Europa Mon Amour

Chapter14

We settled into a routine as Delta-1A slowly ploughed through space on its way to Saturn, which will be around 750 million miles from Earth when we arrive. This is the reason that NASA stepped up the launch date. They wanted to achieve the mission in the least time, but the only way that we could get there in a little more than seven months is by increasing our velocity to roughly 750, 000 miles per hour, a rather dangerous speed because of the possibility of a collision. It means that the collision avoidance system would have to be quick or we would be dead in an instant.

Occasionally, we would hear the engines fire or the thrusters hiss. This didn’t bother us that much during the day when we were awake, but during the night, it would sometimes wake us. However, we soon adjusted to it and began to ignore it, unless a micro meteor hit the shielding. That would cause a God-awful screech when a tiny object interacted and was annihilated by the electrostatic shield. This was particularly annoying when we traversed the asteroid belt where millions of large and small rocks orbited the sun between Mars and Jupiter.

Our first communications with Mission Control was rather interesting. The bubble headed bleach blond, whose name was Heather Wilson, greeted us in a demeaning manner.

“Greetings love birds,” she said with an annoying smile. “We trust that you’re well and that Delta-1A is functioning as expected. Everything on Earth is fine. We’ve detected a Class-M flare on the sun, but at this time it’s orientation poses no danger to you. We await your report.”

The COM system had an annoying habit of freezing the last frame of video from Earth. We were staring at a silly smiling Heather for the entire time before the reply came back.

I had to remain professional, so I suppressed any outward evidence of being annoyed. “We are both well and Delta-1A is performing at nominal parameters. We are experiencing more intense activity from the collision avoidance system as we pass through the asteroid belt. We expect this activity to subside once we are beyond that region.”

The transmission would require at least ten minutes to arrive at Earth. Usually, this type of inane information was all that we exchanged each week. Some people at NASA had suggested that we have continuous communication so that the world could watch us, but that was nixed not because of concerns for our privacy, but rather because it would consume too much power.

“I still don’t understand why they trusted this mission to us,” Marie said.

“I think it has to do with the fact that they think that young people are more adaptable than older people. They also realize that by sending a male and a female, there is less chance for amorous disputes. They realized that we would adjust to being alone together with no one else to compete or interfere with our relationship.”

“In other words, you believe that they put us together knowing that we would fall in love.”

“I fell in love with you long before the Europa mission, but I was unable to do anything about it until I was alone with you on a long mission. As far as I’m concerned, what happened was inevitable. I can understand it from their perspective though. Once we were overcome with amorous feelings for one another, peace would entail and the mission would have a chance for success.”

“You make it sound as if it were part of the mission plan,” she said, pouting.

“I think it was, but it doesn’t matter. We are now a team.”

“A team locked together in a glass cage.”

I smiled. “We’re the monkeys, remember?”

She giggled.

We got up and ran down the wheel to the food station for lunch, which consisted of sandwiches and a fruit drink.

One change in Marie that I approved of was the fact that she was no longer trying to hide her burn scar from me. She probably figured that she had me hooked now and it didn’t matter if I saw it. Actually, I didn’t mind looking at it. It reminded me of how she had saved my life.

“Do you think we’ll find life forms on Enceladus?” I asked as I munched on a salmon salad sandwich.

“There’s a good possibility that we will,” she said. “After what we found on Europa, the possibility has gone up at least an order of magnitude.”

“We were lucky on Europa that the life forms were not aggressive. That may not be the case on Enceladus.”

“You have to wonder how something large could evolve on a moon not even the size of our moon,” she said.

“Life is obviously a lot more tenacious than we once believed, which means that it’s certainly everywhere. Maybe the UFO nuts are right; aliens have visited us.”

“An alien species that spawned inside an ocean will not visit us,” she said. “We only have to take air to survive a voyage. They would have to take water, a much heavier burden.”

I smiled. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

“What doesn’t make sense is this boring trip,” she said, sounding depressed. “We’re trapped in this cage with nothing much to do for months.”

I grinned. “There’s always something we can do.”

She waved a hand at me. “You are ornery, Ryan Taylor.”

“Yes, and I’m proud of it.”

She giggled.