Twelve hours later Rams realized that he was in serious trouble. Whenever he tried to head due north, he was forced farther west of his planned track. To be so affected at this distance meant that the storm was immense.
He prepared for the coming storm. The two things a sailor had to remember about surviving a storm, whether on Jupiter or on Earth, were either to be prepared, or be elsewhere. Rams began to go through Primrose and secure her. Even a small item flying about in a two-g field could do substantial damage.
The galley and his own cabin were easy. Rams made it a practice to stow everything until needed. Just the same, he went through every locker to make sure that nothing would fall out and surprise him. He poured hot tea into a thermos and stowed that, along with some bread, in the cockpit.
Securing the cargo hold occupied him for an hour. He put double lashings on all the containers, and tied them together, just to make sure. That done, he made certain that all loose lines were in the lockers, along with all of the deck gear. Nothing that could become a flying missile was left unsecured.
Since he wasn’t carrying passengers this trip, the other four cabins were empty. Just the same, he checked them for loose gear or an open locker. He had to make absolutely certain they were secure.
Securing the sail locker presented a problem. Rams had to balance being able to hoist sail in a hurry—which meant he had to have one loose—against the risk of it breaking free. He secured the larger sails and kept the two small ones ready to hoist as a compromise. If the blow was as heavy as he expected, the small ones were more likely to be used.
That done, Rams brought the ship about to begin another long, southerly tack. That way he could use the peripheral winds to stay on the outer fringes of the storm. With a little bit of luck, Primrose wouldn’t be drawn into its roaring core. Then he settled down to see what the long night would bring.
Thorn was six days out from the start and making way at a steady 150 mps. Pascal had already grown sick of the close quarters, the five-hours-on, five-hours-off schedule that matched Jupiter’s rotational rate, Louella’s lousy cooking (even if it was better than his own), the dragging load from Jupiter’s gravity, and the lingering, stinking ammonia smell from the boat’s slight atmospheric leakage.
They’d added their own contribution to the atmosphere. After nearly a week of confined quarters they had created a unique miasma. The cabin was redolent of recirculated air, collected flatulence, sweat, and the miscellaneous aromas that the human body produced. Only the ability of the human nose to filter out the worst of these protected him. Still, the smells remained, and, unfortunately, Pascal’s nose sometimes forgot to ignore them.
He fidgeted at the wheel, keeping a wary eye on the instruments. It was important to maintain the sail’s pressure differential right on the edge; that way they could keep their speed up. All week Louella had beaten his time. Somehow she was able to wrest a few extra knots from the wind. No matter how much he pushed, Louella was always able to do better.
They’d been competing ever since he could remember, each trying to outdo the other. She dared him to become a better sailor, even as she relentlessly strove to beat him every time. He challenged her to become the better navigator, and laughed at her struggles with simple plotting problems. She’d succeeded better than he, even if he never was able to offset her intuition with his science. Their teamwork had won numerous races over the years. Their success gained them prime berths in JBI’s commercial racing fleet. Louella had worked her way from an Olympic dinghy championship at age thirteen to finally being the helmsman on most of JBI’s Cup winners as well as the number one competitor in most of the other commercial classes.
Pascal had been recruited by JBI as a navigator for Louella’s first Whitbread. Since then he’d been with her for every race, alternatively as navigator, tactician, winch crank, or sail master. He’d been helmsman when she was captain and shared bunk with her on the Times’s double-around-the-world. They’d weathered hurricanes and drifted demasted for days with only a bottle of water to share between them. They’d broached a hundred thousand dollar racer in ’Frisco Bay, lost a two million dollar racer in the South Pacific, and survived to win the Bermuda in spite of a hurricane that destroyed half the fleet and shredded their mainsail to ribbons. It had been a thrill the whole time.
He just wished that she wasn’t such a pain in the ass.
Louella came awake in an instant and checked her watch. She had managed to sleep for nearly five hours without being jarred awake. “Damn Pascal’s eyes,” she complained to herself as she fastened her truss. “He must be running safe again.” That meant that she would have to make up for lost time during her watch, as usual.
She rolled out of the bunk, stepped cautiously to the deck and used the toilet, splashing a little water from the sink up her nose to counteract the dryness from the ammonia fumes.
“Tea’s hot,” Pascal called down to her in a voice heavy with fatigue.
“Thanks,” she replied, looking for the thermos. “How did you find time to make it?”
“You mean how much progress did that cost us, don’t you,” he replied sharply. “Not a bit, I’m sure.”
“Do you think that the competition’s doing better? Damn, but I wish we had some way of telling where the other boats are!”
A week before everyone had set off from Charlie Sierra Six on the first leg of the Great Jupiter Race, as the press had been calling it. The first leg would take them around CS-15 and then back to CS-27, where they would come to windward and race downwind to CS-6, where they had begun.
Louella had watched the heat signature of their prime competitor fall to Thorn’s lee when they came out of the shelter of the starting station, indicating that they had caught the vortex off Thorn and were spinning away to get good air. It was a trick most sailors learned before they left their cribs.
They had watched the diminishing white dot that represented the station fade into the background noise as Thorn pulled steadily westward, their speed climbing the whole time under Jupiter’s fierce winds. It was therefore a little disturbing to discover a heat signature steadily increasing in definition on their aft screen. Somehow one of the other boats had managed to catch a better wind cell than theirs.
Louella jibed to port, hoping to create a pocket of dirty air behind Thorn that would interfere with the other’s progress. The white dot responded by immediately moving to starboard, long before they could have felt the effects of Louella’s maneuver.
“Obviously they can see us better than we can see them,” Pascal cursed as he tried to crank up the gain. “It’s probably the wind blowing our signature backwards. Should we jibe again?”
Louella dismissed the idea; Thorn lost some momentum each time they jibed. “Let’s concentrate on building up our speed,” she replied, making some tiny adjustments to the set of the sails.
The image of the other boat faded to port and finally disappeared. They were six hours out from the start.
“What are they doing now?” Louella wondered aloud. “Could they have caught another favorable wind cell? Do you think they’re starting their northward leg already?”
Pascal checked the inertial. Thorn was still a few hours from their planned turning point. “Let them go,” he said. “Concentrate on our own course while I grab some sleep.”
Pascal was having difficulty staying awake during his shift at the wheel. The days of five hour sleep cycles, bland food, and lack of exercise were taking their toll. On most of the long races on Earth he at least could stand on the deck, stretch, and get a breath of air to refresh himself. Down here, in Jupiter’s atmosphere, he couldn’t even stand upright, much less sniff the air blowing by outside the boat. Not that he’d want to, he hastily amended.