Anderson, Poul - Call Me Joe

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CALL ME JOE

by Poul Anderson

The wind came whooping out of eastern darkness, driving a lash of ammonia dust before it. In

minutes, Edward Anglesey was blinded.

He clawed all four feet into the broken shards which were soil, hunched down and groped

for his little smelter. The wind was an idiot bassoon in his skull. Something whipped across his

back, drawing blood, a tree yanked up by the roots and spat a hundred miles. Lightning cracked,

immensely far overhead where clouds boiled with night.

As if to reply, thunder toned in the ice mountains and a red gout of flame jumped and a

hillside came booming down, spilling itself across the valley. The earth shivered.

Sodium explosion, thought Anglesey in the drumbeat noise. The fire and the lightning gave

him enough illumination to find his apparatus. He picked up tools in muscular hands, his tail

gripped the trough, and he battered his way to the tunnel and thus to his dugout.

It had walls and roof of water, frozen by sun-remoteness and compressed by torn of

atmosphere jammed onto every square inch. Ventilated by a tiny smoke hole, a lamp of tree oil

burning in hydrogen made a dull light for the single room.

Anglesey sprawled his slate-blue form on the floor, panting. It was no use to swear at the

storm. These ammonia gales often came at sunset, and there was nothing to do but wait them out. He

was tired, anyway.

It would be morning in five hours or so. He had hoped to cast an axhead, his first, this

evening, but maybe it was better to do the job by daylight.

He pulled a dekapod body off a shelf and ate the meat raw, pausing for long gulps of

liquid methane from a jug. Things would improve once he had proper tools; so far, everything had

been painfully

grubbed and hacked to shape with teeth, claws, chance icicles, and what detestably weak and

crumbling fragments remained of the spaceship. Give him a few years and he’d be living as a man

should.

He sighed, stretched, and lay down to sleep.

Somewhat more than one hundred and twelve thousand miles away, Edward Anglesey took off

his helmet.

He looked around, blinking. After the Jovian surface, it was always a little unreal to

find himself here again, in the clean, quiet orderliness of the control room.

His muscles ached. They shouldn’t. He had not really been fighting a gale of several

hundred miles an hour, under three gravities and a temperature of 140 absolute. He had been here,

in the almost nonexistent pull of Jupiter V, breathing oxynitrogen. It was Joe~ who lived down

there and filled his lungs with hydrogen and helium at a pressure which could still only be

estimated, because it broke aneroids and deranged piezoelectrics.

Nevertheless, his body felt worn and beaten. Tension, no doubt— psychosomatics. After all,

for a good many hours now he had, in a sense, been Joe, and Joe had been working hard.

With the helmet off, Anglesey held only a thread of identification. The esprojector was

still tuned to Joe’s brain but no longer focused on his own. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he

knew an indescribable feeling of sleep. Now and then, vague forms or colors drifted in the soft

black—dreams? Not impossible that Joe’s brain should dream a little when Anglesey’s mind wasn’t

using it.

A light ifickered red on the esprojector panel, and a bell whined electronic fear.

Anglesey cursed. Thin fingers danced over the controls of his chair, he slewed around and shot

across to the bank of dials. Yes, there—K tube oscifiating again! The circuit blew out. He

wrenched the face plate off with one hand and fumbled in a drawer with the other.

Inside his mind, he could feel the contact with Joe fading. If he once lost it entirely,

he wasn’t sure he could regain it. And Joe was an investment of several million dollars and quite

a few highly skilled man-years.

Anglesey pulled the offending K tube from its socket and threw it on the floor. Glass

exploded. It eased his temper a bit, just enough so he could find a replacement, plug it in,

switch on the current again.

As the machine warmed up, once again amplifying, the Joeness in the back alleys of his brain

strengthened.

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Slowly, then, the man in the electric wheel chair rolled out of the room, into the hall.

Let somebody else sweep up the broken tube. To hell with it. To hell with everybody.

Jan Cornelius had never been farther from Earth than some comfortable Lunar resort. He

felt much put upon that the Psionics Corporation should tap him for a thirteen-month exile. The

fact that he knew as much about esprojectors and their cranky innards as any other man alive was

no excuse. Why send anyone at all? Who cared?

Obviously the Federation Science Authority did. It had seemingly given those bearded

hermits a blank check on the taxpayer’s account.

Thus did Cornelius grumble to himself, all the long hyperbolic path to Jupiter. Then the

shifting accelerations of approach to its tiny inner satellite left him too wretched for further

complaint. And when he finally, just prior to disembarkation, went up to the greenhouse for a look

at Jupiter, he said not a word. Nobody does, the first time.

Arne Viken waited patiently while Cornelius stared. It still gets me too, he remembered.

By the throat. Sometimes I’m afraid to look.

At length Cornelius turned around. He had a faintly Jovian appearance himself, being a

large man with an imposing girth. “I had no idea,” he whispered. “I never thought . . . I had seen

pictures, but.. .“

Viken nodded. “Sure, Dr. Cornelius. Pictures don’t convey it.”

Where they stood, they could see the dark broken rock of the sateffite, jumbled for a

short way beyond the landing slip and then chopped off sheer. This moon was scarcely even a

platform, it seemed, and cold constellations went streaming past it, around it. Jupiter lay across

a fifth of that sky, softly ambrous, banded with colors, spotted with the shadows of planet-sized

moons and with whirlwinds as broad as Earth. If there had been any gravity to speak of, Cornelius

would have thought, instinctively, that the great planet was falling on him. As it was, he felt as

if sucked upward, his hands were stifi sore where he had grabbed a rail to hold on.

“You live here. . . all alone. . . with this?” He spoke feebly.

“Oh, well, there are some fifty of us all told, pretty congenial,” said Viken. “It’s not

so bad. You sign up for four-cycle hitches—four ship arrivals—and believe it or not, Dr.

Cornelius, this is my third enlistment.”

The newcomer forbore to inquire more deeply. There was something not quite understandable

about the men on Jupiter V. They were mostly bearded, though otherwise careful to remain neat;

their low-gravity movements were somehow dreamlike to watch; they hoarded their conversation, as

if to stretch it through the year and a month between ships. Their monkish existence had changed

them— or did they take what amounted to vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience because they had

never felt quite at home on green Earth?

Thirteen months! Cornelius shuddered. It was going to be a long, cold wait, and the pay

and bonuses accumulating for him were scant comfort now, four hundred and eighty million miles

from the sun.

“Wonderful place to do research,” continued Viken. “All the facilities, hand-picked

colleagues, no distractions—and, of course. . .“ He jerked his thumb at the planet and turned to

leave.

Cornelius followed, wallowing awkwardly. “It is very interesti~hg, no doubt,” he puffed.

“Fascinating. But really, Dr. Viken, to drag me way out here and make me spend a year-plus waiting

for the next ship—to do a job which may take me a few weeks. . .“

“Are you sure it’s that simple?” asked Viken gently. His face swiveled around, and there

was something in his eyes that silenced Cornelius. “After all my time here, I’ve yet to see any

problem, however complicated, which when you looked at it the right way didn’t become still more

complicated.”

They went through the ship’s air lock and the tube joining it to the station entrance.

Nearly everything was underground. Rooms, laboratories, even halls, had a degree of

luxuriousness—why, there was a fireplace with a real fire in the common room! God alone knew what

that cost! Thinking of the huge chill emptiness where the king planet laired, and of his own

year’s sentence, Cornelius decided that such luxuries were, in truth, biological necessities.

Viken showed him to a pleasantly furnished chamber which would be his own. “We’ll fetch

your luggage soon, and unload your psionic stuff. Right now, everybody’s either talking to the

ship’s crew or reading his mail.”

Cornelius nodded absently and sat down. The chair, like all lowgee furniture, was a mere

spidery skeleton, but it held his bulk comfortably enough. He felt in his tunic, hoping to bribe

the other man into keeping him company for a while. “Cigar? I brought some from Amsterdam.”

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