Ben Bova: Jupiter

The screen went blank for a moment and Grant started to smile with a sense of victory. But then ACCESS DENIED appeared briefly and the screen went dead.

“Damn!” Grant snapped, immediately regretting his lack of self-control.

Grant rebooted his palmcomp and tried again. He lost track of time, but he was determined to get the better of the stupid computer system. No matter how he tried, though, every attempt ended in the same ACCESS DENIED message and automatic shutoff.

A knocking on his door finally pulled his attention away from his quest. With a disgusted grunt, Grant got up from his desk chair. He was surprised at how stiff he felt; he must have been hunched over the computer for hours.

Egon Karlstad stood at Grant’s door, a quizzical little hint of a smile on his pale face.

“You must be somebody special,” Karlstad said, standing out in the corridor. “Dr. Wo wants to see you.”

“Dr. Wo?” Grant asked.

“As in woe unto thee, rash mortal,” said Karlstad. “He’s the director of the station. El supremo.”

“He wants to see me? Why?”

Karlstad brushed a hand through his silvery hair. “Beats me. He doesn’t take me into his confidences very often. But when he rings the bell, you’d better salivate.”

Grant stepped out into the corridor and closed his door behind him. “Salivate?”

“Pavlov’s dogs,” said Karlstad, starting down the hallway. “Conditioned reflex and all that.”

“Oh, I remember … in biology class, back in high school.”

“I’m a biophysicist, you know.”

“Really? What’re you doing here? Aren’t all the biology people at the Galilean moons?”

Karlstad waved hello to a couple of women coming toward them before he replied, “All the work on the moons is headquartered here. People can’t stay out there for more than a few weeks at a time: radiation buildup, you know.”

“We’re shielded here?” Grant asked.

“Hell, yes. Superconducting magnets, just like the storm cellars aboard spacecraft, only bigger. And we’re orbiting close enough to Jupiter so that we’re inside the van Allen belts, below the heaviest radiation fields.”

“That’s good.”

“Understatement of the year!”

They walked along the corridor for what seemed like kilometers. Karlstad appeared almost to glide along, pale and slim and seemingly weightless, just about. Like a ghost, Grant thought. A pallid, insubstantial phantom. Most of the doors they passed were closed, although they went through an open area that was obviously a galley or cafeteria. People were lining up and getting trays, piling food on them, moving to tables and sitting down. Hearty aromas of hot food and spices wafted through the area, making Grant truly salivate.

“Is it lunchtime?” Grant asked.

“Dinner,” Karlstad answered. “Your clock is off by seven or eight hours.”

Grant hadn’t realized that the old Roberts ran on a different clock. He had assumed that all space vehicles kept the same time.

They passed through more open areas, workshops and exercise gyms, then a long span with doors spaced close together. The carpeting here seemed newer, thicker, even though it was the same bland gray as elsewhere. “Executive territory,” Karlstad murmured. Each door bore a name-plate.

At last they stopped at a door that said:

L. ZHANG WO STATION DIRECTOR

“Here you are,” said Karlstad.

“You’re not going in with me?” Grant asked.

Karlstad raised his hands in mock horror. “He wants to see you, not me. I’m just the delivery boy. Besides”— he hesitated a heartbeat—“the less I see of the Old Man, the better.”

Karlstad walked away, leaving Grant standing alone before the closed door of the director’s office. Feeling a little nervous, Grant balled his fist to knock on the door, then hesitated.

There’s nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. You haven’t done anything wrong. Besides, this is a chance to talk to the top man; you can tell him you’re an astrophysicist and bringing you here was a mistake, maybe get him to send you back to Earth or at least to the Moon.

Summoning up his courage, he tapped lightly on the door.

No response.

He glanced up and down the corridor. No one in sight. Karlstad had melted away. It was as if no one wanted to be anywhere near here.

Taking a deep breath, Grant rapped on the door again, harder.

Again no response. He wondered what to do. Then a muffled voice from inside the office said, “Enter.”

Grant slid the door open and stepped in. The room was overly warm, sticky with humidity, like a hothouse. Grant felt perspiration break out on his upper lip, yet the director wore a high-collared tunic buttoned all the way up to the throat as he sat behind his desk.

Director Wo’s office was austere rather than imposing. The room was about the same size as his own quarters, Grant guessed, furnished with a large curved desk of gleaming metal, its surface completely clear except for a small computer screen and an incongruous vase of delicate red and white chrysanthemums. There was a chair of tubular stainless steel padded with fawn-colored cushions in front of the desk and a small oval conference table with four stiff plastic chairs in the far corner. The wallscreen behind the desk showed a stark desert: empty sand stretching to the horizon beneath a blazing sun. It made Grant feel even more uncomfortably hot. The other walls were utterly bare; the only decoration in the room was that paradoxical vase of flowers on the director’s desk.

They can’t be real, Grant thought. Nobody would waste the time and resources to grow flowers on this station. Yet they looked real enough. And the vase was a graceful Oriental work of art, like something from a museum.

Without looking up from his desktop screen, Dr. Wo gestured bruskly to the padded chair in front of his desk. Grant obediently sat in it, thinking that the director was playing an old power-trip game: pretending to be so busy that he can’t even say hello. Grant had run into this type before, at school and among the bureaucrats of the New Morality.

All right, he thought. As soon as he does look up I’ll tell him that I’m an astrophysicist and I should be at Farside. Enough of this spying and secrecy agreements.

Feeling sweat dampening his scalp, Grant studied Dr. Wo’s face as he sat waiting for the director to take notice of him. It was a fleshy, broad-cheeked face, solid and heavy-featured, with small coal-black eyes set deeply beneath brows so slight that they were practically nonexistent. Skin the color of old parchment. The man had a small mustache, little more than wisps on his upper lip. His hair was cropped so close to his scalp that it was difficult to tell its true color: light gray, Grant thought. His hairline was receding noticeably. His head looked big, blocky, too heavy even for the powerful shoulders that strained the fabric of his tunic.

At last Director Wo looked up from the screen and fixed his eyes on Grant. They glowered like the embers of a smoldering fire.

“I heard you knock the first time,” he said. His voice was hoarse, strained, as if he were suffering from a throat infection.

Grant blinked with surprise. “When no one answered I thought—”

“You are an impatient man,” Wo accused. “That is not good for someone who wants to become a scientist.”

“I … I didn’t think you’d heard me,” Grant stammered.

“You are also too curious for your own good.” Wo jabbed a finger at the desktop screen, like a prosecuting attorney making a point. “The extension to this station is off-limits to unauthorized personnel, yet the first thing you do when you arrive here is poke your brightboy nose into it. Why?”