Nine

"I'd have called him Adam, not St. Peter," said Mike to Michele as we were waiting, "if you were going to get Biblical. He obviously doesn't have any clothes on, and couldn't care less. 'And they were naked, to wit, and were not ashamed.'"

"Well, he's St. Peter now, anyway," she answered. "He knows his name, and it'd only confuse things if we changed it."

"Don't get me wrong; it's as good a name as any."

"You know," I remarked, "it's a good thing we landed so close to him. With that silvery-gray color he is, he'd have been impossible to see if he'd been any farther off."

"Of course, it wasn't entirely an accident," said Mike. "We headed for the beep we heard, remember."

"I wonder why he made it if he wasn't talking," I said.

"You know what really gets me, though" said Michele, "is how smart he is. He caught on right away to the fact that our signals were a language that was completely different from his, and then in a couple of minutes, he was already using the words we taught him to tell us to wait for him."

"Well I wish he'd hurry up," said Mike.

"Not to mention his skill with his radio transmitter," I said. "Did you notice how he not only got the sounds, but imitated the intonation of our voices? When he was answering you, I'd have sworn it was you talking yourself."

"That'll be a problem when we get outside and can't see our faces inside the helmets," she said. "I hope he's typical. If all the rest of them learn this fast, we may be able to find out a lot in the short time we have here."

"I wonder how they tell each other apart?" said Mike. "You can't go by shape, obviously, because they don't have any. Maybe they come in different sizes."

We speculated pleasantly along these lines for a while. It was interesting that the blankness of Jupiter was nowhere near as depressing now that we knew that there was at least one living thing on--or rather in--it. We were all, as we talked, straining our eyes into the clear nothingness to see if we could spot St. Peter and his delegation returning, or maybe see something else.

Jonathan's voice broke in after a while. "Are you there? What about those bubbles? Are they anything?"

I began typing a full report, beginning with an assertion that we were all sane and hadn't been bewitched by the surroundings. In the middle, he returned, "We're getting it. Find out as much as you can about them as soon as that one comes back. If you need to adjust the time of your stay there, let us know, and we'll figure out how long it can be, and just when you'll have to leave, and all that . . . . And by the way, I think I have something that'll improve communications. Will you take a little time off from reporting, Paul, and listen to a series of numbers I'll give you? Copy them down and see what you make of them, and then send them back; we've got something funny down here, and I just want to check what happens to numbers. The others don't have to bother with this part; you can go on about whatever it is you're doing."

That was a little strange, but maybe some of the monitoring devices on earth were off a little. "Are you ready?" he said, and then spoke these numbers, very distinctly: "10, 1, 3, 11, 19, 15, 14, space, 19, 1, 25, 19, space, 13, 9, 11, 5, space, 11, 14, 5, 23, space, 10, 1, 14, 9, 3, 5, space, 20, 23, 15, space, 24, 5, 1, 18, 19, space, 1, 7, 15, stop. Now, can you type these back to me?"

"What's going on?" said Mike.

"Search me," I said. "I presume they know what they're doing." I typed the numbers back carefully. It was odd how they spaced themselves on the page in front of me; they didn't look like the kind of numbers any instrument would be sending back to earth. Mike and Michele were busy with housekeeping details, and Jonathan went on with instructions and questions to us. Finally, after he must have received that part of my report he said, "I got the numbers back. They're A-1. I'll sign off now. If you have anything to report when the bubbles get back, we'll be listening."

"'They're A-1'?" I thought. "Not okay, or even A-okay? There's something fishy going on. A message? Then it's just to me . . . . A-1. Probably he's saying A is 1; let's see what happens."

"What're you doing, Paul?" said Mike.

Thinking fast, I said, "Trying to figure out what instrument down there is getting faulty readings." I had a pad on my lap, with the alphabet, and was putting numbers on top of letters; but Mike was too busy looking out the window to see it. Not to take a chance in case Mike glanced over, I slipped the key--if it was a key--under the communicator on my lap in such a position that only I could see what was on it, and then began mentally substituting letters for the numbers. The first four letters were JACK, and I knew it was a message, probably dealing with Keith Jackson--who would want this cloak-and-dagger stuff.

It read, "JACKSON SAYS MIKE KNEW JANICE TWO YEARS AGO."

Lovely. In one sense, so what? There was no law against hiring someone you knew, if he even knew she was being hired; and if she knew he was working there and was looking for a job, why wouldn't she have signed up, whether he knew of it or not?

But then why wouldn't he have mentioned it? Or did he? I seemed to recall some remark of his--but I couldn't place it. Anyway, the message didn't say how well he knew her, and I'd have been hard-pressed to recall every person I'd met two years ago. And of course if he did know her more than just having met her, he might have kept it quiet because he knew there'd be a mess if he said anything.

On the other hand . . . . Did he start that business of not coming before or after she got the mass-reducer attached to her blouse? I tried to think back, but couldn't recall the sequence exactly--no, it was after, of course; we'd got the reports of our health and fitness, and that's what started it. Was it really Michele that made him not want to come, or was it because he'd failed in smuggling out a mass-reducer? Or was it because he'd succeeded?

And then there was that episode of eating, and his remark afterward about not committing suicide yet. Could they have made him come, but made sure that he wouldn't get back? Or maybe have given him orders that none of us were to get back, and he wouldn't do it? He might as well kill himself up here, if that was the case, because his life wouldn't last long after we returned, and the way he'd die then wouldn't be pleasant.

Maybe that was it. Maybe Janice had approached him, and he had to go along with her, but with one of the mass-reducers she wouldn't be able to copy because it was so small; and then he got me to come along with him to see her--probably told her I was there and he didn't dare to come alone . . . . I tried to think back to see whether he told me to come with him, or whether I suggested it, and I couldn't remember. The only thing I could remember was that I was the one who spotted the fact that a mass-reducer was missing. But he'd left it on the scale for me to spot--maybe. But then if they didn't have it, why would they want him to kill us all? That would be far more likely if they did have it.

Maybe he told them what to do, and then had to go through with coming with us, and getting killed himself along with us. Then they'd have the mass-reducers and we wouldn't, because we had the whole secret here--unless Keith had managed to steal it somehow, which I couldn't really believe--perhaps. But if that was the case, what was the sense of that elaborate rigmarole with the blouse, if Mike could have just told them how to make one?

You could only fit things together in a rational sequence if you left something out.

Evidently, earth was as puzzled as I was, or they never would have sent me a message that Mike might have been bright enough to intercept--or at least suspect that something was going on. They wanted me to find out what I could from him, obviously; why else tell me?

But how? I couldn't just casually drop Janice's name without making him suspicious--unless there was no reason for him to be suspicious. And if there was, he certainly wouldn't let on that there was.

Lovely.

"Man, you're really lost in space," said Mike. "What's the problem?"

"I give up," I said.

"Can't find where the trouble was?"

"I know where I thought it was," I answered, "but I think it must have been something down on earth."

"Well, let them worry about it."

"I was just coming to that conclusion."

"I think I see something out there," said Michele.

There was a disturbance in the water--that is, the hydrogen, but it was more natural to think of it as water--that was rapidly approaching. As they came closer, we could see that it was only two, not a whole army, which gave me such a feeling of relief that only then did I realize that I had been unconsciously apprehensive about St. Peter's going away to get something to blast this UFO he'd discovered out of existence.

"How do they manage to move so fast?" said Mike.

"They don't seem to be swimming like tadpoles," replied Michele. "Probably they use some kind of jet propulsion, like a squid."

"They sure do a good job of it," he mused.

"Look," I said as they got closer, "the other one's blue." You could still only barely make out St. Peter, but his companion, a deep cerulean, almost ultramarine, stood out against the faintly orange background.

"I wonder if it's his king," said Michele.

"Probably not," I said. "If they're smart--"

"And they are," said Mike.

"--they won't be bringing anyone important to look at us until they're sure we're here in peace."

"Maybe it's just his wife," said Mike.

"Or her husband," said Michele, looking at him.

"I vote for his wife," he said. "Did St. Peter have a wife?"

"I don't know. I suppose not. Why?"

"Trying to think of a name," he said. "Let's see, what's a famous woman? Cleopatra. Why not?"

"That shows the kind of channels your mind runs in," she said.

"What's wrong with it?" he said. "she's got to have a name, doesn't she?"

"If it's a she," I put in.

"It's got to be; look at her color. Can't you see him going to her and saying, 'Will you marry me, Cleo darling? You have such beautiful blue skin, it's got me right off my head--no, not my head, I haven't got one; it makes me lose my marbles.'"

"Cut it out!" said Michele.

"What's the matter?"

"You forget those things are people!"

"Well so what? They're funny-looking, people or not."

"Anyway, here they are," I said. "What's the blue one's name going to be?"

Michele started to speak, but didn't have anything really ready, and Mike broke in, "Cleopatra or nothing. She had her turn."

"All right, Cleopatra," I said.

They stopped a little way away from the ship, and began talking together, turning themselves into a garden full of shapes alternately. "Isn't that beautiful?" said Michele. "And to think it means something!"

"Probably means, 'Get ready for a shock,'" said Mike.

"Paul, Michele, Michael," said St. Peter, and then made a series of shapes, and the other one copied them.

"That's her name," said Michele. "He's introducing her." Into the microphone, she said, "St. Peter, Cleopatra."

Cleopatra thought the whole proceeding was immensely funny, especially her name; and St. Peter found the laughter contagious. After a while, though, Cleopatra made some clumsy attempts to say all the names, especially her own, punctuating everything with spirals, with St. Peter evidently giving her hints at pronunciation. If anything, she was rather quicker than he had been, and now we had two people imitating the sound of Michele's voice.

The pair then swam over to the ship, and began crawling all over it, pausing at each nook and cranny on its surface, and spending a long time out of sight, going over the first stage above us, and examining at great length the engines of the second stage below us. Finally, each appeared at a different window, and peered in with twenty or thirty eyes apiece. They just stayed there, glued to the windows without moving, until we began to realize what life in a fishbowl was like.

"Let's operate some of the controls," I said, "so they can see what they do."

So Mike went over to the mass-reducer console and pushed a few buttons, letting the ship sink a little, and then a few more, letting it rise to where it was. Michele operated a couple of the thrusters that were at a safe distance from the creatures, and the ship turned slowly, spewing a huge plume of fire into the ocean.

"They're really impressed," said Mike. "All their eyes are on the outside now." But they quickly looked back in to see what we would do next. We were, of course, naming all the things we touch, and they were repeating the words, indicating by "good" that they understood. Gradually, Michele had introduced the demonstrative pronouns and the verb "to be," and had showed them how to ask questions; and within an hour or so, we had quite a conversation going on.

Toward the end of the inspection, Cleopatra said, "What is that Paul beside?" and Michele, who did most of the talking and interpreting, corrected, "What is that thing beside Paul? It is a communicator." I pulled it over above my lap and said, "I'd better be getting a report out anyway," and so I typed, "Our Jovian has come back with a companion. They hear radio waves, so this will be brief, because we can't talk to both you and them at the same time. They're very smart, and are learning English fast."

The two Jovians looked puzzled, because, though they could hear the signals, the letters in the code I was sending were, of course, very different from the speech we had uttered. St. Peter gave a prolonged series of beeps back into the speaker, and asked (also making his triangle--apparently talking in two languages at once, as they seemed to do frequently) "What is that?"

Both of us learned a great many new ways of stating things before we were able to explain to him that it was another language; and we had even more trouble when we tried to tell them that it was not addressed to them at all, but was to a different "everything," which was Michele's substitute for a different world.

This oxymoron fascinated them. "Everything is not everything?" said St. Peter. "It is one everything and one everything?"

I am not going to attempt to reproduce the whole of this conversation or of most of our conversations at this early stage, with all their false starts and backtrackings. Both sides had to surmise what the background knowledge of the other was, and to build on it, with the tiny--though ever-growing--vocabulary we had to work with. For instance, here, Michele, as I recall, said something to the effect that what they thought of as "everything" was not all there actually was. She got across some notion of "place," as I remember, and then said there was a place "beside" all the places they knew, and pointed in the up direction.

It had of course never occurred to them that there was anything at all above the surface of their world, since (as we later discovered) even if you went up there, the atmosphere with its constant, more or less undifferentiated thin cloud cover that reflected the light from the center of the planet didn't show you stars or even a sun, which gives even the most primitive people on earth the notion that there might be other worlds.

The grammar of our conversation picked up apace as we threaded our way through these complexities, because the Jovians forgot not one thing that was told them; and they very rapidly began asking structural questions when irregular verbs began behaving differently from what their lightning intellects led them to expect.

But after three hours of this, St. Peter evidently felt that that was enough for now, and said, "Now, Paul, you come out beside the ship."

"No," replied Michele, "I will come out." I protested, and she said, "I can talk to them better. Besides, I want to get a good close look at them. I'm the biologist, after all."

By this time, we had decided to leave the microphone on all the time, since we felt it wouldn't be polite to seem to be whispering behind the Jovians' backs; and so they listened attentively while we entered on a rather lengthy discussion as to what to do.

There was, of course, nothing really that could override Michele's contention that as a biologist she was the logical person to examine and be examined; but Mike would have none of it for quite a while, until finally she withered him with a remark about his being the first to eat, and our not giving him another chance to commit suicide. But she did agree to having a rope attach her to the outer door of the airlock of the first stage, with me there, suited up in the open airlock, ready to pull her back at the slightest indication that one of them might want to cart off a specimen.

Both Michele and I then went up to the first stage and got into our cumbersome space suits, while Mike stayed below, explaining what was going to happen and why we wouldn't look the same when they saw us at the door. We closed the inner door, opened the outer door slightly, and let Jupiter replace the oxygen that was in the lock. This stage was very delicate, since the mixture of hydrogen and oxygen was explosive; so neither of us moved for about fifteen minutes after the door opened. Then Michele swam out, the rope about her waist, attached firmly to the makeshift hinge of the inner door (we were taking no chances), and looped around my wrist.

She dropped down to where St. Peter and Cleopatra had been patiently waiting for her.

"Here I am," came over my earphones, and she reached out a hand. Both St. Peter and Cleopatra made themselves into an arm with a hand, and imitated her; and the first handshakes in outer space took place without a hitch.

"Paul," she said, "I think we were right. As near as I can tell with these gloves on, the spheres they're made of are a thin shell of plastic with gas inside that gives--probably gaseous hydrogen. They're a little stiffer than our hands seem to be, but maybe that's because they're trying to imitate my gloves.

"The colors are very subtle up close; they seem to be an overlay of several semi-transparent colors, like a pearl. Their eyes are transparent, with little veins running through them. They look black at a distance, like the pupils of our eyes, because you can see a little inside them; there's a tiny bit of the animal's kind of reflecting from the back--you know, the way cats' eyes seem to glow in the dark.

St. Peter then said, "Now I will examine you," and suddenly swarmed all over her. My hand tensed on the rope and I caught my breath, but Michele seemed quite calm. She went on with her reporting of impressions, and I could hear a high-pitched series of beeps which indicated that Mike was typing what she said into the communicator.

It was quite clearly a friendly examination, even though it looked as if Michele had been attacked by a giant amoeba. She shifted from talking to me to explaining to St. Peter the parts of her body that he was asking about (his eyes were all over her, and you couldn't tell what he was mainly interested in unless he asked); and he began saying in reply to her explanation of the articulation of her arms and legs something about "other things that cannot talk," and she said "That can move and see?" He said Yes, and she said, "We call them animals." "You are much like our animals," he answered.

He began explaining that when they moved, the spheres they were made up of rolled on one another and allowed the liquid they were immersed in to circulate through the interstices between them, and Michele and he had more or less agreed that this was more or less the equivalent of our breathing, and that this meant that they would always be more or less in motion, when suddenly the rope went taut and snapped, nearly cutting my wrist in two.

Michele had slipped away from St. Peter and with a terrified scream, she plummeted to the hell at the center of the planet.