"Forward, Robert L - Rocheworld 02 - Return to Rocheworld - with Julie Forward Fuller 5.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Forward Robert L)
"No, no," Carmen cried, anxious that Jinjur not get the wrong idea. "I'm not asking that Nels come along as my bedmate! But he and Cinnamon work with other life forms all the time. They even create new life forms. Surely they would be able to get more information than the average biologist."
"Don't call me Shirley," Jinjur said with a smile as she thought over Carmen's suggestion. "I doubt John and Katrina would be considered average biologists. They were the best in the field back home."
"Nels was rumored to be the smartest man alive!" Carmen flashed, defending her friend valiantly.
"Maybe you do have a point," Jinjur conceded thoughtfully. "His file is impressive, although I must admit that I was never too impressed by him. I'll consider what you've said. But when it comes down to it, I am the one responsible and I'm not going to risk the lives of the whole away team by sending some one who's ... well ... not fit for the job."
Carmen stood at attention. "Yes, Ma'am!"
"I said I'd think about it!"
Jinjur left feeling puzzled. Why did Carmen push the leviponics scientist at her? Jinjur had expected Carmen to be thankful she had been chosen, not argumentative about the selection of the others. Maybe it was that lab assistant Cinnamon whom Carmen was really trying to help. Wasn't Cinnamon some sort of pilot, and a medic too? If so, Cinnamon would be a better choice than Nels ... Jinjur resolved to review both their files as soon as possible. Right now she had other fish to fry.
Jinjur tapped lightly on Shirley's door and then let herself in. The tall blonde was standing just inside her bathroom door, taking a "bird bath", wiping away the grime and fatigue with a warm wet washcloth. Jinjur sat on Shirley's bed, and helped herself from the tray of tidbits that Shirley had brought back with her from the party. As Jinjur bit into a pseudochocolate covered strawberry, she watched Shirley's large muscular body move easily in the low gee. Shirley's long blond hair was loosened from its usual single braid down the left side of her head, and the wavy tresses fanned out around her face in the near zero-gee environment. Shirley's imp, normally in a crescent moon shape on the right side of her head opposite the braid, was now splayed out over her scalp, busily untangling incipient snarls and removing the occasional grey hair.
"Why aren't you with George?" Shirley asked. She pulled on a blue silk teddy and fastened it casually. She joined Jinjur on the bed and the General washed down a mouthful of caviar with a squirt from the squeeze bottle of white pseudo-wine.
"George is doing the paperwork ... he was the commanding officer down there and he has to write the trip report."
"Ah, the privileges of rank! He's going to be at his console for hours! He isn't what you'd call a speed typist."
"Oh, I don't know, both his fingers are pretty fast." They giggled together.
"Poor lad," Jinjur said. "And poor me, I'll have to wait to give him a proper welcome home. By the way; welcome home my dear." She leaned forward and gave Shirley a long, deep kiss. Then she upended her, turning the tall women easily over her knee. She delivered a stinging slap on the blond's rump.
"Ouch!" Shirley squealed, but Jinjur held her tightly with one strong arm and kept on spanking.
"That was for scaring the _crap_! out of me when you went off _joyriding_! ... on that _alien_! ... How could _you_! ... the _safety nut_! ... have gone and done anything so _foolish_?" Jinjur had punctuated her remarks with spanks but now she let the engineer roll away from her.
"You're the best engineer I've got!" Jinjur continued with a furious tone. "Without your repair of the fan on the _Dragonfly_, to turn it into a water propeller, chances are that the whole landing party would still be stranded, if not dead. Golflabit! You hardly let me take a piss without you checking out the crapper, and then you go swimming inside a blob of vanilla pudding and nearly get yourself killed!" She glared at Shirley, who was rueful rubbing her reddening posterior, but then Jinjur's eyes softened.
"Shirley," she said softly, "you worry too much about the rest of us, and not enough about yourself. Don't you realize that the worst thing that could happen to us, is for us to lose you? I swear you need a keeper. We may need to send you back to the surface, but this time I'm not going to let you out of my sight."
"I'm going back? _We're_ going back? Oh Jinjur, Thank you!" The pretty blond launched herself at the black woman, knocking her back onto the bed. Sweetmeats floated around the bedroom, left for the flickering cleaning imps to find.
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*CHAPTER TWO -- PREPARING*
George was still sitting at the console on the control deck where Jinjur had left him several hours before. His report was roughed out, but there would need to be a lot more details explained and descriptions refined. His mind was not on the manuscript in front of him. Instead, he was staring at Rocheworld, framed in the viewport window set the curved wall in front of him. The double planet had rotated so both lobes were half-illuminated in the reddish light of Barnard. The light was quite bright, since Rocheworld had just finished its closest approach to the dwarf star in its highly elliptical orbit. Although it was normally not visible, George could now see the narrow neck of atmosphere that bridged the eighty kilometer gap between the rounded points of the two egg-shaped lobes. It was full of clouds, clouds of steam that continued to boil up from the drowned volcanoes on Roche, there to be driven through the atmospheric bridge by the downslope winds from the sun-warmed highlands of Roche to the cool ocean-covered lowlands of Eau. All over the normally dry planet, there were glints of sunlight from lakes and rivers, newly formed during the past day by the three tidally driven interplanetary waterfalls that had occurred during periapsis. Unlike Roche, which had been transformed from a dry, cratered moon to a miniature Earth, complete with storm clouds, Eau still looked the same -- an egg-shaped ball of ocean, with the water at the near pole facing Roche pulled up by Roche's gravity into a mountain of water one-hundred-fifty kilometers high with a slope of sixty degrees. The mountain of water looked impossible, but its shape had been predicted two centuries ago by the French mathematician Edouard Roche. Little did Professor Roche know that one day a planet would be named after him -- and in one of those quirks of fate, the word "roche" means "rock" in French -- a perfect name for the normally rocky planetoid.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, George had been floating ... no, not floating, falling ... without a parachute ... a mile above Roche. He had taken a long look at his life during that long fall, and while he certainly hated to give it up, he had to admit that he had lived about the best life that he could have possibly wished for. Despite this newly discovered but deeply seated sense of peace, George Gudunov had his mind on the future.
Jinjur would be in charge of the next exploration team to Rocheworld. With room for only ten crew members, the away team seemed to suggest itself. Shirley and Carmen would be the engineers and communication experts. Arielle's loosened front tooth was still recovering from the crash landing on Eau, so she would stay here on the _Prometheus_ with Katrina to nurse her. That would leave John to be the medic on the surface. Caroline was the laser communications expert, so she would definitely be needed to set up the flouwen base. There were several people who would be able to pilot the SLAM and the Dragonfly II; George imagined that all those qualified would spend the next few days reminding Jinjur of their qualifications.
George looked again out the port as the shadow of Roche started to move across Eau, darkening the oceans as the six-hour day approached high noon on the outer pole of Roche. Hidden beneath that ocean, almost missed by George and his crew, was the most important discovery of the entire expedition.
Jinjur picked up her breakfast in the galley and took it to her room to eat while she studied the personnel files on her own viewwall. She had lived with these people for over forty years, but one doesn't use daily conversations to discuss one's training and qualifications. She hadn't perused these files since they had left the Earth, except when she had approved George's choices for the first team downside.
Caroline Tanaka, the laser engineer, was an obvious choice. Jinjur had sent Shirley to tell her what they were planning, and to let her know that she would be needed on the surface. Katrina would be staying on the main ship so John could have a turn to go to the surface.
John Kennedy seemed to Jinjur to be a bit shallow, somewhat too glib, but he knew his way around a robotic space vehicle as well as he knew his way around the human body. Jinjur squirmed in her chair as she remembered the way he had handled her last physical exam. Jinjur had been irritated at James for insisting that it was time for her annual exam and had gone into the sick bay with a chip on her shoulder. John had started with a massage, claiming that he couldn't palpitate anything but muscle while she was so tense. Half an hour later, Jinjur was as tense as a blanche mange and John had palpitated every inch of her. Jinjur forced her mind back onto the business at hand.
_We'll need another pilot who can handle the heavy booster in the SLAM, and a back up pilot to fly the Dragonfly airplane_, Jinjur thought. Thomas St. Thomas was the Chief Pilot for the SLAM and they would want to use his expertise and experience again. Red Vengeance, a geologist and backup rocket lander pilot to Thomas on the first mission, had done a fine job, but there were other backup lander pilots available and Jinjur should give one of them of them a chance at the second mission. She asked James to list the pilots, and order them with biology instead of geology as a second requirement. Much to her surprise Cinnamon topped the list.
_This Cinnamon again! You spend forty years barely seeing the chick and suddenly she's popping up every time you turned around_. She called up Cinnamon's file.
Cinnamon Byrd was born in Chenik, Alaska as the eldest of five children. Her father, the altruistic scion of a politically prominent Virginia family, was the only doctor within miles. He used a small plane in order to reach many of his patients. In order to help out, Cinnamon got her pilot's license at the age of fourteen and became an emergency medical technician soon after.
After the 2015 Cook Inlet oil spill ruined the state's economy and decimated the wildlife, Cinnamon decided to go to college to study ichthyology and fish farming. She had hoped to find a way to help revitalize the coastline. After getting her degree at the University of Alaska, she transferred to Goddard Station to do post-graduate work, and it was there that she met Nels. Cinnamon turned out to be the best lab assistant that the temperamental genius had ever had. She named the price for her devoted assistance and Nels managed it within six months. He developed a fast-growing rugged bacteria, that could absorb and break down the spilled crude that had lingered on the beaches for years, killing wild life all the way up the food chain. The single-celled organism was the redemption for that man-soiled region, and it went on to save many other polluted areas. Cinnamon joined Nels permanently and followed him even to the stars.
Then Jinjur noticed an anomaly. "James? This figure for the girl's IQ. Is that correct?"
"Yes, Jinjur, that is correct. Her IQ is measured at one hundred twenty. That is toward the top of the normal range. It only looks low when compared with the rest of the crew."
"But how did she get chosen to come with us to Bernard? Sure, she has some useful skills, but with all the thousands of people clamoring to go to the stars, we could have found someone better than average!"
"Nels insisted that she come. Since Nels was so clearly the best choice of the levibiologists, the committee decided to accept his preferred assistant. They did insist, that although she is an accomplished light plane pilot, she first demonstrate a capability of piloting the _Dragonfly_ class heavy aeroplanes and the landing rockets, but as you see, she passed all the tests given by the experts on the Greater National Aeronautics and Space Agency evaluation committee."
"God save us from GNASA committees! What is she? His wife or something?"
"Not that I have observed. They do seem to work well together however. Nels is not a very communicative person, but while there is never much conversation in the hydroponics lab, Nels and Cinnamon get all the work done smoothly."
"I suppose that Nels' IQ more than makes up the difference. Two hundred plus? Wow. I guess God more than compensated him for his lack of legs. Ironic that he went into genetic research."
"Nels' deformity was caused by chemicals his mother was accidentally exposed to during her pregnancy. It had nothing to do with genetics," said the computer gravely.
"Umm, yes. I suppose Cinnamon would actually be rather a good choice for this particular mission. Pilot, medic, biologist specializing in fish, and she is one of the crew no matter how she found her way on board. Besides, I'd much rather risk her than Nels. I'll pencil her in.
"Now for a pilot to replace Arielle, I suppose it's only fair that I give Tony a chance. He certainly is qualified, and I know he was unhappy about being left behind last time." Jinjur considered the small, handsome, pilot. Long ago she had chosen Anthony "Tony" Roma as the model in a recruiting poster for the Space Marines and that poster had doubled female recruitment for the year. But Tony himself did not trade on his dark good looks; he was a conscientious worker and a very private man.
"Even through this isn't primarily a planetology mission, we'll need some geoscientists..." Jinjur kept at it throughout the morning, muttering quietly under her breath in her cabin.
Caroline Tanaka went over the check list on her videoboard again. She and James were giving the _Prometheus_-to-Sol laser transmitter its annual checkout. It checked out perfectly, despite its age. It didn't really surprise her, for she had designed it. Pushing her long black hair out of her way, the petite engineer found herself wishing something would check out low just so she'd have something to do.
Shirley pulled her long body into the engineering room on the top deck. "I thought I'd find you here. I've got news."
"Hey, Shirley! I hardly got to say more than hi last night. Welcome home." Caroline put her videoboard down.
"Jinjur sent me to talk to you about our going back to Eau to visit further with the flouwen. She wants you to build a specialized communications base for us to take down to leave with the flouwen. The console should be usable by the flouwen, which means it needs to operate under water. The transmitter and antenna should allow them to communicate with _Prometheus_, and later, after _Prometheus_ leaves Rocheworld and goes on to explore the moons of Gargantua, directly to Earth."
"Wow! That's some challenge," Caroline replied. Instantly her mind went to work on the project. They'd need a reliable, long-lived power supply; one that would survive in the ammonia-rich atmosphere and not pollute the area. It would be decades before the follow-up mission would be back to do maintenance and it would take many watts of laser power to punch a signal over the six lightyears from Barnard to Sol. Diagrams began flipping through her head. They could start with the second backup spare for the _Prometheus_-to-Sol laser transmitter. It had the laser power and autotracking telescope that would be needed to reach Earth. But they'd still need a power supply, some interface boxes, and a whole new input console...
"Jinjur will have Carmen, Cinnamon, and John work on an input console designed for the flouwen; you and I are to work on the power supply and the transmitting unit ... Hello? Hello! Earth to Caroline..." Shirley was waving her hand in front of Caroline's face.
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