“I hope—”
“Good-bye.” I switched off.
Loneliness is a sad word; solitude is more dignified. But loneliness is just solitude you don’t want, and there were times in the hours ahead when I would have given anything if Jenny or Zak or anyone had been there.
For a while I watched the radiation gauge every two minutes. It dropped a little but not much. My radio emergency light blinked a few times; I ignored it.
The journey became almost hypnotic. Jupiter was a thin crescent sliced by the familiar bands. I could make out some of the outer moons: Ganymede was a faint blue disc, Io trailed behind me, an orange-red ball that fell below as I moved toward Jupiter’s north pole. Satellite Fourteen was coming down to meet me.
I watched the huge whirlpools catch up and pass below me. At their centers I could see dark blotches—methane? frozen water?—swirling in a grand, lazy dance. It was hard to believe those blemishes were larger than the Pacific Ocean.
Jupiter filled the sky. This close it is more like an infinite plain than a planet and you can’t really be convinced that you aren’t going to fall into it. Beyond the terminator, in what should have been blackness, I could see thin fingers of yellow lightning playing in cloud banks.
Perhaps Jupiter was the home of the gods and the storms were merely giant tournaments; Jove throwing his thunderbolts…
I caught myself right there. Men have been hypnotized by Jupiter’s vastness before me and I recognized the symptoms.
I gave myself some rations, savored them to stretch out the time, and busied myself by climbing around the Roadhog and looking her over. The superconductor fields were working okay. Because of them I couldn’t climb over the side and inspect the undercarriage. I called the Can a few times. After a few tries at persuading me to come back, the bridge officer gave me radiation level readings. They matched pretty closely to mine.
I didn’t think very much about the radiation. I was getting a little more than the “acceptable” dose, but that was just an average worked out for people in all sorts of jobs. If I got a lot there were treatments that would help.
Even if I didn’t make it—so what? Nobody lived forever. I wouldn’t live to see the first star ship leave; I’d never know if there were intelligent life forms living near the Centauri system, or Tau Ceti, or…
I caught myself again. No use getting morbid.
Minutes crawled by, then hours. I dozed.
My radio emergency light was blinking an angry red when I woke up. I ignored it and checked the time. Rendezvous should be coming up.
I looked around to orient myself. Jupiter was still a striped custard below; now I could see a purple darkening toward the pole.
In a few minutes I picked out a white dot that seemed a likely candidate. It grew. I matched velocity and watched Satellite Fourteen resolve itself into an overweight basketball.
I coasted over. The Faraday cup didn’t show any damage; everything looked just the way I had left it.
I disconnected it from the satellite’s electrical system and checked carefully over the outside. Nothing wrong. The heart of a Faraday cup is the grid trapping mechanism. I would have to open it up to get a look at that.
I unclipped a no-torque screwdriver from my suit belt and took the cover off the cup. Everything still looked okay. I removed the backup shields and slid the center of the cup out. It was just big enough to hold in one hand.
The final cover came off easily. Then I saw what was wrong.
The space between anode and cathode was filled with some sort of oil.
I thought back. Oil? That didn’t make sense. I was sure it wasn’t there when I installed the cup. It wasn’t oil, anyway. It was more like sticky dust. I poked a finger into the gap. Some of the stuff stayed on my glove; some more drifted away into space.
I swore. An electrical failure I could understand, but this was out of my department.
What about that old Faraday cup I’d replaced? I hadn’t even looked at it. I’d just let it drift away from the satellite, since I didn’t have any further use for it. Maybe that one had this gunk in it, too.
One thing was certain: I wasn’t going to fix it out here. I took out a plastic sheet and wrapped up the part, dust and all.
I got back in the Roadhog, waved good-bye to Fourteen and fired the ion engine.
The work had made me hungry again. I ate some rations and then finally answered my radio.
“Matt?” It was Mr. Jablons.
“Who else?”
“I thought you might like to know that Satellite Seventeen’s cup cleared up a while ago. There appears to be some saturation phenomenon operating.”
“Oh, great. You mean if I’d left the cup on Fourteen alone it would fix itself?”
“Probably. Are you bringing it in?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll need a look at it anyway. A device that fails only when you need it isn’t much use. I’ll meet you at the lock and get right on the problem.”
“Fine.”
After some chatter about the radiation, which was rising again, I switched over to the bridge. They estimated that if the storm followed the same pattern as it had earlier, I wouldn’t get too much of a dosage.
It was a race to get me back to the Can as soon as possible. I was in the fastest possible orbit right now, so there wasn’t much to be done.
“Connect me with Zak Palonski, would you?” I said. While I waited, my headphones beeping and clicking, I reviewed what I’d been thinking about the last few hours. This wasn’t going to be easy to say.
“Matt? Boy, when you go overboard you do it in a big way.”
I grimaced. “Yeah. I—I went crazy back there, Zak. Once I got away from the Can and cooled off, I could see that. And why. It’s related to something you told me, once.”
“You mean about that fight back when you were a kid? And Yuri?”
“Right. I’ve gotten them all scrambled up, Zak. That eight-year-old Matt Bohles got so damned scared he was frantically glad to get away from Earth. I mean, I must’ve identified those bullies with the way all Earthside was going to be. I cried every night for weeks after that fight, you know.”
“So the little kid thought all the rest of life was going to be getting pushed around, bullied.”
“Yeah.” I smiled to myself, thinking back. “Yeah, I can still remember some of those feelings, now that I understand. When we got out to the Can it was—wow!—like being reborn. Everybody was nice. The bigger kids didn’t gang up on me.”
“You could be the smart guy without getting punished for showing off. You didn’t have to be a phony tough guy.”
“Yeah—say! How come you know all that?”
“Hell, you think you’re so different? We’re all kids from pretty highbrow families. We all had those fears.”
“Then why—?” I sputtered.
“I noticed some funny symptoms when Yuri started hassling you. I mean, I figured we kids were all over that stuff by now—but you didn’t seem to be. The way I see it, something about Yuri—his size, maybe—made you regress, go back to the behavior pattern you had in that Earthside playground. You couldn’t deal with him. You retreated into—”
“Dammit! Why didn’t you tell me? I—”
“I didn’t know. It was just a hunch. Young Freud, remember? I had to give you a chance to work it out yourself, even though I could see something was bothering you, and it was getting worse. Just telling you wouldn’t have worked either. You had to come on it yourself or it wouldn’t ring true. Remember when you had that dream on Ganymede and I started in on you?”
“Zak the head-shrinker, yeah.”
“You brushed me off.”
“Yeah.” I said quietly.