Farthest Reef (8 page)

He raised the bubble to its ceiling position and looked around at everybody. “A little late, I guess,” he said sheepishly. “The programs are loading.” He tipped his head toward his console. “It’ll take a sec.”

“Are we really going in?” asked Alex. “Mary hasn’t even finished her language tapes.”

“It doesn’t matter. “All that matters is that we get a clicker man into his habitat aboard
Goddard
as soon as possible.”

“That’s it?”

“Then let’s get going, Tsu,” said Alex.

5
Goddard
was now just a white needle in the distance, getting smaller every second as
Diver
moved towards Jupiter. To those watching through telescopes aboard
Goddard
, Alex’s ship looked like an arrowhead, silhouetted against the planet’s vast swirling clouds.

Though they couldn’t see their goal, the Great Red Spot, Johnny began giving Tsu approach vectors almost immediately to set
Diver’s
course to its outer fringes. As they cruised into position, Alex and Tsu checked the microfusion power cells and the null-gee systems. As everything checked out and all systems were working, Johnny committed them to the dive.

Soon the ship’s skin began to heat as it hit the outer edges of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Almost immediately Alex noticed that the ship handled differently than it did on previous missions. “Feels strange,” he remarked.

“No surprise. You never ran the simulation, did you?” asked Tsu. “The snatcher package changes the glide configuration.”

“It didn’t look that big,” said Alex.

“Not a problem,” said Tsu.

Johnny and Sciarra compared notes regarding the radar for a moment, then the Professor lowered his bubble. The ship was shuddering and groaning from the stress of reentry but Johnny seemed unperturbed. “The
Diver
records of the reef were a treasure trove, Alex,” said Johnny. “We know the average size of the clicker men and we even know something of their structure.”

“Really?” said Mary, removing her earphones.

“In some ways they are quite flimsy, almost like gossamer in their makeup, but they are also very flexible and fairly strong. Their physical construction is layered, like an onion. And, while we didn’t observe them actually using them, those flowing fins of theirs appear to have a structure … a lattice that can stiffen just one part and leave the rest free flowing.” Johnny ducked his head out of the bubble. “Stop me if you’ve heard all this.”

“Not at all,” said Mary. “Are you suggesting they can use those flower petal arms of theirs as hands?”

“They had to shape those cities somehow.”

“What do they eat?” asked Alex, squinting at the cockpit window. “Have you figured that out?” The outer hull was heating quickly and the pinkish plasma glow outside made it hard to see Jupiter’s horizon.

“We think they just breathe their food, deriving sustenance from the air,” continued Johnny. “The nutrients are the gasses in the reef. They are such low mass beings that they don’t need a lot. It is also possible that they have feeding habits, but we saw no evidence of either a mouth or a digestive system.”

“How do they make sounds?” asked Mary.

“We aren’t sure. Nor do we understand how they produce radio emissions.”

Alex had made sure that at least two geebrews were on hand. He popped one squeezer open and held it up as a salute. “I guess we can’t ply them with the promise of a brew, can we, Professor?”

Tsu and Sciarra laughed.

“I was going to comment on the snatcher system,” said Johnny. “We haven’t really talked about that.”

“One question. Will it work?” asked Alex.

“Yes, Alex, I suppose it will.” Johnny poked his head out, long enough to make a nasty face at Alex, then he disappeared back into his bubble.

Mary had put her earphones back on and seemed to be concentrating. Alex guessed she was listening to her language primer. Over his left shoulder Tony was watching the radar. Like Mary’s, his chair was built into the wall. A large curved screen displayed the radar data he shared with Johnny. Only inside Johnny’s bubble could the real picture of their environment be thoroughly seen and analyzed. It was this system that would locate the target and direct the operation.

As Alex surveyed the group he realized it was all too familiar. “Same basic crew as last time,” he muttered as he turned back to face the console.

“They’ve installed a remote pilot, Alex,” said the Professor. “In my bubble, here. You’ll get me as close as possible to the target … then I’ll do the snatching from here.”

“You’ll do it? Fly the ship, too?”

“To a degree, I suppose, Alex.”

Alex shook his head. “Sorry, Professor. We drive. You coach.”

“Four degrees down,” said Tsu. “Picking up more ionization.”

“We’ve lost com with
Goddard
,” said Mary.

Diver
had become a tiny comet in Jupiter’s skies. Inside the ship the roaring grew so loud that further conversation was impossible. Mary’s cat was in her lap, wide-eyed, utterly spooked, but secure in Mary’s tight embrace. Alex looked at Inky and smiled. He couldn’t think of a better place to ride out reentry.

6
Alex and the crew of
Diver
had visited Jupiter on two previous occasions. Being all atmosphere and having two and a half times Earth’s gravity, Jupiter is a difficult planet to explore. That’s why he had originally chosen
Diver
for the task. It had been an out-of-service class two shuttle called a gasser, abandoned in a hangar on Io. Gassers were light, powerful, and fast spacecraft that could pull gasses from their surroundings and convert them to useable materials, including fuel. Alex had secretly tinkered with it for over a year, adding a ‘borrowed’ null-gee system and several ‘borrowed’ microfusion power cells to its power train. Commissioned
Dover
, Alex painted out the O in the name and replaced it with an I. The ship had a sleek lifting-body shape, yet its flight could be governed solely by thrust. Its rocket motors could be set to hover or to push.

Alex knew when he originally planned to look for Jupiter’s hidden reef that it would be impossible without an anti-gravity system. He had found a misplaced shipping voucher on the loading bay at Ra Patera owned by his employer, IoCorp. That piece of paper was the key to realizing his plan. That, a bit of luck, and a great deal of help from Mary, had encouraged him, seduced him really, into risking everything to prove his theory.

As to what had driven him to seek out life in the solar system’s largest storm, that was a question he never could answer. He was no scientist, and he had no proof. All he really had was a hunch, and he stole a ship to prove himself right.

But
Diver
was Alex’s ship now. All proof to the contrary was lost in the Ra Patera disaster. Along with over five thousand citizens went any proof that might have condemned Alex and Mary to a penal colony for life. They were returning from having just discovered the reef when the disaster occurred. They had witnessed it from space and watched helplessly from orbit as the colony sank into oblivion. The image of Ra Patera still burned in Alex’s conscience. He’d retraced everything a hundred times. Perhaps his fate was to complete some greater mission, but that notion seemed too lunatic to mention even to Mary. Still, it was no crazier than her suggesting that the reef had somehow called to him.

But all that was history. Now, as
Diver
began to level out and reduce speed five kilometers above the cloud tops of the Great Red Spot, Alex was contemplating whether his old ship was really state-of-the-art or a disaster waiting to happen.

At the Professor’s suggestion, Connie switched on the null-gee system. Alex watched the gauges and smiled. “The new cells are amazing. No noticeable drain on the power reserves,” he noted. “On my first mission here, if you added power to the engines or the null-gee, the other systems would weaken. That’s why I needed the balloons.”

The indigo sky in front of them began to lighten to a deep azure as a veil of cloud ripped by them at supersonic speeds.

Johnny had been quiet in his bubble for a while. His silence was beginning to worry Alex. “Have you found a target, Professor?” he asked in a voice loud enough for Johnny to hear.

“You needn’t shout,” said the Professor, his voice now coming from the cabin walls. “I can hear you perfectly. You’ll be happy to know that I received a coded message from
Goddard
that they have their radar and cameras fixed on us.”

“Should we wave?” asked Alex.

“Did you say coded, Professor?” Tony looked up from his radar screen.

“Actually the coding is for separating our transmissions from those emanating from the reef,” answered Johnny. “As you pointed out after our last visit here, Alex, the whole reef is connected in some way. Like a single organism, I think you said.”

“I said that?” Alex looked back at Mary. She smiled, quietly stroking Inky.

A pink haze stretched to a featureless horizon, except for a few high clouds looming in the distance. “It’s foggy down there,” Alex commented, peering out the window. “I guess we’ll be landing on instruments, eh, Tsu?”

“I see a cloud deck,” said Johnny. “I see it just fine. I’ll switch your monitor to my view. I’m in the infrared wavelength, by the way.”

A moment later the haze vanished from the image on the monitor. Far below the ship, moving beneath them very slowly, were huge flat headed clouds, probably thunderheads. The Great Red Spot, Alex mused, is nothing more than a vortex in Jupiter’s atmosphere, rolling counterclockwise in a vast elliptical spiral between two fast moving longitudinal belts of atmosphere that move in opposing directions. While it rotates around the planet, its position never deviates in longitude, about 30° south of Jupiter’s equator. What scientists had always called a storm on Jupiter was really a permanent feature of this and possibly all gas giants. After all, the solar system’s other gas giants. Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, have them as well.

A vortex is a vortex, Professor Stubbs had once argued when Alex first approached him on the net with his theories. “A hurricane is no place to go looking for life.”

But Alex had studied Jupiter all his life and understood the enormous scale of its features. He knew that comparing the Great Red Spot to a hurricane was naive. Caused by the upwelling of heat from a patch of ocean, hurricanes only cover a few hundred kilometers. Jupiter’s spot is large enough to swallow three Earths. Jupiter is condensing and radiating heat, more than it receives from the sun. 1500 kilometers beneath its swirling cloud tops, its hydrogen and helium atmosphere is under such pressure that it becomes a superconducting metallic fluid. Though no one could ever see it, this exotic superfluid under inconceivable pressures is like an ocean whose waves are lit only by massive lightning strikes. The condensation that crushes this endless sea is the source of Jupiter’s gargantuan magnetic field, the engine that drives the feature we see as a dusky red storm on Jupiter’s surface.

Alex knew better than anyone that their ship was less than a flyspeck in the vastness of the whirlpool of cloud they were entering. As Alex and Mary watched the thunderheads passing by, they both remembered their first encounter with Jovian life, huge tethered greenish balloons. But what their eyes were now searching the clouds for were signs of dart birds, Mary’s name for creatures that looked like arrows fired from below at the gas bags.

“I don’t seen any of those gas bags, yet, Alex,” Johnny’s voice resonated in the cabin. The only other sound was that of the supersonic wind on
Diver’s
still white hot polyceramic hide.

“I was just thinking about them,” remarked Alex. “Actually I was thinking more about the dart birds.”

“I guess we’re all thinking about the same thing.” Sciarra gave a sigh of frustration. “Too bad the balloons don’t show on radar.”

“Worried about a collision?” asked Tsu.

“No,” said Johnny. “Not with the gas bags. It’s the dart birds that are more worrisome.”

Tsu scoffed. “Our mass outweighs anything in the reef. What’re you afraid of?”

“We don’t know what damage they might cause, Connie,” cautioned Alex.

“Correct,” said Johnny’s voice. “Your ship was penetrated by an acid from a reef animal that showered it with darts. One of them penetrated and created a decompression problem.”

“Right,” Alex answered. “And if we hadn’t diverted to Mars, you wouldn’t be here, Johnny. We would have gone straight to Earth. The loss of pressure forced us to Mars, where we met Johnny.” he whispered to Tsu.

“Oh, I remember,” said Connie. “As a matter of fact I think read about it in Citizen Magazine.” She smiled coyly at Alex.

“Dingers,” said Alex. “Okay. I’ll just shut up.”

“Don’t stop,” said Sciarra. “A little street theater. I love it.”

Tsu slumped in her seat and pressed her lips tightly together.

“Tsu wouldn’t be here, Alex, if she didn’t know your missions by heart,” boomed Johnny’s godlike voice. “It just might interest you to know that she’s flown over ten simulations of the problems you faced while piloting
Diver
in the reef. I’m sure you’re not surprised that a little analysis has … well … let’s just say you would have benefited from them yourself.”

“Alex is a seat of his pants kind of guy,” defended Mary. “And it seems to me it’s his pants you’re wearing at the moment, Connie.”

“Damn,” said Alex, laughing. “Leave it to Mary to have a show-stopping remark ready at all times.”

Mary raised a perfect eyebrow. “You should look for gas bags out there, not be one in here.”

“Thank you, Mary,” boomed the Professor’s voice.

“I can hear them,” said Mary. “Your clicker men.”

“You can?” said several voices, including the Professor’s. He ducked out from under his bubble without raising it and looked at Mary. “Is that a recent development?”

“I was thinking about them. It didn’t happen when I thought about them before, up in space. I thought those surgical modifications were for the deep space mission.” Mary put down her cat.

“You could hear the clicker men before, but you couldn’t locate them. Right?” Johnny stood and stretched the kinks out of his back. “Well, now you can. Your acuity was improved, that’s all.”