2061: Odyssey Three Read online

  "... tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle - all in slow motion, like a dream.

  "Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the thing was trying to do - and then it was too late. We could have saved ourselves - if we'd only switched off those lights.

  "Perhaps it's a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered by the Sunlight that filters through the ice. Or it could have been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must have been more brilliant than anything that Europa has ever known.

  "Then the ship crashed. I saw the hull split, a cloud of snowflakes form as moisture condensed. All the lights went out, except for one, swinging back and forth on a cable a couple of metres above the ground.

  "I don't know what happened immediately after that. The next thing I remember, I was standing under the light, beside the wreck of the ship, with a fine powdering of fresh snow all around me. I could see my footsteps in it very clearly... I must have run there; perhaps only a minute or two had elapsed...

  "The plant - I still thought of it as a plant - was motionless. I wondered if it had been damaged by the impact; large sections - as thick as a man's arm -had splintered off, like broken twigs.

  "Then the main trunk started to move again. It pulled away from the hull, and began to crawl towards me. That was when I knew for certain that the thing was light-sensitive: I was standing immediately under the thousand-watt lamp, which had stopped swinging now.

  "Imagine an oak tree - better still, a banyan with its multiple trunks and roots - flattened out by gravity and trying to creep along the ground. It got to within five metres of the light, then started to spread out until it had made a perfect circle around me. Presumably that was the limit of its tolerance -the point at which photo-attraction turned to repulsion. After that, nothing happened for several minutes. I wondered if it was dead - frozen solid at last.

  "Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers opening. In fact I thought they were flowers - each about as big as a man's head.

  "Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to unfold. Even then, it occurred to me that no one - no thing - could ever have seen these colours before; they had no existence until we brought our lights - our fatal lights - to this world.

  "Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly... I walked over to the living wall that surrounded me, so that I would see exactly what was happening. Neither then, or at any other time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain that it was not malevolent - if indeed it was conscious at all.

  "There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of unfolding. Now, they reminded me of butterflies, just emerging from the chrysalis... wings crumpled, still feeble... I was getting closer and closer to the truth.

  "But they were freezing - dying as quickly as they formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like fish stranded on dry land - and at last I realized exactly what they were. Those membranes weren't petals - they were fins, or their equivalent. This was the free-swimming, larval stage of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on the seabed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of new territory. Just like the corals of Earth's oceans.

  "I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now, to a drab brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly, and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it sensed my presence.

  "Then I noticed that the stamens - as I'd called them - all carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny star sapphires - or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop - aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I watched, the vivid blue faded, the sapphires became dull, ordinary stones...

  "Dr Floyd - or anyone else who is listening - I haven't much more time - Jupiter will soon block my signal. But I've almost finished.

  "I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand-watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.

  "I wondered if it was too late. For a few minutes, nothing happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches around me, and kicked it.

  "Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to retreat back to the Canal. There was plenty of light - I could see everything perfectly. Ganymede and Callisto were in the sky - Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent - and there was a big auroral display on the nightside, at the Jovian end of the Io flux tube. There was no need to use my helmet light.

  "I followed the creature all the way back to the water, encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down, feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath my boots... As it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain strength and energy, as if it knew that it was approaching its natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.

  "It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bubbled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to see if there was anything to salvage - I don't want to talk about that...

  "I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me.

  "And - when the next ship comes home - ask them to take our bones back to China.

  "Jupiter will be cutting us off in a few minutes. I wish I knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I'll repeat this message when we're in line of sight again - if my suit's life-support system lasts that long.

  "This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the destruction of spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice..."

  The signal faded abruptly, came back for a moment, then disappeared completely below the noise level. There would never be any further message from Professor Chang; but it had already deflected Lawrence Tsung's ambitions into space.

  6: The Greening of Ganymede

  Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made.

  He was the right man because he was a second-generation Afrikaner refugee, and a trained geologist; both factors were equally important. He was in the right place, because that had to be the largest of the Jovian moons - third outwards in the sequence Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto.

  The time was not so critical, for the information had been ticking away like a delayed-action bomb in the data banks for at least a decade. van der Berg did not encounter it until '57; even then it took him another year to convince himself that he was not crazy - and it was '59 before he had quietly sequestered the original records so that no one could duplicate his discovery. Only then could he safely give his full attention to the main problem: what to do next.

  It had all begun, as is so often the case, with an apparently trivial observation in a field which did not even concern van der Berg directly. His job, as a member of the Planetary Engineering Task Force, was to survey and catalogue the natural resources of Ganymede; he had little business fooling around with the forbidden satellite next door.

  But Europa was an enigma which no one - least of all its immediate neighbours - could ignore for long. Every seven days it passed between Ganymede and the brilliant minisun that had once been Jupiter, producing eclipses which could last as long as twelve minutes. At its closest, it appeared slightly smaller than the Moon as seen from Earth, but it dwindled to a mere quarter of that size when it was on the other side of its orbit.

  The eclipses were often spectacular. Just before it slid between Ganymede and Lucifer, Europa would become an ominous black disc, outlined with a ring of crimson fire, as the light of the new sun was refracted through the a
tmosphere it had helped to create.

  In less than half a human lifetime, Europa had been transformed. The crust of ice on the hemisphere always facing Lucifer had melted, to form the Solar System's second ocean. For a decade it had foamed and bubbled into the vacuum above it, until equilibrium had been reached. Now Europa possessed a thin but serviceable - though not to human beings - atmosphere of water vapour, hydrogen sulphide, carbon and sulphur dioxides, nitrogen, and miscellaneous rare gases. Though the somewhat misnamed 'nightside' of the satellite was still permanently frozen, an area as large as Africa now had a temperate climate, liquid water, and a few scattered islands.

  All this, and not much more, had been observed through telescopes in Earth orbit. By the time that the first full-scale expedition had been launched to the Galilean moons, in 2028, Europa had already become veiled by a permanent mantle of clouds. Cautious radar probing revealed little but smooth ocean on one face, and almost equally smooth ice on the other; Europa still maintained its reputation as the flattest piece of real estate in the Solar System. Ten years later, that was no longer true: something drastic had happened to Europa. It now possessed a solitary mountain, almost as high as Everest, jutting up through the ice of the twilight zone. Presumably some volcanic activity - like that occurring ceaselessly on neighbouring Io - had thrust this mass of material skywards. The vastly increased heat-flow from Lucifer could have triggered such an event.

  But there were problems with this obvious explanation. Mount Zeus was an irregular pyramid, not the usual volcanic cone, and radar scans showed none of the characteristic lava flows. Some poor-quality photographs obtained through telescopes on Ganymede, during a momentary break in the clouds, suggested that it was made of ice, like the frozen landscape around it. Whatever the answer, the creation of Mount Zeus had been a traumatic experience for the world it dominated, for the entire crazy-paving pattern of fractured ice floes over the nightside had changed completely.

  One maverick scientist had put forward the theory that Mount Zeus was a "cosmic iceberg" - a cometary fragment that had dropped upon Europa from space; battered Callisto gave ample proof that such bombardments had occurred in the remote past. The theory was very unpopular on Ganymede, whose would-be colonists already had sufficient problems.

  They had been much relieved when van der Berg had refuted the theory convincingly; any mass of ice this size would have shattered on impact - and even if it hadn't, Europa's gravity, modest though it was, would have quickly brought about its collapse. Radar measurements showed that though Mount Zeus was indeed steadily sinking, its overall shape remained completely unaltered. Ice was not the answer.

  The problem could, of course, have been settled by sending a single probe through the clouds of Europa. Unfortunately, whatever was beneath that almost permanent overcast did not encourage curiosity.

  ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA.

  ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

  That last message relayed from the spaceship Discovery just before its destruction had not been forgotten, but there had been endless arguments about its interpretation. Did 'landings' refer to robot probes, or only to manned vehicles? And what about close flybys - manned or unmanned? Or balloons floating in the upper atmosphere?

  The scientists were anxious to find out, but the general public was distinctly nervous. Any power that could detonate the mightiest planet in the Solar System was not to be trifled with. And it would take centuries to explore and exploit Io, Ganymede, Callisto and the dozens of minor satellites; Europa could wait.

  More than once, therefore, van der Berg had been told not to waste his valuable time on research of no practical importance, when there was so much to be done on Ganymede. ("Where can we find carbon - phosphorus - nitrates for the hydroponic farms? How stable is the Barnard Escarpment? Is there any danger of more mudslides in Phrygia?" And so on and so forth...) But he had inherited his Boer ancestors' well-deserved reputation for stubbornness: even when he was working on his numerous other projects, he kept looking over his shoulder at Europa.

  And one day, just a few hours, a gale from the nightside cleared the skies about Mount Zeus.

  7: Transit

  I too take leave of all 1 ever had..."

  From what depths of memory had that line come swimming up to the surface? Heywood Floyd closed his eyes, and tried to focus on the past. It was certainly from a poem - and he had hardly read a line of poetry since leaving college. And little enough then, except during a short English Appreciation Seminar.

  With no further clues, it might take the station computer quite a while - perhaps as much as ten minutes - to locate the line in the whole body of English literature. But that would be cheating (not to mention expensive) and Floyd preferred to accept the intellectual challenge.

  A war poem, of course - but which war? There had been so many in the twentieth century.

  He was still searching through the mental mists when his guests arrived, moving with the effortless, slow-motion grace of longtime one-sixth gravity residents. The society of Pasteur was strongly influenced by what had been christened "centrifugal stratification"; some people never left the zero gee of the hub, while those who hoped one day to return to Earth preferred the almost normal-weight regime out on the rim of the huge, slowly revolving disc.

  George and Jerry were now Floyd's oldest and closest friends - which was surprising, because they had so few obvious points in common. Looking back on his own somewhat chequered emotional career - two marriages, three formal contracts, two informal ones, three children - he often envied the long-term stability of their relationship, apparently quite unaffected by the "nephews" from Earth or Moon who visited them from time to time.

  "Haven't you ever thought of divorce?" he had once asked them teasingly.

  As usual, George - whose acrobatic yet profoundly serious conducting had been largely responsible for the comeback of the classical orchestra - was at no loss for words.

  "Divorce - never," was his swift reply. "Murder - often."

  "Of course, he'd never get away with it," Jerry had retorted. "Sebastian would spill the beans."

  Sebastian was a beautiful and talkative parrot which the couple had imported after a long battle with the hospital authorities. He could not only talk, but could reproduce the opening bars of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, with which Jerry - considerably helped by Antonio Stradivari - had made his reputation half a century ago.

  Now the time had come to say goodbye to George, Jerry and Sebastian - perhaps only for a few weeks, perhaps for ever. Floyd had already made all his other farewells, in a round of parties that had gravely depleted the station's wine cellar, and could think of nothing he had left undone.

  Archie, his early-model but still perfectly serviceable comsec, had been programmed to handle all incoming messages, either by sending out appropriate replies or by routing anything urgent and personal to him aboard Universe. It would be strange, after all these years, not to be able to talk to anyone he wished - though in compensation he could also avoid unwanted callers. After a few days into the voyage, the ship would be far enough from Earth to make real-time conversation impossible, and all communication would have to be by recorded voice or teletext.

  "We thought you were our friend," complained George. "It was a dirty trick to make us your executors - especially as you're not going to leave us anything."

  "You may have a few surprises," grinned Floyd. "Anyway, Archie will take care of all the details. I'd just like you to monitor my mail, in case there's anything he doesn't understand."

  "If he won't, nor will we. What do we know about all your scientific societies and that sort of nonsense?"

  "They can look after themselves. Please see that the cleaning staff doesn't mess things up too badly while I'm away - and, if I don't come back - here are a few personal items I'd like delivered - mostly family."

  Family! There were pains, as well as pleasures, in living as long as he had done.

  It had been si
xty-three - sixty-three! - years since Marion had died in that air crash. Now he felt a twinge of guilt, because he could not even recall the grief he must have known. Or at best, it was a synthetic reconstruction, not a genuine memory.

  What would they have meant to each other, had she still been alive? She would have been just a hundred years old by now.

  And now the two little girls he had once loved so much were friendly, grey-haired strangers in their late sixties, with children - and grandchildren! - of their own. At last count there had been nine on that side of the family; without Archie's help, he would never be able to keep track of their names. But at least they all remembered him at Christmas, through duty if not affection.

  His second marriage, of course, had overlain the memories of his first, like the later writing on a medieval palimpsest. That too had ended, fifty years ago, somewhere between Earth and Jupiter. Though he had hoped for a reconciliation with both wife and son, there had been time for only one brief meeting, among all the welcoming ceremonies, before his accident exiled him to Pasteur.

  The meeting had not been a success; nor had the second, arranged at considerable expense and difficulty aboard the space hospital itself - indeed, in this very room. Chris had been twenty then, and had just married; if there was one thing that united Floyd and Caroline, it was disapproval of his choice.

  Yet Helena had turned out remarkably well: she had been a good mother to Chris II, born barely a month after the marriage. And when, like so many other young wives, she was widowed by the Copernicus Disaster, she did not lose her head.

  There was a curious irony in the fact that both Chris I and II had lost their fathers to space, though in very different ways. Floyd had returned briefly to his eight-year-old son as a total stranger; Chris II had at least known a father for the first decade of his life, before losing him for ever.