Saturn Rukh (16 page)

“Whoops!” said Chastity as the balloon suddenly dropped a few hundred meters, producing a sinking feeling in her stomach. “I’ll sure be glad when we get out of this equatorial jet stream with all of its turbulence.”

“Pete will be glad too,” said Rod, feeling queasy himself from the swinging motion of the capsule. “He’s taking a risk every time he goes outside to check on the meta plant. One of those ‘whoops’ at the wrong time and he’s gone....”

~ * ~

The next day they entered the white clouds below. Sandra and Dan were carefully watching the readings of the chemical analyzer monitoring the composition of the air outside. As they entered the cloud deck, the readings shifted slightly.

“Water,” said Dan. “Ice at these temperatures, but mostly water.”

“A little bit of ammonia and ammonium hydrosulfide, but not much,” added Sandra. “With the helmets to protect our eyes and noses, and the saturnsuits to protect our skin, it shouldn’t be too bad, although I wouldn’t want to stay out in it too long.”

“Once we get down under the cloud deck where it’s dry, it shouldn’t be bad at all,” said Dan. “Except when it rains.”

“Once we get down under the cloud deck, I’m counting on seeing some saganlife forms and perhaps catching a few specimens,” said Sandra. “Something
really
alien.”

“Although you can’t
see
any lifeforms up here in the clouds,” said Dan. “You might be able to
catch
some ... small ones ...riding on the water droplets.”

“You’re right!” said Sandra, getting up. “Help me get in my saturnsuit. I’m going out to set up a dew net and see what I can collect.”

“If you wait until we drop below the freezing point so we are collecting water droplets rather than ice crystals, I’ll come with you,” said Dan.

A few hours later, Dan and Sandra were standing out on the open outer airlock door in their neon-bright fire-engine yellow-green high-visibility saturnsuits. On their arms, legs, and helmets was a highly reflecting colored identification band. Sandra’s color was green, of course, while Dan’s was orange. Each had a safety line attached to rings on opposite sides of the door. They peeked over the edge. The water cloud layer they were in was thick and dark. The 1 percent of Earth-level sunlight that made it across the ten AU of distance to Saturn was now almost completely absorbed by the thick mist. Dan turned on the floodlights that illuminated the exit opening of the airlock, but the intense beams were swallowed up a few meters away by the dense white fog.

Sandra and Dan threw out a net made of absorbent string. After letting it hang over the side for about fifteen minutes, while
Sexdent
plowed its way through the mist, they pulled it back up, soaking wet, and stuffed it in a large plastic bag.

“Look!” said Sandra, as she held the bottom comer of the bag up into the bright beam of the floodlight. “A tiny jellyfish!”

Dan looked carefully at the tiny straggling creature. “Looks like it’s drowning to me.”

“Drowning?” said Sandra, taking another look.

“It may be built like a jellyfish,” said Dan, “but I think it prefers air to water.”

Later, inside, after fishing out the larger specimens that were visible as tiny specks in an intense light beam, and putting them into separate containers, Dan and Sandra went into a routine. Down on the lower deck, Dan would prepare a slide from some water drop that had something interesting floating in it, and hand the slide to Puss, who would clamber into the constricted confines of the engineering sector on its six feet, and insert the slide into a nanoimager there. Meanwhile, up on the command deck, Sandra, with the aid of Jeeves, would quickly scan the slide using the large display on the science console. Jeeves would save a detailed digital image for later analysis, while Sandra would look quickly at the larger specks to see if any of them were significantly different from the others. After a couple of hours, Sandra called a halt.

“My eyes have had it,” she said. “Let’s let Jeeves and Puss do the rest. There’s nothing but simple sinkers here—no floaters or swimmers—too small.”

“Sinkers?” asked Seichi, who was watching over her shoulder.

“The simplest of saganlife,” said Sandra. “Even if a creature is heavier than air, if it is small enough, the viscous drag of the air is high and its rate of fall is slow. These small sinkers are easily carried upward by convective air flows, such as the thermal that is lifting the warm wet air below us, where it condenses to form the cloud around us. The small sinkers use the thermals to rise up to where there is light and they can use photosynthesis to grow. But as they grow, they become heavier and are no longer buoyed up by the air currents. They sink deeper and deeper into the atmosphere until they get to the depths where the air is so hot they are pyrolyzed.”

“Pyrolyzed?”

“Cooked to a crisp,” said Sandra.

“That does not sound like a viable mode of living,” said Seichi, dubiously.

“It takes a month or two for the mature sinkers to fall,” said Sandra. “As long as they can reproduce a new generation of tiny sinkers in that time period, then life goes on. The more successful lifeforms have learned to float or swim, although most swimmers also have flotation bladders.”

She cleared the screen. “I think I’ll go get a cup of coffee.” She clambered down the ladder to the galley on the deck below, while Seichi returned to his post at the scottyboard.

When Sandra turned away from the galley, sucking on the hot squeezer, she saw Dan standing at the door of the engineering sector, holding a glass tube with stoppers at both ends and hoses running into the stoppers.

“I rescued him,” said Dan, holding up the tube.

“Who?” asked Sandra, bewildered.

“The drowned jellyfish,” said Dan. “Fortunately, the water protected him from the oxygen in our atmosphere until I could transfer him to this tube and evaporate the water away with some oxygen-free outside air. Nearly blew him away in the process, but now he’s stabilized. See him ... up near the top ... swimming upward toward the light.”

Sandra looked at the pulsating microscopic glitter floating in the air inside the glass tube.

“Half-balloon, half-jellyfish,” she said, looking carefully at the tiny speck. “A toroidal bladder of hydrogen to provide buoyancy and hoop stiffness, a mouth that gulps air into the top of the hole in the toroid and squirts it out the bottom to provide jet power, and fine sticky tentacles waving in the jet exhaust to capture anything worth eating. Awfully tiny for a floater.”

“Floater and swimmer,” Dan reminded her. “Saturn’s air is ninety-four percent hydrogen and only six percent helium, so there isn’t much density difference between the pure hydrogen in his flotation bladder and the hydrogen-helium air mixture outside. When he stops gulping, he starts sinking.”

“Needs to get a lot bigger before he becomes a true floater,” said Sandra. “What should I call it, Jeeves? It’s a ring-shaped creature that swims to keep alive.”

“The Latin name for a ring- or annular-shaped swimming creature is
Annulus natare, “
replied Jeeves.

“Sounds good to me,” said Sandra cheerfully.

“The motto for these tiny guys is ‘Eat to live,’ “ agreed Dan. “I wonder how big a ringswimmer can get?”

~ * ~

The scientists back on Earth were overjoyed that Sandra and Dan had not only identified a new species on Saturn, but had actually captured a sample of it, which could be frozen and analyzed later on Earth. They were slightly disappointed later when they learned that Jeeves and the nanoimager onboard had been able to determine the chemical makeup and genetic structure of
Annulus.
It wasn’t too much different from life on Earth.

“Not surprising,” said Dan, after Jeeves had given its initial verdict. “Asteroids strike all the planets all the time, and some of them are powerful enough to throw off large blocks of rock or ice into space, with microscopic spores hidden inside the cracks. It would take just one rock, blasted off from the Earth’s surface billions of years ago, to infect Saturn. After all, as we have found, the environment under the clouds of Saturn isn’t that much different from the environment a few hundred meters beneath the surface of Earth’s oceans.”

“A detailed study of the gene pattern should be able to determine
when
the Saturn genetic pattern deviated from the Earth genetic pattern,” said Sandra hopefully.

“I’m sure it will,” said Dan, reassuringly.

“I’m afraid that is not going to be exciting enough to get the Congress-critters to spend more money to come here for scientific purposes,” interjected Rod.

Rod was right. Although the scientific community was very excited over the finding, the public and Congress soon relegated the discovery to the category of: “another kind of jellyfish,” although some of the more intelligent ones added: “on Saturn.”

~ * ~

The dawn of the next day found the
Sexdent
hanging below the water cloud layer. The balloon itself, a kilometer above them, was still inside the clouds.

“Wake up, you sleepy heads!” called Chastity through the intercom to the habitats. She had been standing watch at the pilot console while the rest of the crew slept through the short Saturnian night. “Wake up and look out your viewports! I can see down! And I mean
down!”
She adjusted the multitude of floodlights on the outside of the capsule so they were all pointing downward. Inside their habitats the rest of the crew woke from their five-hour night’s rest and rotated the tilted viewports in the ends of their habitat tubes so they too could look down. The view below them was free of visible clouds, but they could see no surface. The floodlight beams just faded out in the distance far below them.

“That sure is a long way down,” said Pete over the intercom as he stared down into the blackness from the comfort of his bed.

“And the lower you go the hotter it gets,” said Dan, who was also looking down from inside his habitat. “Say, Chass,” he added. “What is the temperature outside? Should be above freezing now that we’re under the cloud layer.”

“It is,” replied Chastity. “Temperature is eight degrees C. That’s warm enough that we don’t even need to wear our saturnsuits anymore. We can go outside in our coveralls. Almost like being on Earth—nearly one-gee gravity and room temperature air.”

“You must like to live in colder rooms than me,” said Rod from his habitat. “Besides, we still have the high pressure to cope with.” The reminder of the high-pressure environment they were in made everyone notice once again Rod’s high tenor voice from the hydreliox mixture they were all breathing. “What
is
the pressure anyway?”

“Just under ten bars,” replied Chastity.

“That’s a lot,” complained Rod.

“Ten bars is like being under only one hundred meters of water,” said Dan. “People have gone a lot deeper.”

“But not for as long as we will be doing,” Rod reminded him.

“That’s why we’re getting paid a billion each,” retorted Chastity. “Hurry up and get dressed, so you can take over this pilot console. We’re already ten minutes into my sleep shift.”

“Set it on autopilot and go to bed,” said Rod. “I’ll be up and take over as soon as I’ve had my coffee.”

Sandra was the first one dressed. While the others were gathering around the galley for breakfast and coffee, she skipped breakfast and took over the science console. Pulling down the biviewer, she set it on maximum photon amplification and maximum zoom, and started a scan.

After a while Rod came up the ladder, a breakfast bar in one hand and a squeezer of coffee in the other. After checking all the settings Chastity had left on the autopilot, he left the pilot console alone and went over to the science console to see how Sandra was doing.

“See anything?” he asked, then realized how dumb the question was. If Sandra had seen something, she would have announced it immediately, and everyone would be crowding around one of the holoviewports trying to see it too.

“Hard to see anything when it’s as dark as it is,” replied Sandra. “With the sunlight cut by a factor of a hundred by the ten-AU distance, and what sunlight there is left being absorbed by the three cloud layers above us, there’s practically no light left to see with.”

“I guess the creatures out there must be blind,” suggested Rod. “Like the creatures that live in caves or the bottom of the ocean.”

“Either that, or they would have to have eyes as big around as
Sexdent
to collect enough light to see at all,” replied Sandra. After a while, she finally whispered, “I think I see something. Get this bearing, Jeeves.” She lined up the biviewer crosshairs and pushed a button on the handgrip.

“I have both a radar and a sonar return from that point,” said Jeeves. “The object has a significant Doppler shift and width. It is coming in this direction and consists of a multitude of smaller objects moving in formation.”

Now that her brain had the clue, Sandra was finally able to “see” what she was seeing. “It’s a flock of snakes!” she cried loudly. Dan, resting in his habitat, trying to compose in his mind his next long-distance message to Pamela and the kids, suddenly flipped ends in his habitat, grabbed his biviewer from its holster in the end of his habitat, and with the guidance of Jeeves, soon had the biviewer focused on the long, narrow cloud.