by Ben Bova
Pascal played straight man. “Why do you say that?”
Spreading his hands in a gesture of explanation, Karlstad said, “If Grant was Catholic, then any offspring they produce would have to be raised in the Church.”
The two women sputtered laughter as Karlstad guffawed at his own joke. Grant took it in good-humored silence, forcing a smile at his own expense, thinking that he hadn’t encountered such doltishness since he’d said good-bye to Raoul Tavalera on the old Roberts.
They joked about dating behavior and made sexual innuendos all through dinner. At last the subject seemed to wind down. By the time they were digging into the fruit cups and soymilk ice cream of their desserts, Grant thought they were finished with it.
Then Pascal asked, quite seriously, “Do you think you could get Sheena to undergo a brain scan?”
Grant blinked with surprise. “You mean an NMR scan of her brain?”
“More detailed,” said Pascal. “I have the equipment in my lab, but Sheena put up a fight the last time we tried to get her in there.” Her voice was a warm contralto, caramel rich, heavy with concern.
Grant thought a moment. “Is the equipment portable?”
Pascal made a Gallic shrug. “Like a desk-sized console. Or a small refrigerator.”
“I guess you’d have to sedate her, then.”
She shook her head. “But I want her conscious. I need to see how her brain functions when she’s active.”
“Can’t you do it remotely?” Karlstad suggested. “I mean, you have neural net headgear, don’t you?”
Van Neumann agreed, “Yes, I’ve worn those damned fishnets myself, for days on end.”
With a sardonic smile, Pascal said, “And if you found it uncomfortable, Ursula, how long do you think Sheena would wear one?”
“How long do you need?” Grant asked.
“As long as I can get, of course.”
Nodding, Grant amended, “I mean, what’s the minimum time you’d settle for?”
She thought a moment. “Ten minutes. Fifteen. Half an hour would be excellent.”
“Would you need any special equipment in her pen while she was wearing the headgear?”
Again the shrug. “Oh, the recording receiver needn’t be in the pen with the beast. It can be outside in the corridor.”
“How far away?” Grant asked.
“Ten meters … fifteen.”
“Okay,” Grant said. “Bring the console into the area tomorrow. Just leave it in the corridor without plugging it in.”
“But it’s useless unless Sheena wears the net on her head.”
“I understand. The first step, though, is to get her to accept the recording equipment and not see it as a threat.”
“Oh-ho,” Karlstad said. “Our gorilla-dating scooter is turning into a primate psychologist.”
Grant smiled at him. “Play your cards right, Egon, and I’ll get you a date with Sheena.”
Karlstad held up his hands in mock terror. “No, no! I can do without that!”
Van Neumann smirked at him. “Come on, Egon, this might be your only chance to get laid for months to come.”
Grant and the others laughed. Karlstad frowned unhappily.
* * *
Every evening Grant brought “presents” to Sheena: a simple wooden jigsaw puzzle of four pieces big enough for the gorilla’s thick fingers to handle; a spongy Nerf ball and a Velcro target that Grant glued to the wall of her pen so she could practice throwing; flash cards showing numbers up to ten and the letters of the English alphabet.
And with every new toy he brought, Grant also carried a few fruits or hard candies that Sheena immediately crunched in her powerful jaws and slurped down, licking her lips noisily and asking for more.
Sheena had the run of the aquarium section, which was sealed off with pressure hatches from the rest of the station. Usually Grant found the gorilla prowling the narrow corridor of the aquarium area or sitting quietly on her haunches, staring with endless fascination at the fish and dolphins.
After only a few nights of visiting, Grant found the gorilla waiting eagerly for him at the hatch he always came through. He soon found himself throwing an arm around Sheena’s thick neck and hugging her, hoping that she would restrain herself and not crack his ribs as she hugged him back, desperately praying that neither Karlstad nor any of his other human friends saw him being affectionate with her.
The thought startled him. I said it, he realized. I said “human friends.” For the love of the Living God, I’m thinking of this animal as a friend.
He was sitting on the floor of the corridor, tossing the Nerf ball back and forth to Sheena. The gorilla sat ponderously a few meters away, letting the ball bounce off her chest before she smothered it in her huge hands and then threw it—left-handed, Grant noticed—back to him.
“Good throw, Sheena!” Grant called as he caught the ball. “You’re getting better every night.”
“Good throw,” the gorilla said back to him in her labored, rasping voice.
She is a friend, Grant told himself. Like a child, a little niece or some kid who lives up the street from you. They tossed the ball back and forth until the overhead lights dimmed to their nighttime setting.
“Time for bed, Sheena,” Grant said, clambering slowly to his feet.
The gorilla got up on all fours and turned ponderously toward her pen, walking slowly on her knuckles. She was so big that Grant had to follow her; there was no room in the narrow corridor to walk beside her.
She never argues about bedtime, he thought. With an inward smile he realized that Sheena was better behaved than most of the human children he’d known back on Earth.
Pascal and her assistants had finally moved the recording equipment into the corridor a few meters from Sheena’s pen, Grant saw. Awfully close to her pen, he thought. Maybe too close for comfort. The gorilla stopped at the open doorway of her pen, stared hard at the squarish gray metal console, then turned back toward Grant.
“It’s all right, Sheena,” he said. “Just some equipment from the neuro lab. It won’t hurt you. Nothing to worry about.”
He knew she couldn’t understand all his words but hoped that his tone would reassure her.
Sheena shuffled up to the inert machine, sniffed at the blocky metal console suspiciously, patted it with both hands, then abruptly slapped it hard enough to rock it slightly off its locked wheels.
“No, no!” Grant exclaimed, rushing up to her, wondering how much punishment the solid-state electronics could take.
Sheena turned to him again. It was impossible to read an expression on her face, but Grant thought he saw something in her eyes—puzzlement? worry? fear?
“It’s all right, Sheena,” he repeated. “Nothing to worry about.”
“Bad,” Sheena rasped. “Bad.” And she pushed at the console.
“No, it’s not bad. Don’t be frightened of it. It won’t hurt you.”
She sat down heavily and turned her head from Grant to the silent electronic equipment and back to Grant again.
“Why?” she asked.
Grant forced a smile. “We need to see how your brain works, Sheena. That’s all.”
“No,” the gorilla said firmly. “Bad thing.”
Grant instinctively reached out and rubbed Sheena’s thickly boned head. “I won’t let anybody hurt you, Sheena. I just won’t let them.”
“Grant friend.”
“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I’m your friend. I won’t let them hurt you. Not ever.”
The gorilla seemed to think this over for a few moments. Then she asked, “Why you?”
“I’m your friend, Sheena,” Grant said again.
“Not me.”
Grant didn’t understand what she meant.
“Grant not me,” Sheena rasped.
“I’m Grant, yes. And you’re Sheena.”
“Grant not me.”
What is she trying to tell me? he wondered.
“Lane not me.”
&
nbsp; It struck Grant like a thunderclap. She realizes that the humans are different from her!
“Fish not me,” Sheena added, pointing a long powerful arm toward the aquarium tanks.
“You’re …” Grant hesitated. How do I answer her? He took a deep breath, then said, “You are Sheena. Sheena is big. Sheena is strong.”
“No like me.”
“That’s right, Sheena, nobody else is like you. You’re the only gorilla within half a billion kilometers.”
“Why no like me?”
“I wish I could explain it to you, Sheena,” Grant said, his eyes misting. “I really wish I could.”
INTELLIGENCE
“It’s official,” Muzorawa said. “We go in thirty days.”
He had dropped into the fluid dynamics lab, he’d said, to check on Grant’s progress with the ocean-mapping work. Grant was glad to see him. Muzorawa had been spending almost all his time training for the deep mission, and Grant found he’d missed the Sudanese dynamicist’s strong, calm companionship.
“Thirty days,” he said.
Muzorawa nodded solemnly. “I don’t suppose I’ll see much of you between now and then. Wo is putting us in quarantine.”
“Quarantine?”
“For security, he says. None of the crew will be allowed to take meals in the cafeteria. They’re setting up one of the conference rooms to serve as a wardroom for us.”
“I won’t see you at all, then,” Grant said.
Muzorawa flashed his warm smile. “I’ll drop in on you now and then, but I won’t be able to work with you very much.”
“You’ll be busy, I know.”
“This mapping work you’ve done, it will be a big help. A very big help.”
“I hope so.”
Grant was sitting at a computer desk that the technicians had rigged with a holographic screen so that he could view the ocean currents in three dimensions. The imagery was in garish false colors, electric blues and fire-engine reds, to make it easier to visualize the swirling turbulent flows streaming through the ocean. Still, Grant found that he had to sit at precisely the right spot and hold his head at just the proper angle to get the three-dimensional effect.
From the seat beside him, Muzorawa asked, “So … do you have anything new to show me?”
“I think maybe.” Grant picked up the headset he’d left on the desktop and called for his latest graph. The holographic view winked out, replaced by a flat diagram of undulating curves sprinkled with a hail of red data points.
“Buckshot pattern,” Muzorawa muttered.
“Not exactly,” said Grant. Tracing one of the curves with an extended finger, he explained, “If you integrate all the data points by time, you get what looks like a periodicity.”
Muzorawa sat up straighten “Periodicity?”
“The thunderstorms carry energy from below into the upper atmosphere, right?”
Guardedly, Muzorawa conceded, “Right.”
Jabbing a finger at the screen, Grant said, “The thunderstorms come in cycles. Both their frequency and intensity shifts every few days. Earth days, that is.”
“How could they shift like that?”
Smiling now, Grant said, “I think it’s a tidal effect.”
“Tidal?”
“It seems to correlate with the positions of the four big moons. Look …” He pointed to the curves again. “When all four of them are on the same side of the planet, storm activity peaks—on that side of the planet.”
Muzorawa squinted at the screen for long, silent moments. At last he asked, “How reliable is this data?”
“Some of it goes back a quarter century,” Grant admitted. “I even have points from the earliest remote missions, before this station was built.”
“Tidal effects.” Muzorawa shook his head. “Hard to believe.”
“But there they are,” Grant insisted. “Small but definitely there.”
“How in the name of the Prophet could tidal effects influence the thunderstorms?”
With a small wave of one hand, Grant replied, “There might be electromagnetic forces involved as well as gravitic.”
“Electromagnetic?” Wide-eyed incredulity was plain on his normally somber face.
“Io’s flux tube,” Grant suggested, waving his hands. “The other Galilean moons cut Jupiter’s magnetic field lines, too, don’t they?”
Muzorawa settled back in his chair, deep in thought. Without thinking consciously about it, Grant punched up a real-time view of Jupiter on the big wallscreen above the desks. The planet loomed over them, huge and awesome, clouds racing and swirling, flashes of lightning flickering like fireflies along the terminator and into the night side of the planet’s immense bulk. Fireflies, Grant thought. More like hydrogen bombs; each lightning bolt released megatons of energy.
With growing enthusiasm, Muzorawa said, “This is very interesting, Grant. Extremely interesting. I’ll have to check the records as far back as we can go … all the way back to the Galileo probe, if necessary.”
“I’ll check the records,” Grant said. “You have enough to do over the next few weeks.”
With a reluctant nod, Muzorawa agreed. Then he asked, “Have you seen any tidal effect in the Red Spot?”
Grant was surprised by the question. “You’re not planning to go into the Spot, are you?”
“God forbid!” Muzorawa raised both hands. “I only wondered if the Spot changes in any predictable way.”
“There’s just not enough data from inside the Spot,” Grant said. “I’ve got a scattering of data from more than five years ago, but even then the probes didn’t last long enough to send back much.”
“They stopped sending probes into the Spot when Wo took over the station,” Muzorawa explained. “He said it was a waste of time and effort.”
“He’s right. That’s an awfully powerful cyclone down there.”
“Yes, that’s true enough. Still…”
“You’re not going near the Spot, are you?” Grant asked again, staring at the view of the giant planet.
“No, of course not. We’ll be on the opposite side of the planet.”
“How deep do you plan to go?”
“Deep enough to find whatever those things are that we saw swimming on the first mission.”
“Do you really think they’re alive?” Grant asked.
Muzorawa turned from the wallscreen to look at Grant. “How high is up?” he asked.
Grant understood. Don’t ask useless questions. The first mission had detected objects in the ocean. This new mission would try to determine what those objects might be. Until they got more data, questions about the nature of the objects could not be answered.
But then Muzorawa nodded, ever so slightly. Barely a dip of his chin. “I believe they are alive, yes. But that is only a belief, a matter of faith—or perhaps it would be better to say a matter of hope. Until we obtain hard evidence, that is all we have to go on: our individual faith, our hopes, our fears.”
“Fears?”
“Oh, yes. Fears.” Muzorawa pointed to the big wallscreen. “There are many people who fear what we might discover underneath those clouds.”
Grant blinked with surprise. “Who? Nobody here on the station, is there?”
“Probably not,” Muzorawa replied. “Wo has screened all the personnel here rather thoroughly.” He hesitated, thinking over his next words, then said, “He was afraid of you at first, you know.”
He was afraid of me?”
Smiling, “Certainly. He feared you were an agent from the Zealots, come to spy on his work.”
“The Zealots?”
“The ultraconservatives. They are always among us, those who fear new knowledge. Nearly a thousand years ago they destroyed a great Persian astronomer and mathematician: Omar Khayyam.”
“Omar… I thought he was a poet.”
Muzorawa shook his head slowly. “His quatrains were a hobby. He was a scientist. He understood that Earth goes around the Sun three centuries be
fore Copernicus. For that the mullahs destroyed him. To this day no one knows where he lies buried.”
“Ultraconservatives,” Grant muttered. “Zealots.”
“In my part of the world they call themselves the Sword of Islam. You have them among your New Morality, don’t you?”
“But I’m not one of them!”
“Dr. Wo wasn’t sure of you. That was why he gave us orders to keep sensitive information from you.”
“But why would the New Morality, or the Zealots, or whatever, want to spy on him?” Grant hated himself for saying it, for lying to his friend and mentor. But I’m not a Zealot, he told himself. I’m not working for fanatics. I’m not!
Muzorawa gripped Grant by the shoulder. “My friend, there are powerful forces among the Zealots who fear new knowledge. They do not appreciate our studies of extraterrestrial life-forms.”
“I know some of the more conservative Believers are uncomfortable with the idea of alien life,” Grant admitted. “But—”
“If they are uncomfortable with alien bacteria and lichen,” Muzorawa interrupted, “how do you think they feel about meeting intelligent aliens?”
“Intelligent?”
“The possibility exists.”
Grant’s inside felt suddenly hollow. “Intelligent creatures? You mean, here, on Jupiter?”
“The possibility exists,” Muzorawa repeated.
“But there’s no evidence …”
“You haven’t seen any evidence. Dr. Wo still does not trust you as fully as that.”
“The things you saw in the ocean?”
“He believes,” Muzorawa said.
“Intelligent?”
“There isn’t enough data even to confirm that they are living organisms. But the director believes they may be not only living but intelligent.”
Understanding flooded into Grant’s mind. “That’s why he brought in the dolphins. And Sheena!”
“To study nonhuman intelligence. Yes. To help us in the effort to communicate with the Jovians.”
“All this … based on his belief? On his hunch? His guess?”
“Belief is a very powerful force, my friend. More powerful than you can imagine. Copernicus believed the Earth revolves around the Sun. Maxwell believed light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, based on nothing more than the coincidence of numbers in his equations.”