by Ian Stewart
Eventually, this decision was overturned—but only after the case had made its way through a series of lengthy and expensive appeals, with platoons of expert witnesses on both sides who examined every aspect of the science in horrendous and conflicting detail. In the end, the appeal was sustained for reasons of jurisdiction, not science—the court ruled that its jurisdiction ended at the Lagrange LI point between the Earth and the Moon, where their gravitational forces canceled out. Anything farther away was not part of its terms of reference. By then, expensive short-lived radioactives had decayed, key items of equipment in the probe and its support systems en route to Europa had deteriorated beyond repair, and much of the funding had been used to fight the court battle, so the project had to be abandoned. Attempts to raise new funds failed, so the near-complete installation of Europa was mothballed and left to its own devices amid the Jovian satellites subarctic ice fields.
When the Jovian Task Force had been conceived and Sir Charles Dunsmoore had been appointed to head it, Europa Base presented itself as the obvious home.
Despite all its shortcomings, Charles felt that the base was a big improvement on the only alternative: staying on board Skylark while it swung in lonely orbit round Europa. Down here there was gravity. He had enough space to stow his belongings where he could get at them easily. He had a narrow but comfortable bed with room to stretch out. He had—
He had rather less space than a convicted mass murderer would have been allotted in an Earthly jail, but a far less comfortable lifestyle.
To cheer himself up, he tried to count his blessings, and ended up more depressed than ever. This had not been part of the game plan. Instead of being stuck in this godforsaken lash-up of inflatable plastic domes and narrow tunnels, he should have been nailing down the presidency of the Egyptological Federation, dining out every night at the taxpayers' expense, and securing over the dinner tables some fast-track appointments to lucrative consultancies.
He lay back on the bed, staring at the translucent plastic sloping strangely overhead, and felt sorry for himself. Through the plastic he could see a fuzzy image of Jupiter, a white-and-brown-striped disk twelve degrees of arc in diameter—an impressive twenty times the size of the Moon from Earth. But the only thing it impressed upon him was the enormity of the task confronting him and how terribly far he was from the comforts of home.
After an hour or so had passed, he worked his way around to some more positive thoughts about the job at hand. It was, he had to admit, the most important job that anyone could ever be given. On its successful conclusion, his return would exceed his wildest dreams. He could—
He could buckle down, get on with the job, and stop thinking about what was in it for him.
This was a new thought, a new kind of thought, though he had a vague feeling that once, as a much younger man, he had entertained such thoughts, and even used them to align his life. He had secured research grants in order to do research. He had done research in order to find things out. Somewhere along the line, he had lost that simplicity of motive, and advancing his career had become far more important to him than advancing human knowledge . . .
He had become a politician. It had crept up on him so gradually that he hadn't noticed. Now he was developing a worrying feeling that somewhere along the way he'd lost the plot. Try as he might, he couldn't completely shake it off. Two years confined in an overgrown tin can on its way to one of the most hostile environments in the Solar System were having a curious effect on his mind. It was as if the layers of protective coloration had peeled away in the harsh light of an unshielded sun. Sir Charles Dunsmoore reviewed his scientific life and discovered that for most of it he had been living an elaborate lie, advancing himself by deceit, conniving, and bribery. Once, not so long ago, he would have been proud of his record, preening himself at his own cleverness in comparison to the foolish, naive honesty of his opponents . . . Suddenly all that seemed hopelessly tawdry, suited to a lifestyle that made sense when you focused your mind only on the immediate world around you, the world of people and the games they played. When that entire world was no bigger than a speck of dust, it all seemed very unimportant in the scheme of things. He didn't give a damn who became president of the Egyptological Federation. How would that affect the comet?
The oddest thing of all was that after this bout of dismal introspection and self-flagellation, which he knew had been brought about by the stress of the voyage and the anticlimax of its end, he found himself feeling a lot more positive. Humanity might not count for anything in the cosmic scheme of things, but it counted for him. There was a job to do, the most important job that any human being could have. It no longer mattered what was in it for him. What mattered was what was in it for everybody else.
Pin Yi-wu, a minor clerk in the Fourth Crime-Prevention and Punishment Division of the Civic Inspectorate of the Yishan Economic Enterprise Zone, Zhuangzu Province, was having a bad day. Some idiot subordinate had filed a report about street-child activity in his jurisdiction. Some jackal dung about them becoming an organized force, making raids into outlying high-rise apartment blocks, stealing food from markets . . . rallying behind a charismatic leader . . .
Blatant nonsense, of course. The street kids were pure anarchy. He'd never understood how they survived at all, though in truth individual children didn't, not for long. They were just constantly replenished from the shanty towns.
Unfortunately, once a report was filed, something had to be done about it, and the someone in charge of that step was him. Hence his annoyance. If only the fool had inquired unofficially first, it would have been easy to sidetrack the whole issue. But now . . .
Sighing at the burdens life imposes, especially those in the form of overzealous subordinates, he stared at the box on the report form where he was required to recommend further action. If any. A less experienced civil servant might well have hit it with the "no action required" stamp and assumed that that would be the end of the matter. But Pin knew that hastily dismissed items had a habit of returning when one least expected them to, accompanied by requests for an explanation of ones poorly judged recommendation. The first role of any bureaucrat is to cover one's own hack, he thought. Nobody else will.
The trick was to boot the foolish thing upstairs without being seen to take it seriously or to recommend anything—including a recommendation to take no action. Equally, it would not do to be seen to have passed on nonsense to a superior.
He would flag it for routine attention higher up the hierarchy, but append a note pointing out the report's evident deficiencies and suggesting (but not recommending) that if it were thought that there might perhaps be something factual behind it, then the wise step would be to dispatch an independent investigator—should such a curious matter be deemed worthy of such action.
It seemed obvious that the report had been conjured up by a brain rendered credulous by strong drink—though Yu was normally a teetotaler . . . But that silly passage about trained packs of wild dogs made no sense at all. For that matter, neither did the color of the alleged leaders skin.
Probably just dirt.
Skylark was equipped with nine OWLs —low-powered shuttles capable of commuting between Jupiter's moons and landing on them, but not suited to the rigors of long-haul interplanetary transport. During the voyage they had doubled as sleeping quarters for the crew. The ship—too elegant a name by far for such an odd bundle of nanofiber struts and misshapen compartments—had capacious cargo bays packed solid with equipment and materials. Its accompanying flotilla was mostly given over to life support for the crews.
Every one of Skylark's modules also served as additional storage. Sir Charles and his task force had been terrified that they might have forgotten something vital.
Nobody knew what to expect; nobody knew what the expedition would need. The problem with aliens is: they're alien. What they did know was that unless any particular item was on board, or could be made with what was, then it might as well be buried at the Earth's core
. Two years' journey from Earth, the expedition was effectively on its own.
Top priority: locate the aliens. Next: communicate with them. But not far down the list was an alternative strategy, locate active wheelers, because those would surely lead to the Jovians themselves. So the task force would monitor the entire electromagnetic spectrum for signals.
There was no room on Skylark to deploy all of the available equipment, but the old base on Europa would fit the bill beautifully. So the first task had been to unmothball Europa Base, transfer a lot of the equipment down to it, and set up a variety of search and monitoring systems. The aliens were widely expected to be living on one (or more) of the moons—Jupiter itself was so inhospitable that it would surely be inimical to intelligent life. However, a small but influential band of dissident advisers was convinced that the aliens could nevertheless be on Jupiter, so Skylark carried a variety of probes designed to plumb the depths of the gas giant's poisonous, high-pressure atmosphere.
Sir Charles considered the dissidents' opinion to be completely mad. Jupiter's surface—inasmuch as there was one—was a small, incredibly dense core of metallic hydrogen, buried at pressures of two-thirds of a million tons per square inch and temperatures above thirty thousand degrees Celsius. Nothing could live in such an environment.
The first serious activity, then, would be to explore Jupiter's moons. Even that would stretch resources to the full. The planet probes would stay under wraps.
A debate was raging. Were the wheelers machines, or an unprecedented form of life? Their structure was turning out to be way beyond the reach of Earthly technology—an interlocking three-dimensional jigsaw that seemed to have been assembled one atom at a time, monomolecular crystals, impossibly tight tolerances . . . The substructure was more intricate than any human nanomachine: life was the only thing on Earth that could match it. But, no matter how extensively the scientists probed, they could find nothing at all that could be an analogue of genes. They'd have settled for long-chain metalloid polymers— no one was expecting to find wheeler DNA—but there was nothing that could pass information about body plans and behavior to the next generation. Worse, there were no signs of wheeler reproductive organs. So the complexity scientists insisted that the wheelers were a form of life, because of their organization, and the bioinformaticists insisted they were not, because they had no heredity. It was an old battleground.
While the scientists and the philosophers argued, Skylark maintained station in the Europan void. Occasionally an ion motor glowed as Captain Hugo Greenberg authorized an accompanying vessel to make a routine course correction to avoid drifting away from the flotilla.
Probes controlled from Europa base prowled the three primary targets—Ganymede, Callisto, and especially Europa—looking for signs of aliens or wheelers.
Three months passed. Six. Ten.
Nothing.
It had all been so positive to begin with. For the teams on board the Skylark and at Europa Base, the first few months had flickered from anticipation to memory in a timeless instant.
There had been radio antennas to deploy, ready to scan the spectrum for the messages that the aliens must surely be using to communicate with each other. There were remote probes to be attended to, making a systematic search of Jupiter's moons to find the aliens' center of operations. They had to be reassembled, readied for use, their systems tested and if need be repaired or reprogramed. Day after day they were spat out from Skylark like surplus seeds from a slice of watermelon—this one to Ganymede, that one to nearby Europa, the majority to Callisto because that's where the wheelers had been found.
lo was considered too unstable for the kind of high-tech installation that presumably would be needed to move bodies roughly three thousand miles across. Before the expedition had set out, mathematical physicists had calculated that the amount of energy expended by the aliens in that one maneuver had been 2 X 10^® ergs—roughly a thousand years of the Earth's total commercial generation of electrical power. Anything capable of handling that much energy ought to be easy enough to locate.
Nothing.
Were they looking in the wrong place? Or was there nothing to be found?
Sir Charles could not avoid remembering a W discussion that he had agreed to take part in, before leaving Earth, to explain to the public some of the detailed scientific thinking behind the mission's configuration and its choice of strategic priorities. With malice aforethought, the program's producers had invited a couple of fantascience authors along as well, to act as devil's advocates. It hadn't gone badly—he'd put up some pretty robust arguments and was generally judged to have won the debate. At the time he'd considered his two opponents to be seriously lacking in the self-criticism department. He realized that they'd been equally sure he had no imagination, which was unfair: he had to decide what to do, not just toss hypotheticals around. He had begun by explaining why they were giving lo low priority . . .
". . . that's certainly a rational line of thought, Sir Charles." That was Valerie Clementine, bestselling author of more than a dozen W novellas set on a high-gravity world that was spinning so fast that its equator was on the verge of peeling oJJ into space. "But: these guys are aliens. You can't rely on human thought patterns. Too parochial."
"Val's right, Charlie," chipped in the second skeptic, a plain-speaking and slightly drunken Australian called Alvin Harris, whose jorte was humorous jar-juture widescreen baroque. "These hozos probably think lo's a real neat place to play Jovian volleyball on the sulfur beaches and lather their scaly hides in the gentle rain from the spouting volcanoes."
"Yes, and for all we know the machines that move the moons might be the size of a suitcase," added Clementine.
Cyrus Feather, the presenter, decided it was time he chipped in. "Sir Charles, is that true?"
"No. It's scientifically impossible to pack enough energy into a suitcase to power this planet's entire civilization for a millennium."
"I dunno," said Harris. "What about a lump of neutron star or a black hole the size of a pumpkin? Come on, mate: two hundred years ago we could pack a ruddy hydrogen bomb into a backpack!"
"Yes, but a hydrogen bomb is piffling compared to what the aliens had to do. And there is no evidence that the aliens can control ultra-dense matter," Charles pointed out patiently. "All we know is: they can move a perfectly ordinary moon."
"Hah! Ordinary moon! My god, Charlie, you're a cool one."
Feather's job was to keep the conversation moving and share it around. "Val — do you have anything to add here?" Why was the woman so timid? Why hadn't the researchers found that out and chosen someone else?
"Um . . . well, Sir Charles. I'm prepared to accept that maybe there is some gigantic machine out there. But how do you know it's not buried, for example . . . or invisible . . . or operating from thirty light-years away?"
Charles could get his teeth into this. "Do you have scientific evidence for what you're suggesting, Val? If you don't, they're not examples of anything. Being able to imagine them doesn't mean they can exist. I can imagine a unicorn the size of a mountain that eats nothing hut lemon sherbet and writes Etruscan poetry on the sky with its horn, but that doesn't mean that such an animal is possible." He was proud of the simile, seeing as he'd made it up on the hoof
Feather changed the subject. "Alvin, you had a question about the Belter telescopes?"
"Oh, yeah. The Belters have been training those big telescopes of theirs on Jupiter's moons ever since they first spotted the comet. Surely they would have seen the kind of gigantic installation you're expecting to find?"
Oh, dear This was a very common misconception, even among trained scientists. He'd heard it a hundred times ... He trotted out his stock answer "At that distance, Alvin, the Belters' instruments can only resolve detail down to about a hundred yards."
Harris was flushed and becoming argumentative. "Wharrabout that new interpretom —"
"Interferometer?"
"Yeah, whaddever Whaddabout it?"
Sir Charles, his eye on the studio clock, now launched into a preprepared winding-up speech. "Solid preparation for foreseeable contingencies will do us a lot more good than wild speculations. For instance, we will he monitoring the entire radio spectrum throughout the voyage. In all likelihood we will pick up their communications before we even get —"
"What if they don't use radio?" Harris interrupted. "We know they can manipulate gravity — why couldn't they use gravity waves to communicate?"
Oh, dear Amateurs. "We've been considering just that possibility for six months. A whole team of cosmologists. The upshot is: it won't work. The bandwidth is far too low. You'd need an antenna the size of the Solar System."
Harris was going red in the face. "How can you be so [BLEEP] sure when you have no idea what technology they've [BLEEP] got?"
Fed enough rope: hanged, Beautiful. "Alvin, please calm down, I agree with you. That's why Skylark has to make a proper study, close up. Vm a responsible scientist. I don't leap to crazy conclusions without seeing the evidence. People in your trade just make things up as you go along." The clock showed only a few seconds to go.