“Maybe you’re right. If you’ve got a small staff, you might as well fill it with triple-threat men if you can.”
“My reasoning exactly. I’m going through the motions anyway. Earthside will be bad, but I’ll be better off than some of you guys.”
“Why?”
“Remember that advertising slogan? ‘You never outgrow your need for computers.’ I can always get work somewhere, partake of the leisure of the theory class.”
“Uh. I guess there won’t be much to do for a shuttle pilot, now that space research is getting the axe.”
“Next!” It was Zak’s turn. He gave the standard information and was waved away. A bridge officer looked up at me with a sour expression.
“Matt Bohles,” I said. “Any idea bow many have signed up?”
“Too many. What’s your job?”
“Shuttle pilot. I know some electronics, too—”
“Who doesn’t?”
“—and I put in some time in Monitoring.”
“Your father is in charge of Monitoring, isn’t he?”
“Yes, but—”
The officer made a note. Maybe he figured Dad had just carried me on the rolls for a while. “How are you going to choose the men?” I said.
“We’ll start with the ones who don’t ask questions. Next!”
I wandered around with Zak. There were people everywhere; it felt like a festival day, only people were clumped together in knots, talking. We fooled around for a while and I mentioned my idea about hiding the skeleton crew instead of forcing the Argosy’s crew to leave them behind. Some of the other kids liked it; others said they preferred a fight, even if the Can’s hull got punctured by accident. They seemed to be looking for a showdown and any handy enemy would do.
The talk wasn’t getting anywhere—good grief, the Argosy was seven months away—so I dropped out and ambled down to Mr. Jablons’ lab.
He wanted to talk politics, too. He’d though! of my idea, and found a hole in it big enough to drive a truck through: what if somebody like Mrs. Schloffski blabbed? That stumped me. We couldn’t very well gag her, and the skeleton crew wouldn’t tolerate leaving her behind. It looked like the only answer was a fight.
I swore off talking about politics; it made my head hurt.
“What I came down here for was some advice,” I said, changing the subject. “I went out yesterday and found a crummy old Faraday cup on Satellite Fourteen. Can’t we rig up something better?”
“Ummm.” Mr. Jablons said. “What about that design you and I roughed out last year?”
“Well—” I hesitated. “The ones we built worked okay here in the lab, but they haven’t been tried in space.”
“We gave them two thousand hours of baking, bursts of radiation, the works. They came through.”
“Right. They’ll sure be better than the ancient one I saw.”
“Which satellite?”
“Number Fourteen.”
“Oh. that’s it. Number Seventeen has the same type. I’ve been nagging people to change those Faraday cups for years. Both Fourteen and Seventeen are in near-polar orbits. That makes them harder to reach by shuttle, and thus far nobody’s wanted to take the time just to replace a part that’s working fine as it is.”
“Well, I’ll do it. Those old ones aren’t sensitive enough for the job. Let’s get the ones we designed out of storage.”
It was a couple of hours before I got the new Faraday cups all checked out and packaged for carrying on the shuttle. They are delicate instruments and can’t be thrown around like freight. It felt good to work with my hands and forget ISA, Yuri, the whole stinking mess.
I went up to the bridge to request a flight plan that intercepted Fourteen and Seventeen both; no use in making two trips. I could have requested the plan over intercom, but I wanted to stick a nose into the nerve center of the Can and sniff around.
The bridge is about two-thirds of the way out toward the rim. smack in the spot most thoroughly shielded from radiation by the mass of the rest of the Can. That’s mostly to protect the magnetic memory elements in the computers; it also shortens lines of communication.
I got past one watch officer, but that was it. At the door to the bridge itself I was stopped and my request taken. I could see into the darkened volume beyond, where viewscreens shifted and threw up lines of incoming data faster than an untrained eye could read them. Commander Aarons was talking to some civilians—I couldn’t tell who—and gesturing at a big display of an Earth-Jupiter orbit, probably the Argosy’s.
Then the officer cleared his throat, asked me if I had any more business, and suggested I move along. I shrugged and went to find Jenny.
It wasn’t hard. She was standing in line to sign up for the skeleton crew.
“What’s this?” I said.
“What does it look like?”
“Sheeg!” I said. “Every fish wants to be a whale.”
“Any reason why a girl shouldn’t be on the skeleton crew?”
“No, none really.” Then I thought of something. “Do you imagine the Commander will pick two shuttle pilots, though?”
“Of course not. Oh… I see what you mean. They’ll split us up.”
“If they take a shuttle pilot at all. Which I doubt. The skeleton crew is strictly a holding operation. No extras.”
Her turn came just then. The bridge officer raised an eyebrow but said nothing; the military has never been a booster of equality for women.
When she was through I said, “Ready to do some work?”
“On what?”
I explained about the Faraday cups.
“Sure,” she said. “Anything to get out of this madhouse.”
I told my father over intercom that I would be gone until after midnight, ship’s time, and to tell Mom not to wait supper on me; I would take enough suit rations. Dad hadn’t heard anything new other than scuttlebutt. The latest rumor was that Commander Aarons had lodged a formal protest with ISA, without expecting it to do any good.
Dad mentioned that Monitoring had picked up more showers of rock orbiting into the Jovian poles; they seemed to be a regular occurrence now. The astronomers were busy trying to explain where they came from.
I told Jenny about the rumor on the way to the lock.
“Is that all he can do, lodge a formal protest?” she said. “Fat lot of good that is.”
“All he can do until the Argosy arrives is talk. There will be plenty of time for action then. The Commander has already sacrificed enough for the Lab as it is.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look, all the bridge officers are military men. When Lt. Sharma made that speech he was advocating that the Commander violate his orders—and Aarons accepted it. Even if he gets us Earthside and leaves a skeleton crew, he’ll be cashiered. The bridge officers effectively ended their careers last night.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that.”
“We’re civilians, we don’t think in those terms. The Commander will never mention it, but it’s a bald fact. After we’re Earthside we’ll see a story in the fine print of a newsfax somewhere, and that will be it.”
Jenny was quiet after that; I don’t think she had realized quite what was going on.
We took the Roadhog again, with me in the pilot’s chair. The orbit was already in Roadhog’s computer with a launch time about fifteen minutes later than we needed; I had asked the bridge for the margin, just in case I couldn’t find Jenny right away.
Jupiter was a brownish, banded crescent, thinner than it was during our last flight. We boosted away from the Can on a long, elliptical orbit. Changing from equatorial to polar orbit costs fuel and time. We had to alter our velocity vector quite a bit to make rendezvous. Flight time was over six hours. I settled down to wait but I kept nervously checking meters and controls. I was jumpy.