Ben Bova: Leviathans of Jupiter

He appraised Deirdre with a look that was halfway between sheer admiration and a blatant leer.

Reaching for her wrist again, he said, “Come on, let’s go to dinner.”

Deirdre backed away a step and Dorn moved between them, grasping Yeager’s extended arm with his prosthetic hand. “The lady is with us,” he said.

Yeager stared at the cyborg for a moment, then shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Okay, okay. In that case, I’ll join you.”

With Dorn on one side of her and Andy Corvus on the other, Deirdre left the lounge and entered the adjacent dining room. Shaggy-haired Yeager kept in step with them, on Dorn’s other side.

“Hey, Max,” a younger coverall-clad man called to him. “I thought you were gonna eat with us.”

Yeager waved at him dismissively. “I found somebody better-looking than you ugly mugs.”

Deirdre saw that the younger man was part of the raucous group that had been sitting together in the lounge.

“Scoopship team,” Yeager explained to her. “Engineers. You know what they say about engineers: so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”

Andy giggled. Dorn remained impassive. Deirdre wondered why Yeager made fun of engineers.

“I’ve heard about you,” Yeager said to the cyborg. “You’re a priest or something, aren’t you?”

“Or something,” Dorn muttered.

Deirdre felt Dorn’s reticence like a palpable force. She said to Yeager, “And what’s your reason for going to Jupiter, Mr. Yeager?”

“It’s Doctor Yeager,” he replied, drawing himself up haughtily. “Doctor of engineering physics, University of Arizona.” Then he grinned at her. “But you can call me Max.”

“Hi, Max,” Corvus said good-naturedly from Deirdre’s other side. “I’m Andy.”

Yeager hadn’t taken his eyes off Deirdre. “And pray tell, fair one, what might your name be?”

With some reluctance, she told him, “Deirdre. Deirdre Ambrose.”

“Deirdre,” Yeager echoed. “That’s an Irish name. It means ‘passionate,’ doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” Deirdre lied.

The dining room was just as sumptuously decorated as the lounge, and it was filling up rapidly. Yeager spotted a table for six halfway across the big chamber and led the others to it. He moved around the table to sit beside Deirdre, then tipped the chair on his other side to lean against the table.

“Put up the chair beside you, Andy,” he said to Corvus as they all sat down.

Blinking in puzzlement, Corvus asked, “Why?”

“They’ll think we’re saving the seats for another couple of people,” Yeager explained. “That way we can just be the four of us without any strangers butting in.”

“But we’re all strangers,” Corvus blurted. “I mean, we just met a few minutes ago.”

Yeager waved him down. “Nah, we’re old buddies. Shipmates.”

He dominated their conversation all through dinner, talking almost exclusively about himself.

“So I tackled the challenge. Me and my grad students. That’s three of them over at the table across the room, with the scoopship team. We designed a submersible vehicle that can carry a maximum of six human crew a thousand kilometers deep into the Jovian ocean and allow them to cruise down there for at least five days.”

“A considerable engineering challenge,” Dorn admitted, as he carefully brought a forkful of hydroponic greens to the human side of his mouth.

Yeager agreed cheerfully. “There’ve been two human missions into that ocean and both ended in disaster. Casualties. People got killed.”

“The pressure down that deep must be incredible,” Corvus mused.

“It is, and then some,” Yeager said. “Some of the uncrewed probes have been crushed. I mean, it’s tough down there.”

Deirdre listened with half an ear as Yeager nattered on. She wondered about Dorn. He was a priest? That was weird. He wasn’t wearing anything that looked clerical: just plain gray coveralls. The left side of his face was etched metal, as was the top of his head. His left arm was prosthetic. A priest? she wondered. He said the scientists wanted to see if he could handle the pressures of a deep dive better than a normal human. That means they’re planning a crewed mission into the ocean. After nearly twenty years. After killing people both times they tried it before.

“So I completed the design and my people have built the dingus out at Jupiter orbit,” Yeager was saying. “Now I’m heading out to the Gold station to supervise the final checkout before we start testing the beast.”

Andy Corvus looked impressed. “A submersible that can carry humans safely deep down into that ocean.”

Yeager mopped up the sauce on his plate with a crust of soybread. “It was a tough design challenge, let me tell you.”

No one responded to that, so he went on, holding the dripping crust in two fingers, “The secret is, you’ve got to make the beast big. I mean big . Big as the research station, almost. The problem with those earlier birds is they made ’em too small.”

“As big as Gold itself?” Dorn asked, intrigued despite himself.

Yeager nodded as he popped the bread in his mouth and chewed vigorously.

“That big, just to hold six people?” Corvus asked.

Gulping down the crust, Yeager said, “You need the size to handle the pressures. Compression. The vehicle’s built like a series of nested shells, one within the other. Like those Russian dolls, you know.”

“Babushka dolls,” Corvus said.

“Matryoshka,” Deirdre corrected.

Yeager grinned at her. “You know, for an incredibly beautiful woman, you’re pretty smart.”

Dorn bristled visibly, but Deirdre simply gave the engineer an icy glare.

Yeager took it all without malice. “Freedom of speech,” he said, almost wistfully. “It can get you into a lot of trouble. Ah well. What’s for dessert?”

“Tell us more about this ship you’ve designed,” Corvus said. “I’m going to be one of your passengers.”

“You?” Yeager looked surprised.

“Me,” Andy said. For once, he looked totally serious.

Dorn accompanied Deirdre to her stateroom once dinner was finished. As Dr. Pohan had told her, the map screens placed strategically along the passageway bulkheads showed where her quarters were and how to get there. All she had to do was ask.

Despite her assurances to her father, the higher g force of the ship’s acceleration was making Deirdre feel weary, slow.

“Thank you,” she said as they walked slowly along the passageway. “I appreciate your protecting me from Dr. Yeager.”

“I learned courtesy from a very noble woman,” Dorn said, his voice low, heavy.

With a tired smile, Deirdre added, “I’ve fended off showoffs like Yeager most of my life, but I’m glad I didn’t have to do it alone, tonight.”

“De nada,” he said.

“You speak Spanish?”

“She did.”

“You must have loved her very much.”

Dorn shook his head slowly. “It’s not that simple.”

“Oh.”

Following the maps displayed upon the wall screens, they at last found Deirdre’s stateroom. Its door was like all the others that lined the passageway except that the oblong electronic screen on it bore her name. Another couple came up the passageway from the other side, deep in whispered conversation. They stared at Dorn as they squeezed by.

“I should be jealous of you,” Deirdre said, once they had passed.

“Jealous?”

“Usually I’m the one people stare at.”

Dorn said nothing.

“Since I was twelve,” she went on.

It was impossible to read the expression on the human side of his face. For long moments they simply stood there in the passageway, silent. For the first time in many years, Deirdre wasn’t sure what she should say, how she should handle this … cyborg.