Ocean Under the Ice Read online

  Deirdre remained silent and relaxed. She rarely had much to say, and the landscape passing ponderously by was absorbing all her attention. Another cyclone, starting up from what must be a hot spot. The comment was unvoiced. Deirdre’s usual tasks, in the hydroponics lab, precluded her spending much time in the communal lounge, but she found the unfolding panorama fascinating.

  Down in the control room, curiosity and excitement were increasing as Prometheus drew closer to the surface of the giant planet. The crew, especially augmented for the encounter, continued to monitor the data being collected. Off on one side of the deck, Shirley took Thomas through the checkout of his spacesuit.

  “Every trip outside involves some risk,” complained Shirley, as she roughly punched button after button on Thomas’s chestpack, the rocket pilot rocking slightly with each punch. “We’ve got plenty of big cameras in the science bays. Why do you have to go out in the vacuum with your piddling little seventy millimeter?”

  “You’re just a worrywart,” replied Thomas, secretly glad that it was Shirley checking him out. She was indeed extremely safety conscious. She never skipped over checklists, no matter how many times she had been through them before. “The others need the big cameras for the scientific work and they can’t afford time to compose a shot like I can. And I don’t want those thick portholes distorting my pictures.” Once more he was grateful that George had taken his shift so that he could go out. Excitement surged through him — as it had so often in his lucky life. New discoveries, new experiences — always they had thrilled him, and he had plunged without a second thought into wherever they would lead him. Now, however, he tried to reassure Shirley. “I promise I’ll stay on the walkway and keep two safety lines on at all times.”

  “Be sure you do,” said Shirley. “Don’t forget that Prometheus is not in free fall — it’s under constant acceleration. If you let go of the safety line, she’ll fly away from you. If you let that happen, I’ll never speak to you again — literally.”

  With that sobering thought, Thomas let Shirley cycle him through the airlock. He stepped out the door onto the roughened portion of the outer hull that was made of magnetizable metal with tiny loops built into the surface. It was a gray path around the circumference of the ship, normally used for inspection of the outside seals of the portholes on the control deck. A similar path led upward to other areas needing inspection. Both magnetic grippers and Velcro footpads stuck equally well to the gray surface, and Thomas had both on the bottom of his spacesuit boots. He switched one of his safety lines to a metal stringer on one side of the path, and the other safety line to the stringer on the other side, then followed the path around until Gargantua came into view over the curved hull.

  “Wow…” he whispered softly to himself, his heart pounding in awe at the sight of the colossal globe nearly filling the sky. “It sure looks bigger out here than it does when it’s framed in a porthole.” He got his electrocam out of its pouch and started taking pictures. Through the sausage fingers of his spacesuit he could feel, rather than hear, the electronic whistle as the liquid crystal shutter activated to take the picture, followed by the chitter of the microprocessor as it compressed the digital data representing the picture and loaded it into the memory chip. The piezoelectric acoustic generator that Electropix had added to the camera to reassure their customers that the picture was really taken and stored was not really of much help in vacuum. Down in the dark region of the south pole, which was in shadow during this “season” in Gargantua’s 120 day “year”, Thomas noticed some lightning flashes. He zoomed his lens in on them, but decided it was not artistic enough to photograph. He was sure George or Arielle were using the large spacecraft cameras to take the shots they needed for scientific purposes.

  “Goddam strange!” Arielle, busy at a science console, sped slender fingers at high speed over the screen in front of her. “George! Jinjur! I keep watch on these clouds on south side as we approach and take pictures. Now I speed ‘em all up, and look!” George and Jinjur switched their screen displays to match hers.

  On the video display, Arielle revealed a massive weather pattern, spawned about mid-planet and drifting southward, but only briefly. Just as it was on the point of disappearing into the darkness of the south polar cap, it rebounded, went west against the prevailing winds, bounced off something else hidden in the southern polar region, and headed northwards again.

  “Bumped into something? Hidden in the dark, there?” asked Jinjur.

  George manipulated the icons on the side of his screen, and soon, superimposed on the image, was a computer-generated map that showed the slightly oblate sphere of the gargantuan planet with the latitude and longitude marks indicated in fine blue lines. The shadowed region of the planet was lightly hatched with gray lines. Near the south pole, inside the shadowed region, was a large feature in white, with dimensions indicated on it. It was a mound in the atmosphere, reaching up five thousand kilometers above the normal Gargantuan surface, and spreading out thirty-five thousand kilometers — half as big as Jupiter. On top of the mound was a central peak as big around as the Earth, rising up another thousand kilometers. George pointed to the feature, and where his finger touched the screen a green blob appeared on their screens.

  “That’s where I noticed an atmospheric volcano during our first flythrough…”

  “George always quick to spot tits,” teased Arielle. Indeed, the computer-generated image of the mound looked very much like a woman’s breast.

  George continued, “…so it’s not surprising the storm bounced off that region — there’s a constant outflow of air off that mound.” They all watched as James ran the stop-motion sequence again. Sure enough, the storm ran into the computer generated drawing of the volcano at the point where it gave the first bounce. “But what is causing the second bounce? There was nothing at that point last time.”

  “There is now,” said Arielle. “Lots of lightning. Wonder what it is?”

  “Use our searchlight, like we did before,” said Jinjur.

  “Right!” replied George. He quickly reconfigured the screen on his navigation console display screen to show the relative positions in three-dimensional space of Gargantua, its moons, and Prometheus — along with the shadow cones that they cast, and most importantly for now, the expanding reflected light beam that came off the sail of Prometheus. It turned out that it didn’t take much of a tilt of the sail to make the reflected light illuminate the southern polar region. George had James curve the lightsail slightly to concentrate the beam in the region around the volcano. The newly illuminated portion of Gargantua brought a gasp from the watchers, some of whom were watching screens, while others looked out the porthole on that side of the ship.

  “Two tits!” exclaimed George over the comments. Sure enough, where there had once been one atmospheric volcano, there were now two, one slightly larger than the other. From hot spots deep in the core, came geysers of liquid metallic hydrogen that spurted upward at high pressure to climb for twenty thousand kilometers through the thick atmosphere until they erupted into outer space. As the geysers rose, the metallic hydrogen, released from the internal pressure that kept it in its relatively dense metallic form, converted back into buoyant hydrogen molecules, then atoms, then ionized plasma as the kinetic energy in the stream was converted into heat. The “tits” of the atmospheric volcanos gave off continuous lightning flashes as the flowing hydrogen atoms rose into space, recombined back into hydrogen molecules, then fell in the strong gravitational field of the planet back onto the upper cloud layers. Now a very light gas instead of a heavy metal, the falling hydrogen built up into a permanent “high-pressure” area that slowly spread out in an atmospheric version of a lava shield and eventually flowed back into the surrounding atmosphere.

  “Arielle!” commanded George. “You take the new one and I’ll resurvey the old one.” The hands of the two atmospheric scientists quickly moved into rapid activity on their console screens, as they directed James in gathering
as much scientific information as possible during their brief flyby.

  “High res UV photos of interior of caldera.”

  “Doppler radar map of flow velocities along flanks…” The mechanical noises from the circular bank of science instruments in the center of the room increased as one sensor after another was brought into play.

  Outside in the vacuum, Thomas was walking slowly along the gray path, keeping Gargantua in sight as Prometheus slowly rotated, his seventy-millimeter electrocam clicking and buzzing. They were moving so rapidly by Gargantua that the planet was changing phase with each passing minute. When he had first come outside, Gargantua was three-quarters lit. Now the terminator between the light and dark side cut the planet in half. The zoom lens moved in and out as he switched from taking an overall shot with different wavelength settings on his liquid crystal electrofilter, to close-up shots of a particularly interesting looking curlicue at the tip of a weather front. When the searchlight beam from the sail swept onto the previously dark southern polar regions and exposed the twin volcanos, he reached into his lens pouch for his super-zoom lens.

  “Got to get this!” he exclaimed, changing lenses, and the electrocam was soon back in action, cramming image after image into its large memory chip.

  In the lounge, David and Deirdre sat up, amazed. They gazed in wonder at the two enormous, seething mountains, with their central jets giving off vivid flashes of lightning.

  The watchers aboard Prometheus, as they took in the awesome sight, reacted in their own ways. In the lounge, the symphony in David’s mind swelled with organ tones; while outside, the camera in Thomas’ hands took on a life of its own, focussing, shifting, closing in. Jinjur, knowing that all the possible forms of technical data were being efficiently gathered in by James and the team of scientists, concentrated on absorbing as much as she could of the magnificent, total sweep of the sight. Katrina, for once incapable of reducing to words the unfolding sight before her, was silent, enraptured by the weird beauty. Arielle’s hands occasionally paused and quivered over a close-up image, as with only her eyes she soared and sailed through that turbulent atmosphere in an imaginary airplane. Carmen’s scalp crawled and tingled; the violence out there awoke horrifying memories of the earthquake that had once ravaged her home. Among the many humans, two, on separate decks, shared a common emotion: in the minds of Reiki and Deirdre there was only room for joy, and gratitude for the privilege of seeing this wonder. The promise of scenes such as this was what had lured them, when the mission itself seemed a dream; and what had sustained them through the long dreary years of childishness, and illness, before their arrival at Rocheworld.

  Then, quite suddenly, the searchlight beam faded and went out. With the fading of the beam that had been illuminating the southern region, all of Gargantua was now dark.

  “What happened? I wasn’t finished!” complained George.

  “We have passed into Gargantua’s shadow cone,” James reminded him.

  “I got good data on new tit,” Arielle said contentedly, as she looked over the new information James had added to its computer map of the two features. “They need names,” she finally decided, and after a brief period of thought, she added names beside the drawings on James’s map — “Big Ma’am” on the newer, smaller volcano, and “Great Big Ma’am” on the older, larger one — while the whole southern polar region now had the name — “Gudunov Heaven”.

  There was a warning gong from the airlock, and an elated Thomas cycled thorough, his brown eyes sparkling. The minute Shirley got his helmet off, he started talking.

  “Such great purples and pinks! You should’ve seen the sunset I got over a hurricane bigger than Jupiter! I can’t wait to get these pictures in my image processor!” Impatiently he shucked off his suit, shoving the various parts at Shirley and the Christmas Bush, then grabbing his camera, he headed up the central shaft to his apartment.

  Slowly Prometheus continued on its way, carrying minds whose memories would never lose the incredible vastness of what they had seen. The tired encounter science crew, their senses overloaded to almost the point of physical shock, closed down their consoles and returned to their own confines, while the next shift came on to monitor the flight back out from behind Gargantua to catch up with the speeding Zulu in its close orbit around the giant planet.

  Jinjur trotted down the carpeted aisle of the control deck, and bounced easily up the central shaft of Prometheus, the low gravity provided by the modest acceleration of the sail as always a satisfaction to her. She had been intrigued with the thought of what Thomas might have captured with his camera, so after a quick stop at the galley to get something to tide her over until dinner, she headed up the shaft to the living quarters decks.

  Thomas’s suite was on the same level as hers, two doors around. The room between theirs had once belonged to Dr. Wang, the ship’s doctor. It was now sealed off. William had died on the long trip out from an infectious cancer that had attacked nearly the entire crew. He had sacrificed his life by delaying the debilitating chemotherapy treatment on himself in order to insure the best treatment for the rest of the crew.

  Reaching the second crew quarters floor, she swung around the railing, perched herself on her Velcro-bottomed slippers in front of Thomas’s door, and pushed the doorbell button above the palm plate. As was her custom, while on the way up the shaft, she had signaled James to give advance notice of her approach to a crew member’s quarters.

  The door responded promptly to her ring by sliding sideways into its slot and Jinjur entered Thomas’s room, wedge-shaped like all the rest. To the left was the standard bathroom, with both the bathroom door and shower door open. Jinjur noticed that the shower head was up near the top of the shower, while Jinjur had hers lower down so she could reach it to adjust the spray head. To the right was the “personal office” area, but instead of a standard touchscreen console, bookcase, and writing desk, plus a few “shelves” for storing knickknacks, holoportraits, and other personal items, Thomas’s whole wall was covered with a complex set of specialized instruments for carrying out intricate image processing of pictures. There were a few small monitor screens, but nothing like the standard console touchscreen.

  Thomas was standing at the back of the apartment in the “living room”, which had a large sofa on the right wall that butted up to the office equipment, and faced the floor to ceiling double-sided viewwall that separated the living room area from the bedroom area. The back wall of the living room area was a smaller viewwall, set into a fake picture-window frame, usually set by most of the crew to some favorite “living picture” scene back on Earth, while the larger viewwall was used for entertainment videos. Thomas was by to the larger viewwall, examining it closely, while behind him the small viewwall displayed a large image of Gargantua in crescent moon phase, obviously taken late in the recent encounter.

  Before Jinjur could speak, Thomas was exulting.

  “They’re going to be wonderful! Sure it was dim, but as soon as I process them, we’re going to see…” Suddenly, he remembered who she was, and years of training brought Thomas to taut attention in the presence of his commanding officer. “…excuse me, ma’am.” Even the laxness of discipline brought about by their isolation and friendship couldn’t erase the basic training some of the crew had undergone in their pasts.

  He relaxed, however, as Jinjur waved him at ease and began to examine his photographs of Gargantua. Soon the two were silent, and the pictures were studied, Thomas moving back and forth from the viewscreen to his equipment to carefully brighten pixels, stretch spectrums, rectify areas, and combine adjacent areas.

  “Ummm,” murmured Jinjur. “Look at this volcano, just forming. Just a baby, kind of cute.”

  “Some baby,” said Thomas. “Considering it’s bigger than the Earth, but it’s doing quite nicely, looks like.”

  “Kind of a shame we don’t dare go any closer, really,” said Jinjur. “But I know the moons will be spectacular enough, and since they have lifefor
ms on them, there will be plenty to do there to keep us busy for the rest of our lives.”

  CHAPTER 03 — CHOOSING

  The giant spaceship, slowed by its lightsails, finally matched orbits with Zulu. Deirdre had been intrigued with the preliminary reports coming in from this planet concerning the life forms, and quietly determined to be watching on the control deck as they approached. She stationed herself at a spare console next to Sam, who was on shift duty at the planetary science console, and matched her screen with his. All the biologists on board Prometheus were, at the moment, connected with Sam’s screen in one way or the other, Katrina from the sick bay where she was watching over John, Nels from a console that swung out over his regen tank, and Cinnamon from a portascreen monitor sitting on her lap while she took a coffee break from her hydroponics lab duties. She was sitting in the favorite break spot of the crew, the sofa in front of the flouwen habitat tank. The flouwen were not just swimming around in colorful display, however, they too were watching their underwater console through “eyes” formed on the ends of pseudopods.

  Sam, who had previously explored Ganymede back in the solar system, was explaining the resemblances. “‘S real simple, how it’s made. The central core is rock, and that’s all covered with water. The water is mostly frozen — all the way down to the rock. There’s some geysers which form lakes that have a thick ice shelf around the edges. Zulu is so close to Gargantua it’s tidally locked, with the inner pole always facing the big planet. The tidal pull is so strong that Zulu gets kind’a squeezed out o’ shape.”