Ocean Under the Ice

by Robert L. Forward

  *Stretch my legs! Little Red have no legs! Richard FUNNY!*

  Richard gave a broad grin in response, then looked up at the corridor ceiling to find the two-meter-diameter airlock door set in the ceiling between some air conditioning vents. Standing on tip-toe in his Velcro-bottomed slippers, he added his long reach to his 195-centimeter-long frame, grabbed the airlock latch and pulled the door open. This airlock had once been used for access upward from the hydroponics deck into the first of their landing rockets, the Surface Lander and Ascent Module, SLAM I. Now, on the other side of the outer airlock door was attached all that was left of the original lander, the Ascent Propulsion Stage for SLAM I, that had returned the exploration crew safely back from their first visit to Rocheworld, after the nearly disastrous crash of their exploration airplane, Dragonfly I.

  Shirley, with the aid of James and the Christmas Bush, had made modifications to the airlock to accommodate the flouwen. Inside the airlock were three strange-looking garments — “drysuits” — custom made for the flouwen by the Christmas Bush. James had modified a standard space rescue bag made with tough glassy-foil fabric, by adding a spare spacesuit neckring that held a custom-molded plastic helmet. The drysuits were wrinkled, as if they had been sucked empty, and were connected by a pair of hoses to electronically controlled valves in the airlock wall.

  “Everything looks OK,” Richard said to Shirley, closing the airlock door and lifting himself up by the hatchway handholds so he could peer into the airlock window.

  Shirley turned to the flouwen in the tank. “Are you ready to transfer?”

  Little Red undulated over to a short hose sticking out of the back wall of the habitat tank. It too was connected to an electronically controlled valve. Little Red impaled its fluid body on the end of the hose and said, *Ready!*

  “Pump away, James,” Shirley muttered to her imp. Valves clicked open and the vibrations of a powerful pump started. Little Red was sucked into the tube in the habitat tank wall, with the electronic valve closing behind as the last little bit of red jelly passed through the wall.

  “The drysuit is filling up nicely,” Richard reported as he watched through the porthole in the airlock door. “Very little water transferred — helmet filling up nicely with red jelly.”

  There was a muffled mutter coming through their imps. It was Little Red, talking through the imp assigned to his drysuit.

  *Too tight! All of me not fit in suit!*

  “Squeeze some water out of yourself!” answered Richard. “Remember, you have to make like a gummie if you are going to move like a gummie.”

  *Little Red not a gummie! Gummie’s DUMB!* Nevertheless, Little Red knew what he had to do, and shed water from his cells until all of his body had condensed enough to fit inside the suit. James aided by pumping the ammonia water out of the suit and back into the habitat tank as Little Red squeezed the liquid out. The airlock imp disconnected the hoses, but since a little ammonia water always seemed to escape that point, it temporarily opened the airlock to outside vacuum to sweep out the ammonia fumes, then brought the lock back to ship pressure.

  Shirley double-checked the airlock indicators and finally allowed Richard to open the inner door. Down from the hole in the ceiling, slowly falling in the low acceleration, came a shiny rotund ball, with a helmeted head and three octopus-like arms extending from holes in the helmet neckring. At the end of each of the glassy-foil covered arms was a three-fingered glove. The flesh inside the arms and fingers was highly condensed and had a strong rubbery consistency instead of the fluid consistency of normal flouwen body tissue.

  “Phew, you stink!” yelled Richard. Despite the vacuum airing the airlock imp had given Little Red’s drysuit, the pungent smell of ammonia wafted from the airlock.

  Little Red reached a pseudopod down to the rescue bag zipper that allowed access to the interior of suit.

  *I can stink worse!* warned Little Red, his helmet looking in the direction of Richard. Molded into the front of Little Red’s helmet were two plastic lenses in about the same position as the eyes of a human. The plastic lenses focused the light coming into them into two stereo images that appeared upside down on the red flesh filling the inside of the helmet. The flouwen had practiced with the suits and helmets during their exploration of the land of the gummies on the Roche lobe of Rocheworld, and were now proficient in using sight instead of sonar to navigate their way around in their drysuits when they were out of the water.

  “Let’s go,” answered Richard, heading off down the corridor, his long legs in their Velcro-bottomed slippers pushing off the looped carpet.

  Little Red, looking like a child’s punch-toy in its legless drysuit, was not as clumsy as might have been expected. The suit had been provided with a number of Velcro “sticky patches” at strategic points on the bottom, side, and arms. Crouching down on the bottom sticky patch, and tilting forward, Little Red pushed off the carpet in a jumping motion and launched himself down the corridor after Richard in a series of long hops, guided by an occasional brush at a wall. As they came to the central shaft, Little Red launched himself over the railing with obvious enjoyment, and started to fall down the shaft.

  *FREE FALL!*

  “Richard!” screamed Shirley after them. “Don’t let him do that!”

  “Stop worrying,” Richard called back to her. “He won’t build up too much speed in this low acceleration. Besides, he has no bones to break, and the glassy-foil can take it.”

  “I don’t trust that zipper!” yelled Shirley. “Although our atmosphere doesn’t bother him, we are sure bothered by his. It’ll take James and me a week to air out the ship if that zipper springs a leak.”

  Richard swung himself over the railing and dove down the central shaft to catch Little Red before he crash-landed on the bottom deck.

  “There we go, little buddy,” said Richard, as he lowered Little Red down onto the top of the science console. The two looked down and out through the three-meter diameter dome set in the floor of the deck. Off in the distance was a double-planet. Its two lobes were so close to each other that instead of being spheres or ellipsoids, their inner points were pulled into egg shapes, as had been predicted by the French mathematician Edouard Roche in the 1800s, who never dreamed that a dual-lobed planet-world would some day be named after him. To Richard, Rocheworld looked like an infinity symbol spinning through space. The inner points of the two lobes were separated by less than one hundred kilometers and although the surfaces of the two lobes were not touching, they shared a common atmosphere, which could be seen by the clouds occasionally passing over the gap from one lobe to the other. When the humans had visited Rocheworld, they had been able to fly their exploration airplane from one lobe to another, passing through the zero-gravity point midway between the two massive planetoids.

  One lobe of the double-planet, named the Roche lobe by the humans, since “roche” is French for “rock”, was a dry rusty-brown and had a few sparse clouds hanging over it. The pointed end of the Roche lobe was heavily fissured and contained a number of active volcanos. Their calderas could be seen glowing up out of the darkness of the shadow cast by the other lobe lying between it and Barnard. The other lobe, named the Eau lobe by the humans, since “eau” is French for “water”, was in sunlight. It was completely covered with an ocean of water that had a multitude of cyclonic cloud patterns moving over it. The ocean was unique in that a mountain of water grew up out of it at the shadowed inner point, pulled upward by the gravitational attraction of the nearby Roche lobe. The water mountain was 150 kilometers high with a rounded top, while its sides were sloped at an impossible-looking sixty degrees. Although the strength of the gravity force varied from near zero at the peak of the mountain to eleven percent Earth gravity at the base, the water did not flow to higher levels of gravity, since the gravity force also varied in direction along the sides of the mountain, and pushed the water into its mountain shape.

  With the light from Barnard heating up the atmosphere of Eau, the wind
s were now blowing up the water mountain, driving the water ahead of it. The wind-driven swells moved upwards toward the top of the mountain, where the surface area was smaller and the gravity was weaker. As a result, the energy in the waves were concentrated into a smaller area at the same time there was less gravity to keep the wave amplitude down. The swells grew into ring waves that reached hundreds of meters in height and finally met in a ring-geyser that fountained up a spray of foamy water toward the zero-gravity point that lay half-way between the two planets. The bottom of the geyser fell back on Eau, while the top drifted across the zero gravity point to spawn tornadoes and thunderheads over Roche, that dropped salty rain onto the volcanoes below.

  “There’s your home — Rocheworld,” said Richard, pointing.

  *Pretty!* replied Little Red. Richard could only agree. After watching the two co-orbiting gumdrops move slowly around each other for a while, Richard turned to look at Little Red.

  “Those are the worlds that we are leaving from. Now let me show you the worlds that we are heading for,” he said. He turned and whispered to the imp on his shoulder. “We’ll need the elevator, James.” He looked up the sixty meter high shaft and saw a doughnut-shaped platform start down from the top deck. As the elevator lowered, James controlled the pace of the descent so that the hole in the center of the platform passed safely over the humans moving up and down the shaft, propelled by occasional kicks or pushes against the handholds in the shaft wall.

  Richard and Little Red rode the elevator to the top of the shaft. Richard lifted them both up into the starside science dome in the ceiling of the top deck and swung out the floor support that kept them from falling down the shaft. Looming large in the black star-studded sky that filled the dome, was the nearly fully illuminated orb of a large planet surrounded by its retinue of orbiting moons. The reddish gas giant was mottled with gigantic white cyclonic storms and weather fronts. Richard turned to look at Little Red. The custom-made helmet on the makeshift drysuit of the alien was filled with featureless red jelly, and on the surface of the jelly, easily seen in the darkness of the dome, were two upside-down images of Gargantua and its moons. Richard suddenly felt strange, for by being able to look into Little Red’s eyes to see what his friend was looking at, he felt he was intruding into the alien’s mind. Slightly shaken, he turned back to look out the dome again.

  “That is Gargantua,” said Richard. “You call it Warm. It is too big for us to land on, so we are going to visit some of its moons. You can easily see the four largest ones from here. The white one closest to Gargantua is the ice-covered moon Zulu. The blue-white one next closest is the water-covered moon Zuni. While the reddish one is the smog-covered moon Zouave.” He looked over to one side of the dome, then lifted Little Red a little higher so he could see too. “The furthest one out is the dry world Zapotec. It is something like the Roche lobe on your Rocheworld and something like the planet Mars in our solar system. There are five other moons, but they are much smaller and hard to see.”

  *The Zapotec moon not round like the others, but only half-round! Why?* asked Little Red.

  “Since we are coming from the direction of Barnard, Gargantua and the three inner moons are ahead of us and fully illuminated by the light from Barnard. We are about to cross the orbit of Zapotec, however, so we are seeing it from the side. The front half is illuminated by Barnard, while the back side is in shadow.”

  There was a brief moment while Little Red digested the idea.

  *Of course! Now I see reason for shadows. Also, I see other moons are not truly round, but show shadow on one side.* There was another pause. *Cone of shadow made by Zulu will soon intersect sphere of Gargantua.*

  “Little Red is correct,” James whispered through Richard’s imp. “The transit of Zulu’s shadow across Gargantua’s face will start in thirty-two seconds.”

  “Let’s watch it,” said Richard, impressed that the immature and impetuous-behaving alien was also an intuitive mathematical genius with an IQ many times that of the smartest human. Little Red had reasoned out the complex mechanics and optics of the multimoon system after just a few seconds of thought. A dark streak soon appeared on the side of Gargantua near its equator and quickly turned into a black dot traveling rapidly across the vast expanse of brightly illuminated surface. It didn’t take long, however, before Little Red got bored.

  *Spot take forever to get to other side! Show me something new!*

  “Well, let me show you something you don’t see every day,” said Richard, pointing to a bright object in the forward starfield. It was the size of a star, but it flickered in a strange way. “Its getting pretty far away now, so we’ll need a telescope to see it clearly. James?”

  James responded by swinging a telescope out into the dome above them. Instead of trying to teach the eyeless alien how to use an eyepiece, Richard merely displayed on a convenient video monitor the image as seen in the telescope. It looked like a planet with a hole in it.

  “That’s the ring sail that brought us here,” said Richard. “It’s made of the same material that the sail of Prometheus is made of. The hole in the ring sail is where Prometheus‘s sail used to be.”

  *Sail on Prometheus very big!* said Little Red, impressed for once. *That sail much bigger!*

  “It’s a thousand kilometers across — nearly one-third the size of one of the lobes of Rocheworld. When we left the solar system, that ring sail and the Prometheus sail were attached together. The laser around the Sun pushed both sails up to speed — twenty percent of the speed of light. After forty years of travel, we finally arrived at your star system. As we approached Barnard, the Prometheus sail was detached from the ring sail and turned around so the reflective surface faced the ring sail. The laser beam from the solar system bounced off the ring sail, pushing it ever faster through the Barnard system and out the other side, where you see it now. But the laser light reflecting off the ring sail was focused back onto the Prometheus sail, pushing it in the opposite direction to its travel, and slowing it down. Because of that ring sail we were able to stop here at Barnard and come to visit you.”

  *And teach me new things.* said Little Red, sober with thought for once. *The word ‘visit’ means a short stay. When do you go back to Earth?*

  There was a long silence as Richard tried to swallow the lump that had suddenly risen into his throat.

  “Our expedition was designed to be a one-way mission that would keep us busy exploring for our entire lifetime,” he answered. “We will never return to Earth.”

  *Good!* said Little Red. *You stay and be my friend forever!*

  “Sure,” said Richard, putting a massive muscled arm around the large alien and giving the squashy body a hug. “Friends forever…” Although Little Red knew the facts about their comparative lifetimes, the red flouwen didn’t really appreciate yet what those differences meant. To the nearly indestructible young alien, who was already hundreds of years old — and could expect to live many thousands of years — “forever” was just a very long time. To Richard, however, who was nearly 50 years old, “forever” was another 40 years of life at best — probably a lot less…

  *Why is there water in your eyes!?!*

  “Never mind. Let’s go pump you back into your tank.”

  As Richard was watching Little Red being squirted out of the hose back into the habitat tank, he noticed that Little Purple was stirring from its rock-like form in the corner.

  #I have calculated mathematical logic of relative motion,# Little Purple announced. #It results in very interesting mathematics. Not intuitive at all. If speed of light is same for all observers as the humans say is true, then things must shrink in their direction of motion, moving masses are heavier than stationary masses, and time moves more slowly for moving observers.#

  ^I agree. Not intuitive at all,^ said Little White. ^Yet, if you say it is logical, it must be. I must taste that.^

  *I taste too!* demanded Little Red, extending a flame-red pseudopod.

  Little Pu
rple concentrated some memory juices into the end of a pseudopod and passed the knowledge on to its two compatriots. The memory juices contained complex chemicals that coded the logical arguments and mathematical equations that Little Purple had recently developed during its latest session of serious thinking.

  ^Very interesting taste — very logical — definitely not intuitive…^ mused Little White, mulling over the multitude of ideas derivable from the mathematical formulas contained in the succinct chemical patterns that had been passed from purple brain to white brain.

  *Wow!* exclaimed Little Red. *Terrific taste!* Amazingly enough, the very active, very vocal impetuous alien was suddenly silent and still — obviously thinking at great speed. Suddenly the Little Red burst into a series of shrieks and turned himself inside out in exultation at his discovery.

  *E=mc^2!!!*

  There was a short silence on the flouwen side of the window as Little White and Little Purple thought through what Little Red had uttered.

  ^Of course!^ said Little White.

  #Yes!# exclaimed Little Purple. #I missed that consequence of the equations. I must be getting too old. My memory is so full of facts that I don’t have any brain left to think with.#

  *You two are too old! You have to be young and big and smart to think fast like me!* bragged Little Red.

  There was a shocked silence on the human side of the window.

  “James! Did he really say Eee equals em cee squared?!?” exclaimed Richard.

  The calm deep voice of James spoke confidentially through their individual imps. “The phrase actually spoken in flouwenese, when literally translated, would have been roughly ‘A quantity of mass can logically be converted to a quantity of energy with the conversion factor being two multiplies of the speed of light; and vice versa’. I think that, on the whole, I translated the technical content quite accurately and succinctly.” There was a trace of a superior tone in James’s voice pattern.