The Ophiuchi Hotline

8

Tweed must have chosen me as some sort of wild card. I couldn't see what possible use I might be to his plans. Not that I was upset about it; I had no burning urge to help him defeat the Invaders. I suppose I sympathized with the goal, on an abstract level, but I just did not think it was possible. Fighting Invaders is like repealing the law of gravity.

There were workers who had much more meaningful work than I did, however. If you call that meaningful. I was shown drawings and small demonstration models of some new weapons systems that were ready to go into production, awaiting only Tweed's reelection and access to the government blank checks he had once controlled. There were some frightening new applications of null-field theory, for instance, including one device which could project a spherical field at great distances. The idea was to enclose an Invader in one, then contract the field down to about one atomic diameter. It was hard to imagine a creature that could survive that. Then you turn off the field. Presto: a pocket H-bomb.

I saw blueprints for ships of war, the kind that hadn't been built since pre-Invasion days. And all the other bric-a-brac of warfare, from servo-powered fighting suits, to rifles and tanks and grenades, to fusion bombs and neutronium bombs. On paper, Poseidon could have outgunned any member planet of the Eight Worlds. But what would we be shooting at?

Lilo was able to get her real work out of the way in about an hour each day. At that, she often stayed in her lab more for appearances than anything.

The first month had been interesting, from an academic standpoint. There was a backlog of atmospheric samples awaiting analysis. Lilo knew a little about the types of organic materials to be found in the Jovian atmosphere from reading about ancient research conducted before the Invasion. The chemists and planetologists on Poseidon had added to that body of information, and had picked up some spores and microorganisms. Then, about a year ago, something had impacted the scoop of the robot probe. It wasn't very big; it had massed about as much as an adult mouse. Anything larger would have wrecked the probe.

There was not much left of it on a structural level. It was a glob of jelly frozen in methane and ammonia. But on a cellular level there was much to be learned. Lilo got that out of the way in the first week, working twelve- and fourteen-hour days. She mapped the chromosomal structure present in the undamaged cells. The organism was similar in many ways to the upper-atmosphere animals that had been collected by probes on Uranus.

She worked with Chea, the inorganic specialist, to learn the chemical properties to be expected from the organism. In common with certain higher Martian life forms, upper-layer gas giant creatures had been found to utilize catalysts and polymers in ways that had been accomplished on Earth only in refineries. Her specimen was no exception. She managed to clone one of the cells at the end of her third week, when she found remnants of a reproductive system. The cell grew into a gauzy sphere filled with hydrogen that lived for a few hours in her jury-rigged Jove Chamber, then collapsed. The balloon was made of a vinyl plastic. On the underside was a thin cross-shaped swelling, which contained a bony structure.

Having done that, the rest of her work was routine. She established a tissue culture from the remains of the specimen and set about finding ways of killing it. It was completely hit-or-miss. If she had been working with a creature using a water-oxygen economy she could have found a dozen ways to attack it merely by studying its genes and synthesizing a virus. But no work had been done on genetic structures of Jovian organisms. Almost all her work on terrestrial life was done with computer calculations, and there were no programs for nonterrestrial genes. To attack them, she had to make changes almost at random at different points on the gene, then sit back to see what happened.

"But Tweed wants some kind of bug that will kill Jovians," Chea pointed out one day. "Is this going to find one?"

Lilo shrugged. "It's as likely to as anything else. But no, it's not very likely. I might come up with something that would kill these things. But not Jovians, if you mean the intelligent creatures down there."

She was in the farm tank with Chea, Cathay, and Jasmine, who was the chief planetologist. They were all getting their hands dirty with the new strain of pork trees Lilo had made which yielded bacon superior to what they had been eating. They knelt on the warm, black dirt and talked as they transplanted the tiny seedlings. Overhead was the brilliant central core of the farm, while beyond that was the far side of the spinning cylinder. They all wore dark goggles and their bodies were coated with UV-screening lotion and sweat. It was a happy time for all of them.

Lilo was spending most of her time farming—in the hydroponic nursery and outside on a plot of ground she had prepared to take the vacuum-resistant plants she was making. The food was already better, and she had become something of a hero with the inmates. Lilo loved working with plants, but was not so fond of cooking. She was teaching Cass and three other children how to do that. They were coming along fine, but in the meantime there were hardly enough hours in a standard day.

"You mean you don't think the Jovians are like this creature?" Cathay asked.

"I have no reason to think so," Lilo said. "And Jasmine could probably give you plenty of reasons why we shouldn't expect it."

Jasmine got another plant from the bucket and started digging a hole. She was a small woman with wide eyes and large, capable hands. She wore her blond hair in thick braids and had a collar of fur around her neck—her only surgical alteration. Cathay had been sharing a room with Jasmine for two years before Lilo arrived, and the two of them had expressed an interest in inviting Lilo to join them. Lilo wasn't sure. She had been doing well rooming with Chea, who was as capable a co-worker as she had ever found. But that phase of their relationship had ended when they finished their work on the Jovian organism. Chea was doing other work now, work that didn't involve Lilo. Since then he had not been around as much as she could have wished.

"There's no way to know for sure yet," Jasmine said, patting the dirt around the roots of her plant. "I mean if what Lilo's learning about the upper organisms will have any bearing on the ones who live deeper. But it's unlikely."

"How come?" Cathay was the perpetual straight man when the discussions got into science, but he didn't mind. He cheerfully admitted that he knew next to nothing about it. He was not a teacher of skills or knowledge, but a primary teacher: one who led children into exploring themselves, discovering and developing their aptitudes.

"We know a lot about the nature of the Jovian atmosphere," Jasmine said. "It's stratified. Hydrogen on top, then under that ammonia, ammonium hydrosulfide, water, and liquid hydrogen, all of them in various crystalline states, or melted, or diffused through each other. There's no reason to think the creature Lilo has could survive if it dropped a few hundred kilometers."

"And plenty of reason to think it couldn't," Lilo added.

"You say this thing had a hydrogen gasbag," Cathay said. "How could that keep it up if it floated in hydrogen?"

Lilo laughed. "Good question. I wondered about that myself, and I'm really not sure. I think I might have seen it in an early stage. Maybe it's born in a lower layer, makes hydrogen to fill its balloon, and rises to the sunlight. After that, it would need a new method of staying in the air. There's plenty of energy it could tap. It's a violent place."

"It's possible that Jupiter has several biospheres," Jasmine said. "They might mix a little, like Lilo's suggestion that her critter might be born at a lower level and rise to the top. But it's going to be tough to study it, especially down at the lowest levels where the Jovians probably are."

"Why do you think they're down there?"

"Well, I... you're right. They might live in the upper layers. But it's unlikely, I think, if only on straight probability. There are so many strata they could occupy. The probes I've sent in have identified thirty-seven distinct environments, like layers of an onion. Some of them mix in different weather conditions, which makes even more possibilities. But it's hard to imagine anything that could live in all of them. Down there at the bottom, just before my probes stop sending, is a core of hot metallic hydrogen. I don't know if anything could live in that, but I wouldn't take any bets that it's impossible to live in the layer just above."

"And what's in that layer?"

"It's a layer of liquid hydrogen, but it's hot. About twelve thousand degrees. Three million atmospheres pressure. And don't ask me what kind of life might be there. It wouldn't be like anything Lilo's ever studied. But if the Invaders and Jovians live in that stuff, all bets are off. We may never touch them."

The conversation was disturbing Lilo. She was new to the concept of weapons research; it was not something she had ever thought of before. It was not pleasant to think that your research is aimed at only one result: to kill anything you could discover.