Jove's Heart

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Aboard a nice, pressurized spacecraft like the Fulminus, however, anybody can.

John Matachin had yet again cracked his knee against the low-hanging underside of the utensil cabinet in the kitchenette. With no one around to object, he went ahead and screamed. It was pretty loud.

The transmitter wasn’t on, since it was the middle of the night back home. Miekka wouldn’t be up for a couple more hours, and John doubted she would want to hear him complain about the interior design again, anyway.

Dr. Miekka Hallit, the mission’s director and grantwriter, was also John’s wife. She had pulled the strings that got him out here, where she could pull his strings.

John giggled, imagining himself first as a marionette, then as a masochist, tied to the posts of Miekka’s hand-hewn platform bed. They’d spent a lot of time on that bed, leading up to launch day. Just about all the time they weren’t working or sleeping. They had had to get in an expected two-plus years of missed lovemaking.

He sighed. They’d been apart for close to seven months now. Quite a dry spell.

The lack of physical intimacy was only one of the problems of solo space flight. There was also plain old lunacy.

Matachin had passed all the psych evals they could throw at him, of course. The grantors wouldn’t have settled for less. But it wasn’t a cakewalk.

It was a spacewalk! his brain joked.

That’s how it went, all the hours he was awake and wasn’t on the horn with Miekka or her grad students. John’s brain chattered away like a teenaged girl, trying to keep him company. It was better to go along with the banter, he’d found. Otherwise he’d drift into fantasy (that bed...and beyond), or go automaton with routine inspections, cleaning, logs, blah blah blah. And you can only read so many hours at a stretch.

Bloop BLOOP bloop BLOOP bloop BLOOP went a soft alert. The sails needed a trim. Maybe we could feather them and fly a little faster! Matachin grappelled to the attitude control panel to confirm the computer’s proposed tack. It looked fine. He double-checked the solar activity monitor before countersigning. One minor sunspot. No problem (probably). Tap-tap on the input pad, tack confirmed.

Solar sails were the key to getting people beyond the Moon. They’d been theorized back in the late 20th century, but the stars had to align, so to speak, before they would be tried and finally utilized. The problems of cheap energy and rare element sourcing had been addressed, and certain political issues as well. Dr. Hallit’s lab wasn’t the first to send up a sailing vessel, but they were the first to land a grant for a manned Jupiter mission. The sails meant a voyage of just over two years, instead of the six years needed for a classic gravity-slingshot trip.

Matachin was her astronaut of choice (and later, her mate). He was in almost perfect physical health and condition, and psychologically extremely well-suited for the work: able to adapt to any schedule, functional on little sleep, disciplined with very low effort, emotionally stable without being repressed. His lack of creative insight made him a somewhat mediocre scientist, but it was good for someone whose job was to carry out a very precisely-planned, collaborative exercise.

Dr. Hallit wanted to know the composition of Jupiter’s core. Fetch! John was out here to get it for her.

In the middle of the “night,” 0200 or so, John woke. Nothing special, just the urge to urinate. He unbuckled himself from the bed, fumbled about with the nightlight and the crotch-grabber urinal, and did his business. As he floated back toward his bunk, John stretched. The edge of his foot grazed a kitchen cabinet.

John recalled yesterday’s knee-collision, and folded up his thigh to check on the damaged area. There was nothing in the way of doing so, as he always slept naked (or as close to naked as possible), despite mission control’s recommendations. You have to stay human somehow.

The knee looked fine.

That was strange. No bruise, no scrape, no twinge of lingering pain. Nothing. Come to think of it, he couldn’t recall any injury being visible after the day of its infliction. Very odd indeed.

Sleepiness came over John in a great wave, then. Returning to the indifferent embrace of his bunk, he succumbed.