Everything went dark. For a moment Grant thought the lights had gone down again, but then he realized he was giddy with pain, awash in agony. The view outside was black; they were in the clouds. Hold on! he commanded himself. Just a few more minutes. Hold on!
He couldn’t hear it, but he knew he was screaming. The thrusters were breaking down, whole chunks of their jet tubes ripping apart. The superconducting coils exploded, dumping all their pent-up energy into a blast that shredded the rear half of the ship’s outermost hull. Grant felt as if he were being flayed alive, his skin and the flesh beneath it torn away by the claws of a giant, vicious beast.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The pain disappeared, yet its memory echoed brutally. Every muscle in Grant’s body was sore, stiff, aching horribly.
He floated into near oblivion. Eyes still closed, he saw tiny bright unblinking points of stars scattered across the darkness.
Something, someone was shaking him. Opening his eyes, he saw it was Karlstad, floating beside him. Egon was laughing hysterically, although Grant could not hear anything at all.
Karlstad gesticulated, pointing to one of the screens on the unoccupied console on Grant’s right. It showed the same view Grant had seen when his eyes were shut: the view that the ship’s sensors were seeing.
The stars.
The serene black infinity of space. Off to one side, the curve of a mottled red-orange moon. Io, Grant realized. And then the massive flank of mighty Jupiter slid into view, wildly tinted clouds hurtling by far below them.
“We made it!” Karlstad mouthed.
Grant closed his eyes and saw the same view that the screen showed, only clearer, in sharper detail. We’ve made it, he realized. We’re in orbit.
BOOK V
For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator…
RETRIBUTION
The thin whine of a medical monitor woke Grant from a deep, dreamless sleep.
His first thought was, I can hear!
Opening his eyes, he saw he was in the infirmary, his bed screened off by thin plastic partitions. He ached from head to foot, but the pain that had throbbed behind his eyes for so long was gone now. His head felt clear, not even dizzy.
The memories came tumbling back, all in a rush. Climbing out of the ocean in the battered, barely functioning
They had rushed the whole crew to the infirmary. Grant remembered fuzzily Dr. Wo wheeling along beside him as a medical team hurried him through the station corridor, the director’s mouth moving in what must have been a thousand questions, but Grant unable to hear a word.
How long have I been here? he wondered. Lane, Zeb —Krebs. How are they? Did they make it? Did they survive?
Gingerly he pushed himself up to a sitting position. The bed adjusted automatically, rising to support his back. The tone of the medical monitors changed subtly.
“I can hear,” Grant said aloud. There was a faint ringing echo to his words, as if he were speaking them from inside an echoing metal pipe. “I’m alive,” he marveled, “and I can hear.”
“Me, too.”
It was Karlstad’s voice, from the other side of the partition on his left.
“Egon!” Grant shouted. “We made it!”
“Yeah. You saved our butts, Grant.”
“Me?”
“Nobody else, kid. You got us out of there all by yourself.”
“But I only—”
The crack of hard heels on the floor tiles sounded like rifles firing. Several people were approaching, walking fast, impatiently.
The screen at the foot of Grant’s bed screeched back. Ellis Beech stood there, sullen anger clear on his dark face. A younger man stood slightly behind him, sallowfaced, thin pale blond hair. Like Beech, he wore a somber gray business suit.
But Grant stared at the other person standing with Beech: Tamiko Hideshi, dressed in a midnight-black silk floor-length robe with a high mandarin collar, her round face expressionless except for the smoldering resentment radiating from her almond eyes.
“I suppose you think you’re a hero,” said Beech.
Grant blinked at him, pulling his attention away from Tamiko. Then he remembered. The final two data capsules. The pair they had fired off
“No,” Grant replied, shaking his head. “I just did the job that needed to be done.”
“You betrayed us!” Hideshi snapped.
“I shared new knowledge with the rest of the human race. How can that be a betrayal?”
In those frenzied moments when he didn’t know if the ship would make it or plunge back into Jupiter in a fiery death ride, Grant had programmed the capsules to broadcast their data on the widest bandwidth possible. He had remembered Dr. Wo’s words:
That’s what Grant had done: beamed every bit of data they had collected to every available antenna on Earth.
“There are three shiploads of news media people on their way to this station,” Beech said, almost snarling his words. “Every scientist in the solar system wants to come here, to study your godless whales, to make a mockery of the truth faith, to—”
“What makes you think the Jovians are godless?” Grant interrupted.
He spoke quietly, but his words stopped Beech in midsentence.
“Don’t you think that God created them, just as He created us?” Grant asked.
Beech glowered at him, speechless.
“When we were down in that ocean, crippled and sinking, I prayed to God for help. One of those creatures lifted us on its back and carried us upward. It answered my prayer.”
“That’s blasphemy,” hissed the young man behind Beech, his voice hollow, his eyes staring at Grant.
“No,” Grant replied. “God worked through that giant Jovian creature. That’s all I’m trying to say.”
Beech pointed at Grant with a long, accusing finger. “You will say nothing about this to anyone. You will not
