Pascal sighed and wiggled in the tiny seat, trying to find a way to stretch his legs full length, and failed. “The navigator’s station on the Bermuda run was bigger than this,” he complained. He tried to put his arms out and his right elbow hit the hanging bags. He sighed again—this was going to be damned uncomfortable.
“Yeah, but you weren’t nearly as warm and dry,” Louella reminded him. “I don’t mind cramped spaces during a race. Hell, on most of our races, dry underwear’s a luxury! Count your blessings, Pascal. Count your blessings.”
While Pascal squeezed up the narrow tube to examine the sail locker, Louella sat in the helmsman’s seat. She let her hands run over the controls. She loved the slightly sticky feel of the wrappings on the wheel. Here and there she noted the faint, oily marks Thorn’s captains’ sweating hands had put there.
A bright, shining circle was worn into the dull metal beside the winch controls. She reached for a knob, as if to activate it, and noticed that the heel of her hand centered on the worn spot. How many hundreds of times had another hand briefly touched there to wear the finish like that, she wondered. How many captains had sat in this seat to guide the tiny craft across the dark seas of Jupiter? In her mind, those other captains were a palpable presence in the tiny cabin, a trace of the boat’s memory. Directly in front of the helmsman’s seat were the screens that displayed the fore and aft camera views. Their controls were in easy reach, just below them. To her left were the inertial display unit, the pressure gauges, and various station-keeping controls. The housekeeping controls were mounted beneath the seat, where they could be reached from the stateroom.
On a swing arm above the wheel were the primary control readouts: sail pressure gauges, wind indicator, barometer, and dead reckoning display. Once they were under way she’d be completely dependent on them.
There was a clatter as Pascal wormed his way out of the tube. “Sail sets look OK,” he said, as he slid across the deck and dropped into the stateroom’s seat. “We’ve got spares for every sail, plus the extras that you ordered. All of them are marked and set for loading.”
“Did you make sure that we have enough lines? I don’t want to get caught short on tack once we get out of here.”
Pascal snorted. “Of course I checked. My butt’s going to be out there too, you know.”
Louella nodded, all business. “I double-checked the inspection reports. Just the same we need to do a walk-around.”
She’d said it so calmly that Pascal almost missed the implication of what she had said. When he did, he snapped erect, banging his head on the bottom of the bunk.
“Y… you mean… go outside?” he blurted.
Louella sneered at him. “Sure. We can get some pressure suits and hand lights to work with. As long as you stay in the dock you won’t have any problems. It will be just like going for our training stroll at geosynch. You didn’t have any problems there, did you?”
Pascal stuttered. He’d been scared out of his wits the whole time, worrying whether his lines were securely attached, worrying about the ability of his boots to hold fast to the deck, worrying about slipping, about the vast distance that he would fall should he become detached from the station.
“N… no,” he lied.
They didn’t need the hand lights after all. Thorn was still parked in the repair bay where there was plenty of external illumination. Louella held tight to her walker as she stumbled through the lock. The walker took most of the weight off her legs, which was a blessing. Even though she didn’t have too much of a problem with the two g’s, the additional weight of the heavy pressure suit made movement difficult.
Pascal stumbled along behind her, clutching his own walker so tightly that it looked as if he’d leave glove marks in the metal.
“What a pig,” Louella remarked as she examined the bulbous skin of Thorn’s outer envelope. “Looks like a damned overgrown, pregnant guppy,” she said as she walked along the side of the bulging hull, thinking of the sleek craft she had sailed in Earth’s tame waters. Every few steps she stopped to examine a weld, a spot of suspicious discoloration, or one of the vents for the ballast hold.
“Let’s take a look at her rigging,” she demanded and followed the crew chief to the boat’s deck.
Two stubby masts projected up from the center line of Thorn’s upper surface. These were thick triangles of heavy metal, nearly six meters across at their thickest dimension. They certainly weren’t the slender masts she’d known all her life.
The trailing edge of each mast was a pair of clamshells. These were double-locked doors that would open when they deployed the sails. A short track ran back from each mast, with a crosswise track at the end. “We extended the travelers on both sides, like you asked,” the crew chief said. “You’re goin’ to have a bit of trouble handling her. Keep a tight hand on the wheel and don’t run close to the wind, is my advice.” Disapproval was evident in his voice. “Don’t think you should have done that, though. These little boats ain’t built to take much heel, y’know.”
Louella bristled as she checked the workmanship on the track modifications, looking for any indication that the repair crew had scrimped on her specifications. “Did you think about adjusting the traveler’s winches to take the extra line?”
The crew chief bristled. “Of course I did,” he said gruffly. “I don’t appreciate you sayin’ that I don’t know how to do my job.”
“Really? Well, I don’t like you telling me how to sail a boat either, asshole!” she shot back. She moved to examine the other mast as the crew chief licked his wounds.
While Louella and the crew chief were above deck, Pascal examined the hull. The keel had already been retracted from the meter-by-meter safety inspection. The huge weights at the ends of the double keel swung slowly from side to side as Thorn bobbed up and down. Thorn was just a balloon when she wasn’t under way. The keels’ slender foils hardly seemed strong enough to support the three hundred tons of droplet-shaped weights. The blunt nose of the forward weight was smooth and bright, as if it had been polished. There were several long gouges along the sides.
“Impact scars,” the crewman said as she reached across the gap and shoved her glove inside one of the larger ones. “There’s always some gravel being driven around the atmosphere, especially down deep, where the keel runs. Sometimes they’re pretty big and movin’ fast. That’s what made these dings, y’see.”
Pascal was still staring at the thin ribbons that supported the weights. Each was only a few centimeters thick, hardly the width of his hand. One rip from a rough piece of gravel, he thought, and the ribbon could be severed and the weight would be released, dropping down into the depths far, far below.
Suddenly he realized that he was only one step away from the edge of the inspection platform. One step away from a fall that wouldn’t stop until he reached a pressure level that would crush and kill him, compressing his suit and body into a tiny mass. He would still fall until it hit the layer of metallic hydrogen, hundreds and hundreds of kilometers below the station. No, that wasn’t really true; he wouldn’t fall that far. His body would come to rest somewhere where his density was equal to the surrounding atmosphere.
But he’d still be dead.
A wave of vertigo overcame him. He stumbled back from the dangerous precipice. “I … I need to get back inside,” he told his escort, clamping his hand on the safety line. “Now!” he shouted when the crewman didn’t respond at once. He had to get away from that horrid drop.