He was already doing so. Jan, her chin resting on his shoulder and her forehead just a few centimeters away from the transparent window, felt the nerve-tingling thrill of the first moment of entry. It would work, and it was working. Her own weight, slight but perceptible, pressed them closer together. The cloud-racked face of the planet flashed past her, and as Paul moved deeper inside her she felt thunderheads within rearing up to rival those from Jupiter’s turbulent depths.
Paul whispered in her ear, “Three more minutes.” She had no idea how he knew that. She nodded, kept her eyes open, and concentrated on catching the wave. It was going to work perfectly. She had wondered if such a thing were possible — had been half-convinced that it was impossible — but in just another minute or two… her legs were tightening, her eyes closing, her mouth opening, all the muscles of her lower body moving to their own internal rhythm.
And then, suddenly — too soon, much too soon — the bells of the ship’s communication system rang out. Paul gave a final spasmodic thrust and pushed Jan away from him.
“No,” she gasped. “Not yet. Keep going, Paul — another minute. Keep going!”
He slipped out, wriggled from under her, and dived toward the other side of the chamber. Jan cried out, “Paul, you can’t—” The ship’s bell was still ringing, and it sounded wrong. “What are you doing?”
“Not closest approach.” He switched the lights on in the observation chamber and she saw him, naked and still erect, over by the door. He was working desperately at the lock. “Hull integrity alarm. Number Three Hatch — some drunken lunatic — this fucking cipher—”
He snarled in triumph, jerked the door open, and swung through. He was still stark naked. Jan, her heart pounding and her head dizzy, shaking as though abandoned at the top of a roller coaster, followed. She had no idea where Number Three Hatch might be, but the absolute urgency in Paul’s voice overrode everything else. She followed him without any thought of clothing.
Amazingly, the corridor as far as she could see was filled with noisy people. They were cheering and waving, celebrating a Jupiter closest approach which had not yet happened. A man and a woman, half-undressed, leaned against each other. They were laughing. As Jan pushed past them, the woman said in a tipsy voice, “That’s right, sweetie, go get him. Lots of good mileage left in him, I could see that.”
Paul, five meters ahead, had swung open another door and thrown himself through. Jan, following more slowly, entered the chamber at the exact moment when a second set of bells rang out. These sounded a different note and were less strident than the ones that had interrupted them in the observation chamber. This was the moment of Jupiter closest approach — and the feeling in the pit of Jan’s stomach was a universe away from orgasm.
The room she entered contained one of the Achilles’ exit points. The inner airlock already stood open. Paul was grappling with a heavily-built dark figure floating by the outer one. Two safety catches on the lock had already been thrown. If the last one were freed, air from inside the ship would rush out, low-pressure hydrogen from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere would replace it, and she, Paul, and the other man would all die.
Jan kicked off hard from the wall and sped headfirst across the chamber. Paul had the man around the neck and was trying to pull him backwards, but he had no way to exert leverage. The man ignored Paul completely and went on fiddling obsessively with the third catch on the lock.
Jan didn’t know how to fight, especially in micro-gravity. As she came close she grabbed the man’s right forearm, pulled herself toward it, and sank her teeth into the fleshy part of his thumb.
He gave a loud “Ow!” and released his hold on the catch. The struggling trio spiraled away in mid-air, Paul still trying to throttle the bulky stranger. Jan lost her bite, but still held the arm. Three other people, two of them crew, burst into the chamber. As they wrestled the man to the floor, she saw his face.
It was Sebastian.
“I feel that I, not Sebastian Birch, must bear full responsibility for all that happened.”
Dr. Valnia Bloom sat in the small medical center of the OSL Achilles. Her red hair was drawn back and hidden by a tight white skull-cap. With her thin lips, chalk-pale countenance, and haunted eyes, she resembled a living skeleton.
“It was at my suggestion,” she went on, “that Sebastian agreed to have a series of treatments using selected psycho-tropic drugs. In our work together over the past weeks, I became convinced that his obsession with planetary atmospheres and their cloud patterns derives from some deep-seated compulsion, either natural or one implanted at an early age. We had been moving backward in time, seeking the site of his earliest memories. This afternoon we came to the time when his memory had been modified by the team that discovered him roaming and helpless in Earth’s northern hemisphere. In an effort to reverse or bypass that block, I administered a second dose. Sebastian had been tolerating the treatment well, with no apparent side effects or post-session abnormalities of behavior. At dinner this evening he seemed his usual self, though perhaps more restrained than the others at our table. That was not difficult, since everyone else was euphoric, and I regarded Sebastian’s poise as the sign of an increasing maturity that matched his actual age. I must admit that I too was in an elevated mood, and when Sebastian disappeared shortly after dinner I thought nothing of it. I assumed that he had gone to join a party somewhere else on the ship. Whereas…”
She gestured to the unconscious body on the bed next to her. Sebastian lay in a deep sleep.
Captain Kondo, standing at the end of the bed, looked to Jan and Paul Marr — both now dressed in conventional if somewhat rumpled clothing.
“Did you or anyone else knock him out, either with a blow or with the use of a sedative?”
Paul and Jan shook their heads.
“And you were with him continuously,” Captain Kondo went on. He was both unrumpled and unruffled. “You were with him from the time that you overpowered him by the Number Three Hatch until he was brought here?”
Paul coughed and said, “Ah — not quite all the time. Two other crew members watched him for a few minutes. But they assured me that they did not touch him in any way while I was gone. He simply became unconscious, and they were afraid to do anything that might affect his condition.” Paul did not add that in those few minutes he and Jan had hurried to the forward observation chamber, where they had dressed as quickly as possible without worrying about the fine details of their appearance.
Captain Kondo slowly nodded. “There will of course be a full investigation of this incident when we reach Ganymede. For the moment, I wish you to say nothing to any of the passengers. I will ask the same of the others who were present in the Number Three Hatch.” He hesitated. “I was about to add that I would make a general statement, reassuring all passengers that the Achilles remains in a safe and spaceworthy condition. However, it is my sense that such an action on my part is quite unnecessary. The vast majority of the passengers are under the misapprehension that alarm bells, naked passengers and crew in a high state of physical arousal” — his eyes flicked from Jan to Paul. He knew! — “unarmed physical combat, and the towing of an unconscious person along a corridor to the ship’s medical center, constitute nothing more than a normal and reasonable element of a Jupiter swingby ceremony. I believe it best if they remain with that impression. Mr. Birch will of course be held under continuous close observation, for which I will now make arrangements.”
He turned, apparently about to leave. Jan blurted out, “But what will this mean? Will Sebastian and I be allowed to continue on to Saturn? Do we — will we — I mean, is there a chance that we will be sent back — back to Earth?