Leviathans of Jupiter

nostrils twitched as he caught a whiff of stale, musky body odor. Yeager’s sour scent didn’t seem to bother Linda Vishnevskaya, though: The petite, intense chief of mission control sat beside the beefy engineer with a contented smile on her heart-shaped face.

“We’re all here,” Archer said, by way of starting the meeting. “Good.”

“Is this all of us?” Vishnevskaya asked, looking surprised. “Shouldn’t Dr. Johansen be here?”

Clasping his hands on the tabletop, Archer replied, “He’ll join us later. At the moment he’s showing Mrs. Westfall through the fluid dynamics lab down in wheel three.”

The four of them looked puzzled.

With a slightly guilty smile, Archer said, “I want to get the latest information you have directly from you, without Mrs. Westfall in the way. Johansen is serving as a decoy, for the moment.”

Deirdre said, “She’ll see through that soon enough.”

“I know.” Archer sighed. “But I do want to hear what you’ve accomplished without all the politics that Mrs. Westfall and the IAA carry with them.”

“Okay,” Yeager said crisply. “Faraday popped a data capsule earlier today. Those shark-things attacked her, banged into her repeatedly.”

“Any damage?”

“Nothing that her internal repair systems couldn’t handle.”

Vishnevskaya added, “The sharks positioned themselves between the vessel and the stream of organics that we believe would have led us to a herd of leviathans.”

Archer stared at her. “You’re sure of that?”

“You can review the data transmissions and see for yourself,” Vishnevskaya replied.

“We’ve never seen that kind of behavior before.”

Yeager suggested, “Maybe it’s because Faraday’s so much bigger than any other probe you’ve sent into the ocean. Maybe the earlier probes were too small for them to worry about.”

Nodding, Archer murmured, “That’s something to consider.”

“Unfortunately,” Vishnevskaya said, “Faraday has not found any leviathans yet. The creatures are not in their usual feeding territory.”

“Scared off by the sharks, do you think?” Archer mused.

Yeager shrugged. “Ask your behavioral specialists. We’re just engineers.”

“We don’t have any behavioral specialists,” Archer confessed. “Until now neither the leviathans nor the sharks have shown enough different kinds of behavior to call for specialists.”

Andy Corvus gave a humphing little grunt and said, “Exopsychologists. A new field of study.”

His brows rising, Archer said, “You might be right, Dr. Corvus.”

“Andy,” he said automatically.

Archer replied, “Well, if you expect me to call you Andy, I suppose you’ll have to call me Grant.”

“Deal,” said Corvus. “Grant.”

“I wonder who we could get to work as an exopsychologist?”

Corvus lifted his arm and jabbed a forefinger down at the crown of Deirdre’s auburn hair. “Here she is.”

“Me?” Deirdre blurted.

Archer asked, “What do you mean, Andy?”

Leaning forward slightly, his lopsided face totally serious, Corvus said, “Deirdre’s made really meaningful contact with the dolphins. She’s a natural. She’s found out more about them in a couple of swims than I’ve been able to get in weeks and weeks. I think, if anybody would be able to make contact with the leviathans, Deirdre’s the one who can do it.”

For a long silent moment they all looked at Deirdre, who was too surprised to say anything. She remembered that Dr. Archer had asked her to study the images that the leviathans displayed on their flanks and she hadn’t even started looking at them yet. She saw the unspoken question in Archer’s eyes and had to look away from him, feeling guilty about not doing what he’d asked.

It’s too much, Deirdre said to herself, apologizing silently to the station director. There’s just been too much happening all at once. I’m sorry …

Finally Archer turned toward Corvus and asked, “Andy, do you truly believe that any human being can make meaningful mental contact with the leviathans?”

“To be completely honest,” Corvus said, “I don’t know. There’s a lot of unknowns involved in this. But if I can get a probe into one of them, I think Deirdre’s more likely to establish contact with them than anyone else.”

“Ms. Ambrose, that means that you’ll have to go down into the ocean when we send Faraday out with a crew,” Archer said, staring into Deirdre’s troubled eyes. “Are you willing to do that?”

“I…” Deirdre hesitated, glanced at Corvus, then looked back at Archer. “I don’t know. This is all … kind of a surprise to me.”

“To us all,” Archer said. “But if Andy is right, you hold the key to making contact with an intelligent alien species.”

FLUID DYNAMICS LABORATORY

Katherine Westfall felt certain that they were trying to hypnotize her. She sat in a comfortably padded chair, her entire field of vision filled by wall screens that displayed swirling, shifting patterns of soft colors. Dr. Johansen’s calm, flat, slightly nasal voice droned:

“These are the currents flowing through the Jovian ocean. As you can see, the organic particles produced in the clouds above drift down into the sea and ride along on the currents, which are generated by Jupiter’s very high rate of spin. Coriolis forces predominate in this mechanism, especially since gravitational effects from Jupiter’s moons are almost completely negligible. The ocean is heated from below, of course, by the gravitational energy released by the planet’s ongoing contraction.”

Katherine watched the drifting, eddying patterns, thinking how pleasant it would be to close her eyes and sink off to sleep.

Johansen continued, “The currents are quite regular, considering all the possibilities for anomalies that arise in turbulent flow. In fact, the only major aberrations we’ve observed in the patterns of the organics’ flow have occurred when a sizeable impactor hits the Jovian atmosphere, such as the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, almost exactly a century ago. A major cometary impact occurred just a few weeks ago, in the northern hemisphere, and this has disrupted some of the currents of the infalling organics.”

It’s like being in church when I was a kid, Katherine was thinking. You have to sit there and listen and not squirm and try to stay awake.

“In actuality,” Johansen’s voice droned on, “we use the organic particles as handy markers to map out the currents, and the disturbances in them. Unless disturbed by a major impact, they generally tend to drift downward until thermal currents rising from deep below…”

Go to sleep, Katherine said to herself. Just close your eyes and take a little nap. But then a knife-sharp voice in her mind rang out, That’s just what they want! They want to bore you to sleep! They’re doing this to you on purpose, to get you out of the way while they’re busy doing god knows what behind your back!

Snapping her cold gray eyes wide open, she said brusquely, “Thank you very much, Dr. Johnson.”

Johansen flinched with surprise. “Er, it’s Johansen, Mrs. Westfall. My name is Johansen.”

“Of course it is.” Westfall got up from the chair. The screens still swirled their softly colored displays. “Excuse my error.”

“We’re not finished with the presentation, Mrs. Westfall. The work we’re showing you here represents two generations of observations and detailed fluid mechanics calculations. It goes all the way back to—”

“I’m certain it’s very important,” Westfall said, putting on a placating smile. “But the time is rushing by and I have so much to do. I’m sure you understand.” She made a show of checking her wristwatch.

“Of course,” Johansen said, looking defeated. He glanced at his wrist, too. “You’re a very busy woman.”