Dark as Day

“I’m going to fly a spaceship?”

“No, you’re not. Another day, maybe, but not today. Division of labor. I do the flying, you do the sight-seeing.”

Jan had not agreed to go, but apparently refusal was not an option. Paul said, “Give me a minute to get my suit on. Good thing you are all set,” and popped into an adjoining cabin before she could speak.

Again Jan was left standing alone. She felt much better. There were times when it was good to have someone else making the decisions.

Suited and outside the Achilles, Paul led them across an open expanse of the surface dotted with small spacecraft. Here and there, bright red shields against the solar hail of high-velocity protons hid whatever sat beneath. There were too many ships to count and to Jan the place was a maze. Paul obviously knew exactly where he was going. Fifteen minutes later he halted by a blunt-nosed oddity that reared high on six ski

“Don’t you have to make arrangements in advance for this sort of thing?” Jan asked, as they climbed up and dropped into massive cushioned seats. Jan’s at once adjusted to her size.

“You might think so.” Paul was checking read-outs. “And the average person couldn’t take a ship without special notice. But I’m in the business. It’s one of the perks. A lot of crew become planet-crazy if they’re stuck below surface between flights, so we can fly anytime we want. Ready to go?”

It was a rhetorical question, because Jan’s weight had suddenly become immense. The dragonfly was rising and rotating, her stomach was turning with it, and the surface of Ganymede dropped away with dizzying speed.

She said, through clenched teeth, “What’s our acceleration?”

“One gee.” The cabin had pressurized and Paul was opening his helmet. “I thought I ought to make you feel at home.”

This was one Earth gravity? But then, before she had time to ponder how quickly the familiar became unfamiliar, she had something else to think about. Another ship, this one ten times their size, flashed by in front of them. Jan saw a line of portholes and people’s heads, and knew that they had missed each other by a few tens of meters.

“Perfectly safe.” Paul must have heard her gasp. “We’re in the arrival zone, relative positions are controlled to within millimeters. Once we’re clear of this I doubt you’ll see another ship until we come back in to land.”

“Where are you taking us?”

“Wherever you’d like to go.”

“How about Io? I’ve heard it’s spectacular.”

“It sure is. Spouting volcanoes and lava and flaming sulfur pits. I’ve tried to paint that scene a hundred times, but I’ve always thrown away the result. I can’t even get close to the reality. Whenever I read a description of Hell, I think of Io. But we can’t go there today.”

“Power limitations?”

“No. The Moby will run forever. But Ground Control doesn’t want crew members joyriding out to Uranus or Neptune, so they’re stingy on volatiles for reaction mass. Anyway, a round trip to Io is a full day’s ride at our acceleration. We’ll just ride around a bit.”

Perhaps they would, but at the moment the dragonfly ship seemed to be plunging straight for the center of cloud-racked Jupiter. The planet was swelling visibly, at least in Jan’s imagination. She recalled their last encounter with the planet, and the Achilles’ near-fatal swingby. What on earth had Sebastian been trying to accomplish when he fiddled with the locks? He had never answered her when she asked him that. Jan had never admitted it to Valnia Bloom — in fact, she had insisted on the exact opposite — but Sebastian’s behavior was becoming steadily more peculiar. Although he still stared endlessly at images of Jupiter and Saturn, he no longer drew their cloud patterns. He no longer seemed to do anything at all. Anyone examining him would conclude that he was half-witted or drugged. He had not always been like that — if he had, he would never have passed the tests, and he and Jan would still be back on Earth. But in his present condition, where in the System could Sebastian possibly be allowed to go next?

“Mind if I talk?” Paul broke into her thoughts. “You seem a bit out of it.”

“I’m all right.” Jan could detect a slight change in heading, they were no longer plunging straight for Jupiter. “The view reminded me of… something.”

“That’s what I was afraid of.” Paul swiveled his seat to face her. “I was surprised to see you board the Achilles today — surprised, but pleased. Because there’s been something I wanted to say to you, and I’ve been putting it off.”

What was coming? Jan stiffened in her chair as Paul went on, “We’ve had a great time these past few weeks — at least, I have. But in six days the Achilles will be gone, and I’ll be gone with it. Now, I’m a sailor and I’m probably a typical one. If it hasn’t quite been a girl in every port, it has been a different companion on every trip. Two or three weeks were just enough time to start something going, then when you arrived at your destination you went your separate ways with everything tied off neat and civilized. I won’t lie to you, Jan, I’ve had a hell of a time doing that and there were never any regrets.

“So I ought to be the last man in the System with any right to complain when something cools off. Except it hasn’t been like that with us. We were really intense on the way out to Ganymede, and again after we arrived until you went off to see how things were with Sebastian. I thought that was it, things were over between us. But you came back and we were hot as ever. I was starting to imagine that we might be something special for the long-term. Then Sebastian had to have this weird operation done, and away you went again.

“Now, I don’t want you to think I’m jealous of the poor bastard. I’m not. I’m sorry for him, because in my opinion — don’t get mad — he’s not firing on all neurons. But it seems like whenever he’s in trouble, I disappear off the screen so far as you are concerned. Like today. You come aboard the Achilles, and I get a big lift just out of seeing you. Only it turns out you didn’t really come to visit me at all. You came because you were worried about Sebastian. So I bring you up here, thinking this will take your mind off him. But after take-off, you went away somewhere inside your head. Tell me the truth. Were you thinking about Sebastian just now?”

Jan paused, then reluctantly nodded.

“Do you wonder if I can’t see any sort of future for the two of us? What do you want, Jan?”

“I don’t want you to leave.”

“I have to leave. The Achilles lifts off in six days.”

“I know. I didn’t mean that. Look, Sebastian’s operation will be finished in three days. Will you wait that long, then ask me again what I want?”

“If it has to be that way.” The ship had been following a long curved arc while they talked. Jupiter’s great orb had vanished, and the frosty glitter of Ganymede lay dead ahead. Paul turned to face away from Jan. “I will ask again. But I’m afraid I already know what you’ll say. We’d better close our suits, we’ll be landing in five minutes.”

“That would be good. I have to get back to the research facility.”

Jan listened to her own words, and she couldn’t believe she had spoken them. They confirmed all Paul’s worries and doubts. She wished they could ride out, just the two of them, and never come back.

Except that it wouldn’t work. Her ties to Sebastian were too strong. The hell of Io was nothing compared to the hell that was Ganymede.

Jan had been away for more than three hours. In that time Sebastian, so far as she could tell, had not moved a millimeter. He sat on his bed staring at the false-color display of Jupiter that covered one whole wall. The centuries-long hurricane that formed the Great Red Spot was muted to dull orange. Curling white vortices of ammonia, each one the size of Earth, spun away from its western edge.