Jupiter

COMING-OUT PARTY

When Grant got back to the cafeteria and broke the news of his promotion to his friends, Muzorawa smiled as if he’d known it all along. Grant realized that this was so; the Sudanese must have asked Wo to allow Grant to join his team.

“Zeb, you did this for me!” he gushed. “I don’t know how to thank you!”

Muzorawa said, “I did it for me, my friend. I need as much help as I can get Wo to give me. Just do a good job, that’s all the thanks you need to give.”

“This calls for a celebration,” said Karlstad. “It’s not every day that a grad student is elevated to the ranks of we scooters.”

“I’m a scooter now!” Grant realized.

They all nodded, laughing. Ukara actually thumped him on the back.

“What kind of celebration, ’Gon?” asked O’Hara.

“We could go to the staff lounge, I suppose,” Muzorawa suggested.

“And drink fruit juice while Wo records every word we say?” Karlstad sneered.

“The lounge is dull,” Ukara agreed.

“And bugged,” added O’Hara.

Gesturing to the remains of their dinners, littered across the round table, Karlstad replied, “Back in my quarters I’ve got something a little more celebratory than this glorified pond scum.”

“Soymeat isn’t pond scum,” Hideshi said, feigning indignation. “It’s a staple for half the world’s population.”

“He’s talking about the algal salad,” Ukara said, almost growling. “And I agree with him.”

“Come on,” said Karlstad, getting up from the table. “You’re all invited to Grant’s coming-out party.”

“Coming out?”

“Out of slavery,” Karlstad said. “Out of the bondage of lab assistantship—”

“And into the indentured servitude of scooterdom,” O’Hara finished for him.

As they went down the hall, Grant asked, “Where did that term ‘scooter’ come from?”

“It means scientist,” Ukara answered. “It’s a derogatory term invented by the administrators.”

“You mean the beancounters,” Hideshi said.

“But why ‘scooters’?” Grant persisted. “How’d that word get chosen to mean ‘scientist’?”

“It’s likely a corruption of the word ‘scholar,’ I should think,” said O’Hara.

“Which was in and of itself a derogatory term created by the beancounters,” Karlstad added.

“The only time they ever showed any creativity whatsoever,” Ukara said, her tone bitter with contempt.

“Maybe it’s a corruption of the word ‘scoter,’” Hideshi suggested.

Karlstad asked, “Scoter? Isn’t that some kind of duck?”

“That’s right. An appropriate name for a scientist, don’t you think?”

“Queer ducks, that’s what we are, for certain,” O’Hara agreed.

“Quack, quack,” Ukara added, a rare burst of humor for her.

“You mean quark, quark,” said Karlstad.

“Only if you’re a physicist,” O’Hara said. “And a theoretical physicist, at that.”

Karlstad’s quarters were almost identical to Grant’s, as far as their dimensions and layouts were concerned. But Karlstad had decorated his room with long hydroponic trays of plants, and as soon as they entered the room the wall screens ht up with views of beautiful Earth forests and meadows. Soft music began to play, too. Grant could not recognize it, but it sounded symphonic, melodious, relaxing.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Karlstad said grandly as they entered and looked around.

Most of the floor was covered with a colorful carpet. Where did he get that? Grant wondered.

“You said something about celebratory ingestants?” Ukara asked.

“Indeed I did,” Karlstad replied, heading for the closet.

Grant felt a pang of worry. He must have alcoholic spirits, he thought. Then, realizing that Karlstad was a bio-physicist and his room thick with green plants, Grant wondered, Is he growing something illegal in here? Stimulants? Narcotics?

Instead, Karlstad pulled several plump cushions from the closet and tossed them onto the floor. As the others settled themselves on the cushions, Karlstad led Grant to the one upholstered chair in the room.

“You get the seat of honor tonight,” he said grandly.

Grant saw that Muzorawa had hunkered down next to him, leaning his back against the wall. Karlstad went to the small refrigerator in his kitchenette area.

“Wine,” he announced, pulling out a dark-colored flask and holding it over his head. “The finest rocket juice, fresh from the rock rats in the Belt. Guaranteed never to have seen an Earthly grape.”

“One hundred percent totally artificial, is that it?” huffed Ukara.

“The finest product of the prospectors out among the asteroids,” Karlstad said.

Grant took in a breath. He had drunk wine before. It was all right.

But Muzorawa bent close to him and said in a near whisper, “If you’re not accustomed to alcoholic drinks, be careful of that stuff. It’s quite potent.”

“I don’t have enough glasses,” Karlstad told them. “You’ll just have to pass the flask around.”

“How unsanitary,” Hideshi said, grinning. She grabbed the flask out of Karlstad’s hand and took a swallow. She gagged, coughed, then croaked out, “Smooooth,” and handed the flask to Ukara.

“Hey, wait,” Karlstad snapped. “The guest of honor should go first.” He recaptured the flask and handed it to Grant.

Cautiously, Grant barely let the liquor touch his lips. It burned the tip of his tongue and went on burning all the way as he let the minuscule sip trickle down his throat. Feeling his eyes tear, he handed the flask to Muzorawa.

Who solemnly passed it on to Kayla Ukara without touching it. Moslem, Grant realized. Alcohol is forbidden to them.

Standing in the middle of the room as the five others passed the flask around, Karlstad said, “I also have some chemical concoctions for those who don’t care for asteroidal wine.”

Muzorawa said pleasantly, “Some hash would be welcome.”

Grant felt totally shocked.

Heading for his fridge again, Karlstad said, “Devlin says he’s run out of stock—”

“The Red Devil, out of stock?” O’Hara looked totally shocked at the idea.

“He’s probably just trying to run up the price,” Ukara grumbled.

“Whatever,” Karlstad said as he handed Muzorawa a pair of pinkish gelatin capsules. “Doesn’t matter. I’ve got a couple of bright kids in the biochem lab who swear this stuff is an almost exact analog of one of the tetrahydrocannabinols. ”

Seeing Grant’s horrified expression, Muzorawa smiled. “It’s perfectly all right, my friend. This concoction is quite similar to one used medicinally to alleviate stress … even by members of the New Morality.”

“It is?”

Holding the capsules in the palm of his hand, Muzorawa said, “It’s a tranquilizer. Nothing more. I believe in the States it’s marketed under a trade name: De-Tense, I believe.”

“Oh.”

“Although this is a rather higher concentration of its active ingredients, I should think.” With that, Muzorawa popped the capsules into his mouth and swallowed them dry.

Grant wished he had some fruit juice, but he felt too intimidated to ask Karlstad for some. Instead, he pretended to sip at the asteroidal wine when the flask passed his way again and sat watching as the real drinkers got louder and happier.

After several rounds the flask was empty. Karlstad pointed to the refrigerator. “Help yourselves to whatever you can find,” he said, slightly slurring the words. “Mi fridge es tu fridge.” He knitted his brows in puzzlement for a moment. “Or is it esta?”

That started a boisterous discussion about the Spanish language, which quickly evolved into an argument about the charms of Barcelona versus the attractions of Paris. Then someone brought up Rome.

“Cairo,” Muzorawa murmured dreamily. “None of you have been to Cairo, have you?”

“That pesthole?” Hideshi said. “It’s overcrowded and filthy.”

Resting his head against the wall, Muzorawa smilingly replied, “That overcrowded and filthy pesthole has the grandest monuments in the world sitting just across the river.”

“The pyramids,” said O’Hara.

“And the Sphinx. And farther upriver the Valley of the Kings.”

“And Hatshepsut’s tomb. One of the most beautiful buildings of all antiquity.”

“You’ve seen it?” Muzorawa asked.

O’Hara shook her head. “Only in virtual reality tours. But it’s truly grand and impressive.”

Without Grant’s seeing her do it, O’Hara had unpinned her hair. Now it flowed like a long chestnut cascade over one shoulder and down almost to her hip.

But she was deep in conversation with Muzorawa now. The others were all talking among themselves, as well. Karlstad and the two other women were head to head off by his bed in an intense three-way discussion of something or other. Grant was completely out of it. Some guest of honor, he thought. His mouth felt dry, so he got up from the chair and went to the refrigerator. Its shelves were bare, except for a small plastic case that held three more capsules and what looked like the last few slices of a loaf of bread, green with mold.

Grant suddenly felt tired. And bored. He thought parties should be more fun than this. I’ll go back to my quarters and send a message to Marjorie, he thought.

He crossed the room and reached the door without anyone paying any attention to him.

Clearing his throat loudly, he said to them, “Uh, thanks for the party. It was great.”

“You’re leaving?” Karlstad looked shocked.

Grant forced a smile. “I’ve got to start work with the fluid dynamics group tomorrow morning, bright and early. Director’s orders.”

Muzorawa gave him a wobbly wave. “Good man. See you at eight sharp.”

Grant nodded, opened the door, and stepped out into the corridor. No one said another word to him. Karlstad barely looked up. As he shut the door, Grant recognized that he wasn’t the central focus of the party, he was merely the excuse for having it.

DESSERT

Grant was surprised to see so many people still roaming along the corridor. His wristwatch read 21:14. It’s early, he saw. For several moments he simply stood there as people passed by, staring at the quickly flicking numerals counting out the seconds. How many seconds until I can get back to Earth, back to Marjorie—if she still wants me? He didn’t dare try to calculate the number.

It was only a few meters to his own door. Better get to sleep, he told himself, and start tomorrow fresh and alert. But just as he started to tap out his security code, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

It was O’Hara. Tall and lithe, with her hair still tumbling down past one shoulder. She smiled at him.

“You never had dessert,” she said.

Grant had to think a moment. “That’s right,” he said. “I never did.”

“Come on.” She tugged gently at his arm. “I’ve got a cache of ice cream in my place. And some real Belgian chocolate.”

Grant allowed her to lead him to her quarters, only a few paces farther along the corridor.

“Has the party broken up already?” he asked.

“No, but it was going downhill, don’t you think? Egon and the colleens were getting pretty frisky with each other. I don’t like group scenes.”

“What about Zeb?”

“He’s retreated into his own private little mirage.

Lord knows what he dreams about, but it’s not fun watching him staring off into space.”

They had reached her door. She pecked out the security code and they stepped in.

O’Hara’s room was the same size and shape as the other quarters, but it was completely different from anything Grant had seen in the station. The wallscreens displayed underwater scenes from Earth’s oceans: myriads of colorful fish, octopi pulsing and waving their suction-cupped tentacles, sharks gliding past menacingly. The floor began to glow, too. Before Grant’s eyes a coral reef swarming with more fish took shape and fell steeply off into an endless, bottomless abyss. Grant flattened himself against the closed door, suddenly giddy with vertigo.

O’Hara noticed his near panic. “Now don’t be alarmed. The floor’s quite solid.” She tapped on it with one moccasined foot. “See? I forget that people are thrown off by the effect. I don’t have visitors in here very often.”

Taking a breath, Grant stepped out onto the floor. It felt firm enough, but it seemed he could stare down into the teeming crystal-clear sea for thousands of meters.

“Look up, why don’t you,” O’Hara suggested.

The stars! Instead of a ceiling, Grant saw the infinite bowl of black night, spangled with thousands of stars. The underwater scenes on the walls vanished, replaced by more stars. It was like being far out at sea on a clear moonless night.

“That’s what we’d see if we were outside the station,” she explained. “Minus Jupiter, of course. I could put Jupiter into the display but it would overpower the grand view of it all, don’t you think?”

He nodded dumbly, staring at the stars. They looked back at him, solemn, unblinking.

“That one’s Earth,” O’Hara said, standing close enough to touch shoulders and pointing to one bright bluish dot of light among the hosts of stars.

Earth, Grant thought. It looked awfully far away.

“It’s a regular planetarium,” he heard himself say in a hushed voice.

“My father ran the planetarium in Dublin,” O’Hara said. “He sent me the program.”

“But … where’s the projector? How do you get all those stars on the ceiling … and make it look, well, almost three-dimensional?”

“Microlasers,” she said, moving away from him. “I sprayed the ceiling and floor with ’em.”

“There must be thousands of them,” Grant conjectured.

“Oh, yes,” O’Hara replied, halfway across the room. “And more on the floor, of course.”

“How did you do it? Where did you get them?”

“Built them in the optics shop.” She popped open the door of the small refrigerator; its light spilling into the room broke the illusion of being out in the middle of the sea.

“I promised you ice cream and chocolate and that’s what you’re going to have,” O’Hara said, as if there had been some question about it.

But Grant’s mind was on more practical matters. Walking through the starlit darkness, across the softly glowing floor, he asked, “You built thousands of microlasers? All by yourself?”

“They’re only wee crystals, a hundredth of a cubic centimeter or so.” She was rummaging in a drawer by the light of the still-open fridge.

“And you built thousands of them?”

“I had some help.”

“Oh.”

She handed Grant a small plate with a scoop of vanilla ice cream in it, topped by a small dark piece of chocolate.

“I used nanomachines,” she said.

“Nanomachines?”

“Of course. How else?”

“But that’s against the law!” “On Earth.”

“The law applies here, too. Everywhere.”

“It doesn’t apply at Selene or the other Moon cities,” O’Hara pointed out.

“But it should. Nanomachines can be dangerous.”

“Perhaps,” she said, slamming the refrigerator door shut with a nudge from her hip.

“I mean it,” Grant said. “On a small station like this, if the machines get loose they could kill everybody.”

Holding her own plate of ice cream in one hand, O’Hara took Grant by the sleeve and guided him to a low couch beneath the stars. He sat awkwardly and sank into the couch’s yielding softness.

Sitting beside him, she said, “Eat your ice cream before it melts.”

He was determined not to be deterred. “Lane, seriously, nanomachines are like playing with fire. And what if Dr. Wo found out?”

She laughed. “Wo started using nanotechnology here more than a year ago.”

Grant felt stunned.

“It’s all right, Grant,” said O’Hara. “We’re not terrorists. We’re not going to develop nanobugs that eat proteins. We’re not going to cause a plague.”

“But how can you be sure?”

“They’re machines, by all the saints! They don’t mutate. They have no will of their own. They’re nothing but tiny wee machines that do what they’re designed to do.”

Grant shook his head. “They’re outlawed for good reason.”

“Certainly,” she agreed. “On Earth, with all its billions of people, nanotechnology could easily fall into the hands of terrorist fanatics, or lunatics, or just plain thrill-seekers. But it’s different here, just as it’s different in the lunar cities.”

“They claim they need nanotechnology to survive on the Moon,” Grant muttered.

“Of course they do. And we need it here, too.”

Looking up at the stars, Grant sneered. “For interior decoration?”

In the darkness, he heard her take in a sharp breath. Then she answered, “For that. And other things.”

“Such as?”

She hesitated again. “Maybe you’d better ask the director about that.”

“Sure,” Grant said. “Wo is going to unburden his soul to me. All I have to do is ask.”

She laughed gently. “You’re right. Wo’s just allowed you to step up a notch. This wouldn’t be the time to ask him sensitive questions.”

“There’s that word again.”

“Which word?”

“Sensitive. Every time I ask just about anything, somebody tells me it’s sensitive information.”

“Ah, yes.”

“What’s going on, Lane? What on earth is so blasted sensitive about studying Jupiter?”

For long moments she was silent. Then, in the starlit shadows, she reached up and removed the long cascade of hair that had draped down her back. Grant saw that her scalp was completely bald.

Even in the dimmed lighting she saw his shocked expression. “It’s the depilation treatments, don’t you know. We’ve got to be completely hairless, all over.”

“Hairless? Why?”

“For the immersion,” Lane said. “Once we’re in the ship.”

“What ship?”

“The submersible that’s being repaired for the deep mission.”

Grant felt an electric jolt of alarm flash through him. Then he asked, very deliberately, “What in the name of the Living God are you talking about?”

O’Hara took a deep breath. “It’s just not fair to keep you totally in the dark. Now that you’re a scooter, you’d think Dr. Wo would tell you about it.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

“I will. I am. But don’t let anyone know I told you. Not a word to anyone! Promise?”

Grant nodded. “I promise.”

She drew in another breath. Then, in a hushed voice, a faint whisper, as if she were afraid of being overheard, she began, “There was a mission below the clouds, into the ocean, but we had an accident. A scooter was killed. Poor Dr. Wo and his second-in-command were both terribly injured.”

“You too?” And Zeb?”

“All of us were battered. We asked Selene for medical help—nanomachines to inject into the injured bodies and repair the damage.”

“But what about tissue regeneration? You don’t need nano—”

“The damage was too severe.”

“Too severe even for stem cell regeneration?”

She nodded in the dim light of the stars. “As I said, a man was killed. They had to put poor Dr. Wo’s legs in frozen stasis until the experts from Selene arrived. By the time they came, most of his injuries were beyond repair. The spinal cord neurons had degenerated too far even for the nanomachines to rebuild them properly.”

Grant sank back into the couch’s cushiony softness. “So that’s why he’s in a powerchair.”

“Yes. And they had to send Dr. Krebs back to Selene for microsurgery.”

“Who’s Dr. Krebs?”

“She was second-in-command of the mission.”

“And this all happened more than a year ago?” Grant asked.

“It did.”

Grant thought a moment, then asked, “So what’s that got to do with that saucer thing stuck on the far side of the station?”

“That’s the ship they were in.”

“Oh, for the love of God.”

“They had entered Jupiter’s ocean. That’s when the accident happened.”

“In the Jovian ocean,” Grant muttered. “And Wo wants to go back.”

“They’re rebuilding the submersible.”

“But Wo’s in no physical condition to go.”

He heard the clink of her spoon on the dish she was holding. “It’s melting,” she said.

“Wo can’t go on the next mission into the ocean. Zeb told me it’s supposed to be a deep probe.”

“He told you that?”

“Yes.”

“You’re right, I suppose. Although I don’t really know. Wo is a very determined man. He’s taking all kinds of nanotherapies and stem cell injections. He still thinks he can rebuild his body, regenerate the spinal cord neurons or replace them with biochip circuitry.”

“He’s crazy!”

“Of course,” she said calmly. “Aren’t we all? But he’s in charge here, and he’s determined to find out what those things in the ocean are.”

Grant’s head was starting to spin. He dipped his spoon into the ice cream. It was soupy.

“Zeb and I are going to start training for the next mission,” O’Hara said. “That’s why Zeb needs you to take over some of his load in the fluid dynamics program.”

“You’re going?”

“Oh, yes,” she said in a flat, resigned tone. “All the survivors of the first mission have been assigned to the new one.”

“Is that why you wear those leggings?”

“That’s for the implants. They wired our legs with biochips. It’s the first step in the mission adaptation.”

“Wired…?”

With a struggle, O’Hara pushed herself up from the couch. Grant heard her spoon clatter to the floor.

“Oh, dear. I’ve spilled the ice cream.”

Grant said, “I’ll help you clean it up.” But it wasn’t easy to get out of the couch. He put his plate on the floor, yet it still took two tries before he could stand up.

“I’m afraid some of it got onto your slacks,” she said, heading for the kitchenette.

“That’s all right. It’ll wash out.”

“Here’s a washcloth,” she said, coming back toward him and handing him the damp cloth.

Grant couldn’t see very well in the starlight. The glow from the floor simply threw most of his slacks into a soft shadow. He dabbed at the stain.

“I’m terribly sorry to be so clumsy,” O’Hara said, sounding genuinely upset about it.

“It’s all right. Accidents ha—” He didn’t finish the thought, remembering what she’d just told him about Wo’s disastrous mission into the Jovian ocean.

“It’s my legs, you see,” she went on. “I haven’t been able to work them right since they implanted the biochips. They tell us not to worry, that legs are pretty useless anyway when you’re floating around in the ship, but that doesn’t make it any easier here and now, not at all.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Grant thought it sounded inane, but he didn’t know what else to say.

They were standing together in the starlit dimness, so close that he could feel her breath on his cheek. Grant wanted to hold her, clasp her close and kiss her and lift her off her feet and carry her back to the couch. He could feel the electricity crackling between them.

Lane stood before him, silent now, unmoving, as if waiting for him to do something, make a move, speak a word.

“I’d better be going now,” he heard himself say, his voice shaky.

“I suppose so,” she responded.

“Thanks for telling me,” he said. Then, trying to lighten the moment, he added, “And for the ice cream.”

She smiled sadly. “You’re wearing it on your slacks, I’m afraid.”

He made a shrug. “Not a problem.”

They walked to the door together and she slid it open. On impulse, he kissed her swiftly, lightly on the lips.

She rested one hand on his shoulder but whispered, “It doesn’t work that way, Grant. Not anymore. It’s the biochips, you see … it’s like being neutered.”

Grant stumbled back from her, shocked.

“Maybe after the mission,” O’Hara said, sounding bleak and hopeless as an orphaned child. “Maybe then, when they remove the biochips …”

Not knowing what to say, not knowing if there was anything he could say, Grant stepped out into the corridor and strode quickly away.

Neutered! The word echoed in his mind. Wo did this to her. To Zeb and everyone else who’s assigned to the mission. No wonder she got so boiled at Egon; he knows damned well she wouldn’t… she can’t…

His mind spun. But then, as he walked aimlessly past his own door and continued blindly along the corridor, he realized that Lane had said she’d be interested in him after the mission, after the neurosurgeons had restored her to normal.

She knows I’m married, Grant said to himself. And I kissed her. I wanted her! I would’ve broken my marriage vows. He knew he should feel ashamed, desolated. Infidelity in the mind was almost as bad as actual adultery, he knew.

Yet, instead, he felt strangely excited, almost pleased with himself. That’s wrong, he raged silently. You’re committing a sin.

Three uniformed guards were walking up the corridor toward him, two women and the guard captain, a tall, burly Albanian with a large patrician nose and a graying buzz cut. He had the physique of a weight lifter: muscles bulged beneath his skintight shirt.

“Working late, are you?” asked the captain in an easy, friendly tone. Still, Grant felt a slight hint of menace beneath the words.

“I’m just heading for my quarters,” Grant said.

The three of them glanced at the wet stain on Grant’s slacks. Both women grinned.

Grant felt his cheeks burn. It must look like I’ve wet myself. Or—he reddened even more. My god, what am I going to do? How can I survive here?

DYNAMICS

Grant buried himself in his new job in Muzorawa’s lab. To his happy surprise he found himself becoming truly fascinated by the fluid dynamics of Jupiter’s ocean.

Muzorawa had constructed a computer model of the planet-girdling ocean, based on data from the probes they had sent below the clouds. It was at best a set of rough approximations. Grant was determined to refine them and generate a true picture of how that vast ammonia-laced sea actually behaved.

They worked together in the fluid dynamics lab. Grant thought it was slightly ridiculous to call the cramped little compartment a laboratory. There was no real experimental work going on. The only equipment there was a desktop-size hypersonic wind tunnel, a small shock tube—which looked like nothing more than a narrow length of stainless steel pipe—and a two-meter-tall transparent tank that served as a cloud simulator. There was nothing in the lab that could simulate the pressures and temperatures of the Jovian ocean. Actually, there was no laboratory apparatus in the solar system that could come close to simulating Jovian conditions. So they worked with computer simulations, instead: electronic approximations to reality, programs that accepted what little they knew and played it back to them.

GIGO, Grant thought. Garbage in, garbage out. On outdated computers, at that. Equations were no substitute for real data.

“This research would make a good doctoral thesis,” Muzorawa told him one day as they sat side by side at the computer desk.

“Doctoral thesis?” Grant echoed.

The Sudanese cocked his head slightly, as if thinking about the matter. At last he replied, “Yes, if you don’t mind switching your subject to planetary astrophysics instead of stellar.”

Grant mulled the idea. I could put my time here to good use, he thought. Instead of wasting the four years I could come out of this with a doctorate … and then go on to what I want to do after I get a university post.

“You would have to do all the course work, naturally,” Muzorawa went on in his deliberate, considered manner. “We can get the necessary materials sent from my department at Cairo. I can provide the supervision for it and—”

Grant’s eyes widened. “You’re on the faculty at Cairo?”

“In the physics department,” Muzorawa answered matter-of-factly. “Professor of fluid dynamics.”

“That’s the oldest university in the world,” Grant marveled.

Muzorawa smiled slowly. “Yes, true. Al-Azhar was founded in the tenth century by the Ismali Fatimids. It was co-opted into the University of Cairo somewhat later.” His smile broadened. “The physics department is a comparatively new addition.”

“But what are you doing here if you’ve got a full professorship at Cairo?”

Muzorawa seemed almost surprised by Grant’s question. “I am here to study Jupiter’s interior. It’s the greatest problem in fluid dynamics that is accessible to direct observation.”

“You’re here voluntarily?”

The black man nodded gravely. “I intend to remain here as long as I can. Jupiter’s ocean is the kind of problem that can take a lifetime and more.”

Grant could only shake his head in awe. This is my mentor, he thought with pride. He’s going to be my thesis advisor. It didn’t occur to Grant to wonder about the sanity of a man who willingly chose to live in an orbiting station that never got closer to Earth than six hundred million kilometers.

That night, for the first time in months, Grant sent genuinely happy messages to Marjorie and his parents. He hadn’t heard from his wife in more than a week, but he knew she was busy. She’d looked tired in her last message, weary and apprehensive. Is she ill? He wondered. Is she hiding something from me? Does she still love me?

He wondered about that. How can you stay in love with someone when you’re separated for six years, millions of kilometers apart? He was struggling to keep thoughts of Lane O’Hara out of his conscious mind, out of his dreams, even. Marjorie was surrounded by handsome young military officers and university graduates on their Public Service tours of duty: dozens of them, hundreds of them.

Still, he had good news to tell her for the first time since he’d shipped off Earth, and he kept smiling all through his message to her. It wasn’t until the computer was off for the night and all the lights in his room were turned down and he was alone in bed in the darkness that his fears about Marjorie warped his face into a pained mask of misery. He tried to pray, but the words felt empty, useless.

As the weeks passed, Muzorawa spent more and more of his time training for the coming crewed mission, less and less on the fluid dynamics problem.

“I’m afraid it’s going to be mostly on your shoulders,” Muzorawa told Grant.

“I can handle it.”

“I’m sorry to lay all this work on you,” Muzorawa went on, staring at the graph Grant had put on the wall screen.

“You can’t be in two places at one time,” Grant said.

“Still … I wanted to get this work in better shape before handing it off to you.”

“You’ve done the lion’s share,” Grant assured him. “Setting up the basic equations and all.”

Muzorawa nodded, but his face showed that he was not satisfied with the situation.

Grant was. For the first time since leaving Earth he had some real work to do. A challenge. It wasn’t stellar astrophysics, but it was almost as good. Nobody understood how Jupiter’s interior worked. Nobody! It was unexplored territory and Grant had the opportunity to blaze a trail through the unknown. He intended to make the best of it.

He’d been surprised, at first, when he found that Muzorawa’s fluid dynamics “group” consisted of the Sudanese alone.

“I thought Tamiko worked with you,” Grant had said.

“She did, studying the clouds, mainly,” Muzorawa replied. “But she was reassigned to the problem of Europa’s ocean.”

There had been two other fluid dynamicists, Muzorawa told him.

“Lucy Denova was a fine scientist,” he recalled, “with a first-rate mind. But the instant her tour of duty here ended she fled back to Selene. She’s teaching at the university there now. She still checks in with me now and then.” He chuckled wryly. “But she wants no part of this station. Not at all. She prefers her home on the Moon.”

Grant couldn’t blame her, especially if she had a position on a tenure track at Lunar U.

“And who was your other assistant?” he asked.

“Not an assistant, my friend. He was Dr. Wo himself.”

“He’s a fluid dynamicist?”

“He was, before he was elevated to the directorship. Even so, we worked together quite a lot—until …” Muzorawa hesitated.

“The accident,” Grant finished for him.

“You know about that.”

“A little.”

“A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” Muzorawa misquoted.

“Then I ought to get more knowledge,” said Grant.

Muzorawa didn’t argue the point. Neither did he add to Grant’s knowledge of the accident.

The fluid dynamics problem he faced, Grant quickly learned, was that they were trying to study conditions that had never been experienced before. With meager data, at that. Hundred of automated probes had been sent into the unmeasured deeps of the Jovian ocean, but the data they returned were nothing more than a series of pinpricks in a sea of ignorance ten times wider than the whole Earth.

Squeezed relentlessly by Jupiter’s massive gravity, the thick, turbulent Jovian atmosphere is compressed into liquid some seventy thousand kilometers below the visible cloud tops: a strange and unknown ocean, water heavily laced with ammonia and sulfur compounds. Yet the ocean’s temperature is far below the Earth-normal freezing point; under Jupiter’s merciless pressure, the water liquefies despite its frigid temperature. With increasing depth, though, the sea becomes increasingly warmer, heated by the energy flow from the planet’s seething interior.

That ocean is at least five thousand kilometers deep, Grant saw. More than five hundred times deeper than the deepest trench in any ocean on Earth.

And that was barely scratching the surface of gigantic Jupiter. For the first time, Grant began to understand how truly immense the planet was. The numbers didn’t even begin to tell the story; they couldn’t. Jupiter was just too mind-numbingly big for mere numbers.

An ocean more than ten times wider than Earth and five hundred times deeper, yet it is nothing more than a thin onion-skin layer on the planet’s titanic bulk. Below that ocean lies another sea, an immense brain-boggling sea of liquefied molecular hydrogen almost sixty thousand kilometers deep. Nearly eight times deeper than the whole Earth’s diameter!

And below that the pressure builds more and more, millions of times normal atmospheric pressure, compressing the hydrogen into solid metal, sending the temperature soaring to tens of thousands of degrees. There might be another ocean deep below those thousands of kilometers of metallic hydrogen, an ocean of liquid helium. On Earth, helium liquefies only a few degrees above absolute zero. Yet deep within Jupiter’s interior, helium becomes liquefied despite the ferocious temperatures at the planet’s core because all that incredible pressure squeezing down from above doesn’t give its atoms room enough to go into the gaseous state.

At the planet’s very heart lies a solid rocky core, at least five times larger than Earth, seething with the appalling heat generated by the inexorable contraction of the stupendous mass of material pressing down to its center. For more than four billion years Jupiter’s immense gravitational power has been squeezing the planet slowly, relentlessly, steadily, converting gravitational energy into heat, raising the temperature of that rocky core to thirty thousand degrees, spawning the heat flow that warms the planet from within. That hot, rocky core is the original protoplanet seed from the solar system’s primeval time, the nucleus around which those awesome layers of hydrogen and helium and ammonia, methane, sulfur compounds—and water— have wrapped themselves.

Jupiter’s core was far beyond any physical probe. Grant had to be satisfied with equations that estimated what it must be like. But that onion-skin ocean of water, that was his domain now. He was determined to learn its secrets, to probe its depths, to resolve its mysteries.

Grant’s task was to learn as much as he could about that huge ocean. The first crewed mission had failed disastrously because they had been unprepared for the conditions to be found down there. Grant drove himself fiercely to make certain that the next human mission into Jupiter’s ocean would not end the same way.

There were currents in that sea, swift vicious currents that tore through the planet-girdling ocean, ferocious jet streams racing endlessly. With the heat flowing from deep below, the Jovian ocean pulsed and throbbed in constant turbulent motion. Storms raced across its surface and roiled the sea with the energy of a million hurricanes.

Muzorawa spent very little time in the lab now; almost his every waking hour was taken by his training for the probe mission. The Sudanese physicist dropped in to the fluid dynamics lab now and then, but for the most part Grant worked alone, struggling with the attempt to map out the major global jet-stream patterns. At first Grant had been upset by his mentor’s increasingly long absences, but as the weeks ground past, Grant realized that Zeb trusted him to do the necessary work. I’m freeing him for the deep mission, Grant told himself. If I weren’t here to do this job, he wouldn’t be able to prepare for the mission.

Late one afternoon Muzorawa stepped into the lab and sagged tiredly into the empty chair next to Grant.

“How goes the struggle, my friend?”

“You’d think that someone would have solved the equations of motion for turbulent flow,” Grant complained, looking up from his work.

“Ah, yes, turbulent flow.” Muzorawa flashed a gleaming smile despite his evident weariness. “In all the centuries that physicists and mathematicians have studied turbulent flow, it still remains unresolvable.”

“It’s chaotic,” Grant grumbled. “You can’t predict its behavior from one blink of the eyes to the next.”

“Is that a new unit of measurement you’ve invented, the eyeblink?” Muzorawa chided gently.

Grant saw the weariness in Zeb’s red-rimmed eyes. “No,” he joked back, “I think Galileo invented it.”

“If you could solve the equations of turbulent flow you could predict the weather on Earth months in advance,” Muzorawa said, stroking his bearded chin. “That would win you a Nobel Prize, at least.”

“At least,” Grant agreed.

“Until then, you must do the best you can. We need to know as much as possible about the currents and how they change with depth.”

“I’m working on it,” Grant said, without feeling much confidence. “But the data points are few and far between, and the mathematics isn’t much help.”

“Situation normal,” said Muzorawa. “All fucked up.”

Grant flushed with shock. He’d never heard Muzorawa use indecent language before.

“I’ve got to get some sleep,” Zeb said. “Dr. Wo’s been driving us all very hard.” He struggled to his feet, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And the Old Man is pushing himself harder than any of us.”

Grant got out of his chair. “Wo’s driving himself? Why?”

With a weary smile, Muzorawa explained, “He intends to lead the mission. Didn’t you know?”

“You mean he’s going to go with you?”

“That is his intention.”

“But he can’t walk! He can’t even get out of his chair.”

“Yes, he can. The therapies are beginning to help him, at last. He can stand up by himself now—with braces on his legs.”

“He can’t lead a mission into the ocean in that condition.”

Muzorawa started for the lab door, and Grant saw that he himself was not walking very well. With a shake of his head, the Sudanese replied, “He claims it doesn’t matter. We really don’t need our legs inside the craft.”

“You don’t?”

“We’ll all be immersed in pressurized PFCL. It’s the only way to survive the gravity pull and the pressure of a deep dive.”

“What’s PFCL?” Grant asked.

“Perfluorocarbon liquid. It carries oxygen to the lungs and removes carbon dioxide. We’ll be breathing in a pressurized liquid.”

“You’ll be floating, then,” Grant said.

“Correct. It’s something like zero gee. That’s why we’re training for the mission in the dolphin tank.”

“I didn’t know.”

Muzorawa placed a finger over his Ups, the sign for silence. “Now you do, my friend.”

SIMULATIONS

Grant wanted to ask Lane about the dolphin tank, but he had forced himself to stay clear of her since the evening he’d spent in her quarters. Avoid temptation, he kept telling himself sternly. He spent his evenings sending long, rambling messages back to Marjorie and rereading hers to him.

Somewhat to his surprise, there had been no repercussions over his stained trousers. Either the guards who’d seen him that night hadn’t thought enough of the incident to repeat it to anyone else, or the station’s gossip-mongers didn’t consider it worth their notice. Whenever he bumped into O’Hara she was cordial and polite, businesslike but friendly at the same time. No mention of the brief kiss that bothered Grant so much. No personal emotions at all that he could discern.

You’re making a mountain out of a molehill, Grant told himself time and again. But he dreamed about O’Hara, despite his strenuous efforts not to. How do you not think about something? he demanded of himself. Take no pleasure in it, he heard the advice of his moral counselor from his teen years. If you rigorously reject any thought that’s pleasurable, then there’s no sin to it.

He prayed for strength to resist temptation. Yet the more he prayed, the more he thought about Lane. Neutered, she had said. The electronic biochips somehow block out the sex drive. Is that a side effect, an accident? Or did Wo make it that way on purpose?

Each message he got from Marjorie he read over and over again, like a rare treasure, like a drowning man clutching at a lifebuoy. Until…

Marjorie was sitting at a desk in some sort of office, or perhaps it was a hospital. Grant couldn’t see enough of the background to tell. Besides, his attention was focused on Marjorie, on her soulful brown eyes and beautiful dark hair. She’d clipped her hair short; it framed her face in thick, luxuriant curls.

“I guess that’s all the news from here in Bolivia,” she said cheerfully. “They’re sending me back home for a month’s R&R. I’ll take a trip to see your parents.”

Before Grant could even think about that, she added, “Oh, and Mr. Beech called to say he hasn’t heard from you. He’d like you to send him a call when you get a chance.”

Ellis Beech.

“That’s all for now, darling. I’ll send you a ’gram when I’m at your folks’ house. Bye! I love you!”

The display screen went blank as Grant sagged back in his chair. Beech wanted to hear from him. I’ll bet he does, Grant thought. But I don’t have anything to tell him.

So far, the New Morality had exerted no pressure at all on Grant; they hadn’t even tried to communicate with him, until now. And all Grant could report to them is that one crewed probe into the ocean failed disastrously and Dr. Wo was readying another mission. They already know that, Grant said to himself. I’ve been here for months now and I don’t know more than they knew when they sent me here.

In a way, though, he felt almost glad of that. He resented being ordered to spy on the scientists, resented being shipped out to Jupiter to suit the prying whims of a man like Beech and his unseen but powerful superiors. You’ve got to decide which side you’re on, Grant remembered Beech telling him. Why do there have to be opposing sides? Why can’t we study Jupiter without the New Morality poking their noses into it?

Confused, miserable, Grant sat up for hours watching and rewatching all of Marjorie’s messages to him. He found that he couldn’t picture her face if he didn’t study her videos.

Sleep just would not come. He was too upset, too resentful. His mind kept spinning the same thoughts over and over again. At last he pulled on a pair of coveralls and trudged barefoot down to the cafeteria for some hot chocolate. The place was empty, the overhead lights turned down to a dim nighttime setting.

As he stood before the dispensing machine, wondering if a cup of tea wouldn’t be better for him, he noticed Red Devlin making his way through the empty, shadowed tables.

“Up late, eh?” Devlin said cheerfully as he approached.

Grant nodded. “I can’t seem to get to sleep tonight.”

Devlin cocked his head to one side, like a red-crested woodpecker. Jabbing a finger toward the dispensing machine, he said, “Nothing in there will help much, y’know.”

Grant replied, “Maybe some hot chocolate …”

Devlin shook his head. “I’ve got just what you need. A couple pops o’ these”—he pulled a palmful of pills out of his trousers pocket—“and you’ll sleep like a baby.”

“Drugs?” Grant yelped.

With a laugh and a shake of his head, Devlin countered, “And whattaya think chocolate is? Or caffeine?”

“They’re not narcotics.”

Devlin put the pills back in his pocket. “Against your religion, eh?”

Nodding, Grant bit back the reply he wanted to make. A man who sells narcotics is evil personified, he knew. Yet Devlin seemed only to be trying to help—in his own benighted way.

“Maybe what you really need is some stimulation,” the Red Devil mused. “A VR program. I’ve got some real hot ones: fireballs, y’know.”

Before Grant could answer Devlin laughed and said, “But that’d be against your religion, too, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, it would,” Grant said stiffly.

“Well, I’m afraid there’s not much I can do for you, then,” Devlin said good-naturedly. “But if you ever need me, you know where to find me.” He strolled off down the shadowy corridor, whistling a tune that Grant didn’t recognize.

Dr. Wo shouldn’t let him stay on this station, Grant told himself. What he sells is wrong, sinful. Still, he found himself wondering what virtual reality sex might be like. Would it really be a sin? Maybe if he could imagine himself with Marjorie …

Grant spent almost all his waking hours in the fluid dynamics lab, doggedly working out a point-by-point map of the turbulent currents in the Jovian ocean based on the scant data returned by the automated probes. The course work sent by the University of Cairo remained in his computer, untouched, ignored.

Late one afternoon Karlstad mosied into the lab, a knowing, superior grin on his pallid face. Grant was alone among the humming computers and silent experimental equipment.

“You do tend to make a hermit out of yourself, don’t you?” he asked, pulling up the wheeled chair next to Grant’s.

Looking up from the graphs displayed on his screen, Grant muttered, “The work doesn’t do itself, Egon.”

“It’s a shame you’re not into biology, then,” Karlstad said easily. “Like, right now I’m helping the bio team from Callisto to culture some of their subzero foraminifera.”

“Are you?” Grant turned back to his screen.

“Damned right,” said Karlstad, leaning back in the chair and clasping his hands behind his head. “Helpful little creatures. The forams are multiplying all by themselves in the rig I built for them. It simulates the ice-covered sea on Callisto very nicely. The fora do all the work and I roam around the station—”

“Interrupting people who’re trying to get their work done,” Grant finished for him.

Karlstad pretended to be wounded. “Is that any way to treat a fellow scooter?”

Grant admitted, “No, I suppose it wasn’t polite.”

“I’m not here to interrupt you. I’m here to offer you a learning experience.”

“What?”

Karlstad leaned closer. “Zeb and Lainie are going into the tank together.”

Grant felt his jaw drop open. “What do you mean?”

Laughing, Karlstad said, “Relax. Put your eyes back in your head.”

His face reddening, Grant tried to erase his mental image of O’Hara and Muzorawa together in the dolphin tank. They can’t do anything! He told himself. They’re both implanted with biochips. Still he saw her sleek and naked, gliding through the water.

“They’re going into the simulation tank,” Karlsad said, obviously enjoying Grant’s unmistakable consternation.

Before Grant could reply, he added, “And Old Woeful is going to join them.”

“The simulation tank,” Grant said dully.

Nodding, Karlstad said, “The test is supposed to be strictly off-limits to everybody except the technicians running the sim.”

The way he said that convinced Grant that Karlstad had an ace up his sleeve. Sure enough, Karlstad went on, “But I have a direct pipeline to the cameras recording the test.”

“You do? How?”

Raising one hand in a gesture of patience, the biophysicist said, “I cannot reveal my sources. But if you’ll allow me…”

He turned to the computer console next to Grant’s and pulled out the keyboard. Blowing dust from the keys, he booted up the machine manually and then tapped in a long, complex string of alphanumerics. Grant watched, fascinated despite himself, as the desktop display screen flickered and glowed.

And there was O’Hara standing in the narrow corridor outside one of the dolphin tanks in a sleek white skintight suit that glistened as if it were already wet. They seemed to be looking down at her from above. Grant realized they were watching the view from a camera set into the ceiling panels in the corridor.

“Shall we put it on the wallscreen?” Karlstad asked.

“What if someone walks in?”

He shrugged. “I’ll wipe the screen before they have a chance to figure out what we’re watching.”

“All right,” Grand said, nodding.

The wallscreen image was life size but a little grainy. He must be using a microcamera, Grant thought, with a fiberoptic link. O’Hara’s slick white wetsuit clung to her like her own skin. She doesn’t have that much of a figure, Grant told himself. Slim, almost boyish. Almost.

Muzorawa stepped into view. His suit was bright green but left his powerful looking legs bare. They were studded with implants, his skin thick with them, like a leper’s sores. No wonder they wear long trousers all the time, Grant thought, recoiling inwardly at the ugliness of it.

Half a dozen technicians in gray coveralls milled around. Karlstad clicked at the keyboard and the view abruptly shifted. Now they were looking into the dolphin tank, over Muzorawa’s shoulder. But there were no dolphins in sight. Instead, the tank contained what looked like a mockup of a control panel, a broad curving expanse of display screens and rows of lights and buttons.

Grant said, “I hope Sheena doesn’t burst in on them.”

“No, no,” Karlstad assured him. “Little Sheena’s safe in her pen, sedated up to her bony brow ridges. She’s sleeping like a three-hundred-kilo baby.”

Two technicians in dark-gray wetsuits clambered up the ladder built into the partition between tanks and cannon-balled into the water with huge splashes, one after the other.

Grant watched them settle down to the bottom of the tank, trailing bubbles from their face masks.

“Can’t you fugheads get into the tank without sloshing half the water outta it?” groused a scornful nasal voice caustically. The test controller, Grant thought, monitoring everything from some central location.

The pair of techs waved cheerfully as they sat on the bottom of the tank.

“Okay,” came the voice of the controller, slightly scratchy from static. “Let’s get this sim percolating.”

O’Hara nodded and pulled the hood of her suit over her bald scalp, then slipped on a transparent visor that covered her entire face. Two of the technicians helped her work her arms through the shoulder straps of what appeared to be an air tank, then connected a slim hose from the top of the tank to her face mask. They slid a belt of weights around her slender hips. O’Hara clicked its clasp shut.

Two other techs were doing the same for Muzorawa. Finally they checked that the air was getting through properly.

“I’m okay,” O’Hara said, her voice muffled by the mask.

Muzorawa asked for a slightly stronger air flow, and a tech adjusted a knob on the back of his tank. Then he nodded and made a circle with his right thumb and forefinger.

O’Hara turned and scampered lithely up the ladder to the top of the tank. Grant saw that her feet were bare.

“Radio check,” said a disembodied voice.

“O’Hara on freak one,” she said. It sounded somewhat fuzzy to Grant. He realized there must be a small radio built into the full-face mask.

But the controller’s voice said, “In the green. Go ahead and dunk.”

O’Hara swung her long legs over the edge of the tank and slipped into the water with hardly a ripple.

“Now that’s the way you get into the pool.” The controller’s voice was admiring.

The two techs already in the tank made exaggerated motions of applause.

Muzorawa climbed the ladder, considerably slower and more ponderous than O’Hara. It seemed to Grant that Zeb had some trouble getting his legs to work right. But he made it to the top, swinging both legs together almost as if they were inert lengths of lumber, and dropped gracelessly into the water.

“Now comes the boring part,” Karlstad murmured.

“What’s that?”

With a smirk, Karlstad answered, “The work, of course.”

O’Hara and Muzorawa, with the two technicians hovering behind them, glided to the control panel and slid their bare feet into loops set into the floor.

“Sim one-a,” the controller’s voice announced. “Separation and systems checkout. Manual procedure.”

The panel was chest high, Grant realized. The two scooters stood at it, anchored by the floor loops, and began working their way through a long countdown, punctuated by the controller’s check-off of each action they took. It was boring, Grant agreed. Repetitious and dull.

“You said Dr. Wo was going to be part of this,” Grant said to Karlstad.

“He’ll show up.”

“When?”

“When the dull routine stuff is finished Old Woeful will make his dramatic entrance, never fear.”

I ought to be working, Grant thought. I ought to be inserting the data points from last month’s probes into the equations to see how they affect the flow maps. But instead he watched O’Hara and Muzorawa as they patiently, methodically, went through the simulation.

“This is the separation procedure,” Karlstad said. “This is what they’ll have to do to disconnect the saucer from the station.”

“It takes so long?” Grant wondered aloud.

Karlstad grunted. “You don’t want to fire your jets and find that there’s still an umbilical linking you to the station proper. Could ruin your whole afternoon.”

“But still, can’t these procedures be automated? I mean, launch crews have automated—”

“Hold it!” Karlstad snapped. “Here he comes.”

All that Grant could see was the technicians outside the tank turning to look down the corridor at something beyond the camera’s view. He heard Karlstad clicking on the computer keys again, and the view shifted to show Dr. Wo rolling toward the test tank in his powered chair. He was wearing a bright red wetsuit, with shining metal braces over the lower half of his pitifully thin, weak legs.

Wo rolled up to the tank and the technicians made a reverential half circle around his chair.

“Dr. Wo,” said the controller’s disembodied voice. “We’ve completed the separation procedure. Ready to start ignition and entry simulation.”

“Good,” said Wo. “I will join the crew now.”

No one said a word. No one moved. Wo pushed himself to his feet and stood unsteadily on his steel-braced legs for a long, breathless moment. Then he took a step toward the ladder. Another step. My god, Grant thought, he’s clunking along like Frankenstein’s monster. He’ll never make it up that ladder without their help.

As if he could read Grant’s thoughts, Karlstad said, “The deal our woeful master made with the test controller is that if he could get up the ladder unassisted, he could go into the tank and participate in the sim. Otherwise, no.”

“As if the simulation controller could say no to him,” Grant sneered.

“During the sim, the controller is god almighty. If he says no, it’s no. Doesn’t matter who he’s talking to. He’s the absolute boss during the simulation.”

“And afterward?”

Karlstad shrugged.

Wo stood uncertainly at the base of the ladder and took a deep breath. Grant felt almost sorry for the man. It had taken all his energy to make the few steps from his chair to the ladder. Surely he won’t be able—

Wo suddenly seized the rungs of the ladder and pulled himself up, hand over hand, his legs dangling uselessly. Grant could see sweat break out on the man’s face, see his snarling, teeth-gritted determination. He made it to the top of the ladder and swung his legs over the edge, letting his feet dangle in the water.

Two of the technicians swarmed up the ladder behind him, carrying his face mask, air tank, and weights. In minutes they had Wo properly rigged. He pushed himself off the edge of the tank and splashed awkwardly into the water. One of the technicians started to applaud, but when he saw he was alone he froze in midclap, a mortified look on his face.

Wo sank to the bottom of the pool and swam easily to the control panel, taking his station between O’Hara and Muzorawa.

“You’ve got to admit that he’s got guts,” Karlstad said reluctantly.

Grant agreed with a nod.

“You’ll never see me getting into that fish tank,” Karlstad went on.

“But aren’t you part of the mission?”

“Me? Don’t be ridiculous!”

“But I thought…”

“Wo put me on the team, yes,” Karlstad admitted. “I’ll be one of the monitors in the control center when they go. But that’s all! They couldn’t get me into that death trap unless they put a gun to my head. Maybe not even then.”

THE WRATH OF WO

It was boring and fascinating at the same time, watching the three of them going through the simulation. Grant kept telling himself that he should get back to his work, he shouldn’t be wasting his time this way, but he could not take his eyes from the wallscreen.

Wo was clearly in charge, and enjoying it. Instead of remaining anchored at the instrument panel as O’Hara and Muzorawa did, he pulled his feet free of the floor loops and floated easily, almost lazily in the big tank. Hovering over the other two, drifting slightly from one side to the other, Wo gave orders and did all the talking with the test controller.

“He’s enjoying himself, isn’t he?” Grant asked rhetorically.

Karlstad hmmphed. “First time he’s been able to get around without his chair since the accident.”

“No wonder he likes it.”

“He also likes the feeling of power, don’t forget that.”

“He gets that all the time,” Grant countered. “He’s got more power around here than God… just about.”

“There are different kinds of power, Grant. Right now, in that tank, he feels physically strong. I’ll bet he’s thinking in the back of his mind that he could grab Lainie and pop her and she’d welcome the thrill.”

Grant felt his face flush again and Karlstad snickered at him. “Hit a nerve, did I?”

“You can be pretty crude sometimes.”

With a tilt of his head, Karlstad replied, “Why not? Sticks and stones, you know. Words can’t hurt you.”

“I thought the biochips short-circuited the sex drive,” Grant said.

“Who told you that?”

“Lane.”

Karlstad’s knowing grin turned into a smirk. “The chips don’t do anything about the drive: That’s in the head, in the brain.”

“But—”

“They apparently shut down all the sensory nerves in the groin, though,” Karlstad went on. “That must’ve been Wo’s brilliant idea.”

“Why would he do that?” Grant wondered.

“The crew on the deep mission will be cooped up in that saucer for weeks. Wo doesn’t want any of them distracted by human frailties.”

Grant nodded, thinking, He’s taken away the sensations but left the desire. That must be as close to hell as a man can get.

“I’ve got to get back to my work,” Grant said, surprised to hear his own words.

“You don’t want to watch the rest of this?”

“It’s not all that interesting.”

“Watching luscious Lainie in that skintight suit? That’s not interesting?”

Grant turned back to his desktop and commanded the computer to bring up its active screen again. The screen saver’s fractal pattern disappeared, replaced by the same graph Grant had been working on when Karlstad had interrupted him.

“Or maybe,” Karlstad said with a wolfish grin, “watching Lainie is too interesting for you. Is that it?”

Grant snapped, “I have too much work to do to sit around watching—”

“Hold one!” the simulation controller’s voice called out. “Medical hold.”

The three people in the tank looked up reflexively, bubbles rising from their masks.

“Dr. Wo,” said the controller, “we’re getting a sharp rise in your blood pressure readings. Your pulse is starting to spike, as well.”

“It’s temporary. Monitor and—”

“Test procedures call for a halt when a subject exceeds the preset medical parameters, sir,” the controller said, his tone respectful but firm.

“It’s temporary, I say!”

O’Hara and Muzorawa had stopped their work at the instrument panel. Glaring red lights were blinking along the panel, casting shimmering highlights in the water.

Even more reasonably, the controller said, “Dr. Wo, I have no choice but to shut down the simulation.”

“Not necessary!” Wo snapped, flailing his arms.

“But the safety protocols—”

“This is the medical officer,” a woman’s voice broke in. “This simulation is terminated.”

Karlstad, still sitting beside Grant, broke into a low chuckle.

“What’s funny?” Grant asked.

“Several things. First, seeing Wo’s macho act collapse around his tiny little ears.”

Wo was still arguing with both the controller and the medical officer. But now all the lights on the panel were a steady glowering red.

“Second, knowing that his blood pressure is going up even higher because he can’t get his way.”

Grant didn’t think it was funny.

“But the funniest thing of all is the medic,” Karlstad went on. “Old Woeful can’t muscle her.”

“The medical officer can’t be overruled?”

“Not this one. She’s due to ship out on the next supply craft. And she’s got a full residence at the university hospital in Basel. Wo can’t do a thing to her.”

“She’s shut down the sim.”

“She certainly has. And I imagine she’s shut down Wo’s plan to head up the deep mission, as well.”

The next few weeks were quickly dubbed “the Wrath of Wo.”

Frustrated in his desire to command the upcoming deep mission, the station director turned his fury on everyone and anyone who crossed his path. Dozens of scooters were summarily banished from the station, sent out to the frozen wastes of Europa and the other Jovian moons, exposed to Jupiter’s intense radiation bombardment, forced to live for weeks on end inside armored pressure suits while grappling on the ice with drilling equipment like common oilfield roughnecks.

All the technicians who worked the ill-starred simulation were relocated. Several were sent packing back to Earth, with the worst possible job ratings that Wo could write. The simulation controller was shipped off to Selene, with a stinging evaluation inserted into his dossier. Even so, they were all glad to get away with their skin still intact.

“He can’t do anything about Lainie and Zeb,” Karlstad said confidently to Grant in the midst of the weeks-long rampage. But he whispered now, and spoke of the director only when the two of them were alone. “He needs them for the mission.”

“Who’s going to command the mission?” Grant whispered back.

“Zeb will, if Wo’s got any shred of common sense left in him. Zeb’s the most capable person on the team.”

Grant wondered. He stayed as far away from Dr. Wo as he could, working steadily in the fluid dynamics lab, keeping his nose clean—and on the grindstone. He even tried to avoid being seen with O’Hara and Muzorawa, on the theory that although Wo could not directly punish them for witnessing his humiliation, he might very well punish their friends.

“He can’t let the mission drift into limbo,” Karlstad said, still whispering even though they were alone in his quarters, well after the cafeteria had closed for the night. “He’s got to appoint a new commander and realign the crew assignments.”

“There’s a vacancy on the crew” said Grant. “Doesn’t that mean that one of the backups will be put on the active list?”

Karlstad’s eyes went round. “There’s only three backups.”

“And you’re one of them.”

“He won’t pick me,” Karlstad said, shaking his head as if to get rid of the very idea of it. “Irene and Frankovich are much better qualified.”

Grant had barely met the other two; Irene Pascal was a medical specialist in neurophysiology, Bernard Frankovich was a biochemist.

“But you’re one of the available backups,” Grant said, surprised at how much he was enjoying the look of sheer terror in Karlstad’s normally ice-calm eyes.

“He won’t pick me,” Karlstad muttered again. “He won’t. He can’t!”

Several days later all of the Jovian team were called into a meeting by Dr. Wo. To his surprise, Grant was included in the summons. Why me? he asked himself. But he made certain to show up at the conference room next to the director’s office several minutes ahead of the appointed time.

Nine men and women crowded into the small, austere conference room, four of them in the black studded leggings that marked them as crew or backup. They milled around for several minutes, talking in guarded whispers until the moment for the meeting arrived.

Precisely at that second, the door from Dr. Wo’s office slid open. Everyone froze in place as the director wheeled himself to the head of the conference table, the faint hum of his chair’s electric motor the only sound in the room. Suddenly they all scrambled for seats at the far end of the table, away from the director. It was like a brief, intense game of musical chairs. Faster than most of the others, Grant grabbed one toward the end of the table and sat down, flanked by O’Hara on his right and Pascal, the neurophysiologist. Karlstad sat exactly opposite him.

Without preamble Wo began, “The medical people have scrubbed me from the mission.”

He paused. Everyone around the conference table made sympathetic noises.

“Therefore,” the director went on, “it is necessary to appoint a new mission commander.”

He looked toward the open door to his office, and a woman stepped hesitantly through, limping noticeably. A sigh of recognition wafted through the room, almost a moan, Grant thought. The woman was a stranger to him, but obviously most of the others knew her. Grant glanced across the table at Karlstad; his long, pallid face looked aghast.

“Most of you already know Dr. Krebs,” said Wo. “She will be commander of the next mission and deputy director of the station, with the specific duty of preparing for the crewed flight.”

Grant got an eerie feeling, a strange tingling at the base of his neck. The aura around the table was tense, almost terrified. If most of the people here know Dr. Krebs, he thought, they certainly don’t like her.

Krebs was short and stocky, barely taller than the seated Dr. Wo, her arms thick and heavy. Her legs were already encased in the studded leggings that told Grant she’d been implanted with biochips. Her face was square, blocky, her deeply black hair obviously a wig cut in a short Dutch boy style with bangs that came down to where her eyebrows should be. The complexion of her face was a pasty gray, as if she hadn’t seen sunlight or a UV lamp in many years. The expression on that face was granite-hard: square jaw thrust out pugnaciously, pale-blue eyes surveying all the faces turned toward her, peering at each individual in the room for a few seconds and then turning to the next. She seemed to be saying, I know you don’t like me; the feeling is thoroughly mutual.

Those accusing eyes focused on Grant for a moment, freezing him even though he wanted to turn away.

At last she turned her attention to the next person. Grant felt as if he’d just been freed from a police interrogation.

“You,” she said, pointing at Karlstad.

“Me?” he asked, his voice squeaking slightly.

“Karlstad,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You will join the crew. Prepare for the surgery immediately.”

Grant stared across the table at Karlstad. He looked like a man who had just seen his own death.

KREBS

“Christel Krebs,” Frankovich said, hunching forward gloomily over the cafeteria table. “She’s Wo’s ultimate revenge on us.”

Muzorawa nodded glumly. Even O’Hara looked worried. The four of them unconsciously leaned their heads together and whispered like conspirators. The cafeteria was only half filled, yet echoing with the noise and clatter of other dinner conversations. Still, they whispered to one another.

Frankovich was a short, roundish, balding man. Grant had seen the biochemist often enough in his days as a lab technician, but the man had hardly spoken six words to him before this.

“What are they doing to Egon?” Grant asked. “What’s the surgery that Krebs spoke of?”

“Wiring the biochips into his legs,” Muzorawa said.

“And teaching him to breathe underwater,” added Frankovich, with a shudder.

Grant knew that the crew would be immersed in a thick perfluorocarbon liquid during the mission. It was the only way they could withstand the enormous pressures of the Jovian ocean. They would be living in their own high-pressure liquid environment, breathing oxygen from the perfluorocarbon, hoping that the pressure inside the cells of their bodies could be raised high enough to balance the pressure outside their ship. It worked in theory. It worked in tests. During the first mission into Jupiter’s ocean, though, one crew member had been killed and the others injured. Wo had never recovered from his mangling; Grant wondered if Krebs was fully recuperated.

“Poor Egon,” O’Hara said. “He was terrified of having this happen to him.”

“Couldn’t he refuse?” Grant asked. “I mean, we’ve still got our legal rights.”

With a shake of his head, Muzorawa replied, “Egon doesn’t. Technically, he’s a convicted felon, serving out his sentence here.”

“That’s why Krebs picked him. He can’t refuse.”

“I’m just glad it wasn’t me,” Frankovich said fervently.

“It’s not that bad,” said O’Hara. “Once you get over the surgery, once you’re connected to the ship.”

“Connected?” Grant wondered aloud.

“The biochips link you to the ship’s systems,” Muzorawa explained. “Instead of using keypads or voice commands, your nervous system and the ship’s systems are directly linked.”

Grant felt his eyebrows hike up.

“It’s … different,” O’Hara said. “Sort of a feeling of power, you know. You feel the ship’s machinery. You and the ship become one.”

Muzorawa nodded. “I’ve never experienced anything like it. It’s …” He groped for a word.

“Intimate,” said O’Hara.

“Yes. A sort of out-of-body experience, yet it’s happening within your own skull.”

“Almost like sex,” O’Hara said.

“Better,” said Muzorawa.

“Better, is it?” she challenged.

Muzorawa smiled knowingly. “It lasts longer.”

Grant changed the subject. “But what about Krebs? Who is she? Where did she come from?”

“She was on the first mission,” Zeb answered. “She was Wo’s second-in-command.”

“She actually piloted the mission craft,” said O’Hara, “and she got pretty badly smashed up in the accident.”

“Some people claim she caused the accident,” said Frankovich. “And now Wo’s put her in command.”

“I thought she was at Selene,” Grant said.

“She was,” O’Hara replied. “Recuperating from the accident, don’t you know.”

“She must be fully recovered,” Muzorawa offered.

Frankovich shook his head. “Physically, perhaps. But did you get a look at her eyes? Like a homicidal maniac.”

Neither Muzorawa nor O’Hara replied.

Another question rose in Grant’s mind. “If you were linked with the submersible’s systems when the accident happened, what did it feel like? Did you feel pain? What?”

Muzorawa closed his eyes briefly. “Lane and I were off duty when it happened.”

“Thank the saints in heaven,” O’Hara whispered.

“Jorge Lavestra was killed. Krebs and Dr. Wo were badly injured.”

Frankovich hunched forward in his chair and clasped his hands on the tabletop. “From what I hear, Lavestra had just plugged into the ship’s systems. He wasn’t physically injured. He died of a cerebral hemorrhage.”

“A stroke?”

“Yes, that’s true,” said O’Hara. “Being linked to the ship at the wrong time can be fatal.”

NEW ASSIGNMENTS

Grant woke up the next morning soaked in a cold sweat, his bedsheet twisted and tangled around his legs. Vaguely he remembered a dream, a nightmare, about strangers pinning him down and slicing away his flesh with sharp scalpels while he struggled and screamed for mercy.

It was early, he saw. He phoned Karlstad, but there was no answer. Recovering from his surgery, Grant guessed as he showered, then pulled on his slacks and shirt and headed for the cafeteria. It was nearly empty at this hour, although Red Devlin was laughing and chatting with a few of the early birds. He must sleep behind the counters, Grant thought.

It wasn’t until the next evening, at dinner, that he saw Karlstad again. Egon entered the cafeteria, walking uncertainly, his legs sheathed in the same kind of studded black leggings, wearing the same kind of turtleneck pullover that O’Hara and Muzorawa always wore, his head completely hairless.

Grant left his half-finished dinner and rushed to Karlstad.

Egon smiled halfheartedly as Grant came up to him.

“Well,” he said shakily, “I survived the surgery, at least.”

“Are you all right?”

Instead of answering, Karlstad pulled down the collar of his turtleneck pullover. “Meet Frankenstein’s monster,” he said.

There were circular plastic gadgets inserted into either side of his neck. The skin around the things looked red, inflamed.

“What’re those?”

“Feeding ports. When we’re in the soup we can’t eat regular food. We get fed intravenously.”

“For how long?”

Letting the turtleneck collar slide back into place, Karlstad answered grimly, “For as long as we’re on the mission.”

“My God,” Grant muttered.

“I’ll live through it—I think.”

Grant stayed with him as Karlstad selected a meager salad and a mug of fruit juice. The man tottered slightly as he walked back to Grant’s table.

“Where’s Lainie and Zeb and the others?” Karlstad said as he slowly, carefully, sat down.

“Not here yet.”

“Um.” Karlstad picked at his salad.

Grant tried to finish his dinner, but he’d lost interest in eating.

“You want to know what it’s like, don’t you?” Karlstad said, his voice flat, dead.

“I don’t want to pry.”

“Pry away, I don’t mind. The worst is over. They sliced me up and put their damned chips into me. But first they drowned me.”

“Drowned…?”

“It’s all done underwater. Or in that fucking perfluorocarbon gunk. It’s like trying to breathe soup. Freezing cold soup, at that. Easier to prevent infection while they slice away at you, they claim.”

Karlstad spent the next quarter hour describing in horrendous detail everything they had done to him. Listening to him, Grant lost his last shred of appetite.

“So now all I have to do is learn to walk again,” he finished bitterly.

“You seem to be doing fine,” Grant said.

“For an outpatient, yes, I imagine so.”

Desperately trying to lighten his friend’s mood, Grant asked, “What I don’t understand is why they put the biochips in the legs. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put them in the brain?”

Karlstad gave him a pitying look. “Not enough room inside the skull. They’d have to break through the bone, the way they want to do with Sheena.”

“Oh.”

“The chips are connected to the brain, though. I’ve got fibers running up my spine right into my cerebral cortex. Whatever those electrodes in my legs pick up is transmitted to my brain. Very efficient.”

“There he is!”

Grant looked up and saw O’Hara rushing across the cafeteria toward them. Muzorawa was a few steps behind her. Neither of them had taken a tray. Both of them limped noticeably.

“How do you feel?” O’Hara asked, pulling up the chair next to Karlstad’s.

“Terrible, thanks.”

“Welcome to the club,” said Muzorawa, sitting down beside Grant.

“Shipmates,” Karlstad said sourly.

“Don’t take it so hard,” said O’Hara, with an impish smile. She rubbed Karlstad’s bald pate. “I think you look better this way.”

“Without eyebrows?” Karlstad said scornfully.

“Once you’re connected to the ship you’ll feel differently.”

“Powerful,” Muzorawa agreed. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever experienced.”

“Better than sex,” O’Hara teased.

For the first time since Krebs had pointed her finger at him, Karlstad smiled.

That Sunday Tamiko Hideshi showed up at the Reverend Caldwell’s services again. Grant edged through the sparse congregation to sit with her. Afterward, they headed for the cafeteria.

“The Catholics go for doughnuts after mass,” she informed Grant as they got into the food line. “The Moslems take coffee and fruit.”

“What about the Protestants?” Grant asked, laughing.

“Brunch,” Tamiko answered, grinning back at him.

Grant selected a fruit salad and soymilk; Hideshi filled her tray with cereal, smoked fish, hot tea, and four slices of toast.

“How do you stay so thin when you eat so much?” Grant asked as they sat at a table.

She shook her head. “I’m not so thin. My body’s like a block of cement.”

“You’re not fat.”

“I guess I burn off the calories at work.”

That started them talking about her studies of the ice-covered ocean on Europa.

“We’re making sense of it, little by little,” Hideshi said. “How’s your job going?”

Grant nodded as he chewed down a slice of melon. “About the same: making sense of it, little by little.”

“Making sense of the Jovian ocean?” Her eyes seemed to go wider.

“Little by little,” Grant repeated.

“Maybe we can help each other,” she suggested. “I mean, we’re both working on fluid dynamics, after all. Maybe we should compare notes.”

Grant hesitated, then said, “I’d love to, Tami, but we’re into sensitive areas. I can’t—”

She waved a disapproving hand. “Oh, Dr. Wo and his silly security rules. There aren’t any secrets in physics.”

“Maybe not,” Grant admitted, “but I’m not allowed to discuss my work with anybody outside the group.”

She put on a hurt expression. “Not even with me?”

Grant thought about it. It might make some sense, at that. After all, we’re both trying to figure out the dynamics of alien oceans.

But he heard himself say to her, “I can’t, Tami. Wo would flay me alive.”

She sighed and shook her head. “How can you do science when you’re afraid to communicate with other scientists?”

Grant brightened. “I could ask Dr. Wo for permission to collaborate with you. If he okays it—”

“No!” Hideshi snapped. “No, I don’t think that would work. Wo’s so paranoid he’d send the two of us off to god knows where.”

“But maybe he’d see the sense of our cooperating,” Grant said.

Hideshi shook her head. “Don’t breathe a word to Wo. He’s crazy enough as it is.”

With a shrug, Grant admitted, “Maybe you’re right.”

“I know I am,” said Hideshi.

It surprised Grant when he realized that he’d been aboard Research Station Gold for six months. He awoke one morning to see that his phone light was blinking. When he answered, still yawning and scratching his jaw, Dr. Wo’s grim face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen.

Grant automatically sat up straighter on the bed and tried to pat down his sleep-tousled hair. But the message was a recording.

“Be prepared for your six-month review tomorrow at eleven hundred hours in my office,” Wo said bluntly. Then the screen went dark.

Grant took a deep breath. Six-month review, he thought. Great. That means there’s only three and a half years left to this prison sentence.

He almost smiled. Until he remembered that sessions in Dr. Wo’s office were never pleasant.

The next day, precisely at eleven hundred hours, Grant rapped sharply on the director’s door. No response. He stood in the corridor, resisting the urge to bang on the door again, as people walked by. Wo’s little power trip, Grant knew. He wasn’t going to fall for it again, as he did the first time he’d been summoned to the director’s office.

At last he heard, “Enter.” He slid the door back and stepped into Wo’s office.

The office was overheated, as usual. Even the bloodred tulips in the delicate vase looked wilted, sagging. The director, however, was brusque, all business. It seemed to Grant that Wo was seething with anger and barely managing to control his fury. He reviewed Grant’s first assignment as a lab assistant and his more recent work with Muzorawa in the fluid dynamics lab. Grant sat rigidly on the chair in front of Wo’s desk, keeping his face as calm and impassive as he could.

“All in all,” Wo concluded, looking up from the desktop screen that displayed Grant’s dossier, “a moderately acceptable six months. At least you haven’t made any major mistakes.”

Grant wondered what minor mistakes the director saw in his record.

“Now then, some changes are in order,” said the director.

“Changes, sir?” Grant asked apprehensively.

“First, Dr. Muzorawa will be fully engaged in training for the upcoming deep mission and will be unable to serve as your thesis advisor until the mission is completed.”

Grant’s heart sank.

“Therefore I will take his place as your advisor. You will continue as a distanced student of the University of Cairo. I have been granted a visiting professorship by the university’s administration.”

“You’re going to be my thesis advisor?” Grant asked, his voice an octave higher than normal.

“Do you have any objections to such an arrangement?”

“Oh, no, sir. None at all,” Grant lied. The thought of having Wo over him in still another capacity brought something close to despair to Grant’s soul, but he knew there was no way around it.

“Good,” said Wo.

“In fact, sir, I’m flattered,” Grant heard himself say, trying to make the best of a situation he could not control.

Wo nodded, although his dour expression did not change by a hair. Then he went on, “The second change may be less pleasant for you. I need someone to work with Sheena.”

“With the gorilla?”

“Yes. Her intelligence level has plateaued. Any increase in her intelligence will require cranial surgery.”

“Oh,” Grant said. “That would be difficult, wouldn’t it?”

“Not at all. The animal can be sedated and the surgery performed in perfect safety. It is the recuperation phase that may present problems.”

Grant got a mental picture of three-hundred-kilo Sheena with a bandaged skull and a nasty headache. It was not a happy thought.

“We will need someone to handle Sheena after the surgery, someone whom she will not connect to the medical personnel. A friend, so to speak.”

“Me?”

“You. You will spend at least two hours each day with Sheena. You will bring her fruits and new toys. The toys will be learning games and devices, of course; there is an extensive supply of such in storage.”

“But my studies—”

“This duty will be in addition to your fluid dynamics work, of course. It will take two hours per day from your personal time, no more.”

I don’t have any personal time, Grant grumbled to himself. I spend all my waking hours working on the dratdamned ocean’s dynamics. But he kept his mouth tightly shut.

“Remember, your task is to befriend the gorilla so that she will be able to deal with you as a trusted companion after the brain surgery.”

Wonderful, Grant said to himself. I’m going to get my neck broken by a postoperative gorilla.

If the director sensed Grant’s dejection or fear, he gave no outward sign of it. “Are there any questions?” Wo asked sourly.

Grant steepled his fingers unconsciously, then quickly put his hands down on his lap once he realized it looked as if he were begging—or praying.

“Yes, sir, I do have a question.”

Wo nodded once.

“Sheena … the dolphins … why are we studying their intelligence? I mean, we’re supposed to be investigating the planet Jupiter. Why are we spending time and energy on the intelligence of these animals?”

Wo’s face took on the implacable expression of a teacher who is resolved to make his dull-witted student solve his own problems.

“That is a question that you should meditate upon while you are entertaining Sheena.” The slightest trace of a smile moved the corners of his mouth a bare millimeter.

LEVIATHAN

Cruising through the eternal sea, Leviathan’s sensory members warned of the storm ahead. Its eye parts could not see the storm, it was much too far away for visual contact, but the pressure-sensing members along Leviathan’s immense bulk felt the tug of currents that wanted to draw the whole world ocean into the storm’s voracious maw.

It was a huge vortex, its powerful spiral generating currents that grew stronger and stronger until even creatures as powerful as Leviathan and its kind could no longer resist and would be sucked into a whirling, shattering dismemberment.

Leviathan felt no anxiety about the distant storm, no dread of its insatiable lure. At this distance the storm was too weak to be dangerous, and Leviathan had no intention of approaching it any closer. Yet it felt a tendril of curiosity. No member of the Kin had ever gone close enough to the storm to actually see it. What would that experience be like?

The food that sifted down from the cold abyss above seemed to be concentrated more thickly the closer Leviathan cruised to the storm’s vicinity. The inward-pulling currents generated by the storm’s powerful spinning vortex were sucking in the drifting particles until they became veritable streams, thick torrents of food flooding into the storm’s maelstrom, impossible to ignore and difficult to resist. The Elders should be shown this, Leviathan thought.

Far, far off on the horizon Leviathan’s eye parts detected a faint flickering, nothing more than the slightest rippling of light, barely discernible. Yet it alerted Leviathan to the fact that it was getting close enough to the storm to actually see it. Leviathan felt a strange thrill, a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

Darters! the sensory members warned.

Leviathan’s eye parts focused on them, the Darters were that close. Swift, streamlined shapes, lean and efficient, heading straight toward Leviathan. There were dozens of them, spreading out in a globe to surround Leviathan, intent on pressing their attack home. They would not be content with a quick nip at its outer hide; an armada of this size meant to kill and feast on all of Leviathan’s members.

Escape lay in retreat, but retreat was in the direction of the storm. The Darters had hatched a clever hunting strategy, knowing that if they pursued Leviathan close enough to the swirling storm front, its members would instinctively disassemble and become easy prey for the voracious hunters.

Leviathan estimated the distance to the storm’s towering ringwall of turbulence, tested the pull of the currents plunging into the storm, and planned a strategy of its own. It commanded its flagella members to row as fast as they could toward the ceaseless streaks of lightning that showed where the storm raged. No questions, no doubts came back from the flagella; they were blindly obedient, always.

Now it was a race, and a test of strength. The Darters chased after the fleeing Leviathan, eager to chew through its thick outer armor and puncture the vital organ-members deep within. Leviathan felt the storm’s currents tugging, pulling it closer and closer to the cloud wall. Lightning stroked the clouds, and Leviathan’s sensor members cringed at the storm’s mindless, endless roar. Members sent signals of alarm to Leviathan’s central brain: Soon they would automatically begin to disintegrate; they had no control over their hard-wired instincts.

Darters were close enough now to nip at the thickened dead tissue of Leviathan’s outer hide. Leviathan swatted at them, turning the faithful mindless flagella into brutal clubs that could rupture flesh, crush bone.

Driven to frenzy by the scent of torn flesh, the Darters redoubled their attack. Leviathan felt their teeth tearing into its hide; all its members flashed signals of pain and fear as the ever-growing pull of the storm’s mighty currents dragged Leviathan closer to involuntary dissociation.

Now! Leviathan suddenly shifted course, moving to parallel the spinning currents of the storm, battering its way through the net of Darters surrounding it. The Darters were too close to the lightning-racked storm to be able to resist the inward-pulling currents. Like helpless specks of food they were sucked into the vortex, one after another, struggling futilely against the storm’s overwhelming power, shrieking their death howls as they spun into the raging clouds.

Leviathan struggled, too, straining mightily to slide around the face of the lightning-streaked cloud wall, gradually spiraling away from the storm.

When at last it was free of danger, Leviathan felt drained, exhausted—and hungry. But there was no food here; on this side of the storm the sea was empty, barren. Only gradually did it realize that it had been swept far from its usual haunts, into a region of the all-encompassing ocean that it had never seen before.

Leviathan flashed out a call to the others of its kind. There was no response. Alone, weak and bleeding, Leviathan began to search for food, desperately hoping to build enough strength to swim far from the storm, wondering how it could find its way back to the familiar haunts of the Kin.

SHEENA’S GENTLEMAN VISITOR

Grant considered hiding his new assignment from his friends, but he knew that would be impossible. The station was too small to keep such secrets. Only the mighty Wo, with the inscrutability of the East and the powers of the director, could hold secrets from the staff.

So he wasn’t surprised when Karlstad began ragging him at dinner the very first night after Wo’s announcement of his new duties.

“I hear Sheena has a gentleman visitor,” the biophysicist said archly as he spooned up soup from the bowl before him. He seemed fully recovered from his surgery, back to his old sarcastic ways.

Ursula van Neumann glanced at Grant, then replied, “Oh, really?”

“Who might that be?” asked Irene Pascal, falling into the game. The neurophysiologist was a petite brunette who always wore miniskirted sleeveless flowered frocks over her black leggings. Normally she was quiet and introspective, but now her hazel eyes twinkled mischievously.

“It’s me,” Grant admitted, wishing that Muzorawa or O’Hara were at the table. They’d put an end to this nonsense of Egon’s, he thought.

“That’s what I’d heard,” Karlstad said, grinning broadly. “I understand you brought her flowers and candy last night.”

“It’s all Dr. Wo’s idea,” Grant protested.

“Flowers and candy?” asked Pascal.

“Have you kissed her yet?” van Neumann teased.

“It’s a good thing Grant’s not Roman Catholic,” said Karlstad, quite seriously.

Pascal played straight man. “Why do you say that?”

Spreading his hands in a gesture of explanation, Karlstad said, “If Grant was Catholic, then any offspring they produce would have to be raised in the Church.”

The two women sputtered laughter as Karlstad guffawed at his own joke. Grant took it in good-humored silence, forcing a smile at his own expense, thinking that he hadn’t encountered such doltishness since he’d said good-bye to Raoul Tavalera on the old Roberts.

They joked about dating behavior and made sexual innuendos all through dinner. At last the subject seemed to wind down. By the time they were digging into the fruit cups and soymilk ice cream of their desserts, Grant thought they were finished with it.

Then Pascal asked, quite seriously, “Do you think you could get Sheena to undergo a brain scan?”

Grant blinked with surprise. “You mean an NMR scan of her brain?”

“More detailed,” said Pascal. “I have the equipment in my lab, but Sheena put up a fight the last time we tried to get her in there.” Her voice was a warm contralto, caramel rich, heavy with concern.

Grant thought a moment. “Is the equipment portable?”

Pascal made a Gallic shrug. “Like a desk-sized console. Or a small refrigerator.”

“I guess you’d have to sedate her, then.”

She shook her head. “But I want her conscious. I need to see how her brain functions when she’s active.”

“Can’t you do it remotely?” Karlstad suggested. “I mean, you have neural net headgear, don’t you?”

Van Neumann agreed, “Yes, I’ve worn those damned fishnets myself, for days on end.”

With a sardonic smile, Pascal said, “And if you found it uncomfortable, Ursula, how long do you think Sheena would wear one?”

“How long do you need?” Grant asked.

“As long as I can get, of course.”

Nodding, Grant amended, “I mean, what’s the minimum time you’d settle for?”

She thought a moment. “Ten minutes. Fifteen. Half an hour would be excellent.”

“Would you need any special equipment in her pen while she was wearing the headgear?”

Again the shrug. “Oh, the recording receiver needn’t be in the pen with the beast. It can be outside in the corridor.”

“How far away?” Grant asked.

“Ten meters … fifteen.”

“Okay,” Grant said. “Bring the console into the area tomorrow. Just leave it in the corridor without plugging it in.”

“But it’s useless unless Sheena wears the net on her head.”

“I understand. The first step, though, is to get her to accept the recording equipment and not see it as a threat.”

“Oh-ho,” Karlstad said. “Our gorilla-dating scooter is turning into a primate psychologist.”

Grant smiled at him. “Play your cards right, Egon, and I’ll get you a date with Sheena.”

Karlstad held up his hands in mock terror. “No, no! I can do without that!”

Van Neumann smirked at him. “Come on, Egon, this might be your only chance to get laid for months to come.”

Grant and the others laughed. Karlstad frowned unhappily.

Every evening Grant brought “presents” to Sheena: a simple wooden jigsaw puzzle of four pieces big enough for the gorilla’s thick fingers to handle; a spongy Nerf ball and a Velcro target that Grant glued to the wall of her pen so she could practice throwing; flash cards showing numbers up to ten and the letters of the English alphabet.

And with every new toy he brought, Grant also carried a few fruits or hard candies that Sheena immediately crunched in her powerful jaws and slurped down, licking her lips noisily and asking for more.

Sheena had the run of the aquarium section, which was sealed off with pressure hatches from the rest of the station. Usually Grant found the gorilla prowling the narrow corridor of the aquarium area or sitting quietly on her haunches, staring with endless fascination at the fish and dolphins.

After only a few nights of visiting, Grant found the gorilla waiting eagerly for him at the hatch he always came through. He soon found himself throwing an arm around Sheena’s thick neck and hugging her, hoping that she would restrain herself and not crack his ribs as she hugged him back, desperately praying that neither Karlstad nor any of his other human friends saw him being affectionate with her.

The thought startled him. I said it, he realized. I said “human friends.” For the love of the Living God, I’m thinking of this animal as a friend.

He was sitting on the floor of the corridor, tossing the Nerf ball back and forth to Sheena. The gorilla sat ponderously a few meters away, letting the ball bounce off her chest before she smothered it in her huge hands and then threw it—left-handed, Grant noticed—back to him.

“Good throw, Sheena!” Grant called as he caught the ball. “You’re getting better every night.”

“Good throw,” the gorilla said back to him in her labored, rasping voice.

She is a friend, Grant told himself. Like a child, a little niece or some kid who lives up the street from you. They tossed the ball back and forth until the overhead lights dimmed to their nighttime setting.

“Time for bed, Sheena,” Grant said, clambering slowly to his feet.

The gorilla got up on all fours and turned ponderously toward her pen, walking slowly on her knuckles. She was so big that Grant had to follow her; there was no room in the narrow corridor to walk beside her.

She never argues about bedtime, he thought. With an inward smile he realized that Sheena was better behaved than most of the human children he’d known back on Earth.

Pascal and her assistants had finally moved the recording equipment into the corridor a few meters from Sheena’s pen, Grant saw. Awfully close to her pen, he thought. Maybe too close for comfort. The gorilla stopped at the open doorway of her pen, stared hard at the squarish gray metal console, then turned back toward Grant.

“It’s all right, Sheena,” he said. “Just some equipment from the neuro lab. It won’t hurt you. Nothing to worry about.”

He knew she couldn’t understand all his words but hoped that his tone would reassure her.

Sheena shuffled up to the inert machine, sniffed at the blocky metal console suspiciously, patted it with both hands, then abruptly slapped it hard enough to rock it slightly off its locked wheels.

“No, no!” Grant exclaimed, rushing up to her, wondering how much punishment the solid-state electronics could take.

Sheena turned to him again. It was impossible to read an expression on her face, but Grant thought he saw something in her eyes—puzzlement? worry? fear?

“It’s all right, Sheena,” he repeated. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Bad,” Sheena rasped. “Bad.” And she pushed at the console.

“No, it’s not bad. Don’t be frightened of it. It won’t hurt you.”

She sat down heavily and turned her head from Grant to the silent electronic equipment and back to Grant again.

“Why?” she asked.

Grant forced a smile. “We need to see how your brain works, Sheena. That’s all.”

“No,” the gorilla said firmly. “Bad thing.”

Grant instinctively reached out and rubbed Sheena’s thickly boned head. “I won’t let anybody hurt you, Sheena. I just won’t let them.”

“Grant friend.”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I’m your friend. I won’t let them hurt you. Not ever.”

The gorilla seemed to think this over for a few moments. Then she asked, “Why you?”

“I’m your friend, Sheena,” Grant said again.

“Not me.”

Grant didn’t understand what she meant.

“Grant not me,” Sheena rasped.

“I’m Grant, yes. And you’re Sheena.”

“Grant not me.”

What is she trying to tell me? he wondered.

“Lane not me.”

It struck Grant like a thunderclap. She realizes that the humans are different from her!

“Fish not me,” Sheena added, pointing a long powerful arm toward the aquarium tanks.

“You’re …” Grant hesitated. How do I answer her? He took a deep breath, then said, “You are Sheena. Sheena is big. Sheena is strong.”

“No like me.”

“That’s right, Sheena, nobody else is like you. You’re the only gorilla within half a billion kilometers.”

“Why no like me?”

“I wish I could explain it to you, Sheena,” Grant said, his eyes misting. “I really wish I could.”

INTELLIGENCE

“It’s official,” Muzorawa said. “We go in thirty days.”

He had dropped into the fluid dynamics lab, he’d said, to check on Grant’s progress with the ocean-mapping work. Grant was glad to see him. Muzorawa had been spending almost all his time training for the deep mission, and Grant found he’d missed the Sudanese dynamicist’s strong, calm companionship.

“Thirty days,” he said.

Muzorawa nodded solemnly. “I don’t suppose I’ll see much of you between now and then. Wo is putting us in quarantine.”

“Quarantine?”

“For security, he says. None of the crew will be allowed to take meals in the cafeteria. They’re setting up one of the conference rooms to serve as a wardroom for us.”

“I won’t see you at all, then,” Grant said.

Muzorawa flashed his warm smile. “I’ll drop in on you now and then, but I won’t be able to work with you very much.”

“You’ll be busy, I know.”

“This mapping work you’ve done, it will be a big help. A very big help.”

“I hope so.”

Grant was sitting at a computer desk that the technicians had rigged with a holographic screen so that he could view the ocean currents in three dimensions. The imagery was in garish false colors, electric blues and fire-engine reds, to make it easier to visualize the swirling turbulent flows streaming through the ocean. Still, Grant found that he had to sit at precisely the right spot and hold his head at just the proper angle to get the three-dimensional effect.

From the seat beside him, Muzorawa asked, “So … do you have anything new to show me?”

“I think maybe.” Grant picked up the headset he’d left on the desktop and called for his latest graph. The holographic view winked out, replaced by a flat diagram of undulating curves sprinkled with a hail of red data points.

“Buckshot pattern,” Muzorawa muttered.

“Not exactly,” said Grant. Tracing one of the curves with an extended finger, he explained, “If you integrate all the data points by time, you get what looks like a periodicity.”

Muzorawa sat up straighten “Periodicity?”

“The thunderstorms carry energy from below into the upper atmosphere, right?”

Guardedly, Muzorawa conceded, “Right.”

Jabbing a finger at the screen, Grant said, “The thunderstorms come in cycles. Both their frequency and intensity shifts every few days. Earth days, that is.”

“How could they shift like that?”

Smiling now, Grant said, “I think it’s a tidal effect.”

“Tidal?”

“It seems to correlate with the positions of the four big moons. Look …” He pointed to the curves again. “When all four of them are on the same side of the planet, storm activity peaks—on that side of the planet.”

Muzorawa squinted at the screen for long, silent moments. At last he asked, “How reliable is this data?”

“Some of it goes back a quarter century,” Grant admitted. “I even have points from the earliest remote missions, before this station was built.”

“Tidal effects.” Muzorawa shook his head. “Hard to believe.”

“But there they are,” Grant insisted. “Small but definitely there.”

“How in the name of the Prophet could tidal effects influence the thunderstorms?”

With a small wave of one hand, Grant replied, “There might be electromagnetic forces involved as well as gravitic.”

“Electromagnetic?” Wide-eyed incredulity was plain on his normally somber face.

“Io’s flux tube,” Grant suggested, waving his hands. “The other Galilean moons cut Jupiter’s magnetic field lines, too, don’t they?”

Muzorawa settled back in his chair, deep in thought. Without thinking consciously about it, Grant punched up a real-time view of Jupiter on the big wallscreen above the desks. The planet loomed over them, huge and awesome, clouds racing and swirling, flashes of lightning flickering like fireflies along the terminator and into the night side of the planet’s immense bulk. Fireflies, Grant thought. More like hydrogen bombs; each lightning bolt released megatons of energy.

With growing enthusiasm, Muzorawa said, “This is very interesting, Grant. Extremely interesting. I’ll have to check the records as far back as we can go … all the way back to the Galileo probe, if necessary.”

“I’ll check the records,” Grant said. “You have enough to do over the next few weeks.”

With a reluctant nod, Muzorawa agreed. Then he asked, “Have you seen any tidal effect in the Red Spot?”

Grant was surprised by the question. “You’re not planning to go into the Spot, are you?”

“God forbid!” Muzorawa raised both hands. “I only wondered if the Spot changes in any predictable way.”

“There’s just not enough data from inside the Spot,” Grant said. “I’ve got a scattering of data from more than five years ago, but even then the probes didn’t last long enough to send back much.”

“They stopped sending probes into the Spot when Wo took over the station,” Muzorawa explained. “He said it was a waste of time and effort.”

“He’s right. That’s an awfully powerful cyclone down there.”

“Yes, that’s true enough. Still…”

“You’re not going near the Spot, are you?” Grant asked again, staring at the view of the giant planet.

“No, of course not. We’ll be on the opposite side of the planet.”

“How deep do you plan to go?”

“Deep enough to find whatever those things are that we saw swimming on the first mission.”

“Do you really think they’re alive?” Grant asked.

Muzorawa turned from the wallscreen to look at Grant. “How high is up?” he asked.

Grant understood. Don’t ask useless questions. The first mission had detected objects in the ocean. This new mission would try to determine what those objects might be. Until they got more data, questions about the nature of the objects could not be answered.

But then Muzorawa nodded, ever so slightly. Barely a dip of his chin. “I believe they are alive, yes. But that is only a belief, a matter of faith—or perhaps it would be better to say a matter of hope. Until we obtain hard evidence, that is all we have to go on: our individual faith, our hopes, our fears.”

“Fears?”

“Oh, yes. Fears.” Muzorawa pointed to the big wallscreen. “There are many people who fear what we might discover underneath those clouds.”

Grant blinked with surprise. “Who? Nobody here on the station, is there?”

“Probably not,” Muzorawa replied. “Wo has screened all the personnel here rather thoroughly.” He hesitated, thinking over his next words, then said, “He was afraid of you at first, you know.”

He was afraid of me?”

Smiling, “Certainly. He feared you were an agent from the Zealots, come to spy on his work.”

“The Zealots?”

“The ultraconservatives. They are always among us, those who fear new knowledge. Nearly a thousand years ago they destroyed a great Persian astronomer and mathematician: Omar Khayyam.”

“Omar… I thought he was a poet.”

Muzorawa shook his head slowly. “His quatrains were a hobby. He was a scientist. He understood that Earth goes around the Sun three centuries before Copernicus. For that the mullahs destroyed him. To this day no one knows where he lies buried.”

“Ultraconservatives,” Grant muttered. “Zealots.”

“In my part of the world they call themselves the Sword of Islam. You have them among your New Morality, don’t you?”

“But I’m not one of them!”

“Dr. Wo wasn’t sure of you. That was why he gave us orders to keep sensitive information from you.”

“But why would the New Morality, or the Zealots, or whatever, want to spy on him?” Grant hated himself for saying it, for lying to his friend and mentor. But I’m not a Zealot, he told himself. I’m not working for fanatics. I’m not!

Muzorawa gripped Grant by the shoulder. “My friend, there are powerful forces among the Zealots who fear new knowledge. They do not appreciate our studies of extraterrestrial life-forms.”

“I know some of the more conservative Believers are uncomfortable with the idea of alien life,” Grant admitted. “But—”

“If they are uncomfortable with alien bacteria and lichen,” Muzorawa interrupted, “how do you think they feel about meeting intelligent aliens?”

“Intelligent?”

“The possibility exists.”

Grant’s inside felt suddenly hollow. “Intelligent creatures? You mean, here, on Jupiter?”

“The possibility exists,” Muzorawa repeated.

“But there’s no evidence …”

“You haven’t seen any evidence. Dr. Wo still does not trust you as fully as that.”

“The things you saw in the ocean?”

“He believes,” Muzorawa said.

“Intelligent?”

“There isn’t enough data even to confirm that they are living organisms. But the director believes they may be not only living but intelligent.”

Understanding flooded into Grant’s mind. “That’s why he brought in the dolphins. And Sheena!”

“To study nonhuman intelligence. Yes. To help us in the effort to communicate with the Jovians.”

“All this … based on his belief? On his hunch? His guess?”

“Belief is a very powerful force, my friend. More powerful than you can imagine. Copernicus believed the Earth revolves around the Sun. Maxwell believed light is a form of electromagnetic radiation, based on nothing more than the coincidence of numbers in his equations.”

“And the Zealots believe that God created us in His image. Extraterrestrial life threatens that belief.”

“And intelligent extraterrestrial life demolishes it.”

Grant countered, “But we’ve known about the Martians for decades now.”

“They are extinct,” Muzorawa said. “And they can be explained away by the faithful.”

With a nod Grant conceded the point. His own father firmly believed that the long-vanished Martians had actually come to Earth and that Mars had been the original Garden of Eden. All the archeological evidence showed that such an idea was nonsense, it was impossible, but that is what the faithful believed. What they wanted to believe, Grant knew.

“Intelligent extraterrestrial life,” Muzorawa went on, “that in no way looks like us, is a frightening idea for many people, in many religions.”

“God created man in His image,” Grant muttered.

“If we find intelligent life that does not resemble us…”

“It disproves Scripture,” Grant concluded.

“That is why the conservatives everywhere have opposed space exploration. That is why they opposed using telescopes to search for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations.”

“And Wo thought I might be one of them, just because I’m faithful to my religion.”

“I think he trusts you now.”

Grant nodded uncertainly. “Maybe.”

“He has taken you under his wing, hasn’t he? He’s working with you on your thesis.”

Grant nodded again, but he thought, A man like Wo is smart enough, devious enough, to keep me under his wing so that he can keep a close watch on me. Maybe he knows about Beech. Maybe he knows I’m supposed to be spying on him.

Beech. Grant saw in his mind’s eye the solemn, intense, tawny-eyed face of Ellis Beech. Him, a fanatic? Grant wondered. It couldn’t be. Ellis Beech was just a functionary, a bureaucrat, a man who sat behind a desk all day and shuffled papers. He couldn’t be a Zealot. He just couldn’t be!

Precisely at that moment, the overhead speaker of the station’s intercom system blared, “GRANT ARCHER, REPORT TO THE DIRECTOR’S OFFICE IMMEDIATELY.”

Startled, Grant thought, By the Living God, the man can read my mind!

COUNTDOWN

If Dr. Wo really could see what Grant was thinking, he gave no sign of it. His perpetual scowl seemed a bit less fierce than usual as he gruffly waved Grant to the chair in front of his desk. As always, the desk was bare, except for the vase of flowers—thickly lush peonies, this time—the only touch of color in the starkly functional office. Despite the almost stifling warmth of the room, Wo’s high-collared tunic was buttoned up to his throat, as usual.

“Dr. Muzorawa has told you that the mission is scheduled for launch in thirty days.” It was a statement, not a question.

“Yes, sir,” Grant replied, thinking, He must have every lab and compartment in the station bugged.

“I have been reviewing your work on the ocean dynamics,” Wo said in his labored harsh whisper. “Tidal variations. Very interesting. That bears further study.”

“Yessir, I agree.”

“And how is Sheena reacting to the idea of wearing the neural headgear?”

Grant had worn the spiderweb of electrodes draped over his own head the previous night, to get Sheena accustomed to the idea of the net. The gorilla might have been amused; she was unable to laugh, of course, but she referred several times to “Grant hat.”

“I think she’ll be okay with it, in a week or so. She’s not spooked by the console any longer. It just takes her a little time to get comfortable with new things— especially things that have the smell of a laboratory about them.”

Wo drummed his stubby fingers on the desk. “She has a long memory.”

“She doesn’t forget something that frightened her, or gave her pain.”

“The neural net will not hurt her in any way.”

“But it could frighten her, unless she sees it as a toy or a game.”

“Yes,” Wo conceded. “Very clever.”

“It doesn’t take much to outsmart a two-year-old,” Grant heard himself say, with some bitterness. “Only time and patience.”

Wo gave him a sardonic smile. “I am pleased that you are learning patience.”

“Sheena’s a good teacher, in that regard.”

The director’s thin smile widened. “You are becoming almost Confucian in your growing wisdom, Mr. Grant.”

Not knowing what else to say, Grant replied, “Thank you, sir.”

“I am afraid, however, that I have still another duty to place upon your shoulders.”

“Another?”

“I have appointed you to join the deep mission team. You will report to the mission control center tomorrow for intensive training. You must be capable of assisting the mission controllers by the time the mission is launched.”

“Intensive training?” Grant echoed. “But … when? How can I … there aren’t enough hours in the day for everything that’s on my plate.”

Curtly Wo replied, “Then I shall remove some items from your plate. Your duties in the fluid dynamics lab will be suspended until the mission is completed.”

“But my thesis!”

“It can wait for a few weeks.”

“The ocean mapping … you’ll need that for the mission.”

“The mapping is sufficiently detailed for the purposes of the mission. Further refinement is not necessary.”

Shaking his head vehemently, Grant argued, “How can you say that? How can you tell how much information is enough? The more data I generate—”

Wo cut him short with an angry slash of one hand. “It is my responsibility to say how much is enough.”

“You’re making an arbitrary decision.”

“Yes. Of course I am.” Wo looked away from Grant for a moment, as if trying to control his anger, then said in a more reasonable tone, “As a scientist, I agree with you. Wholeheartedly. The more data the better. Keep probing, keep learning.”

“So then—”

“But I am not merely a scooter. I am director of this station and chief of this deep mission. I must make hard decisions. I must decide how to use the personnel I have at my disposal, and I have decided that the best use for you is to assist in the control center during the mission.”

“There are several dozen technicians on this station who can do that job, and do it better than I could.”

“Perhaps,” Wo conceded, “but I do not choose to bring additional personnel into this mission.”

“Why not? Wouldn’t it be smarter to—”

“Enough!” Wo snapped. “I have made my decision and you will carry out my orders. End of discussion.”

Grant fell silent for a moment. The two of them glared at each other across the director’s gleaming desk.

“This is a security matter, isn’t it?” Grant asked in a much softer voice. “You don’t want to bring additional people into the mission for fear of a security leak.”

Wo did not reply for several heartbeats. Grant felt perspiration trickling down his ribs. Why does he keep this office so hellishly hot? he wondered silently.

At last Wo said, “Dr. Muzorawa has told you about the Zealots.”

Grant conceded it with a nod. Lord Almighty, he really does listen in on all our conversations.

“I fear them,” Wo said, so low that Grant barely heard the words.

“But surely, here on this station, we’re millions of kilometers away from them.”

“Are we? Who among those dozens of technicians you spoke of might be a Zealot? Who among the scooters working on Europa or studying Io?”

“Not a scientist,” Grant protested.

“Why not? You are a Believer, are you not?”

“Yes, but I’m not a fanatic.”

Wo’s eyes bored into Grant’s, as if trying to pierce to his soul. “No,” he said at last, “I trust that you are not.”

It was that word “trust” that hit Grant. He heard himself say, “When I was assigned to come to this station, the New Morality asked me to report back to them on what you are doing.”

Wo said nothing; his expression did not alter one millimeter.

“They asked me to spy on you,” Grant admitted.

“And have you?”

“I haven’t told them a thing. I haven’t learned anything that they didn’t already know. But if you’re going to make me a part of this deep mission …”

Dr. Wo closed his eyes and nodded. “I see. Your loyalties are divided.”

“No, they’re not,” Grant snapped. “I’m a Believer, and I’m a scientist, also. But my loyalties are clear. I’m not a spy, and whatever the New Morality people back on Earth want to know has nothing to do with faith in God. What they’ve asked me to do is politics, not religion.”

Again Wo lapsed into silence. Grant waited for several moments, then said, “You can trust me, sir. I’m not a spy. I never wanted to spy on you. They never gave me a choice.”

“I want to trust you, Archer. There are very few people aboard this station whom I can trust. That is why my team for the deep mission is so pitifully small.”

“That’s why you put the team in quarantine,” Grant said.

Wo’s chin sunk to his chest. In a voice trembling with inner rage he added, “It would take only one of them, you must understand. One Zealot. This station is a very fragile place. One fanatic could destroy us all.”

“A terrorist?”

“A man—or a woman—who is convinced that our search for intelligent alien life is sinful. One person who is willing to die in order to kill all of us.”

“Don’t the psych profiles screen out such fanatics?”

Wo glowered at his naivete. Then his anger seemed to fade. “I should never have allowed nanomachines in this station,” he whispered, so low Grant could barely hear him. “That was a mistake. A personal frailty.” He shook his head disconsolately.

Grant had no response for that. The idea was too foreign to his thinking, alien to everything he believed.

“If this station is destroyed, it will never be replaced,” Wo continued, his anger palpable. “Never. It is difficult enough to get the funds for maintenance and repair. They would never allow a new station to be built.”

“No, that can’t be true. The work that we’re doing here—”

“They despise the work we do! If it weren’t for the profits that the scoopships make, they would have stopped all our funding and shut down this station.”

“They wouldn’t do that! They couldn’t!”

“You think not?” Wo almost sneered at him. “At this moment there is a group of IAA officials in a fusion torch ship on a high-acceleration burn, racing to get here.”

“IAA people?”

“An ‘inspection and evaluation team’,” Wo said, his voice burning with acid. “How many of them are New Morality members? How many belong to the Holy Disciples or to the Sword of Islam? One of them is a Jesuit, that much I know. An astronomer, no less.”

“And they’re coming here?”

“To review our work. That’s why I believe that you have not made an effective spy for them; they would close us down outright if they knew what we are doing.”

Grant shook his head. “You think they’re coming here to close down the station?”

“Why else? ‘Inspection and evaluation’ indeed!”

“Not necessarily,” Grant said. “The IAA isn’t controlled by the New Morality.”

“Pah!”

“All right, I admit there are ultraconservatives in the New Morality and other groups who want most scientific research stopped. But they’re only a small minority of the movement. A noisy, vocal minority, but still only one small segment of the whole. The people in power, the ones in high office, they understand the importance of exploring the universe.”

“Such as the ones who asked you to spy on us?”

Grant had no reply for that. He realized that Dr. Wo was probably right. The IAA depended on national governments for its funding, and most of those governments were thoroughly under the influence of movements such as the New Morality.

Wo broke the growing silence. “Why is nanotechnology forbidden?”

“Nanotechnology?” Grant asked, wondering what this had to do with the IAA or the New Morality. “They use it on the Moon.”

“Only under very strict controls. The luniks had to fight an outright war against the United Nations to keep their right to use nanomachines. And people who have nanomachines in their bodies aren’t allowed on Earth at all.”

“Nanomachines can be turned into weapons,” Grant pointed out. “That’s why they’re banned.”

Wo snorted disdainfully. “Pah! Why do you think you are using computer systems that are at least ten years old? Why don’t you have an artificial intelligence system to assist you in your work?”

Confused by another sudden shift in subject, Grant replied, “No one’s been able to make an AI system that performs reliably.”

“Not so,” the director snapped. “Twenty years ago research on AI systems was stopped. Why? Because the researchers had produced a prototype that did work. Quite reliably.”

“How could they stop all research—”

“Because they feared where AI research was heading. They feared the creation of machines with the intelligence of humans. With higher intelligence, inevitably.”

Grant just sat there, trying to digest this flood of accusations.

“If they knew where our exploration of Jupiter is heading, if they understood what we might uncover …” Wo left the thought unfinished.

“They’d be afraid that we might find intelligent life in the ocean,” Grant heard himself whisper.

“Exactly. That is why I keep our security so tight. That is why I refuse to bring in more people. One of them might turn out to be a Zealot fanatic.”

Grant tried to sort it all out in his mind. “But there’s no evidence for intelligent life down there. We don’t even know if there’s any form of life at all in the ocean.”

“Don’t we?” Wo jabbed a stubby finger at the keyboard built into his desktop. One of the walls dissolved into a murky, grainy featureless scene.

“This video was salvaged from the first mission into the ocean,” Wo explained, his rasping voice labored, tired.

Lightning flickered in the distance. Lightning? Grant asked himself. Underwater?

As he stared at the wallscreen, Grant realized that what he was seeing was not lightning. The flashes of light were red, yellow, deep orange.

Slowly, before his fascinated eyes, the lights took shape. They were things in the water, a dozen or more of them, coasting through the ocean together, lights flickering back and forth.

Living creatures! Grant realized. And they’re signaling to one another!

Grant watched, fascinated. The lights winked back and forth, back and forth. There was a pattern to them, it seemed. First one, then all the others lit up in the same colors. He couldn’t tell if the lights formed any particular shape or form; the creatures were too far away for him to make out anything except a bright momentary glow against the vast darkness of the sea. Maddening. If only he could get closer, get better detail—

The scene winked off. The screen became a metal bulkhead once again. Grant felt like a child who’d just had a Christmas present yanked out of his hands.

He turned back to Dr. Wo. “They’re alive,” Grant whispered.

“I believe so. But the evidence is hardly conclusive.”

“And they were signaling back and forth!”

“Perhaps.”

“Is that the closest you got to them?”

“We were slightly less than fifteen hundred kilometers’ slant range when the accident ended our mission. They were considerably deeper in the ocean than we were.”

“Fifteen hundred …” Grant blinked with disbelief. “Then the creatures must be huge, to see them at that distance.”

“On the order of five to fifteen kilometers in diameter,” Wo said flatly.

“That’s enormousl”

Wo nodded slowly. “That is the dimension that our computer analysis shows. It may be wrong, of course.”

“But … how … why …?” Grant’s thoughts were swirling.

“Organic particles form in the clouds,” Wo said. “That we have seen; we have even sampled them. They rain downward, into the ocean. Like manna from heaven, food drops down from the clouds into the ocean.”

“But they must be destroyed by the chemistry in the ocean,” Grant mused.

“Or they could be eaten by those creatures you just saw.”

“Living Jovians.”

Wo counted off on his stubby fingers. “There is an energy flow from the planet’s core. There is an ocean of liquid water—”

“Heavily laced with ammonia and God knows what else. An acid ocean, really.”

Ignoring that, Wo continued, “There is a constant food source raining down into that ocean. Energy, water, food: Wherever those factors have been found, life exists. Those are living Jovians swimming in that ocean.”

“But intelligent…?”

“Why not? They appear to signal to each other. In that immense ocean, over billions of years of time, why should not intelligence evolve? On Earth, dolphins and whales show considerable intelligence. Why not the same on Jupiter? Or even better?”

“Better?”

“Why not?” Wo repeated.

Then Grant remembered, “But if the IAA team is really coming here to shut down the station—”

“That is why I am pushing to get the deep mission off as soon as possible.”

“When are they scheduled to arrive here?”

Wo did not need to look at a calendar. “In thirty-nine days. The deep mission will be in the ocean by then,” he gloated. “There will be no way for them to call it back.” The director broke into a rare smile.

“In the meantime,” Grant muttered, “if the Zealots find out about this, they’ll try to destroy the station.”

Wo’s enthusiasm drained away. He sighed. “One suicidal fanatic, that is all it would take.”

“But … suppose you do confirm that there are intelligent Jovians down in the ocean. What then?”

Wo leaned back in his chair and gazed at the metal mesh of the ceiling. “Then we beam the information back to Earth. To the headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority, to the scientific offices of the United Nations, to all the news networks, to every university. Simultaneously. We make our announcement so loud, so wide, that it cannot possibly be overlooked or suppressed.”

“It would certainly shock a lot of people,” Grant admitted.

Wo nodded slowly. “Yes. That discovery will shake the foundations of everything. They will be forced to continue our work, even to expand it. The people of the world will demand it.”

“Maybe,” Grant said, wondering if that were true. What would the people of the world think if we found intelligent creatures here on Jupiter? Living intelligent aliens! How would the people of the world react to that?

“Or maybe,” he added, “the Zealots or some other gang of crazies will try to kill us all, out of fear and hatred.”

Wo snorted disdainfully. “What of it? Once the discovery is announced, no one can erase the information.”

“But they’ll kill us!”

“Yes, they might,” the director admitted easily. “That does not matter. It will be worth our lives to have made such a discovery.”

CONTROL CENTER

Grant told no one of his conversation with the director. He’s a fanatic, Grant realized. He’s just as crazy in his own way as the Zealots or any other radical extremist. I wonder if any of the others know how he really thinks.

Yet he spoke of it to no one. Not even Lane or Zeb or the others who must already know about it. Grant agreed with the director in one respect: The fewer people who know what’s really going on, the better.

Wo’s concept of a quarantine was very loose, Grant found. He and the other members of the mission team took their meals in a conference room and worked together, but they still slept in their own quarters and were able to mingle with the rest of the station’s personnel. It was more a matter of attitude, of a sense of responsibility, that kept them from talking about the mission with the “outsiders.”

Krebs reinforced the attitude in her own grim style. The first evening that Grant had dinner with the team, she showed up in the conference room, glaring at everyone.

“You will discuss our work with no one,” she said, out of a clear sky. “That is vital! Maximally vital! Each of you has signed a security agreement. Violate that agreement and you will suffer the full penalties of the law. Nothing less.”

Then she sat down to eat. No one sat within three chairs of her.

Grant forgot about his thesis work, his research on the Jovian ocean’s dynamics. If those things really are living creatures, if they’re intelligent… we’re sitting on top of the biggest discovery in history! Maybe what the cameras saw are really submarines, giant mobile underwater habitats. Maybe the Jovians have a technology equal to our own. Or better.

Then a voice in his mind warned, You’re sitting on top of the biggest powder keg in history. Watch your steps carefully. You could get yourself killed over this.

The control center, he found, was an unremarkable chamber crowded with six computer-topped desks and communications gear that looked to Grant as if it had been shoehorned into a compartment several sizes too small to accommodate it all. There was barely enough room to squeeze into the little wheeled desk chairs. Director Wo had a separate desk all to himself, though, smack in the middle of the room, with an aisle from the corridor door straight to it—the only open space in the compartment.

The wallscreens were connected to the simulations chamber down at the aquarium, so Grant got to see Muzorawa and O’Hara and the others every shift, at least onscreen. And Karlstad, too, looking tense and almost frightened as he stood at his underwater post, anchored to the deck by plastic loops set into the flooring.

Dr. Wo placed Grant at the console that monitored the submersible’s electrical power systems. Frankovich, at the life-support console alongside him, was assigned to teaching Grant what he had to know.

“So he sucked you into this, too,” Karlstad said through his face-mask radio when Grant first showed up in the control center and said hello to the crew in the tank.

“We’re just one tight little family,” Grant replied.

“Never think that,” Karlstad muttered. “We’re prisoners. Puppets on his strings. He wiggles his fingers and we do the dancing for him.”

Krebs splashed into the simulator tank and Karlstad went silent.

Grant turned to Frankovich, sitting at the console beside his. “You’d better start showing me what I’m supposed to do here,” Grant said, sliding awkwardly into the tight little chair.

“Trying to get on Wo’s good side?” Frankovich asked lightly. “That’s a dubious procedure. I’m not certain our revered leader has a good side.”

Evenings Grant spent with Sheena, no matter how tired he was from the long hours in the control center. He understood Wo’s interest in the gorilla and the dolphins now. How do we communicate with another species? How do we make ourselves understood to creatures that have nothing whatsoever in common with us?

Often Grant took his dinner down to the aquarium and ate with the gorilla. Karlstad twitted him about it, of course, but Grant wanted Sheena to accept the neural net headgear with as little commotion as possible. After several nights of feeling silly with the wires draped over his head, Grant brought an extra set and offered it to the gorilla.

Sheena seemed torn between curiosity and fear. At first she merely looked at the headgear, one set draped over Grant’s sandy hair, the other lying casually on the floor beside him.

Grant was sharing his fruit cup dessert with Sheena when she picked up the net from the floor with her syrup-sticky fingers. She held it in front of her face, studying it, the electrode-studded wires hanging in her massive hand like some arcane set of jewelry.

Tapping his own net, Grant smiled and said, “Funny hat, Sheena”

“Funny hat,” she echoed in her painful whisper.

“I brought it for you.”

The gorilla’s deep-brown eyes shifted from the dangling net to Grant’s face and then back again.

Grant said nothing.

Sheena slowly lifted the net higher and then clumsily plopped it on her head. It slid to the floor with a metallic clicking noise.

“Let me help you,” Grant said, reaching for the wires.

“No.” Sheena pushed Grant back, just a brush of her hand, but it was almost enough to bowl him over. He’d forgotten how strong the gorilla was. I’m taking her for granted, he thought. That’s a mistake.

Sheena fumbled with the net, using both hands this time, and draped it over her head once more. It was lopsided and came down over one eye, but it stayed put.

Grant wanted to laugh at the ludicrous sight, but he held himself to a broad grin. “Good girl, Sheena!” he approved.

“Funny hat,” said the gorilla.

“Funny hat,” Grant agreed, patting his own head.

In a week or so we can connect the net and start taking readings of her brain patterns, he thought. Let her get accustomed to it first. And I’ll get Pascal to show me how to work the console. No sense bringing strangers in here. It would just upset Sheena.

His ribs twinged when he took a deep breath. No, Grant told himself, I certainly don’t want to upset Sheena.