Jupiter

FINAL REHEARSAL

The month flashed past like a single brief day. Grant worked double shifts in the mission control center, squeezed in beside Frankovich, watching as the wallscreens showed Lane, Karlstad, Irene Pascal, and Muzorawa working in the aquarium on the simulators under Dr. Krebs’s baleful eyes.

At first they used only the manual controls in the simulator tank, but after a few days they began to link through the biochip electrodes with the ship systems.

Wo sat at the central console in the control chamber during each simulation run, but to Grant’s eyes the director often looked distracted, unresponsive to what was going on in the aquarium tank. He’s worrying about that IAA inspection team on its way here, Grant thought. They’re due to reach the station exactly seven days after the mission is launched.

Each evening they ate in the conference room and hashed over the day’s work. Krebs rarely had dinner with them, and when she did she was almost completely shunned by the others, eating alone at the head of the table, glowering. The only words she had for the team were warnings about security and complaints that their work in the simulator was sloppy or downright poor.

Most evenings Grant stole away early to spend some time with Sheena; the others were so intent on the mission that they barely mentioned Grant’s “dates” with the gorilla. Even Karlstad had found a new topic for dinner-table discussion.

“My God,” he said at dinner one evening, “being plugged in like that really is better than sex—almost.”

“When you get really adept at it,” Muzorawa explained, “you can even link with each other. It’s almost like telepathy.”

“Really?” Karlstad turned toward O’Hara, leering.

“Get your mind above your beltline, Egon,” she said. “It’s all mental, not physical.”

“The brain is the most important sex organ in the body,” he countered.

She shook her head, frowning.

Muzorawa explained for Grant that the electrode implants also contain microminiaturized semiconductor lasers linked through the fiber-optic lines to connect with the ship’s systems.

“Photo-optics can carry loads more information than electronics,” said O’Hara.

“But the human nervous system is electrical, isn’t it?” Grant asked.

“Electrochemical,” Karlstad corrected.

“Then if all this photo-optical data is pumped into your nervous system—”

“It produces an overload,” Muzorawa said.

“And the wildest sensations you’ve ever experienced,” O’Hara added.

Karlstad sighed mightily.

After dinner Grant went as usual to Sheena. He was trying to get the gorilla accustomed to the neural net. She still could not fit it over her head properly, but gradually Grant got her to accept his help in placing the spiderweb of electrodes properly over her skull.

“If only we could shave her head,” Pascal said yearningly over a late-night snack in the conference room.

Pascal was pulling double duty, too: watching Grant with Sheena each evening through the surveillance cameras and working in the fish tank on the mission simulator. She looked as exhausted as Grant felt.

“She wouldn’t like being shaved,” Grant pointed out.

“We could sedate her.”

“It wouldn’t work,” Grant said as he picked at his open sandwich of simulated roast beef. “By the time she got accustomed to the fact that she’d been shaved, her hair would’ve grown back again.”

Pascal sighed. “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

“If she’d let me fasten the net under her chin, then you’d get a decent contact.”

“If she’d let you.” Pascal put down her fork, frowning. “Do you realize that the laboratory animal is running this experiment? It’s infuriating.”

It surprised Grant to hear Sheena referred to as a laboratory animal. And it surprised him even more when he realized that he thought of the gorilla as a person.

Trying to soothe the neurophysiologist, Grant said, “I’ll get Sheena to wear the net and make good contact with the electrodes. Give me a few more days.”

“We’ll be launching in six days.”

“Sheena can’t be put on a schedule, I’m afraid.”

“Yes, yes, I understand,” Pascal said. “Still, it’s very frustrating. Maddening.”

“I can run the console for you,” Grant said. “I’ll collect the data and have it ready for you when you come back from the mission.”

Pascal gave him a dubious look but said nothing.

The door to the corridor slid open and Red Devlin stepped into the conference room as casually as he might stroll along a city boulevard.

“Irene, luv, how are you?”

“What are you doing in here?” Grant demanded. “You’re not supposed—”

“Now, now,” Devlin chided. “Don’t get your shorts in a twist, Grant. Who d’you think brings your food and goodies in here, eh? Somebody’s gotta check on your coffee supply, mate.”

“It’s all right,” Pascal said softly. “He’s just doing his job.”

“Right you are, Irene luv. And you, Grant, how’s Sheena treatin’ you these days?”

“Fine,” Grant said, weary of jokes about him and Sheena.

Devlin pulled a plastic vial from his pocket and handed it to Pascal. “You sure you need these?” he asked, sounding genuinely concerned. “Looks to me like you need somethin’ to help you sleep, not keep you awake.”

“I sleep very well,” Pascal replied. “I need to be alert during the day.”

“In the simulator, eh?” Devlin asked.

Pascal nodded.

“How’s it goin’? When do you push off?”

Before Pascal could answer, Grant said, “Dr. Wo doesn’t want us to discuss the mission with anyone who isn’t on the team.”

Devlin stiffened into a lampoon of a soldier’s coming to attention, clicked his heels, and snapped off a salute.

“Aye, aye, sir!”

Grant laughed despite himself.

Pascal said, “Grant is correct. We are not supposed to discuss the mission with you.”

“I understand,” Devlin said, relaxing. “No worries.”

“But in three days you will not see me for a while,” she added.

Grant felt a surge of dismay. He knew it was silly, but rules are meant to be followed, not broken. Krebs and Dr. Wo might be paranoid, but Grant thought it was better to be paranoid than the victim of some terrorist’s fiery zeal.

As Devlin headed for the coffee urn, Grant leaned toward Pascal and whispered, “Irene, you told him three days. But the mission doesn’t launch until six days from now.”

“Yes,” she agreed, nodding. “But in three days the crew goes into immersion. We do not come out once we are immersed.”

“I didn’t realize—”

“Once we begin breathing that awful liquid, we do not come into the air again until the mission is completed,” she said.

Grant thought she looked grim, like a prisoner about to be swallowed up by an inescapable jail. And she looked more than a little frightened, too.

He walked with Irene back to their quarters. Pascal’s compartment was a few dozen meters up the corridor from Grant’s. The corridor was dim, shadowy in its nighttime lighting. They saw no one else along the way except a solitary security guard pacing sleepily along his rounds; it was too late at night for casual strollers.

So it surprised Grant to see Kayla Ukara sitting on the floor next to Pascal’s door, her back propped against the wall, her head resting on her knees as if asleep.

“Oh,” Irene said in a small voice.

Ukara’s head snapped up, her eyes fully alert. Instead of her usual fierce, pantherlike expression, she actually smiled up at Irene.

As Ukara scrambled to her feet, Pascal turned to Grant, red-cheeked with embarrassment. “Thank you for walking me home,” she said in a quick, low voice.

Grant nodded, puzzled. “It’s okay. My place is just down the corridor.”

But Pascal was not paying any attention to him. Her eyes were on Ukara and no one else.

Grant muttered a good night to them both and continued down the corridor. He glanced once over his shoulder at them. Pascal was tapping out the security code on her door lock; Kayla had a long, slim arm around Irene’s waist.

They’re lovers! Grant felt shocked. He knew he shouldn’t, knew it was none of his business, that the two women were adults and had the right to their own personal lives. Yet deep in the core of his being he felt that what they were doing was wrong, deeply wrong.

It’s none of your business, Grant told himself. Forget about it.

Still, it bothered him.

The next night Grant tied the neural net he was wearing under his chin.

“See?” he said to Sheena. “It looks better.”

Sheena eyed him suspiciously.

They were sitting on the plastic-tiled floor of Sheena’s spacious pen, Grant facing the gorilla. Her bulk loomed over him like a hairy mountain.

“And it won’t fall off.” Grant shook his head vigorously. The net stayed snug around his skull.

Sheena waggled her head ponderously and her net slid clattering to the floor.

She huffed and stared at the net at her feet. Then she picked it up and draped it over her head again. Grant expected her to try to tie its loose ends, but instead she simply looked down at her open hands.

“No,” she said, and Grant thought it sounded discouraged, disheartened.

She looked at Grant. “Hands … no … Sheena can’t do.”

Grant felt a wave of sadness wash over him. She knows her hands aren’t dexterous enough to tie the ends. She knows how limited she is.

“Grant do,” said Sheena.

“Sure, Sheena,” he said, scrambling toward her. “I’ll be happy to help you.”

“Grant help Sheena.”

“Yes, I will.” He knelt before her powerful body, feeling the heat of her, knowing that those arms of hers could crush his ribs, and carefully tied the neural net under her chin.

“There,” he said, sitting back on the floor again. “Now we’re the same.”

“No.” Sheena swung her heavy head from side to side slowly. “Not same. Sheena not Grant. Grant not Sheena.”

He gulped once, wondering what he could say. When he found his voice, he replied, “I’m your friend, Sheena. You and I are friends.”

“Friends.” Sheena seemed to think that over for a while. Then she said again, “Grant help Sheena.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll help you all I can.”

When the overhead lights went down to their nighttime level and Sheena lumbered into the corner of her pen where the plastic padding had been wadded up into a sleeping nest, Grant climbed wearily to his feet and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

“Good night, Sheena,” he called.

She must have already fallen asleep, because she did not reply. Grant tiptoed to the electronic console sitting a few meters up the corridor. Gingerly he flicked on the power and activated the scanners.

Four small display screens along the top of the console lit up. Green worms of lines crawled across them. Squinting in the dim lighting, Grant checked to make certain that the equipment was recording Sheena’s brain waves. He nodded, satisfied, hoping that the data would cheer Pascal before she left on the deep mission. Maybe we’ll catch her dreaming, he hoped.

The next morning he located Pascal in the lockers where the mission crew changed into their wetsuits. No one else was in the locker area. The others had already gone to the aquarium for the day’s simulation tasks.

Pascal was pleased that they were getting data at last, but Grant could see that her mind was obviously focused on the mission.

“By the time you get back,” he said, trying to sound cheerful, “you’ll have enough data to write a book.”

“If we get back,” Pascal muttered.

“If?”

She zippered up the front of the suit, then reached for the plastic full-face mask on the shelf above the empty suit rack. Grant realized that her legs were bare. Glittery electrodes lined the outside of both legs from her hips to halfway down her calves. They looked like the ends of silver bullets embedded in her flesh. It took a conscious effort for Grant not to stare at them.

“The closer we get to launch, the more fearful I become,” Pascal confessed.

“That’s natural, I suppose,” said Grant. “Nerves.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly. “Entirely natural. But not pleasant to experience.”

Pascal headed for the doorway, her bare feet padding softly on the plastic tiles. Grant saw that she had forgotten her air tank. He picked it up from the floor of her locker, surprised at how heavy it was, and started after her.

Christel Krebs appeared at the doorway, her bulky form effectively blocking it. Pascal stopped, holding her transparent mask in both hands in front of herself, as if for protection.

Krebs stepped awkwardly toward her. Her thick legs were studded with electrodes, too, Grant saw.

She seemed to peer at Pascal quizzically.

“I’m sorry I’m running late, Dr. Krebs” Pascal began. “You see—”

“Dr. Pascal,” said Krebs, as if recognizing her for the first time. She blinked, then went on, “The others are all waiting for you. We have no time to waste.”

“Yes, I understand,” said Pascal.

“Irene,” Grant called. He held out the air tank. “You’ll need this, won’t you?”

Pascal hesitated, then put her mask down on the floor, and allowed Grant to help her slip the tank’s straps over her shoulders.

“Archer, isn’t it?” Krebs said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You should be at the control center, not here.”

“That’s right, ma’am,” Grant replied. “But I wanted Dr. Pascal to know about last night’s work with Sheena.”

“That is of no relevance to this mission,” Krebs snapped, her voice sharp as a whipstroke. “Get to your post immediately.”

“Yes’m.”

It was tense in the control center. Even Dr. Wo, sitting in the center of the crowded, overheated chamber, looked coiled tight with tension.

This is the last simulation, Grant knew. If there are no slip-ups today, tomorrow they practice in the sub itself.

Krebs floated above the four crew members, snapping commands, hovering over their shoulders as they stood at their positions, held down to the deck by foot loops, and went through the procedures for separating the ship from the station and launching it into an independent orbit around Jupiter.

O’Hara, Pascal, Karlstad, and Muzorawa worked together like a smooth, well-oiled machine. They barely had to touch the manual controls. Even Krebs’s snarls toned down almost to a purring satisfaction with their performance.

Grant watched, fascinated, as the simulator’s equipment responded to their control, untouched. It’s like magic, he said to himself, awed even though he knew the biochips were transmitting control signals to receiving electrodes in the ship systems.

Out of the corner of his eye, Grant could see Dr. Wo studying the displays on his console. He wasn’t watching the wallscreens at all, so intent was he on the readouts that showed the simulated ship’s systems and the medical monitors of the five people in the aquarium tank.

Grant concentrated on his own display screens. He was responsible for the propulsion and electrical power systems, which were running just a shade below design optimum. He could goose either one for more power if necessary, but the simulation did not require it unless there was an emergency.

Which Dr. Wo suddenly provided.

In the simulation, the crew had successfully separated the submersible from the station. They were on their own now, as far as the sim was concerned, running on the ship’s internal power.

Wo tapped a single button on the console keyboard before him and abruptly half of the lights on Grant’s console turned a baleful red.

“Power outage!” Grant yelled, just as Muzorawa said exactly the same words—but in a much calmer tone.

“Switch to auxiliary power,” Krebs called out.

Grant knew that he was supposed to keep his hands off the controls in front of him and let the crew work out the problem. But the temptation to cancel the outage and return the simulator to full power made him twitch with anticipation.

“Auxiliary power,” Muzorawa announced.

Glancing up at the wallscreen, Grant saw that the simulator was now dimly lit, and red lights glared across half the consoles in there.

“Life support decaying,” O’Hara said, her voice tight, pained. “The circulation pumps need more power.”

“Return to the station,” Krebs commanded. It was standard operating procedure. This soon after separation, the safest thing to do was to return and hook up with the station’s power supply. If they lost power later in the mission they would have to solve the problem on their own, Grant knew.

His fingers still itching to correct the damage that Dr. Wo had deliberately inflicted, Grant watched passively as the crew simulated their return and remating to the station’s docking module. It was all done with smooth efficiency. They hardly had to touch a keypad or a switch. It’s only a simulation, Grant reminded himself, but he still found that he was soaked in perspiration by the time Krebs announced their successful redocking.

“Very well,” Wo said into his microphone. “Take a break. But do not leave the simulator. Next we will see what you do when you have an emergency after you have entered the clouds.”

All of the crew members groaned. All except Krebs, Grant noticed. She actually smiled.

He turned to Frankovich, crammed in at the next console with barely enough room for his legs.

“Captain Krebs is enjoying herself,” Frankovich said. Then, leaning closer to Grant, he whispered, “But Dr. Wo takes this all very seriously.”

Grant glanced over at Wo. The director’s face looked grim, baleful. With an inward nod, Grant said to himself, Yes, Dr. Wo takes all this very seriously indeed.

BREAKDOWN

Bone weary from the long day’s simulator runs, Grant picked up his dinner in the conference room, stopped by the cafeteria for a bowl of fruits for Sheena, then trudged alone down to the aquarium with two sets of neural nets stuffed into his trouser pockets.

He passed the rows of fish tanks, their underwater lights glimmering against the solid bulkhead on his left. The dolphins were swimming lazily in their big tank, sleek and silent. Grant stopped for a moment at the tank that held the simulator. It was empty now. Technicians would start dismantling the hardware after the ship actually left on its mission. Grant wondered if they would store it in anticipation of future missions. Most likely so, he guessed.

He felt slightly uneasy that Sheena was not out in the corridor to meet him. Usually she was prowling along the fish tanks, waiting for him with the eagerness of a two-year-old child. On the other hand, it gave him the opportunity to power up the monitoring console in the corridor outside her pen. Grant saw that it was working properly and receiving a steady flat signal from the net in his left pocket. The one in his right was deactivated, a dummy whose only purpose was to deceive Sheena into thinking that he was wearing the same “hat” that she was.

When he came to Sheena’s pen he saw that the gorilla was sitting on her haunches, bent over a large wooden jigsaw puzzle. She had filled in eight of the ten big pieces.

She looked up as Grant stepped in.

“Food!” she said in her rasping voice, and scrambled up onto all fours. Grant knew she couldn’t smile, but he thought she was glad to see him—and the bowl he had brought for her.

“Fruit,” he said, placing the tray on the floor.

“Fruit,” echoed Sheena. “And Grant food.”

He nodded. “I’ve got a soyburger and salad and ice cream for dessert.”

Sheena picked up the bowl of fruit but stared hard at the ice cream. Then she looked up at Grant. “Grant ice cream?”

“Would you like some ice cream, Sheena?”

“Yes,” came the immediate answer.

“Okay.” Grant handed the small dish to her. Tucking the fruit bowl under one arm, Sheena grabbed for the ice cream with her free hand.

Grant laughed at her unabashed greed. “Save some ice cream for me.”

“Yes,” Sheena replied. But within less than a minute the ice cream was gone, except for a few smears around her muzzle. Then she started in on the fruit.

Grant wolfed down his burger, surprised at how hungry he suddenly felt. He offered Sheena a few leaves of his salad, but she sniffed at the dressing and refused them.

Once the fruit was gone Sheena asked, “Grant bring hat?”

He pulled the neural nets from his pockets. “Here they are, Sheena. One for you and one for me.”

She leaned toward him and allowed him to place the net over her head and tie it under her chin. Then he did the same for his own.

“Let’s finish the puzzle,” Grant said, once he had both nets in place.

“Grant do.”

“No, no, Sheena. You’ve put most of the pieces together. There are only two left. You do them.”

“Grant do first.”

He nodded understanding. “You want me to do one piece?”

Sheena said, “Yes.” And brought one big hand up to her skull.

“No, no!” Grant blurted. “Don’t rub your head! You’ll mess up your hat.”

“Hurts,” Sheena said.

Grant forced a smile for her. “No, it doesn’t hurt, Sheena. My hat doesn’t hurt. Your hat doesn’t hurt.”

She had knocked the net slightly askew. Grant got to his knees and straightened it out for her.

“Hurts,” Sheena repeated.

“It can’t hurt you,” Grant said. “Here, let’s finish the puzzle.”

He picked up one of the two remaining pieces and put it in place. Sheena stared at the puzzle for a moment, then reached for the last piece.

Suddenly she flung it away. “Hurts!” she growled, and reached up to yank at the neural net.

Grant saw a tendril of smoke rising from one of the electrodes. My God, it’s burning her!

Sheena ripped the net off her head and smashed it to the floor. She roared with pain and lurched up onto her hind legs.

She’s going to kill me! Grant thought.

The gorilla balled one mighty fist and smashed it against the steel wall of her pen. The metal buckled.

Grant scrambled to his feet. Sheena towered over him, immense, fangs bared.

“Grant hurt Sheena!” she rasped.

“No, I didn’t mean to—”

“Grant no friend!”

He started to back away from her, toward the entrance to her pen. There was an emergency control outside that could slide a thickly barred gate across the entry.

Sheena dropped down to all fours, and Grant could see a burned spot on her skull. She glowered at him as he backed away. Don’t turn your back to her! Grant remembered. Gorillas seldom attack a man who’s facing them. Seldom echoed in Grant’s mind.

It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, as if in a nightmare. Grant edged toward the pen’s entrance, Sheena growled and glared at him, then took a knuckle-walking step toward him.

Grant bolted through the doorway and banged the emergency gate control. The bars slid swiftly across the entrance and clanged shut. Sheena grasped one of the bars in a big, hairy hand. Grant thought she could have bent it if she’d wanted to.

“I’m sorry, Sheena,” he babbled. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. One of the electrodes must’ve been defective. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Grant no friend,” the gorilla rasped again. Then she turned her back to him and shambled to the far corner of her pen.

Grant stood there, heartbroken. You’re right, he admitted silently to the gorilla. I’m not your friend. I never was, even though I wanted to be.

IMMERSION

The following night the departing crew held a glum little farewell party for themselves in O’Hara’s quarters. Lane herself invited Grant to attend. Still miserable about Sheena, and afraid to get near the gorilla again, Grant accepted.

He was the last one to arrive. O’Hara’s room was in its planetarium mode again as she admitted him and then slid the door shut behind him. Even the floor was speckled with stars. For a dizzying moment Grant felt as if the others were sitting in empty space, floating in the middle of the universe. The faint, ethereal music of a single keyboard floated through the shadows.

“No stimulants, I’m afraid,” Lane said in a hushed voice. “The mission, you know.”

Grant nodded his understanding, then padded across the starry floor to sit between Muzorawa and Pascal. Zeb’s beard was gone, Karlstad was totally bald. Pascal’s wig was slightly askew; not nearly as natural-looking as Lane’s. All the crew members have been depilated, Grant realized. Because of the immersion; it’s more sanitary.

“I thought you would be with Sheena,” said Pascal.

Grant felt his jaws clench. With an effort, he told her, “I had a problem with her last night.”

“Oh?”

He described the fiasco with the burned-out electrode.

Instead of disappointment, Pascal immediately asked, “Did you get data?”

He blinked at her. “I don’t know. I didn’t check. Everything was so—”

“The other electrodes should have worked,” Pascal said. “You should have some data, at least. Anger. Pain. Such data is priceless!

Betrayal, Grant thought. What kind of brain waves will show feelings of betrayal?

“Do you blame yourself for what happened?” Muzorawa asked gently.

Grant shrugged. “Who else was there?”

“Sometimes experiments blow up on you,” he said. “Equipment can fail.”

“That’s great to hear on the eve of our dunking,” Karlstad grumbled. He’d been sitting on Muzorawa’s other side.

“Do you think Sheena will stay angry with you?” O’Hara asked.

“I don’t know,” Grant said. “Right now, I’m kind of scared to go back and see her again.”

“Lovers’ quarrel,” Karlstad said.

Grant was in no mood for his quips. “Speaking of lovers, isn’t Dr. Krebs coming to this party?”

Karlstad threw up his hands. “God forbid!”

Muzorawa chuckled. “That’s right, Egon. She did specifically tap you for the mission. She must have a special place in her heart for you.”

“That means she hates me, then,” Frankovich chimed in. “Thank goodness!”

O’Hara said, “I didn’t think inviting Krebs here would be such a lovely idea.”

“Why not?” Karlstad snapped. “Maybe she’d perk up this party. We could certainly use something to liven up the proceedings.”

“D’you notice how she seems to stare at you when she talks to you?” O’Hara asked no one in particular. “It’s positively spooky, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Pascal said. “She never did that before the accident.”

“It’s the evil eye,” said Karlstad. “She’s learned witchcraft.”

“Whatever it is, it makes my blood run cold,” O’Hara said.

“You think it runs cold when she gives you the fish-eye,” Karlstad said, almost smirking, “wait until you’re immersed in that PFCL gunk. That’ll chill your blood down to the marrow.”

For a long moment no one spoke a word. Grant knew what they were facing and shuddered inwardly.

“There’s an IAA inspection team on its way here,” Frankovich muttered.

“I’d heard that,” said O’Hara. “It’s really true, then?”

Karlstad grumbled, “That’s why our woeful leader wants to get this mission off so fast. He’s afraid the IAA officials will stop it, once they find out about it.”

“Why would they stop it?”

“Risking human lives.”

“Finding things they don’t want to find,” Grant heard himself say.

The others all turned to him.

“They’ll be here in ten days,” Grant added. “You should be safely on your way by then.”

“Safely?” Karlstad sneered. “I wish.”

Muzorawa said, “Let us remember one thing: We will be exploring a region where no human has gone before. We will be searching for life on a world that is utterly alien to us. We will be seeking intelligent life, if it exists down in that sea. Those are good things to do, no matter how much discomfort we must endure.”

For a moment Grant thought that Zeb would say they’re doing God’s work. But the Moslem scientist stopped short of that.

Sitting at his console in the mission control center, Grant was almost quivering with anticipation. This morning the consoles no longer connected to the simulator in the aquarium. Now, as he looked up at the big wallscreen, Grant saw the interior of the submersible itself.

It was empty, as yet. No, not really empty, Grant told himself. It’s filled with that PFCL gunk instead of air. The crew will be breathing that soup, immersed in it, living in it for days on end, weeks.

“Ready for immersion procedure,” Dr. Wo said from his position at the central console, lapsing unconsciously into the clipped speaking style of the controllers.

The image on the wallscreen changed to show the airlock in the docking module. Krebs and the other crew members stood in a small huddle by the outer hatch. They each wore snug-fitting bodysuits, more for modesty than need, Grant understood. The tights left their legs bare, and he could see the studs of electrodes lining their flesh, like obscene metal leeches attached to their skin.

“We are ready,” Krebs said, peering directly into the monitoring camera. She had an odd way of staring, as if she were focusing only one eye on you.

“Proceed,” said Dr. Wo.

Starting with Muzorawa, the crew entered the airlock one by one. Surveillance cameras watched as the hatch sealed tight and the lock slowly filled with the thick liquid perfluorocarbon, rather than air. It looked to Grant as if each of them were being deliberately drowned. Each one floated upward as the chamber filled, instinctively lifting their heads to suck in their last lungful of air. When the liquid finally filled the airlock, each of them spasmed with inborn reflex, eyes popping wide, mouths gaping and gasping, arms and legs flailing.

Grant had to force himself to sit still, to say nothing, as he watched his friends’ desperate convulsions. This must be what it’s like to watch an execution, he thought, his fists clenched, his own pulse racing hard.

Then, after what seemed like hours of struggle, each member of the crew began to breathe almost normally and opened the inner hatch of the airlock to swim into the sub’s interior. Grant blinked with disbelief when he checked his console clock and saw that Muzorawa’s reflexive struggles had lasted less than thirty seconds. The others did almost as well.

Krebs was the last to enter the airlock. She hardly struggled at all. In fact, Grant thought he saw a smile cross her heavy, gray-skinned face as the liquid closed over her head.

SEPARATION

For most of the day the crew simply accustomed themselves to the submersible. Grant was surprised, as he watched the wallscreen display, at how cramped the interior was. Despite the outer size of the ship, the bridge was no bigger than the simulator in the aquarium had been. The galley was nothing more than a shoulder-tall console built into one of the bulkheads.

Of course, Grant realized. They won’t be eating normally; they’ll get their nutrition intravenously, through the ports in their necks.

Krebs had assigned each of them a privacy berth, where they could sleep and get away from the others for a while. They reminded Grant of the coffin-sized quarters he’d shared with Tavalera aboard Roberts.

Their voices were different: deeper, slower, as if someone were playing a recording at lower than normal speed.

No one left the control center for more than a few minutes. When noon came, Dr. Wo told Grant to go to the cafeteria and bring back enough sandwiches and drinks for all five of them.

“Big appetite, mate,” Red Devlin wisecracked as Grant loaded his tray.

Grant merely nodded.

“What’s goin’ on, eh? Big doin’s?”

“You might say that,” Grant replied as he hefted the tray.

“You need help with that?” Devlin called after him as Grant made his way past the incoming people and started down the main corridor.

“No thanks,” he yelled over his shoulder, nearly bumping into a technician coming up the corridor.

Feeling like a lackey instead of a scientist, Grant juggled the heavily laden tray all the way back to the control center. This is why they call us scooters, he guessed.

As he slid back into his console chair, munching a sandwich, he saw on the wallscreen that Krebs was starting to organize the crew for linking electronically with the ship’s systems.

Muzorawa had taken up his station at the control panel, with O’Hara and Karlstad flanking him. Pascal was nowhere in sight. Grant thought that Lane looked tense, perhaps worried. It was harder to read Zeb’s expression; he seemed totally focused on the controls.

Four hairless humans, naked except for their skintight bodysuits, electrodes studding their legs. Hair-thin fiberoptic wires led from the implants to sets of plugs in the consoles. The wires seemed to float gently in the liquid-filled chamber.

Krebs hovered behind and slightly above the crew, like a levitating sack of cement, watching everything they did. Wires trailed from her stocky legs to a panel set into the ceiling above her.

“Remember,” she said, her voice oddly booming, “that once we are linked, the manual controls will be used only as a backup.”

The four crew members nodded. Grant found himself folding his hands in his lap, to keep them off the controls on his console. This is for real now, he told himself. This isn’t a simulation anymore.

Dr. Wo said, “Proceed with systems linkup.”

It was eerie. Grant watched as, one by one, the crew members activated their implanted chips. Nothing seemed to happen. There were no sparks, no lights, no changes of expression on any of their faces. Maybe they stiffened a little, when the linkage first came through their nervous systems. He thought he saw a slight tic in Karlstad’s cheek. But nothing more.

He forced himself to look down at his console. All the telltales were green: all systems functioning within their design parameters.

“Begin systems checkout,” Wo said. His voice seemed weak, breathless, as if he were excited.

“Systems checkout,” Krebs repeated.

It went very smoothly; flawlessly, Grant thought, except that Quintero, monitoring the sensor array, reported that coolant on one of the infrared telescopes was low. Karlstad was assigned to check it out after separation.

“It might be a leak,” Krebs warned.

“More likely it merely was not filled properly to begin with,” said Wo.

Karlstad said, “I’ll attend to it. It’s not vital, in any case. The backup is functioning in the green.”

Grant thought that Egon was showing some real professionalism. He hates being on the mission, but as long as he’s in, he’s going to conduct himself like a pro. Good for Egon!

The crew finished its checkouts and retired to their privacy compartments for the night. Dr. Wo stayed at his console in the mission control center but allowed the other four controllers to leave for the night. Grant got up and left the cramped chamber, feeling tired and sweaty.

He argued with his conscience about going down to see Sheena. No, he decided. She’ll still be flared up over the burned-out electrode. Still associating me with pain and betrayal. The image of her rearing up in fury, fangs bared, made Grant’s stomach twist. Better to let her cool off for a while, he convinced himself. I’ll see her tomorrow night—or maybe after the ship’s gone.

The entire next day was spent slowly ratcheting up the pressure inside the sub. Free to inspect the ship’s schematics from his console in the control center, Grant saw that it was built of four separate hulls, nested inside one another, with high-pressure liquid between each of the hulls.

That’s why it looks so small inside, he realized. The section where the crew worked and lived was only a tiny part of the submersible’s total volume.

The reason for immersing the crew was to allow them to withstand the immense pressure of the Jovian ocean. The higher the pressure that the crew could take, the deeper the submersible could go into the Jovian ocean. So, under Wo’s watchful eyes, the pressure of the perfluorocarbon mixture in the crew’s space was gradually increased.

With all his lights green, Grant spent the time watching the crew on the wallscreen display. Lane looked a little apprehensive, he thought, although that might have been merely a projection of his own tension. Zeb was checking out the computer programs that digested the sensors’ inputs. He looked as calm and at ease as always, methodical, capable. The only difference that Grant could see was that Muzorawa’s trim beard was gone.

Patti Buono, at the medical console, peered fixedly at her readouts. “Any discomfort?” she called out again and again. Karlstad complained of a headache. Pascal said she felt a tightness in her chest.

“Psychosomatic,” Buono proclaimed. “The monitors show blood pressure, heart rate, all your physical readings are well within normal range.”

Pascal, looking strangely gnomish without a wig covering her bald dome, turned to look into the camera. “And just what is normal range under immersion?” she asked, her voice a deep baritone.

Krebs snapped, “Stop this bickering.”

Pascal shook her head but said nothing.

When the pressure reached 90 percent of the design goal, Krebs said, “Hold it there for one hour. Give them a chance to adjust.”

Wo agreed, “We will hold at ninety percent for one hour.”

The next morning Buono asked each crew member how they had slept. The worst impact of the full pressurization, apparently, was that O’Hara suffered a slight nose bleed and Muzorawa—of all people-reported he had experienced a nightmare.

Buono had no interest in Zeb’s dream; she concerned herself only with the crew’s physical condition. After a careful check of her medical sensors, she pronounced the crew fully fit for duty.

“In that case,” Krebs announced, “we are ready to begin separation sequence.”

“Wait,” said Dr. Wo, raising one hand, palm out, fingers splayed. “This is the proper moment to name the ship.”

“Name it?” Krebs stared into the camera. Grant could not tell from her frowning expression whether she was perplexed or irritated.

“Yes,” Wo replied, perfectly serious. “On the first mission the ship had no proper name. That was unfortunate. The ship should have a name of its own, a name that will be propitious.”

Krebs’s frown soured. Grant could see that she was annoyed with the director’s sudden burst of Chinese superstition.

Unperturbed, Dr. Wo announced, “The name of this vessel will be Zheng He.”

No one said a word. They’re all puzzled, Grant thought. What in the world does “Zheng He” mean?

At last Krebs said, “Very well. Zheng He is ready for the separation sequence.”

“Proceed,” said Wo.

Grant felt a tightening in his chest. The ship’s disconnecting from the station, going out on its own. They’ll be heading down into Jupiter’s clouds and then deeper, into the ocean. If they get into trouble we won’t be able to help them. They’ll be on their own.

The separation sequence was automated. Grant could not hear the latches releasing or the connectors unsealing themselves. He watched the wallscreen, with quick glances at his console board to make certain all the propulsion and power systems were functioning properly. Zheng He disconnected from the access tube and used the station’s magnetic shield to push it free of the great toroidal mass of Research Station Gold.

Grant almost smiled. That magnetic screen was intended to repel energetic subatomic particles that the Jovian magnetosphere sometimes spat out during a magnetic storm. Now it was pushing a somewhat larger “particle,” Zheng He, away from the station’s hull.

The submersible and the station remained side by side, separated by a mere kilometer, for two orbits of Jupiter, slightly more than six hours. Grant watched the wallscreen that showed the sub, a tiny metallic lenticular shape against the gigantic, overwhelming background of Jupiter’s tumultuous, turbulent cloud deck. The crew rechecked all the ship’s systems. Then Krebs reported they were ready for entry into the Jovian atmosphere.

“Insertion burn,” Krebs ordered.

Grant saw a tiny flicker of light at one side of the saucer. For a heart-stopping moment he thought the insertion rockets had failed. Zheng He seemed to remain alongside them, hovering helplessly. But within a few eyeblinks he could see that it was indeed moving away, faster now, allowing Jupiter’s powerful gravity to pull them along, down into those swirling clouds.

Dr. Wo said something aloud, in Chinese.

“Good luck,” said Frankovich, his voice slightly husky.

“Safe journey,” Kayla Ukara called to the departing crew.

Grant licked his lips. His throat was suddenly dry. Then he found his voice and said, “Godspeed.”

REVELATION

All five of the controllers watched Zheng He disappear into the clouds of Jupiter. For several minutes Grant simply stared at the wallscreen showing the planet’s colorful cloud deck. The ship had gone. It was as if it had never existed.

But my friends are in that submersible, Grant said to himself. They’re going down through those clouds right now, while I sit here with nothing to do but watch over this dumb console. If anything happens to them, I’ll be powerless to help them.

“Status reports,” Dr. Wo called out, his rasping voice sharper than usual. “Life support?”

“Functioning within nominal limits,” replied Frankovich.

“Structural integrity?”

Nacho Quintero answered, “No problems.”

The medical monitors and sensor systems were all showing completely normal performance. Even the troublesome infrared telescope’s coolant level was back to normal. When Wo asked for the power systems, Grant swiftly scanned his monitor.

“Power all green,” he reported.

Wo swiveled his gaze across the cramped, stuffy compartment, from one controller to another, and then looked up at the wallscreen. It still showed nothing but Jupiter’s endless clouds.

“Should we call them?” Patti Buono wondered aloud. “Make voice contact?”

“They are due to report in three minutes,” Wo pointed out, gesturing to the mission schedule timeline displayed on his main console screen.

The time ticked by so slowly that Grant thought his console clock might have stopped. Not a word was spoken in the control center. No sound at all except the electrical hum of the monitors and the distant whisper of the air circulation fans. Wo seemed to turn into a block of wood, a statue, unmoving, unblinking. Grant wondered if the man was even breathing. Sweat beaded his own upper lip and brow; he felt it trickling along his ribs.

“Control, this is Zheng He.” Krebs’s voice shattered the silence.

“I hear you,” Wo said, as calmly as if she were sitting next to him.

“All systems functioning normally. No problems.”

“Good,” said Wo, with a satisfied nod of his head.

“We are preparing for the descent. Communications blackout will prevent further”—she seemed to search for a word—“further communications.”

“I understand,” Wo replied. “We will track your beacon as long as possible.”

The sub actually carried two beacons, Grant knew: a long-wave radio transmitter and an infrared communications laser. Both would be absorbed by Jupiter’s deep, turbulent atmosphere, swallowed up in the raging storms and lightning strokes that awaited Zheng He’s crew. By plotting the signal strength and dispersion of the beacons, though, Grant and the other scooters aboard the station could learn more about the dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere.

Even if it kills the crew, Grant heard a sardonic voice in his head whisper.

The submersible also carried half a dozen “torpedoes”: small, self-propelled automated capsules that could be fired from the sub to pop up to the top of the cloud deck and broadcast a prerecorded message.

None of the controllers left their consoles as long as the submersible maintained communications contact. But after six more hours, even the radio beacon was drowned out by the constant flicker of Jovian lightning. They would hear nothing more from Zheng He unless and until the crew popped a message-bearing capsule.

Wo pushed his wheelchair back from his console. “There is nothing more to do here,” he said, sounding tired, weak. “They are on their own now.”

He wheeled himself out of the control center. The plan was to have one person at the central console— Wo’s usual post—throughout the mission. Quintero had drawn the first four-hour shift; Grant was last.

“Let me make a quick run to the toilet,” Quintero said, squeezing his bulk past Grant’s console.

“I’ll sit in until you get back,” Grant said to Nacho’s rapidly disappearing back.

“Even Macho Nacho has to pee sometime,” Patti Buono said, trying to lighten the tension that had smothered them all.

“Don’t you?” asked Ukara, heading for the corridor right behind Quintero.

“Now that you mention it …” Buono got up and followed her.

Grant didn’t bother bringing a chair to the central console, he simply stood in front of its darkened lights and stared up at the wallscreen. Might as well turn it off, he told himself. The radio speaker built into Wo’s console hissed static that crackled every few seconds from a lightning bolt.

Quintero came back and hauled his own chair over to the central console. “Thanks, amigo. I’m okay now.”

“Good,” said Grant, suddenly realizing that his own bladder needed relief.

The nearest rest room was a dozen meters down the corridor. Grant headed for it, but saw that Dr. Wo was sitting in his powerchair near its door.

“Uh … do you need help, sir?” Grant asked.

Wo looked up at him disdainfully. “What I need—” he began in a snarl, then stopped himself. For a moment Grant didn’t know what to expect. Then, much more softly, Wo said, “Come with me, Mr. Archer.”

He followed Dr. Wo to the director’s office. As always it was overheated, uncomfortably warm. But Grant saw that the vase atop Wo’s desk was empty.

Wheeling himself behind the desk, Wo gestured Grant to sit, then said, “I understand you have run into a setback with the gorilla.”

Nodding, Grant admitted, “I’m afraid I’ve thrown away several weeks’ work.”

“Patience, Mr. Archer. Patience.”

“Checking the neural net before I put it on her would have saved me this setback,” Grant muttered.

Wo nodded. “So you must start over.”

“I suppose so.”

“Just as the crew is doing in Zheng He. We failed in our first attempt to explore the ocean, and now they are trying again.”

“Before the IAA inspectors can stop them,” Grant said.

Wo exhaled a sigh and nodded once.

“May I ask a question, sir?”

“You may ask,” said Wo.

“What does ‘Zheng He’ mean? Is it the name of a person, or what?”

The director actually smiled. “A good question. An excellent question!”

Grant waited for more.

“Zheng He was a great explorer. Commander of the Ming emperor’s navy in the fifteenth century. Fifty years before Columbus and his pitiful little boats crossed the Atlantic, Zheng He’s treasure fleets sailed all across the Indian Ocean, to Africa, Arabia, the islands of the East Indies, even to Australia.”

“I never heard about that,” Grant said.

“Great ships, ten times bigger than the Spanish caravels,” Wo continued. “Hundreds of ships! Thousands of sailors! Half the world was in China’s sway while the Europeans still believed the Earth was flat!”

“Then why—”

“But the emperor Zhu Di died, and his successor had the great ships burned. They destroyed the fleet! They forbade exploration and commerce! China turned inward and decayed. By the time the Europeans reached China’s shores, the Empire of Heaven was weak, poor, divided, easily conquered.”

He fell silent. Grant thought over what Wo had just told him, then said, “It could have been the other way around, then, couldn’t it? If they had allowed Zheng He to continue, China could have conquered Europe.”

“Easily.”

“Why did they stop?”

Wo took a deep breath and ran a weary hand over his eyes. “Zheng He was a eunuch.”

Grant felt shocked. “You mean he’d been castrated?”

“Many were, in those days. In Europe, also. Boys with sweet singing voices were castrated well into the nineteenth century, I believe.”

“Zheng He was a eunuch,” Grant repeated in a whisper.

“Most of the palace officials who promoted his fleet were eunuchs. The Confucian bureaucrats who ran the rest of the government opposed the eunuch’s position of power with the emperor.”

“Palace politics.”

“Yes,” said Wo. “Palace politics. And the losers were often executed.”

“The Confucians won?”

“Eventually. When the emperor Zhu Di died, the Confucians tightened their grip on his successor. The great treasure fleet of Zheng He was destroyed.”

“And China crumbled.”

“It took China more than five hundred years to recover. Even today China is not as rich or powerful as it could have been.”

“It was lucky for the Europeans, then.”

“Yes, very fortunate for them,” Wo grumbled.

Grant tried to lighten the mood. “But today we’re beyond all that. Asians and Europeans and Africans— we’re all working together.”

“Are we?”

“Aren’t we?”

“If your Zealots had their way, this station would be closed … destroyed just the way Zheng He’s fleet was destroyed.”

“They’re not my Zealots,” Grant retorted, as firmly as he could manage.

“I feel very close to the spirit of Zheng He,” Wo said, closing his eyes. “His spirit touches my own.”

Grant said nothing.

“In a way, I am also a eunuch. My manhood was destroyed in the accident.”

“I didn’t know,” Grant blurted.

“So I sit here, weak and helpless, while others sail into the unknown sea.”

“You’re not helpless.”

“They blame Krebs for the accident. It was really my fault. I panicked.”

“I never heard that,” said Grant.

“Krebs is too loyal to reveal it. She has taken the blame so that I could remain as director.”

“What happened?”

Wo waved a hand. “What does it matter? Now I sit here and wait for word from them.”

“They should be in the ocean by now,” Grant mused.

“Yes. And while we struggle to explore, the Confucians, the bureaucrats who have the positions of power back on Earth, are on their way here to destroy us. They fear what we are doing here. They despise us.”

“They can’t stop us. We’re doing what we came here to do.”

“I should be down there with them.”

Grant looked at the older man’s tired, dejected face. Lines of fatigue and worry and self-doubt were etched into his flesh.

“If it weren’t for you, sir,” he said, “they wouldn’t be out there exploring the ocean at all. None of us would be here.”

And he realized as he said it that he himself would probably be back on Earth, or at Farside, if it weren’t for Wo’s monomaniacal determination to find intelligent life in Jupiter’s vast ocean.

Yet, for the first time, Grant felt that he’d rather be here—even as a lowly grad student—than anywhere else. Wo’s passion has infected me, he realized.

LEVIATHAN

Weakened by its battle against the Darters, slowly starving in this barren region of the sea, Leviathan allowed the powerful currents surging out of the eternal storm to drive it farther from the towering, roaring wall of seething water and its menacing bolts of lightning.

Its wounded members flared with pain signals. Leviathan needed food, and plenty of it, to heal the flesh torn and shredded by the Darters’ teeth. Yet there was no food to be found.

At least there were no Darters in this empty part of the ocean. Leviathan doubted its members would have the strength to fight them. Food. Leviathan had to find food. Which meant it had to circle the immense storm, return to the side where the currents flowed into it and the food streamed thickly.

Riding the circling currents, drifting rather than propelling itself through the ocean, Leviathan wondered if there might be some food—any food—up higher. It was dangerous to rise too high into the cold abyss above, but Leviathan knew it would be death to remain at this depth, where no food at all was available.

Slowly, cautiously, Leviathan made its flotation members expand. The immense creature drifted higher, nearing exhaustion, nearing the moment when its members would instinctively disintegrate and begin their individual buddings, in the last desperate hope of survival by spawning offspring.

The old instincts would be of no avail now, Leviathan knew. The members could separate and reproduce themselves in the hope of uniting into renewed assemblies, but what good would that do where there was not enough food even for one? Even if a few individual members survived temporarily, how could they live without the unity of all the others? Apart they were helpless. What could flagella members do without a brain to guide them? How could a brain member exist without sensor members and digestive members and—

Leviathan halted its pointless musing. There was food drifting in the currents above. The sensor members felt its faint echo vibrating through the water. The storm’s merciless flow swept the particles into its own mindless vortex before they could sift down to the comfortable level where Leviathan swam.

It would be cold up there, numbingly cold. Leviathan’s kind traced tales of foolish youngsters who rose too high in their haughty search to outdo their elders and never returned, disintegrated by the cold and their members devoured by Darters or the eerie creatures that haunted the abyss above.

But remaining at this level meant starvation. Leviathan needed enough food to allow it to circle around the great storm and return to the familiar region where the food rained down without fail.

Upward Leviathan rose, straining against the growing cold, heading toward the meager trickle of food that its sensor members had detected.

It was not food, Leviathan realized. Despite the numbing cold and the continuing pain signals from its wounded members, Leviathan’s eye parts showed that the echoes the sensors detected came not from a thin stream of food particles but from one single particle, much larger than any food it had ever known, yet puny compared to Leviathan or even to the Darters.

It was that alien thing that had been seen before. Far, far off in the distance, up so high that Leviathan dared not even try to approach it, a strange circular object was struggling through the abyss above, sending out eerie signals that made no sense whatsoever.

Is this real? Leviathan wondered. Or are we so close to disintegration that our brain is beginning to fail?

The alien continued to flash signals mindlessly into the vast ocean, totally oblivious to Leviathan drifting in the cold empty sea, far out of range of its sensing systems.

EMERGENCY

Grant left Dr. Wo’s office feeling strangely upset, conflicted, wondering where his true loyalties lay, what he was truly loyal to.

He threw himself on his bed and immediately fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. The next morning he took his shift at the mission control center and spent four hours looking at the silent consoles and dead wallscreen. Nacho Quintero relieved him, laughing about his latest prank: Last night he’d sprayed epoxy on the cafeteria chair next to his own.

“Kayla sat in it and couldn’t get out,” Quintero wheezed, laughing almost to the point of tears. “She hadda unzip her coveralls and wiggle out of ’em. You oughtta see the underwear she’s got!” He waved a big, meaty hand as if to fan himself.

As Nacho got up from his chair Grant said, “I’ll bet Kayla really loves you for that.”

Quintero’s laughter doubled, and tears actually did leak from his squeezed-shut eyes.

“You shoulda seen it! She grabbed one of Red’s frypans an’ chased me halfway down to the aquarium!”

Grant made an amused face, mumbled the right words, and left Quintero still shaking with laughter. Once outside the control center, he headed for the fluid dynamics lab. It’s time to get back to my thesis, he told himself.

He plopped down on one of the lab’s little wheeled chairs and called up the three-dimensional map he’d made of the Jovian ocean currents. But he could not concentrate on the work. Wo’s confession of guilt, his near-paranoid fears of the Zealots, the others—Zeb, Lane, and all—in the sub, probing the depths of the Jovian ocean.

And here I sit, worrying about my damnable thesis, he told himself.

Then another voice in his mind said, That’s not what’s bothering you.

I know, Grant admitted.

It was Sheena. Grant felt terrible that he had ruined Irene Pascal’s experiment and even worse that he had hurt the gorilla. It’s like betraying a child, he thought. Sheena trusted me. And now she doesn’t. How could she?

With a startled flare of recognition Grant realized that he had come to like Sheena as a friend, a two-year-old friend, perhaps, but the relationship between them had become important to him.

How can I rebuild that trust? How can I become her friend again?

He hauled himself to his feet. You can’t do it here, he said to himself. You’ve got to go down to her pen and face her.

His fists clenched at his sides, his insides fluttering, Grant strode along the main corridor toward the aquarium. He passed dozens of people, scooters and coverall-clad technicians and administrators in their neatly pressed shirts and slacks. All of them working on the studies of Jupiter’s moons, all of them intent on their careers, their lives. There’s only ten of us involved in the real work, Grant reminded himself. Eleven, counting Wo. None of these others knows what we’re doing.

Or do they? he wondered. It’s impossible to keep the deep mission totally secret. Certainly Red Devlin knows more about it than he should. Anybody can see that the submersible is gone.

Looking into the faces of the people as he passed them, Grant asked himself, Which one of them is a Zealot? Which one of them would kill us all, just to stop Wo’s crazy notion that there’s intelligent life down there? God, he’s just as fanatical as any of them!

Grant found himself in front of the closed hatch that led into the aquarium. A new graffito had been scrawled in bloodred ink next to the keypad on the bulkhead:

With a sigh of understanding, Grant tapped out the entry code. The lock clicked and Grant pushed through. The aquarium was chilly and quiet. No one here. Grant walked slowly, hesitantly, along the big tanks, seeing the gliding, gulping fish only out of the corner of his eye.

She ought to be around here someplace, Grant thought. She wouldn’t be in her pen in the middle of the day.

But Sheena was nowhere to be found. With a sudden lurch in the pit of his stomach, Grant bolted from the aquarium and sprinted for the surgical laboratory, down by the station’s infirmary.

“Sheena?” The lone nurse on duty at the infirmary glared at him. “I wouldn’t let that ape within fifty kilometers of here. Do you have any idea of what she did the last time we tried to work on her?”

Leaving the angry-faced nurse, Grant went to the first wall phone he could find out in the corridor and asked the computer where Sheena was.

“There is no listing under Sheena,” said the synthesized voice.

She doesn’t have a phone, Grant realized. That was stupid.

Not knowing what else to do, Grant asked the phone for Dr. Wo.

“The director is not to be disturbed, except for emergencies.”

“This is an emergency!” Grant snapped.

Wo’s face immediately appeared on the phone’s tiny screen. “I am unable to take your call. Leave a message.”

Grant wanted to pound the wall with frustration. “Dr. Wo, I can’t find Sheena! Nobody seems to know where she is.”

The screen went blank.

Security, Grant thought. I ought to notify security. If Sheena’s loose somewhere in the station … He hesitated. Security might panic. They might hurt her.

He made up his mind and strode through the corridor to the administrative area. I wonder who’s on security this week. Maybe it’s somebody I know.

It was a stranger sitting behind the minuscule desk of the security office. A tall, rangy man with a stubbly beard and dark tousled hair. He wore a zippered set of coveralls. Probably a technician of some sort, Grant thought.

“This may be silly,” he started, without introducing himself. “But Sheena seems to be missing and—”

“The gorilla?”

“Yes. She’s not in her—”

“This time of day she’s usually taking her afternoon exercise in the gym. Did you look there?”

Grant gaped at him. “The gym? No… I didn’t know…”

The security officer punched at his phone keypad. “Hey, Ernie, is the monkey in there with you?”

Grant couldn’t see the phone’s screen, but he heard the reply. “Sure, she’s playing with the—”

“EMERGENCY!” the overhead speaker blared. “ALL MISSION CONTROL PERSONNEL REPORT TO YOUR STATIONS IMMEDIATELY!”

The voice was Dr. Wo’s. It sounded frantic.

ACCIDENT

Grant raced to the control center, thudding into Nacho Quintero when the two of them tried to get through the narrow aisle to the consoles at the same time. Ordinarily both of them would have laughed at their clumsiness.

“Watch it, estupido,” Quintero snapped.

“Lard ass,” Grant snarled silently.

Ukara and Frankovich were already at their consoles. The wallscreens were dark, and Grant saw that all the screens were lifeless, as well. All except Wo’s: His console was lit up like a Christmas tree— almost all green lights, although there were several amber and one glaring red.

“Where is Dr. Buono?” Wo demanded, his rasping voice trembling slightly.

“Here,” the physician called as she hurried through the doorway to sit at her console.

“We received the following message from Captain Krebs,” Wo said, his fingers deftly tapping on his keyboard.

Everyone’s console lit up. Grant was grateful that the propulsion and power systems seemed to be in no trouble. Two amber lights, the rest solidly green.

Krebs’s face appeared on the wallscreen, five times bigger than life, strained, etched with anxiety. Or maybe fear, Grant thought.

“Dr. Pascal has collapsed,” Krebs reported with no preliminaries. “She complained of a chest pain and then lost coordination of her limbs. Within ten minutes she doubled over, vomited bile, and lost consciousness.”

Grant glanced at Patti Buono’s console. The physician was frowning worriedly as more and more of the lights on her board flared a sullen, glowering red.

“Transmit her complete medical readouts,” Buono called out. “The patient may be undergoing cardiac—”

“She can’t hear you,” Wo snapped. “This is a recording from a data capsule.”

“How long ago was the message recorded?”

Wo glanced at his console screen. “One hour and seventeen minutes ago.”

“Are they heading back?”

“I don’t know,” Wo answered, shaking his head slowly. “I would presume so.”

“Then there’s nothing we can do until we hear from them again.”

“You can diagnose Dr. Pascal’s condition!”

Buono bit her lips. “The data given here isn’t enough for an effective diagnosis. Besides, if we can’t communicate with them, what’s the use—”

“What has happened to Pascal?” Wo demanded.

The physician’s eyes flared angrily. But she turned back to her console lights and said, “It looks like cardiac arrest, but it might be an infarction or something else altogether. I just can’t make a definitive diagnosis on this meager data!”

“What has caused her to collapse?” Wo insisted.

“I don’t know!”

“Could it be from the high pressure they are exposed to?”

“Yes,” Buono said. It sounded almost desperate to Grant. “Or it could have nothing to do with the pressure.”

“Pah!” Wo smacked his hands on his emaciated thighs in frustration.

“Life-support systems are all in the green,” Frankovich reported, trying to relieve the tension. “At least, they were when Krebs fired off the data capsule.”

“What of it?” Wo snapped. “If Pascal is incapacitated, we must learn why.”

Incapacitated? Grant thought. What a bloodless way of putting it. Irene could be dead, for God’s sake.

A yellow light started to blink on Wo’s console: the communications indicator. He banged it with a heavy fist.

The wallscreen image immediately changed. It was Krebs again, but the picture was grainy, streaked with interference. But it was a real-time image; the submersible was in contact with the station again.

“We are forced to return to the station,” she said. “Please acknowledge.”

“Acknowledged,” Wo said, almost in a snarl.

“What is Dr. Pascal’s condition?” Buono asked.

Krebs blinked at the camera. “She is unconscious. We have placed her in her berth and put a breathing mask on her, to force extra perfluorocarbon into her lungs.”

Buono was working her keyboard swiftly, fingers almost a blur. Each of the crew had medical sensors fixed to their skin. Grant saw what he thought was an EKG trace on Buono’s console screen, but the green wormline tracing Irene’s heartbeat looked weak, irregular, to him.

“Put pressure cuffs on her legs and arms,” Buono ordered. “Keep the blood in her torso and head.”

There was a slight but noticeable delay in Krebs’s answer. Grant realized that Zheng He was still deep below the cloud deck.

“There are no pressure cuffs in the medical stores,” Krebs said.

Buono muttered something under her breath.

Grant leaned toward Frankovich and asked, “Is Irene going to die?”

Frankovich shrugged elaborately, said nothing.

Grant tried to look past Krebs’s dour, grim face to see the rest of the crew, but the camera was set at an angle that did not show them.

“Patti,” he called to the physician, “should you check on the monitors for the rest of the crew?”

Buono shot him a venomous glance. “And what good would that do?”

Grant had to admit she was right. There was nothing they could do to help the crew, not until they returned to the station.

“It’s all being recorded,” Buono added in a softer tone.

“Yeah, okay,” Grant said.

After more than six hours of communicating with Krebs, Wo told Grant, Quintero, and Ukara that they could leave the control center.

“But you are to consider yourselves on standby alert,” the director added. “Be ready to return to duty instantly.”

Slowly, tiredly, Grant slid out of his seat. Quintero sprang up, quick and lithe despite his bulk.

“Do you want me to bring you a tray?” Grant asked Frankovich.

“I’m not hungry,” he said.

“You’re going to be here for a long time,” Grant pointed out. “I’ll bring some sandwiches and something to drink.”

Frankovich conceded with a nod. “Maybe some fruit, too.”

“Right.” Grant started for the door.

“And remember,” Wo said sharply, “you are to discuss this incident with no one. No one! Understand me?”

The three of them nodded.

Grant headed for the cafeteria. He saw that it was early for dinner, yet a fair number of people were heading the same way he was. The line at the sandwich counter was short, though, and in quick order Grant filled his tray.

“Why so glum, chum?”

It was Tamiko Hideshi, grinning at him. It took Grant a moment to realize that, to all the hundreds of other people in the station, this was a perfectly normal workday. Nothing unusual was happening in their lives. Things were going along as always. They weren’t worried about a friend who might be dying in a ship beneath the clouds of Jupiter.

“Hi, Tami,” he said.

Nodding at his heavily laden tray, Hideshi said, “For a guy who’s stoking up for a picnic, you look awfully unhappy. What’s up with you?”

Grant shook his head. “I’ve got to get back to the control center.”

“The picnic’s in there?”

He stepped past her, offering over his shoulder, “It’s no picnic, believe me.”

RETURN

Even though he had been relieved of duty, Grant stayed in the control center, at his console. Under Krebs’s command, Zheng He rose through Jupiter’s turbulent atmosphere, a saucer-shaped aircraft instead of a submersible. Once above the clouds, Krebs lit the ship’s plasma rockets and Zheng He established itself in orbit, a spacecraft once again.

Buono never left her console. All the indicators from Pascal’s medical sensors showed that her condition was slowly deteriorating. It’s a race against time, Grant thought, to get her here where she can get proper medical care before she dies.

It took several orbits around the gigantic planet, many tense hours, before Zheng He was in position to start re-docking maneuvers. Krebs handled the tricky pas de deux flawlessly, and Grant thought he could feel the thump of the ship’s airlock connecting with the station’s access tube. It was nonsense and he knew it, but still he thought he caught a hint of a vibration down in his guts, a visceral affirmation that the crew had returned safely.

They loped down the main corridor, all pretense of secrecy forgotten, in their hurry to reach the access tunnel. Wo, in his powered wheelchair, scattered startled people like a bowling ball rolling through sentient pins capable of getting out of its way—just barely.

Despite himself, Grant grinned at the shouted curses and yells of anger that echoed along the corridor as he and the others sprinted after Wo’s speeding powerchair.

Wo was yelling into the chair’s built-in phone as he careened along the corridor. He was calling someone. Grant could make out the words “… security” and “… seal off the area …” Apparently the director wanted to make certain there were no gawkers at the access tunnel when they brought out the ship’s crew.

They skidded to a stop at the tunnel’s entry hatch. Sure enough, two burly security guards were standing there. And there were two more at the airlock hatch.

“You two get up to the entry area,” Wo commanded. “Clear the entire section of corridor between here and the infirmary.”

They hustled up the tunnel, leaving the five controllers and Dr. Wo facing the sealed airlock hatch.

“I’ve got to get in there,” Buono said, pushing herself up beside Wo in his chair. “The sooner—”

“You can’t go through,” the director said. “They’re in high-pressure fluid. You’re not equipped to breathe it.”

Buono’s jaw sagged open. “I’d forgotten …”

“They must be depressurized,” Wo went on. “The procedure will take several hours.”

“How will that affect Irene’s condition?” Ukara asked urgently.

Wo shrugged his heavy shoulders. “Who knows?”

“We know one thing,” Buono said gloomily. ‘The longer it takes to get her into the infirmary, the worse her chances will be.”

Pascal was the first one out of the hatch. Under Wo’s orders, telephoned into the pressurized airlock, Karlstad and Muzorawa placed the unconscious woman in the airlock and slowly pumped out the perfluorocarbon liquid. They followed the preplanned procedure exactly, despite the urgency; it took the better part of an hour for her lungs to drain.

Patti Buono fidgeted nervously every instant of the wait. Grant saw that even Wo looked tense, almost frightened, his eyes darting back and forth like a trapped animal’s.

Once Krebs told them that the airlock was down to normal air pressure, Quintero swung the heavy hatch open. Irene Pascal lay limp and still, on her side, her electrode-studded legs folded to fit the cramped area of the airlock floor. Her skinsuited body looked cold and still dripped oily liquid. Grant could not tell if she was breathing.

Ukara leaped past the startled Quintero into the airlock and sank to her knees beside the prostrate body.

“She’s not breathing!” Kayla cried.

Patti Buono slapped an oxygen mask over the prostrate woman’s face. “Quick, help me carry her to the infirmary. Quickly!”

Quintero reached for Pascal, but Ukara pushed him away. “No!” she snapped. “Let me do it.”

She grasped the unconscious Pascal under the shoulders while Grant squeezed into the airlock and picked up her feet. Together they ran past the guards and down the corridor toward the infirmary. The corridor was completely empty except for them and Buono, her moccasins thumping on the thin carpeting as she tried to keep pace. Grant saw another trio of uniformed guards pacing up and down a few meters beyond the infirmary’s entrance.

And Sheena was knuckle-walking alongside them. What are they doing with her? Grant wondered as, puffing from the exertion, he helped Ukara carry Pascal’s limp body into the infirmary. A quartet of medics was already there. Buono pounded in behind them and immediately began shouting orders. Grant and Kayla were shooed away, back into the corridor, and the infirmary door slid firmly shut.

Wo was wheeling up the corridor, with Frankovich puffing along beside him. The director impatiently yanked open the infirmary door and rolled inside. Grant could see the team of green-gowned medics huddled over Pascal’s bed.

Frankovich stopped at the door, chest visibly heaving.

“What about the rest of the crew?” Grant asked.

“They’re okay,” said Frankovich. “Decompressing and coming through the airlock one at a time.”

The guard captain showed up, ducked into the infirmary for a few moments, then came out and shut the door again. He folded his arms across his chest and stood there with a stony expression on his face, the picture of inflexible authority, obviously intending to keep anyone else from entering the infirmary until Dr. Wo gave his permission.

Grant hesitated, not knowing what to do, where to go. He saw Sheena again, farther up the corridor, accompanying the guards. If the gorilla had noticed Grant, she gave no sign of it. She just shambled along on her knuckles, a dozen paces in one direction, then back the other way, like a soldier on guard duty.

Grant asked the taciturn guard captain, “Why is Sheena here?”

Barely moving his lips, the captain said, “We use her now and then for crowd control.”

“Crowd control? There isn’t any crowd here.”

“Ah, you see? It works.”

“Sheena shouldn’t be exposed to crowds,” Grant said.

The ghost of a smile flickered across the captain’s stern, hawk-nosed face. “It’s the other way around, rather. People are frightened of the ape.”

“She wouldn’t hurt anyone!”

“They don’t know that.”

Sheena wouldn’t hurt anyone, Grant repeated to himself. Not unless someone hurt her first.

The captain said flatly, “The director wants to keep this section clear. The gorilla discourages people from coming close.”

“I see.”

“You ought to be leaving now,” said the captain.

“I want to wait here,” Ukara said.

“All of you, on your way,” the captain insisted. “There’s nothing more for you to do here.”

Ukara snarled, her hands arching into red-tipped claws. For an instant Grant thought she was going to leap at the guard captain, a coiled steel panther attacking a stolid, well-muscled buffalo.

Then Frankovich touched her arm and said, “He’s right, Kayla. Let’s go help the others.”

Ukara visibly shuddered. But she turned away from the captain and followed Frankovich down the corridor, back toward the airlock, in the direction opposite Sheena.

Still unmoved, the guard captain jabbed a finger at Grant’s chest. “You, too. On your way.”

Grant took a deep breath and walked toward the three uniformed guards patrolling with Sheena. The gorilla stopped her shuffling walk when she saw Grant approaching.

“Hello, Sheena,” he said softly. The small burned patch of hair on her skull looked a deliberate brand of shame to Grant.

The gorilla stared at him out of deep-brown, red-rimmed eyes. “Grant,” she said.

Grant held out his hand, palm up, as if begging. The guards watched with amused grins.

“Are we still friends, Sheena?”

“Grant hurt Sheena.”

“I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”

“Hurt.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sheena looked down at Grant’s hand, still outstretched toward her. At last she said, “You go now.”

“Sheena, I want to be your friend again,” Grant pleaded.

“You go!”

“But, Sheena—”

The gorilla shook her head, a gesture that involved her massive shoulders, as well. “You go!”

Defeated, Grant let his hand drop and turned his back to Sheena. As he walked away, he heard one of the guards stage-whisper, “Would you believe it? A lovers’ quarrel with an overgrown monkey!”

One by one, the crew of Zheng He came through the airlock. Karlstad and O’Hara were already out in the access tunnel, wrapped in blankets. Lane looked sad, close to tears. Egon was hollow-eyed, all his old snide cockiness wiped from his face.

The hatch sighed open and Muzorawa stepped through, sucking in big chestfuls of air, oily liquid still dripping from the tip of his nose and running in thin rivulets down his neck and arms.

Kayla Ukara threw a blanket around Zeb’s shoulders.

“Thanks,” he said, shivering visibly. “This is the first time I’ve felt warm since we went into the soup.”

“Are you all right?” Grant asked.

“Yes. I believe so. No injuries. How’s Irene?”

“Don’t know,” Frankovich answered. “We ran her down to the infirmary. Patti’s working on her.”

“What happened?” Ukara asked.

Zeb shook his head. “I’m not certain. We had entered the ocean … at least, the sensors indicated the outside environment was in the liquid state.”

“Who was on duty?”

“We all were. Krebs wanted us all connected to the ship’s systems until we were cruising at our first depth objective.”

“Irene was connected, then?”

“Yes,” said Muzorawa. “Everything seemed completely normal, but she suddenly gave a scream and doubled over, almost into a fetal posture.”

“Krebs said she’d complained of chest pains,” Frankovich pointed out.

“Yes, that’s true. She seemed to lose her physical coordination, but that isn’t unusual when the pressurization starts to rise. It happens to all of us. It’s a temporary thing.”

“Then she doubled over?” Grant asked.

“Yes. I think she had a heart attack.”

Frankovich scratched his balding pate. “She had a clean bill of health, though. No indicators of cardiovascular problems.”

Muzorawa made a helpless little shrug. “It’s different down there, my friend. Very different.”

They stayed by the airlock, talking, guessing, worrying, until the hatch slid open again and Christel Krebs stepped through, blinking uncertainly, like a burrowing animal exposed to unaccustomed light.

“Where is Pascal?” she asked, her voice sharp, cutting.

“In the infirmary,” Grant said.

“Take me there. Immediately.” And she extended her hand to Grant like a blind person asking to be led.

“WITH YOUR SHIELD …”

Grant got only as far as the security guards stationed at the access tunnel’s entrance. One of them took Krebs up the corridor, toward the infirmary, while another told the rest of them to follow him. He walked the group to the small conference room that they had been using as a wardroom.

The guard captain was already there, standing at the head of the oval conference table.

“Dr. Wo wants you to stay here until further orders,” he told them.

“What about dinner?” Frankovich bleated. “We haven’t had anything to eat all day, just about.”

The captain eyed Frankovich disdainfully. “We’ll bring in dinner trays for you a bit later on. For now, you remain here. The director’s orders. No exceptions.”

He left and closed the door firmly.

Karlstad puffed out a breath. “That’s the longest speech I’ve ever heard from old eagle-beak.”

“We’re prisoners,” said Ukara, scowling at the idea.

Grant wanted to try the door, but realized that even if it was not locked, there would be guards posted in the corridor. Maybe even Sheena was out there.

Abruptly the door slid open. Startled, Grant jumped back.

Krebs stepped into the room, stopped, peered at Grant as if she could barely see him. She was fully dressed in a turtleneck sweater and jeans.

“How is Irene?” O’Hara asked. She and the others had not been able to put on fresh clothes. They still held blankets wrapped around themselves.

Krebs turned toward the sound of her voice. “They are still trying to revive her.” She limped to the table, leaned both hands on it. “We are to remain here until Dr. Wo can talk with us.”

“Well,” said Muzorawa, clutching his blanket, “I suppose we should follow the ancient dictum: When handed a lemon, make lemonade.”

And he pulled out one of the molded plastic chairs from the table and sat down. The chair creaked slightly.

Krebs made her way to the head of the table as the others took chairs for themselves. Instead of sitting, though, she remained on her feet.

“We should use this time to review what happened,” she said, flat and cold. No room for disagreement or even discussion.

“Could we get some decent clothing, d’you think?” O’Hara asked.

“Later,” said Krebs.

She used the conference room’s smartwalls to display the mission’s data records. Grant studied the propulsion and power systems’ performance. Nothing out of the ordinary. Everything functioned normally, with smooth efficiency. No one else seemed to find any anomalies in their areas, either.

Even Pascal’s medical data showed her to be fine, until suddenly her heart rate, blood pressure, and pulse all spiked at once.

“There’s nothing to indicate the chest pain she complained of,” Frankovich noted.

Krebs snapped, “Then it was not severe enough to register on the monitoring systems.”

“Let’s look at her EEG,” Muzorawa suggested. “That loss of limb control should show something in the record.”

It did not.

O’Hara murmured, “Could it’ve been psychosomatic, do you think?”

They went through the data for hours. Two guards came in with dinner trays. Krebs ordered them to bring clothes for the three blanket-clad crew members. They ate as they talked, discussed, argued over the data.

“As far as the records are concerned,” Kayla Ukara said, frowning angrily, “nothing went wrong.”

“Not until Irene doubled over,” Muzorawa said. He looked troubled, Grant thought.

Karlstad had recovered some of his old flippancy. “Maybe she scared herself to death.”

“She’s not dead!” Ukara snapped.

“Want to bet?” Karlstad sneered. “If she was okay, Patti or maybe even Old Woeful himself would have come in here and told us.”

“They are still working on her, most likely,” said Muzorawa.

“If they’re still working on her after this many hours, she’s a goner,” Karlstad said.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” O’Hara muttered.

Karlstad shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s like the ancient Spartan mothers used to tell their sons, ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ Irene came back on hers.”

“I still think it’s a terrible thing for you to say,” O’Hara repeated.

Ukara glowered at him.

“Why? Are you afraid that my saying it will make it come true?”

“I—”

The corridor door slid open and Dr. Wo wheeled his powerchair into the room. He looked exhausted, drained. For the first time, Grant thought of the director as old.

“Dr. Pascal died without recovering consciousness,” he said, his grating, rough voice desolate, bleak. “All attempts to revive her were useless.”

Grant read the emotions on their faces: shock, loss, fear. Kayla looked angry, but beyond her grim expression Grant thought he saw tears in her eyes.

“Mr. Archer,” said Dr. Wo, “you will assume Dr. Pascal’s place in the crew. You will prepare yourself for the necessary surgery tomorrow.”

It hit Grant like a thunderclap. Me? Surgery? Stunned, Grant felt his heart flip in his chest. He looked across the table at Karlstad, smirking at him now.

“With your shield or on it,” Karlstad mouthed silently.

SURGERY

With growing nervousness, Grant smeared the depilating cream over every part of his body. They’re going to immerse me in that goo, he kept saying to himself. They’re going to drown me.

It had been difficult enough to chop the hair off his head and then shave the remainder down to bare skin. The depilating cream worked only on thin body hair or shaved stubble. Trying to reach his calves and buttocks in the cramped confines of his lavatory made him feel clumsy and stupid. He kept banging elbows and stubbing toes as he contorted his limbs. The cream was slick and slimy; when he washed it off it was furred with his hair. He wondered if it would clog the shower drain, then realized that he really didn’t give a damn.

No matter how many times he told himself that it was all right, that he’d be able to breathe the liquid PFCL just the way Lane and Zeb and all the others did, Grant felt the fear rising inside him. And resentment, growing into anger. I don’t want to do this, he thought, but Wo’s given me no choice. He points his finger and I get dunked into the drowning tank. It’s just as Egon said: Wo pulls the strings and we puppets dance. No questions, no appeals, no help.

He found himself praying as he washed the antisepticsmelling cream off his legs, his arms and armpits, his groin. He prayed for understanding, for acceptance, and above all for courage. Don’t let me make an ass of myself when it’s time to go into the immersion tank, he asked silently. Don’t let them see how scared I am.

Well, he told himself, if Egon can go through with it, I can. Still, his hands shook.

The harsh buzz of the phone startled him so badly he dropped the washcloth.

“Answer phone,” he called out.

From the lavatory, Grant couldn’t make out whose face it was on his desktop phone screen, but he heard the guard captain’s coldly insolent voice. “The surgical team is waiting for you. Should I send some of my men to fetch you?”

“I’m almost ready,” Grant answered, the heat of anger flushing his face. “I’ll get there on my own.”

“Ten minutes,” said the captain. “Otherwise I’ll have to come after you.”

Grant finished his washing as best he could, then pulled on a fresh set of coveralls and moccasins. He went to the door, hesitated. You’ve got to do it, he told himself. You have no option.

Seething with irritation and a growing, helpless apprehension, he yanked the door back and strode up the corridor toward the immersion center. As he stalked along, his anger gave way more and more to outright fear.

The Lord is my shepherd, Grant said silently. I shall not want…

By the time he reached the immersion center, he’d repeated the psalm a dozen times.

The captain and half a dozen guards were waiting for him. Sheena was there, too, hunkered down on the floor by the tank, munching on a pile of celery stalks. She hauled herself up onto all fours and knuckle-walked toward Grant.

“Hello, Sheena,” he said tightly.

“Grant swim,” the gorilla rasped. “Like fish.”

He swallowed hard.

The guard captain came up. “We’re running late.”

“Sorry,” Grant muttered, kicking off his moccasins. Then he unzipped his coveralls.

One of the guards whistled as Grant stepped out of his clothes. “Nice legs.”

The others snickered.

“Let’s get started, then,” said the captain.

“Wait a second. I want to—”

They didn’t wait. The captain pushed him toward the edge of the big tank.

“No, wait,” Grant said, his chest heaving with fright, his eyes wide, darting.

Sheena grabbed Grant’s right arm; she was careful not to snap his bones, but her powerful grip was painful all the same. Two of the guards held his left arm while a third wrapped him around the middle and still another lifted his bare feet off the deck so he couldn’t get any leverage for his wild-eyed struggles.

None of the guards said a word. Grant could hear his own desperate, panicked gasping, the scuffing of the guards’ boots on the cold metal of the floor, the hard grunts of their labored breathing.

The guard captain grimly, efficiently grasped Grant’s depilated head in both his big meaty hands and pushed his face into the tank of thick, oily liquid.

Grant squeezed his eyes shut and held his breath until his chest felt as if it would burst. He was burning inside, suffocating, drowning. The pain was unbearable. He couldn’t breathe. He dared not breathe. No matter what they had told him, he knew down at the deepest, most primitive level of his being that this was going to kill him.

Reflex overpowered his mind. Despite himself, despite the terror, he sucked in a breath. And gagged. He tried to scream, to cry out, to beg for help or mercy. His lungs filled with the icy liquid. His whole body spasmed, shuddered with the last hope of life as they pushed his naked body all the way into the tank with a final pitiless shove and he sank down, deeper and deeper.

He opened his eyes. There were lights down there. He was breathing! Coughing, choking, his body racked with uncontrollable spasms. But he was breathing. The liquid filled his lungs and he could breathe it. Just like regular air, they had told him. A lie. The perfluorocarbon liquid was cold and thick, utterly foreign, alien, slimy and horrible.

But he could breathe.

He sank toward the lights. Blinking, squinting in their glare, he saw that there were other naked hairless bodies down there waiting for him.

“Welcome to the team,” a sarcastic voice boomed in his ears, deep, slow, reverberating.

Another voice, not as loud but even more basso profundo, said, “Okay, let’s get him prepped for the surgery.”

They strapped him down onto the surgical table.

“Christ,” rumbled a disgusted voice, “you were supposed to depilate yourself.”

Grant tried to say that he’d done the best he could, but he gagged instead.

“We’ll have to shave him, goddammit.”

“Get the lawnmower.”

Someone put a mask over Grant’s face and he quickly, gratefully, slipped into unconsciousness.

When he awoke he was lying on his back in a narrow cubicle enclosed with what looked like flimsy plastic screens. The infirmary, Grant realized. Medical monitors hummed and beeped softly somewhere over his head.

I’m breathing air!

The surgery didn’t work, was his first thought. I won’t be going on the mission. He wanted to laugh, but disappointment and shame washed out his sense of relief.

His legs ached. Lifting his head took some effort, but when he did he saw that he was wearing a loose-fitting green hospital gown that reached to his mid-thighs— and his legs were studded with metal electrodes. The flesh around them was puckered, red, raw-looking.

With trembling hands Grant reached up to his neck. Plastic ports for the intravenous feeding tubes had been inserted just behind his ears. They were hardly bigger than penny coins, yet they made his skin crawl, feeling those … those things inserted into his flesh. He knew that beneath his skin the ports were plugged into his jugular veins.

“How do you feel, my friend?”

Turning slightly, Grant saw Muzorawa sitting beside his bed. Zeb was smiling slightly, tentatively, like a man hoping for good news.

“Kind of dizzy,” Grant said, letting his head sink back on the pillow.

“That is normal.” Pointing toward the monitors lining the wall, Muzorawa said, “Your condition seems fine.”

“How long have I been unconscious?”

“About six hours, I believe.”

“You’ve been sitting here all that time?”

Muzorawa chuckled softly. “No, we took turns. I only arrived here a few minutes ago. If you had awakened sooner, it would have been Lane sitting with you.”

“Oh.”

“The surgery went smoothly,” Muzorawa told him. “You were an excellent patient.”

“That’s good, I guess.”

“Better than you know.” Then Muzorawa’s smile evaporated. “While you were under, we got Irene’s autopsy report.”

“What did it show?”

“Her blood was loaded with amphetamines.” “What?” Grant snapped to a sitting position despite his dizziness.

Muzorawa spread his hands. “Apparently the stimulants affected the central nervous system more strongly in the high-pressure environment than they do normally.”

“That’s what caused her heart attack?” Grant couldn’t believe it.

Muzorawa nodded.

“But why would she take uppers?” Grant wondered.

“To control her fear, perhaps. Or to heighten her reactions, make her more alert…” His voice trailed off.

“You don’t believe that, do you?”

The fluid dynamicist shook his head. “No. I have never known Irene to take drugs of any kind. Certainly not a cocaine derivative.”

“She took something from Red Devlin,” Grant remembered.

“When?”

“Several nights before you went into immersion. Uppers, he called the pills.”

Muzorawa frowned. “I will speak with Devlin. But I can’t believe Irene would put amphetamines into her system during the mission. She knew better.”

“But maybe … if she was frightened…”

“It would be very unlike her.”

“Then how did it get into her blood?” Grant asked.

Muzorawa leaned closer to the bed. “Perhaps the amphetamines were fed to her without her knowledge.”

“Somebody slipped them into her food?”

“Or drink.”

“But who would do that?”

“A Zealot.”

“Devlin?” Grant yelped.

“Perhaps.”

“No,” Grant blurted. “It’s impossible. How would he know how it would affect Irene when she was immersed in the sub? How would anybody know?”

Very gravely, Muzorawa replied, “My friend, you assume that the Zealots are all ignorant, irrational fools. That is wrong, I think. A man might be quite well educated and still a fanatic.”

“It couldn’t be Devlin,” Grant muttered, more to himself than Muzorawa. “He’s … he’s just a glorified cook.”

“He is a very ingenious man,” said Muzorawa. “Very capable, in his own way.”

“But he’s not a Zealot. He couldn’t be!”

“Why? Do you think all the Zealots are wild-eyed hysterics? A man may smile and still be a villain, as Shakespeare pointed out.”

“But… Devlin?” Grant looked into Muzorawa’s wary, red-rimmed eyes. “Don’t you think it’s more likely to be one of us? One of the crew?”

“No, not at all. That would be like committing suicide.”

“But a Zealot wouldn’t mind dying if it accomplished his goal. Or hers.”

“I cannot believe it would be Egon or Lane.”

“What about Krebs?”

“Krebs?”

“She’s weird, Zeb. I think maybe she’s crazy.”

Muzorawa blinked slowly several times. Then he said, in a voice hushed with fear, “If it is Krebs then we are all doomed.”

TRAINING

The surgeon who implanted the biochips and electrodes in Grant was a baby-faced, sharp-tongued martinet: young, almost Grant’s own age, obviously gifted and obviously well aware of his talents, impatient with his meager staff, his enforced Public Service duties, the station facilities, and especially with his patients.

“You can’t stay in bed forever,” the surgeon snapped as soon as he yanked back the plastic screen on the side of Grant’s cubicle. Two other medics stood behind him at a respectful distance, watching. “Wo wants you up and on your feet. Now.”

With some trepidation, Grant swung his legs off the bed. They felt like lengths of lumber, as if they didn’t belong to him.

“Let go of the bed!” the surgeon demanded. “Stand on your own feet!”

Grant tried it and stood there, swaying slightly, feeling as if he would topple over any second. The surgeon glared at him, fists on his hips. Two other medics watched in silence.

“All right, now walk to me,” the surgeon said, holding out his hands.

Grant took a hesitant, clumsy step. His legs hurt; stinging pain stabbed through them.

The surgeon backed away, urging, “Come on, come on.”

Grant moved his other foot. It was like dragging a dead weight, but a dead weight that burned with pain.

“Walk, damn you!” the surgeon yelled. The medics behind him retreated, keeping their distance from their chief.

Grant forced himself to take another step, then stumbled. He grabbed for the surgeon, but all he managed to do was clutch the man’s sleeve as he crashed painfully to the floor.

“Jesus H. Christ!” the surgeon yowled. “You ripped the sleeve out of my damned shirt!”

He turned his back on Grant and stamped angrily away. His aides scampered after him, leaving Grant alone in a heap on the floor.

“Clumsiest damned idiot yet,” he heard the surgeon complaining loudly. “Goddamned clod! Wo’s going to have a stroke when he hears about this one.”

Reaching for the bed for support, Grant slowly pulled himself back to his feet and propped his rump on the edge of the mattress, panting with exertion. His legs felt as if they were on fire. I’m going to be a cripple, he said to himself. I can’t walk!

For what seemed like hours Grant sat on the infirmary bed, his legs aching, his pulse racing with the certainty that his legs had been ruined. I’ll be just like Wo, he told himself. I’ll be stuck in a powerchair for the rest of my life.

He even thought he could hear the thin humming whine of a powerchair’s electric motor. Looking up from his ruined legs, he saw Dr. Wo rolling past the mostly empty infirmary beds toward him.

Grant flinched inwardly. But as Wo approached, he felt a steely anger flow over him. His fists clenched on the bed-sheets. He sat up straighter.

He can’t scare me, Grant told himself. He can’t intimidate me. I don’t care what he says …

Wo stopped his chair a good five meters from Grant’s bed. The director looked Grant up and down, from his completely bald head to his electrode-studded, useless legs.

“I know it is difficult, at first,” the older man said calmly, almost gently. “But we have no time to spare. The IAA inspection team will be here in little more than eight days. Zheng He must be beneath the clouds before they enter this station.”

Grant shook his head sadly. “I know. I understand what you’re trying to do, but—”

“Your legs are physically strong. You can walk. It merely takes a bit of practice to reestablish the nerve pathways.”

“I can’t even stand up,” Grant said.

“Yes you can.”

“I tried…”

“Try again,” Wo said softly. “Try with me.”

The director grasped the arms of his powerchair and pushed himself to a standing position. There were no braces on his legs, Grant saw. Dr. Wo stood, trembling with the effort.

“If I can do it,” he said, perspiration breaking out on his upper lip and brow, “you can, too.”

Hardly breathing, his anger forgotten, Grant slid his legs off the bed and stood up. The legs hurt, but he stood erect.

“Good,” said Wo. “Excellent. Now walk to me.”

Grant took a tottering step. Wo did the same, holding his arms out as if to balance himself. Another step. Grant’s legs felt as if they did not belong to him. He had to consciously tell them to move. Wo stepped shakily toward him, arms extended. Grant walked, slowly, hesitantly, feeling like Lazarus rising up from death.

“Good,” Wo encouraged. “Very good.”

The director’s legs suddenly buckled. As he sagged Grant reached for him, grabbed him under the arms, and held him up.

“Thank you,” Wo gasped. “Your legs are strong enough to support the two of us.”

Grant laughed, and the director even allowed a slight chuckle to escape his lips. Grant helped the older man back into his powerchair. Wo sat gratefully, squirming a little to make himself comfortable. Grant stood in front of him, feeling a little shaky but knowing now that he would not be a cripple. Even the pain seemed lessened.

“Very good, Mr. Archer,” said Wo, looking up at Grant. “Report for intensive training immediately. Zheng He is scheduled for launch in three days.”

Wo abruptly spun the chair around and rolled out of the infirmary, leaving Grant standing there, flabbergasted, not knowing whether to be angry or grateful.

For the rest of the day, Lane, Egon, and Muzorawa took turns working with Grant, helping him to learn to walk again.

“You have to reestablish the neural paths,” Karlstad told him, as Grant hung onto his shoulder while they walked slowly along the row of beds in the infirmary. Only two of them were occupied. One of the patients was an engineer whose spacesuit had been slightly ruptured while she was out on the surface of Io. She’d breathed a whiff of sulfur dioxide before the team she was with sealed her suit The other was a station beancounter being treated for alcoholism.

“Get the nerves in your legs that connect with the spinal cord to start talking to each other again,” Karlstad coaxed as he helped Grant along. “It takes a day or so.”

“We don’t have a day or so,” Grant muttered, perspiring with the effort of trying to walk normally. “Wo wants to launch in three days.”

Karlstad shrugged. “Well, you don’t really need to be able to walk once you’re immersed in the goo.”

Lane helped him, too, although it troubled Grant to cling to her as they walked together. He closed his eyes and tried to picture Marjorie, but Lane’s softly subtle perfume kept his wife’s image a confused blur.

Muzorawa worked with him all through the night: helpful, nondemanding, patient. He was strong enough to lift Grant and carry him the length of the station’s main corridor, Grant knew, yet he offered only as much help as was needed, nothing more.

“It’s tough,” Grant said as he limped past the row of beds. He was walking on his own now; the pain he felt was almost entirely psychosomatic, the infirmary staff assured him; he was making good progress.

“Of course it’s tough,” Muzorawa sympathized, pacing slowly beside Grant. “You must learn to walk all over again. We all had to.”

“I’m pretty slow, aren’t I?”

“You are like the centipede in the old story.”

“Centipede?”

“You know, one of the animals in the forest asks the centipede how he can possibly control all those feet. And the centipede replies that it’s simple, really. But as he explains how he does it, and he begins thinking about how he controls his one hundred little feet, he becomes so confused that he can’t walk at all.”

Grant nodded. “Yes, I remember that from kindergarten.”

“We all learned to walk so early in life that we take it for granted. When we are forced to learn it all over again, we begin to see how much effort it takes.”

Grant stumbled slightly and reached for one of the empty beds for support.

“Four-legged animals don’t need to be taught how to walk,” Muzorawa said, keeping his hands at his sides as Grant straightened up and resumed pacing. “Human babies crawl on all fours quite naturally. But they must be taught how to walk on their two feet—that’s a sign that we evolved from four-legged creatures, I believe.”

“You really think so?” Grant asked.

“I am not a biologist, but, yes, I believe that is so.”

“You believe in Darwinian evolution.”

“Does that offend you?”

“No,” Grant answered truthfully. “I suppose I do, myself.”

“Suppose?” Muzorawa asked, arching a brow.

Grant swiftly changed the subject. “Wish we were in zero-gee.”

“That’s the irony of it,” said Muzorawa. “On the mission, we will be immersed and floating buoyantly. We won’t need our legs for walking. Not at all.”

“That’s pretty ironic, all right,” Grant agreed.

Lifting a hand like an ancient seer about to deliver a prophecy, Muzorawa went on, “But our legs will have a different function, a far more important function, during the mission.”

And he smiled, as if remembering something that was beautifully pleasurable.

Grant started to realize what Muzorawa was talking about when he began his hurried training sessions in the simulator.

Driven by Dr. Wo’s increasingly anxious prodding, Grant stumbled from the infirmary to the aquarium, donned a wetsuit and full-face mask, and joined Zeb, Lane, and Egon in the converted fish tank—under Krebs’s remorseless command.

If she’s a Zealot, Grant thought as he fumbled his way through the first day’s simulations, she’s hiding it very well. She acts as if this mission is her personal quest.

Maybe it is, a voice in his head answered. If she’s seeking some sort of next-world reward by destroying us all, what better way than to be in absolute command of the mission?

Very soon, though, Grant was far too busy even to think about Krebs’s true loyalties. She drove them through the simulator session mercilessly, demanding that they go through the entire simulation of disconnecting from the station and entering the Jovian atmosphere without a break.

“Stop whining! You’ll get no time for relaxation when we are diving into those clouds,” Krebs snarled at them.

They used the manual controls for the first session. When at last it was finished, Wo told them from his post in the control center, “Tomorrow you will be immersed and work in Zheng He instead of the simulator.”

“Does that mean we performed okay?” Grant asked, from inside his transparent mask.

Muzorawa gave him a grin and a thumbs-up. But Krebs said sourly, “It means that we must stick to the accelerated schedule no matter how poorly you oafs have performed.”

Immersion frightened Grant all over again, but at least this time he faced it without the security guards forcing him.

He felt cold as he stood in the access tunnel with the others, clad only in flimsy tights. We might as well be naked, Grant thought. These tights don’t conceal anything. He had to force his eyes away from O’Hara’s nipples and stare at the curved blank metal wall of the tunnel.

Muzorawa went through the airlock first, then Lane. The butterflies in Grant’s stomach felt the size of pelicans. His legs still ached; they probably would forever, if Karlstad and the others were to be believed. Accept it, Grant told himself. It’s a cross you’ll have to bear. He glanced at Karlstad and saw that Egon looked just as jumpy and frightened as he himself felt.

The airlock hatch sighed open a crack. It was his turn. Grant swung it wide enough to step into the blank, coffin-sized lock. He touched the control stud that shut the hatch and sealed it. Trying to stay calm, he prayed, “The Lord is my refuge and my strength …”

The airlock was lit only by a single fluorescent set into the ceiling and the telltale lights on the control panel. The oily liquid began to pour into the airtight chamber, chill as death. Grant gritted his teeth and pressed both palms against the cold metal walls.

“Our Father, which art in heaven …”

His feet floated off the airlock floor. His head bumped against its ceiling. Through the thick, slimy liquid he could see the glimmer of the control panel’s tiny lights, a faint row of green.

The liquid reached his armpits, his shoulders, his chin. He clamped his lips tight as the cold, clinging perfluorocarbon rose above his mouth. He was trapped in this metal coffin, freezing cold, drowning in the slick clinging alien liquid. His lungs were burning. He had to breathe. It’s all right! he raged at himself. Stop fighting it and let it happen.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Grant took a tentative breath. And gagged. His chest heaved, his entire body convulsed. Pain spasmed through him. I can’t breathe! he screamed silently.

Yet he was breathing.

Coughing, sputtering, his whole body racked with reflex spasms, Grant desperately tried to calm his mind. It begins with the mind. You know what’s happening to you; you understand the process. Relax! he raged at himself. Accept it. Take a deep breath and embrace whatever God has chosen for you to endure.

The spasms slowed, then stopped altogether. He could breathe without gagging, without coughing. He took a long, deliberate, testing breath. The perfluorocarbon still felt bitterly cold and now it was flooding his lungs, his entire body. But he could breathe it without choking. He still felt discomfort, pain actually, but he no longer felt fear.

“Are you going to stay in there all day?”

Grant hardly recognized Krebs’s voice; in his new immersed world her words sounded like the deep, booming thunder of God himself.

“I’m opening the inner hatch now,” he answered. His own voice sounded strangely low, slurred.

Grant floated through another long, narrow access tunnel, flicking its curved walls with his fingertips while he kicked his feet gently. I’m swimming, he realized. And Dr. Wo said we don’t need our legs when we’re buoyant. He was wrong.

Zheng He’s bridge seemed bigger than it had looked when Grant had watched the crew from the control center. O’Hara and Muzorawa were already there, floating easily.

“Welcome aboard,” said Lane, with a big smile. Even her voice sounded lower, sluggish, like a recording played back at a slow speed.

Grant tried to grin back at her, but he wasn’t sure he made much more than a nervous twitch of his lips.

“I believe you Christians have a ceremony of immersion,” said Muzorawa, his voice finally deep enough to match his powerful appearance.

“Baptism, yes,” said Grant.

“Some of your sects use immersion to symbolize a rebirth, do they not?”

“Born-again Christians,” Grant replied.

“I see!” said O’Hara, actually laughing in the frigid soup of the submersible’s environment. “We’ve been born again.”

Nodding, Muzorawa added, “Into a new world.”

For a moment Grant thought that they were teasing him, making fun of a kind of religion that neither of them believed in. But then he realized that they were at least accurate, if not totally serious. We have been born into a new world, he told himself. We’ve undergone a ritual of immersion in preparation for this mission.

The politicians want to stop us, he thought. The Zealots want to destroy us. But maybe we’re really doing God’s work here. Maybe we’re meant to explore Jupiter and seek out whatever’s living beneath those clouds.

The idea hit Grant with the force of a physical blow. Could this be God’s will? Part of His plan for us?

“All right, I’m here,” Karlstad announced, shattering Grant’s train of thought. “We’ve got a foursome; boot up the computer and let’s play bridge.”

O’Hara said, “We’ll not be playing bridge, Egon. We’ll be working on this bridge.”

“Too true,” Karlstad conceded.

Their bantering ended when Krebs joined them. She quickly had them at their posts, standing side by side along the bridge’s consoles, their feet anchored in the floor loops. Grant was assigned to the power and propulsion systems, just as he had been in the control center.

“Today we simulate powering up the ship’s systems, disconnecting from the station, and entering Jupiter’s cloud bank,” Krebs told them, as if they hadn’t already gone through the simulation plan themselves. “None of the ship’s systems will actually be functioning. This is a simulation only.”

Grant nodded his understanding. The station’s simulations computer would be running the show. No matter what kind of crazy emergencies Dr. Wo threw at them, it was all make-believe.

But that would change soon enough, he knew.

CONNECTED

Krebs drilled them mercilessly. All four crew members spent the whole day on the bridge, simulating the first stages of their flight into Jupiter’s ocean over and over again, until their moves became almost like reflex actions.

Standing at his console with O’Hara on one side of him and Muzorawa on the other, Grant felt that he could power up the ship’s generators and propulsion units and go through the procedures of separating from the station and insertion into the cloud bank with his eyes closed. In his sleep, even.

Still Krebs made them go through it again. It was the only part of the mission that could be simulated. No one knew what to expect once they dived through the clouds and entered the vast, turbulent ocean.

Dr. Wo changed the ship’s internal pressure time and again, increasing the pressure to its highest design value and then dropping it back again. Grant never thought that his ears could pop underwater, but they did, more than once.

“He’s trying to see if the pressure changes bother us,” Karlstad told Grant.

“They bother me,” Grant admitted. “Changing the pressure back and forth is damned uncomfortable.”

The two of them had been given a brief meal break by Krebs. Meals on Zheng He consisted of coasting over to the dispenser at the back of the bridge and plugging one of its plastic tubes into one of the intravenous ports in your neck. It made Grant shudder to do it, but it didn’t hurt at all, and it had the advantage of pumping a full meal’s worth of nutrition into your system in only a few minutes. No chewing, no digestive action; the food was already liquefied and ready to be dispersed through the body by the bloodstream.

“The Woeful One must be trying to see if the pressure changes had anything to do with Irene’s heart attack,” Karlstad said.

“I thought the amphetamines did it.”

“Under normal conditions the dose she took wouldn’t have killed her.”

“I thought it was a very high dose,” Grant said.

“Not that high … it wouldn’t have been fatal normally.”

“It would have disoriented her, wouldn’t it? Made her unfit for duty?”

Karlstad started to answer, hesitated, then asked, “Do you think she was trying to get out of—”

The dispenser’s signal bell chimed—clunked, really, in the high-pressure fluid they were breathing—and its light turned red.

“Your dinner’s finished,” Karlstad said needlessly. “Want some dessert?”

Wincing, Grant pulled the slim plastic tube from the socket in his neck. “Dessert’s included,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “No extra charge.”

“Stop your jabbering and get back to your stations,” Krebs snarled at them.

When the long, grueling simulation was at last finished, Krebs relieved only O’Hara and Karlstad. Grant and Muzorawa stayed at their posts on the bridge while the other two went to their berths. Krebs herself remained on the bridge.

Doesn’t she ever sleep? Grant asked himself.

Soon he began to wonder if Krebs was ever going to allow him to sleep. The simulations were finished, as far as he could see. They were pretending to be descending through the thickening layers of Jupiter’s atmosphere, sinking lower and lower until the atmospheric gases were compressed by the planet’s titanic gravity into the liquid state. Since they knew so little about the environment below the clouds, there was very little for them to simulate—unless Wo threw some malfunctions at them.

Instead, the hours passed by so uneventfully that Grant had to fight against boredom. Strangely, he felt no urge to yawn, as he normally would. Maybe breathing this gunk suppresses the yawn reflex, he thought.

At last Karlstad and O’Hara returned to the bridge.

“Muzorawa and Archer to your berths,” Krebs ordered needlessly. Grant was already floating toward the hatch that led to the closet-size sleeping area. Karlstad referred to it as “the catacombs.”

Then Krebs added, “When you two return, we will all link with the ship’s systems.”

Grant was too tired to care. All he wanted was his four hours of sleep. But then he caught the look on Lane’s face: She was glowing with anticipation.

Sleep did not come easily. As soon as he closed his eyes, it hit Grant all over again that he was immersed in this cold thick fluid, breathing it into his lungs, wallowing in a completely unnatural world, as out of place as a fish on a mountaintop. The fear that had been submerged while he was on the bridge among the others rose to the surface of his mind now, his chest heaved, his aching legs twitched with the barely suppressed urge to run, to get away, to find someplace safe, some refuge where he could hide and breathe real air and feel the warmth of the sun on his face.

He opened his eyes and even in the darkness of his screened-off berth he saw that he was in a metal womb, a man-made cave that was pressing in on him, closing down on all sides. And outside this crypt, beyond its metal shell, unbearable pressures were squeezing, pressing, inexorably working to crush the ship, to crush him into a bloody pulp.

Grant could feel his heart pounding frantically in his chest, sense every nerve in his body telling him to get away, to escape, to get out of this deathtrap.

He tried to pray. He tried to conjure up a mental picture of Marjorie, of their times together, of those brief moments when they shared the warmth of their bodies pressing close on a world where the sky was blue and there were trees and grass and birds singing.

Nothing worked. He was imprisoned inside this metal tomb, breathing a horrible alien slime, a billion kilometers from home, from Marjorie, from his parents, from safety. Even God had forgotten him. He was alone and forsaken.

Yet he must have drifted into sleep, because he found himself surrounded by monsters, vague dark shapes that growled and snarled and shambled after him in a world of shadows and menace. One of the shapes looked like a gorilla, only much bigger, looming over him like a mountain. Another pursued him in a powerchair, growling at him.

Grant’s eyes popped open. The growling sound was the clock, its normal alarm buzzer sounding strange, alien in the liquid. Sleep shift was over. Time to return to the bridge.

Grant slid out of the bunk; there was no room to stand except outside in the narrow common area. He bobbed gently off the deck, decided there was no point to changing the tights he’d been wearing. No point to trying to go to the toilet; the predigested pond scum they pumped into his veins produced almost no waste matter at all.

Feeling like one of the damned souls in Dante’s Hell, Grant swam through the hatch back onto the bridge.

Krebs was still there, hovering over Karlstad and O’Hara, who were at their consoles, their backs turned to him. The captain glared at Grant as if he’d somehow done something wrong. Then he realized she was looking past him. Turning slightly, he saw Zeb coming through the hatch.

Krebs stared at the two of them as if she didn’t recognize them. Her eyes flicked back and forth from Muzorawa’s face to his own.

“Returning for duty,” Muzorawa said gently.

“Ah. Dr. Muzorawa,” Krebs replied, as if seeing him for the first time. “And Mr. Archer.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Grant said.

Krebs drifted back away from them as Grant took his station between Lane and Zeb. Then she said in a commanding tone, “Now we will all connect with the ship’s systems.”

O’Hara turned from her console and nodded, smiling. Karlstad looked—Grant couldn’t decipher the expression on Egon’s face. He seemed to be trying to keep his features frozen, impassive, like a little boy pretending that he doesn’t know he’s about to be showered with Christmas presents.

Muzorawa said, “Ready to link, Captain.”

“Proceed,” she said.

Grant did what he saw the other three do: He flicked open the slim panel set into his console’s front. A set of hair-thin fiber-optic wires snaked out of the narrow compartment, floating lazily in the perfluorocarbon liquid like the coiling hair of a murderous Medusa. The end of each fiber was color-coded to match the anodized color spots on the electrodes in Grant’s legs.

Grant watched the others out of the corner of his eye as he fumbled with the devilishly thin fibers. His fingers seemed too fat and clumsy to handle them. The others were finished before he had done even one of his legs. Thankfully, the fiber ends were electrically charged to mate with specific electrodes; they would not connect with the wrong electrode; instead Grant felt a slight but very real repulsive force, like trying to put two north poles of a magnet together.

“We are waiting, Mr. Archer,” Krebs said as he finished one leg at last and started on the other.

Finally he got it done. He straightened up, feeling a little like a puppet with his legs connected to the wires. He saw that the fibers on Krebs’s stubby legs connected to a panel set into the overhead. If she’s not careful, Grant thought, she’ll get herself tangled in those wires. The thought of the captain wrapping herself in her own set of wires, struggling to get herself loose like some fat fly in a spider’s web, almost made him laugh out loud.

“You are amused, Mr. Archer?”

Grant realized he was smiling. Startled, he didn’t know what to do, how to respond to the captain’s accusative glare.

“We are all pleased that we are about to link with the ship, Captain,” said Muzorawa, beside him.

“We’re looking forward to the experience,” O’Hara chimed in.

“Indeed.” Krebs’s angry glare shifted back and forth. “And what have you to say?” she demanded, pointing at Karlstad.

“Not a word, ma’am,” Egon replied. “I’m waiting for your next order.”

Krebs mumbled something too low for Grant to make out, then said grudgingly, “Very well. Activate the linkage.

Each of them reached to the console, lifted the plastic cover plate from the switch that triggered the linkage, then clicked the switch on.

Grant expected some surge of power, a jolt of electrical energy, perhaps a thrill of euphoria or at least pleasure. Better than sex, they had told him. Instead, he felt nothing. A slight tingling in his legs, as if they were going asleep. But that passed almost before he recognized the sensation and he was left with … almost nothing.

Almost.

Grant stood there, ignoring his crewmates alongside him, and felt an odd tremor begin to pulse through his legs. Unlike anything he’d ever sensed before. No, not just along his legs. His entire body seemed to be vibrating, humming inside like a plucked string of a bass viol. He stared down at his hands. They looked steady, not shaking at all, yet inside he felt as if he were quivering like a man hit by a seizure.

He closed his eyes and realized that it wasn’t he who was vibrating, it was the fusion generator, deep in the core of the ship, reverberating with the power of transforming matter into energy, fusing atomic nuclei together to extract their hidden might, converting the blinding radiation into electrical power that raced along the ship’s wiring like blood pulsing through arteries and veins. Grant could feel the throbbing, relentless force of this man-made star buried behind layers of dense shielding as it powered the universe that was their ship. He wanted to reach out his hand and let his fingers touch that glowing hot plasma; he could virtually hear the thunder of its endless blaze.

It was like music, like a symphonic orchestra playing in his mind, in his body, along every nerve, every blood vessel. The electrical currents racing through the ship tingled like a thrillingly beautiful cadenza, endless, eternal, glorious.

The propulsion system was shut down, more’s the pity. Grant wanted to sense it, to connect with it, to feel the drive and force of raw energy hurtling out of the ship’s thruster vents, pushing them forward, onward.

Dimly he heard a voice. He ignored it. This was too much pleasure to allow anything to distract him from it. The whole ship’s electrical systems were part of him. I am the ship! Grant thought. We are one. It’s pure delight. Ecstasy! It’s like being a god.

“Are you all right?”

He forced himself to open his eyes, saw Zeb peering at him worriedly.

“I’m fine,” Grant said. And he meant it. He’d never felt so … so alive in all his life.

“It can be a powerful feeling,” O’Hara said. Grant turned his head and saw that she too looked concerned. “Don’t let it sweep you away now.”

He nodded. Yes, I’ve got to be careful. It is powerful. Overwhelming. Better than sex. Better than drugs. They were right. It’s enough to sell your soul for.

“Are we ready to return to work?” Krebs’s sour voice cut through Grant’s excitement.

“Yes, Captain,” he said sharply.

“Very well. Now we will go through the separation and ignition simulation once again.”

But this time, Grant realized, this time we’ll be connected to the ship. I’ll feel the electrical currents. I’ll power up the thrusters. I’ll move the ship with my own will.

DEPARTURE

I am the ship.

Grant had never felt so powerful and excited in his entire life. When Krebs called a halt to their simulations exercise he didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to disconnect from the ship. Let’s go on, he urged silently. Let’s power it up for real and get going. Let me feel what it’s like to dive through those clouds and into the Jovian sea.

“I said disconnect, Mr. Archer! Now!”

Krebs’s hard, demanding voice cut into him like a whip. With enormous reluctance, Grant did what the others had already done: reached to the console and clicked off his linkage to the ship’s electrical and propulsion systems.

It felt like a lobotomy. One moment he had all the power of a miniature star pulsing through him, part of him, as intimately interwoven into his consciousness as his awareness of his own identity. Then with the click of a switch it was all gone; he was a solitary weak hairless ape again, alone, isolated from the rest of the universe.

He had to blink several times before he realized that the others were unplugging the fiber-optic leads from the electrodes in their legs. Feeling a sullen resentment rising within him, Grant yanked the fibers from his legs one by one. The loose ends floated lightly, bobbing gently in the perfluorocarbon as if beckoning to him. When he was finished he activated the spring that pulled the fibers back into their slim storage rack and snapped shut the door that covered them.

“The simulation is completed,” Krebs said. “Now we all sleep. When we return to duty, no more simulations. The mission begins in five hours and fourteen minutes.”

The four crew members drifted back toward the catacombs and their coffin-sized berths. Krebs remained on the bridge, floating up near the overhead, fitting a communications headset over her bald skull.

“Doesn’t she ever sleep?” Karlstad whispered.

Muzorawa whispered back, “She must.”

“But when?”

The captain was already deep in discussion, presumably with Dr. Wo.

“Well, now,” O’Hara said to Grant, with a smile that looked a bit forced, “how did you like being linked?”

Grant realized he was breathless. It took him several tries to make his voice work. “Overpowering,” he said at last.

“Yes, ’tis that, isn’t it?”

Karlstad butted in, “When do we link with each other like that?” He leered at O’Hara. “That’s what I’m looking forward to.”

She frowned at him. Muzorawa said, serious as usual, “You must be wary of being overwhelmed by the experience. It is extremely powerful, but you must not allow it to overcome your judgment.”

“That’s right,” O’Hara said. “We’re here to run the ship, not to invent some new form of depravity.”

Karlstad smirked. “All work and no play isn’t good for you.”

Muzorawa floated between him and O’Hara. “Egon, the first mission was wrecked, possibly because one of its crew allowed the sensations of linking with the ship to overwhelm his judgment.”

“Or her judgment,” Karlstad said, nodding toward Krebs, still floating in the bridge, deep in discussion with Dr. Wo.

There was absolutely no privacy in the catacombs: nothing but a bare, confined common area so small and tight that the four of them could hardly fit into it together. Their shelflike berths took up one side of it, the hatch to the bridge the other.

“I’ve got to get into a fresh outfit,” O’Hara announced, and she began to strip off her tights.

Grant couldn’t help staring. Karlstad grinned wolfishly and asked, “Do you need any help, Lane?”

“Grow up, won’t you!”

He shrugged and began taking off his own tights.

“Yes, we should put on clean clothes,” Muzorawa agreed.

Grant was surprised that he felt no physical arousal at the sight of O’Hara’s naked body. Yet his breath quickened, his mind raced. She was slim, with small breasts and slender hips, totally hairless, but still this was a naked woman with smooth creamy skin and beautiful green eyes less than an arm’s length from him. He felt embarrassed more than anything else, especially when Zeb and Egon peeled off their tights. Neither of them was aroused, either, Grant saw.

Without a word he ducked into his bunk, pulled the privacy screen shut, and started wriggling out of his own tights. The fresh clothes were in a locker out in the common area, he knew. So was the recycler for the old tights. He decided to wait until the others were in their berths and asleep before venturing out again.

You’re being silly, he told himself. Silly and prudish. There’s nothing sinful about any of this. Your sex drive has been practically eliminated by the surgery. It’s like looking at a painting of a nude.

Yes, said another voice in his mind. But you enjoyed looking at her. The most important sex organ in the human body is the brain, and you took pleasure in seeing her naked body. That’s sinful.

He heard O’Hara slither into the berth next to his; nothing between them but a thin plastic partition. He sensed her stretching out on the bunk, still naked, absolutely hairless. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to drive the image out of his mind.

“What do you think of her?” It was Karlstad’s voice, whispering outside his berth.

“The captain?” Muzorawa’s deeper voice replied.

“Right.”

“What about her?”

“Do you think she’s ever going to sleep?”

“Yes, of course. She takes her responsibilities very seriously.”

Grant remembered his earlier conversation with Zeb, when he’d brought up the possibility that Krebs might be a suicidal Zealot.

Karlstad asked, “Have you noticed the way she gives you the fish-eye? As if she doesn’t recognize you.”

“Yes, it is strange,” Muzorawa agreed.

“Gives me the creeps.”

“As long as she does her job properly we have nothing to complain about.”

“Maybe you don’t,” Karlstad replied, still whispering, “but I don’t like it, not one microbit. She’s weird. I think she’s crazy.”

For several heartbeats Muzorawa said nothing. At last he replied, “Get some sleep. We’re going to need all our energy in about five hours.”

“Engage the linkage,” commanded Krebs.

Grant clicked the switch that energized the fiberoptic links to the chips implanted in his legs. He closed his eyes as he felt the thrumming power of the ship’s fusion generator vibrating within him, warming him, filling him with sensations he had never felt before linkage. He had a blazing man-made star within him. The electricity it generated was pulsing through him, the ship’s wiring was his own nervous system, the ship’s conduits were his own arteries and veins.

He could sense the vibrations of the life-support fans circulating the perfluorocarbon liquid through the ship’s living space; each light and display screen on the bridge’s consoles was like an extension of his fingers. He felt the ship’s sensors powering up, peering into the space outside the hull like searchlights from an ancient lighthouse sweeping a stormy seacoast.

It took a concentrated effort of will to open his eyes and recognize that he was standing in front of his console on the bridge, feet anchored in the floor loops, flanked by Muzorawa and O’Hara, Karlstad on O’Hara’s other side, Krebs floating behind him.

O’Hara was at the communications console, with its multiple touchscreens staring at her like the eyes of a spider. Wo’s chunky, intense face filled the central display screen.

“… automated separation sequence begins in fifteen seconds,” the director was saying.

“Fifteen seconds,” Krebs repeated, her voice flat, unemotional. If separating from the station and launching Zheng He into Jupiter’s clouds excited her, she hid it completely.

Grant licked his lips. The computer’s synthesized voice began the final minute of countdown.

“Power and propulsion?” Krebs asked needlessly. She could see Grant’s screens as easily as he could himself.

“Power and propulsion all green,” he said.

“Life support?”

“In the green,” said Karlstad.

“Communications?”

“Communications normal,” O’Hara replied.

“Sensors?”

“All sensors on and functioning,” reported Muzorawa.

“We are ready for separation and launch,” Krebs said to Wo’s image.

Precisely at that moment the computer’s voice announced, “Automated separation sequence initiated. Separation in thirty seconds … twenty-nine …”

The seconds stretched endlessly. Grant stood there, aware that he was breathing a cold, slimy, oxygenated liquid but no longer caring about that. The ship was coming alive, electrical currents racing through all its systems now, the propulsion units starting up, pumps beginning to stir, the electrons in the powerful superconducting coils singing their eternal hymn of perpetual motion, ceaseless devotion to their task.

“Full internal power,” Krebs said.

“Ten seconds,” announced the computer.

Grant could feel the magnetohydrodynamic channels stirring into life, preparing to take the star-hot plasma exhaust from the fusion generator and accelerate it through the ship’s thruster tubes. Along his nerves Grant felt the trembling thrill of anticipation.

The clamps and bolts that held Zheng He to the station opened like a dozen faces breaking into smiles. Grant broke into a smile himself. We’re free, he knew. We’re on our own now.

“Ignition.”

The plasma thrusters started softly, gently. Grant felt their strength as if it were his own arms reaching out and lifting a heavy burden. As the thrust built up, his strength multiplied, tripled, quadrupled. He was stronger than any mere human could ever be, stronger than Sheena, stronger than a whole tribe of gorillas, he was lifting the entire ship, hurling it with fine purposeful power and precision, flinging it away from the station and down into the waiting clouds of Jupiter.

Better than sex? This was better than life! I can rev up the thrusters to full power and blast this ship past Jupiter in an eyeblink. I can push us out to the stars! To the farthest edge of the universe! Grant knew he had all the power of the universe throbbing inside him, superhuman energy, the strength and power of a god.

That surge of arrogance snapped him back to reality. Pride goeth before a fall, he heard his father’s voice in his mind. All this power, all this sensation of godlike strength, is a trap, a snare, a temptation to the kind of hubris that has hurled many a good man into eternal damnation. Vanity, vanity, all is vanity …

He stood trembling before his console, trying to regain control of himself, battling to keep the enormously seductive power of this illusion from deceiving him. It’s an electronic mirage, he told himself. You are nothing more than a man who is linked electronically to the machinery of this ship. Control yourself.

Still, he trembled.

Is this what wrecked the first mission? Grant asked himself. Is this linkage so overwhelming that someone ran amok with the ship’s systems? He had touched a place in his own mind where he had wanted to run wild with the plasma thrusters, tear away all restraints, push full throttle just for the sheer joy of power. Yes, he realized now. And if I’d done that, I would have killed us all.

Still he trembled, but now it was with the understanding of the enormous dangers that dwelled within his own mind, his own soul. It’s the age-old war, he realized, the never-ending struggle between responsibility and pleasure, between good and evil. This ship is simply a new battlefield in that eternal war. As long as we’re human, the war goes on.

But for an instant, Grant knew, he had been more than human. He still was. He still felt the pulsing power of the ship’s generator and plasma thrusters, they were still a part of him.

I am the ship.

Power requkes responsibility, he told himself. Extreme power requkes extreme care.