Jupiter gt-10

by Ben Bova

  The director grasped the arms of his powerchair and pushed himself to a standing position. There were no braces on his legs, Grant saw. Dr. Wo stood, trembling with the effort.

  “If I can do it,” he said, perspiration breaking out on his upper lip and brow, “you can, too.”

  Hardly breathing, his anger forgotten, Grant slid his legs off the bed and stood up. The legs hurt, but he stood erect.

  “Good,” said Wo. “Excellent. Now walk to me.”

  Grant took a tottering step. Wo did the same, holding his arms out as if to balance himself. Another step. Grant’s legs felt as if they did not belong to him. He had to consciously tell them to move. Wo stepped shakily toward him, arms extended. Grant walked, slowly, hesitantly, feeling like Lazarus rising up from death.

  “Good,” Wo encouraged. “Very good.”

  The director’s legs suddenly buckled. As he sagged Grant reached for him, grabbed him under the arms, and held him up.

  “Thank you,” Wo gasped. “Your legs are strong enough to support the two of us.”

  Grant laughed, and the director even allowed a slight chuckle to escape his lips. Grant helped the older man back into his powerchair. Wo sat gratefully, squirming a little to make himself comfortable. Grant stood in front of him, feeling a little shaky but knowing now that he would not be a cripple. Even the pain seemed lessened.

  “Very good, Mr. Archer,” said Wo, looking up at Grant. “Report for intensive training immediately. Zheng He is scheduled for launch in three days.”

  Wo abruptly spun the chair around and rolled out of the infirmary, leaving Grant standing there, flabbergasted, not knowing whether to be angry or grateful.

  For the rest of the day, Lane, Egon, and Muzorawa took turns working with Grant, helping him to learn to walk again.

  “You have to reestablish the neural paths,” Karlstad told him, as Grant hung onto his shoulder while they walked slowly along the row of beds in the infirmary. Only two of them were occupied. One of the patients was an engineer whose spacesuit had been slightly ruptured while she was out on the surface of Io. She’d breathed a whiff of sulfur dioxide before the team she was with sealed her suit The other was a station beancounter being treated for alcoholism.

  “Get the nerves in your legs that connect with the spinal cord to start talking to each other again,” Karlstad coaxed as he helped Grant along. “It takes a day or so.”

  “We don’t have a day or so,” Grant muttered, perspiring with the effort of trying to walk normally. “Wo wants to launch in three days.”

  Karlstad shrugged. “Well, you don’t really need to be able to walk once you’re immersed in the goo.”

  Lane helped him, too, although it troubled Grant to cling to her as they walked together. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Marjorie, but Lane’s softly subtle perfume kept his wife’s image a confused blur.

  Muzorawa worked with him all through the night: helpful, nondemanding, patient. He was strong enough to lift Grant and carry him the length of the station’s main corridor, Grant knew, yet he offered only as much help as was needed, nothing more.

  “It’s tough,” Grant said as he limped past the row of beds. He was walking on his own now; the pain he felt was almost entirely psychosomatic, the infirmary staff assured him; he was making good progress.

  “Of course it’s tough,” Muzorawa sympathized, pacing slowly beside Grant. “You must learn to walk all over again. We all had to.”

  “I’m pretty slow, aren’t I?”

  “You are like the centipede in the old story.”

  “Centipede?”

  “You know, one of the animals in the forest asks the centipede how he can possibly control all those feet. And the centipede replies that it’s simple, really. But as he explains how he does it, and he begins thinking about how he controls his one hundred little feet, he becomes so confused that he can’t walk at all.”

  Grant nodded. “Yes, I remember that from kindergarten.”

  “We all learned to walk so early in life that we take it for granted. When we are forced to learn it all over again, we begin to see how much effort it takes.”

  Grant stumbled slightly and reached for one of the empty beds for support.

  “Four-legged animals don’t need to be taught how to walk,” Muzorawa said, keeping his hands at his sides as Grant straightened up and resumed pacing. “Human babies crawl on all fours quite naturally. But they must be taught how to walk on their two feet—that’s a sign that we evolved from four-legged creatures, I believe.”

  “You really think so?” Grant asked.

  “I am not a biologist, but, yes, I believe that is so.”

  “You believe in Darwinian evolution.”

  “Does that offend you?”

  “No,” Grant answered truthfully. “I suppose I do, myself.”

  “Suppose?” Muzorawa asked, arching a brow.

  Grant swiftly changed the subject. “Wish we were in zero-gee.”

  “That’s the irony of it,” said Muzorawa. “On the mission, we will be immersed and floating buoyantly. We won’t need our legs for walking. Not at all.”

  “That’s pretty ironic, all right,” Grant agreed.

  Lifting a hand like an ancient seer about to deliver a prophecy, Muzorawa went on, “But our legs will have a different function, a far more important function, during the mission.”

  And he smiled, as if remembering something that was beautifully pleasurable.

  Grant started to realize what Muzorawa was talking about when he began his hurried training sessions in the simulator.

  Driven by Dr. Wo’s increasingly anxious prodding, Grant stumbled from the infirmary to the aquarium, donned a wetsuit and full-face mask, and joined Zeb, Lane, and Egon in the converted fish tank—under Krebs’s remorseless command.

  If she’s a Zealot, Grant thought as he fumbled his way through the first day’s simulations, she’s hiding it very well. She acts as if this mission is her personal quest.

  Maybe it is, a voice in his head answered. If she’s seeking some sort of next-world reward by destroying us all, what better way than to be in absolute command of the mission?

  Very soon, though, Grant was far too busy even to think about Krebs’s true loyalties. She drove them through the simulator session mercilessly, demanding that they go through the entire simulation of disconnecting from the station and entering the Jovian atmosphere without a break.

  “Stop whining! You’ll get no time for relaxation when we are diving into those clouds,” Krebs snarled at them.

  They used the manual controls for the first session. When at last it was finished, Wo told them from his post in the control center, “Tomorrow you will be immersed and work in Zheng He instead of the simulator.”

  “Does that mean we performed okay?” Grant asked, from inside his transparent mask.

  Muzorawa gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. But Krebs said sourly, “It means that we must stick to the accelerated schedule no matter how poorly you oafs have performed.”

  Immersion frightened Grant all over again, but at least this time he faced it without the security guards forcing him.

  He felt cold as he stood in the access tunnel with the others, clad only in flimsy tights. We might as well be naked, Grant thought. These tights don’t conceal anything. He had to force his eyes away from O’Hara’s nipples and stare at the curved blank metal wall of the tunnel.

  Muzorawa went through the airlock first, then Lane. The butterflies in Grant’s stomach felt the size of pelicans. His legs still ached; they probably would forever, if Karlstad and the others were to be believed. Accept it, Grant told himself. It’s a cross you’ll have to bear. He glanced at Karlstad and saw that Egon looked just as jumpy and frightened as he himself felt.

  The airlock hatch sighed open a crack. It was his turn. Grant swung it wide enough to step into the blank, coffin-sized lock. He touched the control stud that shut the hatch and sealed it. Trying to stay calm, he prayed, “The
Lord is my refuge and my strength …”

  The airlock was lit only by a single fluorescent set into the ceiling and the telltale lights on the control panel. The oily liquid began to pour into the airtight chamber, chill as death. Grant gritted his teeth and pressed both palms against the cold metal walls.

  “Our Father, which art in heaven …”

  His feet floated off the airlock floor. His head bumped against its ceiling. Through the thick, slimy liquid he could see the glimmer of the control panel’s tiny lights, a faint row of green.

  The liquid reached his armpits, his shoulders, his chin. He clamped his lips tight as the cold, clinging perfluorocarbon rose above his mouth. He was trapped in this metal coffin, freezing cold, drowning in the slick clinging alien liquid. His lungs were burning. He had to breathe. It’s all right! he raged at himself. Stop fighting it and let it happen.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, Grant took a tentative breath. And gagged. His chest heaved, his entire body convulsed. Pain spasmed through him. I can’t breathe! he screamed silently.

  Yet he was breathing.

  Coughing, sputtering, his whole body racked with reflex spasms, Grant desperately tried to calm his mind. It begins with the mind. You know what’s happening to you; you understand the process. Relax! he raged at himself. Accept it. Take a deep breath and embrace whatever God has chosen for you to endure.

  The spasms slowed, then stopped altogether. He could breathe without gagging, without coughing. He took a long, deliberate, testing breath. The perfluorocarbon still felt bitterly cold and now it was flooding his lungs, his entire body. But he could breathe it without choking. He still felt discomfort, pain actually, but he no longer felt fear.

  “Are you going to stay in there all day?”

  Grant hardly recognized Krebs’s voice; in his new immersed world her words sounded like the deep, booming thunder of God himself.

  “I’m opening the inner hatch now,” he answered. His own voice sounded strangely low, slurred.

  Grant floated through another long, narrow access tunnel, flicking its curved walls with his fingertips while he kicked his feet gently. I’m swimming, he realized. And Dr. Wo said we don’t need our legs when we’re buoyant. He was wrong.

  Zheng He’s bridge seemed bigger than it had looked when Grant had watched the crew from the control center. O’Hara and Muzorawa were already there, floating easily.

  “Welcome aboard,” said Lane, with a big smile. Even her voice sounded lower, sluggish, like a recording played back at a slow speed.

  Grant tried to grin back at her, but he wasn’t sure he made much more than a nervous twitch of his lips.

  “I believe you Christians have a ceremony of immersion,” said Muzorawa, his voice finally deep enough to match his powerful appearance.

  “Baptism, yes,” said Grant.

  “Some of your sects use immersion to symbolize a rebirth, do they not?”

  “Born-again Christians,” Grant replied.

  “I see!” said O’Hara, actually laughing in the frigid soup of the submersible’s environment. “We’ve been born again.”

  Nodding, Muzorawa added, “Into a new world.”

  For a moment Grant thought that they were teasing him, making fun of a kind of religion that neither of them believed in. But then he realized that they were at least accurate, if not totally serious. We have been born into a new world, he told himself. We’ve undergone a ritual of immersion in preparation for this mission.

  The politicians want to stop us, he thought. The Zealots want to destroy us. But maybe we’re really doing God’s work here. Maybe we’re meant to explore Jupiter and seek out whatever’s living beneath those clouds.

  The idea hit Grant with the force of a physical blow. Could this be God’s will? Part of His plan for us?

  “All right, I’m here,” Karlstad announced, shattering Grant’s train of thought. “We’ve got a foursome; boot up the computer and let’s play bridge.”

  O’Hara said, “We’ll not be playing bridge, Egon. We’ll be working on this bridge.”

  “Too true,” Karlstad conceded.

  Their bantering ended when Krebs joined them. She quickly had them at their posts, standing side by side along the bridge’s consoles, their feet anchored in the floor loops. Grant was assigned to the power and propulsion systems, just as he had been in the control center.

  “Today we simulate powering up the ship’s systems, disconnecting from the station, and entering Jupiter’s cloud bank,” Krebs told them, as if they hadn’t already gone through the simulation plan themselves. “None of the ship’s systems will actually be functioning. This is a simulation only.”

  Grant nodded his understanding. The station’s simulations computer would be running the show. No matter what kind of crazy emergencies Dr. Wo threw at them, it was all make-believe.

  But that would change soon enough, he knew.

  CONNECTED

  Krebs drilled them mercilessly. All four crew members spent the whole day on the bridge, simulating the first stages of their flight into Jupiter’s ocean over and over again, until their moves became almost like reflex actions.

  Standing at his console with O’Hara on one side of him and Muzorawa on the other, Grant felt that he could power up the ship’s generators and propulsion units and go through the procedures of separating from the station and insertion into the cloud bank with his eyes closed. In his sleep, even.

  Still Krebs made them go through it again. It was the only part of the mission that could be simulated. No one knew what to expect once they dived through the clouds and entered the vast, turbulent ocean.

  Dr. Wo changed the ship’s internal pressure time and again, increasing the pressure to its highest design value and then dropping it back again. Grant never thought that his ears could pop underwater, but they did, more than once.

  “He’s trying to see if the pressure changes bother us,” Karlstad told Grant.

  “They bother me,” Grant admitted. “Changing the pressure back and forth is damned uncomfortable.”

  The two of them had been given a brief meal break by Krebs. Meals on Zheng He consisted of coasting over to the dispenser at the back of the bridge and plugging one of its plastic tubes into one of the intravenous ports in your neck. It made Grant shudder to do it, but it didn’t hurt at all, and it had the advantage of pumping a full meal’s worth of nutrition into your system in only a few minutes. No chewing, no digestive action; the food was already liquefied and ready to be dispersed through the body by the bloodstream.

  “The Woeful One must be trying to see if the pressure changes had anything to do with Irene’s heart attack,” Karlstad said.

  “I thought the amphetamines did it.”

  “Under normal conditions the dose she took wouldn’t have killed her.”

  “I thought it was a very high dose,” Grant said.

  “Not that high … it wouldn’t have been fatal normally.”

  “It would have disoriented her, wouldn’t it? Made her unfit for duty?”

  Karlstad started to answer, hesitated, then asked, “Do you think she was trying to get out of—”

  The dispenser’s signal bell chimed—clunked, really, in the high-pressure fluid they were breathing—and its light turned red.

  “Your dinner’s finished,” Karlstad said needlessly. “Want some dessert?”

  Wincing, Grant pulled the slim plastic tube from the socket in his neck. “Dessert’s included,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “No extra charge.”

  “Stop your jabbering and get back to your stations,” Krebs snarled at them.

  * * *

  When the long, grueling simulation was at last finished, Krebs relieved only O’Hara and Karlstad. Grant and Muzorawa stayed at their posts on the bridge while the other two went to their berths. Krebs herself remained on the bridge.

  Doesn’t she ever sleep? Grant asked himself.

  Soon he began to wonder if Krebs was ever going to allow him to slee
p. The simulations were finished, as far as he could see. They were pretending to be descending through the thickening layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere, sinking lower and lower until the atmospheric gases were compressed by the planet’s titanic gravity into the liquid state. Since they knew so little about the environment below the clouds, there was very little for them to simulate—unless Wo threw some malfunctions at them.

  Instead, the hours passed by so uneventfully that Grant had to fight against boredom. Strangely, he felt no urge to yawn, as he normally would. Maybe breathing this gunk suppresses the yawn reflex, he thought.

  At last Karlstad and O’Hara returned to the bridge.

  “Muzorawa and Archer to your berths,” Krebs ordered needlessly. Grant was already floating toward the hatch that led to the closet-size sleeping area. Karlstad referred to it as “the catacombs.”

  Then Krebs added, “When you two return, we will all link with the ship’s systems.”

  Grant was too tired to care. All he wanted was his four hours of sleep. But then he caught the look on Lane’s face: She was glowing with anticipation.

  Sleep did not come easily. As soon as he closed his eyes, it hit Grant all over again that he was immersed in this cold thick fluid, breathing it into his lungs, wallowing in a completely unnatural world, as out of place as a fish on a mountaintop. The fear that had been submerged while he was on the bridge among the others rose to the surface of his mind now, his chest heaved, his aching legs twitched with the barely suppressed urge to run, to get away, to find someplace safe, some refuge where he could hide and breathe real air and feel the warmth of the sun on his face.

  He opened his eyes and even in the darkness of his screened-off berth he saw that he was in a metal womb, a man-made cave that was pressing in on him, closing down on all sides. And outside this crypt, beyond its metal shell, unbearable pressures were squeezing, pressing, inexorably working to crush the ship, to crush him into a bloody pulp.

  Grant could feel his heart pounding frantically in his chest, sense every nerve in his body telling him to get away, to escape, to get out of this deathtrap.