Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  The ground seemed resilient Orloff could feel the pressure of the other’s arm holding him down at each step to keep him from springing too high. Steps were longer now-and flatter, as he got the rhythm. Birnam continued speaking, a voice a little muffled from behind the leather flap drawn loosely across mouth and chin.

  “Each to his own world,” he grinned. “I visited Earth a few years back, with my wife, and had a hell of a time. I couldn’t get myself to learn to walk on a planet’s surface without a nosepiece. I kept choking-I really did. The sunlight was too bright and the sky was too blue and the grass was too green. And the buildings were right out on the surface. I’ll never forget the time they tried to get me to sleep in a room twenty stories up in the air, with the window wide open and the moon shining in.

  “I went back on the first spaceship going my way and don’t ever intend returning. How are you feeling now?”

  “Fine! Splendid!” Now that the first discomfort had gone. Orloff found the low gravity exhilarating. He looked about him. The broken, hilly ground, bathed in a drenching yellow light, was covered with ground-hugging broad-leaved shrubs that showed the orderly arrangement of careful cultivation.

  Birnam answered the unspoken question, “There’s enough carbon dioxide in the air to keep the plants alive, and they all have the power to fix atmospheric nitrogen. That’s what makes agriculture Ganymede’s greatest industry. Those plants are worth their weight in gold as fertilizers back on Earth and worth double or triple that as sources for half a hundred alkaloids that can’t be gotten anywhere else in the System. And, of course, everyone knows that Ganymedan green-leaf has Terrestrial tobacco beat hollow.”

  There was the drone of a strato-rocket overhead, shrill in the thin atmosphere, and Orloff looked up.

  He stopped-stopped dead-and forgot to breathe!

  It was his first glimpse of Jupiter in the sky.

  ~ * ~

  It is one thing to see Jupiter, coldly harsh, against the ebon backdrop of space. At six hundred thousand miles, it is majestic enough. But on Ganymede, barely topping the hills, its outlines softened and ever so faintly hazed by the thin atmosphere; shining mellowly from a purple sky in which only a few fugitive stars dare compete with the Jovian giant-it can be described by no conceivable combination of words.

  At first, Orloff absorbed the gibbous disk in silence. It was gigantic, thirty-two times the apparent diameter of the Sun as seen from Earth. Its stripes stood out in faint washes of color against the yellowness beneath and the Great Red Spot was an oval splotch of orange near the western rim.

  And finally Orloff murmured weakly, “It’s beautiful!”

  Leo Birnam stared, too, but there was no awe in his eyes. There was the mechanical weariness of viewing a sight often seen, and besides that an expression of sick revulsion. The chin flap hid his twitching smile, but his grasp upon Orloff’s arm left bruises through the tough fabric of the surface suit.

  He said slowly, “It’s the most horrible sight in the System.”

  Orloff turned reluctant attention to his companion, “Eh?” Then, disagreeably, “Oh, yes, those mysterious Jovians.”

  At that, the Ganymedan turned away angrily and broke into swinging, fifteen-foot strides. Orloff followed clumsily after, keeping his balance with difficulty.

  “Here, now,” he gasped.

  But Birnam wasn’t listening. He was speaking coldly, bitterly, “You on Earth can afford to ignore Jupiter. You know nothing of it. It’s a little pin prick in your sky, a little flyspeck. You don’t live here on Ganymede, watching that damned colossus gloating over you. Up and over fifteen hours-hiding God knows what on its surface. Hiding something that’s waiting and waiting and trying to get out. Like a giant bomb just waiting to explode!”

  “Nonsense!” Orloff managed to jerk out. “Will you slow down. I can’t keep up.”

  Birnam cut his strides in half and said tensely, “Everyone knows that Jupiter is inhabited, but practically no one ever stops to realize what that means. I tell you that those Jovians, whatever they are, are born to the purple. They are the natural rulers of the Solar System.”

  “Pure hysteria,” muttered Orloff. “The Empire government has been hearing nothing else from your Dominion for a year.”

  “And you’ve shrugged it oil. Well, listen! Jupiter, discounting the thickness of its colossal atmosphere, is eighty thousand miles in diameter. That means it possesses a surface one hundred times that of Earth, and more than fifty times that of the entire Terrestrial Empire. Its population, its resources. its war potential are in proportion.”

  “Mere numbers-”

  “I know what you mean,” Birnam drove on, passionately. “Wars are not fought with numbers, but with science and with organization. The Jovians have both. In the quarter of a century during which we have communicated with them, we’ve learned a bit. They have atomic power and they have radio. And in a world of ammonia under great pressure-a world in other words in which almost none of the metals can exist as metals for any length of time because of the tendency to form soluble ammonia complexes-they have managed to build up a complicated civilization. That means they have had to work through plastics, glasses, silicates and synthetic building materials of one sort or another. That means a chemistry developed just as far as ours is, and r d put odds on its having developed further.”

  Orloff waited long before answering. And then, “But how certain are you people about the Jovians’ last message. We on Earth are inclined to doubt that the Jovians can possibly be as unreasonably belligerent as they have been described.”

  The Ganymedan laughed shortly. “They broke oil all communication after that last message, didn’t they? That doesn’t sound friendly on their part, does it? I assure you that we’ve all but stood on our ears trying to contact them.

  “Here now. don’t talk. Let me explain something to you. For twenty-five years here on Ganymede a little group of men have worked their hearts out trying to make sense out of a static-ridden, gravity-distorted set of variable clicks in our radio apparatus, for those clicks were our only connection with living intelligence upon Jupiter. It was a job for a world of scientists, but we never had more than two dozen at the Station at anyone time. I was one of them from the very beginning and, as a philologist, did my part in helping construct and interpret the code that developed between ourselves and the Jovians, so that you can see I am speaking from the real inside.

  “It was a devil of a heartbreaking job. It was five years before we got past the elementary clicks of arithmetic: three and four are seven; the square root of twenty-five is five; factorial six is seven hundred and twenty. After that, months sometimes passed before we could work out and check by further communication a single new fragment of thought.

  “But—and this is the point-by the time the Jovians broke off relations, we understood them thoroughly. There was no more chance of a mistake in comprehension, than there was of Ganymede suddenly cutting loose from Jupiter. And their last message was a threat, and a promise of destruction. Oh, there’s no doubt-there’s no doubt!”

  ~ * ~

  They were walking through a shallow pass in which the yellow Jupiter light gave way to a clammy darkness.

  Orloff was disturbed. He had never had the case presented to him in this fashion before. He said, “But the reason, man. What reason did we give them-”

  “No reason! It was simply this: the Jovians had finally discovered from our messages-just where and how I don’t know-that we were not Jovians.”

  “Well, of course.”

  “It wasn’t ‘of course’ to them. In their experiences they had never come across intelligences that were not Jovian. Why should they make an exception in favor of those from outer space?”

  “You say they were scientists.” Orloff’s voice had assumed a wary frigidity. ‘Wouldn’t they realize that alien environments would breed alien life? We knew it. We never thought the Jovians were Earthmen though we had never met intelligences other than those
of Earth.”

  They were back in the drenching wash of Jupiter light again, and a spreading region of ice glimmered amberly in a depression to the right.

  Birnam answered, “I said they were chemists and physicists-but I never said they were astronomers. Jupiter, my dear commissioner, has an atmosphere three thousand miles or more thick, and those miles of gas block off everything but the Sun and the four largest of Jupiter’s moons. The Jovians know nothing of alien environments.”

  Orloff considered. “And so they decided we were aliens. What next?”

  “If we weren’t Jovians, then, in their eyes, we weren’t people. It turned out that a non-Jovian was ‘vermin’ by definition.”

  Orloff’s automatic protest was cut off short by Birnam, ‘In their eyes, I said, vermin we were; and vermin we are. Moreover, we were vermin with the peculiar audacity of having dared to attempt to treat with Jovians-with human beings. Their last message was this, word for word-’Jovians are the masters. There is no room for vermin. We will destroy you immediately.’ I doubt if there was any animosity in that message-simply a cold statement of fact. But they meant it. “

  “But why?”

  “Why did man exterminate the housefly?”

  “Come, sir. You’re not seriously presenting an analogy of that nature.”

  “Why not, since it is certain that the Jovian considers us a sort of housefly-an insufferable type of housefly that dares aspire to intelligence.”

  Orloff made a last attempt. “But truly, Mr. Secretary, it seems impossible for intelligent life to adopt such an attitude.”

  “Do you possess much of an acquaintance with any other type of intelligent life than our own?” came with immediate sarcasm. “Do you feel competent to pass on Jovian psychology? Do you know just how alien Jovians must be physically? Just think of their world with its gravity at two and one half Earth normal; with its ammonia oceans-oceans that you might throw all Earth into without raising a respectable splash; with its three-thousand-mile atmosphere, dragged down by the colossal gravity into densities and pressures in its surface layers that make the sea bottoms of Earth resemble a medium-thick vacuum. I tell you we’ve tried to figure out what sort of life could exist under those conditions and we’ve given up. It’s thoroughly incomprehensible. Do you expect their mentality, then, to be any more understandable? Never! Accept it as it is. They intend destroying us. That’s all we know and all we need to know.”

  He lifted a gloved hand as he finished and one finger pointed. “There’s Ether Station just ahead.”

  Orloff’s head swiveled, “Underground?”

  “Certainly! All except the Observatory. That’s that steel and quartz dome to the right-the small one.”

  They had stopped before two large boulders that flanked an earthy embankment, and from behind either one a nosepieced, suited soldier in Ganymedan orange, with blasters ready, advanced upon the two.

  Birnam lifted his face into Jupiter’s light and the soldiers saluted and stepped aside. A short word was barked into the wrist mike of one of them and the camouflaged opening between the boulders fell into two and Orloff followed the secretary into the yawning air lock. The Earthman caught one last glimpse of sprawling Jupiter before the closing door cut off the surface altogether.

  It was no longer beautiful!

  ~ * ~

  Orloff did not quite feel normal again until he had seated himself in the overstuffed chair in Dr. Edward Prosser’s private office. With a sigh of utter relaxation, he propped his monocle under his eyebrow.

  “Would Dr. Prosser mind if I smoked in here, while we’re waiting?” he asked.

  “Go ahead, “ replied Birnam, carelessly. “My own idea would be to drag Prosser away from whatever he’s fooling with just now, but he’s a queer chap. We’ll get more out of him if we wait until he’s ready for us.” He withdrew a gnarled stick of greenish tobacco from its case, and bit off the edge viciously.

  Orloff smiled through the smoke of his own cigarette, “I don’t mind waiting. I still have something to say. You see, for the moment, Mr. Secretary, you gave me the jitters, but, after all, granted that the Jovians intend mischief once they get at us, it remains a fact, “ and here he spaced his words emphatically, “that they can’t get at us.”

  “A bomb without a fuse, hey?”

  “Exactly! It’s simplicity itself, and not really worth discussing. You will admit, I suppose, that under no circumstances call the Jovians get away from Jupiter.”

  “Under no circumstances?” There was a quizzical tinge in Birnam’s slow reply. “Shall we analyze that?”

  He stared hard at the purple flame of his cigar. “It’s an old trite saying that the Jovians can’t leave Jupiter. The fact has been highly publicized by the sensation mongers of Earth and Ganymede and a great deal of sentiment has been driveled about the unfortunate intelligences who are irrevocably surface-bound, and must forever stare into the Universe without, watching, watching, wondering, and never attaining.

  “But, after all, what holds the Jovians to their planet? Two factors! That’s all! The first is the immense gravity field of the planet. Two and a half Earth normal.”

  Orloff nodded. “Pretty bad!” he agreed.

  “And Jupiter’s gravitational potential is even worse, for because of its greater diameter the intensity of its gravitational field decreases with distance only one tenth as rapidly as Earth’s field does. It’s a terrible problem-but it’s been solved.”

  “Hey?” Orloff straightened.

  “They’ve got atomic power. Gravity-even Jupiter’s-means nothing once you’ve put unstable atomic nuclei to work for you.”

  Orloff crushed his cigarette to extinction with a nervous gesture. “But their atmosphere-”

  “Yes, that’s what’s stopping them. They’re living at the bottom of a three-thousand-mile-deep ocean of it, where the hydrogen of which it is composed is collapsed by sheer pressure to something approaching the density of solid hydrogen. It stays a gas because the temperature of Jupiter is above the critical point of hydrogen, but you just try to figure out the pressure that can make hydrogen gas half as heavy as water. You’ll be surprised at the number of zeros you’ll have to put down.

  “No spaceship of metal or of any kind of matter can stand that pressure. No Terrestrial spaceship can land on Jupiter without smashing like an eggshell, and no Jovian spaceship can leave Jupiter without exploding like a soap bubble. That problem has not yet been solved, but it will be some day. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not for a hundred years, or a thousand. We don’t know, but when it is solved, the Jovians will be on top of us. And it can be solved in a specific way.”

  “I don’t see how-”

  “Force fields! We’ve got them now, you know.”

  “Force fields!” Orloff seemed genuinely astonished, and he chewed the word over and over to himself for a few moments. “They’re used as meteor shields for ships in the asteroid zone-but I don’t see the application to the Jovian problem.”

  “The ordinary force field,” explained Birnam, “is a feeble rarefied zone of energy extending over a hundred miles or more outside the ship. It’ll stop meteors but it’s just so much empty ether to an object like a gas molecule. But what if you took that same zone of energy and compressed it to a thickness of a tenth of an inch. Molecules would bounce off it like this—ping-g-g-g! And if you used stronger generators, and compressed the field to a hundredth of an inch, molecules would bounce off even when driven by the unthinkable pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere-and then if you build a ship inside-” He left the sentence dangling.

  Orloff was pale. “You’re not saying it can be done?”

  “I’ll bet you anything you like that the Jovians are trying to do it. And we’re trying to do it right here at Ether Station.”

  The colonial commissioner jerked his chair closer to Birnam and grabbed the Ganymedan’s wrist. “Why can’t we bombard Jupiter with atomic bombs. Give it a thorough going-over, I mean! With her gravity, and h
er surface area, we can’t miss.”

  Birnam smiled faintly, “We’ve thought of that. But atomic bombs would merely tear holes in the atmosphere. And even if you could penetrate, just divide the surface of Jupiter by the area of damage of a single bomb and find how many years we must bombard Jupiter at the rate of a bomb a minute before we begin to do significant damage. Jupiter’s big! Don’t ever forget that!”

  His cigar had gone out, but he did not pause to relight. He continued in a low, tense voice. “No, we can’t attack the Jovians as long as they’re on Jupiter. We must wait for them to come out-and once they do, they’re going to have the edge on us in numbers. A terrific, heart-breaking edge-so we’ll just have to have the edge on them in science...

  “But,” Orloff broke in, and there was a note of fascinated horror in his voice, “how can we tell in advance what they’ll have?”