'Goodbye, my dearest, and my love to you all – especially Chris. By the time you get this, it will be over, one way or the other. Remember I tried to do my best for all our sakes – goodbye.'
When he had removed the audio chip, Floyd drifted up to the communications centre and handed it over to Sasha Kovalev.
'Please make sure it gets off before we close down,' he said earnestly.
'Don't worry,' promised Sasha. 'I'm still working on all channels, and we have a good ten minutes left.'
He held out his hand. 'If we do meet again, why, we shall smile! If not, why then, this parting was well made.' Floyd blinked.
'Shakespeare, I suppose?'
'Of course; Brutus and Cassius before battle. See you later.'
Tanya and Vasili were too intent upon their situation displays to do more than wave to Floyd, and he retreated to his cabin. He had already said farewell to the rest of the crew; there was nothing to do but wait. His sleeping bag was slung in preparation for the return of gravity when deceleration commenced, and he had only to climb into it – 'Antennas retracted, all protective shields up,' said the intercom speaker. 'We should feel first braking in five minutes. Everything normal.'
'That's hardly the word I'd use,' Floyd muttered to himself. 'I think you mean "nominal".' He had barely concluded the thought when there was a diffident knock on the door.
'Kto tam?'
To his astonishment, it was Zenia.
'Do you mind if I come in?' she asked awkwardly, in a small-girl voice which Floyd could scarcely recognize.
'Of course not. But why aren't you in your own cubicle? It's only five minutes to re-entry.'
Even as he asked the question, he was aware of its foolishness. The answer was so perfectly obvious that Zenia did not deign to reply.
But Zenia was the very last person he would have expected: her attitude toward him had invariably been polite but distant. Indeed, she was the only member of the crew who preferred to call him Dr Floyd. Yet there she was, clearly seeking comfort and companionship at the moment of peril.
'Zenia, my dear,' he said wryly. 'You're welcome. But my accommodation is somewhat limited. One might even call it Spartan.'
She managed a faint smile, but said nothing as she floated into the room. For the first time, Floyd realized that she was not merely nervous – she was terrified. Then he understood why she had come to him. She was ashamed to face her countrymen and was looking for support elsewhere.
With this realization, his pleasure at the unexpected encounter abated somewhat. That did not lessen his responsibility to another lonely human being, a long way from home. The fact that she was an attractive – though certainly not beautiful – woman of barely half his own age should not have affected the issue. But it did; he was beginning to rise to the occasion.
She must have noticed, but did nothing to encourage or discourage him as they lay down side by side in the sleeping cocoon. There was just enough room for them both, and Floyd began to do some anxious calculations. Suppose maximum gee was higher than predicted, and the suspension gave way? They could easily be killed...
There was an ample safety margin; no need to worry about such an ignominious end. Humour was the enemy of desire; their embrace was now completely chaste. He was not sure whether to be glad or sorry.
And it was too late for second thoughts. From far, far away came the first faint whisper of sound, like the wailing of some lost soul. At the same moment, the ship gave a barely perceptible jerk; the cocoon began to swing around and its suspension tightened. After weeks of weightlessness, gravity was returning.
Within seconds, the faint wail had risen to a steady roar, and the cocoon had become an overloaded hammock. This is not such a good idea, Floyd thought to himself, already it was difficult to breathe. The deceleration was only a part of the problem: Zenia was clutching him as a drowning person is supposed to clutch the proverbial straw.
He detached her as gently as he could.
'It's all right, Zenia. If Tsien did it, so can we. Relax – don't worry.'
It was difficult to shout tenderly, and he was not even sure if Zenia heard him above the roar of incandescent hydrogen. But she was no longer clutching him quite so desperately, and he seized the opportunity of taking a few deep breaths.
What would Caroline think if she could see him now? Would he tell her if he ever had the chance? He was not sure she would understand. At a moment like that, all links with Earth seemed very tenuous indeed.
It was impossible to move, or to speak, but now that he had grown accustomed to the strange sense of weight he was no longer uncomfortable – except for the increasing numbness in his right arm. With some difficulty, he managed to extricate it from beneath Zenia; the familiar act brought a fleeting sense of guilt. As he felt his circulation returning, Floyd remembered a famous remark attributed to at least a dozen astronauts and cosmonauts: 'Both the pleasures and problems of zero-gravity sex have been greatly exaggerated.'
He wondered how the rest of the crew was faring, and he gave a momentary thought to Chandra and Curnow, sleeping peacefully through it all. They would never know if Leonov became a meteor shower in the Jovian sky. He did not envy them; they had missed the experience of a lifetime.
Tanya was speaking over the intercom; her words were lost in the roar, but her voice sounded calm and perfectly normal, just as if she was making a routine announcement. Floyd managed to glance at his watch, and was astonished to see that they were already at the midpoint of the braking manoeuvre. At that very moment, Leonov was at its closest approach to Jupiter; only expendable automatic probes had gone deeper into the Jovian atmosphere.
'Halfway through, Zenia,' he shouted. 'On the way out again.' He could not tell if she understood. Her eyes were tightly closed, but she smiled slightly.
The ship was now rocking noticeably, like a small boat in a choppy sea. Was that normal? wondered Floyd. He was glad that he had Zenia to worry about; it took his mind away from his own fears. Just for a moment, before he managed to expel the thought, he had a vision of the walls suddenly glowing cherry red, and caving in upon him. Like the nightmare fantasy of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum', which he'd forgotten for thirty years.
But that would never happen. If the heat shield failed, the ship would crumble instantly, hammered flat by a solid wall of gas. There would be no pain; his nervous system would not have time to react before it ceased to exist. He had experienced more consoling thoughts, but this one was not to be despised.
The buffeting slowly weakened. There was another inaudible announcement from Tanya (he would pull her leg about that, when it was all over). Now time seemed to be going much more slowly; after a while he stopped looking at his watch, because he could not believe it. The digits changed so slowly that he could almost imagine himself in some Einsteinian time dilation.
And then something even more unbelievable happened. First he was amused, then slightly indignant. Zenia had fallen asleep – if not exactly in his arms, then at least beside them.
It was a natural reaction: the strain must have exhausted her, and the wisdom of the body had come to her rescue. And suddenly Floyd himself became aware of an almost post-orgasmic drowsiness, as if he too had been emotionally drained by the encounter. He had to fight to remain awake.
And then he was falling... falling... falling... it was all over. The ship was back in space, where it belonged. And he and Zenia were floating apart.
They would never again be so close together, but they would always know a special tenderness toward each other, which no one else could ever share.
15 – Escape from the Giant
When Floyd reached the observation deck – a discreet few minutes after Zenia – Jupiter already seemed farther away. But that must be an illusion based on his knowledge, not the evidence of his eyes. They had barely emerged from the Jovian atmosphere, and the planet still filled half the sky.
And now they were – as intended – its prisoners. D
uring the last incandescent hour, they had deliberately jettisoned the excess speed that could have carried them right out of the Solar System, and on to the stars. Now they were travelling in an ellipse – a classical Hohmann orbit – which would shuttle them back between Jupiter and the orbit of Io, 350,000 kilometres higher. If they did not – or could not – fire their motors again, Leonov would swing back and forth between these limits, completing one revolution every nineteen hours. It would become the closest of Jupiter's moons – though not for long. Each time it grazed the atmosphere it would lose altitude, until it spiralled into destruction.
Floyd had never really enjoyed vodka, but he joined the others without any reservations in drinking a triumphant toast to the ship's designers, coupled with a vote of thanks to Sir Isaac Newton. Then Tanya put the bottle firmly back in its cupboard; there was still much to be done.
Though they were all expecting it, everyone jumped at the sudden muffled thud of explosive charges, and the jolt of separation. A few seconds later, a large, still-glowing disk floated into view, slowly turning end-over-end as it drifted away from the ship.
'Look!' cried Max. 'A flying saucer! Who's got a camera?' There was a distinct note of hysterical relief in the laughter that followed. It was interrupted by the captain, in a more serious vein.
'Goodbye, faithful heat shield! You did a wonderful job.'
'But what a waste!' said Sasha. 'There's at least a couple of tons left, Think of all the extra payload we could have carried!'
'If that's good, conservative Russian engineering,' retorted Floyd, 'then I'm all for it. Far better a few tons too much – than one milligram too little.'
Everyone applauded those noble sentiments as the jetti soned shield cooled to yellow, then red, and finally became as black as the space around it. It vanished from sight while only a few kilometres away, though occasionally the sudden reappearance of an eclipsed star would betray its presence.
'Preliminary orbit check completed,' said Vasili. 'We're within ten metres a second of our right vector. Not bad for a first try.'
There was a subdued sigh of relief at the news, and a few minutes later Vasili made another announcement.
'Changing attitude for course correction; delta vee six metres a second. Twenty-second burn coming up in one minute.'
They were still so close to Jupiter it was impossible to believe that the ship was orbiting the planet; they might have been in a high-flying aircraft that had just emerged from a sea of clouds. There was no sense of scale; it was easy to imagine that they were speeding away from some terrestrial sunset; the reds and pinks and crimsons sliding below were so familiar.
And that was an illusion; nothing here had any parallels with Earth. Those colours were intrinsic, not borrowed from the setting sun. The very gases were utterly alien – methane and ammonia and a witch's brew of hydrocarbons, stirred in a hydrogen-helium cauldron. Not one trace of free oxygen, the breath of human life.
The clouds marched from horizon to horizon in parallel rows, distorted by occasional swirls and eddies. Here and there upwellings of brighter gas broke the pattern, and Floyd could also see the dark rim of a great whirlpool, a maelstrom of gas leading down into unfathomable Jovian depths.
He began to look for the Great Red Spot, then quickly checked himself at such a foolish thought. All the enormous cloudscape he could see below would be only a few per cent of the Red Spot's immensity; one might as well expect to recognize the shape of the United States from a small aeroplane flying low above Kansas.
'Correction completed. We're now on interception orbit with Io. Arrival time: eight hours, fifty-five minutes.'
Less than nine hours to climb up from Jupiter and meet whatever is waiting for us, thought Floyd. We've escaped from the giant – but he represents a danger we understood, and could prepare for. What lies ahead now is utter mystery.
And when we have survived that challenge, we must return to Jupiter once again. We shall need his strength to send us safely home.
16 – Private Line
'... Hello, Dimitri. This is Woody, switching to Key Two in fifteen seconds... Hello, Dimitri – multiply Keys Three and Four, take cube root, add pi squared and use nearest integer as Key Five. Unless your computers are a million times faster than ours – and I'm damn sure they're not – no one can decrypt this, on your side or mine. But you may have some explaining to do; anyway, you're good at that.
'By the way, my usual excellent sources told me about the failure of the latest attempt to persuade old Andrei to resign; I gather that your delegation had no more luck than the others, and you're still saddled with him as President. I'm laughing my head off; it serves the Academy right. I know he's over ninety, and growing a bit – well, stubborn. But you won't get any help from me, even though I'm the world's – sorry, Solar System's – leading expert on the painless removal of elderly scientists.
'Would you believe that I'm still slightly drunk? We felt we deserved a little party, once we'd successfully rendez – rendezvous, damn, rendezvoused with Discovery. Besides, we had two new crew members to welcome aboard. Chandra doesn't believe in alcohol – it makes you too human – but Walter Curnow more than made up for him, Only Tanya remained stone-cold sober, just as you'd expect.
'My fellow Americans – I sound like a politician, God help me – came out of hibernation without any problems, and are both looking forward to starting work. We'll all have to move quickly; not only is time running out, but Discovery seems to be in very bad shape. We could hardly believe our eyes when we saw how its spotless white hull had turned a sickly yellow.
'Io's to blame, of course. The ship's spiralled down to within three thousand kilometres, and every few days one of the volcanoes blasts a few megatons of sulphur up into the sky. Even though you've seen the movies, you can't really imagine what it's like to hang above that inferno; I'll be glad when we can get away, even though we'll be heading for something much more mysterious – and perhaps far more dangerous.
'I flew over Kilauea during the '06 eruption; that was mighty scary, but it was nothing – nothing – compared to this. At the moment, we're over the nightside, and that makes it worse. You can see just enough to imagine a lot more. It's as close to Hell as I ever want to get.
'Some of the sulphur lakes are hot enough to glow, but most of the light comes from electrical discharges. Every few minutes the whole landscape seems to explode, as if a giant photoflash has gone off above it. And that's probably not a bad analogy; there are millions of amps flowing in the flux-tube linking Io and Jupiter, and every so often there's a breakdown. Then you get the biggest lightning flash in the Solar System, and half our circuit-breakers jump out in sympathy.
'There's just been an eruption right on the terminator, and I can see a huge cloud expanding up toward us, climbing into the sunlight. I doubt if it will reach our altitude, and even if it does it will be harmless by the time it gets here. But it looks ominous – a space monster, trying to devour us.
'Soon after we got here, I realized that Io reminded me of something; it took me a couple of days to work it out, and then I had to check with Mission Archives because the ship's library couldn't help – shame on it. Do you remember how I introduced you to The Lord of the Rings, when we were kids back at that Oxford conference? Well, Io is Mordor: look up Part Three. There's a passage about "rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth." That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.
'At least we won't have to land there: I don't think that even our late Chinese colleagues would have attempted that. But perhaps one day it may be possible; there are areas that seem fairly stable, and not continually inundated by sulphur floods.
'Who would have believed that we'd come all the way to Jupiter, greatest of planets – and then ignore it. Yet that's what we're doing most of the time; and when we're no
t looking at Io or Discovery, we're thinking about the Artifact.
'It's still ten thousand kilometres away, up there at the libration point, but when I look at it through the main telescope it seems close enough to touch. Because it's so completely featureless, there's no indication of size, no way the eye can judge it's really a couple of kilometres long. If it's solid, it must weigh billions of tons.
'But is it solid? It gives almost no radar echo, even when it's square-on to us. We can see it only as a black silhouette against the clouds of Jupiter, three hundred thousand kilometres below. Apart from its size, it looks exactly like the monolith we dug up on the Moon.
'Well, tomorrow we'll go aboard Discovery, and I don't know when I'll have time or opportunity to speak to you again. But there's one more thing, old friend, before I sign off.
'It's Caroline. She's never really understood why I had to leave Earth, and in a way I don't think she'll ever quite forgive me. Some women believe, that love isn't the only thing – but everything. Perhaps they're right... anyway, it's certainly too late to argue now.
'Try and cheer her up when you have a chance. She talks about going back to the mainland. I'm afraid that if she does...
'If you can't get through to her, try to cheer up Chris. I miss him more than I care to say.
'He'll believe Uncle Dimitri – if you say that his father still loves him, and will be coming home just as quickly as he can.'
17 – Boarding Party
Even in the best of circumstances, it is not easy to board a derelict and uncooperative spaceship. Indeed, it can be positively dangerous.
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