The Jupiter Plague

13

Jupiter had a new moon. Just beyond the fringes of the atmosphere the massive form of the “Pericles” swung in orbit, probing the invisible bottom of the sea of gas below them. It had been a week of constant frustration since they had arrived. One after another of the radio probes had been dropped into the turbulent atmosphere with less than satisfactory results. The thick, frozen soup had swallowed them up. Their sensitive instruments had probed and reported back. Nothing solid. The atmosphere grew denser and denser until it became liquid. Then the radio reports had stopped as the probes vanished one by one into the frigid sea.

All except one.

“A winner,” Commander Rand said. “With this one we have hit the jackpot, Captain. Five hundred bucks of back pay says that I’m right.”

Captain Bramley made a noncommital grunt and looked at the blank screen. “I wish I could share your enthusiasm, Rand,” he said. “Without betting I would be happy to pay a month’s salary to prove you right.”

“You’ll see.” Rand tapped the screen. “While the others just went splash and cut off this one was reporting something well after the time it should have cut out. What we heard was scrambled by the atmospherics, then we lost it as the planet rotated out from under us. But if the probe is on something solid it will be over the horizon soon,” he looked at his watch. “Right about now in fact.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Patience, my captain. Even if it is over the horizon it still has too much atmosphere to punch through. Too much atmospheric static. And the last thing I did was turn off the radio to save the battery.”

“Is it back on?” Rand looked at his watch again and shook his head.

“Too early. But — why not. A few minutes will make no difference. I’ll give the transponder a shot and we’ll at least know if it is still there.”

He turned to the control panel and made adjustments. The other men in the room were silent, listening. They had come so far, had journeyed so long, that they could not bear the thought of the voyage ending in failure. There had to be something solid down there.

The message was sent to the probe ordering it begin broadcasting again. Rand turned on the speaker and the rustle and crackle of lightning storms washed over them. The computer would be listening too, far better than they could, sorting through the random noise for a patterned broadcast. But they wanted to hear it for themselves. If it existed.

“Just trash,” First Officer Weeke said. “Nothing at all…”

“Listen!” Rand said. “Quiet.” He turned up the gain and the room was filled with the sound of radio waves crashing on the stellar shore.

Then they heard it. A thin peep of sound, instantly gone — but it returned again. And louder still until it was clearly the rapid beeping of a digital transmission.

“It’s still there!” Rand shouted. “Not in the ocean but on something solid. We may have found our landing site.”

Someone called it the Reef and the name stuck. Whether it was the only reef, or one of many in that nightmarish, frigid sea they didn’t care. They didn’t try to look for any more like it. Their probe was down and others followed it. If there were other reefs lost in that planet-wide ocean of frigid and liquefied gas it was not important. They had only a limited number of probes — and now they had a positive target to direct them to. One by one they were expended and their information collected and examined. The radar probes found one edge of the reef, but that was all. More time could not be wasted finding out just how big the reef was. At first there was some speculation that it might be floating free in that stupendous ocean, but it turned up exactly on schedule every ten hours as the planet’s rotation brought it back to the same spot.

An image of the surface began to slowly emerge. There was a cruel mountain range, but that could easily be avoided. An immense plain stretched out from it, and that was the site they chose for landing. The probes had sent back indications of wind direction while they were falling free and a rough picture was also constructed of the torrents of rushing gas that made up the atmosphere. They were separated into invisible rivers, and bit by bit some knowledge of their relationships was assimilated by the computer.

“We only have one shot,” Captain Bramley said, looking through the sheets of detailed printout. “Once we’re committed to an orbit that is it. Large as our fuel supplies are they are also finite. We can land — and we can take off again. Nothing else.”

“I know, sir,” Rand said. He tapped the sheets. “But this is a good orbit. I’ve checked it eight ways from Sunday and so has everyone else. It will get us down.”

“No doubts?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Feed it in and prepare to implement during the next window. I’ll let the crew know.”

Four hours later the computer actuated the braking jets and the long fall to the landing site began. Down through the hurtling torrents of the atmosphere the bulky form of the “Pericles” dropped, pitting its mass and the thrust of its thundering jets against the gravitational pull of Jupiter and the attacking weight of the dense atmosphere. Screaming winds buffeted it, tried to turn it from its plotted course, but sensitive instruments detected the deviation even as it began and informed the computer: the incandescent finger of an atomic jet flared, then another, making the constant compensations and balances that kept the ship’s fall under control. Lightning crackled through the soup-thick atmosphere that was compressed by a gravity almost three times greater than Earth’s, while methane and ammonia rain hammered at the rocket’s metallic skin.

No echo of the tempest outside penetrated to the control room, where the ordered calm was disturbed only by the distant hum of the air vent and an occasional rustle as one of the three men in the deep chairs changed position and spoke a few words in a low voice. The thick and insulated walls cut off all sound and sight, the few tiny direct-vision ports were sealed and capped, and only one viewscreen held a televised view of the surging atmosphere outside, a dark and roiling cloud mass of no interest. The display on the other screens was far more relevant, the course plot, altitude, speed, radar soundings. The ship fell.

“On course so far without readable deviation,” the second officer, Commander Rand, said. “We’re going to sit down right in the middle of that iceberg.” He was a blond man with a mild expression, and seemed too young for the naval rank of commander, even though it was a technical rank earned by his prowess in the mysteries of computer control. He had programmed this landing precisely and completely, so that now all he had to do was sit back and watch it happen.

“I wish you would not refer to the Reef as an iceberg,” First Officer Weeke said with slow Dutch thoroughness. “It is made of ice not as we know it on Earth but instead compacted to an incredible hardness. The radio probes have shown that and we have all the readings to prove this is a solid object on which we can land with impunity—”

“Wind velocity is below a hundred m.p.h. What’s the air temperature?” Captain Bramley asked.

“Minus one hundred fifty degrees,” Rand said. “Just a few degrees lower than the Reef temperature. We’re almost down.”

They watched the indicators in silence, alert for the emergency that never came, and in each sweep of their eyes across the crowded boards they rested longest on the trajectory display screen where the red blob of their position was sliding down the white line of the selected course toward the rising bulk of the Reef.

Now they were landing on it. Rocket exhausts lanced down slowing the ponderous “Pericles” almost to a stop, jamming the men deep into their acceleration couches, as radar waves probed the surface below looking for the optimum spot for a landing. Then lateral rockets fired, easing them over as they dropped so that they could come to rest on the flattest surface. Hotter and faster burned the jets digging into the ice and sending out clouds of steam that instantly froze and were whipped away by the ceaseless wind, until finally the great mass was suspended above the surface almost unmoving, dropping at inches a second. In spite of this the ship jarred and creaked as they struck and when the jets went off it was gripped by Jupiter’s trebled gravity. The structure of the ship groaned and settled to rest under the load. They were down.

“Feels like we’re still decelerating,” Rand said, pushing himself painfully forward in the chair.

Captain Bramley did not answer until after he had made a visual check of all the stations and exchanged a few words with the men there. This took less than three minutes since the total complement of the “Pericles” was just forty-one, while only a third of this number were even indirectly involved in the operation of the fully automated ship.

“We’re down and in one piece and no one injured,” the captain said, sinking back into the chair. “These 3G’s are going to be hard to live with.”

“We’ll only have to take it for a week,” Rand said, just as the instrument board went wild.

It was unprecedented and unallowed for in any of the instructions that the computer had ever received and, after running through all the possible solutions in its memory bank within nanoseconds and finding no answers, bank after bank of lights flashed red on the boards. The ship’s officers took over then, testing and clearing circuits, fighting to find out the trouble and correct it before they were destroyed. Bit by bit, as urgent messages proved that the hull was sound and that no alien atmosphere was leaking in, they regained some of their composure and began to cross check. There was nothing wrong that they could discover easily since it was the instruments themselves that were acting wildly and producing impossible observations. They cut them out one by one and it was First Officer Weeke who finally located the trouble.

“It is a magnetic field, a tremendous one that must be over ten thousand kilogauss to cause this trouble. It is low down in the ship, near to the ground, near to the ice I should say, since there is no ground here, and it is affecting all the instruments within range. It came on suddenly, an unusual phenomenon.”

Just how unusual they discovered two hours later when the affected instruments had been taken out of circuit and a measurement had been made of the interfering field.

“Very simple,” Captain Bramley said, staring at the typed sheet that had just emerged from the computer. “It is an incredibly powerful field and we have enough steel in the stern of the ship to be affected strongly by it. The attraction of this field just about equals our maximum thrust under full jet.”

“Do you mean…”

“Exactly. This field is holding us down and if we try to take off while it is still there we will blow ourselves up. For the present moment at least we are effectively trapped on Jupiter.”

“It is impossible phenomena,” Weeke protested. “Even if this onaagenaam planet is a natural cryogenic laboratory for creating magnetic fields of this strength.”

“Perhaps the field is not natural,” Captain Bramley said, very quietly, just as the signal lights came on indicating that something was moving against the lower portion of the hull.

There were floodlights in armored housings on the outer hull and over half of these had survived the landing. The captain ran his fingers rapidly over the testing circuits, cut out the damaged units, then switched on all the remaining lights at once.

Outside was eternal night since no visible light from the sun could penetrate the banked clouds and Jupiter’s compressed, two-hundred-mile-thick atmosphere, where only the occasional flare of lightning lit the darkness. There was light now, intense burning light that picked out every detail of the icescape and clearly revealed the Jovians.

“They are not what I would call handsome,” Weeke said.

There may be a law of natural selection that states that an intelligent creature should have its organs of vision placed high for effectiveness, its organs of locomotion low for mobility and its organs of manipulation at the end of flexible extremities for dexterity. This is a crude description of a man although a much more accurate one of a Jovian. They did look like caricatures of homo sapiens, a waddling pack of squashed down, broadened, elephant-hided men with tree-trunk limbs and wrinkled saurian heads.

“The light doesn’t seem to be bothering them, sir,” Rand said. “You’d think it would blind them.”

“It would — if those creases on the top of those neckless heads cover eyes, but we don’t know. We don’t know anything about these creatures except they seem to have enough intelligence to generate a magnetic field to hold us here. We’ll have to find some way of communicating with them.”

“Perhaps they are trying to do the same thing,” Weeke said, pointing to the screen where a group of the Jovians were near the ship’s hull. “They seem to be doing something out there. I cannot see what, since it is outside of the range of the pickup, but it is the area from which we are having the readings of movement against the hull.”

“That’s the port engine room plating,” the captain said, dialing that compartment on the phone. He had just made the connection when the far wall of the engine room rang like a drum. “Turn the pickup around — let me see that wall,” he ordered, and the scene swam on the screen and steadied on the featureless gray panel.

With a clang like a monster forging press the wall bulged inward and from the center of the swelling emerged a red-dish-green rod, no thicker than a man’s thumb and tapering to a blunt point on the end. It penetrated a foot or more into the room and although made of material hard enough to stab through the multiple layers of the specially built and strengthened wall it smoked and changed color in the oxygen atmosphere.

The rod began to move, bending and writhing like a snake.

“Evacuate that compartment!” the captain ordered as he hit the alarm button that began an ear-shattering clanging throughout the ship as the emergency, airtight doors started to close.

It was alive, that was obvious — alien flesh of some Jovian creature that was harder than the hardest steel — yet still sentient and aware. It was burning in the air as they watched the screen, smoking and crumbling yet still moving in that slow questing motion as though seeking something. Then it slithered backward out of the hole and the captain’s roar of warning was drowned out as the pressurized, frigid atmosphere of Jupiter blasted in through the hole.

Two men did not escape from the compartment before the mounting pressure sealed the door. It was pure chance that saved the ship. If any other compartment had been holed the thin interior walls would have gone down, the poisonous vapor would have spread through the ventilation system and they all would have been dead. But the engine rooms were provided against flarebacks from the combustion chambers with thicker walls, heavier doors and automatic vent-seals. They held. Metal strained and creaked as the pressure heaved against its surroundings but nothing gave way.

For nine more ship days the Jovians left them alone. Occasionally one could be seen passing but they ignored the ship as though it were not there. Rapid work with the remote handling controls in the engine room — before they chilled too much to become inoperable — managed to slap a patch over the small opening and weld it into place. Heavy beams were placed to support it until the pressure could be lowered enough to permit a space-suited volunteer through the air lock to fix a more permanent and stronger patch. This was completed and the air painfully cleaned of the contaminents that had been blasted in through the hole and the engine room was back in operation. Not that there was anything to be done there, the fierce magnetic field still held the ship immobile.

They tried to communicate with the Jovians. With much labor they manufactured a solid-state, fixed-frequency television transceiver. There were no moving parts and the screen and orthicon were of the nonvacuum Partini type. When the set was completed it was poured full of plastic, then imbedded in a larger cube of plastic so it was completely resistant to any pressure changes. The external manipulators swung it out and placed the device where it could be seen clearly by any passing Jovian. Captain Bramley’s loudly amplified voice came from it and his image could be clearly seen on the screen and it was ignored completely. Finally one of the Jovians trod on it accidently and crushed it.

“It looks like they’re not interested in talking to us,” Rand said, but no one smiled.

On the ninth day the Jovians began to gather again about the ship and as a precaution the captain had everyone move to the higher levels and sealed all the airtight doors. A good deal of communicating equipment had been installed in the port engine room while the repairs were being made so there was a crystal clear view of what occurred next.

“They’re punching through again at the same place,” someone shouted. Though it wasn’t the identical spot it was very close.

This time the hole was much smaller and whatever had made it withdrew instantly. There was only a single spurt of the frigid hydrogen-helium atmosphere that was cut off as something else came in through the opening, a thin brown tendril that projected a full yard into the room before it began to sag. When it touched the deck it ceased growing in length but the end began to swell as though the tendril were a tube that was inflating it. No one spoke as they watched the shape expand until it was the size and shape of a barrel covered with a shining and transparent coating. The top of the object writhed and shaped itself into a collection of nodules and there it stopped.

“What — what can it be?” Commander Rand asked, phrasing the question for all of them. The captain looked at it with fierce concentration.

“It’s alien, it could be anything — but I’m hoping that it is a communicator of some sort.” He switched on the phone in the engine room. “Hello — hello — can you hear me?”

A slit opened and gaped in the top of the barrel in the midst of the nodules and a pulsating, high-pitched sound bubbled out.

“Ha-rrr-rrr-ooo…” it screamed in vile imitation of a human voice. “Harrrooo…”

They worked with it during the coming weeks -

and learned to accept it. The men would have been rebellious and frightened if it weren’t for the endless gravity that dragged at them and made life a continual torment. They were spending most of the time in the float beds where their bodies displaced the water so that the drag of gravity was relieved at least for a time. The captain and the ship’s officers were taking turns teaching English to the biological communicator, which is what they thought the alien thing — they called it the barrel — to be. It seemed to have no intelligence of its own, yet it was alive underneath the hard coating that shielded it from the oxygen atmosphere. At first they read to it through a loudspeaker but when it showed no signs of either emotion or aggression they stayed in the compartment with it, near the door in case of emergency. The barrel would refuse to answer any questions — other than those directly involved with the language lessons — and after a few days they stopped trying. There had to be an eventual end to the instruction and they would find out what they wanted to know then. In the meantime the lessons were vitally important; they had to learn to communicate with the Jovians before they could find a way to convince them that they should remove the magnetic field that held them trapped.

In the middle of a lesson, at the end of the seventeenth day, the barrel suddenly stopped talking and withdrew the single eye that it had grown to look at the display screen for the computer that was used for demonstrations. Rand, who was reading at the time, ran for the door and sealed it behind him. He watched.from the control room with the others and when the eye opened again after a few minutes it had changed color and seemed to have a quality of intelligence about it that had been lacking before.

“What thing are you…?” the barrel asked.

The conversation between the two differing life forms had begun.

Words and the simple mechanics of communication were easy enough for the Jovians to master, their memories appeared to be eidetic and no word was ever forgotten once explained. But referents were another thing. Nouns that could be pointed out, chair, glass, knife, were simple enough to convey, as well as easily demonstrable verbs, such as walk, run and write. When abstractions were reached communication of meaning became difficult and there were entire areas of misunderstanding.

“You come from where…?” the Jovian asked, and when informed that they were from Earth, the third planet from the sun in this solar system, they asked, “What is earths? What is planets? What is suns…?”

Buried here, at the bottom of hundreds of miles of near-liquid atmosphere covered by solid layers of clouds, they had never seen the stars nor had they any inkling of knowledge that worlds other than their own existed. Yet they seemed to understand when it was explained to them, though they had very little interest and let the matter drop quickly and went on to something else. This was a pattern they seemed to follow — if they could be said to be following any pattern at all. They would pick a subject up, ask questions, then quickly abandon it. They (or it, the men in the ship never knew if they were talking to one or more Jovians) seemed to lack the simplest knowledge of the mechanical sciences, though they apparently absorbed explanations easily enough. There was only one ^thing that held their attention, that they kept coming back to: they never seemed satisfied with the answers.

“What thing are you…?”

It was the captain who first understood something about them.

“The biological sciences,” he said, “chemistry when it is biochemistry, neurophysics and all the rest. And electricity… of course! Bioelectricity.”

“Sir…?” Commander Rand asked.

“Those Jovians out there. Try to imagine the world they live in, from their point of view. They have no machines or artifacts that we have seen, yet they have intelligence and they have installed a device to communicate with us — even though they didn’t recognize our own communicator. They must work with living matter alone and seem to have an incredible degree of control over it; look at the speed with which they constructed the barrel and installed it here.”

“That’s true, sir, and it explains a lot — but what about the magnetic field that is holding us down? They must have machines of some kind to generate that.”

“Must they? Bioelectricity is well known on Earth, look at the electric eel. But let’s ask them and find out. I think we have finally established a level of communication good enough to try that important question.”

“There is a magnetic field at the base of this ship,” he said, “do you know that?”

“Coming from electricity fields of force abide, yes…” The barrel spoke clearly and precisely as ever, the single eye turning toward the captain, who stood at the far side of the engine room.

“Our ship cannot leave while that field exists, do you know that?”

“Yes…”

“Will you remove the field so that we may leave?”

“The fields of force will no longer rest… after the talking…”

It was a clear enough answer, except for the fact that they had a great deal of difficulty finding out exactly what the talking was. It obviously meant much more than conversation — but how much more? By indirection and suggestion the captain finally discovered that what they wanted to know about was human biology and that they wanted to examine living human cells.

“By talking they seem to mean knowing about. Gives some insight into how they think — though it doesn’t help much.”

He sent for a hypodermic needle and before the unblinking alien eye drew out some of his own blood. “Here…” the toneless voice said, and an opening gaped in the top of the barrel just below the eye. When Captain Bramley walked closer he could smell the sharp burn of ammonia: he emptied the hypodermic into the dark opening, which instantly rolled shut.

“There is talking we must do…” the voice spoke as the captain stepped away. “Talking to do of you…”

“I’ll show you X-rays of human beings, there are also textbooks.”

“There is talking to do with the eye…” The alien eye trembled a bit on top of its stalk as the captain stepped forward again.

“Don’t get too close, sir,” Rand called out. “We still can’t be sure what they mean by the word talking.”

“This time it appears to mean looking.” The captain stopped. “After you have ‘talked’ to me with your eye will you release the ship?”

“The field of force will no longer rest after the talking…”

“I don’t like it, captain!”

“Neither do I, but it sounds clear enough — or rather as clear as they ever get. Someone is going to have to be examined by the creature or we’ll never leave. And I can’t ask anyone else to volunteer for this.”

The captain stepped forward again and the eye stretched forward as its stalk thinned and elongated. It hung quivering for a second before the captain’s face before plunging forward into his chest and slashing down the length of his body, laying him open in one hideous wound that killed him instantly.