew gradually nearer as I lurched along, cursing my own stupidity. It promised nothing—a few random rocks were perched there, sheltering patches of snow.

Then I reached it.

And looked beyond, down the face of the hill. The blue way station beckoned serenely in the distance. It was two kilometers away down a broad swath of bare rock. I could reach it in half an hour.

I’d won.

Won what? I thought. For who? Why did I do this ?

So I got extra oxy from the way station, rested, ate, and hiked back. It was an anticlimactic return—Yuri hardly said anything. I told myself he felt embarrassed.

I didn’t feel particularly comfortable with him, to say the least. I did a lot of hiking out to visit sensor packages, glad to be on my own.

By sundown Wednesday we were heading south and angling back toward the base. There’s no true night on Ganymede because Jove hangs there, beaming down a hundred times brighter than Earth’s full moon. After all, it fills 250 times as much of the sky as Luna does from Earth. So night is really a sort of yellowish twilight; the jagged valleys turn beautiful and spooky all at once. All they need is a moaning wind and an abandoned castle or two, to complete the eerie picture.

We shambled into the base late Thursday night, a little behind schedule and tired. Zak was standing outside waiting for us, along with the mechanic who would check out the Cat to be sure we hadn’t hot rodded her to death. Mechanics are like mother hens, clucking over their machines. This one poked around for half an hour before he gave us an okay. Neither Yuri nor I mentioned the problem with the air tanks; someone would wonder why we hadn’t reported it earlier. I had already had enough red tape for one day.

I told Zak about it, though, over supper.

“It saddens me, Matt boy, to see you picking up bad habits. The rule book plainly says that such little dramas should be reported.” He gave me an appraising look. “On the other hand, creative rule-bending is an art form we must all learn, sooner or later.”

“Looking back on it,” I said, “I’m not so sure I did the right thing.”

“Look upon it as a valuable learning experience,” Zak said grandly.

“My conscience bothers me.”

“Oh? What’s it feel like? I had mine taken out, along with my appendix.”

“I suspected as much.”

“I think I can lay your pangs to rest, Matt. Yuri reported the whole thing, after the fact.”

“Huh?”

“I was on radio watch, remember? Let me consult the Encyclopedia of All Knowledge—” he picked up the binder lying on the bench next to him—“and all will be clear.”

“What’s that?”

“My diary. You can’t read upside-down writing. I take it? Good, my secrets are safe.” He opened the binder and ran a finger along to the right entry. “Ah, yes. You called me, said nothing worth immortalizing with a note. Um. Then Yuri called—said you were outside, visiting a sensor package—and asked to speak to Captain Vandez. On a private line.” He raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”

“So Yuri reported it anyway. I didn’t think he had it in him.”

“Nor I. Maybe he’s not such a rat after all.”

“Um. No comment.”

“Cynic.”

“Um.”

I managed to get in a morning’s skiing before the Sagan lifted off. It was fun to feel a chill wind whipping by my ears, lean into a turn and slash a trail across a hillside. Everybody was out in the dome for a last bit of exercise and we all got into an immense snowball fight an hour before liftoff. After I caught two in a row down the back of my collar I surrendered and went back to pack.

Liftoff was uneventful. By the time Captain Vandez let us out of our seats Ganymede was shrinking rapidly and neither Zak nor I could make out much surface detail. Far away we could see some of the other moons. Io is an orange pizza, volcano-pocked. Europa has a planet-sized glacier and crinkly ridges as tangled as spaghetti. Callisto is a shotgun pattern of overlapping craters. There are thirty-nine Jovian moons in all bigger than ten kilometers across, and lots smaller than that. By the time early expeditions reached J-8 they were tired of the whole business and nobody has even landed on the last four relatively large ones. No reason to—anybody who cares can see them close up if he can get time on the Lab’s big telescope, the Far Eye.

I woke up just before the Sagan docked at the Lab. Zak had fallen asleep in the middle of composing a poem and gave every appearance of being no longer in the land of the living. He had sprawled out over two seats and was teetering on the edge, about to fall into the aisle. I elbowed him awake and we queued up at the air lock.

The Sagan was moored above the top of the Can. When I came out of the lock I was looking down the bore of an enormous gun—or at least, that’s the way it seemed. I was faced down, looking through the hollow center section of the Can—the ship bay. I could see red and white stars out the other end, and the dark outlines of shuttles and skimmers floating around the axial cylinder, being serviced.

I hooked on to a throw line and scooted across to the personnel lock, the same one we’d come out nine days before. The week on Ganymede had given me a touch of groundhog legs—a sense that there really ought to be an up and down, so that I kept looking around for a reference. Going through the personnel lock fouled me up even further, because for a moment I was convinced that I was falling down it. Don’t ask me to explain why; it’s just a reflex, like sneezing. Zak felt it. too; he started spinning his arms for balance the second he came through the lock, which just made him tumble until he stopped it.

We followed the line through a series of tubes and ended up in a big room so long the curvature hid the heads of people standing against the far wall.

“Ah, gentlemen. ‘And the hunter, home from the hill.’ Welcome back.”

I turned and found Ishi smiling at me.

“The first thing he does is quote a rival poet to me.” Zak said, and pumped Ishi’s hand when I was finished with it.

“You look thinner,” I said. “Working too hard?”

“What’s new?” Zak said.

“Not much. We lost another bathyscaphe-type probe in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but it found nothing new before it failed. And no, Matt, there has been little work for me. I do have to go out tonight to correct a drifting setting in a satellite, however.”

“Tonight? But that’s the amateur hour,” I said.

“Correct. I understand you will play guitar. I regret missing it.”

“Don’t,” Zak said. “I’ve heard him practice.”