Leviathans of Jupiter

by Ben Bova

  “See you when we get back.”

  “Of course,” she repeated.

  “So long, kid.”

  “Good luck,” she said again, feeling inane, frustrated.

  Yeager slid out of the display screen’s field of view and Dorn came back. “We’re on trajectory,” he said. “Time line is on the tick.”

  Vishnevskaya nodded at the cyborg. But she was thinking, Max, don’t get hurt. Make your ship perform as it should and come back safe. Come back to me.

  * * *

  Grant Archer sat alone in the gallery that circled the mission control center. As he looked down at the handful of men and women working the consoles he thought, I should have gone on this mission. I should have gone with them.

  A cold, almost sneering voice in his head ridiculed the thought. Gone with them? At your age? What would you do down there in that cold blackness? You’d be useless.

  Archer nodded to himself, his eyes fastened on the big wall screens that displayed data from Faraday’s systems.

  I’d be a burden to them, he admitted silently. But I’d be with them. I’d be facing the same risks that I’ve asked them to face. I’d share their fate.

  Totally alone in his melancholy, Archer bowed his head and prayed silently, Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death …

  To his alarm, he found that he could not speak the next line, not even to himself. He did fear evil. He feared for the people he had sent into Jupiter’s dark, alien sea.

  He feared the malice of Katherine Westfall.

  THROUGH THE ATMOSPHERE

  “We’ll break through the clouds in two minutes,” Dorn said, his eyes focused on the mission profile curve.

  Yeager was standing behind him, his feet anchored in floor loops as he swayed slightly in their liquid world. Deirdre thought of the undersea plants she had seen in vids of Earth.

  “Shouldn’t you power up the sensor screens?” Corvus asked. He was at his station, to the left of Dorn in the cramped compartment.

  The cyborg nodded toward Deirdre. “Powering the sensor screens,” he said as he touched an icon on the control panel’s master screen.

  All the screens on Deirdre’s console lit up, but Deirdre saw nothing except swirling waves of color racing past.

  “Wow!” Corvus blurted. “We’re really moving!”

  “Diving like a falcon,” Yeager agreed.

  “It doesn’t feel as if we’re diving,” Deirdre said.

  “That’s because we’re inside,” Yeager explained. “We share the same relative motion as the ship.”

  Dorn intoned, “Breakout in one minute.”

  “The flight engineers call this a hypersonic descent,” Yeager went on, perfectly serious. “We’re gliding through the atmosphere at Mach 12.”

  “Gliding?” Deirdre asked. “At Mach 12?”

  Yeager nodded tightly. “Gliding. Saves on the propellants we’ll need to launch ourselves back out of here when the mission’s finished.”

  “That’s why we have those aerodynamic fins attached to the ship’s exterior,” Dorn said.

  “Right,” Yeager agreed. “And once we’re in the ocean they’ll serve as steering vanes.”

  The ship was definitely shaking now, buffeting seriously.

  “And the atmosphere’s ten thousand kilometers deep?” Deirdre asked, remembering the figure from their briefings.

  Without turning from his control panel displays, Dorn nodded. “Ten thousand kilometers, roughly. Just about as deep as the Earth’s diameter. It’s—”

  “Look!” Deirdre shouted.

  The display screens suddenly cleared and showed a vast panorama of steel gray ocean stretching far below them. The horizon was far, far away, much more distant than the horizon on Earth. Enormous, Deirdre realized. This is an enormous world. The sky was blanketed with soft pastel clouds, bulbous and billowing as far as the eye could see.

  “We’re below the clouds,” Deirdre breathed. It sounded silly, even to herself. The buffeting was getting worse, but no one seemed to take any notice of it. Am I the only one who’s frightened? she asked herself.

  “Look over there,” Corvus said, pointing.

  Little puffs of greenish clouds floated low across the ocean’s rippled surface, and other, darker smudges dotted the view.

  “I’ll focus the telescopes on them,” Deirdre said, glad to have something to occupy her hands. The smudges grew into an armada of iridescent balloons sailing majestically across the boundless ocean, glittering in the pale light that filtered through the clouds.

  “Look at them,” Deirdre gasped, pointing. “They’re beautiful!”

  “Clarke’s Medusas,” Corvus murmured. “Completely adapted to living airborne. They never land anywhere.”

  “There isn’t any land to land on,” Yeager said. “Nothing down there but a seven-thousand-klick-deep ocean.”

  “They spend their whole lives aloft,” Deirdre said.

  “They’re just sailing along,” Yeager said, a hint of awe creeping into his voice, “on winds that must be at least four hundred knots.”

  “It’s home to them,” Corvus said.

  Deirdre watched the medusas, fascinated. Long tendrils trailed from their colorful main bodies. Sensors, she recalled from her briefings.

  “What’s that?” Yeager asked, pointing a trembling finger at a thin, flat ghostly figure that glided past the medusas.

  “Spider-kite,” said Corvus. “They eat the organic particles raining out of the clouds.”

  “So do the medusas,” said Deirdre. “No predators have been found among the organisms living in the atmosphere,” she quoted from memory. “They all feed on the particles coming down from the clouds. Like manna from heaven.”

  “That doesn’t mean there aren’t any predators,” Corvus said.

  Yeager countered, “Been popping probes into this atmosphere for almost half a century. No predators have been identified.”

  Corvus remained unconvinced. “Still…”

  “A world without predators,” Deirdre said. “Like heaven. Every creature is safe, content.”

  Without looking up from his screens, Dorn said dryly, “Let’s hope there aren’t any predators that like to eat little round metal ships.”

  If he had meant it to be lighthearted, the humor fell flat. Nobody laughed.

  INTO THE OCEAN

  “We’d better strap down now,” said Dorn. “We’ll be entering the ocean in five minutes.”

  Deirdre was still watching the panorama of medusas and spider-kites and long-winged birds that glided effortlessly through Jupiter’s clear hydrogen atmosphere. Endlessly fascinating, she thought. A whole extraterrestrial ecology adapted to living in this wild, airborne environment. She had expected the medusas to be big, and they were, dwarfing the puny Faraday. But the spider-kites were almost as big, wide expanses of gossamer floating out there on winds that were shaking this ship like a leaf in a hurricane.

  Faraday was buffeting heavily now. The four of them swayed and lurched in their liquid surroundings. Deirdre thought that if they hadn’t secured themselves to the deck with the foot loops they would all be bouncing off the bridge’s spherical bulkhead.

  Corvus touched her shoulder. “Come on, Dee, time to strap in.”

  Andy looks tense, she thought. I suppose I do, too. But she gazed once again at the shimmering, coruscating medusas gliding placidly through the hurricane winds, their long slender tendrils swaying gently, almost hypnotically. They’re so beautiful, Deirdre thought.

  She pulled her bare feet free of the deck loops and floated to the bulkhead. It took an effort; the ship was shaking so hard that she missed the safety harness attached to the bulkhead and bumped painfully against the curving metal instead.

  “Are you okay?” Corvus asked.

  Nodding, Deirdre muttered, “Clumsy.” She clutched the safety harness and pulled it over her shoulders, then reached down for the straps that secured her thighs.

  Looking u
p, she saw that Andy and Max were doing the same. For once Max was strictly business: no leering innuendos, no offer to help her with her straps. Deirdre smiled inwardly. Max is just as uptight as the rest of us, she realized.

  Dorn’s harness was different, looser, dangling from the overhead so that he could remain facing the control panel. He turned his head and checked the rest of them.

  “Ocean entry in three minutes,” he announced.

  Deirdre was still watching the medusas on the display screens that circled the bridge.

  “The cameras are saving this imagery, aren’t they?” she asked, knowing that it was so but wanting Dorn or Max to confirm it.

  “Everything’s being recorded,” Yeager said.

  “Good,” Deirdre murmured. Those medusas are works of art, she thought. When we get back I’m going to beam this imagery to every art museum in the Earth/Moon system. They’re too beautiful for only the scientists to look at.

  “Two minutes to entry,” said Dorn.

  The ship’s buffeting was getting worse. Deirdre felt the harness straps cutting into her as Faraday shuddered and jittered down through the lowest levels of the atmosphere.

  “What’s that?” Corvus yelped, pointing a shaking finger at the display screens on Deirdre’s console.

  She turned and saw one of those huge birdlike creatures, its wings outstretched, its long sword-thin beak dipping into the frothing surface of the ocean.

  “Skimmer,” Yeager hollered. “Like on Earth.”

  “Look at the numbers on the data bar!” Corvus cried. “It’s big enough to wrap us up in its wings.”

  “They grow ’em big on this planet,” Yeager said, with grudging admiration.

  As if it could hear them, the skimmer lifted its beak out of the water and seemed to look straight into the camera. Then, with a single flap of its enormous wings, it soared up and out of the camera’s view.

  “Had its fill of fish,” Yeager muttered.

  “It doesn’t eat the manna,” Dorn said. “There are predators in this world after all.”

  “I’m glad it doesn’t eat round metal objects,” said Corvus, remembering Dorn’s earlier attempt at humor.

  “Didn’t show any curiosity about us.”

  Deirdre said, “Maybe we frightened it.”

  Corvus grinned and replied, “Well, it sure as hell frightened me.”

  “There are bugs that eat metal in the clouds of Venus,” Yeager said.

  “Not here, though,” Corvus said.

  “Thank goodness,” said Deirdre.

  “One minute,” Dorn announced.

  The view outside grew misty as they neared the surface of the ocean. Spray from the waves, Deirdre realized. The boundary between atmosphere and ocean isn’t as distinct as it is on Earth. She wondered if Jupiter’s incredible spin rate had something to do with that. The planet’s more than ten times bigger than Earth, yet its day is less than ten hours long. That must whip up tremendous currents in the ocean.

  “Retroburn in ten seconds,” Dorn called out.

  Deirdre felt her body surge against the restraining harness, but it was a gentle push, more like being pressed forward by a partner on a dance floor than being slammed by a hard blast of retrorockets.

  The display screens went blank, then turned dark. She felt another jolt, harder this time, and then the ship’s buffeting eased into a soft rocking motion, like a baby’s cradle. It was soothing, almost, after the hard bumps through the atmosphere.

  “We are in the ocean,” Dorn told them. “Thirty meters deep and heading deeper.”

  “Great entry,” Yeager congratulated. “Smooth as a baby’s butt.”

  “Thank you,” said Dorn. “Your control systems did most of the work.”

  “Can we unstrap now?” Corvus asked.

  “What happened to the screens?” Deirdre asked.

  “Not much visible light penetrates the water,” Yeager replied before Dorn could. “It gets a lot darker as we go deeper.”

  “Switching to infrared,” Dorn said.

  It wasn’t much better. Deirdre couldn’t make out much of anything on the screens. Just darkness, with the vague hint of wavering forms that might have been simply her imagination. But then she saw something drifting by.

  “Snow?” she called out.

  “Manna,” said Yeager.

  Corvus explained needlessly, “It’s a stream of organic particles. They form in the clouds and fall down into the ocean. The leviathans feed on them.”

  We know that, Deirdre thought. Andy’s just reciting facts to hide his nervousness.

  “We have entered the ocean approximately twelve kilometers from the spot that the mission plan called for,” said Dorn. “Now we follow this stream of organic particles down to the level where the leviathans feed.”

  For once, the cyborg’s deep voice sounded satisfied, almost pleased.

  We’re where we ought to be, Deirdre said to herself. Close enough, anyway. Now all we’ve got to do is find those giant creatures.

  SEARCHING

  Deirdre began to feel bored. The display screens remained dark. There was nothing for her to see, nothing for her to do. They had unstrapped from their restraining harnesses: Faraday swayed gently in the ocean’s surging current.

  Corvus had gone to his console to check the status of his DBS equipment. He seemed quite content to run his tests, checking and rechecking the gadgetry. Yeager stood beside him, swaying easily with his feet in the deck loops, running equally incomprehensible diagnostic checks on the ship’s systems.

  Deirdre looked over Dorn’s shoulder at the screens of his control panel, trying to make out what the blinking lights and colored curves meant.

  As if he sensed her behind him, Dorn said softly, “All systems are performing well.”

  “We’re going deeper?” she asked.

  “Yes. Following the stream of organics. We’ve passed the three-hundred-kilometer mark.”

  “And there’s still nothing out there.”

  Dorn made a noise that might have been a chuckle. “I’ll put the sonar returns on-screen.”

  The display screens lit up with ghostly images, strange, alien shapes.

  “Activating the visual subprogram,” Dorn said, touching a key on his control panel.

  The vague grayish shapes suddenly sharpened into clear imagery, brightly colored creatures, some sleek and swift, others that looked misshapen and horribly ugly to Deirdre’s eyes.

  “Fish!” she exclaimed.

  “The Jovian equivalent,” said Dorn. “The ocean is teeming with them at this level.”

  Deirdre watched them, fascinated.

  “The colors are added by the visual subprogram,” Dorn explained. “The actual creatures probably don’t look this way.”

  That didn’t matter to Deirdre. She watched the Jovian fish flicking across the sensor screens. In the distance she saw an undulating, flattened thing that trailed a set of wavering tentacles. The data bar running across the screen’s bottom said it was nearly three kilometers across.

  “It’s like a big, floating bedsheet,” Deirdre said, awestruck.

  “With tentacles,” Dorn added.

  As they watched, the flat undulating creature moved closer. It seemed to slither through the water, its tentacles wavering as it moved. Deirdre thought it looked monstrous, horrible. It made her blood run cold.

  Suddenly one of its tentacles shot out and seized one of the fat, slow-moving fish. Before Deirdre could even gasp it pulled the fish in and shoved it, still wriggling and struggling, into a round mouth on its underside. Deirdre saw that the mouth was ringed with flashing teeth. The fish disappeared into that maw.

  “It’s a predator!” Corvus said, sounding surprised. “We didn’t know there were predators at this level. Nobody ever saw one of those before.”

  “A discovery,” Dorn said evenly.

  Yeager glided up beside Corvus. “The bio guys thought all the critters at this level lived off the manna.”
<
br />   “That’s what they told us at the briefings,” Deirdre recalled.

  “Well, they were wrong, weren’t they,” said Corvus.

  “That’s what science is all about,” Yeager said, a little pompously. “Busting up somebody’s pet theory.”

  Dorn tapped the time line display with a prosthetic finger. “Time for Dee and Andy to take their rest period.”

  Deirdre felt surprised. Six hours already? We’ve been in the ocean six hours?

  Yeager turned to her with his old leering smile. “You need somebody to tuck you in, honey?”

  “No thank you, Max,” Deirdre replied sweetly. “I can do it myself. I’m a big girl.”

  “In all the right places,” Yeager retorted.

  With Corvus trailing behind her, Deirdre swam to the narrow hatch that led to the bunks. She pulled out a fresh set of tights from the storage drawer beneath her coffin-sized bunk, then ducked into the lavatory briefly. The toilet had been adapted from zero-gravity systems developed for spacecraft: It clamped Deirdre’s bottom firmly. She wondered what would happen if she couldn’t pull free of it once she was finished.

  But the collar unclamped easily enough. Deirdre stood up and changed into the fresh tights, then pushed through the doorway to the cramped space where the bunks were stacked, three on one side, two on the other. They were little more than long narrow shelves. While Corvus ducked into the lavatory Deirdre grasped the handbar atop the opening to her bunk and slid her body in.

  She thought she’d be too tense to sleep, but her eyes closed as soon as she lay her head down. She dreamed of that slithering, devouring monster seizing her in its tentacles and pulling her toward its slashing teeth. But at the last moment of her dream the monster suddenly was Andy Corvus, and he was holding her tenderly in his arms.

  RESEARCH STATION GOLD

  Grant Archer came back to the control center and walked down its central aisle to stand behind the mission control chief as the screens on her console suddenly went blank, every one of them. Looking around, he saw that all the other consoles had gone dark, as well, together with the big wall screens.