Rolling Thunder (9 page)

“So how’s Pismo Beach?” he finally said.

“I don’t know how it is now, but when I left it was hot, heavy, humid, hellish. I suspect it’s still pretty much the same.”

“Hellish?”

“Only the Second or Third Circle. Could be worse. I hear Heartland America is Seventh Circle, sliding rapidly toward the Eighth.”

“I’m not much on the geography of Hell,” he said, and lapsed into silence again for a while. Then he sighed, and faced me again.

“I suppose you blame me for that posting,” he said. I was surprised. I mean, I did, a little, but only in the sense that I wished he’d used more of his considerable pull in the upper reaches of the Navy, realms mysterious to most of us draftees, to get me something somewhere else. Like I said, I knew it could have been worse.

“Hate Earth, myself,” he said. “Maybe I’m being unfair. I didn’t see her at her best. All I remember is being left behind at Disney World while everyone else went off on a big adventure. I’m afraid I and my brother behaved rather badly.”

Dad has told me about what holy terrors Uncle Tony and Uncle Bill had been when they were sandrat-sized. It was hard to imagine, looking at this dignified and sometimes even diffident man, so spiffy in his uniform, that he could have been a brat. But looking at me in my current state of adult sophistication and dignified self-assurance, you’d never have known that only a few short years ago I was an awkward, confused, sullen brat myself.

“Later, when I understood where the others had gone and what they’d gone through, I was glad to have been left behind.” He was talking about the horrors immediately postwave, where my family and Travis had gone in search of Gran. To this day Dad won’t talk about a lot of it, except for one story about being scared out of his wits by a tiger that had escaped from a zoo and was later shot by survivors. He makes it into a very funny story, about how close he came to crapping in his pants, and then ends it on a poignant note, the sense of loss he felt when he saw the grand, wild creature laid out preparatory to being skinned, but I know it was an important moment in his life. Of the rest of it, he says nothing at all. Mom will tell me stories of her own journey—they weren’t even engaged back then, but that’s when they fell in love—after she and Grand-père Redmond split from the others to find their family, which was mostly a case of wandering among refugees asking as to the whereabouts of people, just as thousands of others were doing. But of the thousands of bodies floating in the sea, of the decaying corpses in wrecked cars he had to move out of the way, of the dead children, the vacant-eyed survivors, the fighting … of the
stench,
my father speaks not at all.

He doesn’t have to. I’ve read the accounts, I’ve seen the pictures and tapes.

“Never been back,” Uncle Admiral went on. “But I want you to know, Podkayne, that if I could have spared you a tour on Earth, I would have. That’s one thing that is pretty much set in stone these days. Your first half year must be spent at an Earthside post. ‘Know your enemy’ is the theory.”

It was actually
potential
enemy—we weren’t at war—but everybody knew that if more hostilities came, they would be from that degenerate, worn-out old planet, so encrusted with the hatreds of thousands of years of more or less continuous wars. The Republic of Mars got along well with everybody else.

“I got to know them pretty well,” I said, thinking of little illiterate Glinda. If we ever had to fight a War on Ignorance, she could be in the front of the enemy lines, but she’d have to shoulder aside a lot of her fellow Earthies to get there.

“Well, you’ll be relieved to know that your lessons are over. Seeing as you’re already here, I was able to get the rest of your term on Earth waived, and a promotion to a full lieutenancy.”

Suddenly the day seemed a lot brighter. I wanted to shout something, but confined myself to taking his hand and bringing it to my lips and kissing it.

“Thanks, Uncle Bill.”

“That’s Admiral Bill to you,” he said, pulling his hand away and pretending to be stern. “And kissing superior officers is frowned on.”

“Well, seeing as how we’re related, I figured it wouldn’t be right to go ahead with the customary blowjob.”

He tried to keep a straight face, but the laughter forced itself out explosively.

“You’re a pill, Podkayne, but don’t ever talk like that when there are other Navy people around. They don’t like jokes, and I don’t need to be tailhooked.”

If you haven’t served your hitch yet, that’s Navy slang for being accused of sexual harassment below your rank. It’s rare, but it still happens. If it happened to me, I doubt I’d tailhook anybody. I’d kick him in the balls, admiral or not. We have a nut-kicking tradition in my family. My mom once planted her foot in a general’s crotch so hard it lifted him right out of his boots. Or so my dad says.

“What’s the deal with the promotion, though?” I asked. “Just a routine bump?”

“Well, you’re still a little ways from that. But based on your recruitment record, I was able to get you a little slack there, too.”

“What recruitment record? I didn’t send many Earthies here.”

“Practically none,” he agreed. “Those few who got by you are all A-one citizen prospects. You didn’t think you were sent to Hell to send the demons to Mars, did you?” He looked at me, and I expect my mouth was open in amazement, because that’s what I was feeling. He laughed. “Good lord, what are they telling you these days? They don’t put it in the manual, but we figure you all know that you’re there to persuade marginal cases
not
to emigrate. We don’t want more people, certainly not from Earth.”

Well, excuse me! How was I to know? If they were still posting us in pairs, like they used to in Western America, maybe we’d have picked up on the straight skinny. But they dump you in an isolated wasteland all by yourself with nothing but a tutorial on how to fill out the forms.

“You haven’t asked the next question yet,” he said.

“What question is that?”

“About your next posting. Something became available, and I managed to slip your name into the queue. I can always pull it back out again if you don’t want to go.”

“Are you going to make me torture you for the information?”

“How does Europa sound?”

“Europa?” This time I couldn’t restrain myself. I shouted something right at the top of my considerable range—whoopee, hallelujah, golly gee; I can’t remember—and threw my arms around Admiral Bill and kissed him, hard. No tongue, he
was
a relative. Then I said the first thing that came into my head.

“When I get home, I’m burning
all
my bras.”

6

FROM
PODDY’S BOOK
of Places I’d Like to Go:

#1) Europa:

Second and smallest of the Galilean moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. You can see them through a small telescope from Earth; even better from Mars. The moon Europa was named after a beautiful Phoenician princess for whom the continent of Europe was named, so I’m going to be sentimental here and refer to it as “she.” The poor thing was seduced or raped, depending on who’s telling the story, by Zeus in the form of a white bull. Those Greek gods were real party animals, weren’t they?

Diameter: 1,940 miles.

Distance from Jupiter: 417,000 miles.

Albedo: .67. That makes her the fifth most reflective body in the solar system, after Saturn’s moons Enceladus at .99, Tethys at .80, Mimas at .77, and Neptune’s moon Triton at .76. To give you an idea of how bright that is, Venus is .65, Jupiter is .52, Earth is .36, and Mars is .15. Albedo (since you asked) is the ratio of light coming in to light reflected back. The reason for Europa’s high reflectivity is that the surface is entirely covered in water ice.

Europa is one of only six moons with an atmosphere. It’s not much, but it’s all oxygen. It comes from the ice evaporating and ionizing into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is too light to get retained, and blows off into space.

It’s one of the densest bodies in the solar system. The list goes like this:

I’m not counting asteroids, so if you live on Juno, Vesta, Eunomia, Interamnia One, or other places like that which are a bit denser, I’m sorry, okay? I’m making a point here, and it has to do with surface gravity.

That high density is because the bulk of Europa and her nearest neighbor, Io, are rock with an iron core, more like terrestrial planets than any other moons in the solar system. That high density means that, in spite of its relatively small size, it has a surface gravity of .134 gee.

So if you weighed, say, 100 pounds on Earth, you will weigh 37 pounds on Mars, and only 13.4 pounds on Europa. More important to me, considering where I just came from, if your left breast weighed 5 pounds on Earth (I’m just naming a figure, not bragging), it would be a bit less than 2 pounds on Mars, and … well, you do the math. But
that
was the reason for my silly remark about bra-burning. With any luck, I’d never have to wear one of the damn things again.

Around the turn of the century unmanned space probes went into orbit around Jupiter and started some serious studies of the giant planet and its moons. They discovered that Io looked like a pizza and had more active volcanoes than zits on a teenager’s face, but had almost no craters, because the surface was constantly being renewed by stuff upwelling from below. Some of that stuff was molten rock at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and some of it was lakes of boiling sulfur. Io has people living on it, but has not been extensively explored. It’s a tourist destination for its great views of Jupiter, and for the excitement and danger of exploring around the volcanoes.

Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa are all ice-and-rock worlds.

Callisto is heavily cratered and tectonically dead. It’s covered with an ice sheet and beneath that is a relatively thin layer of liquid water. It doesn’t have a defined core.

Ganymede has an iron-and-rock core, but it has a lot more water and a very thick ice sheet covering it, which makes it much less dense than Europa. Surface gravity on Ganymede is just a hair higher than on Europa, though Ganymede is much bigger.

All three are about the same temperature on the surface—100 to 120 degrees Kelvin, say about 260 below zero, Fahrenheit—but down below the surface it’s another matter. All moons are subject to tidal flexing. That means they are distorted by the pull of the primary, Jupiter in this case, and in multimoon systems, by the pull of the other moons as they pursue their different orbits. This tugging produces energy as heat.

If a Jovian moon is in real close, like Io, you get a volcanic hell. If you’re way the hell and gone, like Callisto, you get a ball of slush. A little closer in, like Ganymede, you don’t get so much internal heating, but it’s enough for tectonic processes to work. Plates slide over each other, collide, chasms and ridges are formed. But that was all a long time ago. Many craters on Ganymede are very old, like the ones on the moon and Mars.

They told me in science classes that the situation is comparable to Venus, Earth, and Mars. Too close to the sun and you get a choking-hot planet like Venus. Too far out and you get a cold planet like Mars, where all the water has been frozen for billions of years, mostly deep under the poles. Right in the middle you get Earth, warm and comfy.

Or you could think of Goldilocks and the three bears and the porridge. Io would burn your mouth, and you’d spit out Ganymede because it was too cold. Europa would be just right.

Just right for what? Why, for life, of course. And that’s just what we found when we got there. Or something very much like it. We think.

SETTING OUT FOR
the Jovian system isn’t quite like getting a visa and updating your immunizations and boarding a liner for a trip to Earth. If you intend to stay awhile and not just make a few orbits and snap a few pictures to show the folks back home, you need some more elaborate preparations.

Jupiter has a magnetosphere so big that, if you could light it up somehow, seen from the Earth, it would be five times the width of the full moon. There’s a lot of radiation in it. Our ships and bases are well shielded, but if you planned to stay in the area of Jupiter for any length of time, it would be best to take some prophylactic measures.