Jupiter

Grant told himself. It’s a cross you’ll have to bear. He glanced at Karlstad and saw that Egon looked just as jumpy and frightened as he himself felt.

The airlock hatch sighed open a crack. It was his turn. Grant swung it wide enough to step into the blank, coffin-sized lock. He touched the control stud that shut the hatch and sealed it. Trying to stay calm, he prayed, “The Lord is my refuge and my strength …”

The airlock was lit only by a single fluorescent set into the ceiling and the telltale lights on the control panel. The oily liquid began to pour into the airtight chamber, chill as death. Grant gritted his teeth and pressed both palms against the cold metal walls.

“Our Father, which art in heaven …”

His feet floated off the airlock floor. His head bumped against its ceiling. Through the thick, slimy liquid he could see the glimmer of the control panel’s tiny lights, a faint row of green.

The liquid reached his armpits, his shoulders, his chin. He clamped his lips tight as the cold, clinging perfluorocarbon rose above his mouth. He was trapped in this metal coffin, freezing cold, drowning in the slick clinging alien liquid. His lungs were burning. He had to breathe. It’s all right! he raged at himself. Stop fighting it and let it happen.

Squeezing his eyes shut, Grant took a tentative breath. And gagged. His chest heaved, his entire body convulsed. Pain spasmed through him. I can’t breathe! he screamed silently.

Yet he was breathing.

Coughing, sputtering, his whole body racked with reflex spasms, Grant desperately tried to calm his mind. It begins with the mind. You know what’s happening to you; you understand the process. Relax! he raged at himself. Accept it. Take a deep breath and embrace whatever God has chosen for you to endure.

The spasms slowed, then stopped altogether. He could breathe without gagging, without coughing. He took a long, deliberate, testing breath. The perfluorocarbon still felt bitterly cold and now it was flooding his lungs, his entire body. But he could breathe it without choking. He still felt discomfort, pain actually, but he no longer felt fear.

“Are you going to stay in there all day?”

Grant hardly recognized Krebs’s voice; in his new immersed world her words sounded like the deep, booming thunder of God himself.

“I’m opening the inner hatch now,” he answered. His own voice sounded strangely low, slurred.

Grant floated through another long, narrow access tunnel, flicking its curved walls with his fingertips while he kicked his feet gently. I’m swimming, he realized. And Dr. Wo said we don’t need our legs when we’re buoyant. He was wrong.

Zheng He’s bridge seemed bigger than it had looked when Grant had watched the crew from the control center. O’Hara and Muzorawa were already there, floating easily.

“Welcome aboard,” said Lane, with a big smile. Even her voice sounded lower, sluggish, like a recording played back at a slow speed.

Grant tried to grin back at her, but he wasn’t sure he made much more than a nervous twitch of his lips.

“I believe you Christians have a ceremony of immersion,” said Muzorawa, his voice finally deep enough to match his powerful appearance.

“Baptism, yes,” said Grant.

“Some of your sects use immersion to symbolize a rebirth, do they not?”

“Born-again Christians,” Grant replied.

“I see!” said O’Hara, actually laughing in the frigid soup of the submersible’s environment. “We’ve been born again.”

Nodding, Muzorawa added, “Into a new world.”

For a moment Grant thought that they were teasing him, making fun of a kind of religion that neither of them believed in. But then he realized that they were at least accurate, if not totally serious. We have been born into a new world, he told himself. We’ve undergone a ritual of immersion in preparation for this mission.

The politicians want to stop us, he thought. The Zealots want to destroy us. But maybe we’re really doing God’s work here. Maybe we’re meant to explore Jupiter and seek out whatever’s living beneath those clouds.

The idea hit Grant with the force of a physical blow. Could this be God’s will? Part of His plan for us?

“All right, I’m here,” Karlstad announced, shattering Grant’s train of thought. “We’ve got a foursome; boot up the computer and let’s play bridge.”

O’Hara said, “We’ll not be playing bridge, Egon. We’ll be working on this bridge.”

“Too true,” Karlstad conceded.

Their bantering ended when Krebs joined them. She quickly had them at their posts, standing side by side along the bridge’s consoles, their feet anchored in the floor loops. Grant was assigned to the power and propulsion systems, just as he had been in the control center.

“Today we simulate powering up the ship’s systems, disconnecting from the station, and entering Jupiter’s cloud bank,” Krebs told them, as if they hadn’t already gone through the simulation plan themselves. “None of the ship’s systems will actually be functioning. This is a simulation only.”

Grant nodded his understanding. The station’s simulations computer would be running the show. No matter what kind of crazy emergencies Dr. Wo threw at them, it was all make-believe.

But that would change soon enough, he knew.

CONNECTED

Krebs drilled them mercilessly. All four crew members spent the whole day on the bridge, simulating the first stages of their flight into Jupiter’s ocean over and over again, until their moves became almost like reflex actions.

Standing at his console with O’Hara on one side of him and Muzorawa on the other, Grant felt that he could power up the ship’s generators and propulsion units and go through the procedures of separating from the station and insertion into the cloud bank with his eyes closed. In his sleep, even.

Still Krebs made them go through it again. It was the only part of the mission that could be simulated. No one knew what to expect once they dived through the clouds and entered the vast, turbulent ocean.

Dr. Wo changed the ship’s internal pressure time and again, increasing the pressure to its highest design value and then dropping it back again. Grant never thought that his ears could pop underwater, but they did, more than once.

“He’s trying to see if the pressure changes bother us,” Karlstad told Grant.

“They bother me,” Grant admitted. “Changing the pressure back and forth is damned uncomfortable.”

The two of them had been given a brief meal break by Krebs. Meals on Zheng He consisted of coasting over to the dispenser at the back of the bridge and plugging one of its plastic tubes into one of the intravenous ports in your neck. It made Grant shudder to do it, but it didn’t hurt at all, and it had the advantage of pumping a full meal’s worth of nutrition into your system in only a few minutes. No chewing, no digestive action; the food was already liquefied and ready to be dispersed through the body by the bloodstream.

“The Woeful One must be trying to see if the pressure changes had anything to do with Irene’s heart attack,” Karlstad said.

“I thought the amphetamines did it.”

“Under normal conditions the dose she took wouldn’t have killed her.”

“I thought it was a very high dose,” Grant said.

“Not that high … it wouldn’t have been fatal normally.”

“It would have disoriented her, wouldn’t it? Made her unfit for duty?”

Karlstad started to answer, hesitated, then asked, “Do you think she was trying to get out of—”

The dispenser’s signal bell chimed—clunked, really, in the high-pressure fluid they were breathing—and its light turned red.