Jupiter gt-10

by Ben Bova

  Wo’s enthusiasm drained away. He sighed. “One suicidal fanatic, that is all it would take.”

  “But … suppose you do confirm that there are intelligent Jovians down in the ocean. What then?”

  Wo leaned back in his chair and gazed at the metal mesh of the ceiling. “Then we beam the information back to Earth. To the headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority, to the scientific offices of the United Nations, to all the news networks, to every university. Simultaneously. We make our announcement so loud, so wide, that it cannot possibly be overlooked or suppressed.”

  “It would certainly shock a lot of people,” Grant admitted.

  Wo nodded slowly. “Yes. That discovery will shake the foundations of everything. They will be forced to continue our work, even to expand it. The people of the world will demand it.”

  “Maybe,” Grant said, wondering if that were true. What would the people of the world think if we found intelligent creatures here on Jupiter? Living intelligent aliens! How would the people of the world react to that?

  “Or maybe,” he added, “the Zealots or some other gang of crazies will try to kill us all, out of fear and hatred.”

  Wo snorted disdainfully. “What of it? Once the discovery is announced, no one can erase the information.”

  “But they’ll kill us!”

  “Yes, they might,” the director admitted easily. “That does not matter. It will be worth our lives to have made such a discovery.”

  CONTROL CENTER

  Grant told no one of his conversation with the director. He’s a fanatic, Grant realized. He’s just as crazy in his own way as the Zealots or any other radical extremist. I wonder if any of the others know how he really thinks.

  Yet he spoke of it to no one. Not even Lane or Zeb or the others who must already know about it. Grant agreed with the director in one respect: The fewer people who know what’s really going on, the better.

  Wo’s concept of a quarantine was very loose, Grant found. He and the other members of the mission team took their meals in a conference room and worked together, but they still slept in their own quarters and were able to mingle with the rest of the station’s personnel. It was more a matter of attitude, of a sense of responsibility, that kept them from talking about the mission with the “outsiders.”

  Krebs reinforced the attitude in her own grim style. The first evening that Grant had dinner with the team, she showed up in the conference room, glaring at everyone.

  “You will discuss our work with no one,” she said, out of a clear sky. “That is vital! Maximally vital! Each of you has signed a security agreement. Violate that agreement and you will suffer the full penalties of the law. Nothing less.”

  Then she sat down to eat. No one sat within three chairs of her.

  Grant forgot about his thesis work, his research on the Jovian ocean’s dynamics. If those things really are living creatures, if they’re intelligent… we’re sitting on top of the biggest discovery in history! Maybe what the cameras saw are really submarines, giant mobile underwater habitats. Maybe the Jovians have a technology equal to our own. Or better.

  Then a voice in his mind warned, You’re sitting on top of the biggest powder keg in history. Watch your steps carefully. You could get yourself killed over this.

  The control center, he found, was an unremarkable chamber crowded with six computer-topped desks and communications gear that looked to Grant as if it had been shoehorned into a compartment several sizes too small to accommodate it all. There was barely enough room to squeeze into the little wheeled desk chairs. Director Wo had a separate desk all to himself, though, smack in the middle of the room, with an aisle from the corridor door straight to it—the only open space in the compartment.

  The wallscreens were connected to the simulations chamber down at the aquarium, so Grant got to see Muzorawa and O’Hara and the others every shift, at least onscreen. And Karlstad, too, looking tense and almost frightened as he stood at his underwater post, anchored to the deck by plastic loops set into the flooring.

  Dr. Wo placed Grant at the console that monitored the submersible’s electrical power systems. Frankovich, at the life-support console alongside him, was assigned to teaching Grant what he had to know.

  “So he sucked you into this, too,” Karlstad said through his face-mask radio when Grant first showed up in the control center and said hello to the crew in the tank.

  “We’re just one tight little family,” Grant replied.

  “Never think that,” Karlstad muttered. “We’re prisoners. Puppets on his strings. He wiggles his fingers and we do the dancing for him.”

  Krebs splashed into the simulator tank and Karlstad went silent.

  Grant turned to Frankovich, sitting at the console beside his. “You’d better start showing me what I’m supposed to do here,” Grant said, sliding awkwardly into the tight little chair.

  “Trying to get on Wo’s good side?” Frankovich asked lightly. “That’s a dubious procedure. I’m not certain our revered leader has a good side.”

  Evenings Grant spent with Sheena, no matter how tired he was from the long hours in the control center. He understood Wo’s interest in the gorilla and the dolphins now. How do we communicate with another species? How do we make ourselves understood to creatures that have nothing whatsoever in common with us?

  Often Grant took his dinner down to the aquarium and ate with the gorilla. Karlstad twitted him about it, of course, but Grant wanted Sheena to accept the neural net headgear with as little commotion as possible. After several nights of feeling silly with the wires draped over his head, Grant brought an extra set and offered it to the gorilla.

  Sheena seemed torn between curiosity and fear. At first she merely looked at the headgear, one set draped over Grant’s sandy hair, the other lying casually on the floor beside him.

  Grant was sharing his fruit cup dessert with Sheena when she picked up the net from the floor with her syrup-sticky fingers. She held it in front of her face, studying it, the electrode-studded wires hanging in her massive hand like some arcane set of jewelry.

  Tapping his own net, Grant smiled and said, “Funny hat, Sheena”

  “Funny hat,” she echoed in her painful whisper.

  “I brought it for you.”

  The gorilla’s deep-brown eyes shifted from the dangling net to Grant’s face and then back again.

  Grant said nothing.

  Sheena slowly lifted the net higher and then clumsily plopped it on her head. It slid to the floor with a metallic clicking noise.

  “Let me help you,” Grant said, reaching for the wires.

  “No.” Sheena pushed Grant back, just a brush of her hand, but it was almost enough to bowl him over. He’d forgotten how strong the gorilla was. I’m taking her for granted, he thought. That’s a mistake.

  Sheena fumbled with the net, using both hands this time, and draped it over her head once more. It was lopsided and came down over one eye, but it stayed put.

  Grant wanted to laugh at the ludicrous sight, but he held himself to a broad grin. “Good girl, Sheena!” he approved.

  “Funny hat,” said the gorilla.

  “Funny hat,” Grant agreed, patting his own head.

  In a week or so we can connect the net and start taking readings of her brain patterns, he thought. Let her get accustomed to it first. And I’ll get Pascal to show me how to work the console. No sense bringing strangers in here. It would just upset Sheena.

  His ribs twinged when he took a deep breath. No, Grant told himself, I certainly don’t want to upset Sheena.

  BOOK III

  For he sees that even wise men die … But man in his pomp will not endure; He is like the beasts that perish.

  Psalm 49

  FINAL REHEARSAL

  The month flashed past like a single brief day. Grant worked double shifts in the mission control center, squeezed in beside Frankovich, watching as the wallscreens showed Lane, Karlstad, Irene Pascal, and Muzorawa working
in the aquarium on the simulators under Dr. Krebs’s baleful eyes.

  At first they used only the manual controls in the simulator tank, but after a few days they began to link through the biochip electrodes with the ship systems.

  Wo sat at the central console in the control chamber during each simulation run, but to Grant’s eyes the director often looked distracted, unresponsive to what was going on in the aquarium tank. He’s worrying about that IAA inspection team on its way here, Grant thought. They’re due to reach the station exactly seven days after the mission is launched.

  Each evening they ate in the conference room and hashed over the day’s work. Krebs rarely had dinner with them, and when she did she was almost completely shunned by the others, eating alone at the head of the table, glowering. The only words she had for the team were warnings about security and complaints that their work in the simulator was sloppy or downright poor.

  Most evenings Grant stole away early to spend some time with Sheena; the others were so intent on the mission that they barely mentioned Grant’s “dates” with the gorilla. Even Karlstad had found a new topic for dinner-table discussion.

  “My God,” he said at dinner one evening, “being plugged in like that really is better than sex—almost.”

  “When you get really adept at it,” Muzorawa explained, “you can even link with each other. It’s almost like telepathy.”

  “Really?” Karlstad turned toward O’Hara, leering.

  “Get your mind above your beltline, Egon,” she said. “It’s all mental, not physical.”

  “The brain is the most important sex organ in the body,” he countered.

  She shook her head, frowning.

  Muzorawa explained for Grant that the electrode implants also contain microminiaturized semiconductor lasers linked through the fiber-optic lines to connect with the ship’s systems.

  “Photo-optics can carry loads more information than electronics,” said O’Hara.

  “But the human nervous system is electrical, isn’t it?” Grant asked.

  “Electrochemical,” Karlstad corrected.

  “Then if all this photo-optical data is pumped into your nervous system—”

  “It produces an overload,” Muzorawa said.

  “And the wildest sensations you’ve ever experienced,” O’Hara added.

  Karlstad sighed mightily.

  After dinner Grant went as usual to Sheena. He was trying to get the gorilla accustomed to the neural net. She still could not fit it over her head properly, but gradually Grant got her to accept his help in placing the spiderweb of electrodes properly over her skull.

  “If only we could shave her head,” Pascal said yearningly over a late-night snack in the conference room.

  Pascal was pulling double duty, too: watching Grant with Sheena each evening through the surveillance cameras and working in the fish tank on the mission simulator. She looked as exhausted as Grant felt.

  “She wouldn’t like being shaved,” Grant pointed out.

  “We could sedate her.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Grant said as he picked at his open sandwich of simulated roast beef. “By the time she got accustomed to the fact that she’d been shaved, her hair would’ve grown back again.”

  Pascal sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  “If she’d let me fasten the net under her chin, then you’d get a decent contact.”

  “If she’d let you.” Pascal put down her fork, frowning. “Do you realize that the laboratory animal is running this experiment? It’s infuriating.”

  It surprised Grant to hear Sheena referred to as a laboratory animal. And it surprised him even more when he realized that he thought of the gorilla as a person.

  Trying to soothe the neurophysiologist, Grant said, “I’ll get Sheena to wear the net and make good contact with the electrodes. Give me a few more days.”

  “We’ll be launching in six days.”

  “Sheena can’t be put on a schedule, I’m afraid.”

  “Yes, yes, I understand,” Pascal said. “Still, it’s very frustrating. Maddening.”

  “I can run the console for you,” Grant said. “I’ll collect the data and have it ready for you when you come back from the mission.”

  Pascal gave him a dubious look but said nothing.

  The door to the corridor slid open and Red Devlin stepped into the conference room as casually as he might stroll along a city boulevard.

  “Irene, luv, how are you?”

  “What are you doing in here?” Grant demanded. “You’re not supposed—”

  “Now, now,” Devlin chided. “Don’t get your shorts in a twist, Grant. Who d’you think brings your food and goodies in here, eh? Somebody’s gotta check on your coffee supply, mate.”

  “It’s all right,” Pascal said softly. “He’s just doing his job.”

  “Right you are, Irene luv. And you, Grant, how’s Sheena treatin’ you these days?”

  “Fine,” Grant said, weary of jokes about him and Sheena.

  Devlin pulled a plastic vial from his pocket and handed it to Pascal. “You sure you need these?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. “Looks to me like you need somethin’ to help you sleep, not keep you awake.”

  “I sleep very well,” Pascal replied. “I need to be alert during the day.”

  “In the simulator, eh?” Devlin asked.

  Pascal nodded.

  “How’s it goin’? When do you push off?”

  Before Pascal could answer, Grant said, “Dr. Wo doesn’t want us to discuss the mission with anyone who isn’t on the team.”

  Devlin stiffened into a lampoon of a soldier’s coming to attention, clicked his heels, and snapped off a salute.

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  Grant laughed despite himself.

  Pascal said, “Grant is correct. We are not supposed to discuss the mission with you.”

  “I understand,” Devlin said, relaxing. “No worries.”

  “But in three days you will not see me for a while,” she added.

  Grant felt a surge of dismay. He knew it was silly, but rules are meant to be followed, not broken. Krebs and Dr. Wo might be paranoid, but Grant thought it was better to be paranoid than the victim of some terrorist’s fiery zeal.

  As Devlin headed for the coffee urn, Grant leaned toward Pascal and whispered, “Irene, you told him three days. But the mission doesn’t launch until six days from now.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “But in three days the crew goes into immersion. We do not come out once we are immersed.”

  “I didn’t realize—”

  “Once we begin breathing that awful liquid, we do not come into the air again until the mission is completed,” she said.

  Grant thought she looked grim, like a prisoner about to be swallowed up by an inescapable jail. And she looked more than a little frightened, too.

  He walked with Irene back to their quarters. Pascal’s compartment was a few dozen meters up the corridor from Grant’s. The corridor was dim, shadowy in its nighttime lighting. They saw no one else along the way except a solitary security guard pacing sleepily along his rounds; it was too late at night for casual strollers.

  So it surprised Grant to see Kayla Ukara sitting on the floor next to Pascal’s door, her back propped against the wall, her head resting on her knees as if asleep.

  “Oh,” Irene said in a small voice.

  Ukara’s head snapped up, her eyes fully alert. Instead of her usual fierce, pantherlike expression, she actually smiled up at Irene.

  As Ukara scrambled to her feet, Pascal turned to Grant, red-cheeked with embarrassment. “Thank you for walking me home,” she said in a quick, low voice.

  Grant nodded, puzzled. “It’s okay. My place is just down the corridor.”

  But Pascal was not paying any attention to him. Her eyes were on Ukara and no one else.

  Grant muttered a good night to them both and continued down the corridor. He glanced once over his
shoulder at them. Pascal was tapping out the security code on her door lock; Kayla had a long, slim arm around Irene’s waist.

  They’re lovers! Grant felt shocked. He knew he shouldn’t, knew it was none of his business, that the two women were adults and had the right to their own personal lives. Yet deep in the core of his being he felt that what they were doing was wrong, deeply wrong.

  It’s none of your business, Grant told himself. Forget about it.

  Still, it bothered him.

  The next night Grant tied the neural net he was wearing under his chin.

  “See?” he said to Sheena. “It looks better.”

  Sheena eyed him suspiciously.

  They were sitting on the plastic-tiled floor of Sheena’s spacious pen, Grant facing the gorilla. Her bulk loomed over him like a hairy mountain.

  “And it won’t fall off.” Grant shook his head vigorously. The net stayed snug around his skull.

  Sheena waggled her head ponderously and her net slid clattering to the floor.

  She huffed and stared at the net at her feet. Then she picked it up and draped it over her head again. Grant expected her to try to tie its loose ends, but instead she simply looked down at her open hands.

  “No,” she said, and Grant thought it sounded discouraged, disheartened.

  She looked at Grant. “Hands … no … Sheena can’t do.”

  Grant felt a wave of sadness wash over him. She knows her hands aren’t dexterous enough to tie the ends. She knows how limited she is.

  “Grant do,” said Sheena.

  “Sure, Sheena,” he said, scrambling toward her. “I’ll be happy to help you.”

  “Grant help Sheena.”

  “Yes, I will.” He knelt before her powerful body, feeling the heat of her, knowing that those arms of hers could crush his ribs, and carefully tied the neural net under her chin.

  “There,” he said, sitting back on the floor again. “Now we’re the same.”

  “No.” Sheena swung her heavy head from side to side slowly. “Not same. Sheena not Grant. Grant not Sheena.”