by Paul Preuss
There were renewed shouts, but the majority of the reporters, realizing that Forster would go on ignoring them until he’d been given a chance to read his prepared remarks, turned on their fellows and shushed them smartly.
“If he says anything of the slightest interest, please make sure I’m awake to record it,” Mays drawled into his microlink.
“Thank you,” said Forster into the sullen and expectant silence. “Let me introduce the members of the Amalthea expedition. First, in charge of our vessel, the Michael Ventris, our pilot, Josepha Walsh; our engineer, Angus McNeil; and our navigator, Anthony Groves. Assisting me in surface operations will be Dr. William Hawkins and Mr. Blake Red-field. Inspector Ellen Troy represents the Board of Space Control.”
“I’ll wager she represents rather more than that,” whispered Mays.
“Our mission is two-fold,” Forster continued. “We wish to determine the geological structure of the moon. More particularly, we hope to resolve certain persistent anomalies in the radiation signature of Amalthea. For over a century—until the termination of the Kon-Tiki expedition last year—Amalthea was observed to radiate more energy than it receives directly from the sun and by reflection from Jupiter. Almost all of the excess heat could be attributed to the impact of charged particles in Jupiter’s radiation belt—almost all, but not quite all. We should like to learn where that extra heat came from.”
“Especially now that the heat’s been turned up,” Mays kibbitzed.
“The question has become more urgent since Amalthea became geologically active. It now reradiates much more energy than it absorbs. What kind of heat engine is driving the ice geysers that are causing Amalthea to lose almost half a per cent of its original mass each twelve hours—every time the moon orbits Jupiter?”
“Oh, do tell us,” Mays pleaded, sotto voce.
“Finally, of course,” Forster said, speaking hurriedly, “we hope to learn what connection may exist between the recent events on Amalthea and the creatures called medusas which live in the clouds of Jupiter.” He glared at the audience of ostentatiously bored reporters. “We’ll take questions.”
“Troy! Where did you spend the past year?” shouted one of the loudest of the hounds.
“Is it true you were in an asylum?”
She glanced at Forster, who nodded. He knew who the real media star was. “I’ve been involved in an investigation,” she said, “the nature of which, for the time being, must remain confidential.”
“Oh, come on,” the man groaned, “that doesn’t…”
But other questioners were already shouting him down: What about the aliens, Forster? Aren’t you really going to Amalthea to find Culture X? You and Troy talking to these aliens, is that it?
A piercing female voice cut through the babble: “You claim your expedition is scientific, Professor Forster. But Sir Randolph Mays claims you’re part of the Free Spirit conspiracy. Who’s right?”
Forster’s grin was feral. “Are you sure you’re quoting Sir Randolph correctly? Why not ask him? He’s right there, in back.”
The whole pack of them turned to stare at Mays, who muttered, “What’s this then?” even as he continued to aim his photogram camera at the odd spectacle. “Be ready, my dear,” he addressed Marianne, “we’re going to have to spring our little surprise earlier than I’d hoped.”
“What about it, Sir Randolph?” the woman reporter called in his direction. “Don’t you think Forster’s one of them?”
He held the camera to one side, still pointed at the newshounds—enjoying their resentful attention—and at the crew of the Michael Ventris waiting uneasily on the dais beyond them. “I never said you were part of the conspiracy, Professor,” he called out cheerfully, a huge grin stretching his voracious lips over his sturdy white teeth. “Nevertheless I throw the question back to you. You know something known to the Free Spirit and unknown to the rest of us. Tell us the real reason you are going to Amalthea. Tell us the reason you are taking an ice mole. Tell us why you are taking a Europan submarine.”
Ice mole!
Submarine!
What’s all this in aid of, Forster?
“As for this Free Spirit of yours, Sir Randolph, I am wholly in the dark.” Forster’s grin was as fierce as Mays’s; they could have been a pair of feuding baboons disputing the leadership of the pack. “But as to the moon Amalthea, it seems you have chosen not to hear what I have just been saying. Amalthea is expelling its substance into space through immense spouts of water vapor. Therefore this moon must consist very largely of water, some of it solid—for which an ice mole is a useful exploratory tool—and some of it liquid, the sort of environment for which the submarines of Europa were designed.”
Josepha Walsh leaned forward to tap Forster on the shoulder; Forster paused to listen to his pilot’s whispered words, then returned his attention to the assembled reporters. “I’m informed that the countdown for our departure has already begun,” he said with gleeful malice. “Unfortunately that is all the time we have for discussion. Thank you for your attention.”
The cries of rage from the frustrated newshounds were frightening enough to justify the precaution of spaceport guards, who emerged from the doorway to protect the retreat of Forster’s crew; none but Sparta and Forster himself had said a word to the assembled media.
“Is that all they’re going to say?” Marianne asked, frustrated that her questions—thousands of them—were still unanswered.
Mays tore off his comm rig. “He mocks me.” He stared over the heads of his milling colleagues, seemingly lost inside himself. Then he looked down at his assistant. “We have only begun to report this story. But to carry on will require imagination … and daring. Are you still committed, Marianne?”
Her eyes shone with dedication. “I’m with you all the way, Randolph.”
PART
3
THE MANTA,
THE MOON CRUISER,
AND THE OLD MOLE
12
Everyone not on duty gathered in the wardroom of the Michael Ventris to watch the final approach on the viewscreens. At first, Amalthea appeared as a tiny gibbous moon hanging in space, its night sector lit up faintly by the reflected glory of Jupiter.
Jupiter seemed to expand forever, until finally it filled the sky, rolling overhead at an incredible rate as the ship smoothly matched orbits with its bright, swiftly moving target. What had been a lump of dark rock 270 kilometers long, blotched with a few snowy patches, was now a shorter ellipsoid of gleaming ice, as polished and abstract as a Brancusi sculpture, its long axis pointed straight at the curdled orange and yellow clouds of Jupiter, its principal.
Even if they had not had the aid of the viewscreen optics, they were close enough now to see hundreds of plumes of vapor dotting the sculptured ice surface, a celestial Yellowstone of fizzing soda-water geysers. Instead of falling back to the ground, these geysers all gracefully curved away into space, dissipating in fairy veils of mist that made it look as if Amalthea were caressed by gentle winds, rather than racing into stark vacuum.
The only “atmosphere” this far from Jupiter—despite its awesome size, still almost 110,000 kilometers distant—was the horde of particles in its radiation belts. Like the tail of a comet approaching the sun, the tenuous gases of Amalthea were set aglow and blown backward by radiation pressure alone.
It was into this misty slipstream that Josepha Walsh steered the Ventris—into the only region of space close to Jupiter that was shielded from lethal trapped radiation. Here, a little over a year ago, Garuda had waited while Howard Falcon descended into the clouds in the balloon-borne Kon-Tiki. Garuda’s task had been easy by comparison to that of the Ventris, for it had only to wait the few short days until Falcon returned. The mission of the Michael Ventris, was open-ended, and the object of its study changed shape with each passing minute.
Jo Walsh maneuvered as close to the moon as she dared without actually touching down upon it. Finally Jupiter disappeared from the viewscre
ens, setting beyond the close, sharply curved horizon of Amalthea; a few minutes more, and the Ventris sidled so close that from the main hatch it would be only a little jump into the mists that shrouded the surface below.
Long before the ship stopped moving, the watchers in the wardroom had seen the strange black markings on the moon. Hawkins blurted out the question on everyone’s minds: “What are those? Craters?”
Groves and McNeil soon joined Blake and Bill Hawkins and the professor in the wardroom. The whole crew was there except Walsh, who still had things to attend to on the flight deck, and Sparta, who had not been seen since shortly before launch from Ganymede.
The biggest viewscreen was playing back in extreme slow motion the sequence of images from the Ventris’s final approach. At three places on the side facing them, clearly visible through the tenuous surface mist, were huge, sharply defined circles—black lines inscribed as if with a fine nib, India ink on white rag paper—circles within circles, too mathematically precise and too regularly spaced to have been the product of random cratering.
“Professor, did you already know about this?”
“Let’s say it isn’t as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.” Forster’s shiny young face with its old man’s eyes looked very smug as he fielded their questions. “The Space Board have managed to keep most of its remote satellite observations under wraps. Only one slip—that image Mays somehow got hold of, which was too distant to give away anything of consequence—and these patterns only showed up in the high-resolution visuals within the past month. We’re the first to get a close look.”
As the image sequence continued, with the point of view sinking closer to the surface, it was obvious to the onlookers that the rings were not inscriptions, not something incised in a smooth surface; on the contrary, they stood out in relief. They were structures of some kind, delicate black traceries of metal or some composite material, standing a few meters above the icy plain.
“Anybody got any ideas about what we’re looking at?” Forster asked.
“Well, sir, I’d venture…”
“No fair, Angus, you can tell at a glance. Bill? Tony? Any guesses?”
Tony Groves shook his head and smiled. “No idea. Although they do look a bit like giant dartboards.”
“Some dartboards,” McNeil snorted. “Some darts.”
“Bill?” the professor prompted.
Bill Hawkins said rather sullenly, “I’m a linguist, not a planetologist.” He seemed genuinely hurt by Forster’s evident decision to withhold his prior knowledge of the markings.
“What about you, Blake?”
Blake smiled. “Could they have something to do with the fact that when Falcon aroused the medusas, they aimed a radio blast right at Amalthea?”
“Is that really true?” Hawkins asked sharply. “Mays claimed it, but the Space Board never confirmed it.”
“It’s true, Bill,” Forster said. “I’ll show you my analysis of that signal. I think you’ll come to the same conclusion about its meaning I did.”
“Which is what?” Hawkins demanded.
“A message that translates, ‘They have arrived.’ I believe the medusas were announcing the arrival of visitors in the clouds of Jupiter.”
“The medusas!” Hawkins protested. “They’re not intelligent, are they? Aren’t they merely simple animals?”
“Well, we really have no idea how intelligent they are. Or even how to apply the concept of intelligence to alien lifeforms. But given the right sort of training, or programming, it takes no particular intelligence for an Earthly organism to emit a complex-seeming behavior, upon the right stimulus. Trained parrots for example.”
“Assuming the medusas were signalling, there would have to be receivers to pick up the signal,” Blake said.
“Radio antennas, you mean?” said Hawkins, incredulous.
“So I’d bet,” said Forster.
Angus McNeil nodded. “That’s just what they are, by the look of ’em. Suitable for meter wavelengths, same as the markings on the medusas. What I wonder is why nobody ever noticed ’em before.”
“Until a year ago—until the geysers erupted—Amalthea was covered with reddish black dirt,” Forster said, “the color of a carbonaceous body rich in organics, and incidentally the perfect color to hide these artificial structures.”
“You think they were deliberately disguised, then?” asked Tony Groves, sounding skeptical.
“I don’t know,” Forster replied simply. “I suppose the dirt layer could have accumulated over the millenniums from random collisions with meteoroids.” He looked at Blake. “What do you say?”
“What seems irrational to a human might make perfect sense to an alien,” Blake answered. “Yet I don’t see the point in hiding the antennas, if the idea is to alert some … presence on Amalthea that visitors have arrived at Jupiter. What difference would it make if the visitors saw these things and chose to land on Amalthea before going to Jupiter?”
“Unless this presence, as you call it, didn’t want to be discovered accidentally,” said Forster.
“What does that mean?” Hawkins blurted, still nursing his resentment.
“A year ago nobody knew there were medusas living in the atmosphere of Jupiter,” Forster said to him, “despite a century’s worth of probes—over three hundred robot probes. Until somebody goes back down there and tries to interview a medusa, we won’t know how intelligent they are—your point, Bill—or what kind of intelligence we’re dealing with. Perhaps this—presence—doesn’t want to talk to robots. Or to trained parrots. Perhaps it doesn’t want to talk to entities that have merely stumbled upon some sign or mark of artifice on the surface of Amalthea. Perhaps this presence only wants to talk to those who know exactly what they’re looking for.”
“Those who’ve found and deciphered the Martian plaque?” Hawkins asked, adding a bit acidly, “People like yourself?”
Forster smiled disingenuously. “The Martian plaque—or its equivalent.”
“According to Sir Randolph-Bloody-Mays, the Free Spirit claims to have preserved from antiquity such an equivalent.” Hawkins almost spat the words. “They call it the Knowledge.”
“I’m not one of the Free Spirit, Bill, and I’m not in league with them,” Forster said quietly. “Whatever Mays may claim.”
Blake broke the awkward silence that ensued. “Our turn to quiz you, Professor. What are we looking for out there?”
“Good question.” Forster paused, tugging at a stray hair in one of his thick brows. “Answering it is the essence of our task. I have my notions, but in fact I don’t know anything with certainty. No more than any of you,” he added, with a nod to Bill Hawkins. “We’ll begin with a close-in survey from orbit.”
They flew through a fantastic cloudscape, a corona of gases standing straight out from the surface of the moon like electrified hair. Instead of entangling itself in these evanescent tresses, the Ventris sailed through them without leaving so much as an eddy, except where the cage of its superconducting radiation shield temporarily bent the charged particles around the ship in curves of mathematical precision.
Coming over the leading half, blown bare of gas, they looked down upon a blinding whiteness that appeared as smooth and hard as a billiard ball; but when they bounced radar signals off the surface, a mushy signal came back. They charted the locations of the geysers and found that while they were not exactly equidistant from one another, they marked out the interstices of a regular imaginary grid pattern over the entire ellipsoidal surface of the moon. They found six of the giant “dartboards,” one at each pole of the long axis, and four evenly spaced around the equator.
When they were safely parked back in the radiation shadow, Tony Groves, who was in charge of the survey, neatly summed up the results: “Friends, there’s absolutely nothing natural about this so-called moon.”
The first exploratory team—Blake, Angus McNeil, and Bill Hawkins—went out twelve hours later. In that time Amalthea and its f
lea-sized parasite, the Michael Ventris, had raced all the way around Jupiter once and come back approximately to where they had been with respect to Jupiter and its planet-sized, slower-moving Galilean moons, when they’d first made moonfall.
The hatch swung open and the three explorers, spot-lighted by a circle of yellow light from the airlock, floated out into the shadow of Amalthea. McNeil had done this sort of thing more times than he could count, on hundreds of asteroids and moonlets, although he’d never done it quite like this—
—diving into a white fog as bright and opaque as dry ice vapor but more tenuous, gauzier, harder to disturb, less skittish; it was as if the fog were no more substantial, no easier to cup in the hands or disturb with a vigorous swing of the arm, than the diffuse and omnipresent light that had existed in the photon era of the early universe.
When Forster had announced the roster, McNeil had muttered to Tony Groves that Hawkins was too inexperienced for the tricky extravehicular activity. But Forster made it clear that he wanted Hawkins to be on the first team.
Nor was Blake exactly an old hand; his experience in space was, putting it politely, eclectic. He’d once had fun jumping around on Earth’s moon, and he’d had plenty of practice with Martian pressure suits, but aside from one brief episode in an old-fashioned soft-suit near the Martian moon Phobos, he was new to work in deep space.
McNeil was appointed their shepherd. In thirty years of space travel, there were few emergencies he had not faced and managed.
When they got close enough to the surface they discovered beneath their booted feet a froth of pure and delicate water ice, fantastically carved by forces no more powerful than sublimation into a fluffy crystalline universe of branching miniaturized snowflake-structures—the scale and complexity of deep coral reefs, yet as insubstantial as a puff of talc.