Jupiter's Reef (48 page)

“Go Alex,” said Tony. Alex flipped a switch on the dash and an odd hum resonated through the cabin. “Electric hull,” said Alex looking over at Mary. “In case the clicks want to wrestle.”

Mary was touching her temple and, over the cabin speakers. The clicker men could be heard but now their sound had changed. There was a sweeping wave-like rushing quality to it.

“Do you hear that?” asked Mary.

“I remember stories of marine biologists on Earth,” began Tony as they listened to the sound. “They played recordings of whales to see what the sounds meant, based on what the whales did.”

Everyone looked at Tony except Alex, who stared angrily out the cabin window at the dark tunnel ahead.

“We’re listening,” said Alex. “Did they learn anything.”

“Some, I guess.”

“I did that already,” said Johnny. “No result. Are you suggesting we should try it again?”

“Let me ask you something,” said Alex, looking at Tony

“Okay.”

“Why?” Alex snapped, as his fist clenched the drive stick. “Haven’t we done enough?”

“Why not?” asked Johnny.

“Because we won’t learn anything,” yelled Alex. “You can’t learn anything about a creature if you just walk up to it, poke it with a stick, then leave.”

“Yes you can,” said Tony, sounding contrite. “You can learn a lot.”

“And by doing that you contaminate future research.”

“One little ship?” laughed Johnny. “Upset a whole ecology? One this size? Are you serious?”

Alex looked over his shoulder at the Professor but Johnny remained silent inside his bubble. Alex waited a moment for a reply, then he looked at Mary and said: “Let’s just get the heck out of here, Mary. Our second whirlwind tour is over.”

Part 13

1
Johnny estimated they’d risen a few kilometers, in a nearly straight line, when the air shaft
Diver
was following began to curve. The shaft was perhaps a hundred meters wide and, unlike the other passageways they’d followed, this one neither widened nor narrowed.

Johnny said it reminded him of the entrance to the cave of spheres. Alex agreed but saw a major difference. “That one had ribs,” he said. “The walls are smooth here.”

Sciarra seemed to be losing his patience. He took Alex and the Professor to task for trying to explain what they were seeing.

“There’s no understanding this place,” he said angrily. “You haven’t been buried in it or nearly eaten alive.”

“I don’t think those worms could have been able to ...” began Alex, but Johnny interrupted him.

“We’re just making observations here, Tony,” said Professor Baltadonis. “Nothing we’re saying is engraved in stone.”

“He’s right,” admitted Alex. “I’ve thought the same thing, listening to our explanations.”

The kitten let out a tiny wail.

For a moment Alex thought the gravity had been turned on. But one glance at the instruments told him what had happened. Their speed had doubled.

“What the heck?” said Johnny.

Diver
had been sucked into a more powerful wind tunnel and, rather than narrowing or flattening as they expected, this tunnel was getting larger.

After a short tug-of-war with the drive stick Alex was able to regain control of the ship and had her nose pointed with the wind so they could see where they were going.

Here the tunnel walls was slick and black, not the leafy uneven surface that had, until now, been the norm. Nor was this the coated glassy stuff that had lined the cave of spheres. This tunnel seemed like the reef’s equivalent of a canyon shaped by wind.

Diver
tracked the contours of the gargantuan artery of wind perfectly as it wound and twisted its way through the reef. The ship’s floodlights offered no clue to why the wind continued to increase if the space that contained it was enlarging. “That makes no sense,” said Alex, as he watched the wind speed indicator on the dash climb incrementally.

They were a half hour into the tunnel when Johnny saw the reason. “I see it. On the radar. There’s several channels leading into this one. It’s large and getting bigger but it’s still too small to accommodate all the air that’s piped into it.”

Alex looked around the cabin at the glowing holographic representation of the reef. It was way too dim to see the details Johnny spoke of. Alex looked back at the strange speckled darkness outside the cabin windows. He knew it was the glint of reef debris carried in the wind and sparkling momentarily as it floated past the ship’s floods. Every so often he would catch a glimpse of something that was alive or had been alive. Most were shapeless and unrecognizable.

Alex wondered if the view from Johnny’s chair was better than his.
Diver
now bristled with EarthCorp sensory technology.

Mary heard Alex’s mind at work. It brought her back from nearly nodding off. She couldn’t hear the clicker men. They were either far away or had simply stopped their tormenting radio static. Her mind was free of distractions and she’d had a hot coffee to wake herself up.

She smiled as she savored Alex’s thoughts.

To Mary the experience was like tasting. It had always been that way. Everyone had their own flavor. She remembered long ago, when she was a little girl, a woman visited the Marys’ compound on Mars. She remembered thinking that the woman’s mind tasted bad; like a sourness behind her tongue. Years later she learned that the woman had murdered someone.

She decided that her special ability to sense people’s thoughts came from a part of her brain stem that was nearest her tongue. Or perhaps her powers were analyzed in the same part of her brain that was used for tasting.

Once she discussed tasting people with Alex. But all he had said was, “...and what a pretty tongue it is.”

The strange thing about Alex’s flavor was that it was sweet and familiar, like a weed that grows near one’s home. She decided that they must both taste alike. But he was coffee and she was chocolate. She told that to Alex, too, and he laughed and tousled her white hair and told her she was white chocolate. But he added that he liked chocolate in his coffee.

Nearly dozing off, Mary watched Alex staring out the forward windows. She studied his graying brow and high forehead. She noticed his hair needed trimming. Everyone was beginning to look uncivilized. Even Mary, always nearly perfect, was forgetting to brush her hair.

Alex rubbed the stubble on his face.

“Dingers, Mary,” he said aloud, “I’m forgetting to shave. It’s definitely time to leave.”

Mary had taken a brush from a side pocket in her chair. She began brushing her hair in slow sexy strokes, giving Alex a dark enigmatic stare.

Alex looked over at Mary and blushed when he saw her chin jutting in his direction. It meant she was reading his thoughts. He remembered her telling him that she did that when she was tasting people, as she called it. Now that pretty chin was pointing directly at him, something he wasn’t used to.

He pretended not to notice. He just smiled at Mary admiringly, as she sensuously brushed her hair.

2
After traveling without incident for a while, Alex tired of piloting and turned the task over to the computer. The channel that led steadily upward at a six degree angle had also widened considerably, and the wind had slowed so much that
Diver
’s engines were needed to maintain their speed.

Johnny said he had done a large scale evaluation of the reef system and had concluded that the reef was twice as deep as he had originally estimated. He said Alex and Mary’s original exploration of the reef had been in a relatively shallow part.

“Currently,” said Professor Baltadonis, “we’re between five or six klicks below the top of the reef. If my model is correct, this channel will become a wide cave. A pocket, one of the millions that hold up the reef.”

Tony was in his seat eating Peppiza and reviewing the visual models with his own computers. He held up his hand to attract Johnny’s attention. When the Professor took a breath he interrupted. “I keep wondering about the thunderheads that can be seen from space when we look at the Great Red Spot. If this reef stabilizes the air why isn’t the air above quieter?”

“That’s easy,” said Johnny. “Layers of atmosphere have their own weather.”

Alex swiveled his chair to face Tony. “If you think of the Great Red Spot as a big storm, you see the thunderheads from space and assume that’s part of the storm. But it’s bigger than that.” He sipped some coffee to wet his mouth and then continued. “This storm, unlike everything else in Jupiter’s atmosphere,
never
changes size or shape. Never.

“Look at those white ovals storms that wind around the planet. Some of them are bigger than Earth. They change all the time. They get bigger, smaller, merge with other ovals. But the Great Red Spot is solid. Stable. I watched it for years before I realized there was something weird going on there. Then it hit me that there was something down under those clouds; something that was more than just a storm.”

“So you’ve said,” said Tony. “But that helps explain it.”

“Explain what?” asked Alex.

“Since I learned about the reef I’ve wondered why nobody detected it before. I mean the spot is the most prominent planetary feature in the solar system. Why was it that only you suspected the reef was there?”

“People believe what they want to,” said Mary. “They saw a storm. That’s all they saw.”

“I told Stubbs the reef was there. A hundred times. Ask Stubbs why
he
didn’t suspect the reef was there either,” said Alex, folding his arms across his chest. “Isn’t he the expert on exobiology?”

“I’ve been wondering, Alex,” said Johnny, after a moment of silence. “Do you think you’re owed something for having found the reef?”

Alex didn’t answer.

3
The darkness in Alex’s heart was growing. Rubbing the stubble on his cheek, he stared at the shimmering dust outside the window and thought about Johnny’s question. He wanted to summon a good and righteous answer to it.

Certainly he had discovered the reef. He had taken great risks to prove its existence. He had even returned to the reef as guide and pilot. He felt he had served EarthCorp over and above the call of duty.

Alex looked over at Mary, who was sipping tea while her kitten, perched on her shoulder; watched with great interest Mary’s drink sloshing inside the squeezer.

Mary was reading Alex’s mind. Her eyes, like his, watched the sparkling dust drift by outside. The hologram that had surrounded both of them had been turned off to conserve energy.

Using the radar Johnny watched the walls of the tunnel. He was mapping its surface with high energy radar beams and had found, as he suspected, that the surface was raw carbonized reef material worn smooth by a steady warm wind that had blown for, perhaps, thousands of years.

Alex overheard Johnny making the entry in his log and turned an ear toward the Professor to listen.

“It appears the structure of the reef is far more complex than we originally thought,” said the Professor, his voice barely audible inside his bubble. “After studying the feature of the reef that we saw most often – the reef walls – we have seen both old and new material, most of which is shaped by the airflow surrounding it. In the case of the main channels, like the one we are currently following, we see smooth and apparently ancient wall material that seems dry, lifeless and barren. Such great rivers of air are analogous to the great rivers of Earth, like the Amazon or the Nile. But these are rivers of air and they serve a different function than rivers of water. Here, the reef is suspended in Jupiter’s permanent vortex of rising warm air. “

Alex watched the sparkling white flecks of light outside in the river of air Johnny was describing. Johnny sounded far away not just because his voice was muffled, but because Alex was only half listening. Listening to the Professor was hypnotic and Alex soon became lost in thoughts and memories. There was nothing to do but to follow the river of wind and see where it led. Meanwhile the computer, armed with Johnny’s radar data, tracked their course and watched the ghostly horizon.

Mary and Tony had dozed off; she with her kitten curled around her slender neck and Sciarra with two empty squeezers of greebrew. For the moment there was only Johnny’s voice to keep Alex focused at all.

4
Alex blinked twice, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him. The white clicker man was much taller than Alex remembered. It filled up the cabin and its flowing arms glided over Mary, the dash, and even the cat.

Stranger still, it was talking to him. He had no idea how it managed to talk. Its rubbery face was featureless as an egg.

It spoke to Alex, nevertheless. The voice hissed in Alex’s mind like sand in the wind while its velvety white arms danced in the air as if it was gesturing.

“Who are you?” asked Alex.

“I am,” said the Jovian.

“Do you know who I am?”

“The one who noticed,” said the clicker man as it floated nearer to Mary and her cat. “She spoke. She didn’t want to be here. Afraid. You brought her back. Why?”

Alex frowned. “It was her idea to come along,” he said.

“You have a blue world. Liquid seas. Hard world. You cannot live here. You travel in weightless shells. To hurt us? What is for you here?” The clicker man floated around Johnny, who was snoring in his plastic bubble. Then it moved toward Tony. The clicker man’s white arms touched Tony’s black hair and lingered there for a while. It seemed to be caressing him. Then it wheeled around and floated through the cabin roof.

Alex blinked again. He was staring at a wall, a softly glowing blue-green wall, crawling with living things. He was looking at the reef.

“Whenever you’d like to get up, Alex,” said Johnny. “The ship has stopped.”

“Stopped? Is there ... radar ...?” asked Alex, forcing away a yawn. “Are we ...?”

“Reef, everywhere I look,” replied the Professor.

Alex swore softly as he sat up in his chair. His back hurt.

Alex left his chair and floated in near weightlessness to the rear of the cabin, trying to separate his dream from reality and assess the situation. The ship was still okay. But fear still welled up inside him. He didn’t need it spelled out,
Diver
had reached a dead end.