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Ammonia is the same stuff used in household cleaners, only in Jove’s chilly upper atmosphere it’s frozen into little crystals.
    I went through the inventory, typing out questions for the computer about each satellite. Some were recharging their batteries from sunlight right now and transmitting engineering data. Others were bleeding off the excess charge they’d accumulated from particles in Jupiter’s radiation belts, so they weren’t working at full power. I had to check all these things and be sure the operation was “normal” for that particular satellite.
    Routine work, but necessary. We get a lot of vital information from the satellites, and they’re the only way we have of knowing what goes on close to Jupiter. The Can itself is a million kilometers further out.
    This time I cleared my board right away. If a satellite had shown a malfunction, though, I’d have to carefully diagnose the trouble and turn the problem over to Jenny or Ishi. A sick satellite is no joke. Whoever was on duty would have to make a house call on the patient and fix the thing on the fly, in free space.
    I thought about that, absentmindedly tapping the console keys. I like working in Monitoring, sure, but it didn’t exactly make my blood sing. With only thirty teenagers in the Can. Commander Aarons has made an Eleventh Commandment that we fill in where needed. So my personal preferences hadn’t mattered when they moved me indoors, off the repair gang, and into Monitoring.
    But I wanted to be working, dammit, using my hands. I could maneuver shuttles and skimmers and one-man jetters—but here I sat on my ass, a clerk.
    I grimaced and glanced over at the Caltech catalog. Inside, outside, Earthside—where was I going?

Chapter 3
    Zak called me just before I went off shift. He and Ishi were fooling around with nothing much to do. “C’mon over to my place and we’ll goof off,” Zak said. I had some time free, so I went.
    Zak and Ishi were back in Zak’s tiny bunkroom, wedged in like sardines. Zak’s parents weren’t home yet and Zak was messing around with the computer terminal he had installed next to his bunk. “Hey, close the door,” Ishi called to me.
    “You kidding?” I replied. “The three of us packed in here’ll bring on claustrophobia fits.”
    “We want some privacy, Matt old man,” Zak said mysteriously.
    So I closed the door and perched on the edge of Zak’s bunk. “For what?”
    “This,” Ishi said, with his usual eloquence. He flicked on the big display flatscreen on the wall. A black and white picture formed out of a pearly background fog. A woman. Pretty, with long legs. She was peering off to the left. She wore a flowing robe.
    “Who’s she?” I asked.
    “A creation of mine.” Zak said.
    “A snip from Earthside 3D?” I asked.
    “Well, that’s how she got started, yeah. You remember me telling you about those new Simulife codes I got?”
    “Sure. For taking a mechanical system and studying the stresses. You start off with a new design for a grappling arm, say, and the computer draws a picture of it for you. Then you give it jobs to do and the computer studies how the thing will move and what strains it will take. You can see the grappler making awkward motions, and redesign it to avoid that. It’s—” I noticed the two of them grinning at me. “Hey…” I said, thinking.
    “You are a quick student,” Ishi said wryly. “Show him, Zak.”
    Zak punched a read-in code. The woman began to move. She stood up. She smiled right at us and I guessed she was about twenty, maybe twenty-five. She had a nice smile. She was still staring toward me as she reached up and her fingers found a clasp at her throat. The robe fell. She wasn’t wearing anything under it. She was, well, spectacular.
    “Damn,” was all I could say.
    “I can tap in for color,” Zak said, and her skin became a rosy tan. Green eyes. Dark black hair, so black it seemed to have traces of blue in it. She began to turn slowly. A