Primrose and Thorn p-1 Page 2

  Framed in the viewport was the entirety of Jupiter, half orange, rose, and umber, and half in darkness. The rim of the planet filled the ’port from top to bottom, leaving only a narrow circle of stars at the edges to show that anything else existed in the heavens.

  The bright line of the elevator cable extended from somewhere beneath the window and ran straight toward the planet’s equator, far below, just as it extended thousands of kilometers out into space from this geosynchronous station. The cable’s silvery line narrowed as it diminished into perfect perspective toward the giant planet.

  Jupiter’s great red spot wasn’t visible. Pascal assumed that it was either on the other side of the planet or somewhere within the semicircle of darkness that marked the night side of Jupiter. But there were enough other large features present to occupy the eye.

  Wide bands of permanent lateral weather patterns ran across Jupiter’s face. Each showed feathery turbulence whorls at the edges as they dragged on the slower bands toward the equator or were accelerated by faster ones toward the poles. From here he could easily see the separations between them.

  In the center of one of the higher latitude bands there was a dark smudge. Pascal thought it might be the persistent traces of the “string of pearls” comet, over a hundred years ago, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember if the marks would be on top or bottom from his viewpoint. He decided to ask the hub master about orientation.

  “What a sight,” Louella whispered as she moved beside him. “Gorgeous, just gorgeous,” she said, with a touch of awe. “Where are the floating stations? Could we see them from here?” she asked quickly and pressed closer to the viewport.

  Pascal dismissed her inquiry with a shrug. “The stations are too small to see from here. You’re still thinking in terms of Earth. We’re over six hundred times farther out than one of the orbiting stations would be at home. CS-6 would have to be the size of Australia for you to see it with your naked eye.

  “You’ve got to remember that each one of those weather bands is several thousand miles across,” Pascal continued as he backed away from the view-port and the terrifying precipice it represented. “We could put the entire Pacific inside any one of them and still have plenty of room left over.”

  Louella’s face took on a rapt expression as she absorbed the scale of what she was observing. “You could sail forever in those seas,” she breathed heavily. “Forever.”

  Rams encountered his first problem when he was thirty hours under way. Primrose had been beating steadily to windward since he left CS-15. By his projections they should have been slightly north of the projected track of CS-42, the next station in line. This leg of his upwind trip would be two thousand kilometers long before he came about and headed south on the shorter lee leg. That was as far as he could travel and stay within the limits Weather had advised. He couldn’t go beyond the MM sub-band without risking excessive turbulence. No, he thought, it was better to keep to the smooth and dependable jets of air in the middle of the band.

  It was no small effort to steer Primrose between the two stations. CS-15 had been moving westward at a steady twenty-six meters per second under the slower westward winds of the KK sub-band.

  The two stations had been about eight thousand kilometers apart when he had departed. He had planned to tack about eight times across the face of the wind; four 2,000-kilometer legs to the north and four 3,000-kilometer legs to the south. The southern tacks would gain him the least progress but give him good position to intercept the station as it raced toward him.

  It was a good sail plan. The only problem was that it wasn’t working out. The inertial guidance system indicated that, instead, he was steadily bearing west of his projected course. Rams checked the set of the sails and the pressure readings. Using these numbers, he calculated that Primrose was still bearing forty degrees to the wind, just as he had planned. What could be wrong? Was he was being blown off course by an unexpected head wind?

  An hour later he understood the situation. Something was disturbing the “smooth laminar flow” predictions of Weather. He just encountered a more northerly wind than expected. He decided to adjust his tacking strategy to adapt to the shift. He’d have to take a longer line on the southern tack. But the slower passage would put him at risk from the storm, which could mean big trouble.

  He plotted his course for the next ninety hours with great care.

  As they sped down toward the seas of Jupiter, Pascal sat as far from the port of the tiny cab of the elevator as he could and tried to ignore the pit of blackness, a hole in the sky at the center of an enormous emptiness. The thought of all the distance they had to fall terrified him.

  “I still don’t understand how you guys do it,” the pink-faced elevator pilot said from his perch at the bow. “I mean, I can see how a sailboat can go with the wind. The hot air balloons on Earth just go with the wind, right? Why wouldn’t they do the same here?”

  “It’s the keel,” John said. He and Al were their competitors from GeoGlobal. They’d arrived a few days before, along with the third crew that would participate in the race. “A sailboat would be just like a balloon if it didn’t have a keel.”

  “Oh, I see. That’s why the Jupiter ships have that long ribbon under them,” the pilot remarked. “But how does that help them move against the wind? And isn’t it impossible to go faster than the wind?”

  “Good question,” Pascal said, glad of the distraction. “A sailboat goes faster into the wind, not slower. The slowest speed of all is when you run with the wind directly behind you.”

  Pascal let the kid think about that for a moment before he continued. “A sail is an airfoil. One side forms a pocket of relatively dead air. The opposite side is bent out so that the wind has a longer distance to travel. The pressure differential pulls the sailboat along.”

  “A foresail funnels the air across the main and accentuates the effect,” Al injected. “The closer you haul to the direction of the wind the faster you go.”

  John spoke up, “It’s just a matter of physics: the angle of force on the sail and the keel produces a vector of force that moves the boat forward. The steeper the angle the greater the forward thrust. The trick is to balance the force of the wind and the sails, adjusting your angle of attack to obtain the greatest forward momentum possible, maximizing the transfer of static air pressure to dynamic motive force.”

  “Oh, I understand,” the operator said, screwing his face up in concentration. “It’s like continuously solving a set of differential equations. ” He smiled at them as if he were proud of learning the lesson so well.

  “Don’t bust a gut trying to do that if you’re ever in a sailboat, kid,” Louella said. “It’s all scientific bullshit.”

  Louella glared at the three of them; a fierce set to her eyes and mouth that brooked no interruption. “These guys want you to think that sailing’s a science—that it’s all application of mathematical rules and physics. Listening to them, you’d think that you’re constantly thinking, calculating, and plotting. Well, that’s all a pile of crap—sailing isn’t some branch of engineering.”

  She leaned forward to look straight into the operator’s eyes, her expression softening as she did so. “Sailing’s a love affair between you, the boat, the water, and the wind. Every one of them has to be balanced, held in check; let any one of them dominate and you’ve lost it. A good sailor has to be conscious of wind and water and responsive to the boat’s needs. You have to understand the language of wind and sea and ship—you have to feel that edge that means you’re running a tight line with every nerve of your body. The boat’ll tell you how she wants to behave; she’ll fight you when you’re wrong, and support you when you’re right.”

  She brushed at her cheek, as if something had gotten in her eye, before she continued. “The point I’m trying so damn hard to get across to you is that sailing is an art, not a bloody damn science. That means you have to sail with your heart, as well as your mind. When you’re on the sea, mana
ging the sails and the wheel, the rest of the Universe could disappear, for all that you care. When everything works right, there’s a rhythm, a reverie that transforms you, that makes you one with the Universe. If you put everything you have into it, mind and body, your ego disappears—its just you, the boat, the wind, and the water.”

  She turned back to stare out the viewport at the advancing planet and slumped into her seat. “If it was just science, JBI wouldn’t be paying the big bucks to haul my ass all the way out here. No, they’d get some double-dome Ph. and D. to build a little machine to do it, and the hell with the beauty of a good line and a strong wind.

  “But the fact that I am here to sail on Jupiter’s orange seas says that there’s still a human element to sailing that’s better than the most refined engineering approach. It says that a human being can still stand on a ship’s deck and dare the wind and the seas to do their worst. It tells me that even some damn overgrown pig of a planet can’t tame the human spirit!”

  The silence prevailed for long minutes. “Well,” said Al, apropos of nothing. “Well.”

  Louella said nothing for the rest of the trip down into the thick atmosphere. Pascal tried to ignore the view as sunrise raced across Jupiter’s face, too far below.

  Rams’s destination was floating along at twenty-odd meters per second to the east of his present position. Her track was so reliably managed that the station’s precise location could be calculated to within a kilometer.

  Somewhere on the other side of CS-42 a whirling hurricane was advancing. Given the right spin and direction these storms could grow beyond reasonable bounds, turning into blows that made Earth’s hurricanes look like a faint puff of air. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred Jupiter’s hurricanes dissipated quickly, within two or three of his ten-hour rotations. If Rams was lucky, this one would do the same.

  Rams was dismayed to discover that Primrose fell even farther westward off of her planned track whenever he turned to the north. That meant two things: the winds were continuing to shift, and the storm was deeper than expected. It looked as if he’d hit the edges of a major storm.

  For the thousandth time he wished that Jupiter wasn’t so electronically active. The ambient white noise on the radio bands was so intense that even pulse-code modulation couldn’t punch a signal through. Just one crummy satellite picture, one quick radar image, one short broadcast was all he’d need to find out what was happening with the storm.

  Instead, all he knew about the storm was its rough starting position, Weather’s predicted track, and the data the station master provided about prevailing winds. He also had the data from his own inertial system. From those weak components he had to navigate through a dark eight thousand kilometers, face unknown winds, and find the tiny station that was his destination.

  “A little bit cramped, isn’t it?” Pascal remarked as they inspected Thorn, their tiny, nine-hundred ton, double-masted barque. He sat with one leg extended into the cockpit and the other in the “stateroom,” which also served as kitchen, bath, and bedroom. A single bunk stretched for two meters across the overhead with a single small seat below, which, when lifted, revealed the toilet. A tiny shelf with a built-in microwave oven and a recessed sink—hidden under the working surface—ran along the second bulkhead, to the right. Their food and medical supplies were stored in hanging bags, Velcroed to the bulkhead above the microwave.

  On the opposite bulkhead was a fold-down table whose opened edge would be in the lap of whoever was sitting on the seat. The navigation instruments, computer, and the storage for charts and instruments were revealed when the table was down. Rams could reach out with his left arm and just about touch the edge of the helmsman’s seat, it was that close. For a big boat Thorn had mighty small crew quarters.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t have picked a cargo hauler—it’s a little cramped, isn’t it?” Louella remarked as she ducked her head to peek into the compartment. “Place looked a lot roomier in the plans. I guess the crew wasn’t supposed to stay aboard for more than a day or two.”

  Pascal looked around. “Why couldn’t they convert some of that cargo hold? This is pretty tight. I don’t relish spending a couple of weeks in here.” “Too much trouble just to give us a little bit of comfort. I don’t think the expense would be worth it—might upset the boat’s balance.”

  Pascal sighed and wiggled in the tiny seat, trying to find a way to stretch his legs full length, and failed. “The navigator’s station on the Bermuda run was bigger than this,” he complained. He tried to put his arms out and his right elbow hit the hanging bags. He sighed again—this was going to be damned uncomfortable.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t nearly as warm and dry,” Louella reminded him. “I don’t mind cramped spaces during a race. Hell, on most of our races, dry underwear’s a luxury! Count your blessings, Pascal. Count your blessings.”

  While Pascal squeezed up the narrow tube to examine the sail locker, Louella sat in the helmsman’s seat. She let her hands run over the controls. She loved the slightly sticky feel of the wrappings on the wheel. Here and there she noted the faint, oily marks Thorn’s captains’ sweating hands had put there.

  A bright, shining circle was worn into the dull metal beside the winch controls. She reached for a knob, as if to activate it, and noticed that the heel of her hand centered on the worn spot. How many hundreds of times had another hand briefly touched there to wear the finish like that, she wondered. How many captains had sat in this seat to guide the tiny craft across the dark seas of Jupiter? In her mind, those other captains were a palpable presence in the tiny cabin, a trace of the boat’s memory. Directly in front of the helmsman’s seat were the screens that displayed the fore and aft camera views. Their controls were in easy reach, just below them. To her left were the inertial display unit, the pressure gauges, and various station-keeping controls. The housekeeping controls were mounted beneath the seat, where they could be reached from the stateroom.

  On a swing arm above the wheel were the primary control readouts: sail pressure gauges, wind indicator, barometer, and dead reckoning display. Once they were under way she’d be completely dependent on them.

  There was a clatter as Pascal wormed his way out of the tube. “Sail sets look OK,” he said, as he slid across the deck and dropped into the stateroom’s seat. “We’ve got spares for every sail, plus the extras that you ordered. All of them are marked and set for loading.”

  “Did you make sure that we have enough lines? I don’t want to get caught short on tack once we get out of here.”

  Pascal snorted. “Of course I checked. My butt’s going to be out there too, you know.”

  Louella nodded, all business. “I double-checked the inspection reports. Just the same we need to do a walk-around.”

  She’d said it so calmly that Pascal almost missed the implication of what she had said. When he did, he snapped erect, banging his head on the bottom of the bunk.

  “Y… you mean… go outside?” he blurted.

  Louella sneered at him. “Sure. We can get some pressure suits and hand lights to work with. As long as you stay in the dock you won’t have any problems. It will be just like going for our training stroll at geosynch. You didn’t have any problems there, did you?”

  Pascal stuttered. He’d been scared out of his wits the whole time, worrying whether his lines were securely attached, worrying about the ability of his boots to hold fast to the deck, worrying about slipping, about the vast distance that he would fall should he become detached from the station.

  “N… no,” he lied.

  They didn’t need the hand lights after all. Thorn was still parked in the repair bay where there was plenty of external illumination. Louella held tight to her walker as she stumbled through the lock. The walker took most of the weight off her legs, which was a blessing. Even though she didn’t have too much of a problem with the two g’s, the additional weight of the heavy pressure suit made movement difficult.

  Pascal stumbled along behind h
er, clutching his own walker so tightly that it looked as if he’d leave glove marks in the metal.

  “What a pig,” Louella remarked as she examined the bulbous skin of Thorn’s outer envelope. “Looks like a damned overgrown, pregnant guppy,” she said as she walked along the side of the bulging hull, thinking of the sleek craft she had sailed in Earth’s tame waters. Every few steps she stopped to examine a weld, a spot of suspicious discoloration, or one of the vents for the ballast hold.

  “Let’s take a look at her rigging,” she demanded and followed the crew chief to the boat’s deck.

  Two stubby masts projected up from the center line of Thorn’s upper surface. These were thick triangles of heavy metal, nearly six meters across at their thickest dimension. They certainly weren’t the slender masts she’d known all her life.

  The trailing edge of each mast was a pair of clamshells. These were double-locked doors that would open when they deployed the sails. A short track ran back from each mast, with a crosswise track at the end. “We extended the travelers on both sides, like you asked,” the crew chief said. “You’re goin’ to have a bit of trouble handling her. Keep a tight hand on the wheel and don’t run close to the wind, is my advice.” Disapproval was evident in his voice. “Don’t think you should have done that, though. These little boats ain’t built to take much heel, y’know.”

  Louella bristled as she checked the workmanship on the track modifications, looking for any indication that the repair crew had scrimped on her specifications. “Did you think about adjusting the traveler’s winches to take the extra line?”

  The crew chief bristled. “Of course I did,” he said gruffly. “I don’t appreciate you sayin’ that I don’t know how to do my job.”

  “Really? Well, I don’t like you telling me how to sail a boat either, asshole!” she shot back. She moved to examine the other mast as the crew chief licked his wounds.