by Ben Bova
Yeager interrupted him. “At all times, like the man said. Even if we have to wait out in the passageway.”
“Yeah,” said Andy. “We’ll keep watch over her night and day.”
Dr. Pohan looked as if he might burst: red-faced, mustache quivering, scalp covered with beads of perspiration. But he admitted defeat. “Out in the passageway, then. Do not interfere with medical procedures.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it,” said Yeager, straight-faced.
“We merely want to look in on our friend from time to time,” said Dorn.
“Every day,” Corvus emphasized.
LEVIATHAN
Leviathan’s eye parts could see the darters clearly now, a huge swarm of them lurking upcurrent, between the Kin and the flow of food sifting down weakly from the cold abyss above.
Darters had never done this before, as far as Leviathan knew. They hunted in small packs and attacked individual members of the Kin, usually when one went off alone to dissociate and bud. But now the darters had grouped together and were apparently willing to attack the Kin en masse.
It flashed a question to the Elders, deep in the core of the Kin’s formation. Have the darters ever shown this behavior before? Have they ever displayed such planning, such cunning?
Leviathan’s question was relayed from one member of the Kin to another, inward toward the Elders. Leviathan watched the displays flashing yellow and green, briefly lighting the water, fainter and fainter as the message moved inward toward the Elders. Waiting, Leviathan saw that the darters were trying to cut the Kin off from the flow of food. If they wished to reach the downcurrent they would have to fight their way past the darters.
And if they failed to reach the flow of food, members of the Kin would begin to disintegrate involuntarily, hunger driving their primeval instinct to dissociate and reproduce. Then the darters would feast.
At last the Elders’ answer flashed from the display of the member nearest Leviathan. None of the Elders could recall the darters showing such organization and forethought before. Not even the most senior of the Elders had seen anything like this, even from its first budding, long ages ago.
Something new! Despite the danger Leviathan thrilled at the concept. Something new and different was happening. Perhaps it would lead the Elders to change their ancient ways.
Another message flashed from the display cells of the member nearest Leviathan. The Elders have decided that the Kin will turn away from the darters.
Leave the food stream? Leviathan was stunned by the Elders’ decision. Before it could question the command, though, the message from the Elders continued:
There are other food streams. The world is wide. There is no need to confront the darters over this one stream. We will find another.
As the huge spherical formation of the Kin slowly turned away, Leviathan wondered if the Elders knew what they were doing. The darters aren’t going to remain where they are and let us get away from them. They will follow us and attack, sooner or later.
Leviathan flashed that message inward toward the Elders. In time their reply flared from the hide of the member nearest it. The darters would never dare to attack the assembled Kin. We would destroy them and they know it. Stay together and we will leave them far behind us while we find another food stream.
Leviathan wondered about that. The darters have changed their ways, but the Elders do not recognize it. Nor do they realize that we must change our ways, as well.
But decisions of the Elders must be obeyed, or the Symmetry will be damaged beyond repair. Reluctantly, Leviathan swam with the rest of the Kin, away from the food stream, away from the waiting darters.
Its eye parts saw that the darters turned, too, and began to follow the Kin on their new course. They could be patient, Leviathan thought, and wait until starvation forces us to begin dissociating.
II
JUPITER ORBIT: RESEARCH STATION GOLD
We are not to imagine or suppose, but to discover,
what Nature does or may be made to do.
—Francis Bacon
RECOVERY
Deirdre was dreaming about the dolphins. She was a dolphin herself, swimming easily in a world filled with fish, sunlight streaming from above, water sparkling and warm.
“Ms. Ambrose? Can you hear me?”
The voice was gentle but annoying. She dived deeper into the sea, searching for the bottom where the tasty squid jetted among the rocks and coral formations.
“Ms. Ambrose. Open your eyes, please.”
Go away, Deirdre thought. Leave me alone, won’t you?
“Dee,” a different voice called. “It’s me, Andy. Can you wake up now?”
Andy. She pictured his boyish, grinning, slightly crooked face. Reluctantly Deirdre opened her eyes. It took an effort: Her lids were gummy, as if someone had pasted them together.
“Hey, that’s good! How d’you feel?”
Blinking, she made out a fuzzy form leaning over her. A few more quick flickers of her lids and Andy Corvus’s face came into focus. He was grinning in his lopsided, easygoing way.
“Hi! Welcome back.”
Dorn’s half-metal form came into view. “Welcome to station Gold.”
“We’re here?” Deirdre’s throat felt parched, her voice was scratchy.
“We are always here,” Dorn said gravely, “wherever that may be.”
Andy said, “What he means is—”
“Never mind what he means.” Max Yeager’s burly form pushed into view, behind the other two. “How are you, gorgeous? How do you feel?”
Swiftly taking stock, she said shakily, “Okay, I guess.” Then, stronger, “Fine, actually. I feel fine. Like I’ve had a good, long nap.”
“Nine days, just about,” said Corvus.
Deirdre pushed herself up on her elbows and the thin sheet covering her slipped away. With a shock, she realized she was wearing nothing. Corvus gulped as she grabbed the sheet and pulled it up to her chin. Dorn looked away. Yeager turned flame red.
A medical orderly, young and male, offered Deirdre a small cup of water. Clutching the sheet with one hand as she sat up on the bed, Deirdre accepted the water gratefully. The bed rose automatically to support her.
“We have fruit juices, if you prefer,” said the orderly.
“This will do, thank you.”
Glancing around as she drank, she saw that they were obviously no longer in Australia’s pocket-sized infirmary. This was an actual room, with walls instead of flimsy partitions and display screens that showed vivid swirls and streams of color. Those are Jupiter’s cloud tops, Deirdre recognized. They must be real-time views.
“So we’re on station Gold,” she said.
“It’s big,” Corvus replied, grinning widely. “A lot bigger than the torch ship. Got lots of labs, workshops, even an auditorium where they hold conferences and such.”
Yeager said, “The living quarters aren’t as spiffy as Australia’s, but they’re not all that bad.”
“Wait until you go out to the observation deck,” said Dorn, “and see Jupiter close-up. It’s overwhelming.”
Deirdre nodded. “You guys will have to show me around the station.”
All three of them nodded happily.
* * *
Sitting in a virtual reality chamber, her face masked by molecule-thin goggles and a speaker bud in one ear, Katherine Westfall was getting a tour of Gold from the station’s director, Grant Archer.
Archer had been at the arrival lounge’s airlock to welcome her aboard the station.
“We’ll take care of your staff, Mrs. Westfall,” he had told her. “Once you’re settled in, I’d like to give you a tour of the station.”
Except for his silvery little beard and close-cropped hair, Grant Archer appeared deceptively youthful. Good shoulders, Westfall saw, and steady brown eyes that looked as if they could be stubborn.
“My people will see to my luggage,” she had said. “Why don’t we start the tour right now?”
/> Archer had smiled at her, a warm, personable smile. “That will be fine.” He gestured down the passageway leading from the arrival lounge. “This way, then.”
She was surprised when he led her to a small, dimly lit chamber, empty except for a high-backed chair standing in its center. It looked to her more like an interrogation room than anything else. Except that its walls were covered with gauges and dials and there was a bulky electronics console in one corner.
“The station’s pretty big,” he said, leading her to the chair. “We’ve learned that going through it in virtual reality is a lot easier than actually walking into every nook and cranny.”
“Oh,” she said as she sat in the chair. It felt cold, hard.
“I’ll run the simulation myself,” Archer said, going to the console. She had to turn around in the chair to see him leaning over the console’s desk front and switching on the power. A row of green lights sprang up.
Archer opened a drawer and pulled out what looked to her like a limp cloth and a tiny blob of plastic.
“If you’ll slip the viewing screens over your eyes and put the speaker into one of your ears, we’ll be ready to go.”
Wordlessly Katherine did as he asked. A pang of alarm surged through her. Suddenly she was alone in darkness. She couldn’t see a thing.
But then she heard Archer’s calm tenor voice: “Okay, everything’s in the green. Here we go. Welcome to research station Thomas Gold.”
STATION GOLD
Colors swirled briefly before her eyes. They coalesced to show Katherine Westfall a view of the station as it orbited the giant planet Jupiter. She seemed to be hanging in space, yet she felt perfectly warm and comfortable; the solidity of the chair she was sitting upon felt reassuring.
She saw that the station consisted of three wheels, one on top of another, connected by a central spine. The outer skins of the wheels were studded with viewport bubbles, airlock hatches, antennas, sensors, and other paraphernalia that Katherine could not identify. As she drifted closer to the orbiting station she could see elevator cabs running up and down the central shaft. The entire station was spinning slowly. Of course, she told herself: That’s how they get a feeling of gravity inside, even though it’s only one-sixth of normal.
Archer’s calm, steady voice sounded in her ear. “Station Gold originally was just one wheel, the one on top. We’ve named that one after the station’s original director, Dr. Li Zhang Wo. The other two wheels are too new to have been named yet.”
That’s where most of his funding has been spent, Westfall said to herself. On construction.
Archer’s voice droned on, “The first wheel is now devoted completely to research operations. We have teams working on the four big moons of Jupiter, the Galilean satellites…”
And Westfall saw a building on the ice surface of Europa, built like a fortress in that frozen wilderness. The sky was dark and empty except for a scattering of stars. Archer’s voice explained that glare from sunlight reflecting off the ice blotted out all but the brightest of stars. The scene looked bleak and cold and somehow frightening to Katherine. She shuddered involuntarily.
“The surface structure has to be heavily insulated not only against the cold,” Archer was explaining, “but also against the tremendous radiation flux from Jupiter’s Van Allen belts.”
At that, she saw the immense multihued planet climbing above Europa’s ice-covered horizon, like a huge all-encompassing monster rising out of the black infinity. Jupiter was enormous, streaked with ribbons of color that eddied and swirled while she watched, suddenly gasping for breath.
“Of course,” Archer’s cool, unruffled voice continued, “the real work on Europa goes on beneath the ice mantle, in the buried ocean.”
Katherine watched submersibles nosing through the dark waters, their lights illuminating a nightmare world of long stringy swaying things, dead white, tentacle-like arms waving in the currents. Sheets of rubbery expanses floated into the light and out again, as if trying to flee to the safety of darkness.
“There’s plenty of life in the oceans of Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Most of it is comparable to terrestrial life-forms such as algae, plankton, kelp, and such. All the forms we’ve found so far are autotrophic, like green plants on Earth, although they don’t use sunlight as their energy source. They produce their own foodstuffs using the heat energy from the moon’s gravitational flexing as it orbits Jupiter.”
On and on Archer explained. Though she knew perfectly well that she was sitting safe and warm in the VR chamber, Katherine Westfall felt jittery, almost frightened at the frigid and utterly alien worlds she was experiencing. Even when the scene shifted to Io with its colorful volcanic eruptions of bright molten sulfur, she felt cold and frighteningly alone.
Abruptly the scene changed again to show an ugly, irregular, pockmarked chunk of rock floating in the emptiness of space.
“Some of our researchers are studying the smaller moons of Jupiter, as well,” Archer explained. “They’ve identified seventy-three of them so far. Most of them are asteroids or cometary bodies that have fallen into Jupiter’s huge gravity well and been pulled into orbits around the planet.”
The scene shifted to show Jupiter’s colorful, churning cloud tops again.
“Occasionally an asteroidal or cometary body is pulled into Jupiter itself,” Archer narrated. Westfall saw an oblong chunk of what looked like dirty ice tumbling through space, heading smack into the clouds, a trail of vapor boiling off it as it fell. “Less than two months ago Comet McDaniel-Lloyd was pulled into the planet.”
The comet disappeared into the bright-colored clouds. Then the region brightened briefly with what might have been an explosion below the top of the cloud deck.
“The comet exploded with the force of thousands of megatons,” Archer was saying, still as calm as a grandfather reading children’s stories. “We are, of course, studying the effects the explosion has had on the local ecology.”
Once more she saw the three-wheeled station. “The station’s orbit is close enough to Jupiter so that we’re below the most intense radiation of the Van Allen belts. Our second wheel is taken up by the commercial gas scooping operations that extract fusion fuels such as helium-three out of the upper layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere and sell them to fusion power companies on Earth, the Moon, and elsewhere in the solar system. For more than twenty years, Jupiter has been the main energy source for the human race’s fusion power systems.”
Westfall saw a sleek, bullet-shaped vessel detach itself from the station’s middle wheel and hurtle downward toward the colorful cloud tops of the giant planet.
“The scoopships are remotely controlled, of course, by personnel in the station.” The view changed to show a team of men and women in sky blue coveralls sitting at a row of consoles.
“The fusion operation consists of remote operators, maintenance and service personnel, and the usual corps of administrators and directors,” Archer was saying, as if reading from a prepared script. “Without these scooping operations, fusion powerplants throughout the solar system would be deprived of the fuels they need to provide the human race’s main source of clean, efficient energy.”
The market for fusion fuels has leveled off, Westfall knew. The scientists don’t want to face the fact that their budgets will have to level off, as well.
Now the scene before her eyes was from a camera mounted on one of the scoopships. She watched, suddenly fascinated, as the ship plunged toward those roiling, racing cloud tops.
“Wind speeds at the uppermost levels of the clouds routinely exceed five hundred kilometers per hour,” Archer was saying, without a trace of emotion. “The clouds are composed mainly of diatomic hydrogen molecules and helium atoms: The fusionable isotopes such as helium-three comprise only a small fraction of the total.”
The ship plunged into the clouds. Katherine watched, wide-eyed, as her view was enveloped in swirling multicolored mists.
“The colors, of course, are from min
or constituents in the clouds: sulfur, oxygen, carbon, and such. The ships separate out those impurities in flight and carry back only the fusionable isotopes that are needed.”
Abruptly, they broke out of the clouds. Katherine could again see the research station rotating slowly, almost majestically, as the scoopship returned with its cargo of fusion fuels.
She thought that her tour was finished, but instead the scene shifted to show the insides of a laboratory with serious-looking men and women working at some elaborate network of glass tubing while Archer’s voice cheerfully began to explain what they were doing.
It seemed like hours, but at last the tour ended and Archer helped her remove the mask and earbud.
“That’s about it,” he said, smiling as he helped her to her feet. “You’ve seen just about our entire operation, in less than two hours.”
Katherine Westfall nodded as she stood up. She felt tired, almost exhausted, her legs stiff. But then she realized that Archer’s tour did not mention the studies of Jupiter itself, of the airborne life-forms in the giant planet’s atmosphere, nor the creatures living in the huge globe-encompassing ocean. He didn’t show me the station’s third wheel at all, she said to herself. What’s going on there? she wondered. What’s he trying to hide from me?
INTELLECTUAL COUSINS
As they left the virtual reality chamber, Katherine Westfall told Grant Archer, “It’s not necessary for you to escort me to my quarters.”
“It’s my pleasure,” he said, smiling gently at her. “It’s not every day that we have such a distinguished visitor.”
She realized with some surprise that Archer was nearly a dozen centimeters taller than she. He doesn’t look that big, she thought. He’s built very compactly.
“I hope you’ll have dinner this evening with my wife and me,” Archer was saying as they walked along the passageway. “She’s very anxious to meet you.”