Until she was completely wired and activated her linkage. Then she straightened up and took command.
“Mr. Grant, what are you gawking at?” she demanded.
Grant snapped his head around and stared at his console. “Nothing, Captain.”
“You tend to your duties, Mr. Grant, and I will tend to mine.”
“Yes’m.”
“Dr. Krebs,” said Muzorawa. “We must discuss your condition.”
“There is nothing to discuss.”
“I’m afraid there is.”
“I am fully capable of executing my responsibilities,” Krebs said. Grant thought he heard the slightest of tremors in her voice.
“Dr. Krebs, the trauma to your visual cortex is worsening.”
Krebs glared at him but said nothing.
“It is possible that it will continue to worsen,” Muzorawa went on calmly, reasonably. “It could lead to a cerebral hemorrhage.”
“I know that,” said Krebs, her voice several notches lower than usual. “I accept that risk.”
“We should abort the mission and return to the station,” Muzorawa said. Grant marveled at how impersonally he managed to put it. No blame. No shame.
Krebs hovered in the middle of the bridge, breathing hard enough for Grant to see her chest rising and falling. The ship was running smoothly enough; he still felt the steady thrum of the generator and the energy of the thrusters, but that was all background now, like the constant aching pressure behind his eyes, like the growing dull pain in his back, pushed to one side as he focused consciously on the interplay between Muzorawa and Krebs.
At last she said, “If we return to the station with nothing to show for our efforts, they will never permit another mission. They have already ordered us to abandon our work. I will not do that. Not under any circumstances. Is that clear?”
“But your health is in danger. Your life—”
“What good is my life if I can’t pursue the search to which I’ve devoted it?” Krebs’s voice rose powerfully. “What use would my life be if I am not permitted to do the work which I love? I have already sacrificed everything else in my life—family, friends, even lovers— to be here, in this damned ocean, seeking the answer to the greatest question of them alclass="underline" Is there intelligent life here? Will we find a companion species, another life-form with which we can converse? Will the human race’s loneliness end here, in the hot sea of Jupiter?”
None of the crew could say a word. They all stared at her.
Krebs broke into a bitter smile. “I see the disbelief on your face, Dr. Karlstad. You find it difficult to believe that I had lovers?”
“Uh, n-no, not at all,” Karlstad stammered.
“We go on,” Krebs said. “I don’t care if I die here. Better here than in some dusty classroom where I wouldn’t even be allowed to teach about extraterrestrial life.”
Muzorawa replied meekly, “Yes, Captain.”
Krebs nodded as if satisfied, then turned her baleful look toward O’Hara. “Dr. O’Hara, dive angle of five degrees. Now.”
Lane glanced at the others, then asked, “We’re going deeper?”
“Deeper,” said Krebs.
Grant’s head throbbed with pain. Each beat of his pulse was like a hammer banging inside his sinuses. His back hurt as if it were slowly petrifying. They had passed the hundred-kilometer depth and were still pushing deeper, in a shallow dive that ran parallel to a bright swirling stream of organic particles.
Somewhere out in that dark sea waited the Great Red Spot, Grant knew. He could not see it, not even when tapping into the ship’s long-range sensors. But it was there, that enormous vortex, that eternal storm that was bigger than the entire Earth, sucking currents into its voracious maw. It was waiting for them, drawing them to it like a magnet pulls on a tiny filing of iron.
They were riding one of those inflowing currents now, buffeting noticeably whenever they drifted toward its turbulent outer edge. As long as they remained well within the current, though, the ship rode easily, smoothly. Grant was able to cut down on the thrusters’ power. The Red Spot was doing their work for them, but Grant feared that the work would lead to their destruction.
On a rest break with Muzorawa, Grant pleaded, “Zeb, you can’t let her drag us into the Red Spot.”
“She’ll turn off long before we get into danger,” Muzorawa said. But his red-rimmed eyes would not maintain contact with Grant’s.
Pulling himself down wearily to sit on the end of his bunk, Grant pointed out, “The current’s getting stronger. I don’t know how far we can go before it’ll be too strong for the thrusters to break us free.”
Muzorawa considered that for a long, silent moment, then looked directly at Grant. “What does your fluid dynamics program tell you?”
“I’d have to make a calculation …”
“Do that,” Muzorawa said wearily. “Then show it to me. It might be the point that forces a decision.”
“A decision?”
“About her,” said Muzorawa, gesturing toward the bridge.
Still they descended. A hundred kilometers, a hundred ten, a hundred fifteen. The ship creaked and groaned, metal screeching with strain. She sounds as if she’s in agony, Grant thought. Just like the rest of us.
O’Hara came back onto the bridge after a rest period with a smile on her lips. It surprised Grant; he hadn’t seen any of them smile in days.
“You must have had a good dream,” he said as she hooked up.
“No dream,” O’Hara replied. “I didn’t sleep at all.”
Grant closed his eyes. The headache seemed to abate a little when his eyes were closed, and he saw the glowing star at the heart of the fusion generator, felt its warmth, thrilled at the harmonies of electricity coursing through the ship’s wiring.
“Look at this.” O’Hara nudged him. “I took them from the sampling system.”
She held a dozen or so tiny pebbles in the palm of her hand. No, not pebbles, Grant thought. They were so minute they looked almost like dust motes, except that they were a glassy light gray rather than sooty black.
“Your diamonds,” O’Hara said, her voice lilting with delight.
“Is that what they are?”
“They’re truly diamonds, they are. Not gemstone quality, I’m afraid, and very small. But how many women can say they’ve held a fistful of diamonds in the palm of their hand?”
“Hey, let me see,” Karlstad said, from his console.
Krebs’s sour voice broke in, “You are supposed to be on duty, Dr. O’Hara.”
“I was showing Mr. Archer the diamonds that the sampler’s scooped in,” Lane replied somewhat defensively.
“You should have spent your rest period resting Krebs growled. “You know that—”
“Something’s moving down there,” Muzorawa said.
“What?” Krebs shot over toward him like a stumpy torpedo.
“Very long range,” said Muzorawa. “Sonar return. But definitely a moving object.”
“Distance? Speed?” Krebs demanded. “We need numbers!”
“There’s more than one!” Muzorawa’s voice was shaking now.
Grant tapped into the sensor net and saw three, no four, fuzzy things moving slowly in the same direction as the ship. Another slid into view, then two more.
“They’re seventy-eight point six kilometers, slant range,” Muzorawa called out.
“How deep are they?”
“Fourteen kilometers deeper than we are.”
“O’Hara, give me a two-degree angle of descent.”
“We can’t go deeper!” Karlstad cried out. “We’re far beyond our design limit now!”