by Ben Bova
He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer for guidance. No answer came to him, but Grant accepted God’s seeming silence. He hears, Grant told himself. He’ll send the answer. One way or another.
FUSION TORCH SHIP AUSTRALIA
“What’s so great about Earth?” Corvus asked, looking puzzled. “I’ve lived there most of my life. It’s no big thrill.”
Before Deirdre could think of a reply, Dorn said gravely, “I can see where Dee would be excited about it. If you’ve never been there before, well … it is big, and lots of it is still quite beautiful. The tropical rain forests—”
“What’s left of them,” Corvus grumbled.
“The open plains, the mountains, the oceans. They truly are beautiful, more beautiful than any space habitat, certainly.”
Corvus shrugged impatiently. “And the cities, with the crowds and crooks, the noise, the dirt, the diseases.”
“Don’t you like Earth, Andy?” Deirdre asked.
His expression softened. “Oh, I guess so. But it’s not paradise, believe me.”
“I still want to see it, experience it,” she said.
“It’s worth seeing,” said Dorn, almost wistfully.
“Why are you going to Jupiter, Andy?” Deirdre asked.
Corvus made a half-embarrassed grin, glanced at the cyborg, then looked back at her. “I’m going to make contact with those big critters in the ocean there.”
“Make contact with the leviathans?” Dorn said.
Bobbing his head up and down, Corvus said, “Yep. The leviathans.”
“Make contact?” Deirdre prodded. “What do you mean?”
Both hands fidgeting with his tall beer glass, Corvus replied, “You know what DBS is?”
“It’s a sort of brain probe, isn’t it?” she said.
“Sort of. But it’s more than that. A lot more. Deep brain stimulation. It’s a whole new field.”
“Didn’t they try treating cases of depression that way?” Deirdre asked.
Corvus waved a hand in the air. “It didn’t really treat depression. It just tranquilized the patient so he didn’t show any symptoms anymore.”
“The zombie machine,” Dorn muttered.
“That’s what some people call it,” Corvus said, looking slightly nettled. “They used it on convicts in jail. Kept them pacified, cut down on prison violence. A lot.”
“But the suicide rate tripled.”
Deirdre said, “You seem to know a lot about it, Dorn.”
The human half of his face twitched into what might have been a grimace. “I’ve received an accelerated education on the subject.”
“How come?” Corvus asked.
Flexing his prosthetic hand, Dorn replied, “I have been hired by the scientific directors of station Gold as a sort of experimental animal. They want to see how my body might be advantageous when it comes to probing Jupiter’s ocean. For the past year I’ve been a prime research specimen at Selene University, on the Moon.”
“Ooh.” Corvus’s face lit up with understanding. “Being half mechanical, you might be able to take the pressures of a deep dive better, is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“Humans haven’t gone down into the Jovian ocean in twenty years,” Deirdre said. “They tried two crewed dives and both were disasters.”
“Still,” said Dorn, “the scientists would like to go deep enough into the ocean to observe the leviathans.”
“They send automated probes down deep,” Corvus said.
Dorn nodded. “Now they want to send people.”
“But why?” asked Deirdre. “It’s so dangerous! And the robot probes can do anything people can do, can’t they?”
Corvus shook his head. “They can do everything except react to the unexpected, Dee. The robots can only answer the questions that we knew how to ask before they go into the water. You can’t program a computer to handle unexpected situations.”
“You can link human controllers,” she pointed out. “Have them in charge in real time so that—”
Dorn interrupted her. “As I understand it, the probes must go so deep into the ocean that they can’t maintain contact with the orbiting station. Electronic signals can’t penetrate the depth of water. Not even laser beams can get through.”
“Couldn’t they put relay stations into the ocean?” Deirdre asked. “They could pass the signals—”
“It’s too deep,” Corvus interrupted. “And the relays would have to stay more or less fixed in position.”
“Impossible in the currents of that ocean,” added Dorn.
Deirdre said, “Oh. So that’s why they want to send humans again.”
Both men nodded.
“But it’s so dangerous!” Deirdre exclaimed again. “Who would want to go down there?”
“I would,” Corvus answered, without a microsecond’s hesitation.
Deirdre looked aghast at the idea. “Why would you—”
“To make contact with the leviathans,” Corvus said before she could finish her question.
“Using DBS?” Dorn asked.
Bobbing his head again, Corvus said, “It’s a variation of the deep brain stimulation concept. You can link your brain to the brain of another person. It was originally developed for the intelligence services, and police. You know, you can probe a person’s brain, pull out everything he knows, whether he likes it or not.”
“Is that legal?” Deirdre wondered.
Ignoring her question, Corvus went on, fairly trembling with growing enthusiasm, “Well, back at the University of Rome, our professor got the idea of linking with nonhuman animals. Great for biological studies. Ecological, too. You can experience what an antelope or a lion experiences, see the world the way they see it. We started out with elephants, then chimpanzees. The anthropologists went crazy over it!”
“I can imagine,” Dorn muttered.
“No, seriously,” Corvus said eagerly. “I was one of Professor Carbo’s best students. I could link more easily than any of the others. I was an elephant out in the Serengeti for a solid week!”
Deirdre giggled. “I hope it wasn’t mating season.”
Looking almost hurt, Corvus said, “This is the only way we’re going to make any meaningful contact with the leviathans. Using neuro-optronic probes to link our brains with theirs.”
“Assuming the leviathans have brains,” Dorn said.
“They’ve got to! Critters that big? They’ve got to have a central nervous system with a brain to direct those enormous bodies.”
Dorn shook his head slightly. “You’re assuming that Jovian biology works on the same principles as our own. We have no way of knowing that’s true.”
“Wrong!” Corvus snapped. “We’ve studied those living balloons that float through the Jovian atmosphere, and some of the other airborne creatures. They all have brains.”
“Do you intend to try to link with them before you try to reach the leviathans?”
“I sure do.”
Deirdre put a hand on Corvus’s arm. “Andy, does that mean you’ll have the linking equipment implanted in your own brain?”
“Doesn’t have to be implanted,” Corvus said. Tapping his temple, he explained, “You just fit the sensors on your head, like a crown.”
“But how will you fit the sensors on the leviathans?” she asked.
Corvus’s enthusiasm wavered the slightest bit. “Well, we’ll have to get close enough to one of ’em so we can attach a sensor rig to its hide.”
“Like harpooning a whale?”
“Sort of.”
“Shades of Moby Dick,” Dorn muttered.
“And you intend to go down into the ocean and do this yourself?” Deirdre asked.
Corvus nodded. “Yep. Sure do.”
The three of them looked at each other, none of them knowing what to say next.
“DINNER IS SERVED IN THE MAIN DINING ROOM,” announced the ship’s intercom through the speakers set into the lounge’s overhead.
“Dinner!” Corvus fairly leaped to his feet. “Let’s go. I’m starving.”
Deirdre felt relieved as she pushed her chair away from the cocktail table. She felt uncomfortable about Andy’s blithe willingness to immerse himself in the dark depths of the Jovian ocean and connect his brain to an optronic stimulator system. And my other companion is a cyborg, she said to herself. I sure can pick ’em.
Dorn got to his feet too and the three of them joined the others heading for the dining room.
Before they went a dozen steps, though, a burly, shaggy man in a tan one-piece coverall strode up to them and took Deirdre’s wrist in his thick-fingered hand.
“You’ve got to be the most beautiful woman aboard this ship,” he said, staring at her with unabashed admiration. “No, I take it back. You’re the most beautiful woman this side of Earth.”
“Thank you,” Deirdre said, deftly removing his hand from her wrist.
“I’m G. Maxwell Yeager. Don’t ask what the G stands for. I’m your dinner partner.”
G. Maxwell Yeager was almost as tall as the lanky Corvus and almost as wide across the shoulders as the cyborg Dorn. His face was stubbled with the beginnings of a dirty-brown beard and his hair, also sandy-colored, was a smoothly brushed mane that fell past his shoulders. He wore a rumpled khaki jumpsuit and an incongruous pair of shiny black cowboy boots, into which he had stuffed the legs of his coveralls.
He appraised Deirdre with a look that was halfway between sheer admiration and a blatant leer.
Reaching for her wrist again, he said, “Come on, let’s go to dinner.”
Deirdre backed away a step and Dorn moved between them, grasping Yeager’s extended arm with his prosthetic hand. “The lady is with us,” he said.
Yeager stared at the cyborg for a moment, then shrugged nonchalantly and said, “Okay, okay. In that case, I’ll join you.”
With Dorn on one side of her and Andy Corvus on the other, Deirdre left the lounge and entered the adjacent dining room. Shaggy-haired Yeager kept in step with them, on Dorn’s other side.
“Hey, Max,” a younger coverall-clad man called to him. “I thought you were gonna eat with us.”
Yeager waved at him dismissively. “I found somebody better-looking than you ugly mugs.”
Deirdre saw that the younger man was part of the raucous group that had been sitting together in the lounge.
“Scoopship team,” Yeager explained to her. “Engineers. You know what they say about engineers: so narrow-minded they can look through a keyhole with both eyes.”
Andy giggled. Dorn remained impassive. Deirdre wondered why Yeager made fun of engineers.
“I’ve heard about you,” Yeager said to the cyborg. “You’re a priest or something, aren’t you?”
“Or something,” Dorn muttered.
Deirdre felt Dorn’s reticence like a palpable force. She said to Yeager, “And what’s your reason for going to Jupiter, Mr. Yeager?”
“It’s Doctor Yeager,” he replied, drawing himself up haughtily. “Doctor of engineering physics, University of Arizona.” Then he grinned at her. “But you can call me Max.”
“Hi, Max,” Corvus said good-naturedly from Deirdre’s other side. “I’m Andy.”
Yeager hadn’t taken his eyes off Deirdre. “And pray tell, fair one, what might your name be?”
With some reluctance, she told him, “Deirdre. Deirdre Ambrose.”
“Deirdre,” Yeager echoed. “That’s an Irish name. It means ‘passionate,’ doesn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Deirdre lied.
The dining room was just as sumptuously decorated as the lounge, and it was filling up rapidly. Yeager spotted a table for six halfway across the big chamber and led the others to it. He moved around the table to sit beside Deirdre, then tipped the chair on his other side to lean against the table.
“Put up the chair beside you, Andy,” he said to Corvus as they all sat down.
Blinking in puzzlement, Corvus asked, “Why?”
“They’ll think we’re saving the seats for another couple of people,” Yeager explained. “That way we can just be the four of us without any strangers butting in.”
“But we’re all strangers,” Corvus blurted. “I mean, we just met a few minutes ago.”
Yeager waved him down. “Nah, we’re old buddies. Shipmates.”
He dominated their conversation all through dinner, talking almost exclusively about himself.
“So I tackled the challenge. Me and my grad students. That’s three of them over at the table across the room, with the scoopship team. We designed a submersible vehicle that can carry a maximum of six human crew a thousand kilometers deep into the Jovian ocean and allow them to cruise down there for at least five days.”
“A considerable engineering challenge,” Dorn admitted, as he carefully brought a forkful of hydroponic greens to the human side of his mouth.
Yeager agreed cheerfully. “There’ve been two human missions into that ocean and both ended in disaster. Casualties. People got killed.”
“The pressure down that deep must be incredible,” Corvus mused.
“It is, and then some,” Yeager said. “Some of the uncrewed probes have been crushed. I mean, it’s tough down there.”
Deirdre listened with half an ear as Yeager nattered on. She wondered about Dorn. He was a priest? That was weird. He wasn’t wearing anything that looked clerical: just plain gray coveralls. The left side of his face was etched metal, as was the top of his head. His left arm was prosthetic. A priest? she wondered. He said the scientists wanted to see if he could handle the pressures of a deep dive better than a normal human. That means they’re planning a crewed mission into the ocean. After nearly twenty years. After killing people both times they tried it before.
“So I completed the design and my people have built the dingus out at Jupiter orbit,” Yeager was saying. “Now I’m heading out to the Gold station to supervise the final checkout before we start testing the beast.”
Andy Corvus looked impressed. “A submersible that can carry humans safely deep down into that ocean.”
Yeager mopped up the sauce on his plate with a crust of soybread. “It was a tough design challenge, let me tell you.”
No one responded to that, so he went on, holding the dripping crust in two fingers, “The secret is, you’ve got to make the beast big. I mean big. Big as the research station, almost. The problem with those earlier birds is they made ’em too small.”
“As big as Gold itself?” Dorn asked, intrigued despite himself.
Yeager nodded as he popped the bread in his mouth and chewed vigorously.
“That big, just to hold six people?” Corvus asked.
Gulping down the crust, Yeager said, “You need the size to handle the pressures. Compression. The vehicle’s built like a series of nested shells, one within the other. Like those Russian dolls, you know.”
“Babushka dolls,” Corvus said.
“Matryoshka,” Deirdre corrected.
Yeager grinned at her. “You know, for an incredibly beautiful woman, you’re pretty smart.”
Dorn bristled visibly, but Deirdre simply gave the engineer an icy glare.
Yeager took it all without malice. “Freedom of speech,” he said, almost wistfully. “It can get you into a lot of trouble. Ah well. What’s for dessert?”
“Tell us more about this ship you’ve designed,” Corvus said. “I’m going to be one of your passengers.”
“You?” Yeager looked surprised.
“Me,” Andy said. For once, he looked totally serious.
PASSENGER QUARTERS
Dorn accompanied Deirdre to her stateroom once dinner was finished. As Dr. Pohan had told her, the map screens placed strategically along the passageway bulkheads showed where her quarters were and how to get there. All she had to do was ask.
Despite her assurances to her father, the higher g force of the ship’s acceleration was making Deirdre feel we
ary, slow.
“Thank you,” she said as they walked slowly along the passageway. “I appreciate your protecting me from Dr. Yeager.”
“I learned courtesy from a very noble woman,” Dorn said, his voice low, heavy.
With a tired smile, Deirdre added, “I’ve fended off showoffs like Yeager most of my life, but I’m glad I didn’t have to do it alone, tonight.”
“De nada,” he said.
“You speak Spanish?”
“She did.”
“You must have loved her very much.”
Dorn shook his head slowly. “It’s not that simple.”
“Oh.”
Following the maps displayed upon the wall screens, they at last found Deirdre’s stateroom. Its door was like all the others that lined the passageway except that the oblong electronic screen on it bore her name. Another couple came up the passageway from the other side, deep in whispered conversation. They stared at Dorn as they squeezed by.
“I should be jealous of you,” Deirdre said, once they had passed.
“Jealous?”
“Usually I’m the one people stare at.”
Dorn said nothing.
“Since I was twelve,” she went on.
It was impossible to read the expression on the human side of his face. For long moments they simply stood there in the passageway, silent. For the first time in many years, Deirdre wasn’t sure what she should say, how she should handle this … cyborg.
“Thank you,” Dorn said at last.
She blinked at him. “For what?”
“For not asking about my past. For not probing into my life story.”
“It’s painful to you.”
“Painful. Yes.”
Very softly, she said, “Everybody has pain in their lives, Dorn.”
“I suppose that’s true,” he said, without much conviction.
Even more unsure of herself, Deirdre said, “Well, if you ever want to talk about it, I’ll listen.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“Good night, then.”
“Good night.”
This was the moment when guys made their move, Deirdre knew, but the cyborg merely bowed stiffly a few centimeters, then turned and started walking up the passageway.