Blake and Forster lay side by side in the Europan sub, Blake in the command pilot’s couch, skimming across the lacy ice. Hawkins and McNeil guided the sub by the tips of its wings. The pearly mist was so thick that light from their helmet lamps bounced back into their faces from a meter or two away.
Without a thread to guide them, they could have floundered for hours; they had to feel their way to the entrance shaft along the communications cables that hung like garlands in the mist. They found the opening of the shaft, a wider artificial blowhole in the featureless fog and ice, and the Old Mole tethered nearby, stationed there in case the shaft needed re-opening against the tendency of the boiling water down below to freeze over again.
“We’re ready to go in,” Blake said over the commlink.
“All right, then,” came back Walsh’s voice.
The launch was pure simplicity. Blake curled the submarine’s flexible wings around its body until the craft was smaller than the diameter of the shaft in the ice. Hawkins and McNeil positioned it above the opening and gently shoved it into the pressureless blowhole with the force of their suit-maneuvering systems.
The sub dived blind into the impenetrable fog. A hundred meters down, the surface of the water came up suddenly, a vigorously boiling surface over which a steaming skin of ice constantly froze and broke apart and reformed.
Triggered by radar to ignite upon impact, the submarine’s rockets fired a brief burst to drive the buoyant craft below the surface that otherwise would have rejected it. The rockets continued firing, blowing out a stream of super-hot bubbles, until the free-swimming craft’s wings could unfurl and grab water. With strong strokes, the submarine swam swiftly down into the deep. Then it turned on its back and sought the undersurface of the ice. The water was murky with life—swarming, concentrated life.
“Hungry little devils.” Forster laughed, the happiest sound he’d made in months. “They’re exactly like krill. Swarms and swarms of them.” His bright eye had fixed upon one among the myriad swarming creatures fumbling against the polyglas, and he followed it closely as it wriggled helplessly for a moment before orienting itself and darting away.
“Are they feeding?” Walsh’s voice came to them over the sonarlink.
“Yes, most of them,” Blake answered. “They’re feeding on the underside of the ice, on mats of purple stuff. An Earth biologist would call it algae . . . maybe we should call it exoalgae. And miniature medusas, clouds of them, are feeding on them.”
“We’ll have to let the exo-biologists sort it all out,” Forster said. “I’ll get a few samples, Blake. But don’t let me take too long about it.”
“If you didn’t know we were inside one of Jupiter’s moons,” Blake said into the comm, “you’d think we were in the Arctic Ocean. And that it’s springtime.”
Forster and Blake were lying prone in the Europan submarine, nominally a two-person craft with just enough room for a third occupant to squeeze into the passage behind them. The Manta, they had nicknamed it, on the principle that if an old ice mole deserved a name, so did an old submarine—doing what the Old Mole couldn’t do, for the ice miner had served its main purpose as soon as it had cut its way into Amalthea’s interior.
The Manta was swimming upside down with respect to Amalthea’s center, its ventral surfaces skimming along only a meter from the rind of ice. The teeming biota of Amalthea’s “arctic” seas—or at least a good and lively sample of it—was spread before them, brightly illuminated by the sub’s spotlights, separated from them only by the thin clear polyglas of the sub’s bubble. The white light was quickly diffused in water so thick with living particles—all of them eating or being eaten—that it resembled a thin broth. The darting, teeming schools of transparent krill were a shifting veil of rainbows in the beams of the floodlights.
The men in the sub used magnifying optics to examine the creatures on something closer to their own scale. The medusas were like many of the myriad species of jellyfish that swarm through all the seas of Earth, pulsing with strips of colored light. The creatures Forster called “krill” were shrimp-like, multi-legged little beings with flat tails and hard transparent shells which left their pulsing circulatory systems visible. Whenever the submarine’s lights were directed toward them they swam frantically away—behavior that was easy enough to understand, given that a boiling “sun” was visible as a hot point of light many kilometers down in the murky depths and that the foodstuff of the krill lay in the opposite direction.
“What was that?” Blake said suddenly.
“Ventris, we have new visitors,” said Forster. “Something bigger than anything we’ve seen yet.”
“Looked like a squid,” said Blake. “There’s another . . . a bunch of them. I’m rolling the Manta.”
The submarine flapped its wings and made a lazy half roll in the soupy water. The dark waters came alive with flickering, glowing life. Uncountable multi-tentacled, torpedo-shaped creatures danced in synchrony beneath them, none of them bigger than a human hand, but packed together in an immense school that darted and turned like a single organism. Each translucent, silvery animal was bright with turquoise beads of bioluminescence; together they formed a blue banner in the dark.
“They’re diving again,” Blake said.
“We’ll follow them, Ventris,” Forster said into the sonarlink. “I’ll worry about specimens later.”
Blake pushed the Manta’s diving controls forward and the sub put its transparent nose down. Flexible wings rippled, driving the craft deeper into darkness.
The Manta was a well-used sub, not as old as the Old Mole but based on vintage technology. Its passengers rested in an Earth-normal pressure regime of mixed oxygen and nitrogen. The sub carried liquid nitrogen in pressurized tanks and got its oxygen from the water, but while its oxygen-exchange mechanisms—its “gills”—were efficient enough at constant depths, the craft needed time to adjust internal working pressures to constantly changing external pressures.
And the pressures on little Amalthea, while they didn’t change as rapidly as they did on big Europa (or on bigger Earth), nevertheless mounted swiftly toward impressive numbers. At the surface, a person in a spacesuit weighed a gram or two, and the pressure was zero, a near-perfect vacuum. At the moon’s core the same person would weigh nothing at all—but the pressure of the overlying column of water would have increased to several hundred thousand kilograms per square centimeter.
Blake, frustrated, couldn’t keep up with the rapidly descending school of exo-squid. The Manta’s alarm hooter went off before he’d descended four kilometers: Do not attempt to exceed the present depth until the gill manifold has been recharged, the sub’s pleasant but firm robot voice instructed him.
Blake let the Manta level itself. They could do nothing but wait while the artificial enzyme mixture in the sub’s gill manifold was enriched. Outside the craft swam a menagerie of weird creatures, resembling several new species of luridly colored medusas and jellyfish and glassy ctenophores. A fish with a mouth bigger than its stomach drifted past, peering hungrily in at them with eyes as big as golf balls.
“They’re coming back,” Forster said.
“Sir?” Blake was paying attention to the instruments, not to the view through the bubble.
“Unfortunately we have a poor image up here,” said Walsh on the sonarlink. “Can you tell us what you are observing?”
“The squid. It’s almost as if they’re waiting for us,” Forster said. “The way they dance, you’d think they were laughing at us.”
“That’s your mood talking, sir,” said Blake, smiling.
“Perhaps we’re thinking alike.”
Blake gave the professor a strange look. “You and them?”
Forster didn’t elaborate.
Blake watched the rippling sheet of blue light half a kilometer below them, undulating as if in a lazy current, a sheet made of a thousand little vector-arrows, a thousand tentacled projectiles.
You may proceed to depth, said the sub’s voice, and a tone sounded, indicating it was safe to descend. Blake pushed the controls forward. Instantly the school of fiery creatures peeled away, diving toward the bright nebulosity that lay at Amalthea’s center.
The water was less clouded with nutrients here, but hazy with rising bubbles. The Manta was diving against a lazy upward flow of bubbles.
“Outside temperature’s going up fast,” Blake said.
The core object, though still at a great distance, was more than a blur of light; it was a pulsing white sphere, too bright to look upon directly, a miniature sun in watery black space.
The hooter sounded again. The pressure was approaching a tonne per square centimeter. Do not attempt to exceed the present depth until . . .
“Yeah, yeah,” Blake grumbled, taking his hands away from the controls. They waited longer this time, while the oxygen from the sub’s gills dissolved in the large volume of fluid in its circulatory system.
“I say, they’re doing it again,” Forster exclaimed. Again the school of squid appeared to be waiting for them, wheeling and darting at a constant depth almost a kilometer below. Forster’s voice was as excited as a boy’s. “Do you think they’re trying to communicate?”
“Not much sign of that,” said Blake, playing the skeptic.
You may proceed to depth, said the sub. The tone sounded, and they dived.
The water around them was thick with bubbles now, microscopic spheres streaming past in the millions, and big wobbling spheroids that looked alive. The school of squid swam away below, sliding off to the right as it dived.
“Those bubbles are hot,” said Blake.
“They’re full of steam,” the professor said. “Rising in columns. The squid are avoiding this one—we’d better do the same before our gills cook.”
The Manta flapped its wide wings and slid off to the right, following the invisible wake of the glowing squid. Suddenly they were in still, cool water.
Beneath them, the hot core had grown to the apparent size of the sun seen from Earth—too bright to look at directly, without the viewport adjusted to filter the light. Streams of bright bubbles were flowing slowly away from Amalthea’s white core in serpentine columns, radiating symmetrically away from the region of maximum pressure, reaching steadily upward in every direction toward the moon’s surface.
“I’ll bet there’s a geyser at the top of every one of those,” said Blake.
“Bet not taken,” said the professor, who had noted the regular geometry of the bubble streams. “I’d say you’re right.”
Amber lights glowed on the panel beneath the spherical window. In a reasonable voice the sub said, Please exercise caution. You are approaching the absolute pressure limit.
The inner polyglas hull of the Manta, in which they rode in comfortable Earth-normal conditions, was nearing the point where it would implode from the crushing pressure of the water.
“This is about as close as we’re going to get,” said Blake.
“We’ll break off now,” Forster ordered. “We’ll get what we can in the way of images. On the way up, stop long enough to let me take water samples every five hundred meters.”
“Right,” said Blake. His hands flexed on the controls—
—but the professor reached to touch him, his dry fingers lying gently on Blake’s, commanding him to be still. “A moment more. Just a moment.”
Blake waited patiently, trying to imagine what was going through Forster’s mind. The professor had come tantalizingly near the object of his decades-long search, but still it kept its distance, if only for a little while longer.
Forster listened to the sounds that came through the hull, broadcast on the sub’s sonar: the squeaky fizz of billions of pinpoint bubbles boiling off the hot core, the liquid slither and plash of bigger bubbles colliding and joining together. Almost overwhelming these inanimate sounds were the skirring and chittering of masses of animal life in this spaceborne aquarium, this vast dark globe of water rich in the nutrients of a terrestrial planet’s oceans.
There were patterns in the cries of life, mindless patterns of busy noise that marked feeding and migration and reproduction—and bolder patterns as well?
The school of squid still waited below, swirling and diving and soaring and darting; the thousand wriggling creatures sang as they swam, in rhythmic birdlike chorus. Beneath the soprano choir a deep bass boomed with studied deliberation, like the slow ringing of a temple bell in the tropical night.
As Forster listened, he imagined that he knew what the booming was . . . that the core itself was calling him.