Jupiter's Reef (43 page)

Only a small flake had popped off the surface of the shiny egg. Whatever was inside was still unseen behind the thick powdery shell. Alex was happy to see that no major damage had been done. While Mary stowed the sample he continued to examine the sphere.

He was particularly interested to see how the great globes were attached to the golden guy wires that cris-crossed the cavern. The joins were clusters of rope-like strands that radiated from a single spot on the shell and gripped the yellow cable at several points.

It had occurred to Alex that these spheres could be alive, and now that impression was reinforced when he noted that the radiating ropes could just as easily be legs.

“Dingers,” said Alex.

Mary saw it too. They did look like legs. If so, she thought, the spheres might be the bodies of a giant creature and Alex had just chiseled off a flake of its skin.

Simultaneously, they both took a step backward.

At that moment a white clicker man appeared out of nowhere. It approached the sphere lazily like a great flowing jellyfish, apparently examining the dent Alex had made in the shell. It paused there for a moment, then it came toward Alex and Mary.

They moved backward, away from the approaching creature, and their backs thumped against
Diver
’s hull.

The clicker man’s great pale wings reached for them.

5
“Are you guys all right?” Johnny was firing questions to Alex and Mary over the intercom, but they ignored him for the moment.

The clicker man’s arms had roamed over their bodies like a policeman frisking a suspect, and when it was satisfied, the creature retreated to its glowing sphere and settled back onto an arm of the star shaped structure inside.

“Answer me, will you?” said Johnny, sounding almost frantic. “Are you okay?”

“I didn’t feel anything, Mary,” said Alex. “Did you?”

“Actually, no,” she replied, examining the front of her EVA suit. Seeing no damage to her own space suit she had Alex turn around and checked him over as well. He turned around twice with his arms lifted until she shook her head. “Nothing,” she said. “I don’t see anything.”

“Do you think that was an attack?” said the voice of Sciarra.

“It looked more like an examination to me,” replied Johnny.

“That’s the impression I had,” said Alex.

“Are you both okay?”

Mary turned around and, using one hand to shade her eyes, looked into the cabin window. She could see Johnny looking back at her, wearing an expression of deep concern.

“We’re okay, Professor,” she said, waving.

Alex stood behind Mary, still facing the great sphere that contained the clicker men.

“I don’t know what to make of that,” he said.

“It might have been looking for the sample you took,” said Tony. Mary could see that he was still in his seat. She waved to him and he returned the gesture. “Did you feel the thing tug at the container?”

Mary still had the samples canister strap hanging over her shoulder. She removed it and examined the seal. “The lid’s on solid,” she said. “Still screwed on tight.”

“That’s twice those things have felt us up since we’ve been out here,” said Alex. “I have no idea what they’re doing.”

“Checking you out,” said Johnny’s voice over the intercom. “In some unique fashion.”

“Like blind men, maybe,” offered Tony.

“I wonder what we felt like to them?” asked Mary, looking back at the huge sphere. Inside, the white clicker men remained motionless. Mary touched her temple, trying to focus on the clicker men’s frequency. She was trying to receive the white ones but the strange vibrating voices that came from the glowing sphere were now silent. She could hear transmissions from the ship, from thunderstorms far away and from the black clicker men who had, as far as she could judge from the sound of their radio clicks, retreated to the edge of the cavern.

Mary looked back inside the cabin. Johnny had moved near the window. She saw his lips move but his voice still came through the suit radio. “I know you have special senses, Mary,” the Professor was saying. “What do they tell you is happening?”

Mary squinted at the Professor.

“Well, from what I have seen, you’re the one with all the gadgetry. What do your instruments tell you?” she said.

“That everything is asleep.”

“Asleep,” said Mary. “That would explain it.” Something tugged at her suit. She saw that a breeze was pulling at the tether that stretched from her to the hatch. Alex touched her arm and pointed up.

“The balloons are luffing,” he said. “There’s a wind in here all of a sudden.”

The balloons were indeed pulling to the left, but the ship’s engines were compensating, holding them steady. “We should get inside,” he said.

By the time they arrived at the hatchway, the wind had increased considerably. All the spheres that surrounded them, however, barely moved. Their structural grip on the latticework network of golden wires held them firm. Looking back over his shoulder, Alex saw chunks of brittle shell ripping off the spheres and joining more of the same from other spheres as it flew downward and out of sight. It reminded Alex of snow or flower petals, but on a grand scale.

“What the dingers is this?” he said. “Are those things shedding?”

Mary jumped into the airlock and grabbed a hand rail just as a large chunk of debris hit Alex’s shoulder. Then another smaller piece glanced off his helmet.

Despite the barrage of debris, Alex hesitated at the door, trying to see the white clicker men. He saw their sphere but it wasn’t glowing. Nor could he make out any openings. It had become a solid white ball, smooth and featureless. “Dingers, they’ve ...they’re ...,” he began to say something but another chunk of shell hit his helmet.

Using both hands, Mary yanked Alex inside
Diver
’s airlock and together they forced the door closed. Just before it closed, the door seal hissed as the wind outside reached full force.

“Are you all right?” asked Mary. For a second there was silence. The air was full of white powder and fine chips of shell. They looked as though they had come in from a blizzard and the airlock was full of snow.

“I’m fine,” said Alex. “That stuff had no mass to it at all. I hardly felt it hit.”

The silence didn’t last.
Diver
began to sway as the wind tugged at the balloons and the ship’s engines tried, unsuccessfully, to compensate. Outside Alex and Mary could hear pieces of shell hitting the ship, and Johnny was yelling for Alex to get back in the pilot’s chair. Alex and Mary moved as fast as possible, but they had to flush the contaminated air and the debris out of the airlock before they could open the inner door.

They quickly locked the sample case into its slot, then grabbed a railing so the purgative cycle could clean the airlock. Then they stripped off their helmets, boots, and their suits and left them in the airlock.

When Alex and Mary were ready, Johnny opened the inner hatch and they jumped inside. Then, as Johnny closed the hatch and flushed the airlock, they ran, naked, for the ship’s head.

They took the disinfecting shower together to save time. It took only a minute, and barely another minute passed as Alex forced his way into coveralls.

To the Professor and Tony that minute was the longest. The ship had been unable to hold its position and was drifting with the wind toward the bottom of the cavern, through a passageway that had mysteriously formed between the spheres.

Still zipping up his flightsuit, Alex bolted to the pilot’s seat. When he grabbed the stick the computer recognized him and relinquished the helm. Alex enjoyed feeling the ship come alive in his hand. He paused for a moment with the stick notched forward and let
Diver
come up to full throttle.

6
Alex remembered to power up the null-gee so the gee forces of flight wouldn’t break everyone’s necks, then he pointed
Diver
’s nose straight down to see where they were going.

Mary, Tony and the Professor all had unique vocal reactions to the sudden changes of direction, but Alex knew that every second could be their last and he couldn’t announce his every move. He had to call the shots as he saw them.

As a courtesy, Alex shouted to Johnny: “I’m doing the best I can to stabilize us for whatever’s down this poop chute.”

All the spheres that would have blocked their path had somehow moved, creating a large open passageway.

The rear camera showed that, despite the commotion, the clicker men’s sphere stood firm in its original position, while around it white debris was falling with the ship toward a great hole that had formed in the floor of the cavern.

As Alex struggled to orient the ship, Johnny shouted that the walls of the cavern had expanded. “I think we just observed a growth cycle.”

The noise outside got steadily louder as massive chunks of eggshell pelted
Diver
’s hull and balloon package.

“We can’t keep fighting this downdraft,” said Alex. “We have to go down with this stuff, or we’ll lose the balloons. We don’t have a choice!”

As if to punctuate his words one of their large balloons drifted past, its tether caught in a large chunk of shell. Everyone aboard except Mary’s kitten was watching the cockpit window when it flew past and disappeared into the darkness. No response came from Johnny.

Mary arrived at her seat out of breath.

“Brace yourselves!” shouted Alex as he pushed hard on the stick and the ship leapt downward toward the black hole at the bottom of the cavern. “Now we know what it feels like to be flushed down the toilet.”

“Some damned hospitality,” said Johnny.

“We were bounced by some goons,” said Alex through clenched teeth as he steered the ship past whirling chunks of debris. He knew where they were going. There could be no other answer. They were bound for the bottom of the reef.

7
“That’s why the place was so clean,” said Johnny.

In front of
Diver
pieces of white debris hung almost weightlessly in the ship’s floodlights. Around them on all sides was pitch blackness, and all they had been watching for the last several minutes were pieces of debris rotating in the gloom. Alex had matched the speed of the falling material to minimalize any impacts, but that also meant that they were headed towards denser atmosphere.

They had only lost one balloon, albeit a big one. While they fell Alex had deflated the balloons and reined them in tight to the hull, and he’d collapsed and stowed the inflated ramp. He knew, from experience, that beneath the reef they’d need less floatation and they would need to be more maneuverable and have a lower profile.

The column of air they had been following, by Johnny’s reckoning, led into the heart of the central Great Red Spot. “This place really is a chimney in reverse,” he said. “The cool air’s falling outside.”

8
The debris was gone. Now
Diver
was lost in a vast dark tunnel that led inexorably downward. There was little for Mary to do but watch and hold on to the kitten in her lap. As a gesture of trust, she had left the kitten’s leash near its litter box, but she kept a hand firmly on its red collar. But it wasn’t going anywhere. Though wide-eyed and brush-tailed, it stayed secure in Mary’s grasp, listening with the rest of
Diver
’s crew to a new reef sound. It sounded forlorn and hollow on the cabin speakers, like the voice of Jupiter itself.

If Alex had thought he was an expert on the reef when they had returned to it, now all he could do was reflect that little they’d encountered was as he remembered it. Now, deep under the reef, he peered out the cockpit window into the absolute blackness and wondered if they hadn’t overestimated their chances of returning home.

He wondered, too, as he looked at Mary stroking her cat, where home really was.

Ra Patera wasn’t it. The place where they’d met was gone; erased by a sulphur volcano. All their history, all their records were buried in a fire pit on Io. Neither Mary or Alex knew anyone at any other base there. Mars, on the other hand, was where Mary had begun her life and career, and Earth was where Alex started his life.

Alex thought about the astonishing events that led mankind to set up his and Mary’s situation: two people with a starship, looking for a home somewhere between Jupiter, its many moons, Mars, and Earth. Alex concluded home was pretty much anywhere Mary could be found, and
Diver
was as good a residence as any he could think of. Their mobile home. At least as soon as they could complete the mission.

They now had all the samples they needed and there was no reason to stay. Alex laughed as the thought crossed his mind. Mary looked at him as though he was losing his senses.

Johnny switched the holographic radar image over to the cabin projectors. Now at least Alex could see where he was.

The image was made up of blue lines; topographic tracings Alex found disconcerting. He was looking for the soft aqua glow he remembered from his first trip to the bottom of the reef and feared the display would interfere with his ability to see it, but he appreciated Johnny’s help. At least he could see something.

Diver
had exited the great reverse chimney and was moving with the wind on a horizontal course. Johnny said he was sure that chimney was a massive sewer in the reef. The tubes brought waste down to the bottom. The huge chimneys were, no doubt, made of encrusted waste material that had built up over time.

Johnny was first to recognize that the image on the radar showed they were below the hollow tip of one of those chimneys; one that extended many kilometers beneath the reef.

“We’ve climbed to the mountain bottom,” quipped Alex. He looked at Mary and smiled. But she was listening to the strange sounds of the deep.

“And we don’t want to climb much lower,” said the Professor.

The ship crossed into a great gulf of open air as the frayed and leafy reef disappeared from view. Down this deep they were encountering little wind but Johnny cautioned Alex to be alert for cave-ins.

The radar spelled it out clearly. The terrain they followed angled upward at a steady 45° angle. They traced the endless slope of an upside down mountain. Strands of long fibrous weed hung down toward them as they climbed. Mary said it was like hair on the underbelly of a great beast. Clinging to it were crystalline crab things that seemed too thin and fragile to possibly exist. They looked like glass structures, glittering in
Diver
’s lights.