Gregory Benford - Jupiter Project

When I tucked Roadhog into her berth I topped off her fuel tanks and started running through a series of maintenance checks to be sure the instruments were still okay.

“Hey, don’t you want to get inside?” Jenny said. She had just woken up and was grumpy.

“Sure.” I said over suit radio. “But I want to be sure Roadhog is ready to go out right away if I need her.”

“Ummm.” She stretched. “We’ve been out in her—what?—fourteen hours. Some time to suddenly become a stickler.”

“Tourist!”

“Ummmm.”

“A working cowboy waters his horse before he gets anything to drink himself.”

“She’s a horse now, is she? I thought she was a roadhog.”

“Come on,” I grinned at her through my faceplate. “I’ll race you to the airlock. And —special today only, folks—I’ll buy you that drink.”

“Lead the way, my swain.”

I woke up late the next morning with a funny ringing buzz in my head and eyes that didn’t want to focus. Getting out of bed almost convinced me that the spin had been taken off the Can and my bedroom was now at zero-g—nothing moved quite right.

I recognized the symptoms. I had felt the same way when Dad introduced me to the black currant wine Mom brought down from Hydroponics; with no resistance or experience, it doesn’t take very much to addle your brains.

Jenny and I hadn’t really drunk a lot, but I guess it makes a difference what you drink, too. I’d experimented with hard liquor while she sipped an aperitif wine. The evening had gone rather well: we sat in a corner of the darkened bar, meriting a few puzzled glances from the watch officers who came in after leaving duty. There was no one else around at those early morning hours, so our baptism into the rites of elders went unobserved by our friends, just the way we wanted it. We talked about the various illusions the sexes have, and how hard it is to see through them. It wasn’t so much what was said, as how we said it. No resounding conclusions, but I learned a lot.

Then I had walked her home and kissed her good night. Now I had a hangover. How could life be more complete?

After a solid breakfast to get my blood sugar count up again. I felt pretty good. I resolved to learn a bit more about liquor before I tried some of the more exotic brands of rocket fuel the bar offered.

I got down to the Student Center during what would have been the normal morning coffee break, if these had been normal times. Kids were milling around the corridors trading rumors, with a particularly big clump at the bulletin board. I shouldered my way up near the front and saw a single typed notice:

PLEASE NOTE THAT IF, REPEAT, IF A SKELETON CREW IS LEFT BEHIND AT THE LABORATORY, ONLY SINGLE MEN OF MATURE YEARS WILL BE CONSIDERED.

COMMANDER AARONS

“Pooh!” a girl next to me said. “That boils it down to ship’s officers.”

“And some technicians.” a boy said.

“And me.” I put in.

“Didn’t you read it all?” the girl said. “That ‘of mature years’ translates as ‘no kids’.”

“Eighteen should be old enough,” I said.

“Uh uh.” the boy said. “That just means you’re legally entitled to vote and carry a gun.”

“What’s a better definition of maturity?” I said sharply.

The guy shrugged. “Fight it out with Aarons if you want. I’m just giving you an educated guess.”

“I need more than a guess.”

I turned and worked my way out of the mob again. There weren’t many kids in the Can in all, but they all seemed to be hanging around the Center. I wondered if any work was getting done, and then realized that it probably didn’t matter to most of them; they had already mentally adjusted to the idea of shipping Earthside. It was a depressing revelation.

“Hey! Where you going?”

“Oh, hi Zak.” I stopped at the edge of the crowd. “I’m going to the bridge.”

“Don’t. I’ve already tried that gambit. Fifty other people thought of it first; the place is packed. They’re not giving out any information, either.”

“They’ve got to explain that notice.”

“They haven’t ‘got’ to do anything. The Commander probably wanted to stop people from pestering him with questions, so he eliminated most of them by ruling out women and married men. That’s most of the Lab right there.”

“What about us?”

“Who knows? Maybe they’ll let eighteen-year-olds stay. Or maybe the Commander will stick with men who’ve been on the job a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept it down to only officers.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Figure it out. What have they got to lose? Earthside they’ll be stripped of their commissions for disobeying orders. Why should they go back at all?”

“Well, I hope they don’t fill all the slots.”

“You really want to stay, don’t you?” Zak said, looking at me oddly.

“Sure. Don’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m not a fanatic about it. It’s going to be pretty chancy staying in the Can without the Argosy and Rambler as backups.”

“Think of all the material you would get for your diary. It would be an automatic bestseller.”

“Huh! Boswell—the one who wrote Life of Samuel Johnson—used to feel that he hadn’t really lived a day until he had written it up in his diary. I’m not that compulsive. There are better reasons to do things than just so you can put them in your diary.”

“No more exciting chronicles of life among the supermen?”

“Not unless they pick me for the skeleton crew. Besides, there are some doubts buried deep in my poetic soul about the whole business.”

“Huh?” I glanced at a wall clock. “Say, I want to get over to Monitoring to see my father. Come along for the walk, you probably need the exercise—”

“Health nut!”

“—and you can explain that last statement.”

We went inward a few levels by elevator and started walking through a tangle of laboratories to reach Monitoring.

“Look.” Zak said, spreading his hands, “call me a groundhog if you must, but it seems to me there’s an ethical problem here. ISA is calling us back because Earth needs the money for social problems. Things are tough back there. People are eating sea yeast patties and living in each others’ hip pockets.”

“So are we.”

“Voluntarily. Those people in India didn’t raise their hands, they were born into it. What right do we or ISA or anybody have to take away money that might help them out?”

I walked along in silence for a moment “I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t got a moral leg to stand on. But something tells me there’s more to it. The same logic would have kept Columbus at home until all of Europe’s slums were emptied.”

“Right.”

“How long would that be?”

“Uh? To clear the slums? Oh, I see. They’re still there.”

“And always will be. We keep upgrading the definition of ‘slum.’ Even so, I still don’t think your argument stays afloat.” I ambled along, hands stuck in my pockets, thinking. “I can’t help but feel something basic will be lost if we give up ideas like the Jupiter Project. They’re dreams —the things men live by.”

“There will be other times in the future when we can come back out here.”

“Yeah? When? A thousand years? There have been eras in Earth’s history when men sat on their hands for that long, too poor or weak or scared to try something new. It could happen again, easy.”

“Maybe so and maybe not. You don’t know that would happen.”

“There’s the trick: you never know. Life is riding by the seat of your pants. We think new knowledge will pay off, sometime, but we aren’t sure. All we know is that it always has before. Why should knowing about Jupiter be profitable? No answer. We don’t know until we come. Is terraforming Ganymede a good idea? We won’t know the answer to that one for a century or so, if then. Except if we don’t do it where are we ever going to set up a self-supporting colony? The sociologists say small isolated communities are the best long term places for people. They keep people happy and productive. Ganymede might be a test of that in the long run—Earth hasn’t fit that description in centuries.