“I never heard that,” said Grant.
“Krebs is too loyal to reveal it. She has taken the blame so that I could remain as director.”
“What happened?”
Wo waved a hand. “What does it matter? Now I sit here and wait for word from them.”
“They should be in the ocean by now,” Grant mused.
“Yes. And while we struggle to explore, the Confucians, the bureaucrats who have the positions of power back on Earth, are on their way here to destroy us. They fear what we are doing here. They despise us.”
“They can’t stop us. We’re doing what we came here to do.”
“I should be down there with them.”
Grant looked at the older man’s tired, dejected face. Lines of fatigue and worry and self-doubt were etched into his flesh.
“If it weren’t for you, sir,” he said, “they wouldn’t be out there exploring the ocean at all. None of us would be here.”
And he realized as he said it that he himself would probably be back on Earth, or at Farside, if it weren’t for Wo’s monomaniacal determination to find intelligent life in Jupiter’s vast ocean.
Yet, for the first time, Grant felt that he’d rather be here—even as a lowly grad student—than anywhere else. Wo’s passion has infected me, he realized.
LEVIATHAN
Weakened by its battle against the Darters, slowly starving in this barren region of the sea, Leviathan allowed the powerful currents surging out of the eternal storm to drive it farther from the towering, roaring wall of seething water and its menacing bolts of lightning.
Its wounded members flared with pain signals. Leviathan needed food, and plenty of it, to heal the flesh torn and shredded by the Darters’ teeth. Yet there was no food to be found.
At least there were no Darters in this empty part of the ocean. Leviathan doubted its members would have the strength to fight them. Food. Leviathan had to find food. Which meant it had to circle the immense storm, return to the side where the currents flowed into it and the food streamed thickly.
Riding the circling currents, drifting rather than propelling itself through the ocean, Leviathan wondered if there might be some food—any food—up higher. It was dangerous to rise too high into the cold abyss above, but Leviathan knew it would be death to remain at this depth, where no food at all was available.
Slowly, cautiously, Leviathan made its flotation members expand. The immense creature drifted higher, nearing exhaustion, nearing the moment when its members would instinctively disintegrate and begin their individual buddings, in the last desperate hope of survival by spawning offspring.
The old instincts would be of no avail now, Leviathan knew. The members could separate and reproduce themselves in the hope of uniting into renewed assemblies, but what good would that do where there was not enough food even for one? Even if a few individual members survived temporarily, how could they live without the unity of all the others? Apart they were helpless. What could flagella members do without a brain to guide them? How could a brain member exist without sensor members and digestive members and—
Leviathan halted its pointless musing. There
It would be cold up there, numbingly cold. Leviathan’s kind traced tales of foolish youngsters who rose too high in their haughty search to outdo their elders and never returned, disintegrated by the cold and their members devoured by Darters or the eerie creatures that haunted the abyss above.
But remaining at this level meant starvation. Leviathan needed enough food to allow it to circle around the great storm and return to the familiar region where the food rained down without fail.
Upward Leviathan rose, straining against the growing cold, heading toward the meager trickle of food that its sensor members had detected.
It was not food, Leviathan realized. Despite the numbing cold and the continuing pain signals from its wounded members, Leviathan’s eye parts showed that the echoes the sensors detected came not from a thin stream of food particles but from one single particle, much larger than any food it had ever known, yet puny compared to Leviathan or even to the Darters.
It was that alien thing that had been seen before. Far, far off in the distance, up so high that Leviathan dared not even try to approach it, a strange circular object was struggling through the abyss above, sending out eerie signals that made no sense whatsoever.
Is this real? Leviathan wondered. Or are we so close to disintegration that our brain is beginning to fail?
The alien continued to flash signals mindlessly into the vast ocean, totally oblivious to Leviathan drifting in the cold empty sea, far out of range of its sensing systems.
EMERGENCY
Grant left Dr. Wo’s office feeling strangely upset, conflicted, wondering where his true loyalties lay, what he was truly loyal to.
He threw himself on his bed and immediately fell into an exhausted, dreamless sleep. The next morning he took his shift at the mission control center and spent four hours looking at the silent consoles and dead wallscreen. Nacho Quintero relieved him, laughing about his latest prank: Last night he’d sprayed epoxy on the cafeteria chair next to his own.
“Kayla sat in it and couldn’t get out,” Quintero wheezed, laughing almost to the point of tears. “She hadda unzip her coveralls and wiggle out of ’em. You oughtta see the underwear she’s got!” He waved a big, meaty hand as if to fan himself.
As Nacho got up from his chair Grant said, “I’ll bet Kayla really loves you for that.”
Quintero’s laughter doubled, and tears actually did leak from his squeezed-shut eyes.
“You shoulda seen it! She grabbed one of Red’s frypans an’ chased me halfway down to the aquarium!”
Grant made an amused face, mumbled the right words, and left Quintero still shaking with laughter. Once outside the control center, he headed for the fluid dynamics lab. It’s time to get back to my thesis, he told himself.
He plopped down on one of the lab’s little wheeled chairs and called up the three-dimensional map he’d made of the Jovian ocean currents. But he could not concentrate on the work. Wo’s confession of guilt, his near- paranoid fears of the Zealots, the others—Zeb, Lane, and all—in the sub, probing the depths of the Jovian ocean.
And here I sit, worrying about my damnable thesis, he told himself.
Then another voice in his mind said, That’s not what’s bothering you.
I know, Grant admitted.
It was Sheena. Grant felt terrible that he had ruined Irene Pascal’s experiment and even worse that he had hurt the gorilla. It’s like betraying a child, he thought. Sheena
With a startled flare of recognition Grant realized that he had come to like Sheena as a friend, a two-year-old friend, perhaps, but the relationship between them had become important to him.
How can I rebuild that trust? How can I become her friend again?
He hauled himself to his feet. You can’t do it here, he said to himself. You’ve got to go down to her pen and face her.
His fists clenched at his sides, his insides fluttering, Grant strode along the main corridor toward the
