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Primrose and Thorn

Written by Bud Sparhawk

“Build me straight, O worthy Master!

Stanch and strong, a goodly vessel,

That shall laugh at all disaster,

And with wave and whirlwind wrestle!”

The Building of the Ship, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

“Why did I ever listen to you about THIS race? I already spend a bunch right here on Earth,” protested Jerome Blacker, president of JBI. “I’ve been having second thoughts about this Jupiter race.”

The two tanned and muscular people facing him looked uneasy. A sales tag was still attached to the man’s sleeve and flapped as he waved his hand as he spoke. “You already made the commitment, JB -- you just have to follow through. Come on, it doesn’t cost you any real money.”

“You sure as hell aren’t much of a businessman if you think this won’t cost me anything!” JB said nastily.

“Mr. Blacker,” Pascal interrupted; “The publicity about this race will bring in more than enough to offset expenses.”

Jerome leaned across the desk. “What about insurance, the cost of transport, the cost of the boats? Those things aren’t cheap!”

Pascal sighed. “The funds from the Jovian ventures can’t be spent on Earth. Thanks to the treaty of ‘54, you have to reinvest at least seventy five percent of your profits.”

Jerome winced. “Don’t remind me about those damn pirates! If it hadn’t been for my stations and hubs, the damned Jovians wouldn’t have a pot to piss in,” he grumbled.

Pascal continued his attack. “GeoGlobal and the Times cartel are both outfitting ships for the race. No telling how many the Jovians are going to enter themselves. If we don’t race JBI will lose a lot -- the publicity about our entry will bring in more than enough revenue to cover our expenses.”

Jerome mused, half to himself, as he rubbed his chin. “I remember your numbers, I’ve read the reports. So be it. What do I have to do to finalize the financial arrangements?”

Pascal spoke slowly, not wishing to reveal how anxious he was to get JB’s approval. “I’ve already reserved Thorn, a used barkentine. You just need to sign the commitment for outfitting her. Once that’s done, the orbital factories will start fabricating the sails - We’ve already sent them our specs. We’ll use the Jovian funds for both of those efforts. The only cash outlay you need to worry about will be our transport out to Jupiter.”

“Which leaves only the human element,” Jerome said. “Even now I find it hard to believe that we can win this race.” He swiveled in his chair to face the woman who sat beside Pascal. She was the best captain in his fleet and winner of more sailboat races than he could count. She’d been unusually quiet since she came in the office.

“Do you think you can race one of those barques, Louella?” he asked her quietly. “Do you think you can sail a boat on the seas of Jupiter?”

Pascal held his breath as he awaited her answer. The success of their entire enterprise, and the payoff for the past year’s worth of intense training, rested on her reply. The answer she gave would make or break the deal.

“I could sail a fucking bathtub on the sun if the price was right,” she spat back. “Now how the hell do I get a drink around here?”

***

Rams had stopped at the station in the hopes that there would be an opportunity for business. That, and a chance to restock his supplies. In order to keep his ship, Primrose, he had to take advantage of every opportunity that came his way.

Jake, an irritable old scamp who knew everything there was to know about sailing the winds of Jupiter, had taught Rams how to sail. Rams learned that every ship had its own personality. He learned how to balance keel and ballast, how to adjust the ship’s buoyancy to ride the turbulence.

After teaching him the basics of sail, rudder, keel, and line, Jake went on to show him how to heave-to in the hurricane-force winds so that they would ride easily, neither making way nor being blown back. They’d used that technique to mine the edges of Jupiter’s storms. The updrafts in these dangerous hurricanes often pulled metal-rich meteorites and icebergs - worth their weight in gold to the floating stations - from the lower depths of the atmosphere. Jake showed him how to ‘cheat’ the boat close to the edges of the turbulence, using jib and main to close on these bits of rock and harvest them.

Jake had shared all of his secrets of playing the winds of Jupiter’s storms and winning its rewards. Jake taught Rams to love the winds on the wine-red seas.

Rams’ transition from crewman to ship’s captain hadn’t been easy. He’d scrimped and saved every cent he could, and signed away nearly all of his future profits -- all to buy a fast, outdated clipper at one of JBI’s auctions. Clippers had been deemed too inefficient to achieve JBI’s “acceptable” level of profitability.

Refitting the boat and replacing the instruments that Primrose’s former crew had stripped put him even further in debt. In addition, there had been the outlay for new sails and refitting the keel. Both cost more than he expected and, suddenly, his debt for Primrose started to look like a financial black hole from which there was no hope of escape.

His first year had been a disaster. The cargo he’d hauled hadn’t generated enough to pay the interest on his loans. To keep from losing her he borrowed even more. If he wasn’t careful he could lose Primrose and be thrown him in jail: That was the penalty for simultaneously using her as collateral for multiple loans. Since then it had been nip and tuck, keeping one financial step ahead of bankruptcy.

The second year of operations had taught him where the good money could be earned -- carrying perishable goods on quick dashes. JBI’s huge, lumbering cargo ships could move things cheaply, but they were neither speedy nor very maneuverable. Like the old square-riggers of Earth, they flew with the wind, stolid as the stations, and scarcely moving much faster. Sometimes their crew endured months between station-falls.

Rams usually got the best return when he had to make a darting emergency run from station to hub and back. Double charges both ways, and no hassle for it, either!

Best of all, the fees kept him out of prison.

“Wind one-thirty meters per second and rising, Cap’n. Satellite shows some deep turbulence spinning off the edge about twelve thousand klicks upwind and heading to intercept your destination. Weather advises you should try to stay within the central laminar flows of sub-bands MM and KK until you’re almost to Charlie Sierra One. That should keep you out of the storm,” the station master said.

“Put it down that I acknowledge the limits on bands double em and double kay,” Rams replied as the ‘master logged his ship out. “How much margin does Weather give me before that storm hits?”

“Best they can project is that you have about a sixteen hour margin, give or take six hours. Of course, if it swings south of CS-42 the edge winds might give you a lift.”

“When did I ever see one of those storms change course in a way that would help me?” Rams said rhetorically. “I’ll plan on beating to weather the last leg of the trip. I just hope that Weather’s prediction is right.”

“I agree with that,” the ‘master replied. “You’d better keep a watch for any miners who might be prospecting on the periphery of the storm. Wouldn’t want to run into one of those crazies, would you?”

Rams grinned, remembering when he had been one of those crazies. “I’ll watch out for them,” he promised.

“Well, it looks like you are all set to go, Primrose,” the station master said as he popped the record from the computer and handed it to Rams. “Fair winds and good passage, Cap’n.”

Rams checked the ballast tank when he returned to the ship. According to the leveling mark on the wall of Primrose’s berth, she was riding low -- just a little too heavy, probably from the extra cargo he’d taken on. He switched on the heaters in the ballast tank. That would create enough steam pressure to drive the excess ballast out, lightening the ship. When Primrose’s bulls eye was almost up to the mark, he turned the heater off. In a few moments more she was floating level with the station.

“Ready to cast off!” Rams said over the intercom and listened for the

‘master to loose the clamps that held Primrose in the station’s embrace. Four loud bangs resounded through the pressure hull as the clamps released. Rams immediately felt the ship list to starboard as she drifted backwards into the fierce winds of Jupiter.

Primrose heeled as it caught the full force of the wind. Rams braced himself, checked the instruments, and then turned the ship downwind as it emerged from the lee of the station,

The station’s infrared image quickly faded as they exceeded the viewer’s range. A few seconds later the sonar return vanished as well. Only a fuzzy radar image, quickly dissolving into a cloud of electronic noise, told him where the station rode. Even that image would fade once he got more than a kilometer away. After that he’d be sailing blind.

Primrose ran with the wind as he lowered the keel. He pointedly ignored the keel meter as the diamond mesh ribbon uncoiled from its housing. The thousand-ton weight at the keel’s end started its familiar swinging motion as the keel was unwrapped from its spindle. Primrose rocked in response to the motion. The pendulum’s swing slowed as the ribbon paid out farther and farther into the thick soup of the atmosphere.

Finally the rocking motion dampened and Rams halted the winch, locking it in place. Only then did he check the keel meter. Although he relied more on the feel of the ship’s trim when setting the keel depth, he liked to assure himself of the setting.

A single glance told him that his instincts had been correct. He’d halted the keel at 1,400 meters, one hundred meters shy of the theoretical setting the station master had calculated. He let an additional fifty meters of the mesh keel pay out; it wouldn’t hurt to have Primrose a little bottom-heavy on an upwind run.

Rams reached for the sail controls. Primrose was being blown downwind at thirty meters per second, relative to the station. The station he’d just left plodded along slower than the wind, held back only by her massive drogues -- a fancy word for sea anchors. The drogues that swung beneath the station’s bulbous form created drag and provided a measure of control. It was sailing, but using anchors to steer instead of sails.

Rams hit the switch to release his mainsail from its housing on the main mast and braced himself. The ship tilted even further to starboard as the wind bit the suddenly increased surface area. He immediately played out the traveler, letting the main find the angle that would allow the fierce wind to flow across the sail’s face. He kept a careful eye on the pressure gauges from both sides of the wishbone that constrained the sail, adjusting the sail’s angle to maximize the front to back pressure differential. He wanted to get as much lift as possible from the airfoil effect.

Primrose finally stopped rocking and curved into the wind as Rams adjusted the line. Primrose was running at about sixty degrees to the wind when she finally balanced out and was making an appreciable sixty meters per second.

“All right girl, let’s show old man Jupiter what we can really do,” he said and deployed the jib from its housing at the prow. There was a hellacious rattling from forward as the chain hoist protested the way the wind whipped at the small jib and smashed it against the pressure hull. Rams winched the line back until the jib sheets were taut and the small forward sail was funneling the wind along the back of the mainsail, forming a venturi between them.

Primrose heeled even more as the force on her increased from the additional sail surface exposed to the wind and turned tighter into the face of the wind. She was now running at about a forty degree angle. Rams grinned in satisfaction as her speed increased proportionally. He watched the knot meter rise past seventy, seventy-five, and settle at nearly eighty meters per second.

He checked his location on the inertial positioning display and made a minor adjustment to the rudder, then adjusted both the mainsail and jib to account for the new angle of attack.

“Clipper Ship Primrose out at 1400 hours, under weigh and on course for Charlie Sierra Four Two.” he said into the radio. The station master probably wouldn’t be able to hear the formal sign-off, given the usual overwhelming amount of static in the atmosphere. Nevertheless, Rams was always careful to observe the formalities.

As Primrose pulled steadily away, Rams made a thorough examination of the ship. He wanted to ensure that everything on board was ship-shape. He double-checked the straps and buckles on all of the cargo crates, just to make sure they’d been properly secured.

Next he checked the topside sail locker, taking care to see that the spare sails were properly stored and ready for deployment when the need arose. If all went well he wouldn’t have to replace the sails on this trip, which would help his profit margin. Having them fabricated in orbit and brought down by elevator was bloody expensive.

He swung the power-lifters from their clamps and started working on the new sail. He strained against the resistance of the tough foil of the sail as he refolded it. Even so, he tried to keep from flexing the thin metal more than was necessary.

As soon as he had the sail properly folded and secured, he moved it into its canister. His arms ached as he struggled to get it into the correct position, cursing the financial situation that forced him to fire his crew three months before and the expediency that kept him from having the time in dock to do this sort of housekeeping. One person could barely cope with the bulky sails against the drag of Jupiter’s heavy gravity. Even with the one hundred-to-one ratio of the lifters, he still had to depend on his own muscle to force the cumbersome rig into the canister.

Finally the sail was loaded. He stowed the lifters and rubbed his aching back before fastening the heavy chain lines at the head end of the sail; one line that would lift it into place on the mast and another to connect it to the traveler that limited a sail’s movement across the top deck.

Whenever he had to blow the main its lines would go with it. The lines were another expense he wished that he could avoid. But the only way to save them was to suit up, climb out onto deck, and try to disconnect them while fighting hurricane force winds. Only a fool went outside without a backup crew, no matter how securely he was clamped to the deck! The lost money for lines wasn’t as important to him as much as his life.

By the time Rams worked his way back to the cockpit, Primrose had moved far north of the station. From this position he could start to tack without risking running into it. Just to make certain of his clearance, he peered at the screen, cranking the radar to maximum sensitivity to check.

The screen showed a uniform blur of undifferentiated noise; not even a shadow that could be suspected of being something other than the swirling electronic mist of atmosphere.

Rams and Primrose were now completely on their own and, in five days, more or less, he hoped to see the faint, white, heat signature of his destination. He hoped that the storm wouldn’t spoil his plans - he needed the money to make the next payment!

***

“What a dump,” Louella complained loudly and threw her bag against the bare metal deck of the hub station, sheering as it lazily bounced back into the air. “Not even a bar on the place! To make matters worse I have to share the damned cabin with you. I can’t even have some Gods-be-damned decent privacy before the race!”

Pascal winced at the strident tone of her voice. He regretted accompanying her throughout the long voyage from Earth to the Jovian system. He should have come on another ship.

Louella’s growing catalog of complaints had increased throughout the long transit from Earth. Thankfully, there’d been enough distractions on the transport to silence her complaints, once in the while. The transport had a bar to keep her amused, and enough willing young crew members to keep her bemused. But those diversions were short lived. Too soon she came back to the fact that she wasn’t racing, wasn’t in control, wasn’t at sea.

It made her bitchy.

“How the devil am I supposed to keep my sanity if they can’t even provide civilized, basic amenities?” Louella continued in a rasping voice that cut across his nerves like fingernails on a piece of slate.

“Bad enough that I have to miss three seasons of the circuit for this fool race! Bad enough that we have to stay in this stupid can until the others get here! But that doesn’t mean I have to live like some freaking Spartan in the meantime!”

She lifted the lid of the utilitarian toilet. “Jesus, we even have to share the damned can!”.

“Perhaps you should complain to the hub master,” Pascal said quietly as he floated across the tiny cabin and anchored himself with one hand. “Maybe he can provide whatever it is that you need.”

Louella spun gracefully around on her hold and frowned at him; “What is that supposed to mean?”

Pascal winced again. What had he said now? It didn’t matter; she’d be hell to live with if he just let it be. “Nothing,” he said. “I just thought that maybe the captain has resources we don’t know about. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

“Humph,” Louella huffed, as if unsure of the meaning of his answer. She kicked her floating bag into some netting to secure it. “You’ve got the bunk beside the door, asshole. And don’t get any ideas about us sleeping together.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Pascal replied dryly and turned to fiddle with the controls on the wall. Under his breath he added, “Nightmares perhaps, but not dreams.” He pressed the switch to open the view port.

“What did you say?” Louella asked sharply. “Something I wasn’t supposed to ... Oh my God! Would you look at that!” Pascal didn’t answer, he was as awed by the sight as she.

Framed in the view port was the entirety of Jupiter, half orange, rose, and umber, and half in darkness. The rim of the planet filled the ‘port from top to bottom, leaving only a narrow circle of stars at the edges to show that anything else existed in the heavens.

The bright line of the elevator cable extended from somewhere beneath the window and ran straight toward the planet’s equator, far below, just as it extended thousands of kilometers out into space from this geosynchronous station. The cable’s silvery line narrowed as it diminished into perfect perspective toward the giant planet.

Jupiter’s great red spot wasn’t visible. Pascal assumed that it was either on the other side of the planet or somewhere within the semicircle of darkness that marked the night side of Jupiter. But there were enough other large features present to occupy the eye.

Wide bands of permanent lateral weather patterns ran across Jupiter’s face. Each showed feathery turbulence whorls at the edges as they dragged on the slower bands toward the equator or were accelerated by a faster ones toward the poles. From here he could easily see the separations between them.

In the center of one of the higher latitude bands there was a dark smudge. Pascal thought they might be the persistent traces of the “string of pearls” comet, over a hundred years ago, but he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember if the marks would be on top or bottom from his viewpoint. He decided to ask the hub master about orientation.

“What a sight,” Louella whispered as she moved beside him. “Gorgeous, just gorgeous.” she said, with a touch of awe. “Where are the floating stations? Could we see them from here?” she said quickly and pressed closer to the view port.

Pascal dismissed her inquiry with a shrug. “The stations are too small to see from here. You’re still thinking in terms of Earth. We’re over six-hundred times farther out than one of the orbiting stations would be at home. CS-6 would have to be the size of Australia for you to see it with your naked eye.

“You’ve got to remember that each one of those weather bands is several thousand miles across,” Pascal continued as he backed away from the view port and the terrifying precipice it represented. “We could put the entire Pacific inside any one of them and still have plenty of room left over.”

Louella’s face took on a rapt expression as she absorbed the scale of what she was observing. “You could sail forever in those seas,” she breathed heavily. “Forever.”

***

Rams encountered his first problem when he was thirty hours under weigh. Primrose had been beating steadily to windward since he left CS-15. By his projections they should have been slightly north of the projected track of CS-42, the next station in line. This leg of his upwind trip would be two thousand kilometers long before he came about and headed south on the shorter lee leg. That was as far as he could travel and stay within the limits Weather had advised. He couldn’t go beyond the MM sub-band without risking excessive turbulence. No, he thought, it was better to keep to the smooth and dependable jets of air in the middle of the band.

It was no small effort to steer Primrose between the two stations. CS-15 had been moving westward at a steady twenty-six kilometers per second under the slower westward winds of the KK sub-band.

The two stations had been about eight thousand kilometers apart when he had departed. He had planned to tack about eight times across the face of the wind; four - two thousand kilometer legs to the north and four - three thousand kilometer legs to the south. The southern tacks would gain him the least progress but give him good position to intercept the station as it raced toward him.

It was a good sail plan. The only problem was that it wasn’t working out. The inertial guidance system indicated that, instead, he was steadily bearing west of his projected course. Rams checked the set of the sails and the pressure readings. Using these numbers, he calculated that Primrose was still bearing forty degrees to the wind, just as he had planned. What could be wrong? Was he was being blown off course by an unexpected head wind?

An hour later he understood the situation. Something was disturbing the “smooth laminar flow” predictions of Weather. He was just encountering a more northerly wind than expected. He decided to adjust his tacking strategy to adapt to the shift. He’d have to take a longer line on the southern tack. But the slower passage would put him at risk from the storm, which could mean big trouble.

He plotted his course for the next ninety hours with great care.

***

As they sped down toward the seas of Jupiter, Pascal sat as far from the port of the tiny cab of the elevator as he could and tried to ignore the pit of blackness, a hole in the sky at the center of an enormous emptiness. The thought of all the distance they had to fall terrified him.

“I still don’t understand how you guys do it,” the pink faced elevator pilot said from his perch at the bow. “I mean, I can see how a sailboat can go with the wind. The hot air balloons on Earth just go with the wind, right? Why wouldn’t they do the same here?”

“It’s the keel,” John said. He and Al were their competitors from GeoGlobal. They’d arrived a few days before, along with the third crew that would participate in the race. “A sailboat would be just like a balloon if it didn’t have a keel.”

“Oh, I see. That’s why the Jupiter ships have that long ribbon under them,” the pilot remarked. “But how does that help them move against the wind? And isn’t it impossible to go faster than the wind?”

“Good question,” Pascal said, glad of the distraction. “A sailboat goes faster into the wind, not slower. The slowest speed of all is when you run with the wind directly behind you.”

Pascal let the kid think about that for a moment before he continued. “A sail is an airfoil. One side forms a pocket of relatively dead air. The opposite side is bent out so that the wind has a longer distance to travel. The pressure differential pulls the sailboat along.”

“A foresail funnels the air across the main and accentuates the effect,” Al injected. “The closer you haul to the direction of the wind the faster you go.”

John spoke up; “It’s just a matter of physics: the angle of force on the sail and the keel produces a vector of force that moves the boat forward. The steeper the angle the greater the forward thrust. The trick is to balance the force of the wind and the sails, adjusting your angle of attack to obtain the greatest forward momentum possible, maximizing the transfer of static air pressure to dynamic motive force.”

“Oh, I understand,” the operator said, screwing his face up in concentration. “It’s like continuously solving a set of differential equations.” He smiled at them as if he were proud of learning the lesson so well.

“Don’t bust a gut trying to do that if you’re ever in a sailboat, kid,” Louella said. “It’s all scientific bullshit.”

Louella glared at the three of them; a fierce set of her eyes and mouth that brooked no interruption. “These guys want you to think that sailing’s a science -- that it’s all application of mathematical rules and physics. Listening to them, you’d think that you’re constantly thinking, calculating, and plotting. Well, that’s all a pile of crap, sailing isn’t some branch of engineering.”

She leaned forward to look straight into the operator’s eyes, her expression softening as she did so. “Sailing’s a love affair between you, the boat, the water, and the wind. Every one of them has to be balanced, held in check; let any one of them dominate and you’ve lost it. A good sailor has to be conscious of wind and water and responsive to the boat’s needs. You have to understand the language of wind and sea and ship -- you have to feel that edge that means you’re running a tight line with every nerve of your body. The boat’ll tell you how she wants to behave; she’ll fight you when you’re wrong, and support you when you’re right.”

She brushed at her cheek, as if something had gotten in her eye before she continued. “The point I’m trying so damn hard to get across to you is that sailing is an art, not a bloody damn science. That means you have to sail with your heart, as well as your mind. When you’re on the sea, managing the sails and the wheel, the rest of the universe could disappear, for all that you care. When everything works right, there’s a rhythm, a reverie that transforms you, that makes you one with the universe. If you put everything you have into it, mind and body, your ego disappears -- its just you, the boat, the wind, and the water.”

She turned back to stare out the view port at the advancing planet and slumped into her seat. “If it was just science, JBI wouldn’t be paying the big bucks to haul my ass all the way out here. No, they’d get some double-dome Pee Aitch and Dee to build a little machine to do it, and the hell with the beauty of a good line and a strong wind.

“But the fact that I am here to sail on Jupiter’s orange seas says that there’s still a human element to sailing that’s better than the most refined engineering approach. It says that a human being can still stand on a ship’s deck and dare the wind and the seas to do their worse. It tells me that even some damn overgrown pig of a planet can’t tame the human spirit!”

The silence prevailed for long minutes. “Well,” said Al, apropos of nothing; “Well.”

Louella said nothing for the rest of the trip down into the thick atmosphere. Pascal tried to ignore the view as sunrise raced across Jupiter’s face, too far below.

***

Rams’ destination was floating along at twenty-odd meters per second to the east of his present position. Her track was so reliably managed that the station’s precise location could be calculated to within a kilometer.

Somewhere on the other side of CS-42 a whirling hurricane was advancing. Given the right spin and direction these storms could grow beyond reasonable bounds, turning into blows that made Earth’s hurricanes look like a faint puff of air. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred Jupiter’s hurricanes dissipated quickly, within two or three of his ten-hour rotations. If Rams was lucky, this one would do the same.

Rams was dismayed to discover that Primrose fell even further 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 like 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 mightily 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 and tried to put his arms out - 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 house-keeping 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 weigh 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 of her legs, which was a blessing. Even though she didn’t have too much of a problem with the two-gee’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 like 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 were clamshells. These were double-locked doors that would open when they deployed the sails. A short track ran back from each mast, with a cross-wise 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 and 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 weigh. 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 gravels 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 and clamped 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 to either be prepared, or be elsewhere. Rams began to go through Primrose and secure her. Even a small item flying about in a two-gee 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 cargo hold occupied him for an hour. He put double lashings on all of 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 weigh at a steady one-fifty 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 aroma’s that the human body produced. Only the ability of the human nose to filter out the worse of these protected him. Still, the smells remained, and, unfortunately, Pascal’s nose sometimes forgot to ignore them.

He fidgeted at the wheel, keeping an 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’s 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 dingy 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’ 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.

Louella came awake in an instant and checked her watch. She had managed to sleep for nearly five hours without being jarred awake. “Damn Pascal’s eyes,” she complained to herself as she fastened her truss. “He must be running safe again.” That meant that she would have to make up for lost time during her watch, as usual.

She rolled out of the bunk, stepped cautiously to the deck and used the toilet, splashing a little water from the sink up her nose to counteract the dryness from the ammonia fumes. “Tea’s hot,” Pascal called down to her in a voice heavy with fatigue.

“Thanks,” she replied, looking for the thermos. “How did you find time to make it?”

“You mean how much progress did that cost us, don’t you,” he replied sharply. “Not a bit, I’m sure.”

“Do you think that the competition’s doing better? Damn, but I wish we had some way of telling where the other boats are!”

A week before everyone had set off from Charlie Sierra Six on the first leg of the Great Jupiter Race, as the press had been calling it. The first leg would take them around CS-15 and then back to CS-27, where they would come to windward and race downwind to CS-6, where they had begun.

Louella had watched the heat signature of their prime competitor fall to Thorn’s lee when they came out of the shelter of the starting station, indicating that they had caught the vortex off of Thorn and were spinning away to get good air. It was a trick most sailors learned before they left their cribs.

They had watched the diminishing white dot that represented the station fade into the background noise as Thorn pulled steadily westward, their speed climbing the whole time under Jupiter’s fierce winds. It was therefore a little disturbing to discover a heat signature steadily increasing in definition on their aft screen. Somehow one of the other boats had managed to catch a better wind cell than theirs.

Louella jibed to port, hoping to create a pocket of dirty air behind Thorn that would interfere with the other’s progress. The white dot responded by immediately moving to starboard, long before they could have felt the effects of Louella’s maneuver.

“Obviously they can see us better than we can see them,” Pascal cursed as he tried to crank up the gain. “It’s probably the wind blowing our signature backwards. Should we jibe again?”

Louella dismissed the idea; Thorn lost some momentum each time they jibed. “Let’s concentrate of building up our speed,” she replied and made some tiny adjustments to the set of the sails.

The image of the other boat faded to port and finally disappeared. They were six hours out from the start.

“What are they doing now?” Louella wondered aloud. “Could they have caught another favorable wind cell? Do you think they’re starting their northward leg already?”

Pascal checked the inertial. Thorn was still a few hours from their planned turning point. “Let them go,” he said. “Concentrate on our own course while I grab some sleep.”

Pascal was having difficulty staying awake during his shift at the wheel. The days of five hour sleep cycles, bland food, and lack of exercise were taking their toll. On most of the long races on Earth he at least could stand on the deck, stretch, and get a breath of air to refresh himself. Down here, in Jupiter’s atmosphere, he couldn’t even stand upright, much less sniff the air blowing by outside the boat. Not that he’d want to, he hastily amended.

But it was dry, as Louella had said, and that was something. He recalled how he’d always hated the pervasive dampness, the clinging, sticky moisture that characterized every ocean race.

Thorn’s trim felt wrong, as if she were lumbering in thick syrup, even though her speed was good. Perhaps, he thought, the boat would have a better feel if she rode a little higher, a little lighter.

He clicked on the heaters in the ballast hold. They had pumped nearly four tons of liquified gas from the bottom of the keel into the ballast tank to set their present trim. The heaters would expand the liquid and force the ballast out. He turned them off after an hour, when the trim felt better.

On the seventh day of their run they rounded CS-15 on their port side and watched the vivid image displayed on their radar screen until it faded back into the ambient noise. Pascal had dutifully recorded the close passage, to prove that they had indeed rounded the mark, while Louella concentrated on keeping Thorn a safe distance away. To do so she maneuvered the winches to switch the sails from side to side, slipping a little to slew the craft about without losing momentum.

As much as they’d like to do so, there was no time to stop, and no way to find out if the station knew that they had passed. They’d tried the radio, but the deafening noise of atmospheric static masked any reply that might have been attempted.

“I wish we could find out which boats have already gone by,” Pascal remarked as he stowed the log and climbed wearily into his bunk. He loosened the truss and breathed a sigh of relief.

“The hell with them,” Louella answered weakly in a voice that revealed that she too was getting tired. “We just have to do the best we can and hope that the rest do worse. That’s what racing is all about.”

“Yeah, remember the last Whitbread - didn’t see another boat the whole race. It was like we had the whole ocean to ourselves.”

“Not much fun there. What I remember is sitting dead in the water for three days while the sun baked us to a crisp; no wind, no progress. It was only luck that we caught the edge of that storm and got a boost.”

“Won the race, didn’t we. Luck falls to those with the most skill,” Pascal said encouragingly.

“Let’s just hope it works this time as well,” she said dryly. “Now get some shuteye so you can relieve me in two hours.”

The rest of her watch passed without incident as she tacked at a twenty degree angle to the head wind. The new sails that they had deployed on day five were still serviceable and were probably good for another two days at least. There was a minor fluctuation in the barometer and Louella let the keel down a few hundred meters.

She nearly fell asleep at one point, she was so tired.

Louella was the first to notice how their track was consistently deviating to the south. On the last two tacks they had strayed nearly fifty kilometers west of plan.

“Unless there are some different physics out there we can’t possibly be heading like the inertial shows,” she remarked with a nod of her head at the instrument when Pascal crawled up to relieve her.

Pascal looked at the readout. “This thing’s supposed to be foolproof. Maybe you’re misreading it?”

Louella snorted in reply. “You check it yourself. I’m getting something to eat and then some shuteye.” She slid from the helmsman’s perch, past Pascal, and into the stateroom. “See if you can figure out what’s wrong.”

Pascal kept an eye on the inertial throughout his shift. Sure enough, the southern legs showed the same deviation. If the machine were to be believed, then the winds were coming almost directly down from the north instead of following the westerly course that they had been told to expect.

He wished that he was thinking a little more clearly. Something kept itching at the edges of thought. Something someone had warned them about. What was it? He looked at the curving southerly trace that the inertial was showing and wondered. It almost looked like a smooth curve. . . Then he had it! A turbulence eddy must have formed along the edge. If the readout was right then they were already being drawn into its grasp. “Louella!” he shouted, “wake up! We have a bit of a problem.”

Hours later the winds rocked Thorn from side to side as Louella fought to make way. Unlike the smooth air they had encountered thus far, the winds on the edges of the storm were rough, uneven gusts that quartered with little warning. In one stomach wrenching instance, Thorn had turned completely about, while pitching nearly