"Ben Bova - Jupiter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

He lifted his head and broke into a loud, barking laugh. Grant stared at him. Is that what this conversation was all about? Grant asked himself. He simply wanted to set me up for a creaky old joke?

Still laughing, Tavalera pointed at Grant. "You oughtta see the expression on your face, brightboy! Priceless!"

Grant made himself smile. "I guess I walked into that one, didn't I?"

"You sure did."

They talked for a few minutes more, but as soon as he decently could, Grant excused himself and headed back to the wardroom and his studies. As he walked along the short passageway that ran through the heart of the habitation module, he wondered about Tavalera. Is there more to the engineer than just crude jokes? Was the discussion about Jews a test of some sort? The New Morality had agents everywhere, constantly on the alert for seditious ideas and troublemakers. Are they watching me, wondering if I'll be a reliable spy for them? Beech said they'd be watching me. Is Tavalera reporting to some NM supervisor?

Most likely he was no more than he appeared to be, a newly graduated engineer with a sophomoric sense of humor. But Grant thought that Tavalera was the kind who would report deviant behavior to the nearest NM agent. It would look good on his dossier.




APPROACH



For more than a week Grant spent hours each day watching the flattened globe of Jupiter wax bigger and fatter as tired old Roberts slowly approached the giant planet.

Grant had missed seeing Mars close up; the red planet was on the other side of the Sun when they'd crossed its orbit. Roberts had sailed through the Asteroid Belt as if it weren't there, nothing but a vast silent emptiness, not a rock, not a pebble in sight. The ship's radar had picked up a few distant blips, but nothing big enough even to reflect a glint of sunlight.

Jupiter was something else, though. King of the solar system's planets, big enough to swallow more than a thousand Earths, Jupiter presented a spectacular display to Grant's eager eyes. Like a true king, Jupiter was accompanied by a retinue. Grant watched, day by day, as the four largest Jovian satellites danced around their master. He felt like old Galileo himself, seeing this quartet of new worlds orbiting the massive colorfully striped globe of Jupiter.

Without realizing it, Grant made a ritual of his daily observations. He went to the ship's wardroom immediately after breakfast in the galley, always alone. He had no desire for company, especially Tavalera's. Once in the wardroom, he would boot up his palmcomp and access the ship's cameras. He began each day by putting a real-time view of Jupiter on the bulkhead screen, unmagnified. He wanted to see the approaching planet just as he would if he were outside looking at it with his unaided eyes. Only afterward would he call up the magnification program and begin to inspect the planet more closely.

Each day Jupiter grew larger. Grant began to see some of the other, smaller moons as they hurtled around the planet's massive bulk. Tiny specks, even in the cameras' best magnification. Captured asteroids, undoubtedly; minor worldlets that had been seized by the king and forced to circle his majesty until one day they approached too close and were ground into dust by Jupiter's enormous gravitational power.

There were some disappointments. The bands of clouds were not as brilliant and gaudy as he had expected. Their hues were muted, softer than the garish tones he had seen earlier. Grant realized that the videos he had been studying were false-color images, where the tints of the clouds had been enhanced to show their swirls and eddies more clearly. Nor could Grant see the slim dark rings that encircled Jupiter's middle, no matter how hard he strove to find them. The ship's cameras just did not have the power to resolve them.

"Take a look at Io, brightboy."

Startled, Grant looked up to see the captain standing in the open hatchway of the wardroom. She was a blocky, dour-faced woman with graying blond hair she wore in a no-nonsense military buzz cut that accentuated her chunky, dough-skinned face. Her faded olive-green coveralls looked rumpled, frayed, shapeless. She clutched an empty plastic cup in one thick-fingered hand.

"Prometheus is erupting," she said.

It was the first time in the whole long trip that she'd spoken to Grant in anything less than a snarl. He was too surprised to answer. He sat at the wardroom table, frozen into immobility.

With an annoyed scowl, the captain came to the table, leaned over Grant's shoulder, and snapped commands into his palmcomp. The bulkhead screen blinked and then showed the mottled orange-red globe of lo, the innermost of the four big Galilean moons.

"The pizza-pie world," she muttered.

Grant saw that lo indeed looked like a pizza, covered with hot sulfur, though, not cheese; splotched and spotted with craters and volcanoes instead of mushrooms or sausage slices.

The captain gave another command, and the view zoomed in on one section of Io's limb so fast that Grant almost felt dizzy. The curve of the moon's limb showed bright sulfurous orange against the black of space, and Grant could see a dirty yellowish plume spurting up into the darkness.

"Prometheus is jacking off again," the captain said, chuckling.