by Allen Steele
Danzig saw little of this through the DSV’s small portholes, and the flatscreen in the center of the wraparound control console didn’t reveal much more, until Evangeline switched on the forward searchlights. Lying face-down upon a padded cushion, he watched the lidar readout only a few centimeters from his face. The bathyscaphe was more than a half-kilometer deep within the crevasse, but it still had another 400 meters to go until it reached the hole that the drill had bored through the ice pack.
“You okay there?” Evangeline asked. “Not nervous, are you?”
She lay prone beside him within the tiny cabin, propping herself on her elbows. Although DSV-2 was superficially similar to DSV-1, it was smaller, designed to carry two people instead of three. Nor did it have a separate observation blister; the cabin was the bathyscaphe’s only interior compartment. The face-down arrangement of the couches, albeit uncomfortable, was meant not only to conserve space, but also to give the pilot and passenger the best possible view through the three saucer-sized portholes arranged left, right, and center of the console.
“No,” he said, “I’m fine.” Which was a lie. The swaying of the bathyscaphe upon its cable, the high-pitched whine of the wind, made him all too aware of the danger they faced. If the cable broke, it would be a long plummet to the bottom of the crevasse; even if they survived the fall, rescue would be all but impossible. Nor would he and Evangeline be able to reach the surface on their own; their skinsuits would allow them to keep breathing if the DSV’s hull was breached, but wouldn’t protect them for very long from the elements. If anything went wrong, they would face a cold and lonesome death.
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” Evangeline cocked her head toward the cabin ceiling. “The cable is made of carbon nanotubes … the same material the space elevator will be made of, if ISC can ever afford to build the thing. It’s practically unbreakable, even at these low temperatures.”
“And the winch?” Danzig thought of the mass, drum-shaped windlass around which the cable was wound. It was within temperature-controlled main room of the control igloo built on the edge of the chasm, which itself lay on the other side of the ridge he’d noticed shortly after landing, about a kilometer from Consolmagno Base.
“Tested many times before it was sent here.” A tight smile appeared on Evangeline’s face. “Trust me … I’d never climb into this thing if I didn’t think it was safe.”
Danzig said nothing as he peered through the forward porthole at the dark walls looming around them. He may have been reassured about the technology, but he was less confident in the woman who lay beside him. She’d asked him to trust her, but the last two men to do so were dead, their bodies resting at the bottom of Europa’s fathomless ocean. Only the fact that they shared the same compartment gave him any assurance that he wouldn’t suffer the same fate as John and Klaus; she couldn’t kill him without killing herself.
Or so he hoped.
“Com check,” Evangeline said abruptly, pressing her fingers against her headset mike. “CB-2, this is DSV-2. Com check on ELF, one, two, three.”
A few seconds went by, then Danzig heard Walter’s voice within his own headset. “We copy, DSV-2. ELF reception clear. Confirm distance to hole, please.”
Evangeline glanced at the lidar. “Three hundred meters to entrance hole. Descent nominal.”
“Roger.” A pause. “How about you, Otto? Ready to change your mind?”
Danzig grimaced. On the way to the chasm, Walter had tried to talk him out of making the dive. If only to put him off, Danzig told him that, if he happened to change his mind, he’d let him know. Evangeline had been in the other rover, so she hadn’t heard that conversation; apparently Walter didn’t care if she learned about it now.
Danzig tapped his mike wand. “Not at all,” he replied. “Looking forward to seeing what’s down here.”
“We copy,” Walter replied. “CB-2 standing by. Over.”
“DSV-2 over.” Evangeline muted her mike, then closed her eyes and gave a long sigh. “Thank you for saying that,” she said quietly. “I appreciate it.”
“He was just kidding.”
“No, I don’t think so,” A reflective pause, then she smiled. “But it doesn’t matter.” She winked at him. “Don’t worry, I’m going to give you a good ride.”
The double-entendre was obvious enough to remind Danzig of what she’d said when he’d visited her quarters: I’d be grateful for any help you can give me. There had been an unspoken promise in those words. Once again, he became aware of how close she was to him, their arms, legs and hips nearly touching one another’s. If he wanted to, he could slide his hand a few centimeters to the right and gently caress her buttocks …
He let out his breath, forced himself to look away. “I wish we’d brought along Doctor Faustus. We could have done another scene or two.”
“Uh-huh.” There was a sly undercurrent to her voice. “We were just about at the place where Faustus makes his pact with the devil.”
Perhaps her remark was meant to be in jest, but it gave Danzig a chill. He darted a glance at Evangeline from the corner of his eye, but her expression told him nothing. So he didn’t respond, but instead continued to look straight ahead.
Long minutes passed as the bathyscaphe continued its descent. When it was within 50 meters of the borehole, Evangeline used a forefinger to manipulate the trackball controlling the exterior camera. The lens rotated until it aimed straight down, but nothing could be seen until she cut in the infrared filters. The shaft was seven meters in diameter and almost perfectly round. The first team had formed it by lowering a robotic diamond-head drill into the crevasse; once its particle-beam laser melted the first couple of centimeters of ice and turned it into slush, the massive machine was able to dig through the last five hundred meters separating Europa’s surface from its underground ocean. Just before DSV-2 began its descent, the drill was lowered again, this time to clear away the icy crust which had formed over the hole the last time it had been used, when DSV-1 had made its final journey.
Evangeline continually reported their range to the control igloo as DSV-2 began to slow its descent. Her tone of voice had become tense, her attitude utterly serious. By then the hole was directly beneath them, a bottomless pit yawning open within the icepack floor. Danzig barely had time for any last regrets being there before the bathyscaphe was lowered into it. The chasm vanished as DSV-2 slowly moved down a narrow shaft, its searchlights reflected by the ice walls which surrounded them. The crimson tint of sulfur within the ice became more pronounced; to Danzig, it bore a disturbing resemblance to trails of frozen blood.
“Look there.” Evangeline pointed to the forward porthole, and Danzig crawled a little closer to see clusters of black, granular objects clinging to the sulfur deposits. “Cryptogams. Sort of like fungus, only a lot hardier. They were the first life-forms we found down here.”
“They grow within the ice?”
“No. We think they’re transported by diurnal tides and take root wherever they can find sulfur to feed upon.” She nodded toward the shaft walls. “They weren’t here when the hole was first made, but by the time I made my first dive in DSV-1 they’d been carried upward by the high tide.”
“The tide gets high enough to flood the hole?”
“Every 85 hours, yes.” Evangeline glanced at him. “Don’t worry. We’re at low tide now, so we should be out of here before Europa swings close enough to Jupiter for orbital resonance to affect the ocean levels.”
The cryptogams gradually increased in number, at times resembling irregular patches of carpet, as the bathyscaphe continued downward. “DSV-2 to CB-2,” Evangeline said, tapping her mike wand again. “Range 50 meters to aqualayer.” She listened as Walter made a terse response, then looked at Danzig. “Hold on … there may be a bit of bump when we hit water.”
She was right, although it was nowhere as violent as Danzig had braced himself to expect. One second, the bathyscaphe was surrounded by the shaft’s icy walls. The next, a
n abrupt jar that felt like an automobile jumping a curb and the portholes were awash with water.
“We’re here.” A tight grin appeared on Evangeline’s face. “DSV-2 to CB-2 … we’ve made interface with the aqualayer. Preparing to dive.”
A long pause, then they heard Walter’s voice, now carried by the ELF transceiver. “We copy, DSV-2. Have a good trip.”
Evangeline snapped a series of toggles above her head, and there was a muted gurgle of water as the ballast tanks began to fill. Bracing herself against the deck cushions, she grasped the bathyscaphe’s twin joysticks. She engaged the impellers, then gently moved the sticks forward, manipulating the pitch and yaw while keeping a sharp eye on the sonarscope and the eight-ball of the attitude control display.
On the other side of the portholes was a pitch-black darkness broken only by the sullen glare of the searchlights. Yet the darkness wasn’t absolute; as the bathyscaphe moved downward, every now and then Danzig caught momentary glimpses of light, like fireflies winking in the perpetual night. He was about to comment on this when something moved quickly past the porthole to his left. It was gone before he could see what it was, only to reappear in the forward porthole, hovering for a second or two in the glare of the searchlights before vanishing again, leaving behind only another brief flash of bioluminescence.
“Mariner,” Evangeline said before he could ask. Another shrimp-like creature appeared, then disappeared as quickly as the first. “That’s two,” she added. “That probably means they’re hunting … oh, yes, there they are.”
A sparse white cloud floated into view. At first Danzig thought it was nothing more than sediment until he noticed that it seemed to have a slow, lazy movement of its own. He’d just realized that the cloud was a school of tiny creatures, each no larger than an insect larva, when a mariner darted into their midst. The cloud scattered as the creatures fled from the predator, only to reform just at the edge of the searchlight’s range.
“Ice darters,” Evangeline said. “A mariner’s favorite treat.” She seemed thoughtful as she gazed through the center porthole. “There’s an entire world down there. We’re the only people to see this with our own eyes.”
“Besides Klaus and John, you mean,” Danzig said.
For a brief instant there was a flash of anger in her eyes. “Besides Klaus and John … yes, of course. What I meant was that we’ll be the only ones who’ll tell people what we saw.”
Danzig didn’t reply. What she’d said, though, seemed significant in some way he didn’t quite understand.
Evangeline pushed the joysticks forward, taking the bathyscaphe farther down. DSV-2 had a limited range of mobility, its tether preventing them from traveling very far from the hole, but it would be able to descend to 55 fathoms before it reached the cable’s maximum length. The darkness seemed to swallow the searchlight; every now and then, another mariner or school of darters would flit across its beam, but otherwise they were surrounded by a dark, cold abyss.
Danzig remembered that it was at 37 fathoms that Evangeline claimed DSV-1 encountered the creature that wrecked the bathyscaphe. So far, though, they hadn’t seen anything larger than mariners. The pilot had fallen silent; she seemed tense as she maneuvered the submersible in a broad, clockwise spiral that took them ever deeper into the subsurface ocean. She was obviously searching for the creature, hoping that she’d find it again. If it really existed, that is …
“Perhaps it’s moved on.” Danzig glanced at the depth gauge; the bathyscaphe was at 51 fathoms. Only seven more meters to go before they reached the end of the tether. “The robots didn’t find it when they were sent down here,” he went on. “Maybe they …”
“I know what you’re thinking.” Evangeline didn’t look at him, but continued to stare straight ahead. “I was making it all up. It’s not really there.” Then she looked at him, and Danzig was surprised to see hostility in her eyes. “No one’s ever going to believe me, so why bother? This is a waste of time.”
“I didn’t …”
“Hell with it.” She pulled back on the joysticks, ending the spiraling descent. “I don’t care what you think,” she said as she reached for the ballast control panel. “If I’m going to …”
Something bumped against the bathyscaphe.
The impact was soft, no more violent than one car tapping bumpers with another in a parking lot, but it came from the aft port hull where nothing else should be.
Evangeline’s hand stopped in mid-reach, her eyes wide with surprise. “Did you …?” Another impact, harder this time, from the starboard side just behind Danzig’s porthole.
He looked around just in time to see something move past the thick glass. He couldn’t clearly make it out, but he caught a brief glimpse of a fin before it disappeared.
“I see it!” he yelled. “There it is.”
“Switch on the recorder!” Evangeline snapped. She didn’t wait for him, though, but instead reached across Danzig toward the communications panel, intending to activate the bathyscaphe’s video recorder.
As Danzig watched, she tapped another button by mistake. He didn’t say anything, though, but quietly corrected her error by touching the right button. Then he noticed that the button she’d pressed was the one for the ELF transceiver. It was switched on again, but in her moment of distraction she’d turned it off. He didn’t have a chance to mention what she’d done before something moved on the other side of the forward porthole.
“Here it comes again,” Evangeline said, a little more calmly now.
An instant later, the creature was squarely within the searchlight beam. Two enormous eyes, with bloodless-pink irises and broad black pupils, contracted slightly in the glare, and a lipless mouth opened to reveal a fibrous membrane. For an instant it seemed as if the creature was going to collide head-first with the bathyscaphe, but at the last moment it turned to the left. As it swam past DSV-2’s port side, Danzig saw a fleshy body, albino-white, with narrow slit-like gills and a stubby fin along its side. About three or four meters long — he couldn’t tell for sure — it didn’t quite look like a fish, but not like a mammal or reptile either. Some new kind of animal, utterly alien.
“I’ll be damned.” Danzig caught another glimpse of the creature as it moved past the porthole on Evangeline’s side of the cabin. “It’s …”
Then the extraterrestrial hit the bathyscaphe again, hard enough this time to shake the entire submersible. “I don’t care what it is,” Evangeline said. “If it keeps doing that, it’s going to damage my boat.”
“Maybe it’s attracted by the searchlight.”
“You may be right.” Another glance out the forward porthole, then she reached forward to switch off the searchlight. The portholes went dark, save for the distant flash of a mariner’s bioluminescence. A moment passed, then there was another hard bump against the hull, again from aft but not nearly as hard as before, almost as if the creature had struck the submersible by accident.
Evangeline looked at Danzig. “Seen enough?” she asked, and smiled when he nodded. “Good. So have I.”
She voided the ballast tanks and Danzig felt the bathyscaphe begin to rise, heading swiftly toward the ice layer that hid the ocean from the sky. Taking the joysticks again, Evangeline maneuvered the bathyscaphe toward the hole; there was a sharp tug from above as the bathyscaphe’s computer sent a signal up the cable to the winch, commanding it to automatically begin reeling in the tether.
Danzig didn’t mention to Evangeline the error she’d made when she’d switched off the ELF while reaching for the video recorder, yet he knew that this would explain DSV-1’s mysterious communications failure. Yet this was almost beside the point. The creature existed, just as Evangeline had claimed. Danzig had seen it with his own eyes, and its image had been captured by the recorder.
He couldn’t help but smile. The angel had her alibi.
VIII
“SIX METERS AND CLOSING,” Kevin said. “Five … four … three … two … one …”
&
nbsp; A muffled clang as the shuttle’s docking collar mated with the Zeus Explorer. The pilot reached up to snap a couple of switches before looking over his shoulder at his passengers. “Okay, folks, we’re here. Don’t forget to tip the waiter on the way out.”
“Put it on my tab,” Danzig replied, and Kevin laughed as he continued to shut down the spacecraft. Danzig unbuckled his seat harness, then turned to Evangeline. “Ready to go aboard?”
“Certainly.” She’d already opened her own harness. “Never thought I’d be happy to see the ship again.”
“I’m sure you are,” he said, and caught a brief smile in return. A four-day round-trip aboard the shuttle was enough to induce claustrophobia in anyone, and Consolmagno Base was hardly the most comfortable of places. The Explorer was a luxury yacht by comparison. But there was more to it than just that, wasn’t there?
“Hold on. Let me open the hatch for you.” Kevin left his seat and pushed himself toward the bow hatch. As the pilot pumped the lever that would equalize pressure between the shuttle and the Explorer’s docking port, Danzig stole a glance at Evangeline. She’d changed over the last couple of days; there was no longer a haunted look in her eyes, and it seemed as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. And for good reason. She’d left the Explorer a pariah; now she was returning, if not a hero, then at least vindicated.
Even before Walter relayed the DSV-2 video to the Explorer, it was clear that the accusations against her would be dropped. There was no longer any doubt that the creature was real; now that Danzig had seen what was being regarded as Europa’s largest inhabitant, no one could claim that Evangeline lied about its existence. The worst that could now be said about her was that she’d reacted rashly when it attacked her DSV-1. And even then, no one could really blame her for trying to save her own life.
Someone knocked twice against the outside of the shuttle hatch. Kevin knocked back, then grasped the lockwheel and twisted it counter-clockwise. A faint hiss as the hatch swung open, then a voice called from within the airlock.