The Jupiter Theft

“Reliability test.” He grimaced. “Some arbee I never saw before. I guess they’re worried about my getting contaminated, working with Li.” He drained half his beer and slammed the mug down too hard. The pinkish brew sloshed over the lip of the mug and splashed on the table.

“They’ve got to be careful,” she said reasonably.

“They can be so careful that they’ll endanger the mission. The way Li’s people almost did.”

She looked around uneasily, “You shouldn’t talk like that, Tod. Someone might misinterpret what you said about endangering the mission.”

“Dammit!” he flared. “I’m no Rad! They ought to know that by now. I had my first arbee screening when I was only six years old, when GovCorp transferred my father to another city. I went to Federal schools from kindergarten on. It’s fragging humiliating to be treated like some Privie slob who might have a nuke hidden up his sleeve!”

“My father came from the Private Sector,” she said quietly.

He covered her hand with his. “I’m sorry,” he said contritely. “I didn’t mean that. I’ve got PriSec blood in my own veins, a couple of generations back. Everybody does.”

“I know,” she said wryly. “We’re the salt of the Earth. At least that’s what the government keeps telling us.”

She gave him a warm smile. He held on to her hand. He’d forgotten how pretty she was. The two of them had meshed well during their brief experiment together during the early days of mission training. It had been the policy of the Space Resources Agency to balance the sexes ever since the scandal of the second Mars mission, early in the century. It was the only sensible way to deal with the inevitable tensions. Even the Chinese paired their crew members, though for public consumption they made much of “comradeship” and “Socialist chastity.”

Neither he nor Sue was attached at the moment if you didn’t count Dmitri. He leaned across the table, her hand warm in his. Her dark eyes looked expectantly at him. “Sue…” he began.

“Hey, we’re not interrupting anything, are we?”

He turned his head and saw Mike Berry standing there, a broken-nailed clump of fingers around a pink beer, the other hand resting on Maggie MacInnes’s shoulder.

Maggie was a computer tech, a lean, freckly woman with an impertinent nose and carroty hair worn a little too long for space. She wasn’t wearing anybody’s shirt, just issue shorts and an improvised crisscrossed halter that tied behind her neck, baring skinny shoulder blades. Her rangy figure made Sue look a little chunky. Jameson didn’t know Maggie very well, but after he and Li finished their current schedule of EVA exercises they would be working with Maggie and her counterpart, Jen Mei-mei, plotting orbits and landing approaches.

“No,” he said reluctantly. “Have a seat.”

Sue unobtrusively pulled her hand away from Jameson’s. She smiled a greeting and pushed over to make room.

Berry kicked a couple of airpuffs over, and he and Maggie plumped down on them. “I hear you’ve got the security types buzzing, old chum,” he said.

Jameson looked up, surprised. “How’d you hear that?”

“Oh, word gets around.” Berry hunched over, looking conspiratorial. He brushed his hair forward and narrowed his eyes, in an uncanny imitation of the RB interrogator Jameson had just left. “What’s that?” he said. “You say this Commander Jameson wants us to lodge a protest with the Chinese over their spy camera? Impossible!”

Jameson laughed. “Mike, you ought to be on holovision.”

Berry held up a hand. He changed his body language and became Caffrey, frozen-faced and wary. “Why impossible?” Instantly he was the RB man again. “Because then the Chinese would lodge a protest with us, over the holo scanner we planted in their dormitory. It’s a fair exchange. They don’t find out about our boron engine, and we don’t find out about their sex lives.”

Maggie was laughing too, but Sue looked uncomfortable.

“But when did you meet—” Jameson began.

“You weren’t alone, old chum. They’re doing everybody. Doctor Von Hotseat just arrived this morning on the Earth shuttle. Tuttle’s in there with him now. If you want to know, they started with me, while you were still floating around outside. Wanted to know if I believed in the free exchange of scientific information and all that.”

“See,” Sue said to Jameson. “I told you not to take it personally.”

Berry raised a bushy eyebrow. “What’s this?”

“Oh, I was just sounding off about Security,” Jameson said. He took a swallow of beer and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

Maggie spoke up. “I know what you mean. I never thought I’d get approved for this mission at all. They rescreened me twice. I even had to sign a braindip release.”