He nodded. I got up and pushed off toward the front of the passengers’ compartment. Captain Vandez hadn’t started spinup or pressurized the ship yet. I met an officer just coming in the hatch and touched helmets with him.
“Okay if we go forward and watch over a 3D?”
“Well, Ah suppose so. How many a you? Jest two? Go on, then. Grab a handhold, mind, don’t jest float around. Nevah know when somethin’ might up an’ happen.”
I waved to Zak and wriggled through the hatch. The next compartment was half-filled with baggage secured in netting. We were in the inner tube that ran down the axis of the Sagan. Around us on all sides were storage tanks. At the moment the tanks were empty; the Sagan was returning to Ganymede for more water.
Against the walls were several 3D screens. These were the only concessions to the passengers, aside from seats, that the Sagan made. The screens gave front, rear, and several side views. In color.
Zak bumped into me, but I ignored him. I was busy trying to estimate our trajectory. The rear view was the interesting one.
No, “interesting” isn’t the right word. Beautiful is more like it. In the center of the screen, directly behind the Sagan, was Jupiter.
Jupiter. King of the ancient gods. Lord of the Romans. The lion. The giant. The fat man. Jove.
It filled the screen, striped with horizontal bands of yellowish-brown. The bands churn like thick smoke, each band revolving at different velocities. At the equator the swirling clouds go around Jupiter in just under ten hours.
That’s what they are: clouds. We’ve never seen the surface of Jupiter, the solid rock and metallic hydrogen, and we never will. We can’t get there. The pressure at the surface is thousands of times larger than the pressure at sea level on Earth. We could never design a ship to go there. Even if we could, there’s nothing to see by. No light. The clouds I was looking at absorb nearly all the sun’s light, or reflect it back into space.
I strained my eyes, looking at the equator. I could just make out the writhing masses of giant clouds as they boiled over each other, racing around the planet. Below the ammonia clouds I could see were thousands of klicks of methane crystals, hydrogen, ice, sulfur fumes, thunderclaps, and lightning storms as big as the continent of Asia—a cauldron of instant death for any man who went there.
The lion: Jove contains seventy percent of all matter in our solar system, outside the sun. Even this far out, it filled the sky. Down below the equator churned the Red Spot. A swirling, awesome storm, bigger than a dozen Earths. Each of Jupiter’s bands is a deep layer of gas, spinning at its own speed as the planet whirls. Each has its own grainy, gaudy texture. Here and there a fat storm filled a whole band, rolling like a ball bearing between the bands above and below. Yellow-green lightning forked between purpling clouds.
“Ahem!” A woman cleared her throat next to my ear. “I don’t think you boys should have the first look at everything.”
“We got here first,” Zak said reasonably.
“Rushed up here before we had barely gotten under way, you mean,” the woman said, pushing in front of us at the rear viewscreen. She was as old as my mother and not half as good looking.
Zak opened his mouth to say something and I muttered, “Come on, it’s not worth it. We’ve got all day.”
We moved over to the forward viewscreen.
“Are you boys going to block everything?”
“We’re watching—” I said.
“Well, really, I think you should be grateful your parents even let you go on this trip alone. If you can’t keep your manners—”
“Our parents haven’t got anything to do with it.” Zak said. “It’s Laboratory regs, once we’re above sixteen.”
“Humf! We’ll see what the Captain thinks about two young—”
“Oh. forget it,” I said. “Come on, Zak.” I didn’t know the woman. She must have come in on the Rambler’s last flight.
On my way back to my seat I noticed the air pressure building and popped my helmet seal. I cocked my helmet back and sat down, wondering what I was going to do until we touched down on Ganymede.
Zak went in search of something to read; all our study materials were in our luggage. He came back with two chips of Earthside magazines.
I clicked one in my LCD and read at random. One article was about the staggered working hours in the cities and how much it unsnarls the traffic tie-ups. There was a 3D picture of the subway “packers” of New York—men hired to shove people into the already crowded subway cars, so they can carry a few more. That one earned a double take.
The next article I read was a fashion tip for men: Handy Hints to Get the Right Tint. It had a 3D of a man wearing a maroon coat with an ascot, painting his fingernails.
I asked Zak if he thought Commander Aarons edited the copy that came through the laser beam from Earth.
“Why should he?”
“Well, it seems to me Earth comes off pretty badly in these magazines.” I said. “I mean. I’d almost suspect somebody was trying to keep us from getting homesick.”
Zak put aside his poetry magazine. “Just what is it—oh, I see. Painting fingernails is for women, right?”
“Yes.”
“Who says so?”
“Why—well, my father doesn’t do it. Neither does yours.”
“Yes, they are rather conservative, aren’t they? After all. Matt, the Lab is a backwater. An anomaly.”
“How do you mean that?”
“We’ve got something to do, out here. You follow little green blips in Monitoring, I talk to computers—everybody’s got a job. Even that brat back there—” he gestured behind us, where a baby was yowling—“will have something to do in a few years. Cleaning out the scum in the hydroponics tanks. I hope.”
“So? They have work on Earth, too.”
“That’s where you’re wrong.” He pointed a professorial finger at me. “They’ve got jobs, yes. The government sees to that. Plenty of them. But there’s not much work.”
“You lost me again.”
“How would you feel if you had to sit in an office every day, passing pieces of paper from one cubbyhole to another?”
“Bored, I guess. It would be like going to one of their schools all day.”
“Probably so. It makes you feel pretty useless. That’s the point. People like to see their work doing something; they want to see a final product. A chair, maybe, or a bridge, or a 3D.”
“Uh huh.”
“But that’s all done by machines. The men just push buttons and move paper around.”
“And paint their fingernails,” I said scornfully.
“Sure. Because they’re bored. They’re not doing anything they think is significant. Oh sure, the government says paper-passing is productive labor, but there’s so much make-work people know it’s a sham. That doesn’t jibe with their ego, their self-image.”
“Uh-ho, here we go again.”
“Okay, I’ll skip the jargon. The point is, they’re trying to show their individuality and worth through something other than their work. It’s like birds displaying colored feathers.”
“Expressing themselves.”
“Right. Only, out here, we’ve really got something to do. Fads don’t catch on here. We’re a different culture, really. You wouldn’t look down on a Fiji islander just because he wasn’t wearing a Brooks Brothers suit, would you?”
“No, but—”
“Anyway, Commander Aarons doesn’t have time to worry about what you read.” Zak said triumphantly.
I was still trying to straighten out that jump in the subject when Yuri came clumping over.