by Ben Bova
“And the Zealots believe that God created us in His image. Extraterrestrial life threatens that belief.”
“And intelligent extraterrestrial life demolishes it.”
Grant countered, “But we’ve known about the Martians for decades now.”
“They are extinct,” Muzorawa said. “And they can be explained away by the faithful.”
With a nod Grant conceded the point. His own father firmly believed that the long-vanished Martians had actually come to Earth and that Mars had been the original Garden of Eden. All the archeological evidence showed that such an idea was nonsense, it was impossible, but that is what the faithful believed. What they wanted to believe, Grant knew.
“Intelligent extraterrestrial life,” Muzorawa went on, “that in no way looks like us, is a frightening idea for many people, in many religions.”
“God created man in His image,” Grant muttered.
“If we find intelligent life that does not resemble us…”
“It disproves Scripture,” Grant concluded.
“That is why the conservatives everywhere have opposed space exploration. That is why they opposed using telescopes to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”
“And Wo thought I might be one of them, just because I’m faithful to my religion.”
“I think he trusts you now.”
Grant nodded uncertainly. “Maybe.”
“He has taken you under his wing, hasn’t he? He’s working with you on your thesis.”
Grant nodded again, but he thought, A man like Wo is smart enough, devious enough, to keep me under his wing so that he can keep a close watch on me. Maybe he knows about Beech. Maybe he knows I’m supposed to be spying on him.
Beech. Grant saw in his mind’s eye the solemn, intense, tawny-eyed face of Ellis Beech. Him, a fanatic? Grant wondered. It couldn’t be. Ellis Beech was just a functionary, a bureaucrat, a man who sat behind a desk all day and shuffled papers. He couldn’t be a Zealot. He just couldn’t be!
Precisely at that moment, the overhead speaker of the station’s intercom system blared, “GRANT ARCHER, REPORT TO THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.”
Startled, Grant thought, By the Living God, the man can read my mind!
COUNTDOWN
If Dr. Wo really could see what Grant was thinking, he gave no sign of it. His perpetual scowl seemed a bit less fierce than usual as he gruffly waved Grant to the chair in front of his desk. As always, the desk was bare, except for the vase of flowers—thickly lush peonies, this time—the only touch of color in the starkly functional office. Despite the almost stifling warmth of the room, Wo’s high-collared tunic was buttoned up to his throat, as usual.
“Dr. Muzorawa has told you that the mission is scheduled for launch in thirty days.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Yes, sir,” Grant replied, thinking, He must have every lab and compartment in the station bugged.
“I have been reviewing your work on the ocean dynamics,” Wo said in his labored harsh whisper. “Tidal variations. Very interesting. That bears further study.”
“Yessir, I agree.”
“And how is Sheena reacting to the idea of wearing the neural headgear?”
Grant had worn the spiderweb of electrodes draped over his own head the previous night, to get Sheena accustomed to the idea of the net. The gorilla might have been amused; she was unable to laugh, of course, but she referred several times to “Grant hat.”
“I think she’ll be okay with it, in a week or so. She’s not spooked by the console any longer. It just takes her a little time to get comfortable with new things— especially things that have the smell of a laboratory about them.”
Wo drummed his stubby fingers on the desk. “She has a long memory.”
“She doesn’t forget something that frightened her, or gave her pain.”
“The neural net will not hurt her in any way.”
“But it could frighten her, unless she sees it as a toy or a game.”
“Yes,” Wo conceded. “Very clever.”
“It doesn’t take much to outsmart a two-year-old,” Grant heard himself say, with some bitterness. “Only time and patience.”
Wo gave him a sardonic smile. “I am pleased that you are learning patience.”
“Sheena’s a good teacher, in that regard.”
The director’s thin smile widened. “You are becoming almost Confucian in your growing wisdom, Mr. Grant.”
Not knowing what else to say, Grant replied, “Thank you, sir.”
“I am afraid, however, that I have still another duty to place upon your shoulders.”
“Another?”
“I have appointed you to join the deep mission team. You will report to the mission control center tomorrow for intensive training. You must be capable of assisting the mission controllers by the time the mission is launched.”
“Intensive training?” Grant echoed. “But … when? How can I … there aren’t enough hours in the day for everything that’s on my plate.”
Curtly Wo replied, “Then I shall remove some items from your plate. Your duties in the fluid dynamics lab will be suspended until the mission is completed.”
“But my thesis!”
“It can wait for a few weeks.”
“The ocean mapping … you’ll need that for the mission.”
“The mapping is sufficiently detailed for the purposes of the mission. Further refinement is not necessary.”
Shaking his head vehemently, Grant argued, “How can you say that? How can you tell how much information is enough? The more data I generate—”
Wo cut him short with an angry slash of one hand. “It is my responsibility to say how much is enough.”
“You’re making an arbitrary decision.”
“Yes. Of course I am.” Wo looked away from Grant for a moment, as if trying to control his anger, then said in a more reasonable tone, “As a scientist, I agree with you. Wholeheartedly. The more data the better. Keep probing, keep learning.”
“So then—”
“But I am not merely a scooter. I am director of this station and chief of this deep mission. I must make hard decisions. I must decide how to use the personnel I have at my disposal, and I have decided that the best use for you is to assist in the control center during the mission.”
“There are several dozen technicians on this station who can do that job, and do it better than I could.”
“Perhaps,” Wo conceded, “but I do not choose to bring additional personnel into this mission.”
“Why not? Wouldn’t it be smarter to—”
“Enough!” Wo snapped. “I have made my decision and you will carry out my orders. End of discussion.”
Grant fell silent for a moment. The two of them glared at each other across the director’s gleaming desk.
“This is a security matter, isn’t it?” Grant asked in a much softer voice. “You don’t want to bring additional people into the mission for fear of a security leak.”
Wo did not reply for several heartbeats. Grant felt perspiration trickling down his ribs. Why does he keep this office so hellishly hot? he wondered silently.
At last Wo said, “Dr. Muzorawa has told you about the Zealots.”
Grant conceded it with a nod. Lord Almighty, he really does listen in on all our conversations.
“I fear them,” Wo said, so low that Grant barely heard the words.
“But surely, here on this station, we’re millions of kilometers away from them.”
“Are we? Who among those dozens of technicians you spoke of might be a Zealot? Who among the scooters working on Europa or studying Io?”
“Not a scientist,” Grant protested.
“Why not? You are a Believer, are you not?”
“Yes, but I’m not a fanatic.”
Wo’s eyes bored into Grant’s, as if trying to pierce to his soul. “No,” he said at last, “I trust that you are not.”
It was that w
ord “trust” that hit Grant. He heard himself say, “When I was assigned to come to this station, the New Morality asked me to report back to them on what you are doing.”
Wo said nothing; his expression did not alter one millimeter.
“They asked me to spy on you,” Grant admitted.
“And have you?”
“I haven’t told them a thing. I haven’t learned anything that they didn’t already know. But if you’re going to make me a part of this deep mission …”
Dr. Wo closed his eyes and nodded. “I see. Your loyalties are divided.”
“No, they’re not,” Grant snapped. “I’m a Believer, and I’m a scientist, also. But my loyalties are clear. I’m not a spy, and whatever the New Morality people back on Earth want to know has nothing to do with faith in God. What they’ve asked me to do is politics, not religion.”
Again Wo lapsed into silence. Grant waited for several moments, then said, “You can trust me, sir. I’m not a spy. I never wanted to spy on you. They never gave me a choice.”
“I want to trust you, Archer. There are very few people aboard this station whom I can trust. That is why my team for the deep mission is so pitifully small.”
“That’s why you put the team in quarantine,” Grant said.
Wo’s chin sunk to his chest. In a voice trembling with inner rage he added, “It would take only one of them, you must understand. One Zealot. This station is a very fragile place. One fanatic could destroy us all.”
“A terrorist?”
“A man—or a woman—who is convinced that our search for intelligent alien life is sinful. One person who is willing to die in order to kill all of us.”
“Don’t the psych profiles screen out such fanatics?”
Wo glowered at his naivete. Then his anger seemed to fade. “I should never have allowed nanomachines in this station,” he whispered, so low Grant could barely hear him. “That was a mistake. A personal frailty.” He shook his head disconsolately.
Grant had no response for that. The idea was too foreign to his thinking, alien to everything he believed.
“If this station is destroyed, it will never be replaced,” Wo continued, his anger palpable. “Never. It is difficult enough to get the funds for maintenance and repair. They would never allow a new station to be built.”
“No, that can’t be true. The work that we’re doing here—”
“They despise the work we do! If it weren’t for the profits that the scoopships make, they would have stopped all our funding and shut down this station.”
“They wouldn’t do that! They couldn’t!”
“You think not?” Wo almost sneered at him. “At this moment there is a group of IAA officials in a fusion torch ship on a high-acceleration burn, racing to get here.”
“IAA people?”
“An ‘inspection and evaluation team’,” Wo said, his voice burning with acid. “How many of them are New Morality members? How many belong to the Holy Disciples or to the Sword of Islam? One of them is a Jesuit, that much I know. An astronomer, no less.”
“And they’re coming here?”
“To review our work. That’s why I believe that you have not made an effective spy for them; they would close us down outright if they knew what we are doing.”
Grant shook his head. “You think they’re coming here to close down the station?”
“Why else? ‘Inspection and evaluation’ indeed!”
“Not necessarily,” Grant said. “The IAA isn’t controlled by the New Morality.”
“Pah!”
“All right, I admit there are ultraconservatives in the New Morality and other groups who want most scientific research stopped. But they’re only a small minority of the movement. A noisy, vocal minority, but still only one small segment of the whole. The people in power, the ones in high office, they understand the importance of exploring the universe.”
“Such as the ones who asked you to spy on us?”
Grant had no reply for that. He realized that Dr. Wo was probably right. The IAA depended on national governments for its funding, and most of those governments were thoroughly under the influence of movements such as the New Morality.
Wo broke the growing silence. “Why is nanotechnology forbidden?”
“Nanotechnology?” Grant asked, wondering what this had to do with the IAA or the New Morality. “They use it on the Moon.”
“Only under very strict controls. The luniks had to fight an outright war against the United Nations to keep their right to use nanomachines. And people who have nanomachines in their bodies aren’t allowed on Earth at all.”
“Nanomachines can be turned into weapons,” Grant pointed out. “That’s why they’re banned.”
Wo snorted disdainfully. “Pah! Why do you think you are using computer systems that are at least ten years old? Why don’t you have an artificial intelligence system to assist you in your work?”
Confused by another sudden shift in subject, Grant replied, “No one’s been able to make an AI system that performs reliably.”
“Not so,” the director snapped. “Twenty years ago research on AI systems was stopped. Why? Because the researchers had produced a prototype that did work. Quite reliably.”
“How could they stop all research—”
“Because they feared where AI research was heading. They feared the creation of machines with the intelligence of humans. With higher intelligence, inevitably.”
Grant just sat there, trying to digest this flood of accusations.
“If they knew where our exploration of Jupiter is heading, if they understood what we might uncover …” Wo left the thought unfinished.
“They’d be afraid that we might find intelligent life in the ocean,” Grant heard himself whisper.
“Exactly. That is why I keep our security so tight. That is why I refuse to bring in more people. One of them might turn out to be a Zealot fanatic.”
Grant tried to sort it all out in his mind. “But there’s no evidence for intelligent life down there. We don’t even know if there’s any form of life at all in the ocean.”
“Don’t we?” Wo jabbed a stubby finger at the keyboard built into his desktop. One of the walls dissolved into a murky, grainy featureless scene.
“This video was salvaged from the first mission into the ocean,” Wo explained, his rasping voice labored, tired.
Lightning flickered in the distance. Lightning? Grant asked himself. Underwater?
As he stared at the wallscreen, Grant realized that what he was seeing was not lightning. The flashes of light were red, yellow, deep orange.
Slowly, before his fascinated eyes, the lights took shape. They were things in the water, a dozen or more of them, coasting through the ocean together, lights flickering back and forth.
Living creatures! Grant realized. And they’re signaling to one another!
Grant watched, fascinated. The lights winked back and forth, back and forth. There was a pattern to them, it seemed. First one, then all the others lit up in the same colors. He couldn’t tell if the lights formed any particular shape or form; the creatures were too far away for him to make out anything except a bright momentary glow against the vast darkness of the sea. Maddening. If only he could get closer, get better detail—
The scene winked off. The screen became a metal bulkhead once again. Grant felt like a child who’d just had a Christmas present yanked out of his hands.
He turned back to Dr. Wo. “They’re alive,” Grant whispered.
“I believe so. But the evidence is hardly conclusive.”
“And they were signaling back and forth!”
“Perhaps.”
“Is that the closest you got to them?”
“We were slightly less than fifteen hundred kilometers’ slant range when the accident ended our mission. They were considerably deeper in the ocean than we were.”
“Fifteen hundred …” Grant blinked with disbelief. “Then the creatures must be huge, to see t
hem at that distance.”
“On the order of five to fifteen kilometers in diameter,” Wo said flatly.
“That’s enormousl”
Wo nodded slowly. “That is the dimension that our computer analysis shows. It may be wrong, of course.”
“But … how … why …?” Grant’s thoughts were swirling.
“Organic particles form in the clouds,” Wo said. “That we have seen; we have even sampled them. They rain downward, into the ocean. Like manna from heaven, food drops down from the clouds into the ocean.”
“But they must be destroyed by the chemistry in the ocean,” Grant mused.
“Or they could be eaten by those creatures you just saw.”
“Living Jovians.”
Wo counted off on his stubby fingers. “There is an energy flow from the planet’s core. There is an ocean of liquid water—”
“Heavily laced with ammonia and God knows what else. An acid ocean, really.”
Ignoring that, Wo continued, “There is a constant food source raining down into that ocean. Energy, water, food: Wherever those factors have been found, life exists. Those are living Jovians swimming in that ocean.”
“But intelligent…?”
“Why not? They appear to signal to each other. In that immense ocean, over billions of years of time, why should not intelligence evolve? On Earth, dolphins and whales show considerable intelligence. Why not the same on Jupiter? Or even better?”
“Better?”
“Why not?” Wo repeated.
Then Grant remembered, “But if the IAA team is really coming here to shut down the station—”
“That is why I am pushing to get the deep mission off as soon as possible.”
“When are they scheduled to arrive here?”
Wo did not need to look at a calendar. “In thirty-nine days. The deep mission will be in the ocean by then,” he gloated. “There will be no way for them to call it back.” The director broke into a rare smile.
“In the meantime,” Grant muttered, “if the Zealots find out about this, they’ll try to destroy the station.”
