PART FIVE

JUPITER FIVE
MINUS ONE


XXII

On Ganymede, one week earlier . . .

The commander’s height, only occasionally notable in Manhattan, made him impossible to miss in the corridors and alleys of Shoreless Ocean, where his close-cropped gray head rose above a sea of shiny black hair as he pushed his way through the crowds. He made no concession to security except to wear a plain tan business suit instead of his blue uniform. Security was the least of his worries.

He found the Straits Cafe and Luke Lim inside it, sitting at his customary table beside the aquarium wall. The com­mander’s attention was momentarily split between Lim, the most sinister-looking young Chinese he had ever encoun­tered—but then, having followed him for days, he’d already gotten used to that—and what was certainly the ugliest fish he had ever seen, peering over the fellow’s shoulder. The commander almost smiled, thinking that maybe Lim was attracted to this table because the fish was even uglier than he was.

The commander made straight for his table. “Luke Lim,” he said in his gravelly voice. “I’m the one who called you.”

“Hey, you recognize me, I’m impressed. Don’t we all look alike to you?” Lim grinned evilly, displaying enormous yel­low teeth.

“No. This is not a secure location, Mr. Lim. We know that the owner, Mrs. Wong, has reported details of your meetings with Blake Redfield to Randolph Mays.”

“O my goodness, that naughty Mrs. Wong.” Lim launched an eyebrow into orbit. “Any harm done?”

“Maybe you’ll help me assess that. But we should talk elsewhere.”

Lim shrugged. “Long as you’re buying.”

As they left the restaurant Lim suggested they stop by his living quarters, nearby; he wanted to pick up his guitar. The commander eyed the inside of Lim’s rooms suspiciously, expecting the worst; the walls were solid with shelves of books and magazines in a mixof European and Chinese languages, everything from Eastern and Western classics to Eastern and Western pornography. Hand-welded furniture took up too much of the scarce space, and high-tech toys lay in various stages of assembly in the corners and on the expanses of tabletop that seemed to serve Lim as desks, workbenches, chopping blocks, and dining tables, indiscrim­inately intermixed. Bright red and gold posters on the wall called for Ganymede’s independence from the Council of Worlds; on them, Space Board officers were depicted as round-eyed, jackbooted thugs.

Lim and the commander bought skewers of soybarbe­cued pork from a corridor vendor and walked to the ice gardens, making their way down slippery wet steps to the bottom of an artificial canyon, where a stream trickled at the feet of giant sculptures carved from the old, hard ice of Ganymede. Here were fierce Kirttimukha, rotund Ganesha, bloodthirsty Kali, smiling Kwan-yin, and a host of other supernaturals towering fifteen meters over the wandering sightseers below, under a black and icy “sky” six stories up, deeply carved with an enormous looping, writhing rain dragon.

The two men sat on a bench beside the smoking stream. Lim cradled his twelve-string guitar and picked out a passable solo version of the Concierto de Aranjuez while the commander spoke in a low voice that sounded like stones in the surf: “. . . through Von Frisch, Mays made a contact at Rising Moon Enterprises. Two days ago Mays and the Mitchell woman took the standard cruise. Twelve hours ago their capsule departed from the programmed path. Looks like they crashed on Amalthea.”

Looks like?” Lim strummed energetically on the ancient and honorably beaten-up classical instrument, his expres­sion an exaggerated mask of disbelief.

“Whether anyone survived, we don’t know.” The com­mander focused his sapphire stare on Lim. “Not to be re­peated: we’ve lost communication with Forster’s expedition.” Which was true, although there had been one last, puzzling communication from Forster after the crash—but it had had nothing to do with Mays or Mitchell, and the commander didn’t intend to mention it to Luke Lim or anyone else who didn’t have a need to know.

“What are you doing about them?”

“Nothing. The Space Board have put out a cover story, claiming we’ve been in touch with them, that Mays and Mitchell are safe and recovering from minor injuries. Eat it later if we have to.”

Lim hit the guitar strings hard and glared at him, wide-eyed and disbelieving. “Aieee, all this bureaucratic garbage! Why lie, man?” Thrummy-thrumm.

The commander’s jaw tightened. “First, we haven’t got a cutter on hand. Little slip-up or, as you put it, bureaucratic garbage. Take us two days to get to Amalthea on one of the local tugs, and . . .”—he held up a hand to forestall Lim’s contempt—“second, the Space Board don’t get along all that well with the Indo-Asians. Can’t go to them for help and understanding. Seems they think we’re nothing but a bunch of racist blue-eyed guys looking out mainly for North Con­tinental interests.”

Lim stared straight into the commander’s blue eyes as he picked out an intricate, Moorish-flavored arpeggio on the mellow old instrument. “Yeah, some of our wilder radical types have occasionally whispered words to that effect in my ear.”

“Won’t claim it’s wholly unfounded. Thing is”—the com­mander was usually very good at concealing discomfort, but it now revealed itself in the slight flaring of his nostrils—“I stuck my neck out, personally made sure there would be no cutter on hand to go to Forster’s rescue. Didn’t want to tempt anyone to force the issue.”

Lim was beginning to see what that issue was. Thrummy-­thrummy-thrummy-thrumm. “So Sir Randolph-Pride-of-England-Mays has gone and shipwrecked himself in the last place you guys want him, and a sexy American white girl with him. But he’s not playing our game.” Thrummy-­thrumm. “If we were trying to force the issue, we’d have crashed this year’s raven-tressed, purple-nippled Miss Shoreless Ocean.” Lim considered matters a moment, while the commander patiently waited. Pickety-pickety-pick. “And me with her,” Lim said at last, nodding curtly. Thunka-­thrumm.

The commander tried to hide his disappointment—Lim was refusing to get serious. “You were Forster’s agent here,” he said, changing the subject. “You arranged the sale of the Europan sub. We don’t think Von Frisch ever said anything to Mays about it. Yet we know they were thick as thieves over the Rising Moon business—Von Frisch probably sold him the Moon Cruiser codes. So why didn’t Von Frisch sell him the information about the sub?”

Lim grunted. Strummm . . . Strummm . . . “Maybe because of my money—Forster’s actually. I offered Von Frisch a two percent bonus if he kept his mouth shut.”

“Why didn’t you tell Forster that?” The words grated in the commander’s throat.

“Didn’t think he’d have to pay.” Lim looked mournful, as if he’d sadly misjudged one of his fellows; his fingers plucked out the mournfully introspective melodies. “Von Frisch never blabbed? Not at all like the guy.”

The commander said nothing.

Finally Lim sighed and seemed to relax. Abruptly, he stopped playing and put his guitar aside with a hollow, dis­cordant boom. “Why me, Commander? Why are you trust­ing me with all this information I could use—if I were a political animal—to get the damned Space Board off our backs?”

“Well, this is a deniable conversation.”

“How do you know I haven’t got a chip-corder in my earring?”

But they both knew Lim wasn’t wired. The expression that played at the corner of the commander’s lips was not quite a smile. “Blake trusted you. I trust him.”

Lim nodded and said, “I think you want me to confirm what you already know. Von Frisch probably did spill his guts to Mays. If Mays didn’t broad cast it, it’s because he’s not a reporter, maybe not even a full-time history prof. So whatever mighty secret about Amalthea you—you personally, Commander, not the Space Board—are trying to keep, he’s on to it.”

“Yeah? What secret might that be?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. But if I were you, man, I’d worry about those people of yours. I get vibes off of Mays.”

“Vibes?”

“The man’s a tiger. A hungry one.”


On Amalthea, in real time . . .

“Ellen. Professor. Time to go. The place is coming to pieces over our heads.”

Blake was piloting the Manta, shepherding the lone white figure of the spacesuited professor as he made a final bubble-trailing dash through the Temple of Art, recording in passing what he had no time to study.

“Right now, sir, or we’ll get ourselves in trouble.”

“All right,” came the grudging reply. “I’m coming aboard. Where’s Inspector Troy?”

“Here I am.” Sparta’s voice was attenuated in the depths of the waters. “I’m not going back with you.”

“Say again?”

“Blake, you must explain to the others,” she replied. “Reassure them.”

“What are you saying, Troy?” Forster demanded.

“I’ll be staying here through the transition,” she said.

“What transition?” Forster asked.

“The ship will soon shed its waters. I’ll be aboard it through that transition.”

“But how will you . . . ?”

“Professor, come aboard right now,” Blake said sternly. “I’ll explain later.”

“All right then.”

Blake clapped on an air mask and hit the valves. Water rushed into the Manta’s interior, filling it—except for a few reluctant bubbles that weren’t sure which way was up. Blake hit the switch and the sub’s aft hatch swung open.

Forster maneuvered himself to the hatch and pulled himself into the sub. Blake closed it behind him and hit more switches:the pumps throbbed again and high-pressure air began forcing the water out. He let his mask fall slack as Forster unlatched his helmet. The Manta flapped its wings and headed for the world-ship’s south polar waterlock.

Blake tried to raise the Ventris on the sonarlink. “We’re headed in,” he said. “Come in, Ventris, do you read us? We’re headed back.” But he got no answer. He turned to the professor. “They must have lost the cable, or pulled it up. We’d better hurry.”

“What is Troy doing? You said you’d explain.”

“She’s not doing anything, sir. Things are happening. Her place is down here. Ours is up there.”

The dome of the south polar lock was not as big as the equatorial dome to which the school of squid-like animals had originally led Sparta and the professor, but it was still big enough to admit a terrestrial aircraft carrier. As its mo­lecular layers peeled off, or retracted, or at any rate became magically transparent—in that process which the human ex­plorers had not begun to understand, but which they had rapidly come to depend upon—Blake and Forster saw through to the seething sea outside, filled with the ruddy opalescence of Jupiter-light which shone through the fast-subliming ice.

“They’re coming inside!” Forster exclaimed. Against his fatigue, he could still respond to new wonders.

The Manta was swimming upward against an inflowing tide of luminous sea creatures, luminous squid and shrimp and jellyfish and plankton by the millions, pouring into the core ship in orderly formations that streamed in the water like columns of smoke in the wind.

“They certainly act as if they know what they’re doing, don’t they?” Blake remarked.

The professor said, “It’s as if the ship were drawing them in . . . into its protection.”

“Or into the stock pens,” Blake said dryly.

“Hm.” Forster found that notion distasteful.

“Clearly they are responding to some programmed sig­nal.”

“Could simply be equilibrium conditions. Inside and outside pressure and temperature are just about in equilibrium at the core surface.”

“Very rational,” said the professor. “And still a miracle.”

Blake smiled privately. Professor J. Q. R. Forster was not given to speaking of miracles. But then, any sufficiently advanced technology . . . Blake suspected that they were on the verge of encountering one or two more miracles.

The sleek black Manta was outside the lock now and beating its wings in a swift climb toward the surface. The lock remained open below them as the sea creatures swam swiftly down into the huge ship; above them, the last hard layer of Amalthea’s ice rind was fracturing into ever smaller plates.

Blake still could rouse no one on the Ventris. He found the hole in the ice without trouble; the passage through the shaft was fraught with risk, but the sub flew cleanly through it and shot through the boiling interface between water and vacuum.

The Ventris stood off half a kilometer from the seething surface of the moon. Flying as a spacecraft now, the Manta sought the hold of the freighter with quick bursts of its rockets.

“It’s beginning to look like a Halloween party down there,” said Blake.

“A what?”

“Like a fake witch’s cauldron—a tub of water and dry ice.”

Beneath the flying sub, lanes of black water were open­ing in the cracks in the ice, and from under the jostling ice floes great round bubbles full of milky vapor rose up and burst into puffs of mist. Ahead of the Manta the equipment bay of the Ventris stood wide open, its metal interior bright against the stars—open, bright, and empty.

“The Moon Cruiser’s gone,” said Blake. “Communications are out, radiolink too.”

“What’s happening?” Forster demanded.

“Better put your helmet back on, Professor. We may have trouble ahead.”

Without help from the commlinks, Blake eased the Manta cautiously into the open equipment bay, managing to dock the sub without trouble. His remote controls still functioned—the great clamshell doors closed quietly over the sub. As soon as they were sealed, air rushed into the bay. A few moments later, the hatch to the Ventris’s central corridor opened, audibly clanging against its stops.

Blake tried the commlinks again. “Jo? Angus? Anybody hear us? What’s the situation here?” He peered around through the bubble, but could see nothing amiss. That no one had appeared in the hatch was perhaps a bit odd, al­though not in itself unusual.

The sub’s gauges told him that the air outside was almost at normal pressure. “Okay, Professor, I’m going to open up. We’re pretty wet in here, so this thing is probably going to fog up good. Let me go first.”

“Why should you go first?”

“I can move faster. I’m not wearing a spacesuit.”

“Do you believe something is seriously wrong?”

“I don’t know what to think. It just smells funny.”

He popped the Manta’s lock and winced as his eardrums were hit by the pressure difference. The inside of the Manta instantly filled with fog, which misted the surface of the polyglas sphere. They were blind inside. The fog dissipated quickly, but the condensation on the sphere remained. Blake squeakily wiped at the curved polyglas, clearing a space to peer through. He saw nothing.

He wiggled himself around so that he could go head first through the hatch in the rear of the sub. He got his head and shoulders into the cold, dry air of the equipment bay—

—when something brushed the exposed skin of his neck. He flipped himself over to see Randolph Mays crouching weightless on the back of the Manta. In his right hand Mays held a pistol-shaped drug injector.

Mays’s enormous mouth curved in an obscene grin. “Bad call, I believe you say in North American football. Unfor­tunate tactical error. You should have sent the professor out first—my little mixture of chemicals would have been quite useless against a man in a spacesuit. . . .”

But Blake didn’t hear the rest. He was already asleep.

Inside the Manta, Forster struggled to reverse his ori­entation in the cramped cabin.

Mays’s voice came to him through the open hatch. “You next, Inspector Troy. Or should I call you Linda? Have I given you time enough to put your helmet back on? Need a few more seconds? How about you, Professor? I must say your body is a marvel, sir. Outwardly the very picture of youth. When not swathed in a spacesuit, of course. Just think, in the wake of that very nearly successful attempt to firebomb you on Venus”—Mays’s tone sounded oddly re­gretful—“well, your surgeons are certainly to be congratu­lated. But your poor old bones! Your muscles and organs! Unhappily they must have suffered the wear and tear ap­propriate to your, what, six-plus actual decades? And with what cost to your resilience? To your endurance?”

Forster had now thoroughly got himself stuck in the nar­row passage, curled up as if halfway through a somersault.

“You can come on out whenever you think you’re ready, Inspector Troy; you’ll find me quite ready for you,” Mays said cheerfully, “and as for you, Professor, please, just rest a moment while I explain the situation. Like our friend Blake here, all your crew are taking little naps—but unless I have a reason to keep them asleep, their drowsiness will wear off in another hour or two. And I’ve put your external com­munications hook-up out of commission. Quite thoroughly, I’m afraid. And you have been keeping us incommunicado for reasons of your own, eh? Having to do with me? How did you plan to explain that?”

Forster had himself turned around now, and could see out the open hatch to the bare metal walls of the equipment bay. But Mays was keeping out of sight.

“So I’ve given you the perfect excuse to cover for your own transgressions, d’you see?” Mays paused, as if something had been left out of his script. “You are with us, Troy? You must be. You know it all, don’t you? All of it.” Another pause, but despite his apparent hopes to the contrary, Mays was not interrupted. “As for you, Professor, after all, anten­nas are always getting themselves sheared off, what a pity! Don’t bother to thank me. I’ll tell you how to make it up to me.”

Forster reached for his helmet, and found it jammed against the passage wall below his knees. He would have to back up into the sphere to get enough room to bring it up over his head. He was beginning to breath loudly now, so loudly that he had difficulty hearing Mays.

“All I want, you see, is what you illegally tried to deny me. I want to broadcast to the inhabited worlds the nature of our—yes, our—finds here at Amalthea. And especially I want to tell them about the Ambassador. That magnificent statue.”

As if repelled by Mays’s insistence, Forster had got himself back up into the front of the Manta, into the polyglas sphere . . . and at last his helmet was free. He rolled it over in his gloved and trembling hands, trying to find the bottom of it, aiming to pull it onto his head—

“But to do that,” Mays was saying, “you have to lend me this nice submarine. For just the briefest moment. There are certain angles and points of view—certain effects of lighting, you understand—that are useless for your business, that of the archaeological scholar, but quite essential to mine. . . .”

At last Forster had his helmet properly aligned. “No, Mays. Never,” he said defiantly, surprised at the hoarseness of his own voice. He pulled the helmet toward him. Once it was on his head, Mays’s drugs could not harm him.

Just then an arm and hand came into view in the small opening of the hatch, holding a pistol.

The pistol dispensed an aerosol spray this time, and For­ster had barely a fraction of a second in which to realize his mistake in speaking out. Not long enough to get his helmet sealed.

* * *

As he flew the Manta through the fog above the boiling icescape, immersed in the submarine’s incongruous smells of fresh human sweat and billion-year-old salt water, Mays’s mind ignored immediate sensations and ranged ahead across a plane of abstraction, reviewing possibilities. His plan had already gone awry, but he was a brilliant and highly experienced tactician who found something exhila­rating about improvising within the strictures of an unfold­ing and unpredictable reality. He had accomplished most of what he’d set out to do; it was what remained undone that could undo all the rest.

Inspector Ellen Troy was missing! She hadn’t been aboard the Manta—nor aboard the Ventris earlier, when he’d gassed the others. Surely Redfield and Forster wouldn’t have left her in the water! But just as surely Redfield had intended to park the sub permanently, with no intention of making another trip.

Was she in the water—even inside the alien ship? He had to know. He had to deal with her.

He plunged the Manta with uncanny skill through a tem­porary opening in the ice, handling the machine as if he’d been trained in its use. He steered it through black water, empty of life, toward the south polar lock of the world-ship. No one could reasonably expect to find a single person within the world-ship’s millions of kilometers of passageways, its hundreds of millions of square kilometers of space and rooms. But Mays was willing to bet that he knew where the woman was.

And if she was not there, what matter? What could she do to him then?

Through the great ship’s mysterious lock, which always seemed to know when entry and exit were wanted . . . through the black and winding corridors . . . through water positively filled with squirming creatures, so thick as to make visibility impossibly low . . . nearly to the Temple of Art itself . . .

Mays drove the Manta on beating wings to the heart of the temple, until it could go no further in the narrowing labyrinthine passageways. He was preparing to pull his suit on and go into the water when he thought he saw a flicker of white. . . .

There was a wider passageway, away from the center of the temple, off to one side. He drove the Manta into it at full speed. The rounded embossed walls, weirdly lit in the white beams of the lamps, slid past the sub’s wings with centimeters to spare; still he rushed on. He came around a sharp curve—

—and she was there in front of him, her white suit blooming so brightly in his lights he had to wince. She was wallowing helplessly in the dark waters, trying to swim away from him. He drove into her at full speed; he felt and saw the back-breaking impact of her body against the po­lyglas sphere of the sub’s nose.

He couldn’t turn the Manta around in the narrow cor­ridor, but some meters further along he came to a round hub of passageways and circled the sub. He made his way slowly back down the corridor from which he’d come.

There she was, floating slack in the eddies. Her helmet glass was half opaque, but through it he was sure he saw her upturned eyes. And there was a huge, very visible gash below her heart, cut clean through the canvas and metal of her suit. Tiny air bubbles, silver in the sub’s light, still oozed from the wound.

Mays chuckled to himself as he steered the Manta past the floating body of Inspector Troy. His second task was done. One or two more still to accomplish. . . .

Shrouded in writhing fog only a kilometer away from the Ventris, Moon Cruiser Four was safely parked in Amal­thea’s radiation shadow. More than three hours had passed since Mays had left Marianne alone to safeguard it. He ap­proached it with caution.

Transferring from the Manta to the Moon Cruiser in open vacuum was a tedious business, requiring both Marianne and himself to don spacesuits and depressurize the capsule. When at last they were safe inside the dark little cabin, with air pressure enough to get their helmets off their heads, he found her in a bad mood.

“God, Randolph, this is the worst,” said Marianne.

“Not quite the greeting I’d hoped for, I must confess.”

“Oh, I’m glad you’re safe. You know that’s not what I meant. But three hours! I didn’t know where you were. Or what was happening. I almost went over there, but . . . I didn’t want to spoil everything.”

“You did precisely the right thing,” he said. “You trusted me and waited.”

She hesitated. “They’re safe? They’re awake now?”

“Yes, all lively and quite talkative. As I assured you, it was a harmless hypnotic, only briefly effective—just long enough for you and me to get this, our little home, away from them. They don’t even show signs of hangovers.”

“They agreed, then.”

He lowered his sad eyes and concentrated on taking off his gloves. “Well, I suppose the short reply is . . .” He glanced up at her mischievously. “Yes! After much rather heated discussion, during which I assured Forster that you and I would testify that he had held us incommunicado against our wills, Forster gave me the submarine.”

She seemed more relieved than excited. “Good. Let’s use it right now. Let’s make the transmission. Once that’s done we can go back.”

“I do wish it were that easy. They agreed to let me make my own photograms of the Ambassador. Here are the chips”—he fished them from his inner shirt pocket and handed them to her. “They agreed to let us tightbeam the images. But just minutes ago, when I spoke to the ship and sought to establish communication, they claimed that their long-range radiolinks were still out of service.”

She moaned, low in her throat. “They wouldn’t let you send the damn . . . the pictures?”

“No, darling. But I have some experience of the ways of men and women, and I was prepared for their bluff.”

“O God, Randolph, O God O God . . . what have you done now?”

He regarded her, judiciously concerned. “Please don’t upset yourself, my dear. All I did was move the statue.”

“What? What! You moved it?”

“I had to do just that little thing, don’t you see? I hid it to assure that after our account is published no one can contradict us. For only we will be able to produce the thing itself!”

“Where did you hide it?”

“Since it is inside a very big spaceship, it would be rather difficult for me to expl . . .”

“Never mind.” Marianne stared sullenly at the flatscreen, now blank, that had so recently been the source of profound deception. She wiped at her eyes, as if angry to discover tears there. “I’m really not sure what to think about all this.”

“What do you mean?”

“You say one thing. They say the opp . . .”—she cleared an obstruction in her throat—“something different.”

“By ‘they’ you mean young Hawkins, I suppose.”

She shrugged, avoiding his prying gaze.

“I won’t stoop to demean him,” Mays said righteously. “I believe that he is an honest young man, although a thor­oughly deluded one.”

Marianne turned her dark-eyed gaze upon him. “You meant to come here all along.”

“Your meaning is unclear, Mari . . .”

“Bill says that you must have monkeyed with the computer, the maneuvering system, of this capsule. And ruined the communications gear so we couldn’t call for help.”

“Does he say all that? Is he a navigator? A physicist? A specialist in electronics?”

“He heard it from Groves and the others. After they in­spected it.”

“Forster and his people will say anything to keep the truth from getting out. I’m convinced they are all members of the evil sect.”

Marianne pulled her seat harness tightly about her, as if in memory of what had been wiped from her conscious mind, the horrible moments of the crash into the ice.

“Marianne . . .”

“Be quiet, Randolph, I’m trying to think.” She stared at the blank screen, and he nervously complied with her de­mand. After a moment she asked, “Did you tell them you had hidden the statue?”

“Yes, of course.”

“What did they say to that?”

“What could they say? They simply cut me off.”

“Randolph, you told me—and I quote—‘the eyes of the solar system are fixed upon us. Even now a Space Board rescue cutter is standing by, prepared to come to the assis­tance of the Ventris.’ ”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m telling you I’m not going to sit out here in this stinking tin can and wait for rescue. If you’re holding so many cards, I want you to start playing them. I want you to get out in that submarine and get on the horn with For­ster—or even go back to the Ventris if you have to—and get down to serious bargaining. And I don’t want you back in here until you’ve made a deal.”

“What if I were to confront him personally?” Mays asked with unaccustomed timidity. “What’s to keep him from lock­ing me up? Or even torturing me in some . . . subtle fashion?”

She looked at him, for the first time in their brief rela­tionship, with a suggestion of contempt. “Well, I’ll tell you, Randolph, it’s because it won’t do them any good. You’ve given me the chips, and now you’re going to draw me a map of exactly where the statue is. So they’ll have to kill both of us, partner . . . isn’t that the way they put it in the old viddies?”

For a man of his experience, Randolph Mays found it hard to keep from laughing out loud at this moment. Mar­ianne had asked him to do exactly as he had hoped she would. If he had written her script himself, she could not have said it better. For a long moment he mulled her sug­gestion before he said, soberly, “They would have rather a difficult time explaining that to the Space Board, wouldn’t they?”

But it was her idea, and that was how she would remem­ber it—when they faced the inquiry together, the sole sur­vivors of J. Q. R. Forster’s expedition to Amalthea.