When Grant finally dozed off, his first night on Research Station Gold, he slept fitfully, dreaming of gorillas chasing him while Dr. Wo growled and glared angrily. Marjorie appeared in his dreams briefly, but somehow she changed into tall, slim Lainie smiling at him beckoningly. He tried to move away from her, but Sheena blocked his path. Grant felt trapped and alone, beyond help.
A buzzing noise blurred his dreams, insistent, demanding. He pried his gummy eyelids open and for a moment had no idea of where he was. Then it came into focus: his quarters on Gold. His bedsheets were tangled and soaked with his perspiration. With a lurch in the pit of his stomach, Grant realized he had made a nocturnal emission.
It’s all right, he told himself, while that stubborn buzzing noise kept rasping in his ears. Wet dreams are natural, beyond your conscious control. There’s nothing sinful about them as long as you don’t take pleasure from the memory.
The buzzing would not stop. Grant slowly realized it was the phone. He could see its yellow light on the bedside console blinking at him in rhythm with the angry buzzing.
“Phone,” he called out, “audio response only.”
The screen on the opposite wall lit up to show Zareb Muzorawa’s dark, somber face.
“Have I awakened you?” Muzorawa asked.
“Uh, yes,” Grant replied. “I guess I’ve overslept.”
“That’s natural, your first morning here. Ask the pharmacy for the timelag hormone mix. It will set your internal clock for you.”
“Oh … really? Okay, I will.”
“I’ve been assigned to your orientation,” Muzorawa said, his voice more businesslike. “How quickly can you get to conference room C as in Charlie?”
Still blinking sleep from his eyes, Grant said, “Fifteen minutes?”
Muzorawa smiled, showing gleaming white teeth. “I will give you half an hour. Get to the pharmacy first, then meet me there.”
“Yessir,” said Grant.
Grant spent the entire morning in a small conference room with Muzorawa, his head spinning with details. The day was a blur of orientation videos, schematics of the station’s layout, organization charts of the staff personnel, lists of duties that the various departments were responsible for. Grant had thought he’d known the station’s layout and organization from his months of study on the trip out, but apparently most of his information had been terribly out of date.
“Let’s break for lunch,” Muzorawa said, pushing his chair back from the small oval conference table. The wallscreen went blank and the stuffy little room’s overhead lights came on.
“Fine,” said Grant, getting to his feet.
As they headed for the cafeteria, Grant noticed that Muzorawa seemed to be lurching as he walked; not staggering, exactly, but the man walked with a hesitant, slightly uncertain gait, as if afraid that he were about to bump into some unseen obstacle or stumble drunkenly into a wall. He was clad in another turtleneck pullover shirt that hung loosely over the same bulky-looking black leather leggings, with metal studs running down their outer seams. His feet were shod in what appeared to be soft moccasins.
Most of the station’s other scientific personnel wore casual shirts and slacks, as Grant himself did. The engineers and technicians usually wore coveralls that were color-coded to denote the wearer’s specialty.
Once they had filled their trays and found a table, Grant asked, “I’m still not clear about what you actually do here.”
Moving his lunch dishes from his tray to the table, Muzorawa asked, “Do you mean me personally, or the station in general?”
“Both, I guess,” said Grant, sliding his emptied tray under his chair.
“This station is the headquarters for the ongoing studies of Jupiter’s moons,” Muzorawa said, as if reciting from a manual. “Almost everyone here on the station is support staff for those studies.”
Grant shook his head, unsatisfied. “Okay, I know there are teams studying the life-forms under the ice on Europa and Callisto—”
“And the volcanoes on Io.”
“And the dynamics of the ring system.”
“And Ganymede and the smaller moons, too.”
“But you’re not involved in any of that, are you?”
Muzorawa hesitated a moment, then replied, “No. Not me.
“Neither are Egon or Lainie.”
“She prefers to be called Lane.”
“But none of you is studying the moons, right?”
Reluctantly, Grant thought, Muzorawa replied, “No, we are part of a small group that is studying the planet itself, not the moons or the ring system.”
“And Dr. Wo?”
An even longer hesitation, then, “Dr. Wo’s official title is station director. He runs the entire operation here. He reports directly to the IAA, back on Earth.”
Grant saw that Muzorawa looked distinctly uneasy when Wo’s name was mentioned. And no wonder. The director must have the power of life and death over all of us, just about, Grant reasoned.
Lowering his voice to a near whisper, Muzorawa said, “Wo is more interested in Jupiter itself than its moons. That’s why he’s split us away from the rest of the staff and set us up to study the Jovian atmosphere.”
“And the ocean,” Grant prompted.
Again Muzorawa hesitated. Grant got the impression that the man was arguing with himself, debating inwardly about how much he should tell this curious newcomer.
“Wo has assigned a small team to study the ocean,” he said at last “There are only ten of us—plus Dr. Wo himself. And the medical and technical support staffs, of course.”
“Why do you need a medical support staff?” Grant wondered.
“The ocean is Wo’s obsession,” Muzorawa added, actually whispering now. “He is determined to find out what’s going on down there.”
“So what do you actually work on?”
“Me? The fluid dynamics of the Jovian atmosphere and ocean.”
Grant said nothing, waiting for more.
“The atmosphere/ocean system is like nothing we’ve seen before,” Muzorawa said, his tone at last brightening, losing its guarded edge, taking on some enthusiasm. “For one thing, there’s no clear demarkation between the gas phase and the liquid, no sharp boundary where the atmosphere ends and the ocean begins.”
“There’s no real surface to the ocean,” Grant said, wanting to show the older man that he wasn’t totally ignorant.
“No, not like on Earth. Jupiter’s atmosphere gradually thickens, gets denser and denser, until it’s not a gas anymore but a liquid. It’s … well, it’s something else, let me tell you.”
Before Grant could respond, Muzorawa hunched closer in his chair and went on, “It’s heated from below, you see. The planet’s internal heat is stronger than the solar influx on the tops of the clouds. The pressure gradient is really steep: Jupiter’s gravity field is the strongest in the solar system.”
“Two point five four gees,” Grant recited.
“That’s merely at the top of the cloud deck,” Muzorawa said, waggling one hand in the air. “It gets stronger as you go down into the atmosphere. Do you have any idea of what the pressures are down there?”
Grant shrugged. “Thousands of times normal atmospheric pressure.”
“Thousands of times the pressure at the bottom of the deepest ocean on Earth,” Muzorawa corrected. A smile was growing on his face, the happy, contented smile of a scientist talking about his special field of study.
“So the pressure squeezes the atmosphere and turns the gases into liquids.”