As on a Darkling Plain Read online

  “Damned right. And they’d do it for me. I know they would. I’d make them do it for me!”

  Then Marlene suddenly heard herself asking, “And your wife? How does she feel about a star flight?”

  He hesitated for only a fraction of a second.

  “We’re divorced. As soon as I got out of the hospital.”

  “Oh...” She had guessed it long ago, and hated herself for bringing it up. “I’m sorry, Sid. I didn’t mean to pry.”

  He was facing her, but his eyes were seeing something else, something that hurt. “It ended a long time ago,” he said woodenly. “Before I went to Titan, I guess. It’s just that... well, it didn’t end gracefully. There was a lot of fighting at the end. My fault, mostly.”

  “Don’t blame yourself...”

  “Who else?” He pulled himself out of the chair and took the half-empty cup from her hand. “Here, I’ll get you some more.”

  “No, let me.” Marlene struggled up out of the sling chair. It wasn’t easy to do in one graceful motion.

  He was already halfway to the kitchenette. “I’ll get it,” he called over his shoulder.

  She stood there, uncertain, hating the part of herself that was glad he was no longer married, even though it hurt him so much.

  The phonescreen chimed.

  “Answer!” he called out.

  “Dr. Lee,” said a computer’s carefully modulated voice while the viewscreen stayed blank, “you asked to be reminded within a half hour of your appointment with the psychiatric clinic. It is now ten thirty. Your appointment is at eleven, in building—”

  “I know. Turn off.”

  Lee stared at her for a moment, then turned and started fussing with the coffeemaker.

  “Psychiatric exam,” he said without looking up at her. “I get them every week, to see how I’m handling the pressure of the Training Center. That’s just a little something extra they’ve thrown at me. If they find anything in those exams that they can use against me, I’ll be out the door ten minutes later.”

  “Oh, Sid, they wouldn’t...” She started toward him in the kitchenette.

  “Wouldn’t they?” He still wasn’t looking at her; he was punching buttons along the base of the cooking unit and rattling the coffeemaker with his other hand. “You’d be surprised what they can do. Like having Sylvia pop in on me for an unannounced visit. To see what my reactions are. Shock treatment.”

  Marlene felt her mouth drop open.

  “Nice people. Thorough...” He jiggled the coffeemaker, banged it, then—with a growl of rage—tore it out of the cooker element and banged it against the kitchen wall. Coffee splattered everywhere as the fiber container burst. Marlene jumped back and still got some splashed on her, hot but not searing. Lee stood in the middle of the kitchenette alcove, the metal handle broken off in his hand, dripping coffee.

  “Can’t you see how much I’ve got pounding on me?” he shouted at her. “How the hell can I even talk to you with all this on me? That’s why I didn’t answer your calls. It’s too much. All of it! Too much!”

  “But Sid, I want to help you, to—”

  “No! Leave me alone. What we had on Titan is over with, Marlene. I don’t know where I am now, or where I’m going. You’ve got to... just... leave me alone!”

  She turned, eyes filling with tears, and ran from the room.

  4. EARTH:

  The End of The Day

  They sat facing each other across a narrow table. Outside their booth, the bar was crowded with couples dancing, drinking, laughing, talking. Bob had put up the silence screen, so none of the noise penetrated into their booth. The rest of the world was just a frenetic pantomime of flashing colors and meaningless, foolish people who postured and gestured like mute puppets.

  She seemed down: not just physically tired, emotionally drained. But Bob O’Banion hardly noticed Marlene’s looks, in his own turmoil.

  “I’ve been assigned to the Jupiter mission,” he said.

  Her eyes widened. “Not a star flight?”

  “No,” he answered flatly. “I’m not good enough for that.” He felt cold inside, the kind of helpless anger that leaves you feeling numb. As if he, the real Bob O’Banion, was someplace far distant and looking back on this scene, watching, detached, alone, walled off from all human contact.

  “You shouldn’t think of it that way,” Marlene was saying.

  “They’re going to send me to another training center. I spent the afternoon finding out about it. They’ll do things to my body, so I can live in a high-pressure liquid environment. They’ll take out my lungs and put plastic gills in my throat. They’ll rearrange the muscles in my legs and web my toes. They’ll—”

  She clapped her hands over her ears. “No! Bob, don’t.”

  He went on, emotionlessly, watching her cower under his words. “They claim they’ll put me back together again after the mission. If I live through it. Be the same afterwards, hardly a scar. By the time you come back from your star flight I’ll be more than ninety years old.”

  “Don’t do it,” she said. “Don’t let them do it to you.”

  “Why not? It’s an important mission. And they’ll kick me out if I don’t volunteer for it.”

  “They’re forcing you?”

  “That’s what they need me for. It’s either Jupiter or resign.”

  “Then quit!” Marlene said. “There’s no need for you to—”

  “Will you quit too?” he asked suddenly. “Will you come with me, wherever I’m going, and forget everything else?”

  For a shocked moment she said nothing. Then, “I... Bob, I can’t.” Her voice was barely audible.

  He took a deep breath. “Your... friend. He’s going on a star mission? He’s been accepted?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “He’ll be accepted. You’ll go on the same ship.”

  “Bob... he doesn’t care about me. Not anymore. He’s got enough problems without me hanging on him.”

  “Then come with me. To hell with the damned machines on Titan. Let somebody else worry about them.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Bob, try to understand. I’m a person. I’ve got a career. I spent three years on Titan and now I have an opportunity to go on a star mission. Only a handful of people have that chance....”

  “I’m willing to give up my career for you,” he said.

  She said nothing, avoided his eyes.

  “Okay. That’s it, then.”

  She reached out and touched his arm. “Don’t go, Bob. Don’t let them do this to you.”

  “Don’t let them?” He nearly laughed.

  She didn’t understand. “Don’t let them send you to Jupiter. Not if you don’t want to go. Not if they’re going to turn you into... into...”

  “I’m going.”

  “But the psychologists won’t pass you if they find out....”

  He did laugh now. “The psychologists! Do you know how many people they’ve gotten to volunteer for this thing? They’re down on their knees begging for two or three scientists. Us military types they can order to volunteer. They’re not worried about psychological attitudes. They’re scared of those buildings on Titan and they want us to poke into Jupiter and see if anybody pokes back. It’s a suicide mission.”

  He slid out of the booth, into an explosion of sound: raucous music, shouting voices, jostling, laughing people. As he pushed toward the door, he looked back at Marlene. She sat in her web of silence. Now she was completely alone.

  Two years went quickly. Training, studying, struggling, worrying. Giant ships were assembled in orbit around Earth. More than a million people on the mother planet and the Moon worked to prepare for the flights of exploration. The flights of fear.

  And then the ships were gone. Four of them went toward the stars. Four more to Jupiter, although only one of them would actually attempt to penetrate the giant planet’s swirling clouds.

  The two years were not without mishap. T
here were accidents. There were disasters. People died. Men quit the program when they couldn’t take any more. Others were quietly dismissed when they couldn’t measure up to the necessary standards.

  And still others—six men, a handful—were surgically altered to face the rigors of Jupiter.

  5. THE JUPITER MISSION

  I am the ship.

  We’re cruising okay now, just under the cloud deck. Wind velocity outside still brutal, gusty. Makes us buck and shudder like a glider in a thunderhead. My infrared eyes see the ammonia clouds above us as cold and gray. Lots of turbulence.

  Took a helluva beating getting through the clouds. Scientists must’ve been scared. So was I on that one jolt. It hurt.

  Snowing like hell all around us. I can barely see the second cloud layer, ‘way below. Looks vaguely pinkish, warm. They’re supposed to be water clouds, ice crystals. And below that? Intelligent life? The people who built the machinery on Titan?

  Captain’s snoozing. I am the ship. Me. Robert Donovan O’Banion. All alone except for the computer and this recorder I’m mumbling into. The scientists are plugged into their special instruments, each of them in his own narrow cubicle. But I’m the ship. Plugged in completely. The engines are my heartbeat. Computer flashes information in my eyes and talks right into my brain. The recorder takes down this sub vocal chatter for the ship’s log. I see outward with infrared or sonar or any of the other sensors. And inward with the intercom cameras. I’m in touch with every piece of machinery, every electrical circuit, every transducer and sensor. They all plug into me.

  Me. The human me. I can see myself: floating in a contour couch like some enlarged fetus, naked and depilitated, gills flapping softly. Body bobbing gently in the currents that surge through this heavy saline solution we live in. Face mostly hidden behind sensory connectors and communications unit. Cranial connectors pressed against bald skull like a yarmulke. Hands and feet enclosed in more sensory connectors and control units.

  A semi-mechanical fetus, breathing liquid with manmade gills. A part-time cyborg.

  SYSTEMS REPORT. ALL SYSTEMS PERFORMANCES AT NOMINAL VALUES. ALL SYSTEMS WITHIN TOLERABLE LIMITS.

  I don’t know why they used my voice for the computer’s vocal output. It doesn’t even sound like me, anyway. The captain laughs about it; says it’s like I’m talking to myself. At least they didn’t try to build a personality into the computer. Four scientists aboard is enough personality for any mission.

  What’s Ling saying?

  “They are definitely biological. Look at the readouts yourself.”

  Intercom camera view. Ling’s sitting on the edge of his couch. It’s cranked up to sitting position and swiveled to his workbench. He’s flashing the readout from one of his instruments over the intercom. The spectrophotometer. It’s a list of numbers. The recorder will read it off for the data file. Other three scientists are making professional grunts and grumbles.

  “Highly reduced hydrocarbons, for the most part,” Ling goes on. “But notice, please, lines fourteen and thirty-seven: leucine and tyrosine. Amino acids.”

  Ling’s trying to maintain his Chinese cool, but he sounds excited. Check his medical monitor. Yep... heart rate’s up.

  “Amino acid molecules,” Bromley says flatly from his cubicle. “We’re in the midst of a biological blizzard.”

  No surprise. The unmanned probes discovered the biological “snow” falling from the top cloud deck. Sunlight and lightning drive biochemical reactions in the clouds; amino acids and other gunk precipitates out. It’s what happens to the stuff underneath the second cloud deck that we’re supposed to investigate.

  Shame Ling’s depilitated. He’d look better with a stringy moustache. The compleat Chinese sage. Head too big for his skinny body. Bromley’s just the opposite: soft and round. I swear he’s bloating. He looks spongier every time I check on him. He can’t be gaining weight on what we get for nutrients!

  Ludongo’s hunched over his instruments, running tests on the gas samples we’ve sucked in. “Doc” Speer’s hanging onto his couch; hasn’t said a word since the first jolt up in the clouds. Youngest man aboard. Hope to Christ we don’t have a medical emergency. He’d be useless.

  COMMUNICATIONS CHECK. The computer flashes the words before my eyes as well as saying them to me.

  Okay, sweep the radio frequencies.... Nothing, just nerve-sizzling interference. The electrical storms make everything useless. Try the laser again. Won’t go through the clouds. All right, end communications check. We’re cut off from the orbiting ships, completely shut away from the rest of the human race. Not even the starships are this alone.

  SHIP SYSTEMS CHECK.

  Now the computer’s flashing data at me, images flickering in my eyes as fast as my brain can take in the information: propulsion systems, electrical power, life support, structural integrity... numbers, bar charts, symbols, graphs, curves. Outside pressure’s up to ten atmospheres. And we’ve just started. When do we enter the second cloud deck?

  IN FORTY-SIX HOURS EIGHTEEN MINUTES ACCORDING TO MISSION PLAN.

  Below that deck is the ocean, where the pressure starts at a ton per square centimeter. Then we’ll see how good a ship we are.

  Were those sonar pictures from the unmanned probes really showing animals? As big as icebergs?

  Ludongo’s floated into Ling’s cubicle. They’re comparing notes. Ludongo’s got his atmospheric analysis finished, looks like. And Ling’s working on the biochemistry of the snowflakes.

  Hah! Bromley’s getting off his ass and joining them. Can’t have the nonwhites plotting together.

  Ling’s saying, “It’s amazing how similar the biochemistry is to the terrestrial pattern.”

  Bromley floats in and grabs a handhold. The cubicle’s barely big enough for the three of them. Ludongo nods hello and drifts behind Ling’s couch to the corner where the medical monitoring console is housed. Maybe I ought to make them stay in their own cubicles and chat over the intercom. If we hit more turbulence...

  Check the outside infrared. Give me a course plot and turbulence prediction.

  NO MAJOR TURBULENCE WITHIN INSTRUMENTS’ RANGE AND SENSITIVITY.

  Okay. Let them float around for a while. Bulkheads are padded. Alert me if any sign of turbulence shows up.

  UNDERSTOOD.

  My God, Speer’s getting up! Finally getting a little courage, or is he scared of being alone?

  DISTURBANCE DETECTED AT MAXIMUM INFRARED RANGE.

  Show me. Humph... flickering light. Gone now. No, there’s another. Give me max magnification. Must be a lightning storm. Distance?

  DATA INSUFFICIENT FOR DISTANCE ESTIMATE.

  Hell! Looks pretty dim, but infrared wouldn’t pick up much of a lightning bolt, would it? No ideas at all for estimating the distance?

  COMPARISON OF VISUAL SIGNAL AGAINST AUDIBLE SIGNAL COULD GIVE APPROXIMATION OF DISTANCE.

  Listen for the boom, yeah. Like we used to do when we were kids, gauge the distance to a thunderstorm. Turn on the outside mikes and filter out the boundary layer and background noise. What’s the speed of sound out there?

  BASED ON MEASUREMENTS OF ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE AND COMPOSITION, SOUND SPEED IS APPROXIMATELY SIX KILOMETERS PER SECOND PLUS OR MINUS TWENTY PERCENT.

  But I don’t hear anything. No boom. Shock waves must be damping out. What’s the damping function for this atmosphere?

  DATA INSUFFICIENT FOR ESTIMATE.

  Great. Now do I let them stand around and jabber or do I send them back to their couches?

  NO MAJOR TURBULENCE PREDICTED FOR AT LEAST THIRTY MINUTES.

  Inside view. Speer’s bobbing softly in the passageway just outside Ling’s compartment, one hand on the open hatch. The others are jammed inside.

  Ling’s saying, “If this biological snow is falling all across the planet, what happens to it in the second cloud layer, I wonder? And in the ocean?”

  “Torn to shreds, I should imagine,” says Bromley. “Those are not the warm, gentle seas of Ear
th down there, you realize. They’re no doubt highly corrosive, laced with plenty of ammonia and God knows what else. Long-chain molecules simply wouldn’t have a chance in that ocean.”

  Ludongo looks like he’s fed up with Bromley’s pompousness, but Ling just smiles like a cat.

  “Indeed?” Ling asks softly. “But what of the sonar pictures that the probes returned? What of those huge objects floating in the ocean?”

  “Icebergs, rocks, mountains torn loose from the surface below...”

  “So? Warmer than the ambient seas around them?”

  Bromley’s looking uncomfortable. “I’ll admit that there’s a good deal we have to learn. But one shouldn’t jump to conclusions. Whoever built those machines on Titan certainly did not come from Jupiter... nor from Saturn, for that matter. Any fool could have told the politicians that.”

  Ludongo’s father is a politician. He says, “Yes, of course. But if we convinced the politicians of that fact, there would have been no Jupiter mission at all.”

  “Frankly, I wouldn’t have minded a bit,” Bromley says. “This is no place for a manned expedition. Unmanned probes could do everything that needs to be done here. I volunteered for a star mission, not this. I accepted Jupiter because they needed me.”

  “We all desired star missions.” Ling smiles sadly.

  “And none of us qualified,” adds Speer.

  “I qualified for a star mission,” Ludongo counters. “But my father, the Prime Minister”—he stares straight at Bromley—”did not want me to go. By the time I returned even from Alpha Centauri he would be long in his grave.”

  “Yet he permitted you to go on this... this...” Bromley means suicide mission.

  “A Ludongo does not back away from a question of courage.”

  Speer hunches his thin shoulders. “Let’s face it. We’re expendables. For this mission they needed good capable men who wouldn’t be missed too much if they didn’t come back.”

  He made three great friends with that crack. We all know it’s true, but who wants to admit it? The only nonexpendable member of this mission is the recorder. It listens to everything we say, takes down every bit of data from the instruments, carries my muttering for the log. They built it to get back to the orbiting ships all by itself, even if we break into pieces.