Jupiter Project

Chapter 16

It took two more days to outfit the Sagan for an extra-long flight. I spent most of the time working with Mr. Jablons on the Faraday cups. The biologists were concentrating on the spores themselves so much, nobody had taken the time to figure out how we found them in the first place.

After some tinkering, we figured out why the cup on Satellite Seventeen had cleared up after it had left the region above the poles. It turned out that the spores had their charge bled away after a few hours of contact with the grid and plate. Simple electrical conduction. When their charge vanished they were no longer attracted to the grid, so they gradually drifted out and away into space.

But the biologists had the limelight. Everybody wanted details and everybody had a half-baked theory. Dr. Kadin held a seminar that packed the auditorium. Earth kept the laser comm net saturated with questions, and they televised Dr. Kadin’s talk for prime-time showing Earthside.

In the question session afterward, somebody asked why the older cup I had replaced hadn’t shorted out, too. I had to admit I didn’t know. Maybe the cups didn’t have exactly identical electrical characteristics. Or maybe only a few of the storms carried spores. I had no idea. As the scientists say when they want to wriggle out from under, that aspect of the problem will be left for future research.

I trained for my job. We were taking along a shuttlecraft that had been in storage. It was outfitted with better detectors and special equipment, hydraulics and electron-beam cutters and omnisensors. We would carry it out on the hull of the Sagan. I was to be the pilot. I named it Roadhog. Sentimental, I guess.

There was a big, noisy crowd saying good-bye at the main lock. Somebody was taking 3D scans for Earthside media hype. I said good-bye solemnly to my mother and waved at friends. Zak thumped me on the back, grinning.

“Hold the fort.” I said. I grabbed Jenny and gave her a long kiss that unfocused her eyes. I shook hands in a manly, exaggerated way with Zak. Then I lugged my gear out to the Sagan.

It took three days to reach J-11. We maneuvered into a parallel orbit thirty klicks away from it and the scientists got busy peering at it in the optical, infrared, UV, and beyond. J-11 was an unappetizing lump of rock, a flying mountain. Jagged peaks caught the sunlight and pooled the low spots in shadow. The whole thing was barely thirty klicks across at its longest dimension. There were no snowdrifts or clumps of ice clinging in dark corners, just cratered granite-gray rock. That suggested it had not condensed out of the primordial soup around Jupiter. It was probably a captured asteroid, tugged into orbit by tidal forces long ago.

We saw no swarms. Nothing on J-11 moved. So the next step was a close reconnaissance—and I got to go.

I suited up and went out onto the hull to check out Roadhog. Maybe it should have been Roadhog II, but that would’ve been pretentious. I clumped around in magnetic boots. Commander Aarons came out to look things over. I repped and verified all systems. He waved to the exploration party of eight that I was to ferry over. They climbed on and belted in.

This was where Roadhog was essential. We couldn’t risk taking the Sagan in close to J-11; any small error in jockeying around could smash the ship into a peak. In the Roadhog a small party could slip down into the fissures and get a good look if they needed to.

Lt. Sharma was in charge. His orders were to nose around and report back. The civilian head of the group was my father, one of his jobs, I was sure, would be keeping an eye on me. After all, I was the kid who disobeyed direct orders and stole a shuttle.

We took our time crossing the thirty kilometers. Jenny and I had fitted extra seats on Roadhog back at the Can and now the exploration party was belted into them behind me. What with equipment lashed to every available pipe and strut, we looked like a gypsy wagon.

Jupiter hung off to the left. This far out it didn’t fill the sky any more; its orange bands were creamy and smooth, with no detail, and Ganymede was a frozen silver dot at its side. The scenery hadn’t really changed that much, considering that we were twenty-two million kilometers from the Can.

J-11 was tumbling slightly and I had to correct several times before we were hanging steady over one spot on its surface. I nudged us in slowly, watching the shadows below shift as the tiny moon rotated in the sunlight.

Nobody said anything; most of them were busy taking pictures and watching their meters. After I fixed our relative position there wasn’t much to do; J-11’s gravity was so weak it would take years to draw us in.

After several minutes I said, “Dad?”

“Yes. son?”

“See that crater down there? The big one, between the twin peaks?”

“Ummmm, yes. What about it?”

“For a minute there I thought I saw a bright flash, like metal reflecting the sun, right down at the bottom.”

“I can’t see the bottom.”

“It’s in shadow now. The rock must be dark there, anyway; I couldn’t see anything even when the sunlight was slanting down into it.”

“Let’s go in closer,” one of the other men said. I looked at Lt. Sharma, who was sitting next to me. “Go ahead,” he said.

I nudged the Roadhog nearer. The crater grew. I was busy watching our trajectory and didn’t look up until someone yelled, “Hey! There’s a hole in it.”

He was right. The “crater” was a bottomless pit, several miles across. Where you would expect to see a flat floor there was nothing, just blackness. Utter, eerie blackness.

There was a lot of chatter over suit radio. I tuned it out and concentrated on my piloting. Every few minutes Lt. Sharma would confer with the Commander and obtain permission to go in closer. One of the men behind me was running a portable television camera so they could follow what was happening back on the Sagan.

The hole remained black. We went in closer. One kilometer, then a half, then four hundred yards. One of the scientists checked the radiation level and found nothing more than the usual background count. I aimed the Roadhog’s headlights off to the side and got back a few sparkling reflections from the distant walls. The sides of the pit seemed to be fused and melted here and there.

Lieutenant Sharma asked for permission to go into the pit. The Commander argued a little and then granted it.

I took her down. The yawning crater swallowed us in shadow.

The radio was quiet now. No one had anything more to say. Just before we went in I looked to the side and saw the rim of the crater rise up. Then it was blotted out by the edge of the pit. Behind us the Sagan jockeyed to stay within our line of sight; otherwise, we would lose radio contact.

There still wasn’t much to see. The pit walls were far away and most of the rock could have passed for coal; it was dark.

“Lieutenant! I am registering an increased magnetic field.” one of the men behind me said.

“What’s that?” my father asked, pointing. I turned the craft to bring the headlights toward the walls of the pit. A dim coppery ribbon lined the wall. I rotated the Roadhog. The band formed a thin ring completely around the pit. We were passing through the center of the ring.

“What is it?”

“Looks like metal.”

“Impossible.”

“Quiet,” said Lieutenant Sharma, and spoke to the Commander.

I didn’t slacken our speed. Another ring came into view. As we passed through it I thought it looked a little closer to the shuttle. I wondered how such a natural formation could come about. Something to do with the evolution of the asteroid belt? Veins of metal? The rings were at least half a kilometer in diameter, larger than the diameter of the Can.

We came to another. And another. They were getting closer together. Smaller, too. The pit was narrowing.

“Something is reflecting light ahead,” Lieutenant Sharma said, breaking a long silence. His voice was a dry rasp.

I slowed the shuttle. It was hard to make out any detail. We coasted through a chain of rings, each a little smaller than the last. I was beginning to get a creepy feeling.

Something metallic lay ahead; it looked like the same mottled coppery stuff as in the rings. I brought us up to it slowly, ignoring the radio conversations. It wasn’t until we were quite close that I saw that the pit had ended; the metal object was sitting on a wall of dark rock.

We hung about a hundred meters away from the wall. The coppery object was a hemisphere without any visible markings, about ten meters across.

I glanced at Lieutenant Sharma. He was looking off to the side, squinting. He pointed toward the walls of the pit. “That way,” he said.

I was more interested in the metal dome, but I followed orders. We coasted along parallel to the pit floor. Then I saw a blotch ahead that resolved into a rectangle of white.

“Hey!” someone said.

Suddenly the pit floor was gone. I looked down and saw nothing but blackness. There was an opening below us. Lieutenant Sharma pointed at it and nodded to me. I took the Roadhog into the hole, fumbling nervously with the attitude jets.

The walls in this hole didn’t narrow. There was a clearance of about twenty meters. A moment passed before I realized that walls existed only on two sides, the left and right. In the other directions there was only darkness.

What we had thought was the floor of the pit was only something blocking it, like a cork that doesn’t fill the neck of a bottle. Now we were inching around the cork.

Something loomed ahead, and I slowed the shuttle down.

“Looks like a pipe,” someone said.

“Yes, it does,” my father answered. “About five meters in diameter. It comes out of the wall on the right.”

“And connects into the rock on the left,” Lieutenant Sharma said. He pressed his lips together as he studied it.

I inched us around the pipe. In the shuttle’s pale headlights it looked flexible. Where it joined the wall there were folds in the material. Beyond this pipe we could see others, evenly spaced.

“Let’s go back,” Lieutenant Sharma said. “I want to have a look at that white thing.”

There was some argument, but I was taking orders only from the Lieutenant. Eagerly I backed us out, into the clear. The enormity of this thing was just starting to hit me.

When we came out I steered us toward the white rectangle I had noticed before. It was set into the wall of the pit, flush with the rock, and measured about a hundred meters on a side.

There were odd-shaped openings in it, some with curlicues of metal standing beside them. I found it hard to get my bearings as we approached. Piloting in that vast inky dark was unnerving.

I stopped about ten meters from the face of the thing, and Lieutenant Sharma turned around and pointed out two men to go with him. They cast off together and coasted over, using their suit jets. Not until they had touched down on the surface of the thing did I recognize one of them as my father.

There was an eerie stillness about the place. No one talked. They examined the surface for a few minutes. Then my father said it seemed like aluminum but was stronger. They conferred about their next move and decided to go into one of the openings.

Something that looked like an abstract metal sculpture was set in next to the nearest opening. They carefully clipped a line to it. Then the Lieutenant disappeared from sight over the edge of the hole. The opening was as big as the Roadhog and seemed to have smooth sides. My father snaked in after the Lieutenant, following the line. The third man hung at the edge, looking down and holding a hand flashlight for illumination.

We waited. As soon as Dad and the Lieutenant were out of sight we lost radio contact with them. The other men started talking, but I ignored them. I was busy watching the mouth of the opening and looking for anything coming at us from the darkness all around. Nothing moved. A distant circle framed glowing stars; that was the mouth of the pit. We must have come seven or eight kilometers into J-11, at least.

Minutes crawled by. It was spooky, sitting there in nearly total darkness. It seemed as though my father had been gone a long time. What could they be doing in there? I wondered if Commander Aarons knew how long they had been in. Maybe he hadn’t noticed—

The man at the edge waved to someone below. A moment later my father coasted out, holding the line. The Lieutenant followed. They touched helmets and gestured back at the opening.

After a moment Lt. Sharma looked our way and said over radio, “Why don’t three more come down. I’m sure you all have measurements to make.”

I didn’t wait for the three to be picked. I swarmed over the side and flew across on jets. The white metal rang faintly under my boots as I landed. For a few minutes I helped set up cameras and other gear. Then I drew Dad aside.

“How long are we going to be here. Dad?” I said. “I’d like to have a look inside.”

“Not long enough. I don’t want people haphazardly wandering around, anyway. Could be dangerous.”

I looked around at the warped and tangled fingers of metal. I shivered. Standing here among them I felt a cold strangeness.

“Well, okay. But—who were they?”

“The people who built this?” He shook his head. “No way to tell. From the size of the doorways inside—if that is what they are—I would say they were large, at least twice as tall as we are.”

“They couldn’t be from Jupiter?”

“Not likely. Jupiter is a thick atmosphere over an even thicker ocean. There are no continents down there, no land at all. Could a fish discover fire—or build a rocket?”

“What other possibilities are there? There wasn’t any life on Mars, or even Ganymede.”

“They weren’t from this system, Matt. I just saw some evidence to support that when I was inside. There is a—well, I can only guess that it’s a display board, but I don’t know how it works. It came to life when I entered the room. It seems to be a holographic three-dimensional projection of the nearby stars, with Sol at the center.

“About five light-years away, as nearly as I can estimate, there is a green object. It’s at a point just beyond the Centauri system, where I know there isn’t any star. Besides, the green dot lies on a thin blue line that runs inward from the edge of the projection. The blue line stops here—at Sol. Something tells me the blue is a charted course for a star ship, and that green dot is the ship.”

“Five light-years out. Maybe someone was here before the Can was constructed, and left.”

Dad smiled. “I think we would have noticed something. We’ve had probes around Jupiter for fifty years.”

“Then they’re not going away? They’re…coming?”

“That’s my guess. It fits the rest.”

“What rest?”

“This tunnel. Those metal rings we saw reminded me of our ion engines. I’ll bet they are superconducting magnets. The tunnel is a giant induction accelerator.”

I blinked. “Huh? for what?”

“The meteoroid swarms. Look at that thing,” he said, pointing off into the gloom at the huge rock “cork” we had found blocking the tunnel. “I have a hunch that will be the next swarm we see. Something is pumped into it through those pipes, then it’s broken up and accelerated down this tube. A giant shotgun.”

“Aimed at the poles of Jupiter,” I said.

“Yes…” I could see Dad was thinking. He looked at some of the oddly twisted metal around us and frowned. Whatever the metal was, it had iron in it; our magnetic boots held. “You know, Matt,” he said at last, “I’m not a believer in coincidence. The storms, the meteor swarms, suddenly you found life spiraling out of the atmosphere on electric field lines—it all happened at once.”

“I wonder what we would find if we opened that rock cork in the tunnel,” I said thoughtfully.

“What do you mean?”

“Could somebody be, well, seeding Jupiter? Getting it ready for whatever is in that star ship?”

“Seed it for what?”

“I don’t know. To produce food? Maybe for a fish that can build star ships?” I grinned.

“That’s a big project. Jupiter has millions of times the life-supporting volume Earth does.”

“Size won’t stop men; I don’t see why it should stop anything else that can think. In fifty years we might be wrapping a sheet around Ganymede’s atmosphere to keep the oxygen in and make a better greenhouse out of it. Given time maybe we can do something with Jupiter, too—if somebody doesn’t beat us to the property first.”

Dad gingerly touched one of the metal things. “Perhaps…perhaps. We’re all going to be cooking up theories about this place, and no one will know the right answer until that green dot gets here.”

“You and I will be around to see it happen. Dad,” I said. “ISA can’t ship me Earthside now.”

“Not without a fight from me, and the Commander too, I expect.” He waved to the other men. “Better pack up!” he called. “We ought to bring the whole expedition down and set up a base at the edge of the crater. We want to do this carefully.”

He moved over to talk to the rest. I looked back at the beckoning circle at the end of the tunnel. The Sagan was a sharp bright point framed by Jupiter’s smoky bands.

Jupiter changes constantly. Her bands are an elaborate waltz of white streamers, crimson splotches, lacy brown filaments. The Red Spot seethes and churns. I was going to see a lot of the bands; I might spend my whole life out here.

Somebody has to be around when the owners of J-11 return. There’ll be a whole colony out here by then, waiting. Zak would stay, probably, despite his fatalism. Mom and Dad, yes—it was in their blood.

Jenny, too—and what that meant for me I couldn’t say. Not yet.

Yuri might even stay. Well, I’d handle that too.

That chilling knot of fear in me was gone now, burned away. I’d been carrying that fear since I was a kid. If it ever came back I could recognize it, overcome it. A lot of problems are like that—they wither away if you look at them straight on, unflinching. To grow, gamble. Self-knowledge isn’t always bad news, after all.

It felt good inside to know that. Ultimately, there isn’t anything worth fearing.

The Lab people knew that. They had come this immense distance across the ocean of space, risking everything, living in a cramped tin can—all for the sake of knowledge, to stick their noses into things, to see what makes the universe tick. It’s a human thing to do. Without it we’d bore ourselves to death.

I couldn’t predict the future, but I did know one thing: I wasn’t going to get bored.

“Matt!” my father called. “We’re loading up.”

I freed my magnetic anchors and went to help.