“Well, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for you, then,” Devlin said good-naturedly. “But if you ever need me, you know where to find me.” He strolled off down the shadowy corridor, whistling a tune that Grant didn’t recognize.
Dr. Wo shouldn’t let him stay on this station, Grant told himself. What he sells is wrong, sinful. Still, he found himself wondering what virtual reality sex might be like. Would it really be a sin? Maybe if he could imagine himself with Marjorie …
Grant spent almost all his waking hours in the fluid dynamics lab, doggedly working out a point-by-point map of the turbulent currents in the Jovian ocean based on the scant data returned by the automated probes. The course work sent by the University of Cairo remained in his computer, untouched, ignored.
Late one afternoon Karlstad mosied into the lab, a knowing, superior grin on his pallid face. Grant was alone among the humming computers and silent experimental equipment.
“You do tend to make a hermit out of yourself, don’t you?” he asked, pulling up the wheeled chair next to Grant’s.
Looking up from the graphs displayed on his screen, Grant muttered, “The work doesn’t do itself, Egon.”
“It’s a shame you’re not into biology, then,” Karlstad said easily. “Like, right now I’m helping the bio team from Callisto to culture some of their subzero foraminifera.”
“Are you?” Grant turned back to his screen.
“Damned right,” said Karlstad, leaning back in the chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “Helpful little creatures. The forams are multiplying all by themselves in the rig I built for them. It simulates the ice-covered sea on Callisto very nicely. The fora do all the work and I roam around the station—”
“Interrupting people who’re trying to get their work done,” Grant finished for him.
Karlstad pretended to be wounded. “Is that any way to treat a fellow scooter?”
Grant admitted, “No, I suppose it wasn’t polite.”
“I’m not here to interrupt you. I’m here to offer you a learning experience.”
“What?”
Karlstad leaned closer. “Zeb and Lainie are going into the tank together.”
Grant felt his jaw drop open. “What do you mean?”
Laughing, Karlstad said, “Relax. Put your eyes back in your head.”
His face reddening, Grant tried to erase his mental image of O’Hara and Muzorawa together in the dolphin tank. They can’t do anything! He told himself. They’re both implanted with biochips. Still he saw her sleek and naked, gliding through the water.
“They’re going into the simulation tank,” Karlsad said, obviously enjoying Grant’s unmistakable consternation.
Before Grant could reply, he added, “And Old Woeful is going to join them.”
“The simulation tank,” Grant said dully.
Nodding, Karlstad said, “The test is supposed to be strictly off-limits to everybody except the technicians running the sim.”
The way he said that convinced Grant that Karlstad had an ace up his sleeve. Sure enough, Karlstad went on, “But I have a direct pipeline to the cameras recording the test.”
“You do? How?”
Raising one hand in a gesture of patience, the biophysicist said, “I cannot reveal my sources. But if you’ll allow me…”
He turned to the computer console next to Grant’s and pulled out the keyboard. Blowing dust from the keys, he booted up the machine manually and then tapped in a long, complex string of alphanumerics. Grant watched, fascinated despite himself, as the desktop display screen flickered and glowed.
And there was O’Hara standing in the narrow corridor outside one of the dolphin tanks in a sleek white skintight suit that glistened as if it were already wet. They seemed to be looking down at her from above. Grant realized they were watching the view from a camera set into the ceiling panels in the corridor.
“Shall we put it on the wallscreen?” Karlstad asked.
“What if someone walks in?”
He shrugged. “I’ll wipe the screen before they have a chance to figure out what we’re watching.”
“All right,” Grand said, nodding.
The wallscreen image was life size but a little grainy. He must be using a microcamera, Grant thought, with a fiberoptic link. O’Hara’s slick white wetsuit clung to her like her own skin. She doesn’t have that much of a figure, Grant told himself. Slim, almost boyish. Almost.
Muzorawa stepped into view. His suit was bright green but left his powerful looking legs bare. They were studded with implants, his skin thick with them, like a leper’s sores. No wonder they wear long trousers all the time, Grant thought, recoiling inwardly at the ugliness of it.
Half a dozen technicians in gray coveralls milled around. Karlstad clicked at the keyboard and the view abruptly shifted. Now they were looking into the dolphin tank, over Muzorawa’s shoulder. But there were no dolphins in sight. Instead, the tank contained what looked like a mockup of a control panel, a broad curving expanse of display screens and rows of lights and buttons.
Grant said, “I hope Sheena doesn’t burst in on them.”
“No, no,” Karlstad assured him. “Little Sheena’s safe in her pen, sedated up to her bony brow ridges. She’s sleeping like a three-hundred-kilo baby.”
Two technicians in dark-gray wetsuits clambered up the ladder built into the partition between tanks and cannon-balled into the water with huge splashes, one after the other.
Grant watched them settle down to the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles from their face masks.
“Can’t you fugheads get into the tank without sloshing half the water outta it?” groused a scornful nasal voice caustically. The test controller, Grant thought, monitoring everything from some central location.
The pair of techs waved cheerfully as they sat on the bottom of the tank.
“Okay,” came the voice of the controller, slightly scratchy from static. “Let’s get this sim percolating.”
O’Hara nodded and pulled the hood of her suit over her bald scalp, then slipped on a transparent visor that covered her entire face. Two of the technicians helped her work her arms through the shoulder straps of what appeared to be an air tank, then connected a slim hose from the top of the tank to her face mask. They slid a belt of weights around her slender hips. O’Hara clicked its clasp shut.
Two other techs were doing the same for Muzorawa. Finally they checked that the air was getting through properly.
“I’m okay,” O’Hara said, her voice muffled by the mask.
Muzorawa asked for a slightly stronger air flow, and a tech adjusted a knob on the back of his tank. Then he nodded and made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger.
O’Hara turned and scampered lithely up the ladder to the top of the tank. Grant saw that her feet were bare.
“Radio check,” said a disembodied voice.
“O’Hara on freak one,” she said. It sounded somewhat fuzzy to Grant. He realized there must be a small radio built into the full-face mask.
But the controller’s voice said, “In the green. Go ahead and dunk.”
O’Hara swung her long legs over the edge of the tank and slipped into the water with hardly a ripple.
“Now that’s the way you get into the pool.” The controller’s voice was admiring.
The two techs already in the tank made exaggerated motions of applause.
Muzorawa climbed the ladder, considerably slower and more ponderous than O’Hara. It seemed to Grant that Zeb had some trouble getting his legs to work right. But he made it to the top, swinging both legs together almost as if they were inert lengths of lumber, and dropped gracelessly into the water.
“Now comes the boring part,” Karlstad murmured.
“What’s that?”