“They couldn’t be from Jupiter?”
“Not likely. Jupiter is a thick atmosphere over an even thicker ocean. There are no continents down there, no land at all. Could a fish discover fire—or build a rocket?”
“What other possibilities are there? There wasn’t any life on Mars, or even Ganymede.”
“They weren’t from this system, Matt. I just saw some evidence to support that when I was inside. There is a—well, I can only guess that it’s a display board, but I don’t know how it works. It came to life when I entered the room. It seems to be a holographic three-dimensional projection of the nearby stars, with Sol at the center.
“About five light-years away, as nearly as I can estimate, there is a green object. It’s at a point just beyond the Centauri system, where I know there isn’t any star. Besides, the green dot lies on a thin blue line that runs inward from the edge of the projection. The blue line stops here—at Sol. Something tells me the blue is a charted course for a star ship, and that green dot is the ship.”
“Five light-years out. Maybe someone was here before the Can was constructed, and left.”
Dad smiled. “I think we would have noticed something. We’ve had probes around Jupiter for fifty years.”
“Then they’re not going away? They’re…coming?”
“That’s my guess. It fits the rest.”
“What rest?”
“This tunnel. Those metal rings we saw reminded me of our ion engines. I’ll bet they are superconducting magnets. The tunnel is a giant induction accelerator.”
I blinked. “Huh? for what?”
“The meteoroid swarms. Look at that thing,” he said, pointing off into the gloom at the huge rock “cork” we had found blocking the tunnel. “I have a hunch that will be the next swarm we see. Something is pumped into it through those pipes, then it’s broken up and accelerated down this tube. A giant shotgun.”
“Aimed at the poles of Jupiter,” I said.
“Yes…” I could see Dad was thinking. He looked at some of the oddly twisted metal around us and frowned. Whatever the metal was, it had iron in it; our magnetic boots held. “You know, Matt,” he said at last, “I’m not a believer in coincidence. The storms, the meteor swarms, suddenly you found life spiraling out of the atmosphere on electric field lines—it all happened at once.”
“I wonder what we would find if we opened that rock cork in the tunnel,” I said thoughtfully.
“What do you mean?”
“Could somebody be, well,
“Seed it for what?”
“I don’t know. To produce food? Maybe for a fish that can build star ships?” I grinned.
“That’s a big project. Jupiter has millions of times the life-supporting volume Earth does.”
“Size won’t stop men; I don’t see why it should stop anything else that can think. In fifty years we might be wrapping a sheet around Ganymede’s atmosphere to keep the oxygen in and make a better greenhouse out of it. Given time maybe we can do something with Jupiter, too—if somebody doesn’t beat us to the property first.”
Dad gingerly touched one of the metal things. “Perhaps…perhaps. We’re all going to be cooking up theories about this place, and no one will know the right answer until that green dot gets here.”
“You and I will be around to see it happen. Dad,” I said. “ISA can’t ship me Earthside now.”
“Not without a fight from me, and the Commander too, I expect.” He waved to the other men. “Better pack up!” he called. “We ought to bring the whole expedition down and set up a base at the edge of the crater. We want to do this carefully.”
He moved over to talk to the rest. I looked back at the beckoning circle at the end of the tunnel. The
Jupiter changes constantly. Her bands are an elaborate waltz of white streamers, crimson splotches, lacy brown filaments. The Red Spot seethes and churns. I was going to see a lot of the bands; I might spend my whole life out here.
Somebody has to be around when the owners of J-11 return. There’ll be a whole colony out here by then, waiting. Zak would stay, probably, despite his fatalism. Mom and Dad, yes—it was in their blood.
Jenny, too—and what that meant for me I couldn’t say. Not yet.
Yuri might even stay. Well, I’d handle that too.
That chilling knot of fear in me was gone now, burned away. I’d been carrying that fear since I was a kid. If it ever came back I could recognize it, overcome it. A lot of problems are like that—they wither away if you look at them straight on, unflinching. To grow, gamble. Self-knowledge isn’t always bad news, after all.
It felt good inside to know that. Ultimately, there isn’t anything
The Lab people knew that. They had come this immense distance across the ocean of space, risking everything, living in a cramped tin can—all for the sake of knowledge, to stick their noses into things, to see what makes the universe tick. It’s a human thing to do. Without it we’d bore ourselves to death.
I couldn’t predict the future, but I did know one thing: I wasn’t going to get bored.
“Matt!” my father called. “We’re loading up.”
I freed my magnetic anchors and went to help.
About the Author
Gregory Benford is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and was Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University. His research encompasses both theory and experiments in the fields of astrophysics and plasma physics. His fiction has won many awards, including the Nebula Award for his novel *Timescape*. Dr. Benford makes his home in Laguna Beach, California.
Copyright
An early version of this novel was serialized in
JUPITER PROJECT
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with
the author
PRINTING HISTORY
Thomas Nelson edition published 1975
Berkley edition / October 1980
All rights reserved
Copyright © 1975 by Gregory Benford.
Revised edition copyright © 1980 by Gregory Benford.
Cover illustration by Rick Sternbach.
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission.
For information address: Berkley Publishing Corporation,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
ISBN: 0-425-04569-2
A BERKLEY BOOK ® TM 757,375
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
