Voyage

by C. Paul Lockman

  Three hours out, the computer made us aware of an object in our path. Gemma returned from the bathroom to find me half-dressed, sitting in the pilot’s seat and looking slightly worried. “There’s an asteroid, a medium-sized metallic one, smack in the middle of our flight path. We can turn to avoid it, but the Computer is sensing an opportunity and Hal agrees.”

  I showed Gemma a view of the rock from our onboard telescope camera. It was an egg-shaped, brown nodule of ancient stone, brimming with metals, spinning calmly through space in the system-wide ring of such objects known as the asteroid belt.

  “Computer, is this asteroid known to Earth scientists?”

  Three seconds while the machine checked its records. “Not according to the latest database”, he answered. “I think we can call this one ours.” I smiled and gave the Computer a series of instructions.

  “What’s going on?”, Gemma asked, pulling her clothes back on.

  “We’ve just found a way to really kick-start the Jupiter orbit manufacturing processes. This will really get things going. There’s an asteroid up ahead, about an hour away, and Hal wants us to slow down, attach a foraging miner droid and a couple of construction robots. After a few months, they’ll have built a set of thrusters which will perturb the asteroid’s orbit around the sun and push it into a Jovian orbit. Gradually, once the orbit is made elliptical, the rock will become a resource node for the robots working on Jupiter’s atmosphere. Billions of tonnes of raw material, just waiting to be used.”

  Gemma was amazed at this idea. “Hal reckons that, within three years, we’ll be looking at 4000 tonnes of hydrogen a year, all tanked up and ready to use, as well as a host of other gases. Maybe even water, if we can safely get robots down to the surface of the ice moons and pipe up the meltwater into orbiting tanks.”

  It was audacious, somewhat brilliant, a real technical marvel. But Gemma couldn’t hide a concern. “Who told you that you had unlimited access to the Solar System’s resources? Who said you could start mining out here?”

  I nodded, somewhat chagrined, and lost the zeal with which I had explained the plan. “I know. It is a dilemma. Here’s how I think about it. Jupiter contains countless billions of tonnes of hydrogen. I’m talking about taking 4000 tonnes a year, if that. And that will furnish hundreds of ships a year, if ever that many even make it out here. The asteroid… well, there are hundreds of billions of those, all roughly the same, all floating around out here until they hit something, which they inevitably will. In exchange, we get free deep space travel for everyone. Not a bad trade, I think.”

  We threw around these ideas for a couple of hours while the Computer got ready to begin our deceleration burn sequence. Fundamentally, she was still opposed to simply grabbing the System’s resources and utilising them, but she couldn’t get really angry because, apart from anything else, this was a non-profit venture. We weren’t filling tanks with Jovian hydrogen and sending them back to Earth to sell them. We weren’t mining the ice moons to sell the water at exorbitant rates to passing spacecraft. This was all being made available gratis. And if that were the case, there would be little impetus for private concerns to come out here and do the same thing. Distance and radiation aside, the costs would have been cosmic, particularly given the limited opportunities for profit-making. This, we agreed, was the best way to begin human exploration of deep space. Make everything free. Make everyone equal. Keep big business out of it. Having agreed that, we grabbed some sleep, floating relaxed in the warm cabin.

  The Computer controlled our approach to the asteroid, which had yet to be named, and we slowed sufficiently for a small robot cluster to be decelerated further by a thruster pack, and make a grapple-landing on the surface. We pushed the bundle of robots out of the airlock and watched on the cameras as it shot out a penetrator, hooked into the rock, and hauled itself down. Two years of work, toiling away to turn rock into fuel for the thrusters, and then another year of thruster firings, and he rock would be on its way into a Jovian ellipse.

  We approached the King of the Solar System with a real sense of excitement. Few sights, from the early Voyager images to the more recent Galileo mosaics and videos, embodied such majesty and grace as the face of Jupiter, the Great Red Spot and the dozens of moons circling this giant ball of gas.

  The Computer began the burn precisely on time and we used the ship’s cameras to take a look at our target. The Forager had finished producing the various elements we had requested – a small construction robot, a Forager with an added balloon tank of water, and a thruster pack which would help them achieve their ellipse around Jupiter. These were in a configuration which allowed me to clip them together in the cabin and float them into the airlock. As we finished our burn and Jupiter loomed ahead of us, the airlock emptied and the little package of technology floated out into Jovian space, engaged its thrusters, and set off on its mission.

  “Welcome to Jupiter”, I announced as we slid into orbit. The computer was reporting all systems green. “Depending on how long we wanted to stay, the Phoenix could use a little extra fuel. Our hydrogen-gathering system won’t really have starting paying out yet, so we’re going to do this a different way. Are you ready to put your suit on?”

  It was 4am on a Sunday and humanity was about to take its first steps on an alien world. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. I had personally walked on four different planets, one of them man-made, and twelve men had walked on the moon. But beyond our own Earth-Moon system, only I had so far trodden. I wondered if Gemma’s achievement out here would ever make it into the history books, as it so richly deserved to do.

  “Ready when you are”, she answered. She had gotten used to all of this remarkably quickly, almost as if she had done it before. Zero-G wasn’t a problem, the strange experiences in the submersible, being in orbit around her own planet, travelling at near light-speed, and now arriving in the family of Jupiter, none of it phased her. Like a duck to water. And now she was hauling on her suit like she’d done it a hundred times.

  Within each of the suits was a rocket system, very much like that employed by Bruce McCandless in the famous photo of him floating away from Columbia back in the 1980s, but a good deal more efficient. So much so, in fact, that with the assistance of the Computer, we could use these suits to slow down from orbital velocity to a safe landing speed. I had selected our landing site for three reasons, I explained to Gemma as we checked each other’s gear, like scuba divers.

  “Europa is completely gorgeous, according to all the photos I’ve ever seen of the place. Also, the water ice on the surface is fairly much pure, without contaminants that are found elsewhere. And thirdly, there’s the theory that, given sufficient heat from Europa’s core, there could be a large, fresh water ocean under the ice crust. We’re here for a jolly, sure, but we absolutely must check this out.”

  Attached to the back of my suit, freshly produced by our tireless Forager, was a small robot package. Once on the surface, the robots would use a tiny onboard fusion reactor to generate power, melt water to provide longer-term resources, and then build a drilling robot which would bore down through the ice, forming a tunnel which would extend from the surface down until the drill met water. Well, we assumed it would. Probes could then be manufactured in situ, dropped down the hole in the ice, and used to explore the liquid ocean beneath. That there was the slightest possibility of finding life there made the whole exercise more than worthwhile. And that Gemma and I would get to walk on Europa made it far more valuable.

  “One small step, eh?”, Gemma quipped as we got ready to enter the airlock. She was beaming through her suit’s visor, clearly loving this experience. We closed the inner hatch, ejected the air from the lock and opened the outer door. Below us, the icy moon Europa rotated majestically. Her surface was a compelling mix of glassy smooth plains of blue ice, and strange, fractured terrain which resembled canyons or deep river valleys on Earth. We were aiming for one of the plains, and gently stepped out into space, moving steadily away fr
om the Phoenix and trying out our suit thrusters. Readouts on our wrist pads gave us our speed, altitude and various suit statistics. Despite floating through the emptiness of space, the radiation level was almost off the charts. This was the fault of the massive, angry ball of gas off to our left, which was pumping out brain-cooking levels of radiation. Our suits, crafted from advanced plastics only recently made available on Holdrian, could absorb many hours of this punishment, but we could not stay indefinitely.

  “OK, let’s starting losing some altitude. We’re at 376,000ft – are you seeing the same?”, I asked over the suit microphone.

  “Yes. God, it’s beautiful out here. Ready to descend when you are.” We pushed forward the small joystick which controlled the suit’s thrusters and immediately began to tip forward, facing directly down at the surface, and to lose altitude quite quickly. “Down to 350, looking good”, I said, doing my best impression of one of the Apollo guys talking the Commander down to the surface in the Lunar Module. “Check your temperatures, make sure you’re comfortable. Overheating is a risk in these conditions”, I warned, checking that my own suit was within limits. All seemed fine. We were good to go.

  We dropped down closer to Europa every minute, increasingly able to pick out details on the surface. We passed over a large swathe of surface which seemed to have been smashed and pulverised by upwellings from beneath. “Looks like we have a hot core… look at all that ejecta”, I said to Gemma, flying over the chaotic, icy terrain. We were about half a mile apart, which was further than I had in mind, but we needn’t worry about latitudinal corrections until we were much lower.

  “Hey, there’s Phoenix!”, Gemma cried, and above us, the sleek, silver spacecraft was in its own orbit, circling Europa silently. “Beautiful!”

  “140 thousand, about six minutes until touchdown. Want to stay there while I slide over towards you?” Gemma agreed, and I tweaked the joystick to give me a little rightward drift. Within seconds I was right by her, and killed the drift with a quick squirt of the thrusters. “Down past 100,000 feet”, I announced.

  We could now begin to consider our landing site, or at least avoid the larger patches of chaotic ice blocks. The moon revolved beneath us slowly enough now that we could see, on the very horizon, where we would ultimately be landing, and walking in this strange place. “You ever read 2010 by Arthur C Clarke?”, I asked Gemma as we progressed down.

  “No. Is it any good?”

  I chuckled. “Part of it is about Europa. A Chinese team land here and get swamped by a green, slimy thing which is the first indigenous life ever found off the Earth.”

  “Not a very nice welcome”, she thought.

  “One of the Chinese guys survives and makes a transmission which he sets on repeat, claiming to have found life, but that the life in question trashed his ship!” I looked down at the surface, subconsciously scanning it for patches of green.

  “Do you think there is life down here?”

  I had been wanting to do this for ages. Quoting the famous Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China, with the same slangy accent… ‘This is a pretty amazing planet we live on here, and a man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re all alone in this Universe...’

  “46,000 feet”, Gemma reminded me. “Where do you want to put down?”

  I scanned the view and found a nice, clean patch of flat ice, two thirds of the way to the horizon. “Perfect. See that little crater to the left of the flat plain?”

  “Yep. Want to head for the middle of the plain?”

  “Perfect.” We reoriented so that we would descend smoothly onto the flat area, tweaking our control sticks and responding to the shift in our approach each thruster firing brought. “OK, now when we get really low, like under a thousand feet, centre the stick and press it down. That’ll give you a thruster firing directly underneath you, which will very nearly halt the descent. Allow the thrust to ease off until you’re descending at about three feet a second.”

  “OK”, Gemma responded curtly. She seemed to be concentrating hard, focussing on one spot where we would land. We discussed it again, finalising the site. “No, to the right of that… Can you see the black line across the middle, from left to right?” I could. “Just after that there’s a jumble of blocks. Let’s come in before the black line.”

  At just over a thousand feet, knowing that we would overshoot slightly, we both engaged the central thruster and came into a smooth hover. Beneath us was a patch of white-blue ice as flat as a bowling green. I allowed the thrust to dissipate, picked up some downward momentum and let myself fall towards Europa. Gemma was beside me, slightly above, descending more slowly. At 250 feet, I took another look down, confirmed that there was nothing beneath us which might break an ankle or cause us to topple over, and reigned in my descent to a gentle 2.4 feet per second. Gemma had caught up and we touched down almost simultaneously. My feet slid slightly on the icy surface but then the boots got some purchase and I shut down the thrusters.

  The suit felt heavy in this new gravity, around the same as on the moon, one sixth-G. Gemma kept upright as she got used to the sensations of walking here, and the difficult footing. “Are you OK?”, she called over from her landing spot only twenty meters from mine.

  “Yeah, great. Some crampons would be good, but I think I’ve got it.” She took her first steps towards me as I clicked open the straps which held the robot package in place. The relief at getting this weight off my back was considerable. I plonked the insulated package down on the ice and undid the latches to open it up. “Computer, are you reading us?”

  We would be out of contact with the Phoenix for much of our time on the surface, as I had not thought to put in place a satellite relay system, but I wasn’t too worried about that. “Phoenix calling, how do you read?”

  “We’re good, Phoenix, and we’re on the surface and safe. I need you to instruct the Forager to build us some crampons which will fit our boots. Walking here is almost impossible.”

  “On the way”. The little machine powered itself up and, using the three litres of water it had brought from the Phoenix, quickly manufactured high tensile strength crampons and straps to keep them on our boots. We donned these gratefully and took our first confident steps away from our landing site. Behind us, the robots were already getting to work. Solar cells would be built first, then several more construction robots. In a couple of years, a small army of mechanical beings would be exploring the ice crust and, we hoped, the ocean below, searching for mythical Jovian fish. More likely, I reasoned, a few half-frozen bacteria. I couldn’t want to announce it, even at this early stage. So much had to happen before I could even tell anyone we’d been here. The ultimate stealth mission, a billion miles from Earth. Absolutely secret.

  Gemma approached and we linked up to explore this patch of ice. “Hey, want to walk over and see what that black line was?” I agreed immediately and we struck off in the direction of Jupiter, looking up to gaze at the giant planet. The clouds formed bands of colours, reds and oranges, yellows and browns, which gave Jupiter a placid, pastoral feel. The only interruptions to these kindly bands were angry, red and purple storm clouds, hurricanes in the upper atmosphere which had raged for centuries. Galileo drew the Great Red Spot on his original observations of Jupiter using the very first practicable telescope way back in 1604. And he discovered the moon across whose surface we were walking, plodding onwards, planting our crampons securely in the ice and then bouncing slightly as we pushed down to make the next step. It was a curious combination of ice climbing and ballet, at once cumbersome and graceful. It was not tiring. I only wished we could hear the crunch of our boots in the ice. Inside our suits, apart from the faint swish of our air supplies, there was no sound from Europa.

  The black line turned out to be a large, 100 meter across fissure in the surface, so deep that even the lamps from our suits could not penetrate. The ice exposed by this fissure, which looked like it had been carved with a massive meat cleaver, was an enticing
blue colour. “Hey, we should drop one of those robot probes straight down this thing. I bet it leads all the way to the ocean”, Gemma recommended.

  Then it came to me, the boldest and dumbest thing I had ever said. “Let’s find out if it does.”

  Gemma turned to look at me. “What?”

  “Let’s jump in.”

  She was aghast. “Are you fucking insane?”

  “We can use our thrusters to get back up. And the suit will tolerate any temperature Europa can throw at us. We might actually find the ocean”, I offered.

  “What if we run out of fuel, or the water screws up our thrusters? I have no intention of dying on a little ball of ice orbiting Jupiter. I have a family. You want to tell them whose idea it was, if you get back and I don’t?”. She was genuinely angry at my having made this suggestion.

  “Look”, I tried, “we’ve got rope in our suit backpacks, right?” This was true, although there wouldn’t be more than 30 meters of it, and that was intended for emergencies. “I’ll get the Computer to have the robots build some recovery vehicles which can swim down and get us if we’re in trouble. We’ve got nearly ten hours of supplies left and I want to stay here and get some science done.”

  “Fine. Go by yourself. I’m staying here. You”, she added with unaccustomed venom, “are a maniac.”

  I was saddened. It had been a good idea. “Maybe you’re right”, I sighed. “I just thought it would be fun. Really add a highlight to the trip.”

  “Babe, we’re walking on Europa, for God’s sake. That’s not enough?”

  We stared down into the blue canyon together, standing right on its edge. The ice was glittering and beautiful at the top, near the surface where sunlight, and reflected light from Jupiter was reaching it. Further down, it became a subterranean, eerie space.

  “Listen. We can jump in and just take a look around the top part here”, Gemma offered. My ears pricked up. “But as soon as I say stop, we stop. Got it?”