by Ben Bova
“Are you all right?”
Instead of answering, Karlstad pulled down the collar of his turtleneck pullover. “Meet Frankenstein’s monster,” he said.
There were circular plastic gadgets inserted into either side of his neck. The skin around the things looked red, inflamed.
“What’re those?”
“Feeding ports. When we’re in the soup we can’t eat regular food. We get fed intravenously.”
“For how long?”
Letting the turtleneck collar slide back into place, Karlstad answered grimly, “For as long as we’re on the mission.”
“My God,” Grant muttered.
“I’ll live through it—I think.”
Grant stayed with him as Karlstad selected a meager salad and a mug of fruit juice. The man tottered slightly as he walked back to Grant’s table.
“Where’s Lainie and Zeb and the others?” Karlstad said as he slowly, carefully, sat down.
“Not here yet.”
“Um.” Karlstad picked at his salad.
Grant tried to finish his dinner, but he’d lost interest in eating.
“You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?” Karlstad said, his voice flat, dead.
“I don’t want to pry.”
“Pry away, I don’t mind. The worst is over. They sliced me up and put their damned chips into me. But first they drowned me.”
“Drowned…?”
“It’s all done underwater. Or in that fucking perfluorocarbon gunk. It’s like trying to breathe soup. Freezing cold soup, at that. Easier to prevent infection while they slice away at you, they claim.”
Karlstad spent the next quarter hour describing in horrendous detail everything they had done to him. Listening to him, Grant lost his last shred of appetite.
“So now all I have to do is learn to walk again,” he finished bitterly.
“You seem to be doing fine,” Grant said.
“For an outpatient, yes, I imagine so.”
Desperately trying to lighten his friend’s mood, Grant asked, “What I don’t understand is why they put the biochips in the legs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put them in the brain?”
Karlstad gave him a pitying look. “Not enough room inside the skull. They’d have to break through the bone, the way they want to do with Sheena.”
“Oh.”
“The chips are connected to the brain, though. I’ve got fibers running up my spine right into my cerebral cortex. Whatever those electrodes in my legs pick up is transmitted to my brain. Very efficient.”
“There he is!”
Grant looked up and saw O’Hara rushing across the cafeteria toward them. Muzorawa was a few steps behind her. Neither of them had taken a tray. Both of them limped noticeably.
“How do you feel?” O’Hara asked, pulling up the chair next to Karlstad’s.
“Terrible, thanks.”
“Welcome to the club,” said Muzorawa, sitting down beside Grant.
“Shipmates,” Karlstad said sourly.
“Don’t take it so hard,” said O’Hara, with an impish smile. She rubbed Karlstad’s bald pate. “I think you look better this way.”
“Without eyebrows?” Karlstad said scornfully.
“Once you’re connected to the ship you’ll feel differently.”
“Powerful,” Muzorawa agreed. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”
“Better than sex,” O’Hara teased.
For the first time since Krebs had pointed her finger at him, Karlstad smiled.
That Sunday Tamiko Hideshi showed up at the Reverend Caldwell’s services again. Grant edged through the sparse congregation to sit with her. Afterward, they headed for the cafeteria.
“The Catholics go for doughnuts after mass,” she informed Grant as they got into the food line. “The Moslems take coffee and fruit.”
“What about the Protestants?” Grant asked, laughing.
“Brunch,” Tamiko answered, grinning back at him.
Grant selected a fruit salad and soymilk; Hideshi filled her tray with cereal, smoked fish, hot tea, and four slices of toast.
“How do you stay so thin when you eat so much?” Grant asked as they sat at a table.
She shook her head. “I’m not so thin. My body’s like a block of cement.”
“You’re not fat.”
“I guess I burn off the calories at work.”
That started them talking about her studies of the ice-covered ocean on Europa.
“We’re making sense of it, little by little,” Hideshi said. “How’s your job going?”
Grant nodded as he chewed down a slice of melon. “About the same: making sense of it, little by little.”
“Making sense of the Jovian ocean?” Her eyes seemed to go wider.
“Little by little,” Grant repeated.
“Maybe we can help each other,” she suggested. “I mean, we’re both working on fluid dynamics, after all. Maybe we should compare notes.”
Grant hesitated, then said, “I’d love to, Tami, but we’re into sensitive areas. I can’t—”
She waved a disapproving hand. “Oh, Dr. Wo and his silly security rules. There aren’t any secrets in physics.”
“Maybe not,” Grant admitted, “but I’m not allowed to discuss my work with anybody outside the group.”
She put on a hurt expression. “Not even with me?”
Grant thought about it. It might make some sense, at that. After all, we’re both trying to figure out the dynamics of alien oceans.
But he heard himself say to her, “I can’t, Tami. Wo would flay me alive.”
She sighed and shook her head. “How can you do science when you’re afraid to communicate with other scientists?”
Grant brightened. “I could ask Dr. Wo for permission to collaborate with you. If he okays it—”
“No!” Hideshi snapped. “No, I don’t think that would work. Wo’s so paranoid he’d send the two of us off to god knows where.”
“But maybe he’d see the sense of our cooperating,” Grant said.
Hideshi shook her head. “Don’t breathe a word to Wo. He’s crazy enough as it is.”
With a shrug, Grant admitted, “Maybe you’re right.”
“I know I am,” said Hideshi.
It surprised Grant when he realized that he’d been aboard Research Station Gold for six months. He awoke one morning to see that his phone light was blinking. When he answered, still yawning and scratching his jaw, Dr. Wo’s grim face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen.
Grant automatically sat up straighter on the bed and tried to pat down his sleep-tousled hair. But the message was a recording.
“Be prepared for your six-month review tomorrow at eleven hundred hours in my office,” Wo said bluntly. Then the screen went dark.
Grant took a deep breath. Six-month review, he thought. Great. That means there’s only three and a half years left to this prison sentence.
He almost smiled. Until he remembered that sessions in Dr. Wo’s office were never pleasant.
The next day, precisely at eleven hundred hours, Grant rapped sharply on the director’s door. No response. He stood in the corridor, resisting the urge to bang on the door again, as people walked by. Wo’s little power trip, Grant knew. He wasn’t going to fall for it again, as he did the first time he’d been summoned to the director’s office.
At last he heard, “Enter.” He slid the door back and stepped into Wo’s office.
The office was overheated, as usual. Even the bloodred tulips in the delicate vase looked wilted, sagging. The director, however, was brusque, all business. It seemed to Grant that Wo was seething with anger and barely managing to control his fury. He reviewed Grant’s first assignment as a lab assistant and his more recent work with Muzorawa in the fluid dynamics lab. Grant sat rigidly on the chair in front of Wo’s desk, keeping his face as calm and impassive as he could.
“All in all,” Wo concluded, looking up from the desktop screen tha
t displayed Grant’s dossier, “a moderately acceptable six months. At least you haven’t made any major mistakes.”
Grant wondered what minor mistakes the director saw in his record.
“Now then, some changes are in order,” said the director.
“Changes, sir?” Grant asked apprehensively.
“First, Dr. Muzorawa will be fully engaged in training for the upcoming deep mission and will be unable to serve as your thesis advisor until the mission is completed.”
Grant’s heart sank.
“Therefore I will take his place as your advisor. You will continue as a distanced student of the University of Cairo. I have been granted a visiting professorship by the university’s administration.”
“You’re going to be my thesis advisor?” Grant asked, his voice an octave higher than normal.
“Do you have any objections to such an arrangement?”
“Oh, no, sir. None at all,” Grant lied. The thought of having Wo over him in still another capacity brought something close to despair to Grant’s soul, but he knew there was no way around it.
“Good,” said Wo.
“In fact, sir, I’m flattered,” Grant heard himself say, trying to make the best of a situation he could not control.
Wo nodded, although his dour expression did not change by a hair. Then he went on, “The second change may be less pleasant for you. I need someone to work with Sheena.”
“With the gorilla?”
“Yes. Her intelligence level has plateaued. Any increase in her intelligence will require cranial surgery.”
“Oh,” Grant said. “That would be difficult, wouldn’t it?”
“Not at all. The animal can be sedated and the surgery performed in perfect safety. It is the recuperation phase that may present problems.”
Grant got a mental picture of three-hundred-kilo Sheena with a bandaged skull and a nasty headache. It was not a happy thought.
“We will need someone to handle Sheena after the surgery, someone whom she will not connect to the medical personnel. A friend, so to speak.”
“Me?”
“You. You will spend at least two hours each day with Sheena. You will bring her fruits and new toys. The toys will be learning games and devices, of course; there is an extensive supply of such in storage.”
“But my studies—”
“This duty will be in addition to your fluid dynamics work, of course. It will take two hours per day from your personal time, no more.”
I don’t have any personal time, Grant grumbled to himself. I spend all my waking hours working on the dratdamned ocean’s dynamics. But he kept his mouth tightly shut.
“Remember, your task is to befriend the gorilla so that she will be able to deal with you as a trusted companion after the brain surgery.”
Wonderful, Grant said to himself. I’m going to get my neck broken by a postoperative gorilla.
If the director sensed Grant’s dejection or fear, he gave no outward sign of it. “Are there any questions?” Wo asked sourly.
Grant steepled his fingers unconsciously, then quickly put his hands down on his lap once he realized it looked as if he were begging—or praying.
“Yes, sir, I do have a question.”
Wo nodded once.
“Sheena … the dolphins … why are we studying their intelligence? I mean, we’re supposed to be investigating the planet Jupiter. Why are we spending time and energy on the intelligence of these animals?”
Wo’s face took on the implacable expression of a teacher who is resolved to make his dull-witted student solve his own problems.
“That is a question that you should meditate upon while you are entertaining Sheena.” The slightest trace of a smile moved the corners of his mouth a bare millimeter.
LEVIATHAN
Cruising through the eternal sea, Leviathan’s sensory members warned of the storm ahead. Its eye parts could not see the storm, it was much too far away for visual contact, but the pressure-sensing members along Leviathan’s immense bulk felt the tug of currents that wanted to draw the whole world ocean into the storm’s voracious maw.
It was a huge vortex, its powerful spiral generating currents that grew stronger and stronger until even creatures as powerful as Leviathan and its kind could no longer resist and would be sucked into a whirling, shattering dismemberment.
Leviathan felt no anxiety about the distant storm, no dread of its insatiable lure. At this distance the storm was too weak to be dangerous, and Leviathan had no intention of approaching it any closer. Yet it felt a tendril of curiosity. No member of the Kin had ever gone close enough to the storm to actually see it. What would that experience be like?
The food that sifted down from the cold abyss above seemed to be concentrated more thickly the closer Leviathan cruised to the storm’s vicinity. The inward-pulling currents generated by the storm’s powerful spinning vortex were sucking in the drifting particles until they became veritable streams, thick torrents of food flooding into the storm’s maelstrom, impossible to ignore and difficult to resist. The Elders should be shown this, Leviathan thought.
Far, far off on the horizon Leviathan’s eye parts detected a faint flickering, nothing more than the slightest rippling of light, barely discernible. Yet it alerted Leviathan to the fact that it was getting close enough to the storm to actually see it. Leviathan felt a strange thrill, a mixture of excitement and apprehension.
Darters! the sensory members warned.
Leviathan’s eye parts focused on them, the Darters were that close. Swift, streamlined shapes, lean and efficient, heading straight toward Leviathan. There were dozens of them, spreading out in a globe to surround Leviathan, intent on pressing their attack home. They would not be content with a quick nip at its outer hide; an armada of this size meant to kill and feast on all of Leviathan’s members.
Escape lay in retreat, but retreat was in the direction of the storm. The Darters had hatched a clever hunting strategy, knowing that if they pursued Leviathan close enough to the swirling storm front, its members would instinctively disassemble and become easy prey for the voracious hunters.
Leviathan estimated the distance to the storm’s towering ringwall of turbulence, tested the pull of the currents plunging into the storm, and planned a strategy of its own. It commanded its flagella members to row as fast as they could toward the ceaseless streaks of lightning that showed where the storm raged. No questions, no doubts came back from the flagella; they were blindly obedient, always.
Now it was a race, and a test of strength. The Darters chased after the fleeing Leviathan, eager to chew through its thick outer armor and puncture the vital organ-members deep within. Leviathan felt the storm’s currents tugging, pulling it closer and closer to the cloud wall. Lightning stroked the clouds, and Leviathan’s sensor members cringed at the storm’s mindless, endless roar. Members sent signals of alarm to Leviathan’s central brain: Soon they would automatically begin to disintegrate; they had no control over their hard-wired instincts.
Darters were close enough now to nip at the thickened dead tissue of Leviathan’s outer hide. Leviathan swatted at them, turning the faithful mindless flagella into brutal clubs that could rupture flesh, crush bone.
Driven to frenzy by the scent of torn flesh, the Darters redoubled their attack. Leviathan felt their teeth tearing into its hide; all its members flashed signals of pain and fear as the ever-growing pull of the storm’s mighty currents dragged Leviathan closer to involuntary dissociation.
Now! Leviathan suddenly shifted course, moving to parallel the spinning currents of the storm, battering its way through the net of Darters surrounding it. The Darters were too close to the lightning-racked storm to be able to resist the inward-pulling currents. Like helpless specks of food they were sucked into the vortex, one after another, struggling futilely against the storm’s overwhelming power, shrieking their death howls as they spun into the raging clouds.
Leviathan struggled, too, straining mightily t
o slide around the face of the lightning-streaked cloud wall, gradually spiraling away from the storm.
When at last it was free of danger, Leviathan felt drained, exhausted—and hungry. But there was no food here; on this side of the storm the sea was empty, barren. Only gradually did it realize that it had been swept far from its usual haunts, into a region of the all-encompassing ocean that it had never seen before.
Leviathan flashed out a call to the others of its kind. There was no response. Alone, weak and bleeding, Leviathan began to search for food, desperately hoping to build enough strength to swim far from the storm, wondering how it could find its way back to the familiar haunts of the Kin.
SHEENA’S GENTLEMAN VISITOR
Grant considered hiding his new assignment from his friends, but he knew that would be impossible. The station was too small to keep such secrets. Only the mighty Wo, with the inscrutability of the East and the powers of the director, could hold secrets from the staff.
So he wasn’t surprised when Karlstad began ragging him at dinner the very first night after Wo’s announcement of his new duties.
“I hear Sheena has a gentleman visitor,” the biophysicist said archly as he spooned up soup from the bowl before him. He seemed fully recovered from his surgery, back to his old sarcastic ways.
Ursula van Neumann glanced at Grant, then replied, “Oh, really?”
“Who might that be?” asked Irene Pascal, falling into the game. The neurophysiologist was a petite brunette who always wore miniskirted sleeveless flowered frocks over her black leggings. Normally she was quiet and introspective, but now her hazel eyes twinkled mischievously.
“It’s me,” Grant admitted, wishing that Muzorawa or O’Hara were at the table. They’d put an end to this nonsense of Egon’s, he thought.
“That’s what I’d heard,” Karlstad said, grinning broadly. “I understand you brought her flowers and candy last night.”
“It’s all Dr. Wo’s idea,” Grant protested.
“Flowers and candy?” asked Pascal.
“Have you kissed her yet?” van Neumann teased.
“It’s a good thing Grant’s not Roman Catholic,” said Karlstad, quite seriously.
