Five

The century began to turn before the ship was put back together, and there was still the work of preparing the voyage and preparing ourselves, physically and mentally.

Janice had evidently thought Mike was making a pass at her, because she began to be conspicuous when he was around, and occasionally she'd call and make a nuisance of herself. If she was a spy, we heard nothing of any further developments--but of course, we wouldn't have.

We had to spend time studying Jupiter, of course, and had actually heard a couple of the mysterious radio signals. They were almost like musical tones, but without any pattern I could discern; if they came from living beings, either they didn't have much to communicate, or they weren't very bright. Still, they didn't have any sensible explanation.

Just in case there might be something there, Michele began studying some of the old books on "exobiology," a science that had died out once it had been fairly well established that there wasn't any biology "exo," at least in our solar system.

"Listen to this!" she would explode (she did all her reading at home after work) and would read me a paragraph about how any living beings would have to be made of carbon chains and would have to look just like us. "Could anyone have believed this?" She told me later that not one thing she read in all this speculation was of any use.

Of course, everything now was different from what the 'sixties and 'seventies, where we spent our childhood, had predicted for the year 2000--and, I'm sorry to say, it was all so drearily different. No bases yet on the moon (though there was still talk about it), no mysterious monoliths, no space cars to hop around from earth to station to planets in, not even any solution to the problem of nuclear weapons. We had a number of gadgets then unheard of, at the beginning of the computer age, when what I now put in my pocket would have filled a whole room; but the vast promise of the beginning of the Age of Aquarius was still that, a promise. Mankind is always on the verge, it seems; and it's economics that seems to keep him there.

Fortunately, the developments in computers, especially parallel processing, made the calculations which would have daunted teams of experts something relatively simple. We were able to develop a trajectory with the possibility of corrections at every step so that we could not only be sure of getting near Jupiter, but could pick the point in the Red Spot we wanted to sink into. When we'd get near there, there would be plenty of room, because, even though it was just an oval-shaped mark on the equator of the planet, it was in reality big enough to hold the whole earth.

Some of the people who knew a bit about the project expressed concern about the length of time it would take to get there and back, and how we could pack all the provisions necessary; but I pointed out that we'd be accelerating all the way, and so could get there in a week, rather than nearly a year, as it would be if we had to coast. With our negligible mass, the fuel would be more than enough to take us anywhere we wanted to go, with plenty to spare, accelerating all the way up to the point at which Einsteinian closeness to the speed of light made further acceleration impractical.

There was physical training, too--which I would rather not recall. But we were ready by the middle of 2001, which we all thought appropriate, given the old movie, for a trip to Jupiter; and we had decided to see if we could get it in that year.

Then, one day that Fall, Mike came into my office, and said, "Well, I finally made up my mind. I hope you have a nice trip, Paul." And he held out his hand.

"What are you talking about? I'm not going anywhere."

"I mean to Jupiter. I'm staying home."

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"I'm staying home."

"Mike, you're coming with us."

"No I'm not. I've made up my mind."

"What's the matter, for God's sake? What's there to make up your mind about? We agreed years ago that all three of us were going."

"Oh no we didn't. You and Michele agreed, not me. You might recall that I was against her coming; but you two just decided that the three of us would all go, and that was it. And then I--"

"Well why didn't you say something, Goddammit! You just went along with us, and now you're going to back out when we can't do without you. You can't do that!"

"You can get along without me; I've looked at everything. I'd go if it meant scrubbing the whole mission; but the third person is just redundant. No matter what we're doing at every stage of the trip, one of us is just a backup in case something happens."

"And we're supposed to do without that because for some reason you've decided you don't want to come along!"

"Listen, if anything happens on a trip like this, redundancy is stupid; it's just redundant curtains."

"What, are you afraid or something? Besides, one of the lunar trips got back even though it was crippled."

"That was nothing like this one."

"You are afraid. Mike, there's as much--"

"I'm not afraid--or suppose I am. What difference does it make? I'm not going. You can give whatever reason you want.

"Then what in God's universe is the reason? I feel as if I've been hit on the head."

"You know what it is. I don't think that Michele should come with us, living in a space capsule like that with the two of us all that time, and if she does, I don't want any part of it. I was hoping she'd be found unfit for some reason, and the problem would be solved for me, but the latest reports show that that's out. If you could've talked to the doctors, the way any self-respecting brother would have--"

"Why should I? Why should I? Just to satisfy you. I don't believe it, Mike; this is an excuse, it's not the real reason. There's no reason you should deprive her of going just because--"

"You are hopeless! You're blind!"

"Just because she's a woman."

"It's not just because she's a woman!"

"Well then, because she rubs you the wrong way. You rub me the wrong way sometimes, and I never said anything against your going; I never even thought about it. You two have gotten along for three years now on this project in the most trying circumstances; it isn't going to be any worse on the trip itself. Hell, I could put up with Keith Jackson for that length of time!"

"Well, you're not me."

"It's beginning to occur to me to be grateful for that little fact. Look, if we say any more to each other now, we're going to be really sorry afterwards. Maybe all you need is a little rest; go off to the beach and take a week's vacation. Frankly, I don't want to see your face for a while. If you still feel the same way when the week's over, maybe I won't want to see your face at all.

"Now go back and finish up whatever you were doing, and I'll call Keith and try to explain all of this."

"I can't take a vacation tomorrow! There's the--"

"The hell you can't! You were just telling me that you were going to take a vacation from the whole project! Well, if you do, it can't start soon enough for me. Now get out of here, before I try to find out how good a boxer you still are!"

He looked at me as if he wanted to say something, then turned on his heel and left.

"What a glorious development this is!" I was saying aloud as I waited for Keith to answer his phone.

"What is?" came his voice. I explained in not very measured language.

"I see," he said after my monologue. "Well, Paul, I really wouldn't worry too terribly much about it. I think you were right about his needing a vacation; but if I'm not mistaken, you'll find that when it's over he'll be willing to go with you. I think I'll have a bit of a talk with him during the week, and explain why it's too late to back out. You're a little--um--undiplomatic at times, Paul."

I thought, Well, if you think that grease will work better than straight talk with someone like Mike, you're a little--um--unintelligent. But I didn't say anything.

Evidently, however, whatever he said was effective; he came back to tell me the day before Mike was due that Mike was "reluctant, but not adamant."

"And I'm sure," he added, "if you act normally and leave the rest of the persuading up to me, everything will work out for the best."

Ultimately, it did work; but it delayed us three months, and made the launch not occur in 2001 after all. The first couple of weeks Mike got back, there wasn't much talking among the three of us; Michele, understandably enough, took his planned defection a good deal more strongly even than I did, and she didn't speak to him at all for a week, hardly even looking at him when he was in the room--which seemed to suit him.

But with all the last-minute details of a voyage of hundreds of millions of kilometers, there are more and more times when you have to say things, and things that not only have to be said but discussed, and it's impossible not to begin to have some kind of personal relationship under these circumstances. I will say this: Mike was clearly making an effort, and though he never admitted it, he implied that the mess was his fault; so in the end, if we were not back to normal, we were on fairly good terms, and occasionally could joke at each other again.

The problem at this stage was to keep the actual launch a secret; it was no longer simply routine for a rocket to go up into space, though there were still some orbiters--mainly military, and mainly with the old shuttles--going every now and then. We made it look as much like one of them as possible, which was not too difficult, since the bulk of them were secret anyhow, and no one was really interested any more in watching the plume of flame on television when any old rocket went into orbit.

No one had seen the space craft in its perch on top of the rocket for months (we had it disguised with a shield which would come off after we reached space, so we could see); and the elevator that took us up to it was big enough so that we could enter it dressed as an inspection team and suit up inside as it brought us to the cabin.

Communication from earth to ship was by voice on a laser beam aimed at us, which wouldn't be able to be intercepted; but return communications had to be by radio, using a code that would appear like the mechanical data of an unmanned rocket. I was the one who handled this part of it, and I had on the front of my seat (actually, on my lap for the first part of the trip) a variation of the kind of Stenotype machine used in court, on which I had been practicing diligently for a year or so, so that I could type a good deal faster than any of us could talk; this had a built-in computer that took the recorded sounds and checked them with its dictionary and then coded the words in some complicated way that Keith had had done by some branch of the government that did that sort of thing. We decided to do it this way rather than use voice analyzers (though they were in reserve), because they would be more standard than voice, and as everyone knows, even the newest voice analyzers are apt to mess things up when in an emergency you start getting excited and changing pitch and so on--which is just when you need accuracy. Besides, this way we had a permanent record of everything that went on.

Testing this on the ground, we found it awkward to deal with; but we knew what it would be like when we got really into the journey, and our predictions proved true. Jupiter is so far away, even at its "close" position, that there is a delay of about fifteen minutes for light (and radio, of course) to travel the distance. For comparison, communications with the moon involve a delay of only seconds, and the sun is about seven and a half minutes away by light. This meant that when we got to Jupiter, it would be at least a half hour before our reply to any signal sent us would actually get there. Our method of communication, by laser to us and radio back, allowed us to be talking and listening at the same time; though doing it was a vast exaggeration of the organist's experience when the console is in one part of the church and the pipes are in another; he has to know what keys he's hitting and pay no attention to the sound, because it's a measure or two behind what he's playing.

But of course that experience was still in the future, as we got into the ship and reclined on the couches, with me (of course) between Mike and Michele. We turned on the mass-reducers, felt the jolt through our bodies and let ourselves get calm again, while Jonathan Meyer's voice came over our headsets telling us which switches to turn on at what time, and ticking off the seconds.

Ours was the first rocket in the world, and the only one so far, to have liftoff before ignition. The idea was to get above the thick atmosphere before we used the accelerating power of the engines; and so at T minus Zero, our computer turned on all the mass-reducers of the major components of the rocket and space craft, and we shot up into the air, like a balloon suddenly filled with helium. This, of course, was another reason for having no observers on the ground except those who knew something special was going on.

"You're doing fine so far," said Jonathan's voice in my earphones, "but what a weird sight! It looked like the old Carew Tower in Cincinnati just decided to leap up into the air! Get ready for ignition."

I was reading back data and impressions all the time, noting that we didn't feel uncomfortable, because with practically no mass ourselves, there was almost no G-force due to any acceleration.

But then the first stage of the rocket cut in, and we felt a slight bump. We had adjusted the motor so that it burned very slowly (for a rocket), since all we needed was to get a mass of a hundred grams or so to escape velocity, and we would keep gradually accelerating for about half of the voyage, when the speed would be close enough to light to make further acceleration not only impractical but risky, we thought. The slight G-force would save us from the problems of weightlessness and no sense of "down" that the old astronauts experienced.

Like the old rockets, we went into a parking orbit first, so that the computer could figure out what the wind had done to us as we went up and get us positioned for a shot at Jupiter. This was one of the reasons we were glad we didn't still have the old instrumentation; the computers that belonged to the ship could never have handled data like that.

This phase of the journey took a couple of hours, and while each of us had plenty to do, we could look out, apparently at rest ourselves, and see the great earth rolling slowly beneath us, full of the glorious swirling clouds and the browns and blues we had seen in our childhood in pictures from orbiters; and as it turned, it went through phases like the moon, now a quarter, now dark (though palely illuminated from the atmosphere), now the whole disk beneath us brilliantly lighted.

"This'll be our last days and nights for quite a while," I said.

"It's nice we're getting a good dose of it," said Michele.

Then there was another slight bump, and we were off into space proper.