2010: Odyssey Two Page 6

  "This is Heywood Floyd, saying goodbye for my colleagues and myself, aboard Alexei Leonov."

  "And this is the bridge. Very nice presentation, Heywood. You should have been a newsman."

  "I've had plenty of practice. Half my time was spent on PR work."

  "PR?"

  "Public relations - usually telling politicians why they should give me more money. Something you don't have to bother about."

  "How I wish that was true. Anyway, come up to the bridge. There's some new information we'd like to discuss with you."

  Floyd removed his button microphone, locked the telescope into position and extricated himself from the tiny viewing blister. As he left, he almost collided with Nikolai Temovsky, obviously on a similar mission.

  "I'm about to steal your best quotes for Radio Moscow, Woody. Hope you don't mind."

  "You're welcome, tovarishch. Anyway, how could I stop you?"

  Up on the bridge, Captain Orlova was looking thoughtfully at a dense mass of words and figures on the main display. Floyd had painfully started to transliterate them when she interrupted him.

  "Don't worry about the details. These are estimates of the time it will take for Tsien to refill its tanks and get ready for lift-off.'

  "My people are doing the same calculations - but there are far too many variables."

  "We think we've removed one of them. Did you know that the very best water pumps you can buy belong to fire brigades? And would you be surprised to learn that the Beijing Central Station had four of its latest models suddenly requisitioned a few months ago, despite the protests of the mayor?"

  "I'm not surprised - merely lost in admiration. Go on, please."

  "That may be a coincidence, but those pumps would be just the right size. Making educated guesses about pipe deployment, drilling through the ice and so on - well, we think they could lift off again in five days."

  "Five days!"

  "If they're lucky, and everything works perfectly. And if they don't wait to fill their propellant tanks but merely take on just enough for a safe rendezvous with Discovery before we do. Even if they beat us by a single hour, that would be enough. They could claim salvage rights, at the very least."

  "Not according to the State Department's lawyers. At the appropriate moment, we'll declare that Discovery is not a derelict, but has merely been parked until we can retrieve it. Any attempt to take over the ship would be an act of piracy."

  "I'm sure the Chinese will be most impressed."

  "If they're not, what can we do about it?"

  "We outnumber them - and two to one, when we revive Chandra and Curnow."

  "Are you serious? Where are the cutlasses for the boarding party?"

  "Cutlasses?"

  "Swords - weapons."

  "Oh. We could use the laser telespectrometer. That can vaporize milligram asteroid samples at ranges of a thousand kilometres."

  "I'm not sure that I like this conversation. My government certainly would not condone violence, except of course in self-defence."

  "You naive Americans! We're more realistic; we have to be. All your grandparents died of old age, Heywood. Three of mine were killed in the Great Patriotic War."

  When they were alone together, Tanya always called him Woody, never Heywood. She must be serious. Or was she merely testing his reactions?

  "Anyway, Discovery is merely a few billion dollars' worth of hardware. The ship's not important - only the information it carries."

  "Exactly. Information that could be copied, and then erased."

  "You do get some cheerful ideas, Tanya. Sometimes I think that all Russians are a little paranoiac."

  "Thanks to Napoleon and Hitler, we've earned every right to be. But don't tell me that you haven't already worked out that - what do you call it, scenario? - for yourself."

  "It wasn't necessary," Floyd answered rather glumly. "The State Department's already done it for me - with variations. We'll just have to see which one the Chinese come up with. And I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they outguess us again."

  10

  A Cry from Europa

  Sleeping in zero gravity is a skill that has to be learned; it had taken Floyd almost a week to find the best way of anchoring legs and arms so that they did not drift into uncomfortable positions. Now he was an expert, and was not looking forward to the return of weight; indeed, the very idea gave him occasional nightmares.

  Someone was shaking him awake. No - he must still be dreaming! Privacy was sacred aboard a spaceship; nobody ever entered another crew member's chambers without first asking permission. He clenched his eyes shut, but the shaking continued.

  "Dr Floyd - please wake up! You're wanted on the flight deck!"

  And nobody called him Dr Floyd; the most formal salutation he had received for weeks was Doc. What was happening?

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. He was in his tiny cabin, gently gripped by his sleeping cocoon. So one part of his mind told him; then why was he looking at - Europa? They were still millions of kilometres away.

  There were the familiar reticulations, the patterns of triangles and polygons formed by intersecting lines. And surely that was the Grand Canal itself - no, it wasn't quite right. How could it be, since he was still in his little cabin aboard Leonov?

  "Dr Floyd!"

  He became fully awake, and realized that his left hand was floating just a few centimetres in front of his eyes. How strange that the pattern of lines across the palm was so uncannily like the map of Europa! But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.

  "Sorry, Max," he said. "What's the problem? Is something wrong?"

  "We think so - but not with us. Tsien's in trouble."

  Captain, navigator, and chief engineer were strapped in their seats on the flight deck; the rest of the crew orbited anxiously around convenient handholds, or watched on the monitors.

  "Sorry to wake you up, Heywood," Tanya apologized brusquely. 'Here's the situation. Ten minutes ago we had a Class One Priority from Mission Control. Tsien's gone off the air. It happened very suddenly, in the middle of a cipher message; there were a few seconds of garbled transmission - then nothing."

  "Their beacon?"

  "That's stopped as well. We can't receive it either,"

  "Phew! Then it must be serious - a major breakdown. Any theories?"

  "Lots - but all guesswork. An explosion - landslide - earthquake: who knows?"

  "And we may never know - until someone else lands on Europa - or we do a close flyby and take a look."

  Tanya shook her head. 'We don't have enough delta-vee. The closest we could get is fifty thousand kilometres. Not much you could see from that distance."

  "Then there's absolutely nothing we can do."

  "Not quite, Heywood. Mission Control has a suggestion. They'd like us to swing our big dish around, just in case we can pick up any weak emergency transmissions. It's - how do you say? - a long shot, but worth trying. What do you think?"

  Floyd's first reaction was strongly negative.

  "That will mean breaking our link with Earth."

  "Of course; but we'll have to do that anyway, when we go around Jupiter. And it will only take a couple of minutes to re-establish the circuit."

  Floyd remained silent. The suggestion was perfectly reasonable, yet it worried him obscurely. After puzzling for several seconds, he suddenly realized why he was so opposed to the idea.

  Discovery's troubles had started when the big dish - the main antenna complex - had lost its lock on Earth, for reasons which even now were not completely clear. But Hal had certainly been involved, and there was no danger of a similar situation arising here. Leonov's computers were small, autonomous units; there was no single controlling intelligence. At least, no nonhuman one.

  The Russians were still waiting patiently for his answer.

  "I agree," he
said at last. 'Let Earth know what we're doing, and start listening. I suppose you'll try all the SPACE MAYDAY frequencies."

  "Yes, as soon as we've worked out the Doppler corrections. How's it going, Sasha?"

  "Give me another two minutes, and I'll have the automatic search running. How long should we listen?"

  The captain barely paused before giving her answer. Floyd had often admired Tanya Orlova's decisiveness, and had once told her so. In a rare flash of humour, she had replied: 'Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain."

  "Listen for fifty minutes, and report back to Earth for ten. Then repeat the cycle."

  There was nothing to see or hear; the automatic circuits were better at sifting the radio noise than any human senses. Nevertheless, from time to time Sasha turned up the audio monitor, and the roar of Jupiter's radiation belts filled the cabin. It was a sound like the waves breaking on all the beaches of Earth, with occasional explosive cracks from superbolts of lightning in the Jovian atmosphere. Of human signals, there was no trace; and, one by one, the members of the crew not on duty drifted quietly away.

  While he was waiting, Floyd did some mental calculations. Whatever had happened to Tsien was already two hours in the past, since the news had been relayed from Earth.

  But Leonov should be able to pick up a direct message after less than a minute's delay, so the Chinese had already had ample time to get back on the air. Their continued silence suggested some catastrophic failure, and he found himself weaving endless scenarios of disaster.

  The fifty minutes seemed like hours. When they were up, Sasha swung the ship's antenna complex back toward Earth, and reported failure. While he was using the rest of the ten minutes to send a backlog of messages, he looked inquiringly at the captain.

  "Is it worth trying again?" he said in a voice that clearly expressed his own pessimism.

  "Of course. We may cut back the search time - but we'll keep listening."

  On the hour, the big dish was once more focused upon Europa. And almost at once, the automatic monitor started flashing its ALERT light.

  Sasha's hand darted to the audio gain, and the voice of Jupiter filled the cabin. Superimposed upon that, like a whisper heard against a thunderstorm, was the faint but completely unmistakable sound of human speech. It was impossible to identify the language, though Floyd felt certain, from the intonation and rhythm, that it was not Chinese, but some European tongue.

  Sasha played skilfully with fine-tuning and band-width controls, and the words became clearer. The language was undoubtedly English - but its content was still maddeningly unintelligible.

  There is one combination of sounds that every human ear can detect instantly, even in the noisiest environment. When it suddenly emerged from the Jovian background, it seemed to Floyd that he could not possibly be awake, but was trapped in some fantastic dream. His colleagues took a little longer to react; then they stared at him with equal amazement - and a slowly dawning suspicion.

  - For the first recognizable words from Europa were: "Dr Floyd - Dr Floyd - I hope you can hear me."

  11

  Ice and Vacuum

  Who is it?" whispered someone, to a chorus of shushes. Floyd raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance - and, he hoped, innocence.

  "... know you are aboard Leonov... may not have much time... aiming my suit antenna where I think..." The signal vanished for agonizing seconds, then came back much clearer, though not appreciably louder.

  "... relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio - no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA."

  The signal faded again. A stunned silence followed that no one attempted to interrupt. While he was waiting, Floyd searched his memory furiously. He could riot recognize the voice - it might have been that of any Western-educated Chinese. Probably it was someone he had met at a scientific conference, but unless the speaker identified himself he would never know.

  "... soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadily and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out to check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands - stood - about thirty metres from the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go directly from it and down through the ice. Very thin - not safe to walk on. The warm upwelling..."

  Again a long silence. Floyd wondered if the speaker was moving, and had been momentarily cut off by some obstruction.

  "... no problem - five kilowatts of lighting strung up on the ship. Like a Christmas tree - beautiful, shining right through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first - a huge dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it was a school of fish - too large for a single organism - then it started to break through the ice.

  "Dr Floyd, I hope you can hear me. This is Professor Chang - we met in '02 - Boston IAU conference."

  Instantly, incongruously, Floyd's thoughts were a billion kilometres away. He vaguely remembered that reception, after the closing session of the International Astronomical Union Congress - the last one that the Chinese had attended before the Second Cultural Revolution. And now he recalled Chang very distinctly - a small, humorous astronomer and exobiologist with a good fund of jokes. He wasn't joking now.

  "... like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera - I stayed to watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was - I've seen pictures of the kelp forests off California - but I was quite wrong.

  "I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn't possibly survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved forward - bits were breaking off like glass - but it was still advancing toward the ship, a black tidal wave, slowing down all the time.

  "I was still so surprised that I couldn't think straight and I couldn't imagine what it was trying to do..."

  "Is there any way we can call him back?' Floyd whispered urgently.

  "No - it's too late. Europa will soon be behind Jupiter. We'll have to wait until it comes out of eclipse."

  "... climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold - the way termites protect themselves from the sunlight with their little corridors of mud.

  "... 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 toward 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 could see exactly what was happening. Neither then, nor 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 - 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.