by Ben Bova
“For Krebs,” Karlstad said.
“For all of us,” Muzorawa corrected.
“Maybe not,” Karlstad said. “She’s in command, after all. We’re just following her orders. She’s the one who told us not to acknowledge Wo’s order to return to the station.”
“Dr. Wo gave that order under duress,” Grant said heatedly. “It’s obvious they were forcing him to make that call.”
“That still doesn’t help us to decide what we should do about this,” O’Hara said. “Should we—” She stopped, her eyes going wide.
From behind him, Grant heard Krebs’s harsh voice. “So you’ve put me into the meatgrinder, eh?”
Grant whirled around. How long had she been standing there at the hatch? How much had she heard?
“Let me assure you, all of you,” Krebs snarled, “that if I go down, the four of you go down with me.”
DETERMINATION
“We are here to explore the ocean,” Krebs said firmly. “We are not turning back because some bureaucrat in the IAA has allowed the politicians to overrule his own sense of responsibility.”
“But, Captain—” Karlstad began.
“Silence! Men and women have died in this effort. Do you think that I’m going to spit on their graves by turning back? Not before we’ve done our damnedest to find out if there’s life down here.”
“Yes, Captain,” Karlstad said, as if he’d never considered any other course of action.
“I agree completely,” said Muzorawa.
“It doesn’t matter whether you agree or not,” Krebs spat. “We are going deeper. Now.” She leveled a finger at O’Hara. “And no communication with the station! Nothing! For no reason. Even if we are dying in this coffin we make no attempt to contact the station unless I tell you to. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly clear,” Lane answered.
“Good. Now take your stations. We are going down to ten kilometers.”
Wordlessly the four of them began to link up to the ship’s systems. Krebs did also. Grant felt almost relieved. At least she knows it all now. We’re not sneaking around her back anymore. The visual amnesia or whatever her condition is doesn’t affect her ability to run this ship.
“Ready for linkage,” he reported. Before the others, he noticed.
“Very good, Mr. Archer. You may link.”
As Grant reached for the console switch that would unite him again with the power and propulsion systems, he realized that Krebs couldn’t possibly be a Zealot terrorist. She doesn’t want to destroy this mission, she wants to carry it through, no matter what the consequences afterward.
He felt better about her. And about the mission. He tried not to think about what would happen to them after the mission, when they returned to the station and the waiting Ellis Beech.
Once the others were linked, Krebs gave the order to dive to ten kilometers. After several hours, the headache behind his eyes was throbbing through Grant’s skull. The pressure’s building up, he realized. As we dive deeper the pressure outside the hull goes higher, which means the pressure here on the bridge goes up to compensate.
How deep can we go? he asked himself. He knew the submersible’s specifications, but those were merely numbers. How much pressure can we stand? Zeb was wrong: This vessel can take a lot more pressure than we can. We’ll crack long before the hull does.
He glanced at Karlstad, tending the life-support console. Egon looked tense, his lips a thin tight line, his face even paler than usual. If we weren’t immersed in this fluid he’d be sweating, Grant thought. Egon can feel the pressure squeezing on the hull; it must seem like a giant vise trying to crush his body.
“Ten kilometers,” Lane sang out.
“Maintain descent angle,” said Krebs. “We’re going deeper.”
Grant heard a groan. It didn’t come from anyone on the bridge. It was a metallic, grinding complaint.
“Pay no attention to that noise,” Krebs told them. “It’s not important.”
As if in obedience to her, the grinding noise stopped.
“Support cylinder nine needs lubrication,” Krebs said, trying to reassure them. “Nothing to worry about.”
The nested shells that comprised the Zheng He were connected by buttressing cylinders that contained hydraulic pistons within them. They compressed slightly as the pressure outside the hull squeezed on the ship. Grant began to wonder how well the cylinders would support the shells if one of them was already showing signs of strain.
Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong, he realized. Maybe the ship will fail before our pain becomes unbearable.
After a tense four hours of steady descent, Krebs told Muzorawa and Karlstad to take a rest period.
“One hour, then report back here to relieve O’Hara and Grant,” she commanded.
Grant took over Karlstad’s life-support systems. True to his expectations, he could feel the pressure inside each level of the ship building, mounting, pressing in on him, slowly crushing him to death like a giant boa constrictor wrapping its coils around him. It was getting difficult to breathe; it took a conscious effort to lift his chest to inhale.
Stop it! he chided himself. It’s 90 percent imagination. Ninety-nine percent! Look at the pressure graph; it’s only gone up a couple of percentage points since we entered the ocean. You’re letting your emotions overpower your brain.
Still he felt as if he were being smothered. His headache pounded. He glanced at O’Hara. She seemed normal enough, intently piloting the ship deeper into the sea, watching with glowing eyes the sensors that Zeb normally monitored. Grant fought an urge to tap into the sensor net and see what she was looking at. No, he told himself, you’ve got enough to do. Don’t allow yourself to be distracted.
Then he wondered what the increasing pressure was doing to Krebs. Her condition was due to pressure-induced trauma to her brain. It would be worse as they descended deeper. Did she feel pain? Confusion? He shot a glance over his shoulder at her. Krebs seemed perfectly normal, floating in her usual spot up by the overhead, scowling at him.
“She’s following the currents of organic particles,” O’Hara said to Grant once they were back to the sleeping area.
“You can see them that clearly?”
With a smile Lane said, “In the sonar they show up like a whirlwind, except that they appear white as snow.”
Gesturing to the wallscreen of their common area, Grant asked, “Can you show me?”
O’Hara nodded and spoke into the screen’s microphone. “Display sonar imagery.”
The screen brightened to life, showing a stream of bright white swirling through the dark ocean. It’s just as Lane described it, Grant thought: a whirlwind of snow. He knew the white color of the imagery was an artifact created by the computer program. It made the organic particles easier to discern against the ocean background, easier to track. Lord, Grant thought, if I’d known about this I could’ve used the particles to map out the ocean currents.
With sudden enthusiasm, he stepped to the microphone and said, “Correlate sonar returns with mapping imagery.”
“Please provide more specific input,” the computer’s synthesized voice replied.
Grant ducked into his cubicle and stretched the length of his bunk to pull his palmcomp from its resting place on the shelf above his pillow.
“I’ll be at this awhile,” he said to O’Hara as he sat on the end of his bunk.
She shrugged and crawled into her own cubicle.
After a few minutes, Krebs appeared at the hatch, trailing her optical fibers from her legs, “You are supposed to be resting, Mr. Archer, not writing your thesis.”
“This isn’t my thesis, ma’am,” he said, totally missing her irony. “I’m setting up my fluid dynamics program to use the particle streams as tracers—you know, the way aerodynamicists use smoke particles in their wind tunnel tests.”
“You need your rest.”
“Yes’m. In a few minutes, please.”
Krebs watched him in s
ilence for several seconds, then turned and floated back into the bridge. Grant was still working on the palmcomp when Muzorawa and Karlstad came in for their rest period.
“She wants you on duty,” Muzorawa said.
“In a minute,” Grant said. “I’m almost finished here.”
“Can I help?” Zeb asked, settling on the end of the bunk beside Grant.
“It would take longer to bring you up to speed than it will for me to finish this.”
Muzorawa laughed softly. “The cruel honesty of youth.”
Grant didn’t reply. He barely heard the older man. He hardly noticed when Muzorawa got up and went back to the bridge.
When at last he was finished and the program was running properly, Grant pushed himself up from the bunk and swam through the hatch. Muzorawa was at his console, fully linked up, with O’Hara beside him.
“Are you finished, Mr. Archer?” Krebs asked, dripping acid.
“Yes, ma’am. The program’s working fine now. Thank you for being so patient.”
“Thank Dr. Muzorawa; he is doing your work instead of enjoying his rest period.”
Grant fumbled with his optical fibers in his hurry to get linked. Zeb shot him an understanding smile.
“You have thoroughly messed up the work schedule, Archer,” growled Krebs. “I hope your inspiration improves the fluid dynamics program enough to compensate.”
Grant nodded, thinking, It does. It certainly does. But he knew enough to keep his mouth shut.
They passed seventy kilometers’ depth, following the spiraling flow of the organic particles, still diving deeper. Karlstad complained of a constant headache, O’Hara said she was starting to feel nagging pains in her arms and back, even Muzorawa said he was having some difficulty breathing. Grant’s own headache was still there, not much worse than earlier but certainly no better. Krebs said nothing, neither complaining about her own condition nor making the slightest comment on their gripes. She seemed utterly disdainful of their frailties; whenever she barked a command at him, Grant thought she was looking through him, not at him.
The ship creaked and groaned constantly now, making Grant wonder how deep they could safely go. He recalled that the ship’s design limit was ninety kilometers.
Ninety? Grant marveled. We’ve all got physical problems now, at seventy; how will we be when we’re twenty klicks deeper?
Still Krebs kept the ship descending.
“Do you realize where we’re heading?” O’Hara asked Grant during one of their reliefs.
He felt bone-tired; his throbbing headache was sapping his energy. Lane looked weary, too. She floated a few centimeters from the deck of their common area.
arms half bent before her.
“What do you mean?” he asked. What he really wanted was to crawl back into his berth and sleep for the four hours that were due him.
“The Spot,” Lane said.
That made Grant’s eyes snap wide. “The Great Red Spot?” His voice squeaked, even in the tone-deepening perfluorocarbon.
She nodded as she hooked a heel against the end of her bunk and forced herself down to a sitting position.
“We can’t be going into the Great Red Spot,” Grant said.
“That’s where the currents lead,” O’Hara said, “and we’re following the currents.”
“But she’ll turn off sooner or later.”
“She’s convinced that if there are creatures that eat those organics, they must follow the thickest streams of them. So we’re following the thickest stream and it flows into the Spot.”
“But she’ll veer off,” Grant repeated. “Before we get too close.”
O’Hara closed her eyes. “I suppose so. At the moment I don’t really care. All I want is a good sleep— and to wake up without this backache.”
Grant slid into his berth and fastened the mesh webbing that kept him from floating off the mattress while he was sleeping. It was like nestling into a cocoon, one of the few comforts on this mission. He fell asleep almost instantly.
And dreamed of being dragged into a never-ending whirlpool, crushed and drowned, his screams unheard, his pain unending.
TENACITY
“Approaching ninety kilometers,” said O’Hara, her voice edgy, tinged with strain.
Maximum design depth, Grant knew. He and Lane were on duty, Karlstad and Muzorawa in their berths. O’Hara looked tense, tired. She’s in pain, just like me, Grant thought. Like all of us. We’re all suffering. The pressure’s getting to us, physically and mentally.
“Level off at ninety,” said Krebs, “and maintain course.”
Continue following the stream of organics, Grant interpreted the order. Continue heading toward the Great Red Spot. At least we won’t go any deeper, he thought. We can’t. The ship can’t take it; neither can we.
There was still no sign of any Jovian creatures, great or small. The organic particles swirled and flowed through the great surging ocean, but there was no sign of creatures that fed on them. They had even driven all the way across the turbulent stream, the ship bucking and heaving as their instruments sucked in some of the particles for analysis.
“Jovian carbohydrates,” Karlstad announced, after testing the samples. “Good enough to eat—almost.”
But if the first mission had actually detected giant beasts deep down in the ocean, they certainly had not shown up here. Dr. Wo’s hypothesis that where there was food there must be eaters was proving to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Grant said to himself, Propter hoc ergo post hoc is just as fallacious as the other way around.
Although the fusion generator was performing well, as reliable as a tiny little star, the thrusters were showing signs of wear. Grant felt the erosion of their metal chambers as fatigue, a painful weariness in his bones atop the real pain and weariness of his true body. There was nothing he could do about it. All the diagnostics showed the metal was well within tolerable limits, it just felt so tiring to be linked with it, like being chained to an oar in an ancient galley. Grant thought about disconnecting from the thrusters and relying on the ordinary display screens of his console, but he hadn’t worked up the nerve to ask Krebs for permission to do so.
He was also monitoring the sensors on this shift, striving consciously to avoid being hypnotized by the constant swirling stream of the organics flowing through the ocean. It was fascinating, soothing, lulling him into forgetting about the thrusters and the headache that throbbed behind his eyes and—
What was that?
A flashing glint of something. At first Grant thought he had imagined it, but then he saw it again through the sensors’ multispectral cameras. Something glittering in the stream of organic particles, smaller than the organics, reflecting the light from the ship’s forward spotlights.
Without saying a word, Grant opened the ports for the samplers to suck in some of the particles. Most of them were the organics that they’d been following all this time, but these new things … he wondered what they could be.
The samplers scooped in a batch of particles and automatically fed them to the gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer for analysis. The data flashed into his mind almost instantly. He saw graphs, diagrams, photomicrographs.
Carbon. Nothing but plain old carbon. Crystallized by the pressure, he saw. Then it hit him.
“Diamonds!” he blurted aloud.
O’Hara, standing beside him, turned toward him. “What did you say?”
“Those smaller particles … they’re tiny diamonds!”
“No!”
“Yes, really,” Grant said. “Tap into the analysis. They’re pure crystallized carbon. Diamonds.”
“Glory be,” said O’Hara.
Krebs, monitoring the analysis equipment along with everything else, said, “Congratulations, Mr. Archer, you have discovered a diamond mine.”
“We can bring some back with us,” Grant said, grinning for the first time in days.
“Ah, but they’re too small for jewelry,” said O’Hara sadly.
“Microscopic, don’t you see.”
Krebs grunted behind them. “Considering the cost of this mission, they will be the most expensive diamonds ever found.”
That dampened Grant’s mood almost completely. He returned to monitoring the sensors. Still, he thought, rivers of diamonds flowing in the Jovian ocean. A snowfall of diamonds. I wonder if the Jovians appreciate what God’s giving them?
For nearly thirty-six hours they cruised at the ninety-kilometer level, the ship groaning and creaking, the crew in greater and greater discomfort. Karlstad grumbled constantly; even Muzorawa was clearly having a difficult time of it, despite his stoic refusal to complain. No sign of Jovians, nothing seemed to be moving in the ocean except the streams of particles constantly flowing past.
All that time Krebs remained on the bridge, fully linked to every one of the ship’s systems. Grant and the others took their rest periods, tried to get a couple of hours of sleep, injected analgesics into their neck ports to ease the constant pain and pressure. Yet Krebs remained awake and on duty.
“Captain,” said Karlstad at last, “as life-support specialist and the closest thing we have to a medical doctor, I must remind you that you’ve been on duty without relief for more than two days straight now.”
“Thank you, Dr. Karlstad,” Krebs replied, her voice heavy with irony. “You have reminded me. Now take your station and do your duty.”
“It’s my duty to remind you that you must rest,” Karlstad said, looking worried.
“I am not ready for a rest period,” Krebs said firmly. “I do not need it.”
Grant and O’Hara were still linked to their consoles, ready to come off duty. Muzorawa was hovering by the hatch that led back to the berths.
Swimming over to the life-support console, Karlstad pointed at one of its display screens. “Captain, it’s not me. It’s the mission regulations. The medical monitors show a dangerous level of fatigue poisons in your blood. Your reflexes have slowed. Your pulse and respiration rates are approaching the redline.”
Krebs said nothing. She merely floated in the middle of the cramped bridge, glowering at Karlstad.