A huge stupa-like dome dominated the port’s striated icy plain; big curving black-glass windows took in the pano-ramic view. Through one of them, Randolph Mays idly watched a pressurized moon buggy bound across the ice.
Mays stood slightly apart from the crowd of media-hounds who’d gathered to slice newsbites out of Inspector Ellen Troy and Professor J. Q. R. Forster. His new production assistant craned her neck to see the door, at present firmly shut, where the media victims were scheduled to appear. “Shouldn’t we be closer?” Marianne fretted. “They’ll be here any minute.”
“We’re quite well situated,” Mays replied, speaking into the microfiber that tight-linked him to the pickup unit Mar-ianne wore in her ear. When the time came to take his pic-tures and ask his questions, his great height and unmistakable voice would make it unnecessary to actually come in contact with the squirming mass of his fellows.
“I can,” said Mays, putting an end to the discussion. His assistant didn’t need to see in order to do her job —such as it was. Having decided he could use her help, Mays had been prepared to put up with bare competence in some areas pro-vided he got complete cooperation in others. To his surprise, Marianne had proved far from useless; indeed, she had shown herself quite adept at making travel arrangements and appointments and generally keeping his schedule in or-der, using the phonelink in that half-efficient, half-sexy, American college girl voice of hers as if she’d been born to the device. She didn’t even balk at carrying his luggage; in his workmanlike old leather satchel she’d brought along his recorders and extra chips and the old-fashioned notebook he sometimes used as a prop.
If Mays were given to such thoughts, he would have had to credit Bill Hawkins with his good luck. But Mays wasn’t the sort to give credit to others, unless forced to it. After all, he’d decided to seduce Marianne no matter what; Haw-kins had just made it that much easier. . . .
Mays slipped into the rig and expertly framed the shot in time to catch the opening of the door. Professor Forster was first through it, followed by the rest of his crew. Last onto the dais was Inspector Ellen Troy, trim in her Space Board blues. Marianne stood by, thrilled, watching the scene unfold on her tiny auxiliary remote monitor.
Forster closed his mouth with an almost audible snap, tucked in his chin, and glared from beneath gingery brows, waiting for the questioners to wear themselves down. Fi-nally there was a lull in the cacophony. “I’ll read a brief statement,” he said, clearing his throat with a growl. “Ques-tions afterward.”
There were renewed shouts, but the majority of the reporters, realizing that Forster would go on ignoring them until he’d been given a chance to read his prepared remarks, turned on their fellows and shushed them smartly.
“Thank you,” said Forster into the sullen and expectant silence. “Let me introduce the members of the Amalthea expedition. First, in charge of our vessel, the
Michael Ven tris
, our pilot, Josepha Walsh; our engineer, Angus McNeil; and our navigator, Anthony Groves. Assisting me in surface operations will be Dr. William Hawkins and Mr. Blake Red-field. Inspector Ellen Troy represents the Board of Space Control.”
“Our mission is two-fold,” Forster continued. “We wish to determine the geological structure of the moon. More particularly, we hope to resolve certain persistent anomalies in the radiation signature of Amalthea. For over a century—until the termination of the
Kon-Tiki
expedition last year—Amalthea was observed to radiate more energy than it re-ceives directly from the sun and by reflection from Jupiter. Almost all of the excess heat could be attributed to the im-pact of charged particles in Jupiter’s radiation belt—almost all, but not quite all. We should like to learn where that extra heat came from.”
“The question has become more urgent since Amalthea became geologically active. It now reradiates
much
more energy than it absorbs. What kind of heat engine is driving the ice geysers that are causing Amalthea to lose almost half a per cent of its original mass each twelve hours—every time the moon orbits Jupiter?”
“Finally, of course,” Forster said, speaking hurriedly, “we hope to learn what connection may exist between the recent events on Amalthea and the creatures called medusas which live in the clouds of Jupiter.” He glared at the audience of ostentatiously bored reporters. “We’ll take questions.”
The whole pack of them turned to stare at Mays, who muttered, “What’s
this
then?” even as he continued to aim his photogram camera at the odd spectacle. “Be
ready
, my dear,” he addressed Marianne, “we’re going to have to spring our little
surprise
earlier than I’d hoped.”
He held the camera to one side, still pointed at the newshounds—enjoying their resentful attention—and at the crew of the
Michael Ventris
waiting uneasily on the dais beyond them. “I never said you were
part
of the conspiracy, Professor,” he called out cheerfully, a huge grin stretching his voracious lips over his sturdy white teeth. “Nevertheless I throw the question
back
to you. You know
something
known to the Free Spirit and unknown to the rest of us. Tell us the
real
reason you are going to Amalthea. Tell us the
reason
you are taking an
ice
mole. Tell us
why
you are taking a Europan
submarine.”
“As for this Free Spirit of yours, Sir Randolph, I am wholly in the dark.” Forster’s grin was as fierce as Mays’s; they could have been a pair of feuding baboons disputing the leadership of the pack. “But as to the moon Amalthea, it seems you have chosen not to hear what I have just been saying. Amalthea is expelling its substance into space through immense spouts of water vapor. Therefore this moon must consist very largely of water, some of it solid—for which an ice mole is a useful exploratory tool—and some of it liquid, the sort of environment for which the subma-rines of Europa were designed.”
Josepha Walsh leaned forward to tap Forster on the shoulder; Forster paused to listen to his pilot’s whispered words, then returned his attention to the assembled report-ers. “I’m informed that the countdown for our departure has already begun,” he said with gleeful malice. “Unfortunately that is all the time we have for discussion. Thank you for your attention.”
The cries of rage from the frustrated newshounds were frightening enough to justify the precaution of spaceport guards, who emerged from the doorway to protect the retreat of Forster’s crew; none but Sparta and Forster himself had said a word to the assembled media.
Mays tore off his comm rig. “He
mocks
me.” He stared over the heads of his milling colleagues, seemingly lost inside himself. Then he looked down at his assistant. “We have only
begun
to report this story. But to carry on will require imagination . . . and
daring
. Are you still committed, Mar-ianne?”
Everyone not on duty gathered in the wardroom of the
Mi-chael Ventris
to watch the final approach on the views-creens. At first, Amalthea appeared as a tiny gibbous moon hanging in space, its night sector lit up faintly by the re-flected glory of Jupiter.
Jupiter seemed to expand forever, until finally it filled the sky, rolling overhead at an incredible rate as the ship smoothly matched orbits with its bright, swiftly moving target. What had been a lump of dark rock 270 kilometers long, blotched with a few snowy patches, was now a shorter el-lipsoid of gleaming ice, as polished and abstract as a Bran-cusi sculpture, its long axis pointed straight at the curdled orange and yellow clouds of Jupiter, its principal.
Even if they had not had the aid of the view-screen op-tics, they were close enough now to see hundreds of plumes of vapor dotting the sculptured ice surface, a celestial Yel-lowstone of fizzing soda-water geysers. Instead of falling back to the ground, these geysers all gracefully curved away into space, dissipating in fairy veils of mist that made it look as if Amalthea were caressed by gentle winds, rather than racing into stark vacuum.
The only “atmosphere” this far from Jupiter—despite its awesome size, still almost 110,000 kilometers distant—was the horde of particles in its radiation belts. Like the tail of a comet approaching the sun, the tenuous gases of Amalthea were set aglow and blown backward by radiation pressure alone.
It was into this misty slipstream that Josepha Walsh steered the
Ventris
—into the only region of space close to Jupiter that was shielded from lethal trapped radiation. Here, a little over a year ago,
Garuda
had waited while Howard Falcon descended into the clouds in the balloon-borne
Kon-Tiki. Garuda’
s task had been easy by comparison to that of the
Ventris
, for it had only to wait the few short days until Falcon returned. The mission of the
Michael Ventris
, was open-ended, and the object of its study changed shape with each passing minute.
Jo Walsh maneuvered as close to the moon as she dared without actually touching down upon it. Finally Jupiter dis-appeared from the viewscreens, setting beyond the close, sharply curved horizon of Amalthea; a few minutes more, and the
Ventris
sidled so close that from the main hatch it would be only a little jump into the mists that shrouded the surface below.
Long before the ship stopped moving, the watchers in the wardroom had seen the strange black markings on the moon. Hawkins blurted out the question on everyone’s minds: “What are those? Craters?”
Groves and McNeil soon joined Blake and Bill Hawkins and the professor in the wardroom. The whole crew was there except Walsh, who still had things to attend to on the flight deck, and Sparta, who had not been seen since shortly before launch from Ganymede.
The biggest view-screen was playing back in extreme slow motion the sequence of images from the
Ventris
’s final approach. At three places on the side facing them, clearly visible through the tenuous surface mist, were huge, sharply defined circles—black lines inscribed as if with a fine nib, India ink on white rag paper—circles within circles, too mathematically precise and too regularly spaced to have been the product of random cratering.
“Let’s say it isn’t as much of a surprise to me as it is to you.” Forster’s shiny young face with its old man’s eyes looked very smug as he fielded their questions. “The Space Board have managed to keep most of its remote satellite observations under wraps. Only one slip—that image Mays somehow got hold of, which was too distant to give away anything of consequence—and these patterns only showed up in the high-resolution visuals within the past month. We’re the first to get a close look.”
As the image sequence continued, with the point of view sinking closer to the surface, it was obvious to the onlookers that the rings were not inscriptions, not something incised in a smooth surface; on the contrary, they stood out in relief. They were structures of some kind, delicate black trac-eries of metal or some composite material, standing a few meters above the icy plain.