Jupiter gt-10

by Ben Bova

  He followed Dr. Wo to the director’s office. As always it was overheated, uncomfortably warm. But Grant saw that the vase atop Wo’s desk was empty.

  Wheeling himself behind the desk, Wo gestured Grant to sit, then said, “I understand you have run into a setback with the gorilla.”

  Nodding, Grant admitted, “I’m afraid I’ve thrown away several weeks’ work.”

  “Patience, Mr. Archer. Patience.”

  “Checking the neural net before I put it on her would have saved me this setback,” Grant muttered.

  Wo nodded. “So you must start over.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Just as the crew is doing in Zheng He. We failed in our first attempt to explore the ocean, and now they are trying again.”

  “Before the IAA inspectors can stop them,” Grant said.

  Wo exhaled a sigh and nodded once.

  “May I ask a question, sir?”

  “You may ask,” said Wo.

  “What does ‘Zheng He’ mean? Is it the name of a person, or what?”

  The director actually smiled. “A good question. An excellent question!”

  Grant waited for more.

  “Zheng He was a great explorer. Commander of the Ming emperor’s navy in the fifteenth century. Fifty years before Columbus and his pitiful little boats crossed the Atlantic, Zheng He’s treasure fleets sailed all across the Indian Ocean, to Africa, Arabia, the islands of the East Indies, even to Australia.”

  “I never heard about that,” Grant said.

  “Great ships, ten times bigger than the Spanish caravels,” Wo continued. “Hundreds of ships! Thousands of sailors! Half the world was in China’s sway while the Europeans still believed the Earth was flat!”

  “Then why—”

  “But the emperor Zhu Di died, and his successor had the great ships burned. They destroyed the fleet! They forbade exploration and commerce! China turned inward and decayed. By the time the Europeans reached China’s shores, the Empire of Heaven was weak, poor, divided, easily conquered.”

  He fell silent. Grant thought over what Wo had just told him, then said, “It could have been the other way around, then, couldn’t it? If they had allowed Zheng He to continue, China could have conquered Europe.”

  “Easily.”

  “Why did they stop?”

  Wo took a deep breath and ran a weary hand over his eyes. “Zheng He was a eunuch.”

  Grant felt shocked. “You mean he’d been castrated?”

  “Many were, in those days. In Europe, also. Boys with sweet singing voices were castrated well into the nineteenth century, I believe.”

  “Zheng He was a eunuch,” Grant repeated in a whisper.

  “Most of the palace officials who promoted his fleet were eunuchs. The Confucian bureaucrats who ran the rest of the government opposed the eunuch’s position of power with the emperor.”

  “Palace politics.”

  “Yes,” said Wo. “Palace politics. And the losers were often executed.”

  “The Confucians won?”

  “Eventually. When the emperor Zhu Di died, the Confucians tightened their grip on his successor. The great treasure fleet of Zheng He was destroyed.”

  “And China crumbled.”

  “It took China more than five hundred years to recover. Even today China is not as rich or powerful as it could have been.”

  “It was lucky for the Europeans, then.”

  “Yes, very fortunate for them,” Wo grumbled.

  Grant tried to lighten the mood. “But today we’re beyond all that. Asians and Europeans and Africans— we’re all working together.”

  “Are we?”

  “Aren’t we?”

  “If your Zealots had their way, this station would be closed … destroyed just the way Zheng He’s fleet was destroyed.”

  “They’re not my Zealots,” Grant retorted, as firmly as he could manage.

  “I feel very close to the spirit of Zheng He,” Wo said, closing his eyes. “His spirit touches my own.”

  Grant said nothing.

  “In a way, I am also a eunuch. My manhood was destroyed in the accident.”

  “I didn’t know,” Grant blurted.

  “So I sit here, weak and helpless, while others sail into the unknown sea.”

  “You’re not helpless.”

  “They blame Krebs for the accident. It was really my fault. I panicked.”

  “I never heard that,” said Grant.

  “Krebs is too loyal to reveal it. She has taken the blame so that I could remain as director.”

  “What happened?”

  Wo waved a hand. “What does it matter? Now I sit here and wait for word from them.”

  “They should be in the ocean by now,” Grant mused.

  “Yes. And while we struggle to explore, the Confucians, the bureaucrats who have the positions of power back on Earth, are on their way here to destroy us. They fear what we are doing here. They despise us.”

  “They can’t stop us. We’re doing what we came here to do.”

  “I should be down there with them.”

  Grant looked at the older man’s tired, dejected face. Lines of fatigue and worry and self-doubt were etched into his flesh.

  “If it weren’t for you, sir,” he said, “they wouldn’t be out there exploring the ocean at all. None of us would be here.”

  And he realized as he said it that he himself would probably be back on Earth, or at Farside, if it weren’t for Wo’s monomaniacal determination to find intelligent life in Jupiter’s vast ocean.

  Yet, for the first time, Grant felt that he’d rather be here—even as a lowly grad student—than anywhere else. Wo’s passion has infected me, he realized.

  LEVIATHAN

  Weakened by its battle against the Darters, slowly starving in this barren region of the sea, Leviathan allowed the powerful currents surging out of the eternal storm to drive it farther from the towering, roaring wall of seething water and its menacing bolts of lightning.

  Its wounded members flared with pain signals. Leviathan needed food, and plenty of it, to heal the flesh torn and shredded by the Darters’ teeth. Yet there was no food to be found.

  At least there were no Darters in this empty part of the ocean. Leviathan doubted its members would have the strength to fight them. Food. Leviathan had to find food. Which meant it had to circle the immense storm, return to the side where the currents flowed into it and the food streamed thickly.

  Riding the circling currents, drifting rather than propelling itself through the ocean, Leviathan wondered if there might be some food—any food—up higher. It was dangerous to rise too high into the cold abyss above, but Leviathan knew it would be death to remain at this depth, where no food at all was available.

  Slowly, cautiously, Leviathan made its flotation members expand. The immense creature drifted higher, nearing exhaustion, nearing the moment when its members would instinctively disintegrate and begin their individual buddings, in the last desperate hope of survival by spawning offspring.

  The old instincts would be of no avail now, Leviathan knew. The members could separate and reproduce themselves in the hope of uniting into renewed assemblies, but what good would that do where there was not enough food even for one? Even if a few individual members survived temporarily, how could they live without the unity of all the others? Apart they were helpless. What could flagella members do without a brain to guide them? How could a brain member exist without sensor members and digestive members and—

  Leviathan halted its pointless musing. There was food drifting in the currents above. The sensor members felt its faint echo vibrating through the water. The storm’s merciless flow swept the particles into its own mindless vortex before they could sift down to the comfortable level where Leviathan swam.

  It would be cold up there, numbingly cold. Leviathan’s kind traced tales of foolish youngsters who rose too high in their haughty search to outdo their elders and never returned, disintegrated
by the cold and their members devoured by Darters or the eerie creatures that haunted the abyss above.

  But remaining at this level meant starvation. Leviathan needed enough food to allow it to circle around the great storm and return to the familiar region where the food rained down without fail.

  Upward Leviathan rose, straining against the growing cold, heading toward the meager trickle of food that its sensor members had detected.

  It was not food, Leviathan realized. Despite the numbing cold and the continuing pain signals from its wounded members, Leviathan’s eye parts showed that the echoes the sensors detected came not from a thin stream of food particles but from one single particle, much larger than any food it had ever known, yet puny compared to Leviathan or even to the Darters.

  It was that alien thing that had been seen before. Far, far off in the distance, up so high that Leviathan dared not even try to approach it, a strange circular object was struggling through the abyss above, sending out eerie signals that made no sense whatsoever.

  Is this real? Leviathan wondered. Or are we so close to disintegration that our brain is beginning to fail?

  The alien continued to flash signals mindlessly into the vast ocean, totally oblivious to Leviathan drifting in the cold empty sea, far out of range of its sensing systems.

  EMERGENCY

  Grant left Dr. Wo’s office feeling strangely upset, conflicted, wondering where his true loyalties lay, what he was truly loyal to.

  He threw himself on his bed and immediately fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. The next morning he took his shift at the mission control center and spent four hours looking at the silent consoles and dead wallscreen. Nacho Quintero relieved him, laughing about his latest prank: Last night he’d sprayed epoxy on the cafeteria chair next to his own.

  “Kayla sat in it and couldn’t get out,” Quintero wheezed, laughing almost to the point of tears. “She hadda unzip her coveralls and wiggle out of ’em. You oughtta see the underwear she’s got!” He waved a big, meaty hand as if to fan himself.

  As Nacho got up from his chair Grant said, “I’ll bet Kayla really loves you for that.”

  Quintero’s laughter doubled, and tears actually did leak from his squeezed-shut eyes.

  “You shoulda seen it! She grabbed one of Red’s frypans an’ chased me halfway down to the aquarium!”

  Grant made an amused face, mumbled the right words, and left Quintero still shaking with laughter. Once outside the control center, he headed for the fluid dynamics lab. It’s time to get back to my thesis, he told himself.

  He plopped down on one of the lab’s little wheeled chairs and called up the three-dimensional map he’d made of the Jovian ocean currents. But he could not concentrate on the work. Wo’s confession of guilt, his near-paranoid fears of the Zealots, the others—Zeb, Lane, and all—in the sub, probing the depths of the Jovian ocean.

  And here I sit, worrying about my damnable thesis, he told himself.

  Then another voice in his mind said, That’s not what’s bothering you.

  I know, Grant admitted.

  It was Sheena. Grant felt terrible that he had ruined Irene Pascal’s experiment and even worse that he had hurt the gorilla. It’s like betraying a child, he thought. Sheena trusted me. And now she doesn’t. How could she?

  With a startled flare of recognition Grant realized that he had come to like Sheena as a friend, a two-year-old friend, perhaps, but the relationship between them had become important to him.

  How can I rebuild that trust? How can I become her friend again?

  He hauled himself to his feet. You can’t do it here, he said to himself. You’ve got to go down to her pen and face her.

  His fists clenched at his sides, his insides fluttering, Grant strode along the main corridor toward the aquarium. He passed dozens of people, scooters and coverall-clad technicians and administrators in their neatly pressed shirts and slacks. All of them working on the studies of Jupiter’s moons, all of them intent on their careers, their lives. There’s only ten of us involved in the real work, Grant reminded himself. Eleven, counting Wo. None of these others knows what we’re doing.

  Or do they? he wondered. It’s impossible to keep the deep mission totally secret. Certainly Red Devlin knows more about it than he should. Anybody can see that the submersible is gone.

  Looking into the faces of the people as he passed them, Grant asked himself, Which one of them is a Zealot? Which one of them would kill us all, just to stop Wo’s crazy notion that there’s intelligent life down there? God, he’s just as fanatical as any of them!

  Grant found himself in front of the closed hatch that led into the aquarium. A new graffito had been scrawled in bloodred ink next to the keypad on the bulkhead:

  If fish is brain food, why ain’t we smart enough to get home?

  With a sigh of understanding, Grant tapped out the entry code. The lock clicked and Grant pushed through. The aquarium was chilly and quiet. No one here. Grant walked slowly, hesitantly, along the big tanks, seeing the gliding, gulping fish only out of the corner of his eye.

  She ought to be around here someplace, Grant thought. She wouldn’t be in her pen in the middle of the day.

  But Sheena was nowhere to be found. With a sudden lurch in the pit of his stomach, Grant bolted from the aquarium and sprinted for the surgical laboratory, down by the station’s infirmary.

  “Sheena?” The lone nurse on duty at the infirmary glared at him. “I wouldn’t let that ape within fifty kilometers of here. Do you have any idea of what she did the last time we tried to work on her?”

  Leaving the angry-faced nurse, Grant went to the first wall phone he could find out in the corridor and asked the computer where Sheena was.

  “There is no listing under Sheena,” said the synthesized voice.

  She doesn’t have a phone, Grant realized. That was stupid.

  Not knowing what else to do, Grant asked the phone for Dr. Wo.

  “The director is not to be disturbed, except for emergencies.”

  “This is an emergency!” Grant snapped.

  Wo’s face immediately appeared on the phone’s tiny screen. “I am unable to take your call. Leave a message.”

  Grant wanted to pound the wall with frustration. “Dr. Wo, I can’t find Sheena! Nobody seems to know where she is.”

  The screen went blank.

  Security, Grant thought. I ought to notify security. If Sheena’s loose somewhere in the station … He hesitated. Security might panic. They might hurt her.

  He made up his mind and strode through the corridor to the administrative area. I wonder who’s on security this week. Maybe it’s somebody I know.

  It was a stranger sitting behind the minuscule desk of the security office. A tall, rangy man with a stubbly beard and dark tousled hair. He wore a zippered set of coveralls. Probably a technician of some sort, Grant thought.

  “This may be silly,” he started, without introducing himself. “But Sheena seems to be missing and—”

  “The gorilla?”

  “Yes. She’s not in her—”

  “This time of day she’s usually taking her afternoon exercise in the gym. Did you look there?”

  Grant gaped at him. “The gym? No… I didn’t know…”

  The security officer punched at his phone keypad. “Hey, Ernie, is the monkey in there with you?”

  Grant couldn’t see the phone’s screen, but he heard the reply. “Sure, she’s playing with the—”

  “EMERGENCY!” the overhead speaker blared. “ALL MISSION CONTROL PERSONNEL REPORT TO YOUR STATIONS IMMEDIATELY!”

  The voice was Dr. Wo’s. It sounded frantic.

  ACCIDENT

  Grant raced to the control center, thudding into Nacho Quintero when the two of them tried to get through the narrow aisle to the consoles at the same time. Ordinarily both of them would have laughed at their clumsiness.

  “Watch it, estupido,” Quintero snapped.

  “Lard ass,” Grant snarled sile
ntly.

  Ukara and Frankovich were already at their consoles. The wallscreens were dark, and Grant saw that all the screens were lifeless, as well. All except Wo’s: His console was lit up like a Christmas tree— almost all green lights, although there were several amber and one glaring red.

  “Where is Dr. Buono?” Wo demanded, his rasping voice trembling slightly.

  “Here,” the physician called as she hurried through the doorway to sit at her console.

  “We received the following message from Captain Krebs,” Wo said, his fingers deftly tapping on his keyboard.

  Everyone’s console lit up. Grant was grateful that the propulsion and power systems seemed to be in no trouble. Two amber lights, the rest solidly green.

  Krebs’s face appeared on the wallscreen, five times bigger than life, strained, etched with anxiety. Or maybe fear, Grant thought.

  “Dr. Pascal has collapsed,” Krebs reported with no preliminaries. “She complained of a chest pain and then lost coordination of her limbs. Within ten minutes she doubled over, vomited bile, and lost consciousness.”

  Grant glanced at Patti Buono’s console. The physician was frowning worriedly as more and more of the lights on her board flared a sullen, glowering red.

  “Transmit her complete medical readouts,” Buono called out. “The patient may be undergoing cardiac—”

  “She can’t hear you,” Wo snapped. “This is a recording from a data capsule.”

  “How long ago was the message recorded?”

  Wo glanced at his console screen. “One hour and seventeen minutes ago.”

  “Are they heading back?”

  “I don’t know,” Wo answered, shaking his head slowly. “I would presume so.”

  “Then there’s nothing we can do until we hear from them again.”

  “You can diagnose Dr. Pascal’s condition!”

  Buono bit her lips. “The data given here isn’t enough for an effective diagnosis. Besides, if we can’t communicate with them, what’s the use—”