Jupiter gt-10 Page 7

  A buzzing noise blurred his dreams, insistent, demanding. He pried his gummy eyelids open and for a moment had no idea of where he was. Then it came into focus: his quarters on Gold. His bedsheets were tangled and soaked with his perspiration. With a lurch in the pit of his stomach, Grant realized he had made a nocturnal emission.

  It’s all right, he told himself, while that stubborn buzzing noise kept rasping in his ears. Wet dreams are natural, beyond your conscious control. There’s nothing sinful about them as long as you don’t take pleasure from the memory.

  The buzzing would not stop. Grant slowly realized it was the phone. He could see its yellow light on the bedside console blinking at him in rhythm with the angry buzzing.

  “Phone,” he called out, “audio response only.”

  The screen on the opposite wall lit up to show Zareb Muzorawa’s dark, somber face.

  “Have I awakened you?” Muzorawa asked.

  “Uh, yes,” Grant replied. “I guess I’ve overslept.”

  “That’s natural, your first morning here. Ask the pharmacy for the timelag hormone mix. It will set your internal clock for you.”

  “Oh … really? Okay, I will.”

  “I’ve been assigned to your orientation,” Muzorawa said, his voice more businesslike. “How quickly can you get to conference room C as in Charlie?”

  Still blinking sleep from his eyes, Grant said, “Fifteen minutes?”

  Muzorawa smiled, showing gleaming white teeth. “I will give you half an hour. Get to the pharmacy first, then meet me there.”

  “Yessir,” said Grant.

  Grant spent the entire morning in a small conference room with Muzorawa, his head spinning with details. The day was a blur of orientation videos, schematics of the station’s layout, organization charts of the staff personnel, lists of duties that the various departments were responsible for. Grant had thought he’d known the station’s layout and organization from his months of study on the trip out, but apparently most of his information had been terribly out of date.

  “Let’s break for lunch,” Muzorawa said, pushing his chair back from the small oval conference table. The wallscreen went blank and the stuffy little room’s overhead lights came on.

  “Fine,” said Grant, getting to his feet.

  As they headed for the cafeteria, Grant noticed that Muzorawa seemed to be lurching as he walked; not staggering, exactly, but the man walked with a hesitant, slightly uncertain gait, as if afraid that he were about to bump into some unseen obstacle or stumble drunkenly into a wall. He was clad in another turtleneck pullover shirt that hung loosely over the same bulky-looking black leather leggings, with metal studs running down their outer seams. His feet were shod in what appeared to be soft moccasins.

  Most of the station’s other scientific personnel wore casual shirts and slacks, as Grant himself did. The engineers and technicians usually wore coveralls that were color-coded to denote the wearer’s specialty.

  Once they had filled their trays and found a table, Grant asked, “I’m still not clear about what you actually do here.”

  Moving his lunch dishes from his tray to the table, Muzorawa asked, “Do you mean me personally, or the station in general?”

  “Both, I guess,” said Grant, sliding his emptied tray under his chair.

  “This station is the headquarters for the ongoing studies of Jupiter’s moons,” Muzorawa said, as if reciting from a manual. “Almost everyone here on the station is support staff for those studies.”

  Grant shook his head, unsatisfied. “Okay, I know there are teams studying the life-forms under the ice on Europa and Callisto—”

  “And the volcanoes on Io.”

  “And the dynamics of the ring system.”

  “And Ganymede and the smaller moons, too.”

  “But you’re not involved in any of that, are you?”

  Muzorawa hesitated a moment, then replied, “No. Not me.

  “Neither are Egon or Lainie.”

  “She prefers to be called Lane.”

  “But none of you is studying the moons, right?”

  Reluctantly, Grant thought, Muzorawa replied, “No, we are part of a small group that is studying the planet itself, not the moons or the ring system.”

  “And Dr. Wo?”

  An even longer hesitation, then, “Dr. Wo’s official title is station director. He runs the entire operation here. He reports directly to the IAA, back on Earth.”

  Grant saw that Muzorawa looked distinctly uneasy when Wo’s name was mentioned. And no wonder. The director must have the power of life and death over all of us, just about, Grant reasoned.

  Lowering his voice to a near whisper, Muzorawa said, “Wo is more interested in Jupiter itself than its moons. That’s why he’s split us away from the rest of the staff and set us up to study the Jovian atmosphere.”

  “And the ocean,” Grant prompted.

  Again Muzorawa hesitated. Grant got the impression that the man was arguing with himself, debating inwardly about how much he should tell this curious newcomer.

  “Wo has assigned a small team to study the ocean,” he said at last “There are only ten of us—plus Dr. Wo himself. And the medical and technical support staffs, of course.”

  “Why do you need a medical support staff?” Grant wondered.

  “The ocean is Wo’s obsession,” Muzorawa added, actually whispering now. “He is determined to find out what’s going on down there.”

  “So what do you actually work on?”

  “Me? The fluid dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere and ocean.”

  Grant said nothing, waiting for more.

  “The atmosphere/ocean system is like nothing we’ve seen before,” Muzorawa said, his tone at last brightening, losing its guarded edge, taking on some enthusiasm. “For one thing, there’s no clear demarkation between the gas phase and the liquid, no sharp boundary where the atmosphere ends and the ocean begins.”

  “There’s no real surface to the ocean,” Grant said, wanting to show the older man that he wasn’t totally ignorant.

  “No, not like on Earth. Jupiter’s atmosphere gradually thickens, gets denser and denser, until it’s not a gas anymore but a liquid. It’s … well, it’s something else, let me tell you.”

  Before Grant could respond, Muzorawa hunched closer in his chair and went on, “It’s heated from below, you see. The planet’s internal heat is stronger than the solar influx on the tops of the clouds. The pressure gradient is really steep: Jupiter’s gravity field is the strongest in the solar system.”

  “Two point five four gees,” Grant recited.

  “That’s merely at the top of the cloud deck,” Muzorawa said, waggling one hand in the air. “It gets stronger as you go down into the atmosphere. Do you have any idea of what the pressures are down there?”

  Grant shrugged. “Thousands of times normal atmospheric pressure.”

  “Thousands of times the pressure at the bottom of the deepest ocean on Earth,” Muzorawa corrected. A smile was growing on his face, the happy, contented smile of a scientist talking about his special field of study.

  “So the pressure squeezes the atmosphere and turns the gases into liquids.”

  “Certainly! There’s an ocean down there, an ocean ten times bigger than the whole Earth. Liquid water, at least five thousand kilometers deep, perhaps more; we haven’t been able to probe that far down yet.”

  “And things swimming in the water?” Grant guessed.

  Muzorawa’s smile vanished. He glanced over his shoulder. Then, leaning closer to Grant, he lowered his voice to answer, “The unofficial word is, the deepest probes have detected indications of objects moving in the Jovian ocean.”

  “Objects?”

  “Objects.”

  “Are they living creatures?”

  Muzorawa looked up toward the ceiling, then hunched still closer to Grant, close enough so that Grant could smell a trace of clove or something pungent and exotic on his breath.

  “We don
’t know. Not yet. But Wo intends to find out.”

  Grant felt a stir of excitement. “How? When?”

  Actually whispering again, Muzorawa said, “A deep mission. Really deep. And crewed.”

  “Crude?”

  “Crewed. Not robotic. A team of six people.”

  Grant’s jaw fell open. “Down into the ocean?”

  Muzorawa made a hushing motion with both his hands and turned to glance guiltily over his shoulder. “Not so loud!” he whispered. “This is all supposed to be top secret.”

  “But why? Why should it be secret? Who’s he keeping it a secret from?”

  Muzorawa drew back from Grant. With a shake of his head he said only, “You’ll find out. Perhaps.”

  LEVIATHAN

  Leviathan followed an upwelling current through the endless sea, smoothly grazing on the food that spiraled down from the abyss above. Far from the Kin now, away from the others of its own kind, Leviathan reveled in its freedom from the herd and their plodding cycle of feeding, dismemberment, and rejoining.

  To human senses the boundless ocean would be impenetrably dark, devastatingly hot, crushingly dense. Yet Leviathan moved through the surging deeps with ease, the flagella members of its assemblage stroking steadily as its mouth parts slowly opened and closed, opened and closed, in the ancient rhythm of ingestion.

  To human senses Leviathan would be staggeringly huge, dwarfing all the whales of Earth, larger than whole pods of whales, larger even than a good-size city. Yet in the vast depths of the Jovian sea Leviathan was merely one of many, slightly larger than some, considerably smaller than the eldest of its kind.

  There were dangers in that dark, hot, deep sea. Glide too high on the soaring currents, toward the source of the bountiful food, and the waters grew too thin and cold; Leviathan’s members would involuntarily disassemble, shed their cohesion, never to reunite again. Get trapped in a treacherous downsurge and the heat welling up from the abyss below would kill the members before they could break away and scatter.

  Best to cruise here in the abundant world provided by the Symmetry, between the abyss above and the abyss below, where the food drifted down constantly from the cold wilderness on high and the warmth from the depths below made life tolerable.

  Predators swarmed through Leviathan’s ocean: swift voracious Darters that struck at Leviathan’s kind and devoured their outer members. There were even cases where the predators had penetrated to the core of their prey, rupturing the central organs and forever destroying the poor creature’s unity. The Elders had warned Leviathan that the Darters attacked solitary members of the Kin when they had broken away from their group for budding in solitude. Still Leviathan swam on alone, intent on exploring new areas of the measureless sea.

  Leviathan remembered when the abyss above had erupted in giant flares of killing heat. Many of Leviathan’s kind had disassembled in the sudden violence of those concussions. Even the everlasting rain of food had been disrupted, and Leviathan had known hunger for the first time in its existence. But the explosions dissipated swiftly and life eventually returned to normal again.

  Leviathan had been warned of another kind of creature in the sea: a phantasm, a strange picture drawn by others of the Kin, like nothing Leviathan had ever sensed for itself, small and sluggish and cold, lacking flagella members or any trace of community. It was pictured to have appeared once in the sea and once only, then vanished upward into the abyss above.

  None of the others had paid much attention to it. It was so tiny that it could barely be sensed it at all, yet for some reason the vision of its singular presence in the eternal ocean sent a chilling note of uneasiness through Leviathan’s entire assemblage. It was an unnatural thing, alien, troubling.

  SLAVE LABOR

  Grant finished his lunch with Muzorawa in guarded silence, his mind spinning with the idea of sending a crewed mission into the vast ocean beneath Jupiter’s hurtling clouds.

  And it’s not the first one, Grant told himself. Beech knew there’d already been at least one human mission to the planet.

  Once they left the cafeteria, Muzorawa said brightly, “Very well, newcomer, you have received the official orientation.”

  “And then some,” said Grant.

  Muzorawa shook his head. “None of that, now! What I told you was strictly in confidence, between the two of us. Besides, most of it was conjecture.”

  Grant nodded, but his mind was still racing. What’s he afraid of? Why all this secrecy? If there are life-forms in the Jovian ocean, why doesn’t Wo announce it like any other scientific discovery? And why is the New Morality so torqued up over this?

  He thought he knew the answer to that last question. Finding any kind of alien life was seen as a threat to belief in God. Every time scientists discovered a new life-form anywhere, some people gave up their faith. Atheists crowed that the Bible was nonsense, a pack of scribbling by ancient narrow-minded men steeped in superstition and primitive ignorance.

  Even when biblical scholars and scientists who were also true Believers pointed out that no scientific discovery could disprove the existence of God, the fanatical atheists howled with glee with each new discovery, especially when the cliffside ruins on Mars showed that an intelligent race had lived there millions of years ago.

  He hardly heard Muzorawa telling him, “Now you are to go to the personnel office, where you will receive your work assignment.”

  “What assignment could they possibly have for an astrophysicist?” Grant complained.

  Muzorawa grinned at him. “I’m sure Dr. Wo has something in mind for you.”

  That sounded ominous to Grant.

  The personnel office was little more than a closetsized compartment in the station’s executive area. It was only a few doors from the director’s more spacious and imposing office.

  To his surprise, when he slid open the door marked personnel, Egon Karlstad was sitting behind the tiny metal desk.

  “You’re the personnel officer?” Grant blurted.

  “This week,” Karlstad replied smoothly. “I told you that Wo likes to rotate us through the administrative jobs.”

  “No, you said—”

  “It lets him keep the beancounters down to a minimum, so he can bring more scooters out here,” Karlstad continued. “Of course, that means we scooters have to pull double duty all the time, but that doesn’t bother our peerless leader. Not at all.”

  Karlstad seemed too large for the desk. His knees poked up and it looked as if he could touch the opposite walls of the compartment merely by stretching out his arms. The desk itself was scuffed and battered from long use; someone had even kicked a dent into its side.

  “Have a seat,” Karlstad said.

  Grant took the only other chair: It was molded plastic, solid yet comfortably yielding.

  “Okay,” Karlstad said, turning to the screen built into the desktop. “Archer, Grant A.”

  Grant could see the glow from the screen reflected on Karlstad’s pale features. It made him look even more ethereal than usual.

  Without looking up from the screen, Karlstad said, “Grant Armstrong Archer the Third, eh? Illustrious family, I imagine.”

  “Hardly,” Grant replied, feeling a bit annoyed.

  “First in your class at Harvard?” Karlstad whistled. “No wonder Wo wanted you here.”

  “I don’t think he picked me personally,” Grant said.

  “Don’t be so sure, Grant A. the Third. Zeb might be right; our wily Dr. Wo can stretch out his tentacles and —Hey! You’re married?”

  He’s got my complete file there, Grant realized. My whole life is on that screen.

  Karlstad turned his pallid, watery eyes to Grant. “Did you think being married would get you out of Public Service?”

  “Of course not!” Grant snapped. “I love my wife!”

  “Really?”

  “Besides, Public Service isn’t something to be avoided. It’s a responsibility. A privilege that goes with adulthood and citizensh
ip, like voting.”

  “Really?” Karlstad repeated, dripping acid.

  “Aren’t you doing your Public Service?” Grant demanded.

  Karlstad made a derisive snort. “I’m serving out a prison sentence,” he said.

  “I mean really—”

  “It’s the truth,” Karlstad insisted. “Ask anybody. I’m serving my time here instead of languishing in jail. The Powers That Be decided they’d spent too much money on my education to have me rot in prison for five years.”

  “Five years!” Grant was shocked. “What did you do?”

  “I helped a young married couple to obtain fertility treatments. They had been denied treatment by the government. Population restrictions, you know. I was in the biology department at the University of Copenhagen and I knew a lot of the physicians at the research hospital. So they came to me and begged me to help them.”

  “But it was illegal?”

  “According to the laws of the European Union, which take precedence over the laws of Denmark.”

  “And the authorities found out about it?”

  Karlstad’s face twitched into a bitter scowl. “The two little bastards worked for the Holy Disciples—our version of your New Morality.”

  “It was a sting,” Grant realized.

  “I was stung, all right. Sentenced to five years. When they offered me a post here, doing research instead of jail, I leaped at it.”

  “I guess so.”

  Karlstad huffed. “One should always look before one leaps.”

  Grant nodded sympathetically. “Even so … this is better than jail, isn’t it?”

  “Marginally,” Karlstad conceded.

  “I never realized …” Grant let the idea go unexpressed.

  “Realized what?”

  “Oh … that the New Morality, or whatever you call it in Europe, I never realized they would entrap people and sentence them to jail.”

  “They don’t like scientists,” Karlstad said, his voice going sharp as steel. “They’re afraid of new ideas, new discoveries.”