Isaac Asimov - Lucky Starr The And The Moons of Jupiter

"But-" Norrich began.

Bigman drove on. "He can feel chess pieces and threedee puzzles and all that but he can't feel light going out. He had to see that."

Lucky said, "I think it's time to let Mr. Norrich say something."

Norrich said, "Thank you. I may be blind, Councilman, but my dog is not. When I put out the light at night, it makes no difference to me, as I said before, but to Mutt it signals bedtime and he goes to his own corner. Now I heard Bigman tiptoe to the wall in the direction of the light switch. He was trying to move without sound, but a man who has been blind for five years can hear the lightest tiptoe. A moment after he stopped walking I heard Mutt jump into his corner. It didn't take much brain power to figure out what had happened. Bigman was standing at the light switch and Mutt was turning in for the night. Obviously he had put out the light."

The engineer turned his sightless face in the direction first of Bigman, then of Lucky, as though straining his ears for an answer.

Lucky said, "Yes, I see. It seems we owe you an apology."

Bigman's gnomelike face screwed up unhappily. "But Lucky-"

Lucky shook his head. "Let go, Bigman! Never hang on to a theory after it's been exploded. I hope you understand, Mr. Norrich, that Bigman was only doing what he felt to be his duty."

"I wish he had asked a few questions before acting,'' said Norrich, coldly, "Now may I go? Do you mind?"

"You may go. As an official request, however, please make no mention of what has occurred to anyone. That's quite important."

Norrich said, "It comes under the heading of false arrest, I imagine, but we'll let it go. I won't mention this." He walked to the door, reached the signal patch with a minimum of fumbling, and walked out.

Bigman turned almost at once to Lucky. "It was a trick. You shouldn't have let him go."

Lucky, rested his chin on the palm of his right hand, and his calm, brown eyes were thoughtful. "No, Bigman, he isn't the man we're after."

"But he's got to be, Lucky. Even if he's blind, really blind, it's an argument against him. Sure, Lucky," Bigman grew excited again, his small hands clumping into fists, "he could get close to the V-frog without seeing it. He could kill it."

Lucky shook his head. "No, Bigman. The V-frog's mental influence doesn't depend on its being seen. It's direct mental contact. That's the one fact we can't get around." He said slowly, "It had to be a robot who did that. It had to be, and Norrich is no robot."

"Well, how do you know he-?" But Bigman stopped.

"I see you've answered your own question. We sensed his emotion during our first meeting, when the V-frog was still with us. He has emotions, so he's not the robot and he's not the man we're looking for."

But even as he said so, there was a look of deep trouble on his face and he tossed the book-film on advanced robotics to one side as though despairing of help from it.

The first Agrav ship ever to be built was named Jovian Moon and it was not like any ship Lucky had ever seen. It was large enough to be a luxury liner of space, but the crew and passenger quarters were abnormally crowded forward,. since nine tenths of the ship's volume consisted of the Agrav converter and the hyperatomic force-field condensers. From the midsec-tion, curved vanes, ridged into a vague resemblance to bat's wings, extended on either side. Five to one side, five to the other, ten in all.

Lucky had been told that these vanes, in cutting the lines of force of the gravitational field, converted the gravity into hyperatomic energy. It was as prosaic as that, and yet they gave the ship an almost sinister appearance.

The ship rested now in a gigantic pit dug into Jupiter Nine. The lid, of reinforced concrete, had been retracted, and the whole area was under normal Jupiter Nine gravity and exposed to the normal airlessness of Jupiter Nine's surface.

Nevertheless the entire personnel of the project, nearly a thousand men, were gathered in this natural amphitheater. Lucky had never seen so many men in space suits at one time. There was a certain natural excitement because of the occasion; a certain almost hysterical restlessness that manifested itself in horseplay made possible by the low gravity.

Lucky thought grimly: And one of those men in space suits is no man at all.

But which one? And how could he tell?

Commander Donahue made his short speech of dedication to a group of men grown silent, impressed despite themselves; while Lucky, looking up at Jupiter, glanced at a small object near it that was not a star but a tiny sliver of light, curved like the paring of a small fingernail, almost too small for the curve to be seen. If there had been any air in the way, instead of Jupiter Nine's airless vacuum, that small curve would have been blurred into a formless spot of light.

Lucky knew the tiny crescent to be Ganymede, Jupiter Three, Jupiter's largest satellite and worthy moon of the giant planet. It was nearly three times the size of Earth's moon; it was larger than the planet Mercury. It was almost as large as Mars. With the Agrav fleet completed, Ganymede would quickly become a major world of the solar system.

Commander Donahue christened the ship at last in a voice husky with emotion, and then the assembled audience, in groups of five and six, entered the air-filled interior of the satellite through the various locks.

Only those who were to be aboard the Jovian Moon remained. One by one they climbed the ramp to the entrance lock, Commander Donahue first.

Lucky and Bigman were last to board. Commander Donahue turned away from the air lock as they entered, stiffly unfriendly.

Bigman leaned toward Lucky, to say tightly, "Did you notice, Lucky, that Red Summers is on board?"

"I know."

"He's the cobber who tried to kill you."

"I know, Bigman."

The ship was lifting now in what was at first a majestic creep. The surface gravity of Jupiter Nine was only one eightieth of Earth, and though the weight of the ship was still in the hundreds of tons, that was not the cause of the initial slowness. Even were gravity absent altogether, the ship would still retain its full content of matter and all the inertia that went with it. It would still be just as hard to put all that matter into motion, or, if it came to that, to stop it or change its direction of travel, once it had begun moving.

But first slowly, then more and more rapidly, the pit was left behind. Jupiter Nine shrank beneath them and became visible in the visiplatps as a rugged gray rock. The constellations powdered the black sky and Jupiter was a bright marble.

James Panner approached them and placed an arm on the shoulder of each man. "Would you two gentlemen care to join me in my cabin for a meal? There'll be nothing to watch here in the viewing room for a while." His wide mouth pulled back in a grin that swelled the cords of his thick neck and made it seem no neck at all but a mere continuation of head.

"Thank you," Lucky said. "It's kind of you to invite us."

"Well," said Panner, "the commander isn't going to and the men are a little leery of you, too. I don't want you to get too lonely. It will be a long trip."

"Aren't you leery of me, Dr. Panner?" Lucky asked dryly.

"Of course not. You tested me, remember, and I passed."

Panner's cabin was a small one in which the three barely fitted. It was obvious that the quarters in this, the first Agrav ship, were as cramped as engineering ingenuity could make them. Panner broke out three cans of ship-ration, the concentrated food that was universally eaten on space ships. It was almost home to Lucky and Bigman; the smell of heating rations, the feeling of crowding walls, outside of which was the infinite emptiness of space, and, sounding through those walls, the steady vibrating hum of hyperatomic motors converting field energies into a directional thrust or, at the very least, powering the energy-consuming innards of the ship.