Flandry saw mountains which trembled and droned, blue mists that whirled about their metallic peaks, and then the Jovian ground was lost in darkness. The sky began to turn blood color. “What are we heading for now?” he asked. He checked a map. “Oh, yes, I see.”
“I venture to suggest to the pilot, sir, that our speed may be a trifle excessive,” said Chives.
Flandry heard the wind outside rise to a scream, with subsonic undertones that shivered in his marrow. Red fog flew roiled and tattered past his eyes. Beyond, he saw crimson clouds the height of a Terrestrial sierra, with lightning leaping in their bellies. The light from the screens washed like a dull fire into the cabin.
“Yes,” he muttered. “Slow down, Horx. There’ll be another one along in a minute, as the story has it—”
And then he saw the pilot rise up in his chamber, fling open a door, and depart. An instant afterward Flandry saw Horx beat wings against the spaceship’s furious slipstream; then the Ymirite was whirled from view. And then Chives saw the thing which hung in the sky before them, and yelled. He threw his tail around Flandry’s waist while he clung with hands and legs to a bunk stanchion. And then the world exploded into thunder and night.
V
Flandry awoke. He spent centuries wishing he hadn’t. A blurred green shape said: “Your aneurine, sir.”
“Go ’way,” mumbled Flandry. “What was I drinking?”
“Pardon my taking the liberty, sir,” said Chives. He pinned the man’s wrists down with his tail, held Flandry’s nose with one hand and poured the drug down his mouth with the other. “There, now, we are feeling much better, aren’t we?”
“Remind me to shoot you, slowly.” Flandry gagged for a while. The medicine took hold and he sat up. His brain cleared and he looked at the screen bank.
Only one of the viewers still functioned. It showed thick, drifting redness, shot through with blues and blacks. A steady rough growling, like the breakup of a polar ice pack, blasted its way through the ultimate rigidity of the force bubble — God, what must the noise be like outside? The cabin was tilted. Slumped in its lower corner, Flandry began to glide across the floor again; the ship was still being rolled about. The internal gravity field had saved their lives by cushioning the worst shock, but then it had gone dead. He felt the natural pull of Jupiter upon him, and every cell was weary from its own weight.
He focused on a twisted bunkframe. “Did I do that with my own little head?”
“We struck with great force, sir,” Chives told him. “I permitted myself to bandage your scalp. However, a shot of growth hormone will heal the cuts in a few hours, sir, if we escape the present dilemma.”
Flandry lurched to his feet. His bones seemed to be dragging him back downward. He felt the cabin walls tremble and heard them groan. The force bubble had held, which meant that its generator and the main power plant had survived the crash. Not unexpectedly; a ship like this was built on the “fail safe” principle. But there was no access whatsoever from this cabin to the pilot room — unless you were an Ymirite. It made no difference whether the ship was still flyable or not. Human and Shalmuan were stuck here till they starved. Or, more likely, till the atomic-power plant quit working, under some or other of the buffets this ship was receiving.
Well, when the force-field collapsed and Jovian air pressure flattened the cabin, it would be a merciful death.
“The hell with that noise,” said Flandry. “I don’t want to die so fast I can’t feel it. I want to see death coming, and make the stupid thing fight for every centimeter of me.”
Chives gazed into the sinister crimson which filled the last electronic window. His slight frame stooped, shaking in the knees; he was even less adapted to Jovian weight than Flandry. “Where are we, sir?” he husked. “I was thinking primarily about what to make for lunch, just before the collision, and—”
“The Red Spot area,” said Flandry. “Or, rather, the fringe of it. We must be on an outlying berg, or whatever the deuce they’re called.”
“Our guide appears to have abandoned us, sir.”
“Hell, he got us into this mess. On purpose! I now know for a fact there’s at least one Ymirite working for the enemy — whoever the enemy is. But the information won’t be much use if we become a pair of grease spots.”
The ship shuddered and canted. Flandry grabbed a stanchion for support, eased himself down on the bunk, and said, very quickly, for destruction roared around him:
“You’ve seen the Red Spot from space, Chives. It’s been known for a long time, even before space travel, that it’s a … a mass of aerial pack ice. Lord, what a fantastic place to die! What happens is that at a certain height in the Jovian atmosphere, the pressure allows a red crystalline form of ice — not the white stuff we splash whisky onto, or the black allotrope down at the surface, or the super-dense variety in the mantle around the Jovian core. Here the pressure is right for red ice, and the air density is identical, so it floats. An initial formation created favorable conditions for the formation of more … so it accumulated in this one region, much as polar caps build up on cozier type planets. Some years a lot of it melts away — changes phase — the Red Spot looks paler from outside. Other years you get a heavy pile-up, and Jupiter seems to have a moving wound. But always, Chives, the Red Spot is a pack of flying glaciers, stretching broader than all Terra. And we’ve been crashed on one of them!”
“Then our present situation can scarcely be accidental, sir,” nodded Chives imperturbably. “I daresay, with all the safety precautions built into this ship, Horx thought this would be the only way to destroy us without leaving evidence. He can claim a stray berg was tossed in our path, or some such tale.” Chives sniffed. “Not sportsmanlike at all, sir. Just what one would expect of a … a native.”
The cabin yawed. Flandry caught himself before he fell out of the bunk. At this gravity, to stumble across the room would be to break a leg. Thunders rolled. White vapors hissed up against crimson in the surviving screen.
“I’m not on to these scientific esoterica,” said Flandry. His chest pumped, strugging to supply oxygen for muscles toiling under nearly three times their normal weight. Each rib felt as if cast in lead. “But I’d guess what is happening is this. We maintain a temperature in here which for Jupiter is crazily high. So we’re radiating heat, which makes the ice go soft and — We’re slowly sinking into the berg.” He shrugged and got out a cigaret.
“Is that wise, sir?” asked Chives.
“The oxygen recyclers are still working,” said Flandry. “It’s not at all stuffy in here. Air is the least of our worries.” His coolness cracked over, he smote a fist on the wall and said between his teeth: “It’s this being helpless! We can’t go out of the cabin, we can’t do a thing but sit here and take it!”
“I wonder, sir.” Slowly, his thin face sagging with gravity, Chives pulled himself to the pack of equipment. He pawed through it. “No, sir. I regret to say I took no radio. It seemed we could communicate through the pilot.” He paused. “Even if we did find a way to signal, I daresay any Ymirite who received our call would merely interpret it as random static.”
Flandry stood up, somehow. “What do we have?” A tiny excitement shivered along his nerves. Outside, Jupiter boomed at him.
“Various detectors, sir, to check for installations. A pair of spacesuits. Sidearms. Your burglar kit, though I confess uncertainty what value it would have here. A microrecorder. A—”
“Wait a minute!”
Flandry sprang toward his valet. The floor rocked beneath him. He staggered toward the far wall. Chives shot out his tail and helped brake the man. Shaking, Flandry eased himself down and went on all fours to the corner where the Shalmuan squatted.