He sank, feather-light, to the deck, and got a surprise: Caffrey was waiting for him in the reception area.
Jameson tossed the fake bolt head at him. “Here you go, Ray. The latest Chinese contribution to space cooperation.”
Caffrey looked uncomfortable. “I’ll need a report from you,” he said. “Let’s go to my office for a debriefing.”
“Can’t it wait? I’m bushed.”
“Sorry, Commander. You know how it is.”
Jameson grimaced. “Okay. But I can’t add much to what you already saw through my helmet camera.”
He followed Caffrey to a dropcage, bracing his hands against the ceiling as it plunged down its shaft toward the outer rim of the station. Free fall was too slow for the first stage of the trip and too dangerous for the last stages—especially for newcomers. There was one in the cage now, a mousy man in a drab Earthstyle business blouse, who yelped in surprise as he bobbed to the top of the cage and bumped his head. One of the construction men, laughing, pulled him down and warned him about the gradient. Caffrey maintained a tight-lipped silence, his expression discouraging conversation from Jameson. He had the spy camera tucked under his tunic.
They got out at the rim, in the main corridor that circled the station. There was an electric trolley and a carpeted walkway. The carpeting felt luxurious under Jameson’s bare toes. The lighting was soft, and a hidden speaker played an unobtrusive slipbeat: nines against sevens. The European Space Agency did everything up brown for its clients. They kept their big wheel spinning at a comfortable half-g at the rim, which made it easier for people stopping over on their way back from the Moon or Mars to readjust to Earth gravity. The five restaurants were excellent, and the Swiss ran a four-star hotel.
They passed through the American lounge on their way to Caffrey’s office. A clutter of chairs and little tables were arranged around a central well, circled by a low railing, that looked down on the stars. The far wall was a spectacular row of tall, narrow windows that showed the stars streaming slowly by, their flight showing no detectable arc here in this fractional slice of the station’s vast circumference. A couple of dozen off-duty members of the Jupiter crew were there, socializing with construction workers and transients. There were no Europeans there, except for the bartender and a couple of stewards. This part of the wheel was U.S. diplomatic territory for the present.
Mike Berry waved at him from the other side of the room. He was playing a game of low-gravity darts with a rumpled, bearlike man who looked like a construction worker, but actually was the mission geologist, Omar Tuttle. Berry was a physicist, one of the two fusion specialists in charge of the boron drive. He was thin and thirtyish, with unkempt brown hair and a long, homely face animated by boyish enthusiasm. It was his first trip into space, and Jameson had been assigned to him as big brother during his astronaut training.
The moment of inattention cost Berry his point. His dart strayed sideways under the influence of the Coriolis force and missed the target entirely. One of the construction workers heckled him good-naturedly, and Tuttle, sipping his reconstituted beer, smiled in satisfaction.
“Tod…”
It was Sue Jarowski. He’d almost collided with her. She smiled up at him, appealingly gaminelike with her dark, cropped hair and the man’s faded workshirt with pushed-up sleeves she’d borrowed somewhere. Jameson wondered if the shirt were his. He and Sue had spent a couple of sleep periods together, back when the mission personnel were still sorting themselves out, but for some reason they hadn’t seen much of each other since.
“Sue! How goes it?”
She put a hand on his arm. “Are you just going off duty? Why don’t you join Dmitri and me for a drink?”
He looked past her to where Dmitri Galkin, the junior biologist-cum-life-support tech, was sitting on an airpuff, contemplating a lipped cup with some greenish liquid in it. Dmitri met his eye and glanced away, looking miffed.
“I can’t right now, Sue. I’m on my way to Security.”
He shrugged helplessly, and she followed his gaze to where Caffrey was waiting impatiently by the exit.
“Will I see you later?” Sue said. “Why don’t you stop by the lounge when Caffrey’s through with you?”
She gave his arm a squeeze. He smiled back at her.
“I’ll do that.”
When they reached the security rep’s quarters, Caffrey carefully locked the X-ray spy camera away in a cabinet. He indicated a chair. “Sit down, Commander,” he said.
Jameson sat down. Caffrey’s manner was strangely formal. He was usually a fairly regular guy for a security rep. And this wasn’t the comfortable armchair he usually sat in during debriefings. It was a fully equipped interrogation seat, with accessory plugs, ankle and wrist straps, and a head clamp. It tilted and swiveled to give its occupant a sense of psychological helplessness.
“What do you want to know, Ray?” Jameson said.
The security man didn’t answer. He pressed a buzzer on his desk.
“It’s up to the top brass, of course,” Jameson went on, trying to keep his voice conversational, “but maybe this time we ought to lodge a formal protest. Bugging the lander is one thing, but this time it endangered the mission. If that landing leg had given way when we touched down on Callisto, Li and I could have been killed.”
“Don’t say anything yet, Commander,” Caffrey said.
The door opened and a tall, unsmiling man in gray coveralls came through. Jameson didn’t recognize him, but he knew the type. It was some functionary from the Reliability Board.
“This is Commander Jameson, Doctor,” Caffrey said.
Jameson looked up at the RB psychologist and said, in a feeble attempt at a joke, “You going to strap me in, Doc?”
“That won’t be necessary,” the RB man said. There wasn’t a trace of humor in his words. “Just grasp those armrests. That’s right. Now put your head back against the backrest while I adjust it. That’s the way.”
He had Jameson hooked up in a few minutes: skin electrodes, blood-pressure cuff, EEG cap, electromyograph, voice analyzer, and the rest of them. They were all plugged into a little averaging computer marked restricted use. He positioned a little device on a rolling stand in front of Jameson’s face to record changes in retinal color and pupil size, and sat back, waiting for Jameson to utter the first word. It was a familiar RB gambit.
Jameson fought back his anger. “You know, I was checked out thoroughly at the start of the project,” he said. “Everybody was.”
“Nothing to get concerned about, Commander Jameson,” the psychologist said soothingly. “You’ve been working closely with your Chinese counterpart for some time now. This is just a routine attitude test. Everybody’s going to have one.”
It was easy for Jameson. He’d grown up as a Guvie brat. He’d been taking tests since his kidcare days: tests to get into the right schools, tests to qualify for government employment and housing and food chits, tests to get into the Space Resources Academy. It got to be second nature. You learned to give them what they wanted.
“You speak Chinese rather well, Commander. Not just the vocabulary—the four tones seem to come naturally to you. Most Westerners have trouble with them.”
“I just have a good ear, I guess.”
“Do you feel any special affinity for the Chinese?”
He kept his voice carefully neutral “They’re okay.”