them, but it still showed no disk to the naked eye.
That fact alone brought home the immensity of the distances they were traveling. In the past three months they had journeyed farther and faster than any manned spacecraft before them had ever gone, but Jupiter still seemed as far away as when they had started.
Jameson indulged himself with a final long look at the brilliant dot of light, then turned reluctantly toward the command chair on the balcony above, where he could hear a buzzer sounding. He was tempted to jump for it, but he had to set an example. Some half dozen personnel of both nations were scattered among the paired consoles and the mostly empty seats rimming the circular deck. Most crewpersons preferred to serve their watches in the spin section’s duplicate bridge, connected to this one by electronic ganglia, but some jobs required direct observation here in the ship’s spearhead, and of course there were always one or two free-fall freaks. So Jameson dutifully clipped his jump line to the proper nylon cord in the spider web that crisscrossed the hemispherical chamber.
He soared upward to the catwalk, his trajectory perfectly parallel to the line. It was a point of pride with him never to get a corrective yank from the safety when crew were watching. He caught the rail and swung himself easily over.
He flipped a toggle. The buzzing stopped and his screen lit up. At the horseshoe console opposite his, Yeh Fei nodded formally at him and flipped his own switch. He’d been waiting. The big, shambling Chinese second officer looked like a gorilla hacked out of a block of wood with a dull chisel, but he had a fine sense of the niceties.
Sue Jarowski and little narrow-faced Chang-ho stared out at him from a split screen. He could see a tangle of communications equipment around them. “Commander,” Sue said, “there’s a laser message coming in.”
Beside her Jameson could see Chang-ho’s thick purple lips move, saying the same thing in Chinese to Yeh Fei. This would be a joint message, in clear, for both commands, then.
“Okay,” he said. “Put it on our screens.”
“Commander,” Sue said. “I think you’d better get the astronomers. They won’t want to wait for a replay. Something’s happening on Jupiter.”
Jameson could feel the hair on the nape of his neck prickle. “All right, he said. “I’ll buzz Dr. Ruiz.”
Chang-ho’s small face glared ferociously at him from the other half of the screen. “You must to notify Dr. Chu, you must to notify Dr. Chu!” he said stridently.
“
Dr. Ruiz arrived in a bathrobe. It was not an ideal garment for free fall. Maybury trailed behind him, still buttoning a man’s shirt that was too large for her. Dr. Chu arrived moments later. He’d managed to get himself dressed in shorts, a blue tunic with his astronomer’s rating on the collar, and a cotton cap with a Mao badge pinned to it. He was a frail, fussy man with two large chipmunk teeth peeping through a mossy mustache. When he saw Maybury, he frowned.
“Sit down, everyone,” Jameson said. “We’ll crank it back to the beginning for you.”
Data in computer script was flowing across the big display screen that Jameson and Yeh Fei had plugged in. Ruiz craned toward it with hawklike intensity until it stopped. Then he noticed that his robe had ridden up on his fleshless shanks and absent-mindedly pushed down at it. He sat down next to Dr. Chu, and Maybury handed him a lightpad that had been slaved via FM to the astronomy computer.
“They’re still transmitting,” Jameson said. “We’ll play it at twice real time till it catches up.” He pressed the button that would alert Sue Jarowski.
Random flashes of light appeared on the screen. That was when the ship’s laser ranging retroreflector first noticed that it was being hit by coherent light and locked in on the laser beam from the Moon transmitter. The light it bounced back served both as a ready-to-receive acknowledgment and as a guide to the sender for more accurate aim—though multiple redundancy of the digital pulses meant that the ship’s computers could reconstitute even a badly scattered message. At the speed of light, the back-and-forth exchange would have taken the better part of an hour—mercifully condensed now to a few seconds by a very conservative computer that wasn’t taking any chances of leaving out any information content.
Now the message itself began:
urgent urgent urgent
subject jovian meteorological phenomena
specific reference cloudtop disturbance equatorial region
source sagan reflector farside
optical images beginning 0019 53 07 gr stored for transmission
to follow
action action action
verification requested
specific verification direct optical observation
message follows
What followed was a lot of astronomical gobbledygook to the effect that the 500-inch reflector on the Moon had observed an inexplicable vortex forming in the upper Jovian atmosphere. It was different from the usual eddies and swirls caused by high-speed turbulence in Jupiter’s equatorial region. It was a whirlpool-like disturbance larger than Earth, and almost as large as the Great Red Spot. Coordinates with respect to other atmospheric features followed in lengthy detail.
Ruiz fidgeted, occasionally using his lightpad to do some figuring. He stared balefully at the screen, fingers drumming on the armrest of his chair. Finally he exploded.
“Why don’t they give us the pictures instead of wasting time with all this slush? It’s that jackass Kerry! ‘Verification requested!’ What does the fool expect us to see at almost two hundred million miles with the ship’s telescopes that
“It should only be a few more minutes, Dr. Ruiz,” Maybury said timidly.
Ruiz subsided a little. “Damned posturing idiot,” he grumbled. “I never should have approved his second tour of duty. I should have shipped him back to Earth when I had the chance.” He lifted a grizzled head. “I won’t tell him what I think of him, Commander. I don’t want to burn out your laser sender.”
Jameson grinned. “Mizz Maybury’s right, Doctor. Nothing to do but wait it out. Your pictures are probably somewhere past the asteroid belt by now, anyway. The fellows at Farside probably knocked off for a beer a half- hour ago.”
“Here it comes now,” Dr. Chu said. They all leaned forward to look at the screen. Down below, curious faces were looking up at the balcony.
Bit by bit the computer began to assemble the first picture. At more than five hundred lines to the inch, it was quite detailed. The color, corrected by a digital code nestled among the billions of pulses, was vivid. It began at screen left and unrolled until, seconds later, the screen was filled. The first frame was the only one they saw entire. After that, new frames were transmitted at the rate of two per second, peeling on from the left, so that there was an illusion of flickering motion.
It was overwhelming.
Jameson heard Maybury sigh, “O-o-oh!” Chu sucked in his breath sharply. Ruiz’s breath came in a ragged wheeze.
Jupiter filled the screen, a great swollen luminescent ball, striped in orange-reds and yellows. The image wasn’t holo—couldn’t be, even with high-density laser transmission—but somehow it didn’t matter. Looking at that fantastic orb, they could sense its tremendous bulk,
Jupiter had a mole, a malignant black dot at rest on the rushing ocher cloudtops. The shadow of one of its moons, probably Io. That black speck was probably a couple of thousand miles across.
And there, across the cloud decks, was the Great Red Spot, a bloody egg that was twice the width of Earth. An immense eddying froth of organic molecules that had held its oval shape for the four hundred years that mankind
