“Not me, kid. You’re in charge on this one.”
“What about Roadhog? Is she fueled? He, I mean.”
“Don’t fight it. The Roadhog is a she. And of course she’s fueled. I’m not sloppy at maintenance.”
We coasted into Berth G, freed the lines, and Jenny gracefully swung into the pilot’s couch. She called in to the bridge and had an updated flight plan transmitted to the shuttle computer’s memory. Then I took over. I ran quickly through the standard checklist. Jenny sat on the flat bench next to the couch, buckled herself in and gave me the high sign.
I backed us cautiously out of the berth and brought the nose up to a point at the “top” of the Can. We still carried the angular velocity of the Can, so I gave the lateral jets a burst. We backed away from the Can’s inner wall. The Can appeared to spin faster and faster and I thumbed in more side thrust.
I gave Roadhog one burst of LOX through the rear jets and we coasted for the top of the Can in one long, clean line. We glided by the shadowy shapes of parked craft, safety neons splashing pools of light over them. The Can pinwheeled about us. Viewports passed, glowing softly. In one a woman looked up at her skylight and saw us. She waved. Jenny waved back. The interior of the Can, with its soft yellow glow, already seemed far away.
We passed the Sagan. Thick hoses sprouted from her water tanks and snaked into sockets on the Can’s axis. Above, the pancake sac of water reflected Jove’s amber light on its mottled plastic skin. As we reached the top of the Can I bled out a stream of air from the decelerating jets and we came to a halt.
The water shields are held by a few mooring lines, stationary above the Can itself. There’s about fifty meters clearance between the Can top and the pancake, enough for us to slip out. The shields are only moved to let out a big cruiser ship like the Sagan; otherwise they sit there, blocking high energy electrons. I turned us so we pointed out, between the Can and the gray water-shield. Jupiter peeked over the rim as we cleared the top of the Can. It was a crescent; the Can was moving sunward in its orbit.
The shuttle shifted and murmured under me. The computer program was taking over. I punched the release button on the small control board and instantly felt a slight thrust. The ion engine had cut in. It made no noise; it’s a low-impulse system.
We went straight up, away from the Lab, as though the Can was a cannon and we had been shot out of it. I was looking at Jupiter through the spaces in the Roadhog’s floor.
“Hey,” I said, “we’re heading due north.”
“Most observant. We’re going into a polar orbit.”
“Satellite Fourteen is in a polar orbit?”
“Nearly. Monitoring and Astrophysics are making it pretty popular. Satellite Fourteen is in an eccentric orbit that takes it in close to Jupiter’s poles.”
“So it gets the best data on the storms?”
“That’s what I hear. I just fix ’em, I don’t try to understand ’em. Look, you can see the storms now.”
I followed her pointing finger. Near the north pole of Jupiter the bands broke and eddied and lost some of their bright orange color. I could make out tiny whirlpools that churned up the edges of the bands.
“Is a storm brewing?” I said.
“No, we’re seeing the last gasp of one that peaked five days ago. Astrophysics said they didn’t think another would come along for a while yet. but that’s only a guess.”
“What’s the radiation level like during the storm?”
“High. Higher than they’ve ever seen before, Astrophysics says. Why, worried?”
“Yup. I’m too young to be broiled in an electron shower. Are the shielding fields on?” I looked at my control panel. Everything glowed green.
“Yes, they went on automatically when we left the Lab. Don’t worry.”
“Don’t mind me. I’m a natural worrier,” I looked around at the superconducting bars that ring the Roadhog, though of course you can’t see the magnetic fields they produce. Those bars were all that kept Jupiter’s Van Allen belts from frying us alive.
Radiation is a subtle thing. You can’t see it or taste it, but those little electrons and protons can fry you in an hour. They are why the Lab wasn’t orbited in close to Jupiter.
Earth and Jupiter have one big thing in common: radiation belts. A man named Van Allen discovered them back in the early Space Age, around Earth. A little later Jupiter turned out to have them, too. Mars doesn’t, nor Venus, nor Mercury. Reason: no magnetic fields. Earth and Jupiter generate big magnetic fields around them, and those fields trap high-energy particles that the Sun throws out.
They’re called belts because that’s what they look like—big doughnuts around Jupiter and Earth, many planetary radii in diameter. The Lab had to be located out beyond the worst part of that doughnut or we’d be cooked with radiation. Even so, the Lab has water tanks that line the outside of the Can and stop incoming particles before they can reach the living quarters.
The Roadhog hasn’t got that mass. It’s a shuttle, engineered for speed and economy. So you don’t go out in it during radiation storms.
Extra mass might have stopped the pellet that killed Ishi. Maybe there was an argument for putting shielding around the shuttles. Magnetic fields don’t affect pieces of rock, because the rock is electrically neutral; only encasing a shuttle in heavy walls would make it really safe.
But I wasn’t planning on applying for an insurance policy, anyway. I stopped brooding about Ishi and turned to Jenny.
“What’s wrong with Satellite Fourteen, anyway?”
“Here.” she said, handing me a clipboard with a maze of circuit diagrams on it. “A problem for the student.”
I found the circuit component that was fouling up pretty fast. The tough part was the Faraday cup.
The cup on most satellites, including Fourteen, is a simple affair. It has an electrostatically-charged grid open to the space around the satellite. Any charged particle that wanders by can be attracted by the grid. When it is, it picks up some added velocity and overshoots the grid—goes right through it—and runs smack into a collector. The process builds up a voltage across a capacitor. Every so often a watch officer in Monitoring—somebody like me—will call for a count from the satellite. The capacitor will be discharged, the voltage measured, and a little arithmetic gives the number of particles (usually electrons) the cup captured.
Satellite Fourteen’s cup wasn’t working. I had my own idea why. I didn’t think they were well designed.
“Hey, look,” Jenny said. I looked down, through the Roadhog’s floor. A brownish whirlpool, thick with blotches of red, was churning in the clouds below.
“That one reminds me of the Red Spot,” I said.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before. Odd color.”
“There are some funny things going on in that atmosphere. Old Jove is putting on a show for us.”
“I wonder why.”
“Come back in ten years. Maybe we’ll know then.”
The nice thing about having somebody along on a trip is the reassurance you get. It’s easy, out in space, to get swallowed up in the vastness of everything. Being able to talk to somebody brings things back into perspective.
So we chattered away. I’d never spent that much time alone with Jenny, and I found out a lot of things about her I didn’t know. What I saw, I liked.
That’s the way it went, for six hours. Yes, six. Jupiter is big. The Roadhog pushed steadily at our backs and took us upward, toward the north pole, so we could match orbits with Satellite Fourteen.