Chapter 7 — BETRAYAL

I must have snoozed—certainly I needed more rest!—because I was jolted awake when the warning klaxon went off. We had separated far enough from the planet and were about to go into spin. That meant gravity, or a reasonable facsimile, and we didn't want to be sleeping in midair when it started. I had, of course, been doing exactly that.

But it started gently enough. I heard noises from the hull and realized someone was out there in a space suit, doing something. "They're moving the drive unit around to the equator," I said, catching on. "If they angled it side-wise at the pole, it would start the bubble turning pole over pole, and it's not designed for that. So they have to fasten it where it belongs for proper spin."

Then the room began to drift to the side. "Now they're starting the spin," I said, working it out in my own mind. "But at the start it's spin acceleration, so we feel it mostly sidewise. Once it gets up to proper torque, we'll feel it outwards. But it's not much of a jet, so it's slow."

"You're good at physics," Helse said.

I wasn't good at physics. I'm not, if the truth must be told—and I suppose it must, here—much good at anything apart from my judgment of people. Oh, I'm smart enough in a general way; that runs in our family, except for Faith, who got beauty instead of brains. But I owed my comprehension of the present situation more to the fact that males tune in to these things more than females do, by training and inclination. I knew Helse was gratuitously complimenting me, and the words meant nothing in themselves. But I was flattered that she wanted to flatter me. After all, she was a year older than I, a real girl, a young woman. I was sure that in normal circumstances the likes of her would not even have noticed the likes of me. Of course, she needed my cooperation for the bathroom, so she could keep her secret; it figured that she would try to keep on my good side. Still, I was unreasonably pleased. I would have been pleased if a boy had complimented me similarly, but I knew it would not have had the same force. I wanted a genuine young woman to respect me; it made me feel almost like a young man instead of an awkward adolescent. So she was trying to manage me—and I was eager to be managed.

Slowly the spin increased until the outer wall became the new floor and the sliding door became a ceiling exit. The slight push of the jet sidewise was constant, not increasing, while the effect of centrifugal force was cumulative, so that it came to dominate. It was good to have weight and orientation again!

In due course there was a jolt. Helse looked up, startled. "Just the drive unit being disconnected," I explained. "They have to take it back to the pole and set it up again for normal forward thrust. Now that our spin is established, it will maintain itself; the rocket is needed to continue our acceleration toward Jupiter. We'll hardly feel it pushing at right angles to our new gravity, but the bubble will get up respectable velocity in due course."

She smiled, complimenting me again, and I felt unreasonably good again. Helse had done nothing, really, to turn me on like this, but I was thoroughly turned on. For the first time in my life, I was coming to appreciate the potency with which a woman could affect a man—just by being near him.

We had been sitting on the new floor, wary of standing while our orientation was shifting. Now we stood—and I felt abruptly dizzy and had to lean quickly against a wall for support. I saw Helse react similarly. Naturally I had to set my brain scrambling for a facile explanation, lest my newfound status as a knowledgeable person suffer erosion. "The spin!" I said. "This is a small bubble, so we feel the effect. When we stand upright, our feet are moving faster than our heads, and maybe they weigh more too. So we get dizzy, and we tend to fall sidewise, because of the physics of the situation."

"So it's not something I ate," Helse said. "I don't have to get sick."

I wish she hadn't said that word! We struggled with our equilibrium and our psychologies and managed to get ourselves less queasy and more balanced. But we could hear the sound of someone retching in a neighboring cell.

"Let me try something," I said, struck by a notion. I took my comb from my pocket, held it aloft near the ceiling just above head level, and dropped it.

The comb took about one second to reach the floor—but it didn't fall straight down. It drifted four feet to the side and banged into the wall.

Helse gasped. "How—?"

"It's the spin, again," I said, pleased. "The hull is evidently providing us about half Earth-gravity, which I think is standard for a bubble this size. It has a diameter of about sixteen meters, which means a circumference of just over fifty meters, and so if it spins in ten seconds—"

"Wait, wait!" Helse interrupted. "I want to understand, really I do, because I think comprehension makes me less queasy. But I've had most of my education in Jupiter measurements, you know, inches and feet, and—"

Oh. I wondered how she had picked up that education, since it was normally affected on Callisto only by the rich landholders and politicians who had dealings with the Colossus Planet. But I did have some conversance with that clumsy system, so I rose to the challenge. "The bubble's radius in feet would be perhaps twenty-five," I said. "And its circumference, here just inside the hull, maybe one hundred sixty feet, roughly. So if it completes a full turn every ten seconds, which seems reasonable, a point on the hull will travel sixteen feet every second. That gives us a velocity of sixteen feet per second—no, I guess it doesn't because the deviation is tangential, not straight—"

"That's all right," she said quickly. "Now I understand the principle. But why did your comb fall sidewise?"

"Well, the floor of the Commons, our ceiling, is a little over six feet farther in, so while the hull moves sixteen feet, the ceiling moved only, let me see, twelve feet. So that's the velocity of my comb at that level. When I drop it, it can't match the velocity of the hull, so it falls four feet behind."

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed. "Yes, of course!" And yet again she was flattering me.

"So when we go up into the Commons," I concluded, "We had better lean a little to compensate for the effects, and watch out how we jump, because we may not land where we expect. And our weight will be less on the Commons—about three-quarters what it is here. If this is half-gee here—and I really can't tell, now, so maybe it's quarter-gee, like Callisto—the Commons will be three-eighths gee, or three-sixteenths, or whatever. Anyway, less."

"I feel better already," Helse said. "Maybe some time I'll have the chance to explain something as useful to you."

She was giving me too much credit, but I could live with it. It was time for us to go abroad and meet our neighbors.

I reached up, opened the panel, and hauled myself into the Commons. Spirit had done the same thing, and other passengers were popping out of their holes, some of them looking greenish. Yes, I understood their nausea! Soon a number of us were standing on the new concave floor of the doughnut, meeting each other. Camaraderie was easy, for we all shared some significant experiences: fleeing Callisto and adapting to spin-gravity.

I introduced Helse formally to my family. "He's traveling alone," I explained. "His family couldn't support him any longer." I made sure I made the "he" plain, so that Helse would know I was honoring her secret. I suppose technically this was lying, but I had given my word, and it would have been a greater wrong to betray her. Still, I felt a twinge and resolved to cogitate upon the ethics next time I had cogitation time on my hands. Is a lie ever justified by circumstances? That's one you cannot answer in an offhand way.

Our neighbors, as it turned out, were basically similar to ourselves. They had been ground into intolerable poverty by the system, or had incurred the wrath of some person of power, or had simply come to the conclusion that they were on a dead-end street on Callisto. They were not the very poorest, for those could not even have raised the fare; they were the descending middle class, like us, or the disillusioned specialists who could no longer tolerate the system.

There was a lot of demand for the heads at this point, as people tried to get their motion-sick stomachs in order. Helse and I had overcome our problem, so were all right in that respect. I saw that a number of people were remaining in their cells, probably too sick to emerge. Time would help cure that, I was sure.

The immense if cloud-shrouded lure of Jupiter summoned us all. There we would somehow find the reprieve life had so far denied us. It was a giant mutual dream, and if it was short on practical details, at least it was better than dwelling on the problems behind us. How much better to float toward a dream than to sink into potential nightmare!

Now at last it was time to eat. Those of us who were not sick were famished, after the ardors of our departure from our lifetime homes. A bubble crewman dispensed packages of food and drink from the storage space in the center of the vessel, dropping them down through a hole in the net. People watched, amazed, as those items angled to the side, traveling twice as far horizontally as vertically. I spread my explanation around, but found that quite a number of people had already figured it out for themselves. Spirit, always one to get into the spirit of these things, practiced jumping up to the net, which she could do with much less distortion by adjusting the angle and velocity of her take-off, then spreading her arms and flapping them as if flying, on the descent. Soon she had all the children doing it, and I suppose it was good experience. A person should always be properly conversant with his environment.

The food was staple stuff: all-purpose vitamin/mineral/protein cakes and globed water. No gourmet fare, but quite good enough to sustain us. This was, after all, not a pleasure excursion.

"We have to see to the orientation of the lenses," the pilot announced, as we squatted in groups on the Commons floor near our cells. "We need a volunteer to supervise the air lock while we're outside."

"I'll do it," an older man said. "I've floated a bubble before."

"Fair enough. I'll appoint you temporary captain for the interim. Your name is—"

"Diego," the man said. "Bernardo Diego."

"Take over, Captain Diego," the pilot said, making a mock salute. Then he entered the air lock with his two crewmen.

Diego settled down by the lock, and the rest of us returned to our repast. Helse ate with us, seeming almost to become part of our family, and I guess that was just as well. No one seemed to suspect her true nature, not even Spirit, who could be unconscionably perceptive when that was least convenient. But she was more interested in her flying and in the other people around us, learning their names; she was as good at that sort of thing as I was poor. My talent is judging, not remembering people. That's why I am not naming people freely here; I did know their names, but I have already forgotten them, and there is nothing to be gained by cudgeling my memory to recreate every last one.

We finished our meal, and Helse and I took our turn at the head again, lining up by the cell numbers as before. We, as a group in the bubble, were fortunate that the male-female ratio of the total was just about even, for there were four heads of each type, and an imbalance would have been awkward. I helped Helse again; no one found it remarkable that two teen-age boys entered the room together, for that was the nature of boys. My mother and sisters went to their head together, though three was crowding it, and my father shared his turn with another family man. It was really working out quite well, considering the crowding. One person could use the liquid collector while another used the solid collector, and then they switched; in this way no more time was taken than it would have for one person at a time. We seemed to have a good group here, for all that it had been randomly assembled. Maybe there just happened to be a large percentage of intelligent, motivated people who couldn't abide the repressive Halfcal system.

Time passed. "How long does lens adjustment take?" I asked. "They can't stay out there forever."

"Lens adjustment?" a neighbor asked. "Was that what they said? I was in the head when they went out, and didn't hear."

"Orientation of the lenses," I informed him. "They appointed a temporary captain from our number while they were out."

"But a gravity lens is not oriented from outside," the man protested. I remember his name now: it was García. "The lenses are not physical objects; they are fields, generated by a unit in the center of the bubble. It has to be that way; otherwise the spin would interfere with the gravity shielding, and we'd be jerking all over the cosmos. I used to be a technician. I'm not expert, but that much I do know."

"That's right!" I agreed, chastened for not realizing it myself. I excuse myself in retrospect by pointing out that we were then in a new situation, adjusting to the spin in various ways, eating our first bubble meal, and meeting our neighbors, so that the affairs of the crewmen were not uppermost in our minds. Probably that was the way the crewmen had intended it. "They had no reason to go out for that—and one of them would have had to stay inside to change the settings if they were wrong."

"We had better investigate," my father said.

He and I and García made our way to Diego to present our concern. Diego looked stricken. "You know, you're right! They don't need the lifeboat to check the lenses!"

"Lifeboat?" I asked, experiencing a sinking sensation that my trace weight could not account for—

"This lock opens to the lifeboat," Diego explained. "That's why they didn't need space suits this time. The boat's sealed, with its own supplies. I believe they stored the gold in there, for safekeeping—" Now his face was as aghast as mine had been.

It took us some time to verify and believe it, for our resources and information were limited and we didn't want to believe it. We had to get out the space suits and go outside the air lock to search for the lifeboat that wasn't there. But it was true: The three bubble crewmen had decamped with the gold. We were abruptly on our own, without even a lifeboat, in space.

We organized a meeting to discuss the situation and work out our options. Most of the refugees were in a state of disbelief; surely the crew would come back! They couldn't leave us stranded in space! Who would pilot the bubble? How would we get to Jupiter? But as time passed, more people believed. We realized that there was close to $50,000 in gold involved, and that this old bubble, converted from a retired pleasure craft, could not be worth more than $5,000. Perhaps a similar amount was invested in supplies. The crewmen had the money, so weren't bothering to carry through with their commitment. They were thieves or swindlers—and we had been taken.

Some women became hysterical. Some people retreated to their cells, refusing to face our situation. But a solid nucleus remained to tackle the problem. After all, if we ignored it, we would all perish. We could not simply float forever in space.

Diego argued in favor of reversing our thrust and descending to Callisto and taking our chances there. But too many people had cut their ties to the society below; return would mean harsh treatment by the government of Half-cal.

My father argued that if we could manage to operate the lenses and jet well enough to descend safely, we could use them as readily to proceed on our original mission. We could float the bubble to Jupiter ourselves!

There were arguments back and forth, but in the end we took a vote and my father was elected to be the new captain, since he had spoken for the majority. He immediately appointed Diego lieutenant captain. "If something prevents us from going forward, you will be the one to take us back," he explained to the man. "You will need experience in handling the bubble, just in case. We are still a long way from Jupiter! Meanwhile, you're in charge of bubbleboard operations."

Diego, who had been working up an irritation of temper when he saw the vote going against him, became mollified. My father had acted to preserve harmony in the bubble, and I noted this and learned from it. A person who opposes you does not have to be your enemy.

"Anyone who knows anything about navigation, come to me now," my father announced. "We need all the expertise we have, because I'm no space mechanic. We're a long way from the coffee plantation now!"

"And anyone who knows anything about supplies, atmosphere, recycling, sanitary facilities, or human motivation come to me," Diego announced. "We've got to keep this bubble healthy while it's going wherever it's going."

I hesitated, then went to join Diego. Helse tagged along with me.

As it turned out, we were fairly well off. Diego found people to monitor the pressure and oxygenation equipment and check the funnel toilets. He glanced at me, and I was about to explain that I was good at human motivation, but he spoke first. "You're Hubris's boy, aren't you? You'll be in charge of food supplies. First thing you'll want to do is get up there in the net and make a count, just to be sure we have enough."

"Uh—yes, señor," I said, realizing that he was doing the same thing my father was: appointing a potential malcontent to a responsible position. My father had made Diego second-in-command, so Diego was giving recognition to my father's son. It was a mutual backscratching operation, but I suppose it did alleviate tensions.

"And take your friend," Diego added.

Helse was glad to participate. She had been staying close to me so she wouldn't have to tell her secret to anyone else. How this suddenly critical situation would affect her personally I didn't know, but it was unlikely to facilitate her serenity.

We clambered into the webbed chamber. I profited from my reasoning about the distortion caused by our spin, but still it took me two jumps to catch the entrance aperture in the net. Our weight was much less here, for we were near the center of the bubble. In fact, some of the packages were floating, glancing off each other like molecules in motion. It was a good place for storage, since even the heaviest article could readily be moved here in free fall. This doughnut hole space was only four meters in diameter, so just by standing on the lattice net we had our heads just about banging the globe that enclosed the lens generator. It was a strange sensation: feet with trace gravity, head with none.

But we really could not conveniently stand, because the food packs and water bags and such mostly filled it. Some refugees had stored baggage up here, sensibly enough. So counting the food packs was a problem, because they didn't stay put very well. We could end up counting some several times and missing others completely. It might average out and lead to a correct count—but this was too important to leave to chance. Without food we would be in deep and early trouble.

I stuck my head down, out of the hole of the lattice. I spied Spirit, who was naturally curious about what I was doing, and tired of playing. "Tell Señor Diego we need a bag or something to count them into; a big bag," I called to her.

Soon she was back with a voluminously bulging armful of the kind of netting used to sweep rooms clean in free fall. She scrambled up with it, using this pretext to get in on the fun. It was all right; we were able to use her help. Spirit could be extremely helpful when she wanted to be.

We counted food packs into the net. There were quite a number, but in time we got a close enough figure: about 2,800.

"How many will we need for ten days' travel to Jupiter?" Helse asked.

I did some quick computations. "Three per person, per day, for two hundred people—that's six hundred. Times ten days—" I broke off. "Oops!"

"That's not enough!" Spirit said.

I worked it out another way. "We've already had one meal, so that's two hundred. We must have started with three thousand. That's enough for a normal load of one hundred people—but we're overloaded. So there's only half enough."

"Why didn't they pack more?" Helse asked.

Suddenly it all fitted together. "They must have planned for one hundred, but twice as many refugees showed up, so they took us all. Because of the money. Then they realized they couldn't feed us all, so they took the money and flew."

"Leaving us to starve in space!" Spirit exclaimed angrily.

"So it seems," I agreed wearily. "They planned a legitimate venture, but greed overwhelmed them, and we are left to pay the price. We'd better make a private report to Señor Diego, so the people won't panic."

We glided down, hitting the Commons deck running so as not to be swept off our feet by its higher velocity. I noticed this time that there was a constant movement of air, for it had the same problem we did: differing velocities at different elevations. It tended to drag at the floor and to rush at the net ceiling. Well, that helped circulate it, so the purifiers could operate effectively.

We approached Diego. "How many?" he asked.

"Twenty-eight hundred," I murmured.

He leaned against the curving wall. "You sure?"

All three of us nodded solemnly.

He led us to my father, who was at the control section of the bubble. "Tell him," Diego said to me.

"There're only half enough food packs," I said.

My father considered the implications. "I'll call another meeting," he said grimly.

Soon it was done. My father summarized the situation. "So it seems we don't have enough food to make our journey," he concluded.

"How do we know the count's correct?" a man demanded. "Diego doesn't want to make the trip, so he could have—"

"My son made the count," my father said. And I realized how neatly Diego had arranged it. He must have suspected that the supplies would be short, so made sure no suspicion would attach to him. Regardless, it was true; we didn't have enough food.

"What about oxygen?" the man asked.

"There's enough," Diego replied. "Another crew checked that. And most of the water is recycled. It's only food we're short." And I realized that, whatever his preferences, Diego was trying to do an honest job. Had I interacted with him longer and paid more attention, I would have perceived what I now did; he was an honest man, expressing honest judgments. He had not urged our return to Callisto because he wanted to be a leader, but because he truly believed that was the best course. Snap judgments are treacherous.

"We could travel on half rations," my father said. "We would be hungry, but we wouldn't starve, and for ten days it should be bearable. If it were longer, we could try to use our refuse to grow edible plants, but we really aren't set up for that, and in ten days that won't work. But we can do it on what we have—if we wish to make the sacrifice. I won't insist on that unless there's a clear consensus."

There was debate. The democratic process does take time! Then we took a vote. It was about four to one in favor of going on to Jupiter. Diego, amazingly, voted with the majority. "We have better leadership than we had before," he explained wryly to those who looked askance at him. "I think we can make it now, with Don Hubris."

My father smiled. "Thank you, Don Diego." And there was a minor ripple of appreciation, for there is this about that polite title of Don in our language: It is generally used with the given name, not the surname. They should have said Don Major and Don Bernardo—and indeed, thereafter they did so. I am not sure why they elected to misuse it this one time; there are aspects of adult humor and interaction I have not yet mastered. Perhaps Diego had simply not known my father's given name before.

The navigation crew had a fair notion what it was doing. Señor García explained it for those of us who were interested, and at this point most of the refugees were. All of us wanted reassurance that we were not traveling into doom. The details were somewhat technical for me, but here is the way I understand it.

Our bubble was now floating inside the orbit of Callisto—that is, closer to Jupiter—but moving ahead of Callisto because of the increased velocity of the inner orbit. We continued to jet in the reverse direction, with the paradoxical effect of increasing orbital velocity. In less than five days we would be a quarter of the way around Jupiter from our starting point. Then we would use the gravity of the sun to slow us, for we would be swinging away from the sun. That would slide us closer yet toward Jupiter. We would also try to use the gravities of Jupiter's inner moons, until we were close enough to orbit in the range of Jupiter's innermost rings. At that point the Jupiter Border Patrol would intercept us, and we would claim our status as refugees from the oppression of our homeland. They would take us in, of course. Jupiter had a standard policy of absorbing refugees in search of freedom.

Ah, but life is seldom as neat and simple as it appears! It was Hell we were so blithely floating into!