Jupiter Project by Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online

adventure—vicariously, of course.”
    “Adventure?” I said, putting the dishes into the electrostatic cleaner. “Out here?”
    “Adventure is someone else doing something dangerous far away,” Mom said. “The Jupiter Project qualifies on all counts.”
    “Aw, it’s not so dangerous.”
    “Oh?” Dad said. He had gotten out a deck of cards and the cribbage board and was setting up for our standard three-handed game. “Here we sit, surrounded by the radiation from Jupiter’s Van Allen belts, in absolute cold, high vacuum, far from the sun, the nearest help seven months away at best, without even a planet beneath our feet.”
    “Okay, it’s a little dangerous. But so is crossing a city street.”
    “Getting hit by a commuter bus is ordinary, Matt,” Mom said, “but a meteorite is another matter.”
    “Precisely. The trouble is that we’ve been pretty careful out here and nothing very exciting ever happens. That lets out the adventure part. The only thing left is romance.”
    “Romance.” I said, thinking. “Oh, you mean hunting around for alien life forms.”
    “Yes,” Mom said. She was straightening up the kitchen and making out a list of groceries to request for tomorrow. There isn’t much storage space so she has to plan ahead every day. She flicked on our stereo and light, mellow music flowed into the room and covered the faint noises from other apartments. She looked up at me. “Your father is something of a pessimist about Man as a political animal. But I do agree with him that the man in the street back home cares only about the chances of finding life on Jupiter, dear, no matter what else the Laboratory can do for science.”
    “The only trouble is—woe is us—the Lab has not been able to find life,” Dad said. “I suspect the taxpayer and ISA both are getting tired of waiting.”
    I spent a moment sorting out the leftover food from our plates and putting it into the disposal tube. Thirty seconds later it would begin a new career as recycled fertilizer in Hydroponics.
    “What bothers me most about this damned business,” Dad went on, “is that some people in the Lab have known about ISA’s doubts for months now. A couple of department heads kept their ears to the ground. They’ve been trying to use that information to enhance their own careers—”
    He stopped abruptly. One of Dad’s cardinal rules is, no talk about Lab infighting. Gossip is what people turn to when they run out of good conversation. I can remember him saying that there’s no harm in having nothing to say—just try not to say it out loud.
    And Dad had started to violate one of his own rules. It meant he must be more worried than I thought.
    Mom put an arm around me and said, “Come on, you two. That’s enough. Politics inhibits the reasoning processes.”
    “Correct. Cribbage!” Dad said with new energy. “Sharpens the mind, lightens the soul. You’re three games down, Matt, as I remember. Leyetta, your deal.”
    The next morning I spent with Mr. Jablons—the one who lost the chess game to Yuri—learning electronics in his low-temperature laboratory. A lot of our instruction is on a one-to-one basis, by necessity.
    Take me, for example. I like electronics. I spent more than a year, back when I was twelve years old, building electronic detectors for our satellites. Kids are pretty good at small handwork like that, if you can get them to sit still long enough to get the job done. My specialty was a little beauty called a Faraday Cup. It measures the total number of charged particles that strike a satellite. They have to be built just right, or they’re worthless.
    But after all, how many kids are interested in Faraday Cups? When I was learning about them Jenny was maneuvering skimmers and Zak was talking to computers. I comprised a class of one.
    That’s the way I like it, too. Big classrooms with thirty kids crammed in, listening to an adult yak for an hour—well, you can keep it. That sort of education