Louella’s pulse was all right, but her breathing was labored. He turned her to one side to relieve the front-to-back pressure from the two-g gravity. She moaned as he shifted her.
He ran his hand down her arm, feeling for a break, a dislocated joint. The arm was all right, but there was a swelling at her wrist indicating a possible sprain or fracture. Since there was nothing more serious apparent, he climbed into the seat and buckled himself in. He could take care of Louella’s medical problems later, after he found out what Thorn’s situation was. The boat always came first!
A quick glance at the instruments showed that there was no pressure differential on the sails. The wind speed indicator read a fat zero, which meant that Thorn must be moving at the same speed as the wind. He noted that the ballast was zip. In an obvious contradiction, the pressure gauge showed them to still be on the boundary layer. Nevertheless Thorn was bobbing uncomfortably, as if she had lost some trim.
He clicked on the pumps that would bring more ballast up through the pipes. Once the boat had the proper trim he could turn her back into the wind. As he was waiting for that, he looked at the inertial. According to the readout they had lost most of their progress for the last day, at least. They were being blown back toward CS-15, but on a southward angle.
Since it would be a while until the pumps did their work he got the first-aid kit out of storage and put a splint on Louella’s arm. He prepared a dose of painkiller for when she awoke. He’d only give it if she asked for it. Carefully he turned her head and waved a broken ampule under her nose.
“Wha… where… humph,” she said and tried to sit up. “Wha … what happened?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Was coming back down the tube when all hell broke loose. Threw me against the side and knocked me out. We’re way off course now.”
“Oh, your head,” she said and reached out with her good hand to touch his forehead. “You’re bleeding!”
He brushed her hand away. “Just a bump, I think—rotten headache, though. How do you feel? Do you need this?” he held up the dose he’d prepared.
“Can’t take something that will knock me out. Help me get to the bunk so I can lay down. We need to figure out what we have to do. Maybe then I’ll let you use it.”
By the time he’d wrestled her into the bunk and fastened the straps to secure her in place, the pumps had been running for a good ten minutes.
He dropped into the seat and checked the gauges. The stabbing pains in his side abated for a moment.
“That’s strange,” he remarked as he flicked the pump switches on and off. “There doesn’t seem to be any ballast.”
“Yeah,” Louella said. “You left the heaters on. I flipped them off while you were messing with the sail.”
“Shit, I forgot about them when the sail blew. But that doesn’t explain why the pumps aren’t working.”
“Maybe we’re floating too high. Maybe the keel isn’t deep enough to find anything to pump.”
“Can’t be. Pressure gauge says we’re right where we’re supposed to be.” He glanced at the keelmeter. “The keel’s down as far as it will go, so we should be pumping ballast. Since we aren’t that means that either the pumps have stopped working or something has damaged the lines leading to the ballast tanks.”
“Either way we can’t trim the boat,” Louella mused. “Well, let’s try using the sails anyway to see what sort of maneuverability we have. We have to be able to make one of the stations or we’re royally screwed.”
Pascal threw the switches to pull the foresail back from its fully extended position. As the winches brought the sail tight, Thorn heeled to lee instead of turning into the wind. He let the sail out, hoping to run downwind instead. Perhaps on that setting he’d be able to steer from side to side. But the boat wouldn’t turn that way either.
“Unless you can think of any other things to try,” he said after an hour of experimenting with various settings of sails and the immobile keel, “I think we’re stuck. There aren’t any rescue boats out here. It looks like you’ll get your wish to ‘sail Jupiter’s seas forever.’ According to my calculations, Thorn won’t intersect a station’s track for at least a thousand years.”
“Well, Pascal,” Louella said in a surprisingly soft voice, “If we’re going to die, I can’t think of anybody I’d rather do it with than you, and no better place than on a racing boat.”
“I’m afraid that I can,” he replied too quickly and watched the gray nothingness of the infrared display as he contemplated his own death.
At least he’d be free of this damn headache, he thought.
Rams was puzzled as he approached the strangely warm object that had suddenly appeared. Primrose was now matched to the speed of the object. He carefully headed downwind and slowly closed the gap between them. Rams kept one hand on the winch controls as he maneuvered the ship closer and closer to the object, tightening and loosening the sail controls to creep forward.
At a few hundred meters the infrared image resolved into a strange double blob. The large upper blob was one or two hundred meters above Primrose. The smaller one was about the same distance below. A barely discernible thin line, apparently just a few degrees above the ambient temperature, connected the two blobs. He’d never seen anything so strange in all of the time he’d spent on Jupiter’s seas.
As he drew closer, the upper blob resolved itself into the familiar heat signature of a small craft, possibly a cargo barque or maybe a miner. Maybe the connecting line was its keel, he thought. But what was the blob at the bottom? It was far too large and irregular to be keel weights.
He pumped a little more ballast into Primrose’s tanks and sank lower. He wasn’t going to get any closer to the pair until he figured out what was going on. “Hate to mess up some science folks, wouldn’t we?” he remarked to Primrose.
The heat image resolved into two keel ribbons. They appeared to be tangled around some large shape that was below ambient temperature, as if it had come from deeper in the atmosphere. He flooded it with his sonar, watching as the display built up a ghostly image of the irregular shape.
On a hunch he pinged it with the docking sonar frequency and listened through the static for the reply: One, two, three pings came back, which indicated that he had made the lump ring. Either it was hollow, which made no sense, or it had a high metallic content. Somehow the other ship had been hit by a piece of rock brought up by the storm—a huge piece that could be worth a fortune.
He brought the ship back up until it was level with the other ship, carefully staying downwind to avoid smashing into her. With fine adjustments of the jib he allowed the other ship to come closer and closer until they almost kissed.
“Hello,” he yelled over the radio link, hoping that they were close enough to overcome the static. “This is the clipper Primrose, four days out of CS-15. Do you need assistance?”
Louella started at the sudden and unexpected sound of a strange human voice coming over the static of the radio. Pascal tried to sit upright and looked around. Since the accident he had slept in the helmsman’s seat, letting Louella have the more comfortable bunk where she could sleep. She’d relented after the second day and let him administer the painkiller. “Just make sure it isn’t a lethal dose,” she’d jokingly remarked. “I don’t want to miss the end of this race.”
“Nor I,” Pascal had replied slowly, and thought about what she had just said. He’d never considered that possibility. An “accidental” mistake in dosage would certainly be something to think about as the air grew closer.