Eleven

My father had had a copy of that dictionary in the old days when things like that were in print and not on digital disks. The original print version, as I remember, occupied thirteen volumes; and so it is not surprising that the reading of it--which we couldn't even hear, it was going by so fast--took two hours.

Even so, the creatures outside didn't seem to be having any trouble, though they were a good deal more concentrated than they had been, and didn't spend much time conversing among themselves in their own language; only making a remark here and there when some interesting word appeared.

We had a number of housekeeping details, sent up by Jonathan on the laser, to see to; so we weren't reduced to twiddling our thumbs while the Jovians were soaking up our language and its history. I was typing back every detail of what I could remember, and informing the ground that we would be moving soon, and wondering whether they would be able to keep track of us. They seemed to think there would be no difficulty, since any information they sent, even by laser, would cover the whole of the Red Spot, and it was unlikely that the homes of these creatures were outside, where there was nothing but enormous storms.

"Please tell your friends," said St. Peter when the reading was over, "to accept our profoundest gratitude. We have been able to circumvent what might have proved an insuperable obstacle to our continued amicable relations. Don't you think?"

"It's a lot better than it might have been," I said. "The only problem now is that you know so much more than we do."

"We surmised that, you know," said Cleopatra. "But you have nothing to be ashamed of. After all, you are here, and we have not traveled there, wherever it is."

"You're very kind."

"No, really. What matters is to make the most of the ability one has, not the ability itself."

"Good God!" said Mike. "Already they're getting philosophical on us!"

"Relax," I said. "At least they're not going to rub it in."

"That remains to be seen."

"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mike," Michele was saying when St. Peter (who was experimenting with different intonations, in order to give himself a distinctive sound of voice, and had come up with a kind of hybrid of the three of us) said, "Now we would like to invite you to behold our domiciles. We will lead. Can you make your vessel follow?"

"We can try," I said. "Let us discuss it among ourselves for a minute." I turned to Mike and said, "What do you think?"

"It depends on how fast they go, I guess. I suppose we ought to use the pitch and yaw thrusters and go sideways, with the first stage pointed in their direction, or we might snap it off. But there's no way of telling how well we'll be able to control our speed through this stuff."

We spent a few minutes on details, and then Michele, who was now at the mike and would serve as a lookout said, "I think we're ready now," and suddenly they were off like bullets in the direction they had come from.

"Man!" said Mike, "look at them go! Well, that means Number Three with corrections from Number Two. You take care of the direction, will you, Paul, and I'll handle Number Three and see if I can regulate the speed."

"They seem to have stopped up ahead," said Michele.

"That's a help. We'll be able to keep them in sight," said Mike.

The ship shuddered slightly and began to move, a huge plume of blue fire spouting into the sea behind us. The first stage gave a number of creaking noises, but we didn't see any hydrogen ocean pouring in on top of us (we were ready to close the hatch if that happened). Mike looked back for a moment to see if we had begun to move, and said, "Well, if there wasn't any water on Jupiter before, there is now." The hydrogen and oxygen of our tanks, of course, created water as the product of the burning.

Gradually, we picked up speed. We had no mass to speak of, of course, but the liquid was fairly viscous, and we had to move this enormous object through it, so there was a good deal of resistance. "We don't want to do too much of this," said Mike, "at least if we want to keep that first stage."

"And we do," said Michele.

"I had a feeling you'd want a place to store specimens in," he said. "Maybe we could even smuggle one of them aboard."

"Mike! What're you saying!"

"Relax, it was just a joke."

"Well I for one don't think it's very funny. I have a great respect already for these people, and--"

"Sorry, Michele, but I just find it a little hard to have a 'great respect' for a bag of golf balls, even if they can memorize the dictionary and snow us with our own words."

"Well all I can say is I'm glad they don't have the same attitude toward us."

"They can have any attitude they want, as far as I'm concerned."

"Look," I said, glad of something to change the subject, "Those must be plants."

We were passing orange fronds that seemed to be hanging down from a kind of matting on the surface of the ocean. They looked a little like ferns, magnified a couple hundred times, with branches and something that must have corresponded to our leaves: little circles or disks with the center open, about the size of a quarter (it seemed, but sizes were hard to judge because we didn't have any reference to distinguish the relation between size and distance) with frayed edges, scattered about the rather flattish branches more or less at random, and all oriented one way or another toward the light at the bottom.

"They must get their nourishment from the atmosphere above," said Michele, "and that yellowish-orange must be the color of whatever corresponds to chlorophyll here. They obviously trap the light the way our plants do."

The plants were rather thinly spaced at first, but got more numerous as we went on, and larger, sometimes reaching halfway down to where we were. They also showed a rather great variety of shapes, some like iris leaves, stiff and swordlike, some delicate and hairy, and so on; but all that same orange.

"But it gives you a kind of upside-downy feeling," said Mike as we passed what was probably a forest on our left--a dense grove of plants of all sizes, some of which left tentacles like the moss growing on trees in Florida, hanging down until they disappeared into the apparently transparent murk below. The feeling wasn't exactly like a forest upside down, however, because the gravity in earth's trees gives you the feeling that everything is being pulled in the direction of the roots, and the trees and plants are thrusting up out of it, while here, the pull was toward what on earth would be the sky, and you had the feeling that the roots were holding the plants back, so to speak.

Not that the experience wasn't serene, after you got used to it. Actually, it was the orange color that it took us a while to adjust to, since orange for us is exciting, not restful like green; but gradually, being in these groves began to have more or less the effect on us that a day in the woods has on earth.

"Look!" said Michele. "That's got to be one of their animals!" and she pointed to what looked for all the world like a miniature version of the old Volkswagens swimming among the trees. It had a rather large eye or dark expanse on the front, which would correspond to the windshield (except that it wasn't rectangular, of course, but more oval), and a mouth below that could have been a radiator grille. But as it swam into closer view, we could see that it was longer, and had something like the hinges in a doll's legs in the middle of its body; and with that, and a few appendages, it swam, moving the back part more or less as our fish do.

We found later that Jovian animals are just as diverse-looking among themselves as our animals are; and the same, of course, went for the plants. Some of the animals were as large as our whales, also; but these kept themselves in the vastness of the central area of the Red Spot, and we never saw any. Most of the ones that swam around the woods and buildings of the place we visited were about the size of a German Shepherd dog downward to tiny things we couldn't see clearly through our helmets. Apparently, the more articulated their bodies were, the more intelligent as animals they were; but there was only the one species, Cleopatra told us, that actually could think, and that was the bubble people of whom St. Peter and Cleopatra were members.

"We find it fascinating," someone told me later--St. Peter, I think it was--"that creatures of an intelligence rather below that of our most intelligent animals can think. It shows rather graphically the difference between what you might call brain-power and thinking itself. You are not very efficient as information-processors; but you do quite remarkable things with the information you are able to hold in your minds. And the fact that you have been able to create machines that supply the lack of information-processing ability is a testament to what can happen by understanding relationships among pieces of information, rather than simply connecting the pieces."

"You think that's the difference, then."

"There is not the slightest question of it--in my mind, at least."

"Maybe that's why artificial intelligence never lived up to its promise of making a thinking machine."

"If it ever is to think, that is what it will have to do, I am sure," he said.

Michele found out later that we were right in our conjecture that all the living things (including, apparently, the people) were made of plastic; but of an extremely intricate series of polymers that had never been made on earth, and so far (from the one or two fragmentary samples we were able to bring back) not duplicable here. Cleopatra later showed us about them, and described differences in taste and aroma that they had; but since we couldn't eat them we couldn't verify anything about the taste (and so his terms simply indicated differences to us), and since we never left the ship except in our space suits, aromas were impossible for us to experience for ourselves also.

We never did find out whether there was any sound on Jupiter, or whether the Jovians heard anything in our meaning of the term. Undoubtedly sound did exist; but we couldn't hear it inside our insulated space suits (though we could hear radio signals without trouble), and no one of the Jovians ever mentioned anything in connection with "hearing" except our radio signals--and, of course, a sense which responds directly to radio signals would probably be more of an extension of sight than what we think of as hearing, since radio is just a very low-energy kind of light. Conceivably, since sound is most useful in warning of danger, then if they could not in fact be harmed against their wills, as St. Peter said, they had no real need for such a sense.

This inability to be harmed caused some discussion among us as we were traveling. Michele brought it up, and Mike answered flatly, "I don't believe it."

"Why not?" she said. "They certainly seemed surprised that we can be harmed accidentally, and there was no reason for them to be lying."

"It's too much like mysticism for me," he said. "They can be harmed if they want to be, but not if they don't want to be. If they can be harmed, they can be harmed. They're probably just tough."

"Maybe they're like the Indian fakirs," I said. "They can walk on live coals and lie on beds of nails, and all that."

"Fakers is right. I don't buy mind over matter. Actually, Michele," he said as Michele was about to interrupt indignantly, "I can believe that they think they can't be harmed against their wills, because they probably don't have that much that could actually do them any damage. But that kind of idea is dangerous if they run into new forces--like us, for instance. And maybe they just live a long time, and so they think they live forever; but if they use energy, they use it up, and eventually, they'll run into an energy crisis, and then where'll they be? Nope. They die, or the laws of physics are different on Jupiter--and that's something I have to see proved."

"You physicists and your physics!" she said. "You think everything is explainable in terms of attraction and repulsion. If you'd taken the trouble to study a little biology--"

"As far as I know, nothing in biology goes against the basic laws of nature," said Mike.

"That shows how far you know," she answered, "if you think the laws of nature are summed up in the laws of physics."

Well, things were getting back to normal. They went on, both of them obviously having a great time sparring with each other, just as they had before Michele said that she was coming with us. Their voices got higher and higher, and they were just at the point where, in the laboratory, one of them would stalk out only to come back a couple of hours later as if nothing had happened, when I said, "Mike, pay attention; they've just turned aside."

Both of them looked out as St. Peter and Cleopatra made about a forty-five degree deviation from their path; and soon we saw why. We were headed for a solid wall of plants.

"Oh, oh," said Mike, "we're going to hit! I can't steer this thing that fast!" He gave a burst to the yaw thruster in the direction we were going, but there was no hope of its reversing us, or even stopping us now, and the wall was approaching at an alarming speed."

"Brace yourselves, everybody!" he yelled. "Let's hope the first stage will cushion the impact!"

"More mass on the first stage!" I shouted to Michele. "We may drop below it, or maybe ram through!" She pushed several buttons and we dropped maybe a quarter of a kilometer, and then hit the wall.

But there was no crash. The wall wasn't solid after all, but actually consisted of innumerable strands of incredibly long orange grass; and they simply parted as the first stage entered head-on, and gradually slowed us down until we came to rest, still attached to the first stage, about a meter or so from the wall itself. The strands of grass hung like a beaded curtain on either side of the first stage above us.

"Well!" said Mike finally, when things had come to rest. "That wasn't as bad as it might have been. Everybody okay?" He looked over at Michele.

"Can we get out of here?" she asked.

He fired another brief retro burst. The ship shuddered, but didn't budge. "First stage's stuck," he said. "I'm afraid I'll rip us apart if I try anything; I don't know how strong those welds we made really are."

I was radioing to earth meanwhile, and as I typed, I said, "Let's not try anything drastic until earth figures out what to do. I've given them the situation, and we should be hearing from them in an hour or so."

"And meanwhile," said Michele, "what is this stuff we're trapped in?"

St. Peter and Cleopatra had by this time come back, and were waiting by the ship. Cleopatra came up to the window and Michele asked her about it, and she said, "You have become immersed in the unique vegetation which grows around the periphery of our world. At first, I thought you might have come from outside it, but St. Peter told me that you come from a completely different cosmos above us."

"Has anyone ever been through this to find out what's on the other side?" she asked.

"A few are said to have tried," he answered, "but no one has ever returned. Most never make the attempt, because it is prohibited to do so; only those we call (and here he made a series of shapes), which would roughly translate into 'unfortunate people,' have ever hazarded it; and the fact that those who do never return tends to dampen curiosity."

"Can't you just go underneath it?"

"No. No one has ever plumbed a depth beyond which there is no wall; it extends far below the level at which we overtook you in your fall, which itself is about twice as deep as we feel comfortable in going."

We looked down. The grass did seem to vanish far below us in the apparently transparent murk, without giving any sign of having a bottom.

"Say!" said Michele. "Where are we, Mike?"

"What do you mean? On Jupiter."

"I mean, where on Jupiter, you clown! I have an idea. Can't you figure out our position with that thing?"

Mike punched some figures into his computer, based on the position we had been in and our speed and direction. "Hey!" he said as the chart came up on the screen. "Look at that! According to this, we're just outside the Red Spot!"