Seven

We were now the weirdest-looking rocket ship ever conceived. The relatively tiny second and third stages were stuck into the middle of the first stage at right angles, so that the whole thing formed a T, but with the arms ten times as long as the upright. We turned the rocket so that the upright was now in the direction of motion, pushing that immense log in front of it, and this gave us the whole flattened side as our floor.

The first thing we did, of course, once we had any free time in the hydrogen tank, was to run and jump and yell like crazy things, after being cramped into that tiny cabin for so long. With our minuscule mass, jumping was rather dangerous, and we ricocheted off the sides of the tank rather like pool balls; but without actually hurting ourselves. There's nothing like stretching your legs every now and then on a little jaunt to Jupiter.

"Why didn't you think of this earlier?" said Michele. "We've only got a day or so before we actually get to Jupiter."

"We didn't get hit earlier," I answered.

"That's no excuse. You could have had us bumped by one of our satellites as we went by."

"Sure," I said. "And with my luck, it'd have been one of the ones with a nuclear warhead."

"We can always postpone the landing, if you enjoy the traveling so much," said Mike with a twinkle in his eye.

"With you at the controls," she retorted, "we may do just that; we'll wind up outside the Red Spot and be bounced around forever in convection currents and storms."

Mike winced, but he had asked for it. He said, "That could happen anyway, you know."

"Offhand, it looks a little hard to miss," I said, remembering what it had looked like an hour ago when we were back in the cabin. It was by now almost all you could see, we were so close to the planet, which was so many times bigger than earth.

But it really wasn't anywhere near that simple, since the Red Spot zipped around the planet, which rotated once in about ten hours, and we were not yet rotating with it. Everything was all programmed into the ship's and ground's computers, of course, including the compensations we thought necessary for the addition of the first stage to our nose; but you never were certain that there wasn't a derivative or an integral that you left out someplace.

But that sort of thing was not to be dwelt on. "I know one thing," said Michele. "I'm taking my break up here and having my first good nap in a week."

"Occasionally you do get something like a bright idea," said Mike.

"Oh, yes; women are very good when it comes to domestic matters," she said, which brought us into forbidden territory, and I said quickly, "You don't think we'll have to jettison this when we land, do you, Mike? It'd be nice to have all this room to move around in on the way back."

Mike seemed not to have noticed Michele's remark, because he said, "Not to mention all the specimens of Jovian life Michele is going to want to bring back. Sure, we can try keeping it on. It all depends on how turbulent it is down there, and how gently we can sink into the ocean."

"To bad we can't have a window up here," said Michele.

"Well," Mike said, "you find me the glass and I'll give you a pane."

"You do anyway," she said, "but it's where I can't see out of."

"Okay," I said. "Mike, let's leave Michi up here for her nap and get below to see if this thing is entering orbit right."

By the time we were seated for five minutes, Jonathan's voice came from earth giving us instructions, and we were busy for an hour or more, getting the ship into orbit over Jupiter.

"Looks okay to me," said Mike finally. "Now all we have to do is wait for confirmation from Jonathan. If we missed, this half-hour gap in the telephone line is going to be a nuisance."

"It'll be more than a nuisance this time," I answered, looking up from my console. "I just figured out that in forty-five minutes we'll be on the far side of Jupiter, and won't be able to hear anything from earth for another five hours."

"That's right," he said. "From how on it's five hours talk and five hours on our own. Oh, well; it could have been worse. If they didn't reactivate that tracking station in Australia, there would have been twelve hours when earth would have been in the wrong position to send anything; and it would have taken half of the storage of the computer here just to figure out when we'd be able to communicate and when we'd have to twiddle our thumbs."

"Aren't we supposed to be in a synchronous orbit?" I said.

"Almost. Why?"

"Well, don't look now, but the Red Spot isn't below us."

"Oh that. No problem. It catches up with us tomorrow morning, and we make the final burn just as we're over the leading edge."

I was working to free up the high-gain antenna we had, directing it at the storms below us. I turned it on, and a burst of static assaulted my ears. "Wow!" I said. "If those radio signals they heard from the Red Spot were people talking, there's a convention down below us!" It was just the storms, of course. "Anyway, the radio works."

"Good. We'll need it."

Shortly afterward, Jonathan's voice came over the laser communication telling us that we were right where we should be, and that we could relax during the period of blackout, because nothing would be happening.

It was about time for Michele to come off her break, and then Mike went up and got a whole eight hours, while I stayed with Michele down in the cabin catching up on data. Finally, she said, "I can keep things going; you go up and get in some sleep; we may need everybody alert six hours from now."

When the two of us got up, we could see the Red Spot on the horizon, advancing slowly upon us. "There she comes," said Mike, "just like it says in the instruction manual."

"Well, I hope its really the eye of a storm and is calm inside there, and isn't actually a whirlpool," said Michele.

"That'd be nice, wouldn't it?" said Mike. "We'd be sucked down to the center of the planet and be incinerated." Jupiter was so massive that it was just this side of being a star, with the center so hot that nothing could exist there; almost enough for hydrogen fusion.

"Well, we'll find out soon enough," I remarked. "another couple of hours, and in we go, whirlpool or not."

"What I can't understand," said Michele, "is why the thing's so constant. There's lots of other spots that appear and disappear, but this one's always there. And it's by far the biggest. You'd think it'd be the most unstable."

"That's really what we're here to find out," said Mike. "All this business of radio signals was something to keep Keith and his people happy. They have radio signals on the brain; they think if there's radio transmission, somebody's leaking intelligence documents."

At this point Jonathan broke in, giving us instructions on what we were to do. He had succeeded in getting a fix on our position within a few kilometers, and so he knew exactly how many seconds he had to anticipate what he said so we'd receive it at the right time. It was a great help; it kept us from having the added trouble of juggling with our clocks, especially since there was some relativistic slowing down of our time with respect to his because we'd been accelerating all this while.

We first flipped the ship over so that the tail of the second stage was facing the planet, and then, as the Red Spot came below us, we gave a brief burn to get us out of orbit, and began to float gently down, Mike with his eyes now glued to the mass-reducer console to keep our descent slow, Michele just as intent on the rocket console in case emergency power was needed, and I keeping up a steady flow of information to Jonathan, to back up what the instruments were saying directly to him--and trying to keep an eye on everything else at the same time.

"We'll get into it with no problem," said Mike. "Paul, have you got the high-gain antenna on in case there's one of those signals?"

"It's on, but there's nothing coming over."

"We're beginning to enter the atmosphere," said Michele, as the sky outside the window turned from black to a slight murkiness.

"Seems calm," said Mike, "but it's probably too early to tell."

"The sky's not blue here," I said, glancing out. "It's kind of a grayish orange."

"It figures," said Mike, still concentrating on his console. "There's not enough light from the sun to make any difference to speak of; all the light comes from the center of the planet. Besides, methane and ammonia have a different scattering coefficient from oxygen and nitrogen."

"Lovely air for breathing," said Michele. "Almost as nice as Los Angeles."

There was a faint "Beep!" from the high-gain antenna. "There's one of them," I said. "I think," I added. "It only lasted for a fraction of a second."

"A tone somewhere around a high A?" asked Mike.

"I guess so. I didn't have my pitch-pipe out."

"That'd be it. Any way of telling where it came from?"

"I suppose it was dead ahead. The antenna was pointed in that direction, but it didn't last long enough for me to get a fix on it."

"Give us--let's see--" he punched in figures "say a half second from Number Three, Michele. That'll keep us from drifting. Thank God there's no wind."

"Will it happen again?" I asked.

"No telling, but probably not. These signals were only sporadic. We're lucky we heard one at all."

"Here comes the ground," said Michele.

"Get ready, everyone," I said.

Mike gave us a little less mass, and we slowed down almost to no speed at all. There was no real surface; the atmosphere just gradually thickened into the hydrogen sea, and we were under before we fully realized it.

"The eagle has landed," said Mike. "I guess," he added.

"Are we completely under?" I asked.

"That depends on where 'over' is."

"Well, let's go down a little farther."

"The problem from here on is going to be how to keep from going down," said Mike. "Don't bother me for a few minutes; I have some fine tuning to do."

We sank and sank, slowly and ever more slowly; and the view out the window got clearer and clearer, until if you looked up you could see the beginning of the atmosphere as a kind of grey surface. It was almost as if we were upside down, and the atmosphere was the solid part of the planet, and we were in the real air. Everything had a kind of warmish glow to it, like a brilliant day at sunset, just before the sun actually sinks beneath the horizon; but the sun in this case was underneath us. The temperature surrounding us was not too great, and there didn't seem to be the slightest disturbance of the ocean we were in, except for the turbulence caused by our entrance into it.

Finally, we stopped, floating about half a kilometer under the surface.

"That should do for now," said Mike, letting go some of the strain he had been under. "Now. What's out there?"

Nothing.

Nothing at all. Everywhere you looked, the sea went on and on, until it disappeared into a generalized orange glow, a little more pronounced as we looked downward (we couldn't see straight down), and the merging into grayishness as we looked upward. But to the sides, nothing at all.

I don't know what we had been expecting; but it is one thing to be told that there probably aren't any features in the hydrogen sea, and another thing to experience it for yourself. There wasn't even a proper horizon, let alone trees or plants, or rocks; there was just nothing at all. It was even more desolate--far more desolate--than space, because space was full of stars, far more brilliant than we had seen them on earth; but still the familiar Orion and the friendly Pleiades. The distance we had traveled had not disrupted the way the constellations appeared; we only missed the moon and saw the sun as small.

But all there was here was light, undifferentiated light; but the light was darker than the black of outer space, because the only thing it lighted was our ship.

I know what my hell will be like; I've seen it. I am going, God forbid, to be all alone in the middle of the Red Spot on Jupiter, bathed in a glow that would caress any object, if only there were an object to caress. Being alone in the desert is nothing to the emptiness of this experience, because in the desert, there is sand and sky and sun and stars at night. But here, there was not even any day or night; all the light came from the hot center of the planet, and it was a steady, constant effulgence that hadn't changed for billions of years; and there was no shore and not even a bottom to this ocean; it just went down and down into what you knew was white-hot destruction--and even then it just kept going, and went up through the same thing. And when you reached the surface, there really wasn't even a surface; just the hint of a line and a lessening of the light.

"Well," said Mike at last.

And his comment bounced around the space craft, echoing, looking for a way out, feeling its way through the window, and vanishing into the void outside.

And then came Jonathan's voice, faintly through the layers of atmosphere, choked by the nothingness that engulfed us, "I presume you've made it; you'll let us know, won't you, and not get so interested in what you see that you leave us on pins and needles."

Interested in what we see! It was lucky that our communication was by keyboard, because I couldn't have brought myself to say anything, once I heard Mike's voice reverberating in the despair that surrounded us.

"We've got to snap out of this, you know," Michele said with an obvious effort. "We have to find out if the whole Red Spot is like this, or whether we just happened to land in an empty place."

"Frankly, I don't care," said Mike, and I added, "I don't think I can take much more than an hour or two of this."

"Well, we really should cruise around a little. I admit it looks pretty hopeless."

"It looks like the definition of hopelessness," I said.

"Look, there are some bubbles we made," said Mike. "At least it's something to see."

"Bubbles?" said Michele. "Where?"

"Out there," said Mike.

"I see them." And suddenly I sat up. "Moving down?"