When Jameson staggered into his quarters after his first twelve-hour watch, Maggie had a mug of steaming coffee and a hot beanie waiting for him. He wolfed the crisp, paste-filled cone down gratefully. “Thanks,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to eat. It was wild on the bridge. The skipper’s still up there. Have you had anything?”
She gestured at a half-eaten beanie, its fragile rice-flour wrapping spilling out a congealing green sludge. “I was too excited. Are we really on our way?”
He nodded. “Everything got straightened out a couple of hours ago, when you felt us put the spin back on. The engine’s working beautifully. We won’t have any more trajectory corrections till tomorrow. By that time the computer should have accumulated enough data to tell us how much longer those damn bomb blisters are going to make us keep the boost on.”
“Want another beanie?”
“No, that’ll hold me till mealtime.”
“Let’s not go down to the mess for dinner. I’ll fix us something here.”
He ruffled her red hair. “That’s fine with me. Let’s put on some music and have a drink.”
She pecked him on the cheek and got up to put a music card in the slot. It was “Giles Farnaby’s Dreame” again. Jameson was getting a little tired of it, but he didn’t have the heart to tell her. They had been careful with each other since making up their quarrel on the shuttle trip, and Maggie had moved in with him. Sue had taken it well. She’d been a little hurt, but she recovered quickly, and her behavior toward Maggie had been warm and friendly.
Maggie returned with some chilled gin and one of the adulterated joints that were all anyone could get from Stores. She lit the joint and passed it to Jameson. She seemed unusually quiet.
“Something’s bothering you,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Come on, What’s wrong?”
“Oh, it’s just that Klein.”
“What did he do?”
“Wanted to come by my quarters tonight. Got very insistent about it. Threw rank at me. I told him I was bunking here. He started quoting regulations about pair-bonding during a mission. Said I ought to be spreading myself around. That’s how he put it. Nasty man! Anyway, I’ve only been here about week.”
“And you’re going to stay here,” Jameson said. “I’ll have a talk with Klein.”
“He’s already made trouble for Liz Becque and Omar. They’re reporting for counseling sessions with Janet.”
“I’ll speak to the skipper,” Jameson said. “Nobody’s complained about your work. Or mine. Klein can mind his own damned business.”
She snuggled against his chest. “I shouldn’t have mentioned it.”
The “Dreame” came to an end on a translucent D-major chord, to be replaced by the jolly tones of “Tower Hill.” Maggie pried the drink from Jameson’s hand and pressed herself against him. There was a rapping at the door.
“Damn!” Jameson said, sitting up. Maggie picked up her drink again, and Jameson went to the door.
Mike Berry was standing there, looking tousled and exhausted. “Could I talk to you?” he said.
“Mike! I thought you’d locked up and sacked out.”
Berry glanced over at Maggie and nodded apologetically at her. Maggie looked away and gathered her robe more closely around her. Berry turned back to Jameson.
“Yeah, I did. I left Quentin in charge, and Caffrey put a guard on the door, and Tu Jue-chen put one of her Struggle Brigade mugs on guard outside their door, and … look, could you come back to the engine room with me? I haven’t said anything to Boyle yet. I don’t want to make a big thing of it.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Look, Po Fu-yung’s techs and my techs have got to talk to one another, don’t they? We’ve got a good working relationship. When something comes up, we get together in one of the nonrestricted areas off the cryo department. Now Caffrey’s goon won’t let Quentin out of the computer room to work with Po’s man and the Struggle Brigade goon is throwing his weight around too. Could you come down and smooth things over before it develops into anything official?”
Jameson sighed and got to his feet. “Let’s go.”
He slipped a pair of stickysocks over his bare feet and followed Mike into the corridor. Maggie looked sulky and turned her face to the wall as he closed the door behind him.
“I’m sorry,” Mike said. “But I thought we’d better stop it before it got out of hand. I didn’t think we’d have this kind of a problem so soon after launch.”
Jameson nodded. “And we’ve still got half a billion miles to go.”
Chapter 11
They were a quarter of a billion miles beyond the orbit of Mars when the message came.
Jameson was standing on the bridge, admiring the stunning view around him through the vast comforting bulge of clear plastic that kept space outside. Jupiter hung against the night, a yellow lantern that outshone the crystal stars. It was by far the brightest light in the sky, except for the chill shrunken golfball of the Sun behind them, but it still showed no disk to the naked eye.
That fact alone brought home the immensity of the distances they were traveling. In the past three months they had journeyed farther and faster than any manned spacecraft before them had ever gone, but Jupiter still seemed as far away as when they had started.
Jameson indulged himself with a final long look at the brilliant dot of light, then turned reluctantly toward the command chair on the balcony above, where he could hear a buzzer sounding. He was tempted to jump for it, but he had to set an example. Some half dozen personnel of both nations were scattered among the paired consoles and the mostly empty seats rimming the circular deck. Most crewpersons preferred to serve their watches in the spin section’s duplicate bridge, connected to this one by electronic ganglia, but some jobs required direct observation here in the ship’s spearhead, and of course there were always one or two free-fall freaks. So Jameson dutifully clipped his jump line to the proper nylon cord in the spider web that crisscrossed the hemispherical chamber.
He soared upward to the catwalk, his trajectory perfectly parallel to the line. It was a point of pride with him never to get a corrective yank from the safety when crew were watching. He caught the rail and swung himself easily over.
He flipped a toggle. The buzzing stopped and his screen lit up. At the horseshoe console opposite his, Yeh Fei nodded formally at him and flipped his own switch. He’d been waiting. The big, shambling Chinese second officer looked like a gorilla hacked out of a block of wood with a dull chisel, but he had a fine sense of the niceties.
Sue Jarowski and little narrow-faced Chang-ho stared out at him from a split screen. He could see a tangle of communications equipment around them. “Commander,” Sue said, “there’s a laser message coming in.”
Beside her Jameson could see Chang-ho’s thick purple lips move, saying the same thing in Chinese to Yeh Fei. This would be a joint message, in clear, for both commands, then.
“Okay,” he said. “Put it on our screens.”
“Commander,” Sue said. “I think you’d better get the astronomers. They won’t want to wait for a replay. Something’s happening on Jupiter.”
Jameson could feel the hair on the nape of his neck prickle. “All right, he said. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ruiz.”
Chang-ho’s small face glared ferociously at him from the other half of the screen. “You must to notify Dr. Chu, you must to notify Dr. Chu!” he said stridently.
“Yi-ding,” Jameson said soothingly. “Of course.”