Krebs touched the screen and the light went off.
“Is that all you’ll be saying?” O’Hara blurted. “Won’t you tell them about their signaling lights?”
“They’ll be able to see the lights as well as we do,” Krebs said. “They can draw their own conclusions as to whether they are signals or not.”
“But they’ve got to be!” O’Hara said. “What else could they be?”
“Launch the capsule,” Krebs said to Karlstad. Giving O’Hara a sour look, she retorted, “They could be almost anything, anything at all. Don’t leap to conclusions.”
Karlstad launched the capsule with the touch of a fingertip against a screen. Grant felt it as a slight shudder.
“The lights flicker on and off so fast,” Muzorawa said, “that it’s impossible to tell what they are.”
“Can’t we slow them down?” Grant asked. “I mean, run our imagery of them at a reduced speed.”
“Slow motion?”
“Yes.”
Muzorawa thought it over for a moment, then said, “Yes, that’s a good idea. Captain?”
“Do it,” Krebs snapped.
It took several minutes for Muzorawa to program the imagery stored in the sensors’ computer memory. Finally he told them he was ready.
“Put it on the main screen,” Krebs ordered.
The ache in Grant’s back was returning. He could not see anything wrong in the display screens of his console, but the ache warned him that the thruster was starting to decay again.
Looking up, he saw on the wallscreen what appeared to be a still picture of one of the Jovians. No, its flippers were moving, but so slowly that Grant could see little silvery particles in the water tumbling in the wake of those powerful paddles of flesh. Diamonds, he realized anew. They’re swimming through a cloud of diamonds —and food.
Though the beasts were still some fifty kilometers distant, the cameras’ magnification showed them in some detaiclass="underline" Their skins looked gray, rubbery, but mottled with rough lumps and knobs and—eyes. Those things had to be eyes; rows of them, hundreds of them staring out into the hot, dark sea. Grant shuddered. For a moment he felt as if those eyes were looking at him, watching him, appraising the intruding aliens from another world.
They’re so huge, Grant thought. How could any creature grow to such enormous size? How does its nervous system control those flippers? Where is the brain located? Lord, one of those flippers could crush us with just a flick.
He saw patches of different colors here and there on the skin of the beasts. Parasites? There’s a whole biosphere in this ocean, with plenty of ecological niches for all sorts of creatures. The organics from the clouds are at the bottom of the food chain and these gigantic superwhales must be at the top. What else are we going to find?
Red and orange lights glowed along the huge flanks of the massive creatures, strange puzzling designs that lit the ocean with their eerie glow. They made no sense to Grant, they gave no hint of meaning.
“Well, at least they’re not saying ‘Earthlings go home,”’ Karlstad wisecracked.
“But look,” Muzorawa pointed toward the wallscreen, “they are all repeating the same set of symbols.”
“Is it writing?” O’Hara asked.
“Impossible,” spat Krebs.
“And yet…”
“It must mean something,” Karlstad said.
“It means something to them, I should think,” Muzorawa murmured.
Krebs started to say, “Do not leap to—”
She stopped, open-mouthed. Grant saw it, too. So did all the others.
One of the Jovians displayed an image of a round, saucer-shaped object with a single row of lights dotting its forward side. The saucer was in deep red, the lights a bright orange. Almost immediately, the others began to show the same picture.
“That’s us!” Karlstad yelped.
The same picture flashed back and forth among each of the Jovians in the screen’s display.
“They’ve seen us,” O’Hara said in an awed whisper.
“They know we’re here,” Krebs agreed, her own voice hushed with astonishment.
“My God,” said Grant, “they are intelligent.”
LEVIATHAN
Gulping down the streaming food greedily, Leviathan realized it had been congratulating itself too soon. A lone member of the Kin was always prey to the Darters, and it was too far from the giant storm to use the same tactics that had saved it from the earlier pack.
Speed. Speed was Leviathan’s only hope. If it could get back to its own Kin, rejoin the others, then the Darters would not dare to attack. Even if they were foolish or desperate enough to try, an entire gathering of Kin could crush the Darters with ease. Darters almost always broke off their attacks when they saw a whole gathering swinging into a defensive sphere. They preferred to attack lone members, waiting until one of the Kin moved off by itself to dissociate and begin budding.
But the Kin were still far, far off. And the Darters were moving in fast. It was going to be a race, Leviathan knew, urging its flagella members to their utmost speed. A race against time. A race against death.
PURSUIT
“Nonsense!” Krebs snarled. “Just because they can mimic what they see doesn’t make them intelligent.”
“It doesn’t make them stupid,” Karlstad quipped.
“Parrots can mimic human speech,” Krebs said.
“Dogs, horses, many animals can respond to human commands. Does that make them intelligent?”
“Dolphins speak with us,” O’Hara said.
Krebs shook her head stubbornly. “Intelligence requires culture, technology. Dolphins have none.”
How could they, Grant wondered, living underwater, without hands to manipulate their environment, without the ability to make fire? They’re stuck with their own muscle power, and that’s a dead end.
“Ants have culture and technology,” Karlstad said.
Before Krebs could respond, O’Hara countered, “The mark of intelligence is the ability to communicate abstract ideas among others of your species. The dolphins do that.”
“Abstract ideas?” Muzorawa asked.
“Yes,” O’Hara replied firmly. “They can understand friendship and loyalty. They have family ties.”
Krebs, still looking utterly unconvinced, said, “We are not here for philosophical debates. Maintain the same course and speed as the whales. The more data we get on them, the better.”
The pain in his back was getting worse. Grant closed his eyes and visualized the faulty thruster. The pain told him that it was sputtering again.
Before he could call out the problem, Krebs complained, “I need full power from all the thrusters, Mr. Archer.”
“Number two is failing again,” he said.
“I can see that. Fix it!”
“If I could shut it down … just for half an hour…”
Krebs seemed to consider the possibility. Then she shook her head. “No. We will lose the whales.”
Muzorawa spoke up. “Captain, we know the herd’s course and speed. We could catch up with them once the thruster is repaired.”
“We are barely keeping pace with them now,” Krebs growled. “Once they move away from us we’ll never catch them.”
“The stream of organics that they are grazing on follows a curving path,” Muzorawa said, calmly reasonable, displaying Grant’s map of the ocean currents with the organics’ course highlighted. “We could cut across the current, once the thruster is repaired, and intercept the herd.”
Krebs closed her eyes. She’s visualizing Zeb’s map, Grant thought, using the implants to give her a picture that her eyes can’t see. The pressure must be affecting her optic nerves, not her visual cortex.