XIV

Randolph Mays knew damned well that spectacular discov­eries were being made on Amalthea, and—as he made clear to Marianne—sitting still on Ganymede waiting to hear about them was driving him crazy.

Even in the midst of his self-described insanity he re­tained his charm, however. Whether he had really read her so completely, or whether it was just wonderful luck, Mar­ianne found that he exerted a powerful attraction upon her. He was almost old enough to be her father—though not so old as her real father, which perhaps lowered that particular psychological barrier—and he was far from conventionally handsome. Nowhere near as handsome as . . . well, Bill Haw­kins, for example. But his . . . rugged look and, mm, rangy physique were kind of sexy if you thought about it, and his mind . . .

She loved working with him. She wouldn’t have minded something more than work. But he had treated her with nothing but professional courtesy. She did her best to live up to all his expectations in that category, and at first she trotted after him as faithfully as a pet. . . .


Marianne was not the only woman on Ganymede who was trying to read Randolph Mays’s mind. Sparta had hardly stopped thinking about him since Forster’s press conference, on the eve of the launch of the Ventris. She had never seen him in person before. So intrigued was she by the stagy presence of the historian-reporter, in fact, that she had de­cided not to be aboard the Ventris when it blasted for Amal­thea.

“You need to go openly now,” Sparta said to the com­mander. “Find out more about this broker Von Frisch. See if Luke Lim is what he claims to be. Be obvious about it—it will take the pressure off of me.”

“Everyone thinks you’re with Forster.”

“You’ll get me there later. When I need to be there.”

“You think I’ll get you wherever you need to be whenever you need to be there, don’t you?”

“Not always. Only if you can.”

He said nothing, only stared morosely at the wall. He was sitting on a sprung plastic-covered couch, legs stretched out and arms crossed, and she was pacing the scuffed tile floor of the visitors’ area in the Space Board’s headquarters on Ganymede, a grim, cramped room in a grim, bulging, pressure structure hidden from casual view among blast domes and fuel storage tanks in a remote corner of the spaceport—a structure whose low domed profile and win­dowless, government-gray skin were a reflection of the uneasy relations between the Space Board and the Indo-Asian communities of the Galilean moons.

“This is a small settlement,” she continued. “All it takes is one curious person to spread the news. I’ll have to dress up like a Balinese dancing girl or something.”

He emitted a gravelly chuckle. “You’ll be on every vi­deoplate in Shoreless Ocean if you dress up like a dancing girl.”

“Like a Tibetan nun, then,” she said. “I know how to be invisible, Commander. With your help.”

“Not that you really need it.”

“Mays mustn’t suspect I’m watching him.”

The commander shifted uneasily on the broken springs of the steel-backed couch. “Why do you want to bother with Mays? He’s got no way of interfering with Forster now, no way of getting to Amalthea. We have him right where we want him, under observation.”

“He strikes me as a very clever man,” she said. There was nothing flip or clever about the way she said it.


Ganymede had an electromagnetic cargo launcher like the two on Earth’s moon—proportionally longer, of course, some fifty kilometers overall, to accommodate Ganymede’s greater gravity. In addition to freight services and routine transportation to parking orbit, the Ganymede launcher of­fered something Earth’s moon couldn’t—self-guided tours of Jupiter’s spectacular Galilean moons.

But the delta-vees required to send even an essentially free-falling capsule around the Jovian system and get it back again didn’t come cheap, and selling tour tickets at several hundred new dollars a pop wasn’t a cinch. Over the years the hucksters had evolved a graduated pitch:

Free!—and available at any of the numerous agencies with offices on the main square—was an informational slide show, a minichip’s load of two-and-a-half-dimensional views of the Galilean moons as seen through the portholes of automated tour cruisers, with an accompanying narration consisting mostly of astronomical facts—cleverly presented by leading industrial psychologists to instill in the viewer the conviction that there was something interesting out there, and whatever it was wouldn’t be learned from this feeble presentation.

“What’d you think, Marianne?” Mays asked her after they’d watched it.

“If there’s something interesting out there, you wouldn’t know it from that feeble presentation,” she replied.

For only a few new cents more, one could view a three-­dee-feelie in the big Ultimax theater, just off the Shri Yantra square. Breathtaking fly-bys of Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io! See Grooved and Twisted Terrain! See History in the Craters! See the Largest Active Volcano in the Solar System! Outside the theater, buy sackfuls of Greasy Dim Sum and Fried Won Ton!

“What’d you think of that, dear?”

“Well—it seemed kind of flat.”

And for just one new dollar more, you could ride Captain Io’s Mystery Tour, which mimicked a close pass right through the plume of Io’s biggest sulfur eruption. The tilt­ing, vibrating seats, the high-speed, high-definition images, the screaming music and sound effects made a thrilling ride for adults and even for very young children.

“How did that strike you, darling?”

“My spine hurts.”

When all else failed, there was the real thing.


“Countdown’s under way! Let’s get the next couple of folks aboard. Move along smartly please!”

Randolph Mays and Marianne Mitchell were led through the boarding stages of the Rising Moon Enterprises tour by brightly uniformed young men and women who all seemed to have been cloned from the same pair of traditionally golden-haired Southern Californians—Ken ’n’ Barbies who might have seemed strangely out of place in this Asian cul­ture, were it not for the ancient Disneyland tradition, much admired in Earth’s Mysterious East. If any thoughts lurked behind these white-toothed, blue-eyed smiles, the customer would never know it; these kids were paid to stay cheerful.

“Doesn’t your spacesuit fit? Why not? Oh dear, who told you to do it that way . . . sir?”

“Now keep that helmet buttoned tight until after the launch, Ms. . . . and have a good trip!”

Marianne was too shrewd not to see the boredom and alarm that alternately lurked just beneath the smiling faces, and it made her uneasy. But unless she was willing to make a scene it was too late, for suddenly she and Mays were left alone, strapped into the cramped cabin of Moon Cruiser Number Four, lying side by side in standard suits that stank of a thousand users before them. They faced a videoplate screen wide enough to virtually fill the field of view. The console below it was so simple it looked fake. There were no instruments on this ship except those needed to monitor volume and frequency, no controls except those needed to change channels and adjust sound and picture quality.

At the moment, the wide screen videoplate was display­ing the view from the capsule of the launcher’s marshalling yard. It was about as attractive as a subway station in mid-20th-century Boston.

“Somehow this wasn’t how I pictured the business of interplanetary investigative reporting, Randolph,” said Mar­ianne. Her thin voice through the commlink sounded weary, on the verge of discouragement.

“No one could possibly understand the back ground of the events on Amalthea without a first hand look at the Jovian system,” Mays replied. For all the effort in his deliv­ery, he didn’t sound completely convincing.

“I must be getting to know you too well,” Marianne mur­mured. “I could swear there’s something you’re not telling me.”

The capsule lurched violently, and he was saved from the necessity of a reply. Somewhere machinery had begun to hum, jostling their capsule forward onto magnetic tracks. They were moving through the switchyard to join a string of other capsules, lined up for launch. Most carried cargo destined for transfer to ships in orbit, while others were going up empty, for more cargo came down to the surface of Ganymede than left it. Perhaps once a week, a couple of Moon Cruisers held tourists like themselves.

“One minute to launch,” said the soothing androgynous voice on the speaker system. “Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip.”

The image on the videoplate showed the capsule nearing the end of the electromagnetic cannon that would shortly fire them into space. Except for entertainment programs prerecorded on chip, only one other view could be accessed by the passengers, and that was a schematic of the planned trajectory.

Tour itineraries varied constantly with the positions of the Galilean moons. Often no tours were possible, especially when Io was inaccessible, for Io, with its Technicolor land­scape and its sulfur plumes a hundred kilometers high, was the moon tourists really wanted to see.

When the little Moon Cruisers were running, an average circuit might last sixty hours or so, some two and a half days. What the tour operators didn’t emphasize was how very few minutes of this time would be spent in the near vicinity of any celestial body. The video player was stocked with an exciting selection of programs for all tastes, and the food and liquor cabinets were equally lavish. The personal hygiene facility at the back of the capsule offered the ulti­mate in robomassage. Or a passenger could select sleep mode, and with the aid of precisely measured drug injec­tions, skip the boring parts of the trip.

“Thirty seconds to launch,” said the voice. “Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip.”

Just as the video showed them about to enter the breech of the launcher, Mays reached up and tapped the plate’s selector switch.

“Hey,” Marianne protested. “The launch is the last exciting thing that’s going to happen to us for eighteen hours. We’ll have plenty of time to look at the map later.”

“That is not us on the screen, you know,” said Mays. “It’s prerecorded.” Mays was right. Where things could actually go wrong—however rarely—the tour operators thought it best to let the passengers see only a stage show, a shiny new capsule undergoing a perfect launch.

“I want to see the launch, not look at some stupid map,” she said heatedly. “Even if it’s only fake-live, at least it’s educational.”

“As you wish.” He flipped the channel back. Onscreen, the idealized launch capsule that might have been theirs, but wasn’t, was almost into the breech; electromagnetic coils were poised to seize it and hurl it forward. “Do you mind if I monitor the trajectory after we clear the rails? The map at least is generated in real time.”

“Whatever you wish, Randol . . .”

Their conversation was interrupted by the robot voice. “Ten seconds to launch. Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip. Nine seconds, eight, seven . . . just lie back and relax completely, your tour is about to begin . . . three, two, one.”

The acceleration didn’t hit like a fist, it came like a feather pillow laid across their tummies—a feather pillow that magically increased in weight, becoming first a sack of flour, then a sack of cement, then an ingot of cast iron. . . .

“Only thirty more seconds until our launch is completed. Just relax.”

Inside the capsule, the passengers lay smothered under ten gravities of acceleration. A row of diodes on their con­trol panel showed all green, but they would have been all green even in a dire emergency; the little green lights were window-dressing, intended to reassure passengers who were utterly helpless to affect their fate.

On the videoplate, the perfect prerecorded launch pro­ceeded. The capsule silently accelerated at a hundred meters more per second each second that ticked away, until it was moving far faster than a high-powered rifle bullet.

The coils of the launcher smeared into invisibility. Only the longitudinal rail that supported the coils could be seen, a single impossibly straight ribbon of shining metal vanish­ing somewhere above the distant horizon, into the stars.

They were weightless.

“Acceleration is complete,” the voice of the capsule reassured them. “Only five more seconds until our launch se­quence is over. Just continue to relax.”

Along the final few kilometers of the electric raceway the capsule drifted weightless at blurring speed, subjected to fine magnetic adjustments in aim and velocity—here each individual capsule had its trajectory tailored to fit its par­ticular destination, whether near-Ganymede parking orbit or distant moonscape fly-by.

Meanwhile the frozen surface of Ganymede curved away beneath the track, which in order to maintain its artificial Euclidian straightness now rose above the ice on spindly struts.

In an eyeblink it was over; the long launcher rail was behind them, and the ice mountains of Ganymede were fall­ing rapidly away. The screen was filled with stars.

“All right with you?” said Mays, not really asking her permission, as he tapped the channel over to “Itinerary.”

On the wide screen the scale of the graphic was set so as to fill the plate with the icy disk of Ganymede; a pale green line parallel to the equator extended from the far right side upward, and along it a bright blue line crept impercep­tibly. The green line was their planned route; the blue line was their actual track, as monitored by ground-based radar and navigation satellites. The two lines currently followed an identical trajectory for as far as they extended, and un­less something went terribly wrong, they would stay that way throughout the trip.

Mays adjusted the scale. The disk of Ganymede zoomed down to a tiny speck in the lower right portion of a screen filled with stars. The larger disk of Jupiter, realistically pat­terned with cloud bands, now dominated the center of the screen. Arranged around it in concentric rings were the orbits of Amalthea, Io, Europa, and Ganymede itself. Callisto lay farther out, offscreen. It was the poor sister of the Gal­ilean moons, thought to be too like Ganymede to be worth a special trip; only when the moons were arranged so that the laws of celestial mechanics decreed it easier and quicker for a capsule to fly past Callisto than not were tourists able to judge Callisto’s charms for themselves.

The pale green line was a graceful loop of string that swooped inward past Io, curved steeply around Jupiter, came near Europa on its way back, and finally rejoined the orbit of Ganymede a third of the way farther along in its circuit. Amalthea was not on the itinerary; its orbit lay well inside the capsule’s closest approach to Jupiter.

Given the capsule’s energetic initial acceleration from Ganymede, most of the ride was coasting. But at certain key junctions, a nudge from the capsule’s strap-on rocket was necessary to get the roller coaster all the way around the curve.

Mays contemplated the graphics on the video plate, which at this scale changed too slowly to be perceived. The orange light of the false Jupiter was reflected in the face-plate of his spacesuit and lit a warm gleam in his eye.

Marianne yawned. “Maybe I’ll take the sleeper. Wake me when we get to Io.”

His reply was unnaturally delayed. “Delighted, my dear,” he murmured at last.

Something in the tone of his voice attracted her glance. “What are you scheming, Randolph?” she asked lazily, but the hypnotic was already running in her bloodstream, and she could not stay awake to hear his answer—

—which at any rate he did not give.