Prologue

A ll over the northern hemisphere of Earth, it was raining.

Forty minutes before the last episode of “Overmind” was scheduled to be sent throughout the solar system over open channels, Sir Randolph Mays appeared at London’s Broadcasting House, water streaming from his Burberry, coming out of the night to insist that the episode’s opening tease be re-recorded.

Hastily summoned from dinner at his club two streets away, a bedraggled and frantic program director confronted the interplanetary celebrity. “Sir Randolph, you can’t pos­sibly be serious. We’ve already loaded the finished chip for automatic transmission.”

Mays pulled a blue-bound folder from his capacious leather satchel and brandished it in his huge right hand. “Kindly direct your attention to section thirty-three, paragraph two of our contract,” he replied; he always talked as if underlining his key words. “Herein are set forth the penalties to be paid by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the event I am not granted absolute and total editorial control over the content of the series.”

“Well, yes, but you also agreed to deliver a finished chip on a timely basis, following a script previously approved by us.” The director didn’t have to check the contract; the clause was standard. He allowed his old-fashioned steel-rimmed bifocals to slide down his long nose, the better to peer sternly at Mays. “That you have already done. And the time is, ah, no longer timely.”

“You may countersue. However, if you weigh the pen­alties specified by contract—what my breach will cost me as opposed to what your breach will cost you—I think you will agree that a simple substitution of the opening two minutes of tonight’s program is the preferable solution.” Mays was a gaunt man with a wide-stretched mouth, whose enormous hands chopped the air as he spoke, slicing out each empha­sized word.

“I’ll need a moment to . . .”

“Here is the timed script for the new section. All the visuals to be replaced are on this chip.”

The director pushed his bifocals back up. “Well . . . let me see, then.”

Within five minutes Mays was ushered to an insert stu­dio, where he sat in front of a matte screen facing a dimin­utive viddiecam and read half a dozen lines of narration in his unmistakably inflected voice.

Five minutes after that he was ensconced in a plush ed­iting suite, peering over the shoulder of a hastily summoned video editor.

The editor was a pale, thin young man with glossy shoulder-length brown curls. After spending a few moments tapping keys with his delicate fingers he said, “All ready, sir. Old master on one, insert chip on two, unsynched read­ing on channel thirty, feeding to new master on three.”

“I should like to see if we can do this in real time. Live to chip, as it were.”

“All right, sir. You’ll cue me.”

“You may go ahead at any time. Begin on two.”

On the flatscreen monitor an image appeared, familiar but still majestic, of Jupiter’s clouds filling the screen, swirl­ing in an intricate curdle of yellow and orange and red and brown—and in the foreground, the tiny bright spark of a swift moon.

“Reading,” said Mays.

The editor tapped the keys again; May’s recorded voice, a sort of harsh half-whisper filled with suppressed urgency, filled the upholstered room.

Jupiter’s moon Amalthea. For more than a year, the most unusual object in our solar system—and the key to its central enigma.

The picture enlarged. Amalthea swiftly drew closer, re­vealing itself as an irregular lump of ice some scores of kilometers long, its major axis pointed toward nearby Ju­piter. Too small to feel the internal sag and stretch of tidal forces and the resultant heat of friction—much too small to hold an atmosphere—Amalthea was nevertheless wreathed in a thin fog which trailed away behind it, blown to tatters by an invisible sleet of hard radiation.

“Good picture,” the editor remarked.

Mays only grunted. This very image was the reason he had been insistent on revising the show opening; it was a classified Board of Space Control reconnaissance-satellite recording that Mays had acquired less than twenty-four hours earlier, by methods he did not care to discuss. The editor, with long experience of cutting together investigative news programs, understood Mays’s diffidence and said nothing more.

The ever-enlarging video image now showed that upon Amalthea’s surface, obscured by the clinging mist, hundreds of glittering eruptions were spewing matter into space. The voice-over continued: The ice geysers of Amalthea have no known natural explanation.

“Switch back to one,” said Mays.

Abruptly the screen picture cut to Amalthea as it had been known for the previous century—a dark red rubble-strewn chunk of rock 270 kilometers long, dusted with a few large patches of ice and snow. Since the first views returned by robot spacecraft expeditions in the 20th century, Amalthea has been thought to be an ordinary, inert, captured asteroid.

The scene dissolved, and now the image on the flatscreen was a view from deep within Jupiter’s clouds, as recorded by the previous year’s Kon-Tiki expedition. At center screen a giant floating creature, like one of Earth’s many-armed jellyfish but several orders of magnitude larger in dimen­sion, browsed quietly in cloudy pastures. Clearly visible on the side of its immense gas bag were peculiar markings, the checkerboard pattern of a meter-band radio array.

When the medusas that swim in the clouds of Jupiter were disturbed by the research vessel Kon-Tiki, the voice-over continued, they began what some have called a “celes­ tial chorus.”

“Cross to two,” said Mays.

The screen dissolved to another of Mays’s newly ac­quired illicit images, a false-color radio map of Jupiter’s clouds, seen from Amalthea’s orbit: concentric circles of bright red splotches indicating radio sources spread out over the paler graph lines like ripples on a pond, or the rings of a bull’s-eye.

Six Jupiter days they sang their radio song directly toward Amalthea, commencing when that moon rose above their horizon, pausing when it sank. On the seventh day they rested.

The surface of Amalthea again: seen close, a column of foam stood up high above the slick surface. The geyser’s orifice was veiled in tendrils of mist.

Surely it is no coincidence that these immense geysers suddenly began to spout everywhere on Amalthea at pre­ cisely the moment the medusas ceased to sing. So far, Amal­ thea has expelled more than one-third of its total mass. Every hour it shrinks faster.

“Insert my on-camera reading,” Mays ordered. In the minute or two they had been working together, Mays and the editor had already fallen smoothly into synchrony; the editor had tapped the keys almost before Mays had spoken.

The image of Sir Randolph himself appeared, inserted neatly into a lower corner of the screen—the huge white geyser seemed to loom behind him, vaguely menacing. Three years earlier, few people would have known the face that stared from the screen—and in real life stared back at itself over a technician’s shoulder. Once handsome, that face had grown pale and thin from half a century of disappoint­ment with human nature, yet it betrayed no cynicism, and behind the staring gray eyes, under the drooping gray brows, a spark of faith seemed to burn hotly in Mays’s brain.

Many more seeming unrelated events culminate on little Amalthea—events occurring in such far-flung locales as the hellish surface of Venus, the far side of Earth’s moon, the deserts of Mars—and not least, at a lavish estate in England’s Somerset countryside. These and other impossible coincidences will be the subject of tonight’s program, the conclu­ sion of our series.

Mays and his editor said the familiar words in chorus: “Music up. Roll titles,” and the editor chuckled at their iden­tical reflexes. Music swelled. Standard opening titles and credits flashed on screen, superimposed on scenes from ear­lier “Overmind” episodes.

Both men stood. The editor stretched to get the tension out of his arms. “You had it timed to within a tenth of a second, sir,” he said with satisfaction. “I’ll just get this down to Master Control. We’re on the air in seventeen minutes. Want to watch from the control room?”

“No, I’m afraid I have another appointment,” Mays said. “Thank you for your assistance.”

With that he strode out of the halls of Broadcasting House and back into the rainy night without another word to anyone—as if really, one did this sort of thing every day.