Bone

Scientific discoveries aren't always made by scientists.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

The best part of this job is the view. Not of where we’re working. Europa is the most boring body in the whole Solar System. But we get to see Jupiter hanging in the sky above us.

You’ve watched Earth’s Moon, right? Unless you were born outworld, sorry. It’s big and complicated and you can stare at it for a good long while.

Now imagine it’s a dozen times wider and full of clouds. The clouds on Earth are a great show from above or below. But Jupiter’s are huge and multicolored and shifting slowly in movements greater than the world we’re on.

So I’ll spend my working shift lying on my back, looking at Jupiter through the thick window in the roof of the Mobile Processing Unit.

Until something breaks. Then I have to do some work. This shift, my Jupiter watching was interrupted by a brief message. ‘Intake Hopper -> Jake. Occlusion detected. Processing halted.’

Which meant we wouldn’t be earning any money until I fixed the ‘occlusion.’ Probably a rock. Europa gets its share of meteorites falling from the sky. Unlike other places where they blend in with all the junk on the ground, here they stick in the ice.

Europa’s surface is all ice. There’s an ocean under it, but no atmosphere worth mentioning. So when the ocean is exposed, you get vacuum freezing. Instant ice.

Which is what brought us here. It’s the densest concentration of water off Earth. The new generation of fusion generators want deuterium. So Fred and I are manning the MPU, filtering ice to extract the deuterium. But the MPU chokes on rocks, so whenever one falls into the hopper I have to fish it out. Or Fred, if it’s his shift.

Putting on the radiation suit took about fifteen minutes. It weighs several times what I do. You don’t want to go out in Jupiter’s radiation field unprotected. Once I was dressed, I staggered into the airlock and cycled it.

I could handle the load just fine. Europa’s gravity is a seventh of Earth’s, just a hair lighter than Luna’s. We’d trained on the Moon for this job.

I emerged on the catwalk spanning the front of the MPU. It’s two hundred meters wide. Fortunately my head up display picked out where the occlusion was. I grabbed a rake and headed for the spot.

The MPU’s scrapers pick up ice and dump it into the hopper, which goes the whole width of the front. That funnels the ice to the grinders, which reduce the ice to a fine powder. That’s melted, then it goes through the filter and sorter. Any water molecules heavy enough to have a deuterium atom in them are separated out for processing. The leftover water is poured out the back, filling in the trench the MPU dug. The remnants of the deuterium extraction are vented as peroxide. It’s like we’d never touched the place. Take that, eco-crazies.

The whole thing breaks down if it tries to ingest some rock. Hence, me.

The occlusion was buried under a meter of ice in the hopper. I scraped away with the rake to expose it. My suit gave me a ‘warmer-colder’ beep as I hunted around. Then I pulled the rake over one last time, exposing a solid object in the hopper.

It was paler than usual, I noticed. It might be a different kind of stone. I pried it up, lifting it until I could flip the rake under it. That done, I hauled rake and rock in.

There was enough ice frozen to the thing I couldn’t get a good look at it. I scraped away with my suit gloves until I had one side exposed.

Then I froze in shock. I activated the intercom. “Fred! Wake up! Get out here now!”

“Huh? What?” came through the link.

“Suit up and get out here now.”

“Right, Jake. Okay.”

Then I had twenty minutes to look at the object. I brushed off more ice. Gently. I didn’t want to risk damaging it.

Fred staggered out the airlock. It always took a couple minutes to readjust to moving in a rad suit. It’s just so damn much inertia. “What’s the emergency? There’s no errors in the system.”

“Look at this,” I said, holding it out toward him.

“What about it?” asked Fred.

“It’s a bone,” I said reverently.

It took Fred a moment to absorb that. “So what?”

“So what? It’s a bone! From an animal. This is proof of life on Europa. Look.”

I turned the bone so he could see where one end was broken off, maybe by the MPU’s scrapers, maybe from some predator. There were pores in the exposed surface, and a hollow where there might have been marrow once.

“I doubt it. There were two science expeditions here and they didn’t find any life.”

I knew that. Our rad suits were bought used from the scientists. That’s part of what makes operating here cheap enough to turn a profit.

Fred continued, “So if you cleared the blockage, why didn’t you restart the processing?”

Oh, right. The ice should be going into the MPU. “I didn’t think of it. This is too important.”

“Important? It’s junk. You just cost us some of our pay.” He tapped on his forearm keyboard.

I felt vibrations through my feet as the ice fed into the grinders once again.

“It’s not junk. It’s a unique find. The first proof of life off Earth.” I pulled the bone toward myself, not wanting to let Fred grab it if he didn’t have the proper respect for it.

“Wait, have you been standing out here since you found it?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you flipping suicidal? You just soaked up a half hour of rads for no damn reason. You’re going to get sick and make them do crew change early. That’s even more money you’re costing me. Get inside!”

“I’m taking pictures of it. I want to get every angle.”

“So bring it inside, we can do it there.”

“No! It’ll oxidize. I don’t want to destroy it.”

“You God-damned idiot. Fine.” Fred held up his wrist camera and started recording.

With the two of us covering opposite angles, I managed to get good coverage of the whole thing. I put the bone in one of the storage baskets by the airlock, usually used for holding tools or parts when we had to fix something.

Once inside we helped each other take off our rad suits. Still took about ten minutes each.

Fred glared at me. “Plug yourself into the medchecker.”

“What? I’m fine.”

“You were outside for over half an hour. I don’t want to wake up and find you keeled over from anemia or something. Checkup. Now.”

I folded the exam bed out from the wall and laid down on it. The cover extended over me. Cables stretched around my limbs, chest, and head. Then I had twenty minutes of utter boredom as the medchecker scanned, sampled, and otherwise examined me.

It gave me time to think about the bone. We had the images. Fred was a witness, though he might not want to cooperate with me on spreading word of the find. The images would let me make a 3D model of it.

The big question was, who to tell?

There were no scientists on Europa. The two expeditions had failed to find anything interesting enough to justify a third one. The staff had scattered to new jobs.

Well, it shouldn’t be that hard to track one down and send him the model of the bone. Even if the first scientist I found didn’t know what to do with it, he should have the connections to know who I should ask.

The medchecker flashed a message on my HUD. ‘Red blood cell count low but within acceptable variation. Please recheck in twenty-four hours. No other anomalies found.’

It always wanted me to do a recheck. I think the damn gadget is just bored.

When the cover retracted I sat up. First order of business, find a list of the scientists on the expeditions and their current addresses.

Fred had the pictures of the bone up on the display wall, scrolling through them. “Yeah, it’s a bone. I’m wondering if it’s a human bone.”

“How the hell could a human bone be lying around on Europa?”

“The scientists lost some people. Could be from one of them.”

I looked at the picture. My main idea of what human bones looked like came from Halloween decorations. This didn’t match anything I remember from them, but there’s a lot of bones in a body. “Maybe. But wouldn’t they have brought the bodies home?”

“Second expedition had a shuttle blow up. Reactor overloaded because it couldn’t handle the radiation here. They couldn’t bring those bodies back.”

“Huh.” I thought about it. “I guess the explosion could have blown the flesh off the bone. There’s no bacteria here to eat it.”

“Yeah, the radiation would kill all the bacteria fast.” Fred cocked his head at the display. “I wonder if the medchecker could identify it.”

“I can’t bring it in here,” I objected. “It would oxidize.”

Fred snorted. He opened one of the cabinets and tossed me a bag.

I caught it. It was one of the clear plastic bags we used for transporting stuff that wouldn’t survive vacuum between the MPU and our relief shuttle. I felt stupid.

“Right. I’ll go get it. Help me suit up?”

“Yes. But you promise you’ll be quick. You’ve spent enough time outside already this shift.”

With Fred’s help, I was in the rad suit in eight minutes. I went out, popped the bone into the vacbag, and sealed it. When I came in the bag squished against the bone’s surface. The amount of trace gas I’d scooped up was nothing compared to the air pressure inside our habitat module.

Fred had the medcheck ready for it. Apparently there was a ‘forensic mode’ which I hadn’t known about. Unlike Fred, I don’t read user manuals for fun.

I laid the bone on the bed. Fred started the scan. The cover slid out, hiding the bone from us.

“Go eat something high iron,” said Fred. “You need to rebuild your blood cells.”

“You’re such a mom,” I snapped. I wasn’t hungry enough for a real meal, but some beef soup got him off my back. I needed to do something while waiting for the scan to finish anyway.

The result was flashed to both our HUDs. ‘Specimen is not human.’

“Ha!” I said. “Not human.”

Fred shook his head. “Doesn’t mean it’s native. Somebody could’ve brought a dog along.”

The cover had retracted. I picked up the bone. It was a little longer than the distance from my wrist to my elbow. “Would’ve been a damn big dog. You think they’d let a scientist bring a Great Dane along? How much would its chow weigh?”

“Okay, not a dog. I don’t know what it is. But saying ‘native life’ is jumping to a big conclusion.” Fred yawned. “Hell with it. I’m going to try to get some more sleep. I have three hours until I’m supposed to be on shift.”

“I’ll take an extra hour,” I said. I was regretting waking him up.

“Thanks.” He went off to his sleep cubby.

You’d think we’d have bigger quarters on the MPU, but all our space together would barely be a hotel room on Earth. It’s the radiation shielding. It takes so much mass the engineers wanted to minimize the protected volume.

So we made sure we were quiet when awake so we didn’t interrupt our partner’s sleep. Not a problem right now. I found the roster for the Second Europa Expedition and looked over the roster for who to tell about the bone.

My first choice, a biologist who was the deputy leader, turned out to be dead. Anemia because of radiation overexposure. Maybe I should apologize to Fred for calling him a mom.

The expedition had a bunch of chemists, oceanographers, and glaciologists. I kept going through the list until I found another biologist. Professor Sebahizi was it. I looked him up. Alive. Working at the University of Lagos. Still researching exobiology. Perfect.

I spent a couple of hours fiddling with my note to him. I didn’t want to sound like some illiterate blue-collar rockjack. I mean, I am, but I wanted to sound better than that.

I attached the medcheck’s scan of the bone, and a few of the best pictures. That probably mattered more than whatever I said.

Our datalink is slow enough it took half an hour to upload. The company isn’t investing much in letting us get the latest entertainment. Normally I didn’t mind—Jupiter was a better show than all the vids I’d brought along—but this time I wanted real bandwidth.

I’d just have to suffer. Besides, even if the prof answered instantly it was going to take a couple of hours to hear back. Lightspeed delay.

So I just laid back and went back to watching Jupiter.

Naturally, another occlusion shut down the MPU right after our normal shift change. As I promised Fred, I went out to fix it. I took the bone out and put it in the basket.

The occlusion was just an ordinary rock this time. A chunk of nickel-iron. I left it in the basket next to the bone. When we accumulated enough of them, we’d take the time for one of us to walk to the back of the MPU and toss them into our wake.

Fred took over at one hour past shift change exactly.

I had an iron-heavy meal and went to bed. The sleep cubby is about three times the size of a coffin, plenty of room unless you like sitting up in bed. Fortunately I fell asleep quickly. I’d been afraid I was going to keep fretting about when Professor Sebahizi would reply to my message.

I woke up after nine hours of sleep. Checked in with Fred. He hadn’t even had a rock all shift, lucky bastard. I had my usual breakfast, then checked my mail.

One message from the University of Lagos.

I was shivering a little as I opened it. Then I froze.

‘Dear Sir, Professor Sebahizi is extremely busy with both research and teaching. He does not have time to review crackpot theories for—”

It went on for a bit. The school’s mail system included a pitch for taking classes remotely as part of the rejection.

Fred took his dinner out of the microwave and sat across from me. “What’d he say?”

“Didn’t even get to the professor. The mail system spam filtered me.” I couldn’t keep the dejection out of my tone. If this prof wouldn’t even read my message, could I get through to any of the others?

He blew on the plate to cool it. “Not surprising. I mean, what are the odds a rockjack would find something scores of scientists couldn’t?”

“So what am I supposed to do? Just throw the thing away?”

“Dunno.” Fred started eating, flinching as he put too hot food in his mouth. The guy never learned.

I sat and brooded. Shift change time came, so I clocked in. The next rock to be cleared would be my responsibility.

After Fred washed his dishes, he turned back to me. “You could just post it on the net. One of the social sites. If folks are interested, they’ll pass it around.

I laughed. “That’s the way to make me look like a real crackpot. The company would probably decide I’m hallucinating and send an early crew relief.”

“God, I hope not. I have to work my whole year here or I’m screwed.”

We didn’t get into the details of each other’s lives. Privacy was a precious thing when jammed together like this. But I knew he’d taken the job because he owed money to three ex-wives.

That shift had a couple of rocks. I cleared them with minimum downtime, so I wasn’t costing Fred money. The rest of the time I brooded.

Every scientist I could find from that expedition was working at some university. I didn’t want to risk being spam-filtered by another one. That would get me on a list. Bad enough to have universities ignoring my messages. If everyone sent my messages straight to trash, I’d have real problems when I went back to my normal life.

The company probably wouldn’t let me take the bone on the return shuttle. It was contaminated with radioactive particles. It had been exposed to enough neutrons that some of the original material was likely radioactive now. It wasn’t much compared to what we were getting from Jupiter, but any place but here would consider the thing a hazard.

I finally realized I was procrastinating on the obvious next step. I brought up the list of scientists on the first Europa expedition. There were three biologists. Two were working at universities, which would probably spam filter me like Sebahizi’s school did.

One was retired. A Professor Chekunkov, formerly of Ares University. A Martian colonist might be more open-minded toward a rockjack. And a retiree wouldn’t have an intelligent spam filter.

Of course, he wouldn’t have a big institution paying for his bandwidth either. I rewrote my message. Instead of attaching my images and scan of the bone, I included links to copies of them I put on a Martian server.

I reread it a few times before sending it. Finally there were no typos to fix. I was tempted to fiddle with the grammar, but I’d probably just be making it worse. I pressed send.

Okay, I stopped fiddling with it because Fred was waking up and I didn’t want him looking over my shoulder and making comments.

When he came out of the lav he asked, “Anything interesting on your shift?”

“Just a couple of boring rocks.”

Fred grunted and turned to the microwave. Today he’d decided to burn his mouth on some oatmeal.

I retreated to my cubby and watched a vid until I fell asleep. A reply from Mars couldn’t come much faster than one from Earth. From Jupiter, the distance isn’t much different.

When I woke, I checked my messages. Nothing new. So if my letter to Chekunkov was spam filtered, at least the system didn’t feel the need to tell me.

I knew I shouldn’t, but I checked the file server.

The images had been downloaded. The server reported a count of “1” for each one. Even the medchecker scan had been downloaded.

He’d read my message. He’d believed it enough to look at my evidence.

I tried to get my hopes under control. He might have clicked the ‘download all’ link by accident.

But at least he read the message.

I bounced out of my cubby. My hair brushed the ceiling.

Fred looked up from his reader. “Somebody had a happy dream.”

“A scientist read my message. Hasn’t answered yet, but he looked at the data.”

He snorted. “If the guy asks you for ten thousand credits to do his analysis, don’t pay him.”

I was expecting him to be cynical about it but that still surprised me. I didn’t answer.

We did shift change. I spent the shift watching Jupiter. No rocks interrupted.

I’d set my system to chime when I received a message, to keep myself from checking for new ones every three minutes. Still wound up looking at my inbox every hour or two, just in case I’d missed the notification.

When Fred woke up, he went through his normal routine without asking about the scientist. I didn’t open a conversation. That was normal enough. We’d sometimes go days at a time without saying anything. This wasn’t a job for chatty people.

We did shift change. I had dinner. Still no notification. I needed a vid to get to sleep again.

I woke halfway through my sleep shift. I was confused until I realized it must have been the notification chime. There was a message from Professor Chekunkov:

Dear Jake,

Thank you for telling me about your fascinating find. That’s exactly what we were hoping for during the Expedition. I’d love to pass word of it to my colleagues, but we’d need more data first. What device did you use to do the 3D scan of it? Do you have anything else we could use to do additional analysis?

Looking forward to working with you,

Ivan C.

I was thrilled. Didn’t realize how thrilled I was until Fred pulled the curtain of my sleep cubby open.

“You okay?” he asked. He looked honestly concerned.

“I’m fine. Great, even. Why?”

“You made this hollering noise. I wondered if you were having a nightmare or a stroke or something.”

“Oh. That was a whoop of joy. The professor wrote back. He wants to work with me on the bone.”

That made Fred pause a moment. “Congrats. You should get some more sleep.” He let the curtain fall.

I did want to be rested for my shift. Fred was right. But it was hard to fall back asleep thinking about the bone.

My alarm woke me, which was unusual. I did shift change and then started on my breakfast. I checked the model number of the medchecker and put that into a reply to Professor Chekunkov. Poking around the maintenance tools found an ultrasonic scanner and a multimeter. I added them to the reply and sent it off.

The next message came in five hours.

Jake,

The medchecker is perfect for this job. It has all the sensors we need. We’ll just have to replace the medical software with a general biology package. Please download and install that. The ‘full scan’ option will get the data we need. Remember to bag it like you did for the first scan.

Thanks,

Ivan C.

The message ended with a link to one of the Circum-Jupiter servers. The file was huge. It’d take most of a day to download. Not surprising. The medchecker is a complex system. I started the download.

I lay back and looked at Jupiter again. It’s a good thing I wasn’t one of those soap opera addicts. Blocking the dataflow would be painful for one of them.

Only one rock had to be cleared by the time Fred woke up. “What the hell’s blocking the downlink?” he demanded.

“I’m downloading a software update,” I replied.

“Seriously? For what?”

“The medchecker.”

“Okay. I wish you’d timed it better. My kids send me messages every day and I try to answer them the same shift. When’s it going to be done?”

I checked the status. “A couple of hours after your shift ends.”

Fred cursed. “What kind of patch is this? It shouldn’t take so long for an update.”

“Well, it’s not a patch. It’s giving the medchecker science software so it can analyze the bone.”

“Wait, what? You’re overwriting the medchecker’s software?”

“Yeah.”

Fred partially blocked the view of Jupiter. That wasn’t unusual, the room was small enough just moving around could put him in the way. Fred grabbing the neck of my shirt and picking me up, that was unusual.

In Europa’s gravity it didn’t take much effort for him to hold me in mid-air. Still, it was rude. I grabbed his wrist and tugged.

Fred didn’t let go. “You’re letting some total stranger sabotage the only machine that keeps us alive here?”

“It’s not sabotage. We’ll analyze the bone and then restore the medical software.” I was tempted to pry his fingers off my shirt, but I might break one. That would be a firing offense. One that would ban me from any of the Company’s operations. And get me blacklisted among the other deep space corporations.

My co-worker wasn’t worried about getting fired. He shook me hard, making my stomach a little queasy. “Restore? What if the back-up is corrupted? What if one of us gets hurt while it’s doing your science thing? You’re risking our lives!”

When he held me still again, I looked him in the eye. “Fred. This bone is important. It’s the first real evidence of life off Earth. We need to get all the data we can on it. I’m not going to let you stop me.”

“I God damned will stop you!” His other hand smacked into my jaw, sending me flying across the room.

I hit the wall before I could react, feeling a sharp pain in a shoulder blade as I hit a shelf. We’d been trained on Luna to handle accidents, so my reflexes curled me into a ball. I must have bounced a dozen times before I came to a stop. Earth gravity muscles are overpowered for lunar gravity environments.

Fred stood over me, fist cocked.

I rubbed my jaw. “Science matters. I’m going to analyze the bone.”

He picked me up with his left hand and punched me in the nose with his right.

That hurt a lot more than the first punch. I curled up right away, but still picked up bruises from the things I bounced against.

Fred scooped me up as I was still rolling. He held me up, fist ready, and demanded, “Give up?”

“No.”

Punch bounce bounce bounce OUCH bounce bounce bounce bounce bounce. As I rolled across the floor I realized my scalp was bleeding. I reached up to touch it. Wet. I looked at my fingers. Red. Yep, blood.

I looked up at Fred. “Are you going to kill me? Are you that desperate to avoid the slightest trace of risk?”

He stomped his heel onto my folded up leg. The pain was nothing compared to what I already felt. The force only bounced me a couple of times around the floor.

I rolled into a corner, out of reach from where he was standing. “Sheesh. We’re taking more radiation in here than they’d allow in a reactor room on Earth. Why the hell are you worried about playing it safe?”

“Radiation risk is one thing. You want to let some random guy mess with essential equipment. He could overload the circuits and ruin it. Then we’re dead if either of us get sick.”

I shook my head. Which hurt. “He’s not random. I found him in the directory. He’s a retired professor. Why would he want to harm us?”

“You found an address. Some hackers could’ve taken it over. Anybody could be sending you that software.” His fists weren’t clenched as tightly any more.

“His messages sound like a professor, not a hacker.”

I pushed myself back to my feet and stood in front of Fred. I kept my hands at my sides. “So are you going to let me install the software so I can analyze the bone? Or are you going to beat me to death? Because that’s the only way you can stop me.”

His hands lifted. Clenched.

I braced myself.

Then his hands drooped. “You stubborn bastard. Fine. Go ahead.”

“Thanks.”

We stared at each other for a bit. His assault on me was certainly grounds for firing. I was still bleeding.

On the other hand, the company would probably have opinions on me reprogramming some of the MPU equipment. Anything that didn’t lead directly to more deuterium production was against company policy. Guess we’d just have to live and let live.

I said, “Your hands are bruised. Want to use the medchecker while we’re waiting for the download?”

Fred glanced at his knuckles. “You can go first.”

The medchecker treated me efficiently, straightening my nose and sealing the scalp cut. The bruises received more cursory treatment. Some of the procedures hurt. The worst part was receiving the automated lecture on ‘Safety and Accident Avoidance.’

Fred only needed a few minutes in the medchecker on his turn.

Installing the new software wasn’t any trouble. Resting the vac-bagged bone on the table cued up the scan sequence Professor Chekunkov wanted. It took a couple of hours to run. The results took three hours to upload to Mars.

Fred had the original medchecker software reinstalled before the upload finished. Three diagnostic cycles all agreed that it was the proper software and not a corrupt version.

It wasn’t until halfway through my next work shift that I saw a response to the data.

Jake,

This is beautiful. We have a comprehensive view of the bone fragment. It doesn’t match any Earth-descended species I can find models for. I’ve asked a couple of old colleagues to do their own analyses of the data. We’ll see what shakes out.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but it looks like you’ve made a hell of a find.

I’ll keep you posted on what we discover.

Ivan C.

That made me feel like the slight ache in my nose was worth it.

My next three shifts were only interrupted by two rocks (one silicate, one nickel-iron). The bruises from Fred’s tantrum turned spectacular colors, then started to fade.

He never apologized, but he picked up more than his share of the maintenance tasks for the MPU, so maybe he felt a little guilty.

The next message from the professor was huge. It had graphs attached.

Dear Jake,

We have proof. The scan identified the isotopes of calcium in the bone. Their frequency ratio is a close match to the distribution of calcium isotopes in the samples of water the Second Expedition pulled up from the ocean. They’re very different from the distributions in Earth seawater or Martian permafrost.

My colleagues agree this is sufficient to go public with the bone as proof of life on Europa. We’re working on a paper discussing the results. Unless you object, you’ll be listed as a co-author. I expect we’ll have a pre-print version posted to the academic sites in a week.

The deviations in isotope distribution between the bone and the Europan ocean may be caused by unshielded exposure to Jupiter’s radiation belt. If so, that could be used to estimate how much time passed between the bone coming to the surface and you finding it. I’m running some Monte Carlo simulations to get a feel for the impacts.

When we have a draft of the paper, I’ll send you a copy for you to make comments and corrections on.

Thank you so much for contacting me with this.

Ivan

The graphs were complex, but I could tell that the ‘bone’ lines were more similar to the ‘Europa’ ones than the Earth or Mars ones.

That was enough to make me confront Fred with the news.

He read the letter and nodded. “Guess it’s a good thing it didn’t turn up on my shift. I probably would’ve tossed it. I’ll make sure to keep any others that turn up.”

Probably as close to an apology as I was ever going to get.

The draft paper was tough to read. We had a good enough dictionary in our system for me to puzzle through the sentences, but most of what they were saying was in such convoluted jargon it made no sense to me. The ‘abstract’ was clear enough. Proof of life on Europa.

I sent the prof a thank you note for sending me the draft. I didn’t have the nerve to suggest any changes. ‘Redo the whole thing in real English’ probably wouldn’t go over well with the scientists.

Professor Chekunkov messaged me daily after the paper was out. Lots of scientists were refusing to believe it. The news media got hold of it and misrepresented the hell out of it. People started worrying about monsters under the ice.

I showed one of those stories to Fred. He said, “Good. If the company thinks there’s monsters here we’ll earn extra hazard pay.”

A consortium of universities, government science agencies, and pharmaceutical firms began organizing a Third Europan Expedition. The prof’s describing the plans ended with:

I’ve been invited to join, but I’m too old for field work. I do have a position as part of the planning staff. One suggestion I’m pushing hard is to hire some people who have experience in the environment. We probably could have avoided some of the casualties in the first two expeditions if we had some knowledgeable guides.

Would you be willing to take a position with the expedition? We’d hire you as a research assistant at half again your current pay. If you know any other rockjacks who’d help us out, send them to me.

Thank you,

Ivan

I started typing a reply. Then I erased the “Hell, yes” and wrote a more polite acceptance. Then I paused to look at Fred. He was sipping some coffee. I described the expedition’s plans to him and asked if he’d want to join it.

He responded with a curse. “No way. When I finish my year here, I’m going to stay so far away I’ll never see Jupiter bigger than a dot ever again.”

More stories by Karl K. Gallagher are on Amazon and Audible.