Collected Short Fiction, page 759
With heat from the nukes, they carved radiation shelters, condensing steam to refill the mass-tanks and replace lost oxygen. Such things accomplished, the search began. Deep inside the chilly refuge, they read telemetry, frowned over monitor screens, groped for truth beneath the dance of digits and the flicker of shifting images.
Rana was all scientist now, concentrating on the magnetosphere and the clouds of death it held around them, on the killer ions that sputtered and erupted from volcanic Io, on the cosmic dynamo that drove the Jovian auroras. “A million facts,” she whispered once to Hawker, lying unresponsive in his arms when they shared the same ice-carved cave. “No answers yet.” Consumed by Jupiter, she had nothing left for love.
Petrescu had no more. Wanting neither woman now, he slept and ate in his own frozen den, spending all his days on the swift-moving moons and the rivers of cloud that raced across the planet’s blazing face, toiling to support his notion that tidal drag could explain the Spot. Morosely silent, he claimed no progress.
Nicola played no chess. Wrapped up in their greater game, glowing with a vital cheer that sometimes irked the others, she probed for gravitational or magnetic anomalies beneath the surface clouds, for thermal effects of the Io flux, for hot spots from deep convection. Failure never dismayed her, though Hawker himself was often depressed.
“Our time’s running out,” he admitted once. “You know, Nik—I guess it’s pure imagination, but I can’t help a sense of malice in the Spot. The way it creeps and leers—”
“You’re letting it haunt you.” She laughed at him. “Come along to bed.”
Sex was yet another game, one she played with a dispassionate but total skill. Warm and wonderful in his cold sleeping bag, inventing new uses for the lighter lunar gravitation, she helped him keep hope alive, even after Rana’s recurrent dreams had begun to haunt them all.
“Inexplicable dreams.” She reported them reluctantly, her voice hushed and hesitant, the Hindi accent stronger. “Suggested, I suppose, by your own notion of biological activity in the Spot, but still—strange!”
They were sitting over coffee, rationed and precious, in the frost-glinting cave they used for a galley. Puzzled by her agitation, he waited for her to go on.
“Strange! Because they’re all the same. I get a—a feeling of the Spot. Alive, perhaps, in its own way, but not like any life on Earth. It exists alone—I guess it somehow evolved alone—and it had never known another mind. Not till it felt us.”
Hawker had to remind himself that this was just a dream.
“It’s terribly—I guess astounded would be the word, though it has no words—astounded that other minds exist. Afraid, I suppose. Machines are utterly strange, because its world is all whirling gases, with nothing solid anywhere. It never even imagined metal.
“Most of all, it’s perplexed by us. Because it’s all one. It can’t understand how we can be so—so separate. It can’t understand how we could come from Earth alone. Or anything we do. Not even sex—or do you think I’m cracking up?”
She checked herself, staring uneasily at Hawker.
“I don’t know what to think,” she whispered. “We’re all under such terrible tension. I thought at first it had to be hallucination. But it keeps coming back, and it seems so very real—”
“We are in trouble.” Hawker nodded. “Getting nowhere, and picking up too much radiation. Time to move.”
He called the others in to announce that they were going on to Ganymede.
“Out of one hell?” Petrescu muttered. “Into a hotter one!”
“True enough,” he said. “But we halve our distance out. Gain a better vantage point from which to study everything—the inner moons, the ring and the auroras, the zonal circulation, the Spot itself.”
“If—” Rana shuddered—“if we must.”
Her shivery voice dried up.
Ganymede, the hugest of the moons. Itself an enigma four billion years old: cratered highlands of dark and dirty ice, broken with queerly ridged and younger lowlands. They landed on another crater floor, a cragged ice-scape lying strange and dead beneath a huger, brighter-blazing Jupiter.
“If it’s life you’re looking for—” Petrescu called to Hawker as they struggled outside to string the long arrays of instruments. Voice harsh in the helmet radio, he turned to gesture at the desolate black horizon. “No motion here in the last billion years!”
Hawker didn’t try to reply. Working fast in that airless yellow deadliness, they tested the telemetry and rigged the nukes to melt out a deeper radiation refuge. Probing for whatever drove the Spot, they scanned it with telescope and spectroscope, measured zonal velocities and computed shear effects, computed temperatures and densities, looking for convergence below it, upwelling within it, divergence above. All that for nothing, but Rana dreamed again, this time that she was down inside it.
“I thought it was trying—” The Hindi twang was strong in her haunted voice when she came to Hawker, down in their cold common room. “Trying to show us what we’re looking for. Not that it made much sense.”
Her eyes were wide and dark, full of troubled wonder.
“I thought it was—bubbling. Bubbles of hot hydrogen boiling up everywhere, like tiny golden balloons. Seething up through those hurricane winds. Each one finally bursting, with a flash of reddish light. The flashes—”
Her own perplexity checked her.
“They came in the queerest sort of unison, making slow waves of brightness that rippled through the Spot. It felt my puzzlement about them, and we were just as strange to it It wanted us to come down closer, so we could understand each other. I thought it was shocked—and utterly baffled—when I said we couldn’t, because we would die.
“Dying, you see, is something it had never even imagined. It has lived almost forever. Perhaps it was frightened, too, because that’s the end of the dream.” She shrugged uneasily. “That’s it, Derk. I don’t know what it means, if it means anything. I just don’t know.”
Hawker studied her across their cooling coffee, trying to appear more cheerful than he felt. Problems with the instrument array had taken her outside too many times. Though she had not reported any illness, he thought she looked pale and unwell.
“Try to relax,” he advised her. “Get what rest you can. And make the best of Pete.” Regretfully, he added, “I’m afraid we will have to go closer—”
“Derk!” Her coffee mug rattled on the tray. “I don’t want to die!”
“We’re trading our lives.” Gently, he leaned to touch her trembling arm. “We must get all we’re worth.”
Petrescu flushed with defiance when he announced that they must move, but Nicola stepped quickly to his side.
“Derk, let’s us—” Her voice and her smile were as lightly bright as if she had been suggesting a summer picnic. “Let the main base stay here while you and I make a dash down to Europa to set up a satellite station.”
Petrescu muttered sourly that they were never to get back, and Rana clung to him for a desperate-seeming farewell kiss, but they took Explorer I down to Europa. A smaller, brighter, smoother moon, nearly craterless, crisscrossed with endless darker streaks that perhaps were fracture zones where ancient impacts had shattered its thinner mantle of ice.
They didn’t stay to make a shelter. Exposing themselves only in brief dashes outside the shielded spacecraft, they strung out the cables, hooked up the telemetry, erected the antenna, and took off again for Ganymede.
Closer still to Jupiter, immersed in far vaster energies, the satellite station bombarded them with data for two hectic-seeming months and then abruptly failed, the old riddle of the Spot still unresolved.
“We’ll have to try Io.”
Astonished, Hawker stared at Rana. They were sitting over hoarded half cups of weak coffee in the frigid common room. She had lost more flesh. Even her form-hugging spaceskins had grown too large. Her dark-circled eyes seemed hollow and too bright.
“You’re crazy—” Petrescu caught himself. “My dear, I’m afraid you aren’t well.”
“Our last chance.” She looked at each of them, with a wan and wistful smile, and slowly shook her head. “I’ll go.”
“Kill yourself?” Petrescu rasped. “For nothing?”
“Perhaps for something. If we’re looking for life, Io is more alive than any other moon. Hot with vulcanism. The whole surface new—changing even as we watch. We need to know more about it than we do.”
“Stop her!” Petrescu swung to challenge Hawker. “You can’t let her give her life—” His hoarse outburst died when he saw that Hawker would not move to stop her.
They refilled the mass-tanks of Explorer II, and she took it up alone, the shield coils pushed to twice their tested overload. Down on Io, she called back through Jovian thunder that drowned half her words. Though her full array of instruments was never deployed, she had been able to hook up the magnetometers and plasma sensors and program the craft’s own telescope to follow the Spot as Jupiter spun.
“Down in hell!” Her far voice rose and fell on roaring breakers. “If hellfire takes brimstone. A world of fire and sulfur, yet it has a deadly splendor. I’m near the equator, high on the sulfur slopes outside a hundred-kilometer caldera. Lava colors mostly reds and yellows. High scarfs above me, jagged and darker. Radial flows below, red and brown and violet. Jupiter enormous in a dead-black sky. I can see—”
Static swept her voice away.
Hawker was on watch alone when she came back. “Derk?” He thought she seemed elated, yet rushed and desperate. “News for you, dear! Real data now, on the energy cycle. Spectroscopic evidence of organic polymers and other complex molecules created all over the planet by. high-energy effects. Lightning, the Io flux, ions out of the plasma. Something in the Spot breaks them down . . .”
A crashing cataract.
“. . . your own theory. The breakdown reactions do warm the Spot enough to support convection. The products spread away to mix in the zonal winds and build up again.”
“Products of life?” His own voice was shaking. “Is there biology—”
She was gone.
For two days of strain, all they could pick up was that roar of Jovian energy. Hawker and Nicola were sleeping, worn out from long watches, when he heard Petrescu shouting, “—if you love me!”
Hawker stumbled out to the command pit.
“You’re too close to that volcano,” Petrescu was rasping. “If ejecta falls on the coils—”
“You know I do.” Faint at first, her voice swelled until it shattered from the speakers. “Maybe more than Derk. But I’m where I want to be . . .”
The sound wave had faded.
“Get her back,” Hawker called. “Ask her—”
“Listen!” White with emotion, Petrescu gestured for silence. “Damn you!”
“. . . can’t come back . . .” That roaring sea tossed up broken words. “. . . melanoma . . . these past months . . . very fitting finish . . . please, tell Derk . . . dreams that seem . . .”
When the static swelled again, it was only static. Hawker claimed the mike to beg for more about her dreams, but there was nothing more. At the telescope, Petrescu watched her location on the north slope of that erupting volcano. A few hours later, he saw a bright flash there. A louder blast crashed out of the speakers.
“Dead!” He glared at Hawker, glassy-eyed, his stubbled cheeks drawn and twitching. “That flash was her shield, exploding when the superconductors went. You—you’ve killed Rana!”
“Pete, I loved—loved her too.” Hawker’s own voice caught. “She volunteered, remember? Knowing she was dying—”
“Aren’t we all?” He staggered at Hawker and stopped again, breathing hard. “You—you total bastard! You seduced her. Seduced and betrayed her. And sent her down to die in that blazing yellow hell.” His fists knotted. “You murdered my wile!”
“Easy, Pete—”
“I’m through with you. I’m going home—”
“You’ll be walking.” Painfully, Hawker tried to grin. “We have only one spacecraft left. We’re taking it on toward the Spot. Rana gave her life for what she learned about it. We can’t waste her—”
“What?” Petrescu. swayed as if from a blow. “You aren’t—”
“We’re going down below the Io torus. Skirting it and the radiation belt below. Perhaps we can get close enough to finish Rana’s study of that exothermic chemistry—”
“Exothermic bull! I won’t go—”
“Please remember we’re scientists—”
“Jungle animals!” Petrescu grated. “Except for maybe Nikki.” He nodded bleakly toward her ice-cave. “We’ll leave the decision up to her.”
She was hard to wake.
“A crazy dream!” Shivering in her spaceskins, gold hair loose around her sleep-swollen face, she blinked at them groggily. “We were diving into the Spot—the three of us. The crazy part was what we found.”
Her brightened eyes clung to Hawker, as if in search of something sane.
“Little golden balloons, floating up out of the depths. Hydrogen bubbles, I thought. Each one bursting, when it got high enough, with a reddish flash. All somehow in tune, so the flashes made pulsing waves against the deeper darkness. The strangest thing:—”
She shuddered and stopped.
“Please, Nik, what else?”
“Rana! She was somehow speaking to us. I don’t know how, because she wasn’t in the spacecraft. About those bubbles. A vehicle, she called them, for the mind of the Spot. Those waves of radiance were like the alpha waves in the human brain—”
“Wake up, Nik!” Petrescu cut her off. “No wonder we dream—living a nightmare! The way Rana died—” His face worked. “The way we all will, unless we get out—”
“It seemed—seemed so real!”
“Listen, Nik!” His harsh voice fell. “If you’ll just say we’re going home, we’re two to one against this arrogant—”
“Hold it, Pete!” Trembling, Hawker caught her arm. “Tell us the rest of the dream—if it was a dream.”
“That was all.” She rubbed her swollen eyes. “That was when you woke me.”
“Nik—”
“Sorry, Pete.” She sat up straighter, tossing back her tangled hair. “But we can’t give up the game. Our move now.”
With more current in the coils than Petrescu wanted, they lifted Explorer I out of the crater and went down from Ganymede. Red lights flashed as they dived past the Io torus, warning that their accumulated radiation exposure was now enough to kill them all in time, if not at once. They dived past Almathea, down into synchronous orbit.
Jupiter’s bright-belted enormity filled half the sky. Plunging around it in time with its spin, they kept the Spot fixed below. With something less than Rana’s special skills, they labored to decipher its secret chemistry. Staring hour after hour into its red-blazing maelstrom, Hawker felt sometimes elated, sometimes cold with awe, sometimes simply giddy. Its mystery eluded all their instruments, but Nicola fell asleep at the monitor console and dreamed again.
“It was calling to us—I don’t know how.” She woke in breathless agitation. “I thought it had—” She stopped to shiver. “Thought it had a Hindi accent. It could feel us out here, but it wants to know us more. It wants us to come down closer—”
“Not me!” Petrescu yelped. “Not yet!”
They had reached the point of no return. From any lower orbit, they could never climb out again, not even far enough to refill the mass-tanks on hazardous Callisto. With nothing left above the torus to relay their signals to Mars, whatever they learned would die with them.
“Damn you both!” Hoarse and shaking, he saw that he had failed. “The Ship of Loons!” he rasped. “Going down!”
“You’re a riddle to it, Pete.” She shook her head at him, gently reproving. “It can’t understand you—the hate and bitterness you feel. Or much about the rest of us, really.” Her bewildered gaze came back to Hawker. “Rana’s pain and her death. Our sorrow for her. Or even the fact that we will probably die before we ever reach it.”
“No doubt of that!”
“Don’t you see—” She frowned, groping for what to say. “It has no way to understand us. Though its existence has risen from those hydrogen bubbles, they themselves are hardly half alive. Each one is nothing. Rising, flashing, bursting, vanishing. If we were something like them, it could grasp us. But we aren’t.”
“So it must kill us?” Petrescu grated. “Just to see what we are?”
Down, down again, into unseeable storms of killing energy. Jupiter grew, wider, wider, a dark-streaked sea of golden fire, stretched from horizon to black horizon. The Spot spread out to swallow them. A vast shallow funnel of rust-red iron, wound with darker lines of spiral flow. The wake of it, that endless train of lesser yellow vortices, crawled away and lost itself beyond the mad slopes of red-streaked, wind-whipped cloud that reached out and up, many thousand kilometers, to the funnel’s ragged rim.
Nicola took the cockpit.
“Fly into the rotation,” Hawker told her. “Level out and keep us up.”
He put Petrescu at the telescope.
“To look for what? Circus balloons?”
“Report everything. And quick. We can’t last long.”
When Nicola tried to level out, the Jovian gravity caught them. Weight doubled, Hawker sagged into the monitor seat.
“You’re right—for once,” Petrescu gasped. “Can’t last—”
“Just report. Anything.”
“Blurred red fog,” Petrescu gritted. “What else—”
“Pete! Derk! I see them now.” Nicola was joyous. “The golden balloons!”
Hawker swayed to brace himself in the bulkhead door. Beyond it, she sat relaxed and erect at the controls, smiling as eagerly as if she hadn’t felt that pitiless gravity. Her eyes were closed.
“It wants us, Derk. It’s spreading bright ripples around a point ahead, to mark where we should come in.”
