“We still have more remoras than we can easily carry,” The Geek sang on. “Snow can carry them and she can harmonize to the technical knowledge we barely understand.”
Melody remained silent, a sign that she disagreed but would not further object.
Looking at her, Ensign felt more than a twinge of sympathy. Before Skyfall the Bach Choir had been the most renowned singers in their entire cloud band.
The Geek called out to Snow, “Come join us, fly in the gentle wake of our pod.”
“I come.” Snow’s response sounded as a single, clear note. She had never sung so well before, Ensign thought. Perhaps the new member of the Bach Choir was a promising vocal choice after all.
Suzanne Quinlan—Dr. Suzanne Quinlan, she reminded herself—really had no business in the Deep Space Network control room. But she was there because in a few hours the Galileo probe would plunge into Jupiter.
Not that you could tell from the control room. The two consoles were dark, the desks appeared unlittered and the only people in the room were herself and F. Gary Rhine, who appeared engrossed in some kind of equipment check.
“Control room” was a misnomer for Galileo. The controlling was done by the computer on the spacecraft. Even at the speed of light it was nearly an hour from Earth to Jupiter, far too much lag to actually control anything directly. Nor would there be a flood of data, instantly translated into pictures. With the high-gain antenna useless, the data information would crawl back to Earth over the next weeks and months.
The control room was not manned because it didn’t need to be. It was still early morning and the probe would not penetrate Jupiter’s atmosphere until mid-afternoon. Rhine was there because he had work to do. Suzanne was there because, well, because it seemed right somehow that she be in this place. In a way this was what she had struggled through graduate school for, why she had labored over her dissertation and fought the growing disillusionment as she came to understand what a Ph.D in planetary science was really worth. In a way it was keeping faith with the promise implicit in all those magazines with the bright covers her father had carefully stored in the basement. Whenever she thought of that she remembered the rainy afternoons with the damp creeping into the basement and the woody smell of old paper in her hands.
It would have been better if there had been someone to share it with, but The Rhino’s reputation and air of fierce concentration didn’t encourage casual conversation.
The phone shattered the stillness and made her jump. Without thinking, she picked it up.
“DSN Control, Dr. Quinlan speaking.”
“Is this the Deep Space Network?” asked a nasal voice.
“Yes.”
“White House operator. Hold for a call from the vice-president’s office.” Suzanne looked around frantically for someone to hand the phone to, but Rhine kept his back to her as he fiddled with his instruments.
“Hello?” The voice didn’t sound anything like it did on television. “Terwiliker here. I need to speak to whoever’s in charge.”
“What?”
“Claude Terwiliker, special assistant to the office of the vice-president. Who’s this?”
Suzanne assumed her best tone of authority, “This is Doctor Quinlan. How may I help you?”
“We need a statement about that probe that landed on Jupiter. Also some pictures.”
Suzanne’s jaw dropped. “But—”
“Look, honey, let me talk to someone who knows what’s going on. OK?”
Suzanne colored to the roots of her hair. Before she could say anything else, Gary Rhine reached over her shoulder and slammed the speakerphone on with a swipe of his hairy paw. “Who the hell is this?”
“This is Terwiliker, special assistant to the office of the vice-president of the United States. Who’s this?”
“This is F. Gary Rhine.”
“Well, Dr. Rhine…
The Rhino frowned so deeply that his bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows nearly met in the center of his forehead. “Mr. Rhine,” he growled. “Now what do you want?”
A brief pause. “The Vice-President needs photos of the surface of Jupiter from that spacecraft, ah Galileo?, for his speech tomorrow.”
Rhine expelled breath between clenched teeth. “Did you get the briefing package our flacks sent you?”
“The Vice-President needs the very latest,” Terwiliker insisted.
“Did you read what you’ve got?” Another hesitation then the voice firmed. “This is getting nowhere. Put your supervisor on.”
“Son, it’s just after six a.m. here. I’m the closest thing to a supervisor you’re gonna get. Now, did you read that stuff?”
“Well…”
“Because if you had,” The Rhino roared, “you’d know the damned data isn’t going to be available for weeks—thanks to the damned antenna that jammed because you damned Beltway idiots wouldn’t authorize a damned high-energy launch. You’d also know that even when the damn data does come limping through there won’t be any damned pictures because the damn probe doesn’t carry a damned camera.” He got all that out without taking breath. In spite of Suzanne’s terror she was impressed.
“Hey, don’t get upset. I’m only doing my job. The Vice-President has a press conference this afternoon and he wants to be able to say something about the program.”
“Tell him it’s on schedule.”
“OK. I guess that’s better than nothing!” The line went dead.
Suzanne finally managed to get her jaw closed as The Rhino reached over and slapped the speakerphone off. “God,” he growled, rolling his eyes upwards, “I love this job.”
“Was that wise?” Suzanne quavered.
“No, that was a bureaucrat. Worse, a political appointee bureaucrat. They’re not even sentient by any reasonable measure.”
“I mean, can’t he retaliate?”
The Rhino snorted explosively. “And let people know he was ass enough to call in the first place? Not likely. He’ll keep his mouth shut and just hate me quietly.” He grinned. “It’ll be good for his scum-sucking little soul.”
“I can’t believe he thought Jupiter had a solid surface,” she said, still shaken. “Not to mention that he didn’t know it will take signals nearly an hour to reach us.”
“Where bureaucrats are concerned, believe anything. Except intelligence, Mzz Quinlan,” he dragged it out like a buzzing bee.
“Doctor,” Suzanne muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“It’s doctor,” she said more distinctly. “Doctor Quinlan.”
“Don’t worry,” The Rhino said cheerfully. “I won’t hold it against you.” With that, he turned back to whatever it was he had been doing.
Galileo swung close to Jupiter, listening to the radio hiss, tasting the stream of particles tossed off by its moons and trapped in its magnetosphere. It sped above the dusty ring plane. Far below, the probe drifted ever-faster toward the planet, oblivious of time and travel and its eventual fate.
If Galileo wasn’t intelligent enough to be awed by what was around it, the probe wasn’t even smart enough to be called automated. A two dollar oven timer had more smarts than the sequencing switch that was the closest it came to a brain. Only when the crushing deceleration of atmospheric entry actuated a simple sequencer, would the probe take any action.
That time was fast approaching. The probe slid down the gravity well towards Jupiter at ever-greater velocity. The tenuous outer edges of the planet’s atmosphere began to take hold, tentatively at first and then ever more firmly as it grew thicker and stronger. Invisible fingers of gas tore at it, and the heat shield began to glow from the impact of the gas molecules.