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The shuttle docked at the Europa tower with a thud. The pilot had made the landing
with the exterior cameras’ feeds displayed on the secondary monitors, but there wasn’t
much to see. Europa’s ice, even in the enhanced view, was a lumpy grey with reddish
swirls. The top of the tower was a dull black lump that looked as if it projected less than
five meters over the surface.
“Why do they call it a tower?” I craned in towards the monitor.
“It’s tall,” the pilot assured me without looking away from her monitor. “It goes down
more than a kilometer to the lab complex below. That’s what they say, anyway – you
wouldn’t catch me going inside this rusty iceball.”
Her description of the smallest of Jupiter’s inhabited moon seemed apt, although the
job I’d been offered in the lab was too good for me to say so. Compared to the glow of
Io’s domes surrounded by drifts of golden sulfur frost, though, my new home seemed
twice as dismal.
“How long ‘til the lock cycles?”
She pointed to a blinking readout by her left elbow. “It’s already started. You should
go down and grab your stuff now. Trust me, you want to get over before they start
loading protein. The cubes are a meter square, and they smell <i>organic</i>, despite
the freezing process.”
The krill farms were the whole reason for the Europa station, the largest food producer
in the outer solar system. After a year of work as a biologist at the Europa facility, my
resume should carry me anywhere that I wanted to go. A lucky few of the researchers
and technicians at the station had developed and patented new strains of krill or the
chemosynthetic bacteria they lived on. If that happened for me during my stay at the
station, I’d own a share in the food supply of the whole outer system. Even a single
share of that business represented an unthinkable amount of wealth.
Daydreams of academic and financial successes occupied me as I gathered up my
belongings (a slim bag that held my two jumpsuits and holocube). When I got to the
shuttle’s bay, I saw that they were already loading the protein into it. I only barely
dodged a pallet of the cubes guided by a technician whose face was blanked out by a
sanitary mask. In the tower’s half of the lock, another technician in the same outfit of
heavy-duty jumpsuit and anonymous sanitary mask was guiding a second pallet into
position. I squeezed up against the wall and the person (it was impossible to tell age,
gender or ethnic affiliation through the obscuring mask) drove the pallet into the shuttle
without greeting me.
“Dr. Park! Over here,” a man called. On the other side of the tower bay, a man waved
to me. I noted with some relief that he wasn’t wearing a sanitary mask, but almost as
oddly, he had a beard. On Io and Ganymede, at least, it was normal for those who could
grow a beard to use an inhibiting depilatory. I had never had to use one myself, but the
sight of the man’s atavistic facial hair made my face itch. I controlled the urge to scratch
at my chin and offered him my hand instead.
“Thank you for coming to meet me. I take it that there isn’t an infectious hazard on the
station?”
“An infectious hazard? Oh, no. The techs born on station just have a, well, you might
call it a superstition about diseases from outside. They always wear full bio-containment
gear when they load the shuttles,” my guide explained. He entered a key code into the
wall panel beside him and a door slid open.
“Let’s get in the lift before the techs finish unloading,” he said.
“We aren’t all going to ride down together?”
“No. Until they feel that you’ve passed the full decontam procedures, the techs won’t
want to share a lift or a galley with you,” he told me. The material I’d read about Europa
hadn’t included any of these customs.
“But how will I work with them? I understood that I was going to start shifts within a
standard day,” I asked plaintively.
He shook his head. I found it hard to read his expression behind the beard. “You
should start within the day, but that would be, oh, a little more than three standard days .
. . no, three and a half.”
I tried to calculate it, but found that I was too tired. “How many hours is that?”
“We’re on a hundred-hour day, Dr. Park,” he told me.
“But how long is an hour?”
“One hundred minutes, of course.”