Farthest Reef (9 page)

Chapter 4

1
Alex counted a dozen gas bags drifting between two anvil headed clouds. They were still over a kilometer away but at
Diver’s
rate of speed they would be among them soon.

Mary was standing between Alex and Tsu, studying the scene carefully. “There must be hundreds of them out there.”

“I have them on magnification,” said Johnny, inside his bubble. “Here … I’ll put it on your screens.”

Suddenly they were seeing a group of creatures that looked like giant translucent melons, the same balloon creatures Alex had seen before, complete with rows of glistening eyelike disks on their midsections. Alex noticed that one important detail was missing. Unlike the ones they had seen on the two previous missions, only some of these gas bags were tethered to long black stalks that trailed off into the clouds. “Some of ’em are floating free,” he said.

“That’s new, isn’t it?” asked Mary.

As they watched, one of the balloons broke free of its cable on its own.

“Maybe it’s a seasonal thing,” suggested Tony.

“Did you see that cable go?” Johnny’s voice was full of excitement. “It recoiled with a snap! Just … zap … into the clouds!”

“Like a rubber band,” Tsu remarked, sounding unimpressed. “Makes sense to me. Cables attached to the reef. That’s kilometers below us. Think of the tension.”

In the magnified view, the balloon that had broken free seemed to be heading directly for them. “Is it my imagination, or is that thing charging us?” asked Connie nervously.

“The wind’s behind it,” observed Johnny.

“And we’re gaining on it,” offered Alex. “I don’t like this. We should stick to the mission. Anyone for a dive, dive, dive, before we have a mid-air collision?”

“I’m wondering about the dart birds,” said Mary.

By Alex’s estimate the balloon thing was dead in front of them and closing fast. “Johnny! Should I repeat the question?”

“By all means, dive,” answered the Professor.

“Maybe we should climb,” said Tsu, glancing at Sciarra. “Have you located a target?”

“Dive, Tsu,” said Johnny firmly.

Tsu pushed the drive stick forward. A few seconds later they were in the clouds.

Something thumped against the hull. A moment later, another. This time Mary’s keen eye caught the moment when a black cable was snapped by the ship’s leading edge. “We just freed a gas bag,” she said.

They continued their quick descent into the ever darkening mist. Suddenly there was a peachy flash of brilliant light, followed by a spattering of liquid on the windshield that vanished almost immediately.

Connie kept her hand locked solidly on the stick while she watched the instruments. Alex noticed a look of disappointment on her face. “Flyin’ blind takes some getting used to,” he said sympathetically.

“No problem,” Tsu grunted, not looking at him.

Alex knew there was a fine line between encouraging and patronizing someone, so he decided to ignore Tsu for a while. “Any blips yet, Tony?” he asked, looking back over his left shoulder.

“Only lightning.”

Tsu kept
Diver’s
diving angle at a steady 15 degrees. While a fairly steep angle, it still allowed the ship to level off quickly.

They were quiet for some time as the darkness outside deepened to charcoal and then to pitch black. Occasionally a glow from faraway lightning illuminated the darkened cabin. They all knew that the reef, or the top layer of it, was about thirty kilometers below them. They could have easily made the trip in only a few minutes, but they hadn’t yet determined where they wanted to go. That was Tony’s job.

“Something coming up,” said Tony. “A thousand meters.”

“Not the reef, I assume,” the Professor commented. “Not this high up.”

Diver
had broken into a clear space, a gap between the layers in the clouds. Because it was pitch black outside, no one knew it at first, except possibly Mary who’d noticed a subtle change in the light.

“Whatever it is, we’re in it,” said Tony. “There’s a bank of some kind ahead.”

“I didn’t want to use the doppler, but perhaps I should,” said the Professor.

Alex switched on the outside lights and saw, only for a moment, a ceiling of cloud fade into the darkness above the ship. “Clear space,” he said. “We’re under the top deck.”

Lightning stabbed through the darkness, revealing, for only a moment, a vast empty space stretching all around them as far as they could see. The cobweb of light jumped from cloud to cloud in the deck above and revealed a floor to this cavern in the clouds, perhaps a kilometer away. Alex realized they’d stumbled into a river of air dividing the clouds, but before he could say so
Diver
suddenly pitched to the left. Mary’s cat let out a shriek as she stepped on its tail to avoid being hurled from her seat. Inky jumped away toward the back of the cabin.

At the same time another flash of lighting illuminated the clouds again, this time much farther away. The moment of brightness revealed with awesome clarity the enormity of their surroundings.

“Good God!” cried Tsu. “Look at that.”

Alex smiled. “You guys watching from the
Cornwall
missed a lot of firsthand fun, eh, Tsu?”

“Jeanne Warren should be here to see this,” said Tsu. “She wanted it more.”

“She’s on the
Goddard
, right?”

Tsu nodded. “Probably listening to us right now.”

Connie had easily stabilized the ship, keeping them headed downward precisely on angle. They entered the clouds and spent some time in silence. A few loud thumps on the hull reminded them of the floating balloon creatures hovering so many kilometers above.

“I think I’m seeing the reef!” Tony sounded relieved. “At least it looks like I remember it on the LF radar.”

Almost reflexively Alex looked at Mary. She caught his eye and smiled. “Yes, I can hear them.”

“When we hit the clear space above the reef … if there is one as before … we’ll start the hunt,” announced Professor Baltadonis. “Unless you can give us a target, Tony, we’ll just have to wing it.”

“Okay,” said Tony. “I’m seeing something.”

“I see it, too,” said Johnny.

Before Alex could ask, Johnny had switched the radar image to the screen above the cockpit windows. The computer had blended the data with a night-vision image from cameras on
Diver’s
nose. At the moment there was nothing but cloud in front of them but farther away, like a dimly glowing web, was the reef.

“That’s more like it, Professor,” said Alex. He could feel Tsu relax. “What do you think, Connie? You like flyin’ in this soup?”

“Like the simulator, so far.” Tsu punctuated her words with a slight yawn. She seemed the portrait of calm, but Alex noticed that she still held the stick in an unflinching death grip.

“Minus forty-seven point six kilometers,” said Johnny.

Alex knew from the two previous dives that the reef depth was about fifty kilometers. There the air pressure, the humidity, and the warm gases rising from below had sustained the reef for millennia. Alex had just begun to wonder how long the reef had existed when Mary spoke.

“Have you any idea how old the reef is, Professor?” she asked.

The Professor was quiet for a moment before he answered. “Computer and physical models of Jupiter indicate that the Great Red Spot formed millions, maybe billions of years ago. That doesn’t mean the reef is that old. Jupiter isn’t as hospitable as Earth, after all. It probably took a while for life to start here. And, since there’s no rock strata down there to contain a fossil record, we’ll probably always be guessing about its age. On the other hand, we might get some idea of the reef’s age from samples. Needless to say, your question’s one we scientists would love to answer.”

“If you had to make a guess, then, would you say life’s been on Jupiter a billion years?” asked Alex.

“Possibly.”

“Then life from Earth has had time to migrate here on meteorites knocked off the Earth?”

Johnny was quiet for a moment inside his bubble. “Well, I’ll admit it’s easier to knock material off a rocky world than off a gas giant,” he said finally. “Our current theory is that life here was seeded by comets raining into Jupiter’s atmosphere over the millennia, same as Earth, but …”

There was a brief pause in the Professor’s dissertation, then he spoke again, this time with some urgency. “Time to attend to business, people. According to our radar, we’re closing on the reef. Right, Tony? I’m switching the outside cameras to normal starlight mode.”

“Leave the radar imaging on screen, Professor,” said Sciarra. “Tsu will need it for guidance.”

Connie gave Tony an appreciative smile.

“Okay, Tony,” said Johnny. “I’ll just layer the new data on top of it.”

During the two previous missions into the reef, Alex had been pilot. Now, he felt superfluous – a mere observer on the mission. Of course it was his own fault for giving the job to Connie. He looked over at Mary, who was staring at the viewscreen with Inky sleeping peacefully in her lap. She smiled when their eyes met. “Are you bored, my love?” she asked.

“Well, I’ve never been a passenger on
Diver
before.”

“Don’t worry,” said Tsu. “I’ll need a break soon.”

Alex’s attention was suddenly drawn to the viewscreen. The air in front of them had cleared and the reef came into view. Its brightness was intensified a hundredfold by the outside camera.

“My god,” said Tsu. “It looks like we’re flying over a city.”

Johnny laughed. “I told you, Tsu,” he said. “The recordings just can’t do the reef justice.”

Below them, perhaps a quarter kilometer away, was a shadowy cloud-like mass laced with creatures or colonies of creatures flickering with biochemical light. There was a sudden blinding flash of lightning, and the reef went dark as far as the eye could see.

“Ah,” sighed Johnny. “The cycle of the reef. I’m switching on the outside microphones. It’s time we introduced Connie to the music of the reef.”

“The hummers.” Mary tapped the back of Tsu’s seat. “They’ll be the first ones you’ll hear.”

Everyone listened for a moment. The only audible sound outside was the soft whine of
Diver’s
engines and the wind moving past the ship. “What?” said Tsu. “What am I supposed to be hearing?”

“Just listen,” whispered Alex.

As if on cue a humming sound, like a note from a musical instrument, could be heard in the darkness. Almost immediately another voice like it, but with a different musical tone, joined the first as if the two were singing together.

“Watch the reef, Tsu,” Johnny said.

“I see them,” said Tsu, excitedly. “Tiny pools of light! Those are the hummers.”

“Yup. Hummers scaring up their dinner,” offered Alex. “The lightning seems to make the reef critters turn off their lights for some reason. The hummers light it up with sound.”

“We don’t know why the luminescing stops,” added the Professor. “I think it has to do with the sudden electrical charge … or the noise … of the lightning. Hummers produce sound to find food. We think it activates bioluminescence in the tiny critters they feed on. When we first observed them we thought the hummer’s sound frightened them, making them glow. But after study we believe the sound actually soothes them, making them feel it’s safe to light up again, I suppose.”

“Interesting,” said Tsu, trying to watch the screen and the ship’s instruments at the same time. “I remember them from your recordings.”

“We’re getting close, Connie,” advised Johnny. “Time to level her off.”

Tsu nodded. “Leveling to zero degrees.”

“Cruise until we find a target,” added the Professor.

Alex noticed Tsu was having difficulty watching the reef and
Diver’s
instruments at the same time. “Why not let me take the stick for a while, Connie,” he suggested cheerfully. “This is your first visit and you might not get another chance to see it. Relax and enjoy the view.”

“Okay,” said Tsu, relaxing her grip on the drive stick. “Thanks.” Her eyes widened as she gazed at the screen. She smiled. “Watching from the
Cornwall
… your recordings … they didn’t really do this place justice.” She looked at Alex. “How did you know life was here, in the middle of a giant storm?”

He smiled. “I had a hunch. Whirlpools collect things.”

“Oh, admit it, Alex,” Mary said.

“Admit what?”

“It called to you,” said Mary Seventeen.

2
It felt good to be flying
Diver
again, but now it was Alex who had to keep an eye on the instruments and on the reef, not Connie Tsu. She had taken them as far as the reef. Now it was Alex’s turn.

He had two views of the reef to choose from: the cockpit windows or the viewscreen above them. The view through the windows was too dim to be seen reliably, so Alex kept his eye on the screen. On it he could see in detail the great reef’s dark rolling mass stretching off into the distance. He could see the clouds of glowing biota living in it and surrounding it. Everywhere one looked, flocks of flying or swimming creatures could be seen diving in and out of the darkened landscape. Here and there, strange movements betrayed the location of creatures living in it.

As Alex watched the reef move beneath them on the large viewscreen, he could still see the faint orange radar tracings that showed the tunnels and passageways used by the clicker men. At a glance he was able to see there were few clicker men in the area, but farther ahead there appeared to be more traces.

With the exception of Professor Baltadonis, who remained in his bubble trying to establish a link to
Goddard
, everyone was watching the reef in awe.

“I thought I’d be scared to see it again,” Tony said. “But it looks so …”

“Peaceful?” asked Mary.

Tony smiled. “Yeah. Can you hear them, Mary? The clicker men, I mean.”

“Not here,” Mary said cryptically.

“But you do hear them, don’t you?” Tsu asked.

“Oh, yes. They’re around, but I can’t tell you where. For that matter I can’t tell you how many there are. Or if I’m hearing a lot of them … or all of them.”

“Finally!”