The heat shield sprang away and the parachute streamed out behind. Then the radio transmitter began to broadcast the readings of six sensors, verbatim. Swinging gently under its parachute, the probe began its oneway descent into the clouds of Jupiter.
Ensign browsed on and watched Melody and Snow, grazing while practicing a simple duet. The Geek angled over and hummed quietly, “Looks like Melody has accepted her”
Ensign bobbed agreement. “A good start. But we need more members.”
“They’ll come—in time ” His tone changed. “Shark, low and to the right.”
Ensign’s body tensed as he saw the small, dark torpedo shape dimly through the clouds and relaxed again when he saw that they were beyond its range. The predators of the clouds often followed the plankton swells in hope one of the High Folk would be hungry enough or foolish enough to graze the richer fields at the very cloud tops. Ensign sent a low frequency warning to Melody and Snow. They acknowledged on the same frequency without interrupting their song.
The Geek said, almost casually, “Snow says she knows of a large pod in the east that would probably be willing to share members.”
“Oh? Does she know any of them personally?”
“No, only that the pod is ready to split. They deplete the plankton fields too fast and must constantly move.”
Ensign nodded. “Wise choice. Especially if there are calves. The constant travel saps their strength and they grow up weak. Perhaps we will drift eastward for a while.”
“SKYFALL!” Melody’s hysterical warning carried secondary tones indicating danger from the south.
Ensign used his upper eyes to find a bright white object arcing toward them while his lower eyes searched the clouds for a place to run—but a second shark appeared down in the clouds. Within seconds it became obvious that the piece of the sky falling near them was nowhere near the size or speed of a devastating comet. Indeed, as it came lower it dimmed to red and then a piece broke off. “Relax—it is a small skyfall. No danger. Just stay away from it.” Ensign had heard stories after the last Skyfall of small, hard solid things falling with the comet—stones that could pierce the soft tissues of the High Folk more easily than a shark’s jaws.
Then a long, dark streamer spun out behind the thing. Ensign thought it the strangest thing he’d ever seen in his life—until he saw the streamer blossom into a circular canopy attached to the object by sinews. It slowed greatly in its descent and swung back and forth below a billowing arc.
Suzanne Quinlan watched the data stream carefully on her monitor. Normally, sitting watch in the Deep Space Network Control Room was about as exciting as watching paint dry. This afternoon was no different. NASA’s large dish antennas scattered across the globe regularly communicated with a handful of interplanetary craft all over local space—and a few which had left the Solar System entirely. Her job was to make sure all the pieces of equipment—antennas, receivers, data recorders, communications links—and the people who operated them, followed a complex and ever-changing schedule.
Forty minutes ago the Galileo spacecraft had started a scheduled data transmission. The Earth-bound antenna it sought was still transmitting instructions to a satellite orbiting far above the south pole of the Sun. Just before Galileo’s message reached Earth, the antenna, located in Australia, swung around to hear it.
“Anything new?”
Suzanne started at the voice, and looked up to see F. Gary Rhine standing behind her.
“We’ve got some data.” She hesitated. “How was the administrative meeting?”
Rhine pulled a chair up and sat on it backwards. “If I told you it was stirring and inspiring would you believe me?” She didn’t respond as she searched the data stream for housekeeping bits that marked off blocks of data.
“If I can just hold on for another eight months of this equine excrement,” Rhine continued in his usual growl, “I can retire. Now they say we have a new performance review procedure we all have to go through.”
Suzanne looked at him out of the corner of her eye, not quite sure what to make of her new acquaintance. Rhine’s irascibility, explosive temper, and way of charging problems head-on had earned him the nickname of “Rhino.” She’d heard the water cooler gossip that he knew where every body and skeleton in all of JPL was buried. Supposedly he had started his career playing with V2s at White Sands in the early ’50s, and had spent all his life working with rockets and spacecraft. He was one of the few who’d lasted through the decades of budget cuts, killed programs, layoffs and program reorganizations. She decided she rather admired him, in spite of the fact that he made her profoundly uncomfortable.
“There it is!”
“What?”
“Memory allocations!” Suzanne pointed to the screen. “These blocks are probe data. Looks like we got a good chunk of data.”
F. Gary Rhine sighed. “Well, at least something went right today.”
It was Suzanne’s turn to snort. “All we know for sure is the probe data’s been stored in these memory blocks—it may all be incomprehensible garbage, but at least it’s duly recorded incomprehensible garbage.”
“Little cynical this morning?”
Suzanne sighed. “I guess.” Then on impulse she added: “I mean it’s exciting and everything, but it’s not the way I thought it would be. There’s all this trivial junk—like performance review meetings—and so little of the important stuff.”
“There’s damn little of the important stuff any more,” the older man told her. “You want my advice? Get out and go do something else.”
Suzanne grimaced. “There’s not much you can do with a Ph.D in planetology. But what about you?”
The Rhino shook his head. “I’m not as valuable as you might think. Most of this place runs on ’60s and ’70s technology, years behind the commercial stuff. I’m not so much a technical chief as I am curator of a communications museum.” Then the little-boy grin. “Besides, I’m sticking around to see what happens next.”
What next? Ensign thought as the strange thing came lazily down, borne slightly east by the prevailing winds. First Sky fall and now this.
The Geek watched the strange object drift toward them. “Is it alive?”
“It’s moving,” Melody offered.
Snow slipped beneath it to use her upper eyes. “It swings rhythmically.” She ventured a song of greeting. The thing remained silent.
The Geek moved in, “tasting” the probe with beams of sound. The upper round canopy was a membrane of some sort, but the lower section was unlike anything he had ever seen.
“It reflects,” he sang in wonder. “The lower part reflects almost everything.”
Even from his distance and angle Ensign could feel the reflections of The Geek’s song. That made him even more wary. Everything in the High Folk’s world reflected sound, but imperfectly. A probe of the right frequency told you something about the inner structure of things. But this object was reflecting everything from its surface.
For the moment he ignored the membrane as being more-or-less familiar and concentrated on the lower part. The small sphere wasn’t quite smooth. It had crisp markings in regular circles and lines. He compared it to the mottled skins of his own folk, sharks and plankton. A ray of sunlight glinted off the shiny surface, a phenomenon he’d seen only when looking into the eyes of others. “It’s smooth. Very smooth. I don’t see how anything would grow up like this!”