Jupiter gt-10 Page 4

  As he made his solitary way through the slightly flexible transfer tube, he got that same sudden feeling: This enormous thick wheel of a station was going to come crashing down upon him any moment now. Again his breath caught and for just a heartbeat of an instant he felt very small, very vulnerable, very close to death.

  The instant passed. Grant finished his prayer as he strode on alone through the tube; he was the only person transferring from the freighter to the research station. The flooring felt soft and spongy beneath his boots, especially after so many months of the freighter’s steel decks. Everything’s fine, he told himself. He remembered that the instant he stepped through the hatch at the far end of the tube he was officially engaged in his Public Service duty; every second would count toward his four-year commitment. Every second would bring him closer to Marjorie, to home, to the life he wanted.

  But he had seen something in that brief glimpse of the station, something that should not have been. Grant had memorized the station’s layout after months of studying it during the long trip out to Jupiter. Research Station Gold was a massive fat doughnut of a structure, more than five kilometers in diameter. It rotated once every two minutes to give its interior a spin-induced artificial gravity of almost exactly one g, so that its inhabitants would feel a comfortable Earthly gravity inside the station.

  Grant had seen an additional structure sticking out from the doughnut shape, a metallic lenticular section, round and flattened like a discus, connected to the station by a single slender tube, literally poking out from the main body like a sore thumb. It should not have been there. Grant knew the schematics of Station Gold by heart; he had pored over its design details and operations manuals for months. There was no extra section hanging out on one side of the doughnut. There couldn’t be. It would unbalance the station’s spin and inevitably destabilize it so badly that it would shake the structure apart.

  It could not be there, Grant knew. Yet he had seen it. He was certain of that.

  He felt puzzled, almost worried, as he took the few steps that brought him to the end of the transfer tunnel. Grant had to duck slightly to get through the hatch that connected with the station itself. As he stepped through, he found himself in a small bare chamber. Its metal walls were scuffed, dull; its flooring was metal gridwork. Once it had been painted, Grant saw, but there was nothing left of the paint except a few grayish chips clinging here and there.

  A tall, slim man in light-gray casual slacks and soft blue velour shirt was standing there, waiting for him with a listless, bored expression on his angular, ascetic face. Grant had never seen such a pallid complexion; the man looked almost ghostly. His hair was very light, almost white, thin and straight and hanging down to his shoulders. Despite the silvery hair, Grant guessed that the man was only slightly older than himself.

  “Grant Archer?” the man asked needlessly, extending his right hand.

  Grant nodded as he shifted his travelbag and took the offered hand.

  “I’m Egon Karlstad,” the man said. His grip seemed measured: not too strong, not too soft.

  “Good to meet you,” said Grant. He heard the hatch behind him slide shut, then a quick series of clicks and thumps as the transfer tube disconnected.

  Karlstad grinned sardonically. “Welcome to Research Station Gold,” he said. “Welcome to the gulag.”

  Puzzled, Grant asked, “What’s a gulag?”

  “You’ll find out,” Karlstad said resignedly as he turned to lead Grant through a second hatch and into a long, wide passageway.

  Gold seemed even bigger inside than it had looked from the outside. The passageway that they trudged along was spacious and even carpeted, although the carpeting seemed threadbare, badly worn. Still, after all those months of tatty old Roberts, Grant reveled in the feeling of openness and freedom. Men and women passed them, nodding their greetings or saying hello to Karlstad. He did not introduce any of them, but kept up a constant chatter about what was behind each of the doors set into either side of the corridor: fluid dynamics lab, cryogenic facility, electronics maintenance shop, other titles Grant did not understand.

  Grant thought of it as a corridor, not a passageway. He was not on a ship any longer. This was a research station. Even though he knew he was walking inside a big wheel-shaped hoop, it looked and felt to Grant as if the corridor were perfectly flat and straight, that’s how big the station was. It was only off in the far distance that the corridor appeared to slope upward.

  Well, he thought, at least I’ll be in reasonably comfortable surroundings. And working with real scientists.

  After what seemed like a half hour, Karlstad stopped at an unmarked doorway. “This is your compartment, Mr. Archer.”

  “Grant,” said Grant. “Please call me Grant.”

  Karlstad made a polite little bow. “Good. And I’m Egon. My quarters are just down the passageway, two doors.” He pointed.

  Grant nodded as Karlstad tapped the security pad built into the doorjamb. “You can set your own code, of course,” he said. “Just let the security office know what it is.”

  The door slid open. Grant’s compartment was roomy, with a real bed instead of a bunk, a desk, table, chairs, shelves, even a compact kitchenette with its own sink and microwave unit. It was all strictly utilitarian, like a college dormitory room, not fancy or luxurious in the least. Certainly nothing in the compartment looked new or bright. Everything smelled faintly of disinfectant, even the thin gray carpeting.

  “Two of the walls are smartscreens, of course,” Karlstad was saying. “That door on the right is your lavatory, the other one’s a closet.”

  Grant stepped in and tossed his travelbag onto the bed. This is fine, he told himself. This is perfectly fine. I can be comfortable here.

  Karlstad shut the door and left him alone in his new quarters before Grant could ask him about the strange structure jutting out from the station’s perimeter. But as he bounced on the bed to test its springiness, Grant told himself to forget about it. The people running this station wouldn’t build anything that would jeopardize their own safety, he thought. That would be crazy.

  It didn’t take long for Grant to unpack his meager belongings. His clothes hardly filled a tenth of the ample closet space and bureau drawers. He sat at the desk and linked his palmcomp with the wall screen. The first thing he did was to compose a long, upbeat message to Marjorie, telling her that he had arrived safely at the station and showing her—by swiveling in his desk chair while holding the palm-size computer with its built-in video camera in his hand—how spacious and comfortable his new quarters were. Then he sent an almost duplicate message to his parents, back in Oregon.

  But even as he did so, the memory of that odd appendage sticking out from the station’s rim kept nagging at him. A flattened circular shape, like a fat discus. It was big, too: several hundred meters in diameter, at least. It bothered him. After sending off the message to his parents, Grant called up the station’s schematics, as he had done countless times on the long journey to Jupiter. Nothing. No reference to such a structure anywhere in his palmcomp’s files.

  “Did I imagine seeing it?” Grant whispered to himself. Then he shook his head. He had seen it, he was certain of that.

  He jacked into the station’s own files and pulled up the schematics. Nothing there, either. Frowning with puzzled frustration, he scrolled through the station’s files. Many of them were marked ACCESS LIMITED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL. At last he found what he wanted: realtime views of the station from other satellites in orbit around Jupiter.

  At first he was mesmerized by the satellite views of Jupiter itself, the ever-changing kaleidoscope of swirling, racing colors, endlessly fascinating. It took a real effort of will to concentrate on finding views of the station.

  And there it was, the thick torus of dulled, pitted metal, looking small and fragile against the overwhelming background of Jupiter’s gaudy, hurtling clouds. And there was that saucer-shaped thing hanging out from one side of the station’s
wheel, connected only by an impossibly slim tube.

  Grant froze the image and framed the extension on the wallscreen, then asked, “Computer, pull up the schematic for the indicated image.”

  No response from the computer. His palmcomp merely hummed to itself; the picture on the screen did not change. Feeling nettled, Grant pulled out the keyboard that was built into the desk and connected it to his palmcomp, then typed out his command.

  The screen went blank for a moment and Grant started to smile with a sense of victory. But then ACCESS DENIED appeared briefly and the screen went dead.

  “Damn!” Grant snapped, immediately regretting his lack of self-control.

  Grant rebooted his palmcomp and tried again. He lost track of time, but he was determined to get the better of the stupid computer system. No matter how he tried, though, every attempt ended in the same ACCESS DENIED message and automatic shutoff.

  A knocking on his door finally pulled his attention away from his quest. With a disgusted grunt, Grant got up from his desk chair. He was surprised at how stiff he felt; he must have been hunched over the computer for hours.

  Egon Karlstad stood at Grant’s door, a quizzical little hint of a smile on his pale face.

  “You must be somebody special,” Karlstad said, standing out in the corridor. “Dr. Wo wants to see you.”

  “Dr. Wo?” Grant asked.

  “As in woe unto thee, rash mortal,” said Karlstad. “He’s the director of the station. El supremo.”

  “He wants to see me? Why?”

  Karlstad brushed a hand through his silvery hair. “Beats me. He doesn’t take me into his confidences very often. But when he rings the bell, you’d better salivate.”

  Grant stepped out into the corridor and closed his door behind him. “Salivate?”

  “Pavlov’s dogs,” said Karlstad, starting down the hallway. “Conditioned reflex and all that.”

  “Oh, I remember … in biology class, back in high school.”

  “I’m a biophysicist, you know.”

  “Really? What’re you doing here? Aren’t all the biology people at the Galilean moons?”

  Karlstad waved hello to a couple of women coming toward them before he replied, “All the work on the moons is headquartered here. People can’t stay out there for more than a few weeks at a time: radiation buildup, you know.”

  “We’re shielded here?” Grant asked.

  “Hell, yes. Superconducting magnets, just like the storm cellars aboard spacecraft, only bigger. And we’re orbiting close enough to Jupiter so that we’re inside the van Allen belts, below the heaviest radiation fields.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Understatement of the year!”

  They walked along the corridor for what seemed like kilometers. Karlstad appeared almost to glide along, pale and slim and seemingly weightless, just about. Like a ghost, Grant thought. A pallid, insubstantial phantom. Most of the doors they passed were closed, although they went through an open area that was obviously a galley or cafeteria. People were lining up and getting trays, piling food on them, moving to tables and sitting down. Hearty aromas of hot food and spices wafted through the area, making Grant truly salivate.

  “Is it lunchtime?” Grant asked.

  “Dinner,” Karlstad answered. “Your clock is off by seven or eight hours.”

  Grant hadn’t realized that the old Roberts ran on a different clock. He had assumed that all space vehicles kept the same time.

  They passed through more open areas, workshops and exercise gyms, then a long span with doors spaced close together. The carpeting here seemed newer, thicker, even though it was the same bland gray as elsewhere. “Executive territory,” Karlstad murmured. Each door bore a name-plate.

  At last they stopped at a door that said:

  L. ZHANG WO STATION DIRECTOR

  “Here you are,” said Karlstad.

  “You’re not going in with me?” Grant asked.

  Karlstad raised his hands in mock horror. “He wants to see you, not me. I’m just the delivery boy. Besides”— he hesitated a heartbeat—“the less I see of the Old Man, the better.”

  LI ZHANG WO

  Karlstad walked away, leaving Grant standing alone before the closed door of the director’s office. Feeling a little nervous, Grant balled his fist to knock on the door, then hesitated.

  There’s nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. You haven’t done anything wrong. Besides, this is a chance to talk to the top man; you can tell him you’re an astrophysicist and bringing you here was a mistake, maybe get him to send you back to Earth or at least to the Moon.

  Summoning up his courage, he tapped lightly on the door.

  No response.

  He glanced up and down the corridor. No one in sight. Karlstad had melted away. It was as if no one wanted to be anywhere near here.

  Taking a deep breath, Grant rapped on the door again, harder.

  Again no response. He wondered what to do. Then a muffled voice from inside the office said, “Enter.”

  Grant slid the door open and stepped in. The room was overly warm, sticky with humidity, like a hothouse. Grant felt perspiration break out on his upper lip, yet the director wore a high-collared tunic buttoned all the way up to the throat as he sat behind his desk.

  Director Wo’s office was austere rather than imposing. The room was about the same size as his own quarters, Grant guessed, furnished with a large curved desk of gleaming metal, its surface completely clear except for a small computer screen and an incongruous vase of delicate red and white chrysanthemums. There was a chair of tubular stainless steel padded with fawn-colored cushions in front of the desk and a small oval conference table with four stiff plastic chairs in the far corner. The wallscreen behind the desk showed a stark desert: empty sand stretching to the horizon beneath a blazing sun. It made Grant feel even more uncomfortably hot. The other walls were utterly bare; the only decoration in the room was that paradoxical vase of flowers on the director’s desk.

  They can’t be real, Grant thought. Nobody would waste the time and resources to grow flowers on this station. Yet they looked real enough. And the vase was a graceful Oriental work of art, like something from a museum.

  Without looking up from his desktop screen, Dr. Wo gestured bruskly to the padded chair in front of his desk. Grant obediently sat in it, thinking that the director was playing an old power-trip game: pretending to be so busy that he can’t even say hello. Grant had run into this type before, at school and among the bureaucrats of the New Morality.

  All right, he thought. As soon as he does look up I’ll tell him that I’m an astrophysicist and I should be at Farside. Enough of this spying and secrecy agreements.

  Feeling sweat dampening his scalp, Grant studied Dr. Wo’s face as he sat waiting for the director to take notice of him. It was a fleshy, broad-cheeked face, solid and heavy-featured, with small coal-black eyes set deeply beneath brows so slight that they were practically nonexistent. Skin the color of old parchment. The man had a small mustache, little more than wisps on his upper lip. His hair was cropped so close to his scalp that it was difficult to tell its true color: light gray, Grant thought. His hairline was receding noticeably. His head looked big, blocky, too heavy even for the powerful shoulders that strained the fabric of his tunic.

  At last Director Wo looked up from the screen and fixed his eyes on Grant. They glowered like the embers of a smoldering fire.

  “I heard you knock the first time,” he said. His voice was hoarse, strained, as if he were suffering from a throat infection.

  Grant blinked with surprise. “When no one answered I thought—”

  “You are an impatient man,” Wo accused. “That is not good for someone who wants to become a scientist.”

  “I … I didn’t think you’d heard me,” Grant stammered.

  “You are also too curious for your own good.” Wo jabbed a finger at the desktop screen, like a prosecuting attorney making a point. “The extension to this
station is off-limits to unauthorized personnel, yet the first thing you do when you arrive here is poke your brightboy nose into it. Why?”

  “Uh, well … it seemed odd to me, sir, having an extension hanging on one side of the wheel and nothing to balance it.”

  “Oh, so you are a design engineer, are you?” The man’s voice made Grant want to wince. It seemed so harsh that it had to be painful to speak that way.

  “Nosir, but it does make me wonder.”

  Wo huffed impatiently. “Better men than you have designed that extension, brightboy. And when you get an access-denied message on your screen you should take your curiosity elsewhere. Understand me?”

  “Yessir. If I may, though, I want to—”

  “You set off all kinds of alarms, trying to pry into sensitive information.”

  “I didn’t realize there was anything that sensitive being done here,” Grant said. Even as he said it, Grant realized it was a lie. He’d been sent here because of the scientists’ secrecy.

  “You didn’t realize …? Didn’t you sign a secrecy agreement?”

  “Yes, but I thought—”

  “You thought it was just a bit of paperwork, did you?” Wo hunched forward, both hands balled into fists atop the desk. His hands looked powerful, thick wrists and heavy forearms that bulged in his tunic sleeves. “Another pointless piece of red tape from the bureaucrats running this station.”

  “Nosir. But about my assignment here—”

  “You have been assigned to this station. Under my direction. You will follow the terms of the secrecy agreement you signed. That is mandatory. No exceptions.”

  “I …” Grant swallowed hard. “I didn’t associate the secrecy agreement with the access-denied message on my screen. As you said, sir, my curiosity got the better of me.”

  Wo stared coldly at Grant for several long moments. At last he said, “Very well. I will take you at your word. But my security people are buzzed up about you.”

  Grant knew when to behave meekly. “I’m sorry if I’ve caused any trouble, but, you see, I’m actually an astrophysicist and I don’t understand why I’m here.”