Jupiter

make, they would have stopped all our funding and shut down this station.”

“They wouldn’t do that! They couldn’t!”

“You think not?” Wo almost sneered at him. “At this moment there is a group of IAA officials in a fusion torch ship on a high-acceleration burn, racing to get here.”

“IAA people?”

“An ‘inspection and evaluation team’,” Wo said, his voice burning with acid. “How many of them are New Morality members? How many belong to the Holy Disciples or to the Sword of Islam? One of them is a Jesuit, that much I know. An astronomer, no less.”

“And they’re coming here?”

“To review our work. That’s why I believe that you have not made an effective spy for them; they would close us down outright if they knew what we are doing.”

Grant shook his head. “You think they’re coming here to close down the station?”

“Why else? ‘Inspection and evaluation’ indeed!”

“Not necessarily,” Grant said. “The IAA isn’t controlled by the New Morality.”

“Pah!”

“All right, I admit there are ultraconservatives in the New Morality and other groups who want most scientific research stopped. But they’re only a small minority of the movement. A noisy, vocal minority, but still only one small segment of the whole. The people in power, the ones in high office, they understand the importance of exploring the universe.”

“Such as the ones who asked you to spy on us?”

Grant had no reply for that. He realized that Dr. Wo was probably right. The IAA depended on national governments for its funding, and most of those governments were thoroughly under the influence of movements such as the New Morality.

Wo broke the growing silence. “Why is nanotechnology forbidden?”

“Nanotechnology?” Grant asked, wondering what this had to do with the IAA or the New Morality. “They use it on the Moon.”

“Only under very strict controls. The luniks had to fight an outright war against the United Nations to keep their right to use nanomachines. And people who have nanomachines in their bodies aren’t allowed on Earth at all.”

“Nanomachines can be turned into weapons,” Grant pointed out. “That’s why they’re banned.”

Wo snorted disdainfully. “Pah! Why do you think you are using computer systems that are at least ten years old? Why don’t you have an artificial intelligence system to assist you in your work?”

Confused by another sudden shift in subject, Grant replied, “No one’s been able to make an AI system that performs reliably.”

“Not so,” the director snapped. “Twenty years ago research on AI systems was stopped. Why? Because the researchers had produced a prototype that did work. Quite reliably.”

“How could they stop all research—”

“Because they feared where AI research was heading. They feared the creation of machines with the intelligence of humans. With higher intelligence, inevitably.”

Grant just sat there, trying to digest this flood of accusations.

“If they knew where our exploration of Jupiter is heading, if they understood what we might uncover …” Wo left the thought unfinished.

“They’d be afraid that we might find intelligent life in the ocean,” Grant heard himself whisper.

“Exactly. That is why I keep our security so tight. That is why I refuse to bring in more people. One of them might turn out to be a Zealot fanatic.”

Grant tried to sort it all out in his mind. “But there’s no evidence for intelligent life down there. We don’t even know if there’s any form of life at all in the ocean.”

“Don’t we?” Wo jabbed a stubby finger at the keyboard built into his desktop. One of the walls dissolved into a murky, grainy featureless scene.

“This video was salvaged from the first mission into the ocean,” Wo explained, his rasping voice labored, tired.

Lightning flickered in the distance. Lightning? Grant asked himself. Underwater?

As he stared at the wallscreen, Grant realized that what he was seeing was not lightning. The flashes of light were red, yellow, deep orange.

Slowly, before his fascinated eyes, the lights took shape. They were things in the water, a dozen or more of them, coasting through the ocean together, lights flickering back and forth.

Living creatures! Grant realized. And they’re signaling to one another!

Grant watched, fascinated. The lights winked back and forth, back and forth. There was a pattern to them, it seemed. First one, then all the others lit up in the same colors. He couldn’t tell if the lights formed any particular shape or form; the creatures were too far away for him to make out anything except a bright momentary glow against the vast darkness of the sea. Maddening. If only he could get closer, get better detail—

The scene winked off. The screen became a metal bulkhead once again. Grant felt like a child who’d just had a Christmas present yanked out of his hands.

He turned back to Dr. Wo. “They’re alive,” Grant whispered.

“I believe so. But the evidence is hardly conclusive.”

“And they were signaling back and forth!”

“Perhaps.”

“Is that the closest you got to them?”

“We were slightly less than fifteen hundred kilometers’ slant range when the accident ended our mission. They were considerably deeper in the ocean than we were.”

“Fifteen hundred …” Grant blinked with disbelief. “Then the creatures must be huge, to see them at that distance.”

“On the order of five to fifteen kilometers in diameter,” Wo said flatly.

“That’s enormousl”

Wo nodded slowly. “That is the dimension that our computer analysis shows. It may be wrong, of course.”

“But … how … why …?” Grant’s thoughts were swirling.

“Organic particles form in the clouds,” Wo said. “That we have seen; we have even sampled them. They rain downward, into the ocean. Like manna from heaven, food drops down from the clouds into the ocean.”

“But they must be destroyed by the chemistry in the ocean,” Grant mused.

“Or they could be eaten by those creatures you just saw.”

“Living Jovians.”

Wo counted off on his stubby fingers. “There is an energy flow from the planet’s core. There is an ocean of liquid water—”

“Heavily laced with ammonia and God knows what else. An acid ocean, really.”

Ignoring that, Wo continued, “There is a constant food source raining down into that ocean. Energy, water, food: Wherever those factors have been found, life exists. Those are living Jovians swimming in that ocean.”

“But intelligent…?”

“Why not? They appear to signal to each other. In that immense ocean, over billions of years of time, why should not intelligence evolve? On Earth, dolphins and whales show considerable intelligence. Why not the same on Jupiter? Or even better?”

“Better?”

“Why not?” Wo repeated.

Then Grant remembered, “But if the IAA team is really coming here to shut down the station—”

“That is why I am pushing to get the deep mission off as soon as possible.”

“When are they scheduled to arrive here?”

Wo did not need to look at a calendar. “In thirty-nine days. The deep mission will be in the ocean by then,” he gloated. “There will be no way for them to call it back.” The director broke into a rare smile.