CHAPTER 21 – ON THE WAY TO JUPITER
09:59 (Universal Time)
Thursday, August 7, 1980 ‘C’
Command bridge of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS
Low Earth orbit near the AURORA space station
‘’Warning! One minute to engines ignition. All crewmembers and passengers must be in their seats, with safety belts buckled… Thirty seconds to engines ignition. This is the last warning… Ten seconds to engines ignition… Five, four, three, two, one, chemical rocket engines ignition, full power!’’
The pilot of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS, Lieutenant Commander Robert Gibson, then pressed a large red button on his control panel. A powerful roar transmitted through the structure of the ship then filled the command bridge section, while vibrations made everything and everybody shake.
‘’We are rising from orbit!’’ announced after a few seconds the ship’s navigator and head mathematician, Katherine Johnson, seated to the left of Gibson. ‘’We are on the calculated heading!’’
‘’Jupiter, here we come!’’ said to herself Ingrid, who was seated in her command chair, situated just behind the front row of control stations inside the command bridge section. That section of the ship, which was normally in zero-gravity condition, now experienced an acceleration of 0.6 G as the chemical rocket engines of the heavily loaded and fully fueled up U.S.S. PROMETHEUS pushed it out of orbit and accelerated it on a path to Jupiter. The chemical rocket engines, burning a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, roared for about four minutes before being cut off by the ship’s navigation computer’s program, to be then replaced by the weaker rumble from the nuclear rocket engines, which heated up liquid hydrogen by pumping it through a nuclear reactor core. While the felt acceleration decreased sharply, the burn went on for much longer than for the chemical rocket engines.
Buckled in her cabin’s easy chair, which doubled as an acceleration seat, Germaine Lapierre held with both arms her nineteen-months-old son Thomas, who was also held by her seat belt and harness. The last ten months had been for her like a fairy tale as she prepared for this space trip at Vandenberg, learning how to use a spacesuit and behave in space and also getting familiarized with the various ground mockups of spaceship sections used to train the crew and passengers of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS. She had also practiced daily with the other musicians and entertainers hired by Ingrid Dows for this mission, including her three New Orleans comrades from the CREOLE JAZZ NIGHT CLUB, while earning a much bigger salary than ever before in her young career as a single mother musician. The social services and family support facilities she had found in Vandenberg, along with a refreshing lack of racial discrimination, had also done a lot to make her happier than she had been for years. With those same kinds of social services and family support facilities also to be found aboard the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS, Germaine was quite certain that she had taken the right decision when she had accepted Ingrid Dow’s job offer. The only thing she may miss in the coming months and years was the possibility to go shop around for things like new clothes, books, decorative objects and musical instruments. On the other hand, how many New Orleans residents would be able to brag about looking from up close at the mighty planet Jupiter?
13:01 (Moscow Time) / 10:01 (Universal Time)
Kremlin, Moscow
Soviet Union
The balding, fifty-year-old man sitting behind a big work desk watched the televised departure from orbit of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS with a mix of awe and bitterness. Awe for the gigantic size of the American spaceship and the technological feat its construction and launch represented, bitterness for the realization that the Soviet Union would be incapable of replicating such a feat without bankrupting itself. Despite all that the Soviet propaganda machine would claim, the hard truth was that the U.S.S.R. was now hopelessly outdone in most domains by the United States, except maybe the military domain. Its economy was stagnant, its government machinery inefficient and riddled with corruption and its population’s average standard of living clearly inferior to that of the United States, especially if you excluded the tiny portion represented by Communist Party high echelon members, which benefitted nearly exclusively from the present system. Only in the domains of general education, universal health care services and pure sciences could the Soviet Union pretend to be equal or superior to the United States.
At the end of the televised report, made by an American television crew filming from aboard the space station AURORA, Mikhail Gorbachev switched off the television set that had been set up in his office by an aide and sat back in his chair, deep in thoughts. The decades after the end of The Great Patriotic War, also known in the West as World War 2, had not been very kind to the Soviet Union, if you excepted the benediction constituted by the early passing of Stalin and the demise of the KGB as an all-powerful organ of repression. First, the threat by the British to use atomic weapons in 1945 if the Soviet Union invaded Eastern Europe had boxed in the Soviet Union inside its own territory and had blocked its attempts at creating a protective buffer zone along its western borders. Joint efforts with Communist China to turn Indochina into a communist state in the late 1940s and early 1950s had failed, thanks to an American intervention masterfully led by a young female general, intervention which had also cost dearly in terms of Soviet modern combat aircraft. The disastrous attempt by Stalin to invade Poland and the Baltic States in 1953 had ended in a humiliating defeat and the death of Stalin himself, on top of eviscerating the Red Army and Red Air Force, again thanks mostly to the same young American female general. Then, the United States had started its vertiginous ascent to space, reaching orbit before the USSR and then building up an insurmountable technological and space capability lead. The only true success achieved by the Soviet Union and its ally, China, the invasion and taking of South Korea, followed by the unification of all Korea into a single, communist state, had been undone recently by the foolish use of atomic weapons by both China and Korea, which had attracted in return a measured but decisive American response. Now, an American spaceship of titanic proportions had just left for a five-year mission towards Jupiter and Saturn, led by the same female general who had caused so much grief to Soviet strategic plans in the past. However, Gorbachev found himself incapable of hating or even simply resenting that female general: while a formidable adversary in war, Ingrid Dows had proved as well to be a most tolerant, humane and liberal-minded person, on top of also showing herself to be a true technical genius in the aerospace domain. Today, in Gorbachev’s opinion, the Soviet Union’s best course of action was through détente and peaceful cooperation with the United States, not through continued military confrontation and ruinous military expenditures. The main problem for him now was going to be to try to convince his colleagues in the Politburo{22} to abandon for good any ideas of future Soviet worldwide dominance.
11:48 (Universal Time)
Command bridge of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS
On its way to Jupiter
‘’Transition Point Bravo now attained, General.’’
‘’Thank you, Katherine! Colonel Barry, shut down our nuclear rocket engines and switch our nuclear cores to power production mode. Major Onizuka, be ready to light up our V.A.S.I.M.R. plasma engines.’’
‘’Plasma engines on stand-by!’’ replied the ship’s flight engineer, followed a few seconds later by the nuclear engineering officer, John Barry, an ex-submariner who had participated with Ingrid in the first manned Mars expedition aboard the U.S.S. CONSTITUTION.
‘’Nuclear cores switched to power-production mode! Power levels ramping up… Power levels now stable at ninety percent capacity. You now have juice for your plasma engines, Major Onizuka.’’
‘’Thank you! Powering up our plasma engines! All V.A.S.I.M.R. engines now functioning at cruising power level.’’
Ingrid couldn’t help try to feel the new acceleration imparted to her ship by the plasma engines, even though she knew not to expect to feel any. The V.A.S.I.M.R. engines of the PROMETHEUS were of the magneto-hydrodynamic type and had an efficiency ten times better than the nuclear rocket engines of the ship, but they also produced only minuscule amounts of thrust. However, that minuscule thrust could be sustained for months, eventually adding a very significant acceleration factor over a long trip like this one, cutting to sixteen months a trip that would otherwise have taken over three years.
‘’Gee! We won’t be winning any drag race with our plasma engines, guys.’’
There were chuckles and giggles around the command bridge, with Katherine Johnson replying to Ingrid’s remark.
‘’Yes, but we are presently running a marathon, General.’’
‘’True! Well, now that we are on our merry way towards Jupiter, I believe that we can go to space cruise routine.’’
Ingrid then switched her microphone to ship-wide mode and spoke calmly in it.
‘’Attention to all! This is your commander speaking. We are now in cruising mode and on our way to Jupiter. You can now leave your acceleration seats, remove your spacesuits and switch to space routine activities.’’
With that done, she looked around at her bridge crew.
‘’Alright, start removing and storing away your spacesuits: I will stay at the helm and monitor things while you do that. Then, we will go have lunch once the afternoon shift shows up.’’
12:06 (Universal Time)
Ship’s central kitchen
Main Deck, Quadrant 01, Carrousel ‘A’
‘’Joan, start heating up a tub of chicken and noodle soup. Once it will be ready, you will go fill the self-serve pot in the food court.’’
‘’On it, Nick!’’ replied Joan Brewster, the wife of a young Space Corps technician who was part of the crew of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS. She was one of the 132 military spouses who were accompanying their life partners on this mission and who had taken one of the support positions offered by Ingrid Dows. In her case, she was one of the ten wives who were now employed as assistant cooks in either the central kitchen or in the fast food court, situated in the other habitat carrousel of the ship. Since she had worked previously in a restaurant as both a maid and as an assistant cook before getting married a mere two years ago, she had quickly found her pace during the pre-mission training. It also helped that the chief cook of the ship, Senior Master Sergeant Nicholas Buscemi, had proved to be very competent and also polite and friendly with his kitchen hands, in sharp contrast to some other NCOs Joan had met in the past.
Walking out of the kitchen and crossing the central hallway going through the quadrant’s main deck and linking together the sixteen sections, or quadrants, of Carrousel ‘A’, Joan entered the large compartment which served as the ready pantry for the central kitchen. There, she grabbed the handle of one of the shopping carts stored in a corner of the pantry and pushed it down one of the alleys of the pantry, passing by twin rows of storage tablets full of either canned or bagged foodstuff items, all of them secured on their storage tablets by elastic nets. Stopping in front of the tablets supporting big tins of soup of the kind used in restaurants and dinners in the United States, she lifted with some effort a one gallon can of chicken and noodle soup and put it in her cart, then lifted in succession two more similar cans, also putting them in her cart. Once that was done, she turned her cart around and left the pantry, returning to the central kitchen. There, she opened her big cans of soup and poured their content in a large pot already secured atop an electric stove, then started heating the soup. While she waited for the soup to heat up, she saw Cecilia Clark, another military wife, enter the kitchen at a near run, to then present herself with a contrite expression to the chief cook.
‘’Sorry for being a bit late, Nick, but I had to drop my little Cheryl first at the ship’s daycare center.’’
‘’That’s quite alright, Cecilia.’’ replied Buscemi in a jovial tone. ‘’We all had to scramble to come here after the General gave the go to leave our acceleration seats. Just make sure to wash your hands thoroughly before jumping into the preparations for lunch. I expect a wave of hungry customers to hit us soon.’’
Buscemi was proven right quickly, with the start of a growing crowd of patrons arriving after another fifteen minutes. With a total of 521 persons of all ages to feed on the ship, the kitchen crew found itself quite busy, warming up and serving large quantities of pre-cooked recipes of meat, vegetables or pastas, along with a mountain of fresh salad. To ensure a long shelf life for the foodstuff brought on this five-year space mission, most of those pre-cooked recipes came in freeze-dried airtight packages and were thawed only hours before being served. Today, due to their departure time, a quantity of those freeze-dried packages had been taken out of the ready freezer of the central kitchen in advance, so that they could start thawing while the ship departed Earth orbit and accelerated to cruising speed. All this had been made in normal gravity conditions, thanks to the twin contra-rotating habitat carrousels of the ship, which contained all the living and working facilities used by the crew and passengers. Joan, like all the other occupants of the ship, had been able to experience zero-gravity-like conditions during her training, either aboard an aircraft flying in ellipses and justifiably nickname ‘The Vomit Comet’, or aboard the AURORA Space Station, and could easily imagine the nightmare that cooking for over 500 persons would represent if done in zero gravity. She thus thanked mentally Ingrid Dows as she went on with her tasks in the kitchen, for having insisted on incorporating habitat carrousels in the PROMETHEUS’ design.
17:52 (Universal Time)
Ship’s central kitchen
‘’Well, ladies, now that the people of the evening shift has shown up, you are free to return to your spouses and families. Thank you again for your good work.’’
‘’You’re welcome, Nick!’’ replied Joan, imitated by the other wives employed as assistant cooks, who then left the kitchen as a group, mixing up in the central hallway with the first crewmembers and guest scientists to show up for supper. On her part, Joan went to the next section of the carrousel, Quadrant 02, and used one of the two staircases there to go down to the median deck, one level down, where the cabin she shared with her husband Jack was situated. Once on the median deck, Joan walked across the nineteen-meter-long and five-meter-wide lobby/lounge of the deck to get to her cabin, saying hello in passing to a couple sitting in one of the sofas furnishing the lobby. Entering her cabin, which measured six meters by five meters and was split in three main rooms, the lounge, the bedroom and the bathroom, she checked first to see if her husband had returned yet from his own shift as a life support systems maintenance technician. Not finding Jack, Joan then decided to take a shower and change while waiting for him. Entering the bedroom, with its queen-size bed, she undressed quickly and went into the small adjacent bathroom, where she stepped inside the shower stall, closing its curtain before starting to make the water come out of the shower head. That system was actually a copy of the ‘miserly shower’ type found on U.S. Navy ships, where you have to repeatedly press a button to keep the water flowing. She had soaked her body and had rubbed soap on it when she heard someone enter the cabin as she was rinsing away the soap. Next, she heard a familiar male voice.
‘’Joan, are you in?’’
‘’YES, JACK! I’M IN THE SHOWER.’’
Her husband walked at once into the bedroom and then into the small bathroom, where he pulled the shower’s curtain slightly open to smile at her.
‘’Do you mind if I join you in the shower?’’
‘’Of course not, Jack! I will help soap and scrub you.’’
Smiling with anticipation, Jack, a tall and fit young man with red hair, quickly undressed on the spot, then stepped inside the shower stall, squeezing Joan’s naked body between his body and the wall. Joan immediately felt his reaction to her nudity and gave him a devilish look.
‘’Hmm, hungry for something apart from supper?’’
‘’Damn right I am, Joan! Let me remove the sweat and grime covering me first, then we will jump into some fun interaction.’’
Interaction…that’s your latest way to describe sex?’’
‘’Why not? It does imply some interaction, after all.’’
‘’You’re right. Soak yourself first, then I will help you soap up.’’
As Jack started turning around in the shower stall in order to wet his whole body, Joan started to rub his body, continuing to do so as he applied soap on himself. Scrubbing his back and bum first, Joan then concentrated on his front, with her hands staying a good minute over his groin area. Seeing him react with pleasure to her attention, Joan kept her hands active until he attained orgasm with a grunt of pleasure. Jack then returned her favor by kneeling in front of her and using his two hands and his tongue on her. Joan also attained orgasm after a couple minutes of that treatment, with the couple then kissing tenderly before rinsing their bodies one last time. Jack stepped out of the shower stall first and, grabbing a towel, dried up Joan’s body with gusto, arousing her again. By the time she was finished drying him in return, Jack was again fully aroused as well, prompting his wife to gently push him towards their bed.
‘’I believe that we have unfinished business here, Jack. Why don’t you lay down a bit?’’
‘’Uh, shouldn’t I go put on a condom first?’’
That stopped Joan, who thought for a moment before answering him with a question of her own.
‘’Jack, we agreed before marrying that we wanted to have at least one child, preferably two. Do we want to wait another five years before trying for the first? They have everything here aboard this ship to care for infants and young kids.’’
Jack only had to think for a second before he smiled down to his wife.
‘’You’re right, my love. Let’s try for the first one right now!’’
On hearing that, Joan pushed Jack, making him fall on his back atop the bed. She went on her four and crawled over him, then impaled herself on him before presenting her hanging breasts to his waiting hands.
‘’Show me how good you are, tiger!’’
Forty minutes later the couple, having showered again and changed into informal civilian clothes, left their cabin in order to go have supper.
‘’So, where should we go eat, Joan? At the main cafeteria or at the fast food court?’’
‘’I saw the supper’s menu before leaving the central kitchen: there is Chicken à la King on it, one of your favorite dishes.’’
‘’Sold!’’ replied at once Jack, who then took Joan’s hand and started walking with her towards the staircase leading up.
The Chicken à la King, one of the recipes in the long and varied list of pre-cooked dishes stored aboard in large freeze-dried airtight packages, met with Jack’s approval, who devoured his food while Joan ate a portion of Veal Marsala. Both of them left the cafeteria sated after dropping their dirty plates and utensils at the dishwashing counter of the food court. Jack then looked down at his wife as they were walking out of the food court.
‘’So, what would you like to do next this evening, Joan?’’
‘’How about we go to the lower observation lounge first, to go admire Earth as we speed away from it? We could then go visit the BOURBON STREET Jazz night club: they are giving their first show tonight.’’
‘’Sounds good! I will lead you to the observation lounge.’’
‘’Thanks! I am not sure that I can find my way alone in this ship: it is so huge!’’
‘’Yes, it is, but it is so for a good reason: to make long space missions bearable by including as many crew facilities as possible in its design. Thankfully, General Dows understood how important the human factor is on such long missions. The same can’t be said of the Navy, where sailors have to spend months at sea while living out of three or four-tiered bunk beds arrangements.’’
Jack didn’t say more then, although he could have said a lot more. As tempting as this mission to Jupiter had been, he would never have accepted or asked for a spot on its crew list if that would have meant leaving Joan behind for five years. On the other hand, he was very conscious that, would he have volunteered to leave alone for Jupiter, the chances were that Joan would probably have divorced or left him by the time he returned to Earth.
Following the circular central hallway at main deck level, the couple then took place in one of the four elevator cabins running up and down the port communications hub tube of Carrousel ‘A’, rising to the level of the rotating central hub of the carrousel. As they went up, they felt the gravity diminish quickly, ending in near-zero gravity condition by the time they stepped out of the elevator. Their magnetized boot soles then helped them stay on the deck as they switched to another elevator cabin which circulated along an axis at right angle to the one they had just used. That cabin finally dropped them at the level of one of the two lower observation lounges of the ship, which gave a direct view of space below the PROMETHEUS. When they arrived in the observation lounge proper, a doughnut-shaped hallway with armored plexiglass windows around its sides and deck, they found that many other occupants of the ship had the same idea than they had. Using the handrails running along both sides of the hallway, Jack and Joan walked to an unoccupied spot in front of one of the observation windows, where they could see the Earth, still visible as a big blue and white ball in the black background of Space. Joan snuggled against Jack’s side while she admired Earth.
‘’What a fantastic, beautiful sight! I guess that few other Humans were able to contemplate that kind of sight before.’’
‘’You’re right, Joan. Only the crews who went to either Mars or the Moon were able to look at Earth the way we are doing now. With luck, our first child will also be able to admire this sight in five years’ time.’’
‘’I wish so too!’’ replied Joan while snuggling even closer to her husband.
14:17 (Universal Time)
Saturday, October 25, 1980 ‘C’
Ship Commander’s office, Main Deck, Quadrant 09
Carrousel ‘A’, U.S.S. PROMETHEUS
When Ingrid answered her telephone, it was to hear the voice of the ship’s chief medical officer, Colonel Jennifer Biddle.
‘’General, this is Colonel Biddle.’’
‘’Hello, Doc! Are you calling to announce to me bad news or good news?’’
‘’It is definitely good news for you, General, although it would be considered as a bad news by most ship commanders in the U.S. Navy: we now have our third confirmed pregnancy aboard since our departure from Earth orbit.’’
Ingrid immediately broke into a wide grin on hearing that.
‘’But that’s fantastic! Was it a wanted pregnancy?’’
‘’Yes, it was, General. Both of the parents are ecstatic at the news. At this rate, we will have children running everywhere around the ship by the time we return into Earth orbit.’’
‘’And I would approve of it, Doc: Space is the future of Humanity…and the future of our children. Thank you for informing me of this.’’
‘’It was my pleasure, General.’’ said Biddle before hanging up, leaving Ingrid thinking. She had never given birth herself and the urge to have a baby of her own had only become stronger in the last few years. Yes, she was single at this time and would be categorized as a single mother if she gave birth during this mission, something still regarded mostly negatively in the United States, but that wouldn’t bother her one second. More important to her was the fact that a pregnancy would drastically reduce for at least a few months her ability to properly command this ship, and this during a mission where all her crew would be counting on her to safely lead them along. As much as she would like to have a child soon, it was probably going to have to wait until she was back on Earth, in five years or so.
09:55 (Universal Time)
Friday, March 06, 1981 ‘C’
Office of the Chief Agronomist
Main Deck, Quadrant 15, Carrousel ‘B’
U.S.S. PROMETHEUS, halfway to Jupiter
Julie Lecomte’s job description as Chief Agronomist of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS would have sounded like a relatively minor one for most people in the United States. However, such an opinion would have been a big mistake. A veteran of one year-long tour on the Moon and of two expeditions to Mars, the 49-year-old French scientist probably knew more about plant growth in Space than anybody else on Earth and knew everything about hydroponic techniques, where plants were grown indoor in stacked up basins full of liquid nutrient solutions. Those techniques in turn allowed a very efficient year-long production of fresh vegetables and fruits in the least floor surface possible, something that Ingrid Dows had embraced early on in the design of her spaceships. As the Chief Agronomist of the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS, Julie was in charge of the good functioning of a total hydroponic cultivation surface of 40,180 square meters, or the equivalent of 9.93 acres. That cultivation surface in turn made the U.S.S. PROMETHEUS and its 521 occupants self-sufficient in the production of eighteen types of vegetables, ten types of fruits and four types of herbs and spices. While helped by an assistant who specialized in farm animal care and exploitation, Julie was also in charge of an egg-producing hen farm, a chicken farm, a turkey farm, a rabbit farm, a dairy cow farm, a beef cattle farm and a pig farm, all of which made the ship self-sufficient in terms of fresh eggs and dairy products and also provided a partial supply of fresh meat. In turn, those hydroponic gardens and animal farms were run and maintained by 32 qualified hydroponic technicians and by over thirty experienced farm hands, most of which were military spouses who had been hired because of their past life experience on farms and plantations during their youth. All this helped provide to the crew a steady supply of fresh produces which supplemented nicely their reserves of canned or freeze-dried foodstuff, which in turn helped support the crew’s morale on this five-year space mission.
Julie was reviewing the latest agricultural production figures in her office, situated on the main deck of Quadrant 15, Carrousel ‘B’, when the sound of an approaching musical band made her get up from her chair and walk out of her office to have a look down the main hallway, imitated in that by most of the other people present on this level. She smiled in amusement on seeing an approaching marching Jazz band accompanied by a number of young women dancers wearing colorful costumes. Julie then remembered something.
‘’It’s Mardi Gras day, of course! What a wonderful idea!’’
The other persons who had come out of their offices to watch apparently agreed with her, applauding and cheering on the marching band and dancers as they went by on their way to complete a full tour of the main deck level of Carrousel ‘B’. One young dancer in particular attracted a lot of attention and male lust: she was leading the band while dancing energetically and was wearing a colorful but also very sexy and revealing costume typical of the costumes worn by female Brazilian carnival dancers. Apart from a colorful set of feathered angel wings worn on her back, the dancer wore only a tiny string groin piece and a pair of small pastilles clamped to her nipples. An elaborate mask covered the upper half of her face, while glittering gold and silver particles had been glued all over her body. Ankle and wrist bracelets to which a collection of tiny bells was hooked produced some extra music as she danced and walked. When she passed by Julie, the agronomist was able to see that her buttocks were bare, save for a tiny string which helped hold her groin piece. Julie then recognized one of the black Jazz musicians in the band, who was playing a saxophone with gusto, as being Ronald McNair, one of the physicists and members of the Space Corps who were part of the crew. Julie applauded along with the other spectators as the band and dancers passed by her door. Once they were gone out of sight, Julie returned to her office while one of the agronomists on her staff, a bearded Israeli scientist in his late forties, commented gleefully the spectacle they had just witnessed.
‘’This marc