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 her, 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.
While Louella and the crew chief were above deck, Pascal examined the hull. The keel had already been retracted from the meter-by-meter safety inspection. The huge weights at the ends of the double keel swung slowly from side to side as Thorn bobbed up and down. Thorn was just a balloon when she wasn’t under way. The keels’ slender foils hardly seemed strong enough to support the three hundred tons of droplet-shaped weights. The blunt nose of the forward weight was smooth and bright, as if it had been polished. There were several long gouges along the sides.
“Impact scars,” the crewman said as she reached across the gap and shoved her glove inside one of the larger ones. “There’s always some gravel being driven around the atmosphere, especially down deep, where the keel runs. Sometimes they’re pretty big and movin’ fast. That’s what made these dings, y’see.”
Pascal was still staring at the thin ribbons that supported the weights. Each was only a few centimeters thick, hardly the width of his hand. One rip from a rough piece of gravel, he thought, and the ribbon could be severed and the weight would be released, dropping down into the depths far, far below.
Suddenly he realized that he was only one step away from the edge of the inspection platform. One step away from a fall that wouldn’t stop until he reached a pressure level that would crush and kill him, compressing his suit and body into a tiny mass. He would still fall until it hit the layer of metallic hydrogen, hundreds and hundreds of kilometers below the station. No, that wasn’t really true; he wouldn’t fall that far. His body would come to rest somewhere where his density was equal to the surrounding atmosphere.
But he’d still be dead.
A wave of vertigo overcame him. He stumbled back from the dangerous precipice. “I … I need to get back inside,” he told his escort, clamping his hand on the safety line. “Now!” he shouted when the crewman didn’t respond at once. He had to get away from that horrid drop.
Twelve hours later Rams realized that he was in serious trouble. Whenever he tried to head due north, he was forced farther west of his planned track. To be so affected at this distance meant that the storm was immense.
He prepared for the coming storm. The two things a sailor had to remember about surviving a storm, whether on Jupiter or on Earth, were either to be prepared, or be elsewhere. Rams began to go through Primrose and secure her. Even a small item flying about in a two-g field could do substantial damage.
The galley and his own cabin were easy. Rams made it a practice to stow everything until needed. Just the same, he went through every locker to make sure that nothing would fall out and surprise him. He poured hot tea into a thermos and stowed that, along with some bread, in the cockpit.
Securing the cargo hold occupied him for an hour. He put double lashings on all the containers, and tied them together, just to make sure. That done, he made certain that all loose lines were in the lockers, along with all of the deck gear. Nothing that could become a flying missile was left unsecured.
Since he wasn’t carrying passengers this trip, the other four cabins were empty. Just the same, he checked them for loose gear or an open locker. He had to make absolutely certain they were secure.
Securing the sail locker presented a problem. Rams had to balance being able to hoist sail in a hurry—which meant he had to have one loose—against the risk of it breaking free. He secured the larger sails and kept the two small ones ready to hoist as a compromise. If the blow was as heavy as he expected, the small ones were more likely to be used.
That done, Rams brought the ship about to begin another long, southerly tack. That way he could use the peripheral winds to stay on the outer fringes of the storm. With a little bit of luck, Primrose wouldn’t be drawn into its roaring core. Then he settled down to see what the long night would bring.
Thorn was six days out from the start and making way at a steady 150 mps. Pascal had already grown sick of the close quarters, the five-hours-on, five-hours-off schedule that matched Jupiter’s rotational rate, Louella’s lousy cooking (even if it was better than his own), the dragging load from Jupiter’s gravity, and the lingering, stinking ammonia smell from the boat’s slight atmospheric leakage.
They’d added their own contribution to the atmosphere. After nearly a week of confined quarters they had created a unique miasma. The cabin was redolent of recirculated air, collected flatulence, sweat, and the miscellaneous aromas that the human body produced. Only the ability of the human nose to filter out the worst of these protected him. Still, the smells remained, and, unfortunately, Pascal’s nose sometimes forgot to ignore them.
He fidgeted at the wheel, keeping a wary eye on the instruments. It was important to maintain the sail’s pressure differential right on the edge; that way they could keep their speed up. All week Louella had beaten his time. Somehow she was able to wrest a few extra knots from the wind. No matter how much he pushed, Louella was always able to do better.
They’d been competing ever since he could remember, each trying to outdo the other. She dared him to become a better sailor, even as she relentlessly strove to beat him every time. He challenged her to become the better navigator, and laughed at her struggles with simple plotting problems. She’d succeeded better than he, even if he never was able to offset her intuition with his science. Their teamwork had won numerous races over the years. Their success gained them prime berths in JBI’s commercial racing fleet. Louella had worked her way from an Olympic dinghy championship at age thirteen to finally being the helmsman on most of JBI’s Cup winners as well as the number one competitor in most of the other commercial classes.
Pascal had been recruited by JBI as a navigator for Louella’s first Whitbread. Since then he’d been with her for every race, alternatively as navigator, tactician, winch crank, or sail master. He’d been helmsman when she was captain and shared bunk with her on the Times’s double-around-the-world. They’d weathered hurricanes and drifted demasted for days with only a bottle of water to share between them. They’d broached a hundred thousand dollar racer in ’Frisco Bay, lost a two million dollar racer in the South Pacific, and survived to win the Bermuda in spite of a hurricane that destroyed half the fleet and shredded their mainsail to ribbons. It had been a thrill the whole time.
He just wished that she wasn’t such a pain in the ass.