Leviathans of Jupiter

Maxwell Yeager was still sitting up there as he had sat through all day yesterday, watching, listening, as the controllers monitored Faraday’s plunge into the sea.

Tiredly she plodded up the stairs toward Yeager. He looked as if he hadn’t moved a muscle in the past forty-eight hours. He was unshaven, pouchy-eyed, his tawny coveralls rumpled. Her nostrils twitched slightly as she neared him; obviously Yeager hadn’t bathed recently.

“There’s no sense staying here any longer. There’s nothing we can do for her until she comes back up out of the ocean.” She bit back the impulse to say “If she comes back.”

Yeager shook his head and sighed. “I know. I know. It’s just … I hate to leave her alone.”

“She’ll send up a data capsule tomorrow,” the launch director said, trying to sound cheerful. “You’ll see then that everything is going well.”

“If she pops the capsule on schedule,” Yeager replied morosely.

Vishnevskaya patted him on the shoulder. “Come with me, little father. I’ll buy you a drink. We both could use some vodka.”

Yeager slowly got to his feet.

“You’ve designed a good vehicle. She works beautifully. There’s nothing else for us to do until she sends that first data capsule to us, Dr. Yeager.”

Yeager admitted the truth of it with a rueful nod. “Well,” he said, “if you’re going to buy me a drink, at least you should call me Max.”

* * *

Deirdre watched as the nurse pressed the hypospray gun against the bared skin of her arm. She felt a slight tingling, nothing more.

“Dr. Mandrill wants to see you now,” the nurse said as Deirdre got up from the chair. She pointed toward the treatment room’s open door. “Take a left; he’s the third door on your right. His name is on the door.”

Deirdre nodded absently as she rolled her sleeve down and buttoned its cuff. Dr. Mandrill. Maybe he has good news.

One look at the doctor’s face showed that the news was not good. His dark eyes were rimmed with red, as if he’d been crying.

“Ms. Ambrose,” he said, once Deirdre had seated herself in front of his desk, “we seem to be fighting a losing battle.”

Trying to stay calm, Deirdre asked, “What do you mean?”

“The immunoglobulin therapy is holding your infection in check, but not making any progress in eliminating it.”

“Oh?”

“Ordinarily, after a week of treatments, the virus would be virtually eliminated from your system,” the doctor said, his fleshy dark face morose, his tone gloomy. “In your case, however, the virus shows no sign of decreasing. It is still in your nervous system, as strong as when you first came to me. Most puzzling. Most extremely puzzling.”

Fighting down the tide of fear edging up from the pit of her stomach, Deirdre asked, “What can we do?”

With a massive shrug of his heavy shoulders, Dr. Mandrill said, “Continue the immunization therapy. Without it your disease will grow and spread. Perhaps if we continue the therapy long enough the virus will succumb to it.”

“And if not?”

Another shrug. The doctor looked away from Deirdre as he said, “There is always the possibility that all we are doing is building up the virus’s immunity to the immunoglobulin injections. In that case, the disease will grow worse.”

“And there’s nothing else you can do?” Deirdre was surprised by how small, how childlike, how pathetic her voice sounded.

Forcing a toothy smile, Dr. Mandrill said, “I have put in a call to Massachusetts General Hospital, on Earth. Perhaps they can suggest something.”

* * *

Faraday reached the depth prescribed by its mission profile and adjusted its internal density to achieve neutral buoyancy.

Floating easily, the vessel’s sensors showed that the sea was teeming with life at this level. Faraday’s central computer reviewed the data flooding in from the ship’s sensors, checked them against earlier inputs from previous missions, and stored the new information in its capacious memory core.

Streams of organic matter flowed on turbulent currents that swept downward through the ammonia-laced water. Creatures of all sizes followed the currents, eating and being eaten. If a computer could feel excitement, Faraday’s central processor would have tingled with joy.

All the ship’s systems were performing within nominal limits. The main fusion drive had switched from internal propellant to intake mode, sucking in water from the surrounding ocean, boiling it plasma hot, and expelling the superheated steam through the propulsion jets.

Heterotrophic life, the computer’s biology program noted. No autotrophs at this depth, no creatures that manufacture foodstuffs for themselves, as green plants do on Earth. No, this ecosystem is based around the constant infall of organic particles from the clouds high above the ocean’s surface.

The computer’s primary assignment was to find one or more of the gigantic creatures defined as leviathans. These Jovian behemoths fed on the tiny organic particles sifting through the sea. They lived directly off the base of their food chain, like the largest animals of Earth, the great baleen whales.

Visual and even infrared sensors were pitifully limited in this deep, dark sea. Faraday depended on sensors that detected sound waves, like sonar, and pressure waves in the water made by the movements of living creatures. The most sophisticated transducers and display systems that the human mind could produce translated these waves into moving images that human eyes could see, human brains could interpret.

All the data streaming in from the sensors were being stored in Faraday’s memory on a picosecond-by-picosecond basis, to be transferred to the data capsules due to be sent back to the orbital research station, and finally to be uploaded once the vessel regained contact with the controllers aboard the station.

Faraday extended its sensors’ range to their limits, but there was no sign of the mammoth leviathans. Logic tree concluded that this meant that none of the creatures were at this depth. Mission protocol called for following the most abundant stream of organics, in the expectation that this would lead to one or more of the leviathans feeding.

Faraday activated its secondary propulsion system and began to follow the richest organic stream, diving deeper into the ocean, adjusting its buoyancy as it sank downward. Its external temperature sensors reported that the outer hull was rapidly becoming hotter, but internal monitors showed that the temperature rise was not threatening.

Not yet.

GALLEY

“I think they’re laughing at me,” Andy Corvus said disconsolately.

This late in the evening, the galley was nearly empty. The dinner hour was long past, and only a few of the neatly lined-up tables were occupied. The usual noise and clatter of the place had transformed into a scattering of quiet conversations as people finished their desserts or sipped synthetic coffee.