Jupiter's Reef (46 page)

Alex had been watching the instruments. Without the balloons, the MPCs would be ‘riding on the nines’, a spacer’s term for the level at which MPCs could, theoretically, melt down.

He knew they were well designed. Two of them had already shut down on their own, rather than cause a meltdown. But he feared the odds.
Diver
carried 198 potential supernova in its belly. At the very least, an explosion of that magnitude could take out the entire reef.

3
There was only one way, and Johnny’s okay was no quicker than Alex’s flip of the toggle that stowed the balloons.

Diver
was heading down to an altitude where a shockwave wouldn’t matter. But the gravity was greater, the air was heavier and
Diver
’s power plant would be pushed to the limit.

“We’re ridin’ the nines, Johnny,” said Alex.

“Great,” said Tony. But the Professor remained silent.

Alex knew that Johnny had his own view of the instruments and knew their logistics as well as anyone. Mostly Alex said it just to get out a little of his own steam. Inside Alex felt that he, too, was in danger of going nova.

Alex firmly believed that the Professor’s lagging had put them in harm’s way, but to dwell on that was pointless. As pilot Alex was the one now who held the responsibility for saving everyone on board.

Alex looked at Mary as his mind drifted back to their first excursion to the reef. Mary, knowing Alex’s thoughts, returned his glance and smiled. He didn’t have to tell her about their situation. Neither did she need instruments or even her uncanny extrasensory perception. Alex’s expression said it all.

“Go, Alex,” she whispered. “Tear it up.” Mary winked.

Alex smiled then his eyes returned to the front.

“You’re right, my love,” he said. “All the lights are in the green. Let’s blow this pop stand.”

When the balloon’s stowage latch signaled it was closed, Alex pushed the drive stick forward.

Outside the ship was only blackness and heat. There was nothing to watch the ship’s speedometer climb to hypersonic speeds.

4
“Glad I got to see my air whales,” said Mary, with a happy shrug of her shoulders. “Don’t forget to mention them by that name,” she said, looking back at the Professor. “And don’t forget to credit me with naming them, Johnny.” .

“Everything’s on the record,” said Tony. “What are you worried about? You guys are heroes. Or aren’t you aware of that?”

“I guess that’s right,” said Alex. “But that’s on Earth. We’re on Jupiter now, and I don’t get the feeling we’re heroes here.”

“But you’re definitely historical figures here,” said the Professor. “Whether the natives see it that way is another story.”

It had been several hours since they had deflated the balloons and dipped lower into the Great Red Spot. The MPCs were still in the nines but operating well. For the first time since he could remember Alex’s shoulder muscles were beginning to relax.

The back of his neck hurt and he had a headache from the tension he’d been under. So he decided to let the computer fly the ship and to get some sleep.

Alex instructed the computer to continue toward the rim while searching with its radar for signs of an updraft. As soon as one was found Alex planned to follow it to the surface.

After passing the helm to the computer, Alex unfastened his seat belt. As he rose from his seat the computer reduced the ship’s gravity from one and a half gees to less than half a gee. The change made Alex’s head swim. He held his seat’s head-rest for a moment until his blood pressure adjusted. “Whoa,” he said as his knees wobbled. “It’ll be good to get back into some steady-state gravity. Right, Mary? Right now, I’m for a greebrew and a nap.”

Sleep he did. And like Mary’s kitten, Alex radiated sleep. Soon Mary dozed off. Then Tony and finally the Professor fell asleep in his bubble.

Diver
’s computer held the course straight and true toward the outer rim of the Great Red Spot at a speed of slightly more than three thousand kilometers per hour. But even at hypersonic speeds it would take about eight more hours of bee-line travel to get there.

Through the hot darkness the ship rode the deep currents and eddies of the great Jovian vortex. Alex dreamed of dragons whose fiery breath licked at the tiny ship from a place far below; a place of black, super hot hydrogen gas squeezed to a liquid by the shrinking of the gas giant. Larger than human perception can allow, the vortex was a chimney, extruding the planet’s excess heat in the same machine-like fashion it had used for millions of years. On top, the computer knew, was a vast whirlpool of scum Alex now called the reef. And somewhere along its rim was the hole in the cheese that would allow best access to the surface. If anyone could find it, it would be the computer. Its eyes were long range radar and its guidance was an ever growing store of data about the reef.

And best of all the computer had infinite patience. Three hours after Alex and the crew of
Diver
fell asleep the ship saw an opportunity; a slight upwelling in the inky road ahead.

A gong sounded in the cabin. Alex opened his eyes and stared straight ahead. Nothing seemed to have changed.

As soon as his eyes could focus he examined the altimeter and saw they were climbing.

“Dingers,” whispered Alex. “You found it.” Rotating in front of him was a three dimensional model of the reef above them, rendered in green. Alex didn’t need the flashing red circle to see the hole in the reef.

“I was up before the rest of you,” said the voice of the Professor. He leaned against his chair, holding a squeezer of tea and watching the rotating image. “I’d have woken you but frankly it seemed unnecessary. The computer ... well, I have to admit it’s doing a fine job of piloting without us. It’s found us a way out of here, I think.”

“Well, I’ll just go back to sleep, and leave the flyin’ to you two,” said Alex.

Mary stepped from the shower room wrapped in a towel. Her white silky hair spiked out as she shook her head. “Are we climbing?” she asked, squinting at the image that hovered before Alex.

A cloud of steam framed Mary in the bathroom doorway. Alex remembered her silhouette in the shower room of the Cydonia Hotel on Mars. Alex closed his eyes as he tried to remember the last time they’d made love. It contented him slightly to remember their recent shower together, but the memory of it didn’t really help. It made him wonder if they could possibly sneak off with both the Professor and Tony wide awake. He decided to focus on the road ahead. Some day, if they were lucky, Alex and Mary would find privacy and, hopefully, a soft bed.

Alex groaned as his back twinged with pain. He knew the chairs were designed to accommodate a body alert or asleep. “Tell it to my back,” he muttered.

5
Diver
pointed straight up as it rose in the middle of a great river of warm air that cut into the reef. Everyone, for the time being, had to remain strapped in while they decided how to approach the climb.

Alex suggested they deploy the balloons and drift upward using less power. There was no argument from Johnny or Tony so he instructed the computer to make it so. The ship lurched clumsily as the balloons reinflated and the ship twisted to an upright position.

“Computer, keep us in the center of this channel of air.”

The radar and the holographic panorama were still active. Alex sat sideways in his seat, hands behind his head, twisting the kinks out of his spine.

“Sheesh,” Alex grimaced as his back gave an audible cracking sound. “Was that me?”

He was watching the monitors. Both the front and rear cameras were looking up, and Johnny had altered the holographic cabin display so the radar guidance system was a dome over their heads. It took some doing to get the display to work and Tony had to change the cabin lighting, but soon everyone but Johnny could put their seat back and watch their ascent.

Johnny didn’t miss the effect; it was his chair’s ability to recline and alter the bubble’s view to a dome that made it possible for the computer to interpolate the view to the cabin’s hologram.

Alex lay back in his chair and watched the artificial traces of the tunnel’s edge roll by the ship. He could see that they were rising slowly, no more than two or three kilometers per hour. Since the walls of the tube were out of range of
Diver
’s lights, there was no white light overlay to the view they were seeing. But the ship’s sensors could see heat in the form of infrared radiation, and the data was used to describe a three dimensional scene. From the pilot and co-pilot’s viewpoint it appeared they were in a gargantuan tunnel with glowing walls rendered in shades of green. Here and there were spots that glowed red and orange, betraying the location of nests of living organisms. Sometimes these glowing patches connected forming chains of light that ran for hundreds of meters along the tunnel wall. Nearby they could see larger creatures, crawling or jumping from place to place. If they traveled swiftly, heat from their bodies left visible trails in the hologram.

But most of the life was cold and dark. There was no general reef glow here. The Professor noted that life down here was hanging on the walls of tunnel probably to absorb heat, not lose it.

Now and again the computer ran the engines to steady the ship or to hold its position in the exact center of the tunnel. Alex paid close attention to what it was doing. But
Diver
was running smooth and cool. Power was being diverted from the engines to the null gee generators in a systems balance that Alex knew he couldn’t provide.

The only thing that worried Alex about the computer’s piloting the ship was that it did too good a job. He flatly didn’t trust machines, no matter how well they performed. And
Diver
’s abilities, being an over-powered ultralight ship, were exceptional. Still, he knew that the moment he let his guard down the death bell would sound for all of them. Alex took a long drink, finishing his squeezer of geebrew, and watched the monitors.

They were nearly weightless and the kitten was directly over Alex and Mary’s heads, walking on the fabric covered areas of the ceiling. Its little claws caught in the weave, making a ripping sound as it moved. The kitten was looking at Mary.

Alex thought it funny to see a cat playing in the dark through the holographic image of the tunnel.

“Dingers, Mary,” he said in mock alarm. “There’s a monster cat in the tunnel ahead. We’ve had it.”

Mary laughed and, as if on cue, the kitten sprang spread-eagle from the ceiling and fell directly into her lap. Mary squealed with delight, then picked up the kitten. It hissed angrily and cuffed her and a tiny claw caught Mary’s forearm.

“Ohhhh ... you nasty little twerp!” Mary tossed the cat into the air and it did a perfect four-paw landing on the ceiling. It stood there proudly for a moment and looked at everyone all bushy and wide-eyed. It looked back at Mary and mewed.

“Don’t apologize to me, sir,” she said, rubbing her scratched arm and pouting angrily. “We’ve got to do something about those claws of yours.”

Undaunted, the kitten jumped back to Mary, landing on her seat’s headrest. There it perched and looked down at Mary’s head. It took a swipe at her hair and missed.

“That’s it,” said Mary Seventeen. “Time to get your toes clipped.”

With Johnny’s chair in the prone position he was able to watch the cat and what was going on inside his bubble at the same time. When he heard Mary mention clipping the cat’s claws he sat up. “Um, have you ever done that before?” he asked her.

When Mary admitted that she hadn’t, Johnny told her how to do it.

“Just make sure you don’t trim too far back into the pink part,” he said.

Mary thanked the Professor, then asked how he knew so much about cats.

“My first wife. She raised them,” he said.

“Martian cats,” said Tony. “The spotted ones with the long legs?”

“For sale on Earth,” said Johnny. Alex noticed that the Professor’s brows always drooped a bit when he mentioned his wife. “Then she went to Earth to open new markets for Martian cats. Now she’s raising Mars-Earth hybrids.” Johnny looked over at Alex and smiled. “She never explained why people wanted such a hybrid.”

“Did you ever ask?” said Mary. The kitten was now biting at a lock of Mary’s white hair. Mary’s expression betrayed that she was trying to ignore the kitten. And she squinted an eye shut when the cat began to climb over her brow and peer into Mary’s eye.

“No,” answered Johnny.

Mary shook her head and the kitten flipped back to the headrest. It looked back at the ceiling as though it wanted to be thrown back there.

The Professor volunteered to brave the null gee and get everyone a drink.

“Any Ganny brew left?” asked Alex. “That stuff was good.”

Johnny reminded Alex that they’d polished that off before the Gannys left the airlock.

“Okay,” Alex said sadly. “Geebrews for everyone, then, I guess.”

Mindless of the crew, the computer detected a bend in the tunnel and executed a fairly sharp turn. Because of the null gee the movement sent the Professor careening into a wall.

Johnny grunted as he slammed into the paneled wall. After a moment he gathered up the four foaming squeezers of greebrew, rose to his feet, and pushed himself toward Alex and Mary. After deftly handing them out he moved handily into his chair and buckled in. “I think I’m getting the hang of this weightless stuff,” he said, rubbing his elbow.

Alex had been keeping an eye on the instruments. It wasn’t long after he took the first draught from the squeezer Johnny had handed him that he noticed the tunnel was getting narrower.

Johnny was telling an anecdote about his ex wife and her love of cats when Alex interrupted with the news.

“Sorry, Johnny, but you might want to check our position and our movement on that super-plotter you have in that bubble of yours.”

Johnny looked upward into the canopy that hung above his seat.

“Hmmmmm,” he said softly. Then the Professor lifted the chair so he could reach the instrument panel. A moment later he announced that Alex was correct. “We’re sliding to the west laterally a bit. But we’re still rising. Two point seven kilometers per hour.”