“Certainly! There’s an ocean down there, an ocean ten times bigger than the whole Earth. Liquid water, at least five thousand kilometers deep, perhaps more; we haven’t been able to probe that far down yet.”
“And things swimming in the water?” Grant guessed.
Muzorawa’s smile vanished. He glanced over his shoulder. Then, leaning closer to Grant, he lowered his voice to answer, “The unofficial word is, the deepest probes have detected indications of objects moving in the Jovian ocean.”
“Objects?”
“Objects.”
“Are they living creatures?”
Muzorawa looked up toward the ceiling, then hunched still closer to Grant, close enough so that Grant could smell a trace of clove or something pungent and exotic on his breath.
“We don’t know. Not yet. But Wo intends to find out.”
Grant felt a stir of excitement. “How? When?”
Actually whispering again, Muzorawa said, “A deep mission. Really deep. And crewed.”
“Crude?”
“Crewed. Not robotic. A team of six people.”
Grant’s jaw fell open. “Down into the ocean?”
Muzorawa made a hushing motion with both his hands and turned to glance guiltily over his shoulder. “Not so loud!” he whispered. “This is all supposed to be top secret.”
“But why? Why should it be secret? Who’s he keeping it a secret from?”
Muzorawa drew back from Grant. With a shake of his head he said only, “You’ll find out. Perhaps.”
LEVIATHAN
Leviathan followed an upwelling current through the endless sea, smoothly grazing on the food that spiraled down from the abyss above. Far from the Kin now, away from the others of its own kind, Leviathan reveled in its freedom from the herd and their plodding cycle of feeding, dismemberment, and rejoining.
To human senses the boundless ocean would be impenetrably dark, devastatingly hot, crushingly dense. Yet Leviathan moved through the surging deeps with ease, the flagella members of its assemblage stroking steadily as its mouth parts slowly opened and closed, opened and closed, in the ancient rhythm of ingestion.
To human senses Leviathan would be staggeringly huge, dwarfing all the whales of Earth, larger than whole pods of whales, larger even than a good-size city. Yet in the vast depths of the Jovian sea Leviathan was merely one of many, slightly larger than some, considerably smaller than the eldest of its kind.
There were dangers in that dark, hot, deep sea. Glide too high on the soaring currents, toward the source of the bountiful food, and the waters grew too thin and cold; Leviathan’s members would involuntarily disassemble, shed their cohesion, never to reunite again. Get trapped in a treacherous downsurge and the heat welling up from the abyss below would kill the members before they could break away and scatter.
Best to cruise here in the abundant world provided by the Symmetry, between the abyss above and the abyss below, where the food drifted down constantly from the cold wilderness on high and the warmth from the depths below made life tolerable.
Predators swarmed through Leviathan’s ocean: swift voracious Darters that struck at Leviathan’s kind and devoured their outer members. There were even cases where the predators had penetrated to the core of their prey, rupturing the central organs and forever destroying the poor creature’s unity. The Elders had warned Leviathan that the Darters attacked solitary members of the Kin when they had broken away from their group for budding in solitude. Still Leviathan swam on alone, intent on exploring new areas of the measureless sea.
Leviathan remembered when the abyss above had erupted in giant flares of killing heat. Many of Leviathan’s kind had disassembled in the sudden violence of those concussions. Even the everlasting rain of food had been disrupted, and Leviathan had known hunger for the first time in its existence. But the explosions dissipated swiftly and life eventually returned to normal again.
Leviathan had been warned of another kind of creature in the sea: a phantasm, a strange picture drawn by others of the Kin, like nothing Leviathan had ever sensed for itself, small and sluggish and cold, lacking flagella members or any trace of community. It was pictured to have appeared once in the sea and once only, then vanished upward into the abyss above.
None of the others had paid much attention to it. It was so tiny that it could barely be sensed it at all, yet for some reason the vision of its singular presence in the eternal ocean sent a chilling note of uneasiness through Leviathan’s entire assemblage. It was an unnatural thing, alien, troubling.
SLAVE LABOR
Grant finished his lunch with Muzorawa in guarded silence, his mind spinning with the idea of sending a crewed mission into the vast ocean beneath Jupiter’s hurtling clouds.
And it’s not the first one, Grant told himself. Beech knew there’d already been at least one human mission to the planet.
Once they left the cafeteria, Muzorawa said brightly, “Very well, newcomer, you have received the official orientation.”
“And then some,” said Grant.
Muzorawa shook his head. “None of that, now! What I told you was strictly in confidence, between the two of us. Besides, most of it was conjecture.”
Grant nodded, but his mind was still racing. What’s he afraid of? Why all this secrecy? If there are life-forms in the Jovian ocean, why doesn’t Wo announce it like any other scientific discovery? And why is the New Morality so torqued up over this?
He thought he knew the answer to that last question. Finding any kind of alien life was seen as a threat to belief in God. Every time scientists discovered a new life-form anywhere, some people gave up their faith. Atheists crowed that the Bible was nonsense, a pack of scribbling by ancient narrow-minded men steeped in superstition and primitive ignorance.
Even when biblical scholars and scientists who were also true Believers pointed out that no scientific discovery could disprove the existence of God, the fanatical atheists howled with glee with each new discovery, especially when the cliffside ruins on Mars showed that an intelligent race had lived there millions of years ago.
He hardly heard Muzorawa telling him, “Now you are to go to the personnel office, where you will receive your work assignment.”
“What assignment could they possibly have for an astrophysicist?” Grant complained.
Muzorawa grinned at him. “I’m sure Dr. Wo has something in mind for you.”
That sounded ominous to Grant.
The personnel office was little more than a closetsized compartment in the station’s executive area. It was only a few doors from the director’s more spacious and imposing office.
To his surprise, when he slid open the door marked personnel, Egon Karlstad was sitting behind the tiny metal desk.
“You’re the personnel officer?” Grant blurted.
“This week,” Karlstad replied smoothly. “I told you that Wo likes to rotate us through the administrative jobs.”
“No, you said—”
“It lets him keep the beancounters down to a minimum, so he can bring more scooters out here,” Karlstad continued. “Of course, that means we scooters have to pull double duty all the time, but that doesn’t bother our peerless leader. Not at all.”
Karlstad seemed too large for the desk. His knees poked up and it looked as if he could touch the opposite walls of the compartment merely by stretching out his arms. The desk itself was scuffed and battered from long use; someone had even kicked a dent into its side.
“Have a seat,” Karlstad said.
Grant took the only other chair: It was molded plastic, solid yet comfortably yielding.
“Okay,” Karlstad said, turning to the screen built into the desktop. “Archer, Grant A.”