“They’ve got to explain that notice.”
“They haven’t ‘got’ to do anything. The Commander probably wanted to stop people from pestering him with questions, so he eliminated most of them by ruling out women and married men. That’s most of the Lab right there.”
“What about us?”
“Who knows? Maybe they’ll let eighteen-year-olds stay. Or maybe the Commander will stick with men who’ve been on the job a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised if he kept it down to only officers.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Figure it out. What have they got to lose? Earthside they’ll be stripped of their commissions for disobeying orders. Why should they go back at all?”
“Well, I hope they don’t fill all the slots.”
“You really want to stay, don’t you?” Zak said, looking at me oddly.
“Sure. Don’t you?”
“Yes, but I’m not a fanatic about it. It’s going to be pretty chancy staying in the Can without the Argosy and Rambler as backups.”
“Think of all the material you would get for your diary. It would be an automatic bestseller.”
“Huh! Boswell—the one who wrote Life of Samuel Johnson—used to feel that he hadn’t really lived a day until he had written it up in his diary. I’m not that compulsive. There are better reasons to do things than just so you can put them in your diary.”
“No more exciting chronicles of life among the supermen?”
“Not unless they pick me for the skeleton crew. Besides, there are some doubts buried deep in my poetic soul about the whole business.”
“Huh?” I glanced at a wall clock. “Say, I want to get over to Monitoring to see my father. Come along for the walk, you probably need the exercise—”
“Health nut!”
“—and you can explain that last statement.”
We went inward a few levels by elevator and started walking through a tangle of laboratories to reach Monitoring.
“Look.” Zak said, spreading his hands, “call me a groundhog if you must, but it seems to me there’s an ethical problem here. ISA is calling us back because Earth needs the money for social problems. Things are tough back there. People are eating sea yeast patties and living in each others’ hip pockets.”
“So are we.”
“Voluntarily. Those people in India didn’t raise their hands, they were born into it. What right do we or ISA or anybody have to take away money that might help them out?”
I walked along in silence for a moment “I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t got a moral leg to stand on. But something tells me there’s more to it. The same logic would have kept Columbus at home until all of Europe’s slums were emptied.”
“Right.”
“How long would that be?”
“Uh? To clear the slums? Oh, I see. They’re still there.”
“And always will be. We keep upgrading the definition of ‘slum.’ Even so, I still don’t think your argument stays afloat.” I ambled along, hands stuck in my pockets, thinking. “I can’t help but feel something basic will be lost if we give up ideas like the Jupiter Project. They’re dreams—the things men live by.”
“There will be other times in the future when we can come back out here.”
“Yeah? When? A thousand years? There have been eras in Earth’s history when men sat on their hands for that long, too poor or weak or scared to try something new. It could happen again, easy.”
“Maybe so and maybe not. You don’t know that would happen.”
“There’s the trick: you never know. Life is riding by the seat of your pants. We think new knowledge will pay off, sometime, but we aren’t sure. All we know is that it always has before. Why should knowing about Jupiter be profitable? No answer. We don’t know until we come. Is terraforming Ganymede a good idea? We won’t know the answer to that one for a century or so, if then. Except if we don’t do it where are we ever going to set up a self-supporting colony? The sociologists say small isolated communities are the best long term places for people. They keep people happy and productive. Ganymede might be a test of that in the long run—Earth hasn’t fit that description in centuries.
“That’s the whole trouble; the whole history of the human race has been one long unrepeatable experiment. Nobody’s ever going to figure us out. So we might as well try everything we can, even if it hurts a little, to see what doors it opens up.”
“Lecture over?”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
“That’s okay. I have a funny feeling you’re right. It feels right, anyway. Something has got to be wrong with a system that says Michelangelo shouldn’t have taken money to do the Sistine Chapel as long as everybody wasn’t eating prime beef.”
I nodded. The walls of the corridor were painted in a red spiral to give the feeling of depth, but at the moment the effect just made me a little dizzy. We came to Monitoring and Zak waved good-bye. I went in.
Dad looked up from his notes. Mr. Jablons was with him.
“Come on in, son. You’re just in time to see if your Faraday cup design holds up.”
Chapter 13
There was a third man I vaguely recognized, wearing African robes.
“Matt, this is Dr. Kadin. He is the Laboratory Science Director.” Dr. Kadin bowed slightly and smiled. I remembered that he was Dad’s boss: in fact, he was the head of all the scientific research done in the Can and on Ganymede. I made the appropriate introductory noises while I tried to figure out why he was here.
“There are large storms brewing at Jupiter’s poles.” Dr. Kadin said to me. “Over the last few weeks I have been working with the astrophysicists to find an explanation. We have had little success. We do, however, think the storms may be throwing great swarms of electrons and other particles completely out of the Jovian atmosphere. Once above the ammonia cloud layer, they may become caught in Jupiter’s magnetic fields and funneled into the Van Allen belts. It is, of course, only a hypothesis.” He smiled again, showing incredibly white teeth.
“It’s a good thing you installed those new cups,” Mr. Jablons put in. “They’ll give us much better resolution of the electron concentration around Satellites Seventeen and Fourteen.”
“Because Seventeen and Fourteen pass close over the poles?” I said.
“Correct,” Dr. Kadin said precisely. “If your design can function under high particle flux, we may be able to record some highly significant data. There are some theoretical reasons to believe these particles originated deep in the Jovian atmosphere, perhaps deeper than we have ever been able to probe before.”
“When does it happen?” I said.
Dad glanced at a clock. “About now. I’ve been trying to reach you at home and down at the Student Center, with no luck. Thought you might want to watch. Satellite Seventeen should enter the polar region any moment.”
Dad thumbed the panel on his desk and his viewscreen began registering a readout from the Hole. The watch officer had set up a simple moving graph to show the particle flux that Satellite Seventeen was registering. The black line had already started a gradual climb. We all crowded around the screen, just about filling Dad’s office.
“That is an expected result,” Dr. Kadin said after a moment. He poked a finger at the rising line. “We can correlate this data with information from other equatorial satellites, to find the energy and other characteristics of the particles. The important point is how high this line can go.”