2010: Odyssey Two Page 7

  "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 be1ow the noise level. Although Leonov listened again on the same frequency, there was no further message from Professor Chang.

  III: DISCOVERY

  12

  Downhill Run

  The ship was gaining speed at last, on the downhill run toward Jupiter. It had long since passed the gravitational no-man's-land where the four tiny outer moons - Sinope, Pasiphae, Ananke, and Carme - wobbled along their retrograde and wildly eccentric orbits. Undoubtedly captured asteroids, and completely irregular in shape, the largest was only thirty kilometres across. Jagged, splintered rocks of no interest to anyone except planetary geologists, their allegiance wavered continually between the Sun and Jupiter. One day, the Sun would recapture them completely.

  But Jupiter might retain the second group of four, at half the distance of the others. Elara, Lysithea, Himalia, and Leda were fairly close together, and lying in almost the same plane. There was speculation that they had once been part of a single body; if so, the parent would have been barely a hundred kilometres across.

  Though only Carme and Leda came close enough to show disks visible to the naked eye, they were greeted like old friends. Here was the first landfall after the longest ocean voyage - the offshore islands of Jupiter. The last hours were ticking away; the most critical phase of the entire mission was approaching - the entry into the Jovian atmosphere.

  Jupiter was already larger than the Moon in the skies of Earth, and the giant inner satellites could be clearly seen moving around it. They all showed noticeable disks and distinctive colouring, though they were still too far away for any markings to be visible. The eternal ballet they performed - disappearing behind Jupiter, reappearing to transit the daylight face with their accompanying shadows - was an endlessly engaging spectacle. It was one that astronomers had watched ever since Galileo had first glimpsed it almost exactly four centuries ago; but the crew of Leonov were the only living men and women to have seen it with unaided eyes.

  The interminable chess games had ceased; off-duty hours were spent at the telescopes, or in earnest conversation, or listening to music, usually while gazing at the view outside. And at least one shipboard romance had reached a culmination: the frequent disappearances of Max Brailovsky and Zenia Marchenko were the subject of much good-natured banter.

  They were, thought Floyd, an oddly matched pair. Max was a big, handsome blond who had been a champion gymnast, reaching the finals of the 2000 Olympics. Though he was in his early thirties, he had an open-faced, almost boyish expression. This was not altogether misleading; despite his brilliant engineering record, he often struck Floyd as naive and unsophisticated - one of those people who are pleasant to talk to, but not for too long. Outside his own field of undoubted expertise he was engaging but rather shallow.

  Zenia - at twenty-nine, the youngest on board - was still something of a mystery. Since no one wished to talk about it, Floyd had never raised the subject of her injuries, and his Washington sources could provide no information. Obviously she had been involved in some serious accident, but it might have been nothing more unusual than a car crash. The theory that she had been on a secret space mission - still part of popular mythology outside the USSR - could be ruled out. Thanks to the global tracking networks, no such thing had been possible for fifty years.

  In addition to her physical and doubtless psychological scars, Zenia laboured under yet another handicap. She was a last-minute replacement, and everyone knew it. Irma Yakunina was to have been dietician and medical assistant aboard Leonov before that unfortunate argument with a hang-glider broke too many bones.

  Every day at 1800 GMT the crew of seven plus one passenger gathered in the tiny common room that separated the flight deck from the galley and sleeping quarters. The circular table at its centre was just big enough for eight people to squeeze around; when Chandra and Curnow were revived, it would be unable to accommodate everyone, and two extra seats would have to be fitted in somewhere else.

  Though the 'Six O'Clock Soviet', as the daily round-table conference was called, seldom lasted more than ten minutes, it played a vital role in maintaining morale. Complaints, suggestions, criticisms, progress reports - anything could be raised, subject only to the captain's overriding veto, which was very seldom exercised.

  Typical items on the non-existent agenda were requests for changes in the menu, appeals for more private communication time with Earth, suggested movie programmes, exchange of news and gossip, and good-natured needling of the heavily-outnumbered American contingent. Things would change, Floyd warned them, when his colleagues came out of hibernation, and the odds improved from 1 in 7 to 3 in 9. He did not mention his private belief that Curnow could outtalk or outshout any three other people aboard.

  When he was not sleeping, much of Floyd's own time was spent in the common room - partly because, despite its smallness, it was much less claustrophobic than his own tiny cubicle. It was also cheerfully decorated, all available flat surfaces being covered with photos of beautiful land and seascapes, sporting events, portraits of popular videostars, and other reminders of Earth. Pride of place, however, was given to an original Leonov painting - his 1965 study 'Beyond the Moon', made in the same year when, as a young lieutenant-colonel, he left Voskhod II and became the first man in history to perform an extravehicular excursions

  Clearly the work of a talented ama
teur, rather than a professional, it showed the cratered edge of the Moon with the beautiful Sinus lridum - Bay of Rainbows - in the foreground. Looming monstrously above the lunar horizon was the thin crescent of Earth, embracing the darkened nightside of the planet. Beyond that blazed the Sun, the streamers of the corona reaching out into space for millions of kilometres around it.

  It was a striking composition - and a glimpse of the future that even then lay only three years ahead. On the flight of Apollo 8, Anders, Borman and Lovell were to see this splendid sight with their unaided eyes, as they watched Earth rise above the farside on Christmas Day, 1968.

  Heywood Floyd admired the painting, but he also regarded it with mixed feelings. He could not forget that it was older than everybody else on the ship - with one exception.

  He was already nine years old when Alexei Leonov had painted it.

  13

  The Worlds of Galileo

  Even now, more than three decades after the revelations of the first Voyager flybys, no one really understood why the four giant satellites differed so wildly from one another. They were all about the same size, and in the same part of the Solar System - yet they were totally dissimilar, as if children of a different birth.

  Only Callisto, the outermost, had turned out to be much as expected. When Leonov raced past at a distance of just over 100,000 kilometres, the larger of its countless craters were clearly visible to the naked eye. Through the telescope, the satellite looked like a glass ball that had been used as a target by high-powered rifles; it was completely covered with craters of every size, right down to the lower limit of visibility. Callisto, someone had once remarked, looked more like Earth's Moon than did the Moon itself.

  Nor was this particularly surprising. One would have expected a world out here - at the edge of the asteroid belt - to have been bombarded with the debris left over from the creation of the Solar System. Yet Ganymede, the satellite next door, had a totally different appearance. Though it had been well peppered with impact craters in the remote past, most of them had been ploughed over - a phrase that seemed peculiarly appropriate. Huge areas of Ganymede were covered with ridges and furrows, as if some cosmic gardener had dragged a giant rake across them. And there were light-coloured streaks, like trails that might have been made by slugs fifty kilometres across. Most mysterious of all were long, meandering bands, containing dozens of parallel lines. It was Nikolai Ternovsky who decided what they must be - multilane superhighways, laid out by drunken surveyors. He even claimed to have detected over-passes and cloverleaf intersections.

  Leonov had added some trillions of bits of information about Ganymede to the store of human knowledge, before it crossed the orbit of Europa. That icebound world, with its derelict and its dead, was on the other side of Jupiter, but it was never far from anyone's thoughts.

  Back on Earth, Dr Chang was already a hero and his countrymen had, with obvious embarrassment, acknowledged countless messages of sympathy. One had been sent in the name of Leonov's crew - after, Floyd gathered, considerable redrafting in Moscow. The feeling on board the ship was ambiguous - a mixture of admiration, regret, and relief. All astronauts, irrespective of their national origins, regarded themselves as citizens of space and felt a common bond, sharing each other's triumphs and tragedies. No one on Leonov was happy because the Chinese expedition had met with disaster; yet at the same time, there was a muted sense of relief that the race had not gone to the swiftest.

  The unexpected discovery of life on Europa had added a new element to the situation - one that was now being argued at great length both on Earth and aboard Leonov. Some exobiologists cried 'I told you so!', pointing out that it should not have been such a surprise after all. As far back as the 1970s, research submarines had found teeming colonies of strange marine creatures thriving precariously in an environment thought to be equally hostile to life - the trenches on the bed of the Pacific. Volcanic springs, fertilizing and warming the abyss, had created oases of life in the deserts of the deep.

  Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists. Water - or at least ice - occurred on all the moons of Jupiter. And there were continuously erupting volcanoes on Io - so it was reasonable to expect weaker activity on the world next door. Putting these two facts together made Europan life seem not only possible, but inevitable - as most of nature's surprises are, when viewed with 20/20 hindsight.

  Yet that conclusion raised another question, and one vital to Leonov's mission. Now that life had been discovered on the moons of Jupiter - did it have any connection with the Tycho monolith, and the still more mysterious artifact in orbit near Io?

  That was a favourite subject to debate in the Six O'Clock Soviets. It was generally agreed that the creature encountered by Dr Chang did not represent a high form of intelligence - at least, if his interpretation of its behaviour was correct. No animal with even elementary powers of reasoning would have allowed itself to become a victim of its instincts, attracted like a moth to the candle until it risked destruction.

  Vasili Orlov was quick to give a counter-example that weakened, if it did not refute, that argument.

  "Look at whales and dolphins," he said. "We call them intelligent - but how often they kill themselves in mass strandings! That looks like a case where instinct overpowers reason."

  "No need to go to the dolphins," interjected Max Brailovsky. "One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he'd won a gold medal for designing spacestations. What a waste!"

  Even if Dr Chang's Europan was intelligent, that of course did not rule out higher forms elsewhere. The biology of a whole world could not be judged from a single specimen.

  But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment. Above all, how could marine creatures ever develop a technology without the aid of fire?

  Yet perhaps even that was possible; the route that humanity had taken was not the only one. There might be whole civilizations in the seas of other worlds.

  Still, it seemed unlikely that a space-faring culture could have arisen on Europa without leaving unmistakable signs of its existence in the form of buildings, scientific installations, launching sites, or other artifacts. But from pole to pole, nothing could be seen but level ice and a few outcroppings of bare rock.

  No time remained for speculations and discussions when Leonov hurtled past the orbits of Io and tiny Mimas. The crew was busy almost non-stop, preparing for the encounter and the brief onset of weight after months in free-fall. All loose objects had to be secured before the ship entered Jupiter's atmosphere, and the drag of deceleration produced momentary peaks that might be as high as two gravities.

  Floyd was lucky; he alone had time to admire the superb spectacle of the approaching planet, now filling almost half the sky. Because there was nothing to give it scale, there was no way that the mind could grasp its real size. He had to keep telling himself that fifty Earths would not cover the hemisphere now turned toward him.

  The clouds, colourful as the most garish sunset on Earth, raced so swiftly that he could see appreciable movement in as little as ten minutes. Great eddies were continually forming along the dozen or so bands that girdled the planet, then rippling away like swirls of smoke. Plumes of white gas occasionally geysered up from the depths, to be swept away by the gales caused by the planet's tremendous spin. And perhaps strangest of all were the white spots, sometimes spaced as regularly as pearls on a necklace, which lay along the tradewinds of the middle Jovian latitudes.

  In the hours immediately before encounter, Floyd saw little of captain or navigator. The Orlovs scarcely left the bridge, as they continually checked the approach orbit and made minute refinements to Leonov's course. The ship was now on the critical path that would just graze the oute
r atmosphere; if it went too high, frictional braking would not be sufficient to slow it down, and it would go racing out of the Solar System, beyond all possibility of rescue. If it went too low, it would burn up like a meteor. Between the two extremes lay little margin for error.

  The Chinese had proved that aerobraking could be done, but there was always the chance that something would go wrong: So Floyd was not at all surprised when Surgeon-Commander Rudenko admitted, just an hour before contact: "I'm beginning to wish, Woody, that I had brought along that icon, after all."

  14

  Double Encounter

  "... papers for the mortgage on the Nantucket house should be in the file marked M in the library.

  "Well, that's all the business I can think of. For the last couple of hours I've been recalling a picture I saw as a boy, in a tattered volume of Victorian art - it must have been almost one hundred and fifty years old. I can't remember whether it was black-and-white or colour. But I'll never forget the title - don't laugh - it was called "The Last Message Home". Our great-great-grandfathers loved that kind of sentimental melodrama.

  "It shows the deck of a windjammer in a hurricane - the sails have been ripped away and the deck's awash. In the background, the crew is struggling to save the ship. And in the foreground, a young sailor boy's writing a note, while beside him is the bottle he hopes will carry it to land.

  "Even though I was a kid at the time, I felt he should have been giving his shipmates a hand, not writing letters. All the same, it moved me: I never thought that one day I'd be like that young sailor.

  "Of course, I'm sure you'll get this message-and there's nothing I can do to help aboard Leonov. In fact, I've been politely requested to keep out of the way, so my conscience is quite clear as I dictate this.