Collected short fiction, p.758
Collected Short Fiction, page 758
Wiping at the tears, he swayed toward the luckless wretch, reaching out to comfort him. The cavernous room rocked as he moved. Savage quakes tossed that vast white desert. The high vault roared with thunder he couldn’t understand, and Brong’s colossal form receded, faster than he could move.
“Shape up, Crewman!” At last he grasped the thunder-words. “We’ve got to go.”
He perceived then, pierced with a godlike tenderness, that Brong was afraid. A foolish fear, because the humanoids were infinitely kind. Yet he owed a debt to this blundering hero, who had come here for him across the deadly emptiness of space. “I’m ready—”
He tried to say that, but his tongue seemed swollen from that searing dust. His lips were stiff, and his parched throat had closed. Though he labored a long time to speak, no sound came from his mouth.
Pale with staring horror, Brong had shrunk from the humanoid, and he saw now that it was no longer dead. Though it still lay flat, the golden plate on its chest was vibrating slightly and its sightless eyes shone with a colorless rhodomagnetic glow.
“It’s—awake!” He tried to say. “Spying!”
Brong’s chuckle rolled like slow and far-off thunder.
“Let it spy!” Intrepid again, he had shaken off that quaking dread. “Or try to. It will never see where we go, or how, because it is blind to life.” Overwhelmed with pity for its wasted wonders, he almost wept. A mere machine, it could feel no joy in all its terrible rhodo powers, or in all the wisdom stored in its remote and mighty plexus, or in all the myriad worlds it ruled. Lacking life, its robot mind could understand neither love nor hate, hope nor fear, nor even the vast compassion he felt for it.
“Listen, Crewman!” Brong’s thunder-tones battered him again. “I never meant to get you quite so high, but maybe you can make it yet.”
Ruthless metal talons sank into his arm. “Look toward the Zone.”
Spun away from the sun, he searched the pale summer sky for Malili, but all he could see was the luminous splendor of the fantastic palaces the humanoids were building for the fortunate people of Kai and the fleeting glory of those five bright and lovely ships driving toward him fast. “Can’t—”
“It is now or never, Crewman!” Brong’s giant voice drummed. “Cyra says her monopole can hold the Zone, and they won’t care much for the rockrust outside it. With aid from our Leleyo friends, we can hold out forever. Before Summersend, your girl should be back to visit the Zone.”
“But—can’t—”
His tongue toiled and stalled, but he felt Brong hauling, saw the gold hand flashing, turning him toward Malili. It was low and pale and gibbous, nearly lost beyond those glowing pylons and the five shining divers—
“Close to the top.” The slow words crashed. “Midway between the limb and the sunrise line. A bare slope of broken stone—so watch your feet!” He wanted to watch the quick stark beauty of the playful divers.
“Lean a little.” The golden hooks hurt his arm.
“Fix your mind on those rocks and hold your image of a window through the interface. Rhodo or whatever, the word doesn’t matter. Intend to be beyond the window. I’ll count us down and do all I can. “Three. Two. One. Now—” Nearer thunder cracked. A frigid wind whipped him. A heavy pressure crushed his chest. Loose rocks slid beneath his unshod feet. Cruelly burdened, he fought to stay erect.
“All right, Crewman?” To his ringing ears, Brong’s eager shout seemed far-off and faint. “Here we are!”
He got his breath and found his balance. Beneath them, shattered rock sloped sharply toward the zigzag of a long concrete wall. Slim towers stood spaced along it, and the violet shimmer between them hurt his eyes. Beyond the wall, rockrust blues and greens slanted on into jungle reds and yellows and a far gray-blue sea of cloud that reached out and out to lemon-green horizons beneath a high and tiny silver crescent.
Kai!
The glimpse of it washed him with healing peace. If that silver shard was Kai, this was—this had to be Malili, where no humanoid could follow.
“Good jump, Crewman, but you had me sweating.” Brong swung to lead him up the slope. “Let’s look for Cyra and your father.”
Still giddy from the feyolin, hardly feeling the icy stones beneath his naked feet, he staggered after Brong toward the inner perimeter wall and the low brown roofs of the human town.
1981
. . . All Ye Who Enter Here
The Great Red Spot: a riddle three centuries old. A giant continent battered by the insane seas of Jupiter? A floating island of frozen hydrogen? A monster hurricane, mighty enough to swallow many Earths? Or something stranger yet, beyond the normal human ken?
Nine years old, Derk Hawker saw it through his first homemade telescope. A bloodshot eye squinting back at him across half a billion miles, its mystery coldly mocking. He saw it again in the TV shots from the Pioneers and the Voyagers, from the Galileo probes and the Tsiolkovsky robot explorers.
“The riddle’s too much for any machine,” he told his father. “When I grow up, Tm going out to tackle it myself.”
His father smiled, tolerant but troubled. Derk was ani overachiever. The school counselors said he had lots of potential but unrealistic aims. Unless he learned to compromise, they were afraid his life could turn tragic.
He never learned to compromise. Always at the head of his classes, he earned scholarships and honors in a galaxy of sciences. At nineteen, he published his monograph on The Riddle of the Great Red Spot and begged NASA to send him out to solve it.
“Beyond our budget,” he was told. “A light-year beyond—Congress doesn’t love us.”
“Suicide, anyhow,” one space expert added. “Stupid suicide.”
Jupiter, they warned him, was wrapped in clouds of radiation hotter than the insides of a nuclear reactor. Men might survive a few weeks on the outer moons, but nothing alive could get past Io to reach the Red Spot.
“I’ll find ways,” he promised, “to solve the engineering problems—and to fund the expedition.”
“The robot probes now cost a billion dollars a shot,” the expert warned him. “And the Io torus has always been too hot for them in spite of all the shielding. If you think of going there—you’re insane!”
“Maybe I am.” He grinned. “If that’s what it takes.” He never earned even half a billion, but at twenty-nine he did invent a better sun-power cell. With a fortune earned from that, and fame already dawning, he chartered JOVE—Jupiter Orbital Vehicular Expeditions. He paid for engineering research, hired PR people to campaign for international support, picked and trained his crew. By the year he was thirty-nine, they were taking off from White Sands to probe the Spot.
The media made tragic drama of it. Four chosen souls against the deepest mystery of the greatest planet. Hawker had searched for the finest human specimens who could be infected with his own insanity, all top achievers of his own stamp. The drives for support had won the world’s admiration, coins from school kids everywhere, and grants from a dozen governments, but skeptics still called their spacecraft the Ships of Loons.
“Two years out.” Lean and brown in his tight orange-colored spaceskins, Hawker waited to face the cameras after the others were aboard the shuttle. “Two years there to unlock the Spot. Or two more years, if it takes two more.”
“Can you survive?” a newsman shouted. “So many years and so many dangers?”
“We’ll unlock the Spot.” With a hard grin the world remembered, he waved the dangers away. “Or we won’t come back.”
Two men and two women—he wanted no trouble with sex. Each picked for physical perfection, superlative achievement, total dedication. Hawker himself: astronomer, mathematician, cybernetic engineer. Peter Paul Petrescu: Olympic athlete once, trained astronaut and renowned cosmologist. Nicola Zarand: “Candy” Zarand as a college beauty queen on her way to advanced degrees in medical research, machine intelligence, and xenobiology. Rana Sindhi: dark-eyed charmer who had turned down a TV career to specialize in high-energy physics, magnetohydrodynamics, and astrochemistry.
Before takeoff, Rana and Petrescu decided to marry.
“No matter to me.” Hawker squinted thoughtfully at Petrescu’s male magnificence. “We’ll be on our own.” And he added, with a nod of speculative appreciation for her, “I’m in command.”
Out in orbit, they transferred from the shuttle to the twin Explorers, one couple in each. At flight velocity, nuclear jets shut down, they linked the spacecraft by cable and set them spinning to simulate gravity.
Two years to Jupiter. A JOVE team at the Martian orbital station followed them with the new twenty-meter space telescope to monitor their broadcasts and transmit fresh observations of the planet and its swarming moons. The telescope troubled Petrescu.
“It could reveal everything,” he grumbled. “While we’re on the way.”
“Don’t sweat it, Pete.” Hawker shrugged. “The Spot wouldn’t give up its secrets quite that quick.”
They stood watches in the unturning hub at the middle of the cable. Six hours on and eighteen off, beaming their brief reports to the Martian station and keeping their own instrumentation targeted on Jupiter and the Galilean satellites. Four immense moons, discovered by Galileo with his first telescope—all swinging through that plasma cloud, each unlike the others and itself a separate enigma. Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io, all turning the same dead faces forever toward Jupiter. The outer three, cores of rock wrapped in primal ice. Io, the inmost and the deadliest, spewing sodium and sulfur into that killer cloud. All of them convenient stepping-stones, as Hawker saw them, down to the planet and its enigmatic Spot.
It glared blankly back, sweeping them every ten hours as Jupiter spun. Swelling slowly, day by day, week by week, a vast and everlasting vortex, it gave up no secrets. Hawker hated it, or thought he did.
“Watch yourself, Derk,” Rana warned him once. “You’re too obsessed.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“The rest of us came out to get the facts and take them back.” She paused to study him with a somber intentness and slowly shook her head. “But you’re investing too much ego. I’m afraid the Spot will never let you go.”
Five months out, Petrescu was waiting in the hub for Rana to relieve him. It was Hawker instead who came up the cable, a lean little elf in the tight orange spaceskin’s. Floating easily in free-fall, he read the records, checked the instruments, and swam over to Petrescu.
“By the way—” He nodded amiably at the cable he had climbed. “We’re exchanging.”
“What?”
“Nikki’s waiting for you. She’ll take the following watch, while I’m with Rana—”
Breathless, speechless, Petrescu tried to fight. He was fit as ever, a hard bronze giant, but he forgot the lack of gravity. His fury flung him sprawling off the deck into midair.
“Cool it, Pete.” Hawker tossed him a holdrope. “We’re scientists, after all. Not jungle animals. The women are willing, and you know I’m in charge.”
Petrescu caught the rope and tried to stifle his anger. The mission had to come first. He had accepted Hawker’s law. Trembling with bottled-up emotion, he slid down the cable to Nikki and found her in the hydroponic bay.
Stripped to shorts and halter, she had been tending the plants. The bay was hot and odorous. With water recycled and precious, their baths were rationed. Shining with sweat, pale hair bound in a bright-red kerchief, she smelled like her healthy self.
Aglow with a silent expectation, she helped peel off his spaceskins. She caught a lingering reek of Petrescu’s rank maleness among the mingled scents and almost turned away before he saw her shucking off the halter and opening her arms.
Suddenly, surprised, he found that he too was willing.
Hoping to defuse tensions, Hawker called them all back together at the end of the watch, to air his own theory of the Spot. It was colder in the hub. Floating on the ropes, they loosened the spaceskins but kept them on. The fans stirred a stale reek of mixed chemicals and old sweat.
“A notion I’ve kept to myself,” Hawker began. “Because it may seem a little far out. In print, it might have cut off half our grants. Some of you will doubt it now.”
Quizzically, he squinted at Petrescu. “Of course I know the Spot’s a storm. A cyclonic storm that never dies. First observed three hundred years ago. Tens of thousands of kilometers across. Winds in it blowing hundreds of kilometers an hour. It shrinks and grows again, drifts back and forth, keeps going forever.
“Driven by—what?”
Petrescu was hauling at the holdrope to plunge his big body forward and back again, scowling with an impatience he wasn’t trying to contain.
“Heat, of course.” Hawker shrugged at him. “That’s what drives our tropical storms on Earth. Latent heat in water vapor sucked off sun-warmed oceans. But that process can’t explain the Spot. Jupiter’s a gas planet. It has no oceans.”
“Derk, dear, it does have heat,” Nicola spoke gently but quickly, as if to forestall some slash from Petrescu, “from gravitational contraction. The planet radiates twice the energy it gets from the Sun.”
“We’ve computed that.” He gave her a grateful grin. “What we can’t compute is any mechanism to concentrate it under the Spot. There has to be something else.”
“A solar component?” Rana’s accurate English had a faint but fascinating Hindi accent. Though her quiet tone seemed almost too respectful now, her lowered eyes flashed him a fleeting invitation. “The Spot is dark enough to absorb solar heat the rest of the planet would reflect.”
“Thank you, Dr. Sindh!” He took care to seem formal. “That too has been computed. Jupiter is a long way out from the Sun. The effect is there, but not sufficient.”
“Sir”—Petrescu seldom called him sir—“what else could be sufficient?”
“Eliminating every other factor—” Careful, still, he looked away from Rana’s secret glee. “I think the heat is due to biological activity.”
“Life in the Spot?” Petrescu snorted. “You and Carl Sagan!”
He looked at the women. Rana was floating slowly toward him on her holdrope, her dark half smile enigmatic, relaxed as if nothing mattered more than the moment when he would slide down the cable to her.
“You stun me, dear.” Nicola’s fond tone was halfway teasing. “What sort of biology could create such immense effects?”
“I hope to find out—”
“If you’re a fool, we’ll all find that out!”
“Please, Pete!” Nicola shook a pink finger at him. “If we knew what makes the Spot, we wouldn’t be here.”
Petrescu drew a noisy breath and gripped the hold rope harder, his bronze fists pale with pressure.
“If we’re scientists, let’s do science.” He was too loud. “Frankly, sir, I prefer a notion of my own. That the Spot has a tidal drive.”
“An old idea.” Hawker shrugged it off. “Not sufficient.”
“Never really tested.” Petrescu hauled at the rope, darting at him. “Our own Moon creates effects enough on Earth. Here we have four major moons, one larger than the planet Mercury. If you’ll compute the tidal differentials on the Jovian atmosphere, you’ll find a shear effect between the zonal jets—”
“I did compute—”
“Derk! Pete!” Nicola reached for the ropes to draw them apart. “Let’s remember why we came. The only question now is where do we begin.”
“On Callisto,” Hawker said. “The radiation there ought to be endurable. If the shields hold up, we can move on to Ganymede and I think Europa. Maybe even to Io—”
“Io?” In prim contempt, Petrescu called it Ee-o. “With luck we’d live two minutes there.”
“If you wish you’d stayed on Earth—” Hawker caught himself. “We’ll take the risks we must.”
Drifting on the ropes, they all looked at him. Petrescu bleakly scowling, Nicola reaching again to restrain him, Rana’s dark eyes wide with dread, that secret smile erased. A radiation counter clicked. A fan whirred gently, stirring the odorous chill.
“We’re all afraid,” Nicola said. “But we’ll do what we must.”
Petrescu grunted.
“We knew the risks,” she told him. “Before we made our bargain—”
“With an arrogant maniac?”
“With science, Pete.”
“So we’ll go on.” His tone was bleakly sardonic. “So long as we are scientists.”
Hawker followed Rana out of the hub and down their cable, and the coupled spacecraft whirled on toward Jupiter. The planet grew against black space ahead, swelling slowly through the weeks and the unending months, until at last it ballooned, too huge for their telescopes, yellow-belted and strangely pocked, suddenly overwhelming. The widening Spot swept them every ten hours, a huger, redder, stranger eye.
“I can’t help wishing, Derk,” Rana whispered once, shivering in his arms. “Wishing you hadn’t said you thought it was alive. I can’t imagine how it could be, yet the notion haunts me. I get dreadful dreams about it.”
They spun on into the planet’s vast magnetic field, down into the clouds of trapped particles and always hotter radiation. The unshielded hub had to be dismantled. At the last meeting in it, Hawker told the others that he and Nikki were coming back together. Though Rana seemed serene, Petrescu turned grim again, no better pleased to have her back than he had been to lose her.
“Can’t help it, sir,” he muttered at Hawker, less than half apologetic. “Guess I am a jungle animal.”
“No matter now.” Hawker shrugged. “Gametime’s over. We’ve got hard science to do.”
They uncoupled the Explorers and restarted the reactors, first to power the supercooled coils in their own magnetic shields and then to brake for Callisto. In the cockpit of Explorer I, Hawker led them down across the equatorial basin, that vast bull’s-eye where some ancient cataclysm had left its frozen print in ripple-ridges across two thousand kilometers of ice. They landed beyond it, inside a ten-kilometer crater.
Tumbling out in orange spaceskins, they all stopped to stare. A cragged black moonscape of age-frozen mud, splashed here and there with white, where impacting masses of cleaner ice had shattered perhaps a billion years ago. Jupiter was spinning in the inky sky, the Spot vast and glaring.
