Jupiter (22 page)

'That's why you put the team in quarantine,' Grant said.

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

'A terrorist?'

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

'Don't the psych profiles screen out such fanatics?'

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

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

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

'No, that can't be true. The work that we're doing here—'

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

'They wouldn't do that! They couldn't!'

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

'IAA people?'

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

'And they're coming here?'

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

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

'Why else? "Inspection and evaluation" indeed!'

'Not necessarily,' Grant said. 'The IAA isn't controlled by the New Morality.'

'Pah!'

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

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

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

Wo broke the growing silence. 'Why is nanotechnology forbidden?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

'How could they stop all research—'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turned back to Dr Wo. 'They're alive,' Grant whispered.

'I believe so. But the evidence is hardly conclusive.'

'And they were signaling back and forth!'

'Perhaps.'

'Is that the closest you got to them?'

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

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

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

'That's
enormous
!'

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

'But… how… why…?' Grant's thoughts were swirling.

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

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

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

'Living Jovians.'

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

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

Ignoring that, Wo continued, 'There is a constant food source raining down into that ocean. Energy, water, food: wherever those factors have been found, life exists. Those are living Jovians swimming in that ocean.' 'But intelligent…?'

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

'Better?'

'Why not?' Wo repeated.

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

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

'When are they scheduled to arrive here?'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'But they'll kill us!'

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

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

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

Wo's concept of quarantine was very loose, Grant found. He and the other members of the mission team took their meals in a conference room and worked together, but they still slept in their own quarters and were able to mingle with the rest of the station's personnel. It was more a matter of attitude, of a sense of responsibility, that kept them from talking about the mission with the 'outsiders.'

Krebs reinforced the attitude in her own grim style. The first evening that Grant had dinner with the team, she showed up in the conference room, glaring at everyone.

'You will discuss our work with no one,' she said, out of a clear sky. 'That is vital! Maximally vital! Each of you has signed a security agreement. Violate that agreement and you will suffer the full penalties of the law. Nothing less.'

Then she sat down to eat. No one sat within three chairs of her.

Grant forgot about his thesis work, his research on the Jovian ocean's dynamics. If those things really are living creatures, if they're intelligent… we're sitting on top of the biggest discovery in history! Maybe what the cameras saw are really submarines, giant mobile underwater habitats. Maybe the Jovians have a technology equal to our own. Or better.

Then a voice in his mind warned, You're sitting on top of the biggest powderkeg in history. Watch your step carefully. You could get yourself killed over this.

The control center, he found, was an unremarkable chamber crowded with six computer-topped desks and communications gear that looked to Grant as if it had been shoehorned into a compartment several sizes too small to accommodate it all. There was barely enough room to squeeze into the little chairs. Director Wo had a separate desk all to himself, though, smack in the middle of the room, with an aisle from the corridor door straight to it — the only open space in the compartment.

The wallscreens were connected to the simulations chamber down at the aquarium, so Grant got to see Muzorawa and O'Hara and the others every shift, at least on-screen. And Karlstad too, looking tense and almost frightened as he stood at his underwater post, anchored to the deck by plastic loops set into the flooring.

Dr Wo placed Grant at the console that monitored the submersible's electrical power systems. Frankovich, at the life support console alongside him, was assigned to teaching Grant what he had to know.

'So he sucked you into this, too,' Karlstad said through his face-mask radio when Grant first showed up in the control center and said hello to the crew in the tank.

'We're just one tight little family,' Grant replied lightly. 'Never think that,' Karlstad muttered. 'We're prisoners. Puppets on his strings. He wiggles his fingers and we do the dancing for him.'

Krebs splashed into the simulator tank and Karlstad went silent.

Grant turned to Frankovich, sitting at the console beside his. 'You'd better start showing me what I'm supposed to do here,' Grant said, sliding awkwardly into the tight little chair.

'Trying to get on Wo's good side?' Frankovich asked lightly. 'That's a dubious procedure. I'm not certain our revered leader has a good side.'

Evenings Grant spent with Sheena, no matter how tired he was from the long hours in the control center. He understood Wo's interest in the gorilla and the dolphins now. How do we communicate with another species? How do we make ourselves understood to creatures that have nothing whatsoever in common with us?

Often, Grant took his dinner down to the aquarium and ate with the gorilla. Karlstad twitted him about it, of course, but Grant wanted Sheena to accept the neural net headgear with as little commotion as possible. After several nights of feeling silly with the wires draped over his head, Grant brought an extra set and offered it to the gorilla.