JUPITER ENCOUNTER MINUS THREE DAYS

Eberly asked Jaansen to sweep his apartment for bugs at least once a week.

“Are you really worried that Wilmot is spying on you?” the tall, pale Norseman asked as he walked across the bedroom, electronic detector in his hand.

Eberly, shorter, darker, replied, “It’s what I would do if I were in his place.”

“Are you bugging his office?” Jaansen asked, with a smile.

“Of course.”

“Well, in three days we fly past Jupiter,” said Jaansen. “It’s a milestone.”

Eberly agreed with a curt nod. “I’m more interested in what happens inside the habitat than outside.”

Jaansen, ever the engineer, pointed out, “We’ll be taking on fresh fuel. Without it we won’t be able to get to Saturn.”

“I have other things on my mind. More important things.”

“Such as?”

“The coming elections.”

Jaansen clicked off the detector and announced, “You’re all clean. No cameras, no microphones, no electrical power drain anywhere, down to the microvolt. Nothing that shouldn’t be here.”

“Good.” Eberly walked him back into the sitting room and gestured him to the sofa.

Sitting himself in the easy chair, Eberly said, “Sooner or later, we must get the people to vote on a new constitution and new leaders.”

Jaansen nodded, tucked the detector into one pocket and pulled out his inevitable handheld computer from another.

“I’ve been thinking about the elections,” Eberly said.

“They’re a long way off.”

“Less than a year now. We must prepare for them.”

Jaansen nodded, fiddling with his palmcomp.

“The scientists will vote for one of their own, probably Urbain.”

Another nod from Jaansen.

“They form a sizable bloc of votes.”

“Not a majority, though.”

“Not of themselves,” said Eberly. “But suppose the engineers and technicians vote with them?”

Recognition dawned on Jaansen’s face. “That could be a majority. A solid majority.”

“Therefore we must somehow split the engineers and technicians away from the scientists,” Eberly said.

“How can we do that?”

Eberly smiled. “Let me explain what I have in mind.”

Edouard Urbain tried to control the trembling he felt inside him as he stared out the observation port. The giant planet Jupiter, no more than a bright star only a few days ago, was now a discernable disk even to the naked eye, obviously flattened at its poles, streaked with muted colors from bands of clouds racing across the face of that enormous world. Four tiny stars flanked the disk: the moons that Galileo discovered with his first telescope.

Tucked into a close orbit just above those multihued clouds, Urbain knew, was the research station Thomas Gold. I could have been there, he told himself for the thousandth time. I could have been leading the teams studying the life-forms on Europa and Jupiter itself. Instead I am here in this glorified ark, stuck in along with renegades and madmen like this Gaeta fellow.

He knew it was his imagination, but Jupiter seemed to be getting larger as he watched. No, we are not that near to it yet, Urbain said to himself. Three days from now, that is when the spectacle will occur.

Habitat Goddard’s complement of scientists and their equipment was far smaller than Urbain had asked for. The university consortium was unwilling to send their best people on a multiyear voyage out to Saturn. Let them sit on their thumbs while the habitat lumbers its way out to that distant planet? No, never. Urbain recalled the face of the consortium’s chief scientist with perfect, painful clarity:

“We can’t tie up our best people for several years like that, Edouard. You take a skeleton team out to Saturn. Once you’re established in orbit about the planet, we can shoot our top researchers out to you on a torch ship, get them there in a month or two.”

The implied insult still burned in Urbain’s heart. I am not one of their top people. A lifetime of work on Mars and the Moon, three years in orbit around that hellhole of Venus, a life dedicated to planetary science, and all they think me capable of is playing nursemaid to a skeleton crew of also-rans.

It rankled. It cut. His wife had refused to come with him; instead, she sued for a divorce. She had warned him, over the years, that he was foolish to ignore the political aspects of his career.

“Make friends,” Jeanmarie had told him, over and again. “Play up to those who can do you good.”

He could never do it. Never play that game. He had done good work, solid work, perhaps not the level that wins Nobel Prizes, but important contributions nevertheless. And now this. The end of the road. Exiled to Saturn. I’ll be retirement age by the time I can work my way out of this habitat.

I should have paid more attention to Jeanmarie. I should have heeded her advice. I should have paid more attention to the New Morality counselors. They pull the strings behind the scenes. Mediocre Believers get promotions while honest researchers like me are left behind.

A wasted life, he thought.

Yet, as he looked out at Jupiter glowing like a beacon in the dark depths of infinite space, the old excitement simmered within him. There’s a whole universe out there to explore! Worlds upon worlds! I won’t be able to study Jupiter or its moons, but I’ll be at Saturn before any of the others. I’ll be directing the first real-time probes of Titan’s surface.

He thought of the tracked rover vehicle that his staff was building. It will roam across the surface of Titan and obtain more data about that world in a few weeks than all the scientists back on Earth have been able to amass in their lifetimes. Before the bright youngsters get there on their torch ships I’ll already be getting data from Titan. And from the cloud deck of Saturn. And the ice rings.

Perhaps my life won’t be a waste, after all, thought Edouard Urbain. Perhaps this time I’ll hit the jackpot. Perhaps there is a Nobel Prize waiting for me in the future, after all.

Perhaps, he even thought, Jeanmarie will return to me.

In the workshop where he and his team labored, Manny Gaeta was walking Kris Cardenas around his EVA suit. Von Helmholtz and his four technicians stood at the benches that ran along two walls of the chamber, watching their boss and the nanotech expert as they slowly paced around the heavy, bulky suit, like shoppers inspecting a new outfit built for Frankenstein’s monster.

She had arrived at the lab carrying a small briefcase, which she had left on the floor by the door as soon as Gaeta came over to greet her. The technicians stayed well clear of it.

Now she and Gaeta stared up at the suit, looming head and shoulders above them, gleaming in the light from the ceiling lamps.

“It’s big,” Cardenas murmured. With its helmet and jointed arms, it reminded her of a medieval suit of armor.

“It’s gotta be big,” Gaeta said as they paced slowly around it. “Lots of gear inside.”

“You’ve got room in there for a cafeteria,” she joked.

With a rueful grin, Gaeta answered, “Nope. Just enough room inside for me to squeeze in. The rest is packed with sensors, cameras, VR transmitters, servomotors to move the arms and legs, radiation armor, life support systems—”

“Systems? Plural?”

“You bet. Redundant systems are the only way to go. One craps out, you can live on the other.”

Cardenas peered at the gleaming armor’s bright finish. “Is this cermet?”

“Partly,” said Gaeta. “Lots of organometallics in it, too. And semiconductor surfaces, protected by borosilicates and Buckyfilament shields.”

“How do you put it on?”

He walked her around to the suit’s back. “You climb in through the hatch.”

Cardenas broke into a laugh. “Like the trapdoor in old-fashioned long johns!”