“Jeanette Ryan on Flutterbye One. Go ahead, Seattle.”
“Oh good! Miz Ryan, this is Charles A. French,” her contact replied. “Dr. Blevin is taking a nap and I didn’t want to wake him, but we didn’t want to miss the chance to tell you what we know. We have an update on the conditions at OceanLab.”
Aha! The son of the aquarium’s director. Which means his father is probably there, too. They’re really hauling out the bigwigs for this one! She was pleased with her audience; she was getting more attention for this one flight than she had ever had before. Despite her penchant for solitude, her tours were mostly an exercise in loneliness. She tended to try to make up for it when she had some human contact.
“Chipper! Pleased to meet you! Your dad has been telling me all about you! Congratulations on making valedictorian! And that’s enough of that miz crap. Call me Jeanette. Now, what’s up?”
“Sure. Uh, thank you, Jeanette,” Chipper French replied. “There’s an anomaly in the rate of pressure drop in the laboratory module. That is, it seems to have stopped leaking, or at least it isn’t leaking as fast as it should be. You might get there in time to save some of the specimens.”
She felt puzzled. “That’s odd. None of the maintenance bots at OceanLab has the ability to fix a puncture.”
“Er, just a minute…” There was a short pause. “Dad agrees with you. We can’t figure it out either. The reduction in leak rate is a series of step functions, so something must be plugging the holes one at a time. Dad thinks it must be some kind of debris moving around, getting sucked toward the punctures and clogging them. If this keeps up, the environmental control system will be able to make up for the loss and hold full atmospheric pressure for several days.” “Hey! Maybe Oscar is patching the leaks!”
“Who?”
“Octopus vulgaris, the big one,” Jeanette explained. “Specimen one ten stroke nine one.”
Another pause. “Dad says there’s no way. Octopi are bright, but they’re not that bright. Even if he understood the need to plug the holes, which isn’t likely, he’d never figure out how to use the patches.”
“Yeah, of course you’re right. I guess I’ll find out what it is when I get there. Any further instructions?” “Just to remind you that specimen one ten stroke nine one is still the highest priority. We still might be able to figure out how the animal processes docosahexaenoic acid by analyzing its muscle tissue. So no matter what, bring back the octopus. Even if it’s dead. You understand why that’s important, don’t you?”
Oscar!Jeanette didn’t want to think about the possibility that he might be dead. There was pressure at OceanLab. She just might be able to save him. She wanted to throttle up her scooter’s engines, to do anything to get there faster, but with a tight grip on her control panel echoing her clenched teeth she reminded herself there was nothing she could do to thwart the inexorable laws of orbital mechanics. Flutterbye was already on its fastest possible trajectory.
“Yeah, I understand,” she said, feeling the quaver in her voice. “DHA is the fatty acid the body uses for brain growth, and the human body can’t process fatty acids in zero g.”
“Dad says you’ve got it right,” Chipper agreed. “That’s why asteroid miners’ babies are usually retarded if they don’t get them into a gravity field.”
She winced at the thought of the rockballers’ babies; she’d met some of them. “It explains vegetarians’ babies, too. They need animal protein to develop their brains.”
“That’s a big one,” Chipper said. “We can feed a larger population down here if we can get everyone to adopt a vegetarian diet, but as long as we need docosahexaenoic acid, we’re going to be carnivores. But diets and babies aren’t all of it. We’re also looking for a way that human muscle tissue can use fatty acids for fuel. Right now your muscles are only burning carbohydrates; the fatty acids just build up and eventually get excreted. Some of the doctors down here think it might be worse than cardiovascular deconditioning. You must be familiar with those problems.”
“Uh huh. Spacer syndrome. It’s the story of my life.” She gritted her teeth in determination. “I’ll get that specimen even if there’s nothing else I can do at the lab.”
Her control panel interrupted, chirping for her attention. “Chipper, I have to barbecue my spacecraft for a while to even out the heat load, so I’ll have only intermittent communication. If you have anything more for me, you can call through Colorado Springs. I’m monitoring them for breakthroughs. Jeanette Ryan on Flutterbye One out.”
A tap on her control stick started the Universe slowly rotating around her. Every time Earth came into view, she strained to search out the tiny speck that would be OceanLab. Of course she couldn’t find it. She knew she wouldn’t be able to see the laboratory for hours, but felt disappointment nevertheless.
It was the dead of winter in Seattle. The people there would be living under thin layers of overcast clouds for the next couple months, an incessant light drizzle giving them a feeling of being enclosed, isolated from the rest of the world. The thought comforted her. If she ever moved to Earth, she would live in Seattle where she could feel protected by the overcast sky. She whiled away the hours of her flight by wondering what weather must be like.
Finally it was there, a minuscule spark of light centered in the cross hairs on her trajectory display. Reluctantly, Jeanette turned her scooter around. She could no longer see the lab, but she had to turn her back to it before she lit up her main engines for the rendezvous bum.
When the bum was complete, she was almost on top of her target. OceanLab looked like two cans with wings—the larger laboratory module was crowned with a tiny service module which doubled as an airlock. The wings were OceanLab s solar power arrays and radiators.
The laboratory looked odd, as if it had grown a patch of bristly hair in one spot. She nuzzled a switch on her neck ring to turn on the suit’s camera, and puzzled over her mental map of the lab; the bristles were all over the dry section. Her maneuvering rockets left her station-keeping alongside the service module, where she could nurse her vernier jets until the Flutterbye’s grapple fixture nestled into a capture latch at the entrance to the service module.
The furry patch on the lab intrigued her, so she decided to fly around OceanLab before going inside. She’d use her suit jets rather than bum up the Flutterbye’s precious fuel supply. The cold-gas jets in her suit had originally been intended to allow a space worker to rescue himself if he became detached from his spacecraft. Her suit didn’t have a lot of nitrogen for joy-riding, but she could recharge her backpack from the laboratory’s atmosphere tanks. A few hours less nitrogen wouldn’t make any difference to the dying OceanLab. Anticipating the frightening exhilaration of being surrounded by nothing but the cosmos, she pulled herself out of her scooter’s protective enclosure and floated free.
She wanted her hands inside her suit for the next maneuver, so she deflated her back bladder to get the volume she needed. By leaning back in her now roomy suit, she could extract both hands from her gloves and pull them inside. Her chest pack had outside switches for the suit’s tiny rockets, but the joysticks on her interior control panel gave her the precise control she needed for close piloting. With a few squirts of nitrogen, she floated over the service module and aimed herself at the furry patch on the laboratory.
Up close, it was obvious that OceanLab hadn’t really grown hair. The lacy streamers attached to the lab’s outer surface were ice, murky water ice tainted with streaks of red. Blood red. She touched one of the icicles. It broke. A spike of ice slipped away to reveal a thin white string protruding rigidly from its murky encasement. She stared at the string for a full minute before she finally realized what it was—a jellyfish tentacle. She thought about that for a moment, and then suddenly had to reswallow her bile. She hated jellyfish. Oscar did too. Perhaps he had taught her to hate them; she liked to watch him do horrible things to the loathsome creatures, tearing off their tentacles or tying them into Gordian knots. His ability to avoid the stinging nematocysts while manipulating the jellyfish never ceased to astound her.