“In the meantime,” Grant muttered, “if the Zealots find out about this, they’ll try to destroy the station.”
Wo’s enthusiasm drained away. He sighed. “One suicidal fanatic, that is all it would take.”
“But … suppose you do confirm that there are intelligent Jovians down in the ocean. What then?”
Wo leaned back in his chair and gazed at the metal mesh of the ceiling. “Then we beam the information back to Earth. To the headquarters of the International Astronautical Authority, to the scientific offices of the United Nations, to all the news networks, to every university. Simultaneously. We make our announcement so loud, so wide, that it cannot possibly be overlooked or suppressed.”
“It would certainly shock a lot of people,” Grant admitted.
Wo nodded slowly. “Yes. That discovery will shake the foundations of everything. They will be
“Maybe,” Grant said, wondering if that were true. What would the people of the world think if we found intelligent creatures here on Jupiter? Living intelligent aliens! How would the people of the world react to that?
“Or maybe,” he added, “the Zealots or some other gang of crazies will try to kill us all, out of fear and hatred.”
Wo snorted disdainfully. “What of it? Once the discovery is announced, no one can erase the information.”
“But they’ll kill us!”
“Yes, they might,” the director admitted easily. “That does not matter. It will be worth our lives to have made such a discovery.”
CONTROL CENTER
Grant told no one of his conversation with the director. He’s a fanatic, Grant realized. He’s just as crazy in his own way as the Zealots or any other radical extremist. I wonder if any of the others know how he really thinks.
Yet he spoke of it to no one. Not even Lane or Zeb or the others who must already know about it. Grant agreed with the director in one respect: The fewer people who know what’s really going on, the better.
Wo’s concept of a quarantine was very loose, Grant found. He and the other members of the mission team took their meals in a conference room and worked together, but they still slept in their own quarters and were able to mingle with the rest of the station’s personnel. It was more a matter of attitude, of a sense of responsibility, that kept them from talking about the mission with the “outsiders.”
Krebs reinforced the attitude in her own grim style. The first evening that Grant had dinner with the team, she showed up in the conference room, glaring at everyone.
“You will discuss our work with no one,” she said, out of a clear sky. “That is vital! Maximally vital! Each of you has signed a security agreement. Violate that agreement and you will suffer the full penalties of the law. Nothing less.”
Then she sat down to eat. No one sat within three chairs of her.
Grant forgot about his thesis work, his research on the Jovian ocean’s dynamics. If those things really are living creatures, if they’re intelligent… we’re sitting on top of the biggest discovery in history! Maybe what the cameras saw are really submarines, giant mobile underwater habitats. Maybe the Jovians have a technology equal to our own. Or better.
Then a voice in his mind warned, You’re sitting on top of the biggest powder keg in history. Watch your steps carefully. You could get yourself killed over this.
The control center, he found, was an unremarkable chamber crowded with six computer-topped desks and communications gear that looked to Grant as if it had been shoehorned into a compartment several sizes too small to accommodate it all. There was barely enough room to squeeze into the little wheeled desk chairs. Director Wo had a separate desk all to himself, though, smack in the middle of the room, with an aisle from the corridor door straight to it—the only open space in the compartment.
The wallscreens were connected to the simulations chamber down at the aquarium, so Grant got to see Muzorawa and O’Hara and the others every shift, at least onscreen. And Karlstad, too, looking tense and almost frightened as he stood at his underwater post, anchored to the deck by plastic loops set into the flooring.
Dr. Wo placed Grant at the console that monitored the submersible’s electrical power systems. Frankovich, at the life-support console alongside him, was assigned to teaching Grant what he had to know.
“So he sucked you into this, too,” Karlstad said through his face-mask radio when Grant first showed up in the control center and said hello to the crew in the tank.
“We’re just one tight little family,” Grant replied.
“Never think that,” Karlstad muttered. “We’re prisoners. Puppets on his strings. He wiggles his fingers and we do the dancing for him.”
Krebs splashed into the simulator tank and Karlstad went silent.
Grant turned to Frankovich, sitting at the console beside his. “You’d better start showing me what I’m supposed to do here,” Grant said, sliding awkwardly into the tight little chair.
“Trying to get on Wo’s good side?” Frankovich asked lightly. “That’s a dubious procedure. I’m not certain our revered leader has a good side.”
Evenings Grant spent with Sheena, no matter how tired he was from the long hours in the control center. He understood Wo’s interest in the gorilla and the dolphins now. How do we communicate with another species? How do we make ourselves understood to creatures that have nothing whatsoever in common with us?
Often Grant took his dinner down to the aquarium and ate with the gorilla. Karlstad twitted him about it, of course, but Grant wanted Sheena to accept the neural net headgear with as little commotion as possible. After several nights of feeling silly with the wires draped over his head, Grant brought an extra set and offered it to the gorilla.
Sheena seemed torn between curiosity and fear. At first she merely looked at the headgear, one set draped over Grant’s sandy hair, the other lying casually on the floor beside him.
Grant was sharing his fruit cup dessert with Sheena when she picked up the net from the floor with her syrup-sticky fingers. She held it in front of her face, studying it, the electrode-studded wires hanging in her massive hand like some arcane set of jewelry.
Tapping his own net, Grant smiled and said, “Funny hat, Sheena”
“Funny hat,” she echoed in her painful whisper.
“I brought it for you.”
The gorilla’s deep-brown eyes shifted from the dangling net to Grant’s face and then back again.
Grant said nothing.
Sheena slowly lifted the net higher and then clumsily plopped it on her head. It slid to the floor with a metallic clicking noise.
“Let me help you,” Grant said, reaching for the wires.
“No.” Sheena pushed Grant back, just a brush of her hand, but it was almost enough to bowl him over. He’d forgotten how strong the gorilla was. I’m taking her for granted, he thought. That’s a mistake.
Sheena fumbled with the net, using both hands this time, and draped it over her head once more. It was lopsided and came down over one eye, but it stayed put.
Grant wanted to laugh at the ludicrous sight, but he held himself to a broad grin. “Good girl, Sheena!” he approved.
“Funny hat,” said the gorilla.
“Funny hat,” Grant agreed, patting his own head.
In a week or so we can connect the net and start taking readings of her brain patterns, he thought. Let her get accustomed to it first. And I’ll get Pascal to show me how to work the console. No sense bringing strangers in here. It would just upset Sheena.
