Leviathans of Jupiter Read online

  Vavuniva turned to a screen set into the chamber’s curving bulkhead. He touched it once, and a display of alphanumerics lit up.

  Nodding as if satisfied, he turned back to Dorn and said, “Very well then, in you go.”

  Dorn saw that there was a ladder built into the side of the tank. He stepped into the perfluorocarbon, prosthetic foot first.

  Dahlia leaned over the rail. “You’ll gag on it. Everybody does, at first. It’s a reflex. Don’t panic.”

  Dorn smiled at her as best as he could. “Thanks for the advice. I’ll try not to panic.”

  He climbed slowly down the ladder. The liquid felt cold, slimy to the human half of his body. Up to his waist. Up to his shoulders. Another step and the liquid rose over his head. He held his breath automatically. Down another step. Immersed in the liquid, Dorn could hear the tiny whining of the servomotors that moved his mechanical half. But the noise sounded deeper, lower.

  He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. His lung was burning. He couldn’t help himself, he sucked in a deep breath. And gagged. Don’t panic! he commanded himself.

  For ageless moments he hung on the rungs of the ladder, feeling the cold oily fluid in his nose, sliding down into his lung. He closed his human eye, gripping the ladder, shuddering as he tried to breathe the liquid. His prosthetic hand bent the rung’s metal.

  With dogged resolution Dorn pushed himself off the ladder completely and slowly sank deeper into the tubular tank. His feet touched bottom, his knees flexed slightly.

  And he was breathing. It wasn’t pleasant, but Dorn found that he could breathe almost normally in the all-pervading liquid perfluorocarbon. The fluid was almost as transparent as air; he could see the welded seams of the tank’s metal walls quite clearly.

  “I’m at the bottom,” he said, his voice sounding strangely deep and slow in his ears.

  “Fifteen minutes,” came the chief tech’s voice, also distorted. “Starting now.”

  Dorn waited, trying not to think about the past as the minutes ticked slowly by. When you go into Jupiter’s ocean in the submersible you’ll be immersed in this liquid, he thought. You’ll have to spend days breathing this slime.

  Unbidden, memories of his past life surged to his consciousness. His first raid, when he was twelve, destroying the village, killing everyone, everything, even the cattle and dogs. Strange that the mangy, half-starved dog still stuck in his memory. He had tried to kill it cleanly, with one shot, but only crippled its hind legs. The mutt crawled painfully away, yowling until he emptied the whole clip of his assault rifle and blew it to bloody scraps.

  Dorn’s pulse was thundering in his ears when at last the chief tech announced he could come back up.

  Dahlia’s voice added, “Climb the ladder slowly. Don’t try to float to the surface, please.”

  Dorn followed her orders, glad to have something, anything, that papered over the memories of his past. When he broke to the surface, he gagged again. He began to cough uncontrollably as the younger technician leaned over the railing to help him out of the tank. Dahlia reached out both her arms to help steady him. Dorn’s body spasmed. He bent over and coughed up oily, greenish liquid.

  “You must lie down now,” the chief tech said sternly. “We have to pump the perfluorocarbon out of your lungs.”

  Lung, Dorn replied silently, his body racked with coughing. I only have one lung.

  The pumping procedure is worse than the immersion, Dorn thought. But at last it was finished and he was breathing air once again. His chest hurt, his head was spinning, but he was breathing normally at last.

  As he got slowly to his feet the chief tech looked at him unhappily. “Good enough for the first time,” he said, as if it hurt him to admit it. “Tomorrow we start the high-pressure tests.”

  Even Dahlia looked sorrowful at that.

  FARADAY

  Linda Vishnevskaya pushed herself wearily from the control center’s main console.

  “That’s it,” she said, loudly enough for her six teammates to hear her even through the earbuds they were wearing. “The bird’s on automated programming now. She’s on her own.”

  It had been another routine day, which somehow made her all the more tired. Sitting at the console yesterday while Faraday ran through its internal checks during its initial orbits of Jupiter had been stupefyingly dull. The bird behaved beautifully: everything on the tick. Vishnevskaya had been a little edgy earlier this morning when Faraday plunged into Jupiter’s thick swirling clouds, as programmed, but telemetry showed all systems were operating nominally.

  Then came the entry into the ocean. Even that had been virtually letter perfect. And exactly as calculated, Faraday’s telemetry signals cut off. The bird was too deep in the ocean for electronics signals to reach station Gold; not even tight-beam laser communications could get through that depth of ocean, and the clouds that wreathed the giant planet perpetually.

  “She’s on her own,” Vishnevskaya repeated, in a muttering whisper.

  She looked across the chamber and up to the empty visitors’ gallery. Empty except for one person: G. Maxwell Yeager was still sitting up there as he had sat through all day yesterday, watching, listening, as the controllers monitored Faraday’s plunge into the sea.

  Tiredly she plodded up the stairs toward Yeager. He looked as if he hadn’t moved a muscle in the past forty-eight hours. He was unshaven, pouchy-eyed, his tawny coveralls rumpled. Her nostrils twitched slightly as she neared him; obviously Yeager hadn’t bathed recently.

  “There’s no sense staying here any longer. There’s nothing we can do for her until she comes back up out of the ocean.” She bit back the impulse to say “If she comes back.”

  Yeager shook his head and sighed. “I know. I know. It’s just … I hate to leave her alone.”

  “She’ll send up a data capsule tomorrow,” the launch director said, trying to sound cheerful. “You’ll see then that everything is going well.”

  “If she pops the capsule on schedule,” Yeager replied morosely.

  Vishnevskaya patted him on the shoulder. “Come with me, little father. I’ll buy you a drink. We both could use some vodka.”

  Yeager slowly got to his feet.

  “You’ve designed a good vehicle. She works beautifully. There’s nothing else for us to do until she sends that first data capsule to us, Dr. Yeager.”

  Yeager admitted the truth of it with a rueful nod. “Well,” he said, “if you’re going to buy me a drink, at least you should call me Max.”

  * * *

  Deirdre watched as the nurse pressed the hypospray gun against the bared skin of her arm. She felt a slight tingling, nothing more.

  “Dr. Mandrill wants to see you now,” the nurse said as Deirdre got up from the chair. She pointed toward the treatment room’s open door. “Take a left; he’s the third door on your right. His name is on the door.”

  Deirdre nodded absently as she rolled her sleeve down and buttoned its cuff. Dr. Mandrill. Maybe he has good news.

  One look at the doctor’s face showed that the news was not good. His dark eyes were rimmed with red, as if he’d been crying.

  “Ms. Ambrose,” he said, once Deirdre had seated herself in front of his desk, “we seem to be fighting a losing battle.”

  Trying to stay calm, Deirdre asked, “What do you mean?”

  “The immunoglobulin therapy is holding your infection in check, but not making any progress in eliminating it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Ordinarily, after a week of treatments, the virus would be virtually eliminated from your system,” the doctor said, his fleshy dark face morose, his tone gloomy. “In your case, however, the virus shows no sign of decreasing. It is still in your nervous system, as strong as when you first came to me. Most puzzling. Most extremely puzzling.”

  Fighting down the tide of fear edging up from the pit of her stomach, Deirdre asked, “What can we do?”

  With a massive shrug of his heavy shoulders, Dr. Mandrill said, “Co
ntinue the immunization therapy. Without it your disease will grow and spread. Perhaps if we continue the therapy long enough the virus will succumb to it.”

  “And if not?”

  Another shrug. The doctor looked away from Deirdre as he said, “There is always the possibility that all we are doing is building up the virus’s immunity to the immunoglobulin injections. In that case, the disease will grow worse.”

  “And there’s nothing else you can do?” Deirdre was surprised by how small, how childlike, how pathetic her voice sounded.

  Forcing a toothy smile, Dr. Mandrill said, “I have put in a call to Massachusetts General Hospital, on Earth. Perhaps they can suggest something.”

  * * *

  Faraday reached the depth prescribed by its mission profile and adjusted its internal density to achieve neutral buoyancy.

  Floating easily, the vessel’s sensors showed that the sea was teeming with life at this level. Faraday’s central computer reviewed the data flooding in from the ship’s sensors, checked them against earlier inputs from previous missions, and stored the new information in its capacious memory core.

  Streams of organic matter flowed on turbulent currents that swept downward through the ammonia-laced water. Creatures of all sizes followed the currents, eating and being eaten. If a computer could feel excitement, Faraday’s central processor would have tingled with joy.

  All the ship’s systems were performing within nominal limits. The main fusion drive had switched from internal propellant to intake mode, sucking in water from the surrounding ocean, boiling it plasma hot, and expelling the superheated steam through the propulsion jets.

  Heterotrophic life, the computer’s biology program noted. No autotrophs at this depth, no creatures that manufacture foodstuffs for themselves, as green plants do on Earth. No, this ecosystem is based around the constant infall of organic particles from the clouds high above the ocean’s surface.

  The computer’s primary assignment was to find one or more of the gigantic creatures defined as leviathans. These Jovian behemoths fed on the tiny organic particles sifting through the sea. They lived directly off the base of their food chain, like the largest animals of Earth, the great baleen whales.

  Visual and even infrared sensors were pitifully limited in this deep, dark sea. Faraday depended on sensors that detected sound waves, like sonar, and pressure waves in the water made by the movements of living creatures. The most sophisticated transducers and display systems that the human mind could produce translated these waves into moving images that human eyes could see, human brains could interpret.

  All the data streaming in from the sensors were being stored in Faraday’s memory on a picosecond-by-picosecond basis, to be transferred to the data capsules due to be sent back to the orbital research station, and finally to be uploaded once the vessel regained contact with the controllers aboard the station.

  Faraday extended its sensors’ range to their limits, but there was no sign of the mammoth leviathans. Logic tree concluded that this meant that none of the creatures were at this depth. Mission protocol called for following the most abundant stream of organics, in the expectation that this would lead to one or more of the leviathans feeding.

  Faraday activated its secondary propulsion system and began to follow the richest organic stream, diving deeper into the ocean, adjusting its buoyancy as it sank downward. Its external temperature sensors reported that the outer hull was rapidly becoming hotter, but internal monitors showed that the temperature rise was not threatening.

  Not yet.

  GALLEY

  “I think they’re laughing at me,” Andy Corvus said disconsolately.

  This late in the evening, the galley was nearly empty. The dinner hour was long past, and only a few of the neatly lined-up tables were occupied. The usual noise and clatter of the place had transformed into a scattering of quiet conversations as people finished their desserts or sipped synthetic coffee.

  “Who’s laughing at you?” Deirdre asked.

  “The dolphins,” said Corvus.

  “Laughing at you?”

  He exhaled an unhappy sigh. “I’ve been in that tank with them every day, just about all day. Trying to learn more of their language. They swim around me and chatter to each other and I can’t figure out what they’re saying. Even Baby isn’t as friendly as she used to be.”

  Deirdre could see the wretchedness on his usually happy face.

  Corvus went on, “I mean, they talk to each other but they’re not talking to me.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Aw, they say hello and good hunting and things like that. But they say a lot more to each other and they’re not letting me know what they’re talking about. I think they’re laughing at me: dumb two-legs trying to learn their language.”

  Deirdre reached for her nearly empty teacup as she said, “I don’t think they’d behave that way, Andy. Maybe you’ve just reached a level that’s going to take more work, more effort.”

  Suddenly insistent, Corvus asked urgently, “Dee, would you come back to the tank with me? You made contact with them so easily. They like you!”

  “They don’t dislike you, Andy.”

  “Maybe not,” he conceded, “but I’m up against a stone wall. Will you help me, Dee? Please?”

  She saw the pleading in his wide blue eyes, but heard herself say, “I can’t, Andy. I’m working full time on the Volvox, trying to find the chemical signals that trigger their reproduction.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s important, too.”

  “Dr. Grant himself gave me the assignment. I report directly to him.”

  “What assignment?”

  They looked up to see Max Yeager approaching their table. He pulled out a chair and sat between the two of them.

  “Hope I’m not too late for dinner,” Yeager said as he sat down. He looked tired, rumpled, unshaven. He smelled unwashed.

  “Where’ve you been?” Corvus asked the engineer. “Haven’t seen you for the past two days.”

  Yeager scratched at his stubbled jaw. “Down in the control center, waiting for my baby to talk to me.”

  “Faraday?” Deirdre asked.

  Yeager nodded as a robot waiter glided to their table, the evening’s menu displayed on its touch screen.

  “Who else?” he said. “She’s been on her own for more than fifty hours now. Too deep to maintain a link with us. She’s supposed to fire off a data capsule tomorrow.”

  “So you’ll know then how she’s doing, right?” Corvus asked.

  “Maybe,” Yeager replied. He methodically pecked out his dinner order and the robot trundled away.

  “What assignment were you talking about, Dee?” the engineer asked.

  “For Dr. Archer. I’m studying Volvox aureus. He thinks it might give us some insights into the way the leviathans reproduce.”

  Yeager’s old leer reappeared. “I like the way we reproduce.”

  “Oh, Max,” Deirdre said.

  “I need Dee down in the dolphin tank,” Corvus told the engineer. “They’ve stopped talking to me.”

  Still grinning, Yeager said, “Well, I don’t blame them for preferring our beautiful one to you, Andy.”

  Deirdre looked past Yeager’s dark-jawed face and saw Dorn entering the galley. He walked slowly, as if utterly weary.

  Corvus saw him too and waved the cyborg to their table.

  “How are you?” Deirdre asked as he sat down.

  “Fatigued,” Dorn said. “I have been many things in my life. Now I am an experimental animal.”

  “Pressure tests?” Yeager guessed.

  “Pressure tests,” Dorn acknowledged. “The scientists are very happy with me: I’ve withstood higher pressures than any other subject they’ve ever worked with.”

  “They dunk you in that liquid?” Corvus asked.

  “Perfluorocarbon. Yes.”

  Deirdre suppressed a shudder as Corvus asked, “What’s it like?”

  “Not comfortable,” s
aid Dorn. “Not enjoyable at all.”

  “I heard it’s cold and slimy,” Corvus said.

  Nodding, Dorn added, “And then some.”

  “Great,” Corvus said. “I’m going to have to live in that stuff for days on end when I go down on the crewed mission.”

  “I’ll be with you, apparently,” said Dorn.

  Yeager made a sour face. “First we’ve got to get Faraday back and check out how she performed.”

  “Your vehicle is still in the ocean?” Dorn asked.

  “Another two days,” Yeager answered.

  The waiter came back with Yeager’s dinner tray. Dorn did not order anything.

  “I’m too tired to eat,” he said.

  “You ought to keep up your strength,” Deirdre said.

  He made a noise that might have been a grunt. “The scientists check my physical condition at the start of each day. If they feel I lack sufficient nutrition they pump nutrients into me through an IV tube.”

  “Yuck!” said Corvus.

  Yeager picked up his fork, hesitated, then looked at each one of them in turn.

  “We make quite a quartet,” the engineer said sardonically. “Andy can’t get his dolphins to talk to him. Dorn’s being used as a guinea pig. I’m hanging around like an expectant father in a maternity ward.” He turned to Deirdre. “You’re the only one without a problem, Dee.”

  “I have my problem,” she said quietly.

  “Anything I can do to help you?” Yeager asked, his usual smirk gone; his expression was almost fatherly.

  “Or me?” Corvus said.

  “Or me?” added Dorn.

  Deirdre smiled at the three of them. “You’re all very kind. But my problem is medical. Rabies.”

  “Aren’t the medics helping you?” Corvus asked.

  With a slight shake of her head, Deirdre replied, “The immunization shots aren’t working the way they should. The virus is still infecting my nervous system.”

  “You’re not showing any obvious symptoms,” said Dorn.

  “Not yet,” Deirdre replied.