“I’m afraid it’s going to be mostly on your shoulders,” Muzorawa told Grant.
“I can handle it.”
“I’m sorry to lay all this work on you,” Muzorawa went on, staring at the graph Grant had put on the wall screen.
“You can’t be in two places at one time,” Grant said.
“Still … I wanted to get this work in better shape before handing it off to you.”
“You’ve done the lion’s share,” Grant assured him. “Setting up the basic equations and all.”
Muzorawa nodded, but his face showed that he was not satisfied with the situation.
Grant was. For the first time since leaving Earth he had some real work to do. A challenge. It wasn’t stellar astrophysics, but it was almost as good. Nobody understood how Jupiter’s interior worked. Nobody! It was unexplored territory and Grant had the opportunity to blaze a trail through the unknown. He intended to make the best of it.
He’d been surprised, at first, when he found that Muzorawa’s fluid dynamics “group” consisted of the Sudanese alone.
“I thought Tamiko worked with you,” Grant had said.
“She did, studying the clouds, mainly,” Muzorawa replied. “But she was reassigned to the problem of Europa’s ocean.”
There had been two other fluid dynamicists, Muzorawa told him.
“Lucy Denova was a fine scientist,” he recalled, “with a first-rate mind. But the instant her tour of duty here ended she fled back to Selene. She’s teaching at the university there now. She still checks in with me now and then.” He chuckled wryly. “But she wants no part of this station. Not at all. She prefers her home on the Moon.”
Grant couldn’t blame her, especially if she had a position on a tenure track at Lunar U.
“And who was your other assistant?” he asked.
“Not an assistant, my friend. He was Dr. Wo himself.”
“He’s a fluid dynamicist?”
“He was, before he was elevated to the directorship. Even so, we worked together quite a lot—until …” Muzorawa hesitated.
“The accident,” Grant finished for him.
“You know about that.”
“A little.”
“A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing,” Muzorawa misquoted.
“Then I ought to get more knowledge,” said Grant.
Muzorawa didn’t argue the point. Neither did he add to Grant’s knowledge of the accident.
The fluid dynamics problem he faced, Grant quickly learned, was that they were trying to study conditions that had never been experienced before. With meager data, at that. Hundred of automated probes had been sent into the unmeasured deeps of the Jovian ocean, but the data they returned were nothing more than a series of pinpricks in a sea of ignorance ten times wider than the whole Earth.
Squeezed relentlessly by Jupiter’s massive gravity, the thick, turbulent Jovian atmosphere is compressed into liquid some seventy thousand kilometers below the visible cloud tops: a strange and unknown ocean, water heavily laced with ammonia and sulfur compounds. Yet the ocean’s temperature is far below the Earth-normal freezing point; under Jupiter’s merciless pressure, the water liquefies despite its frigid temperature. With increasing depth, though, the sea becomes increasingly warmer, heated by the energy flow from the planet’s seething interior.
That ocean is at least five thousand kilometers deep, Grant saw. More than five hundred times deeper than the deepest trench in any ocean on Earth.
And that was barely scratching the surface of gigantic Jupiter. For the first time, Grant began to understand how truly immense the planet was. The numbers didn’t even begin to tell the story; they couldn’t. Jupiter was just too mind-numbingly big for mere numbers.
An ocean more than ten times wider than Earth and five hundred times deeper, yet it is nothing more than a thin onion-skin layer on the planet’s titanic bulk. Below that ocean lies another sea, an immense brain-boggling sea of liquefied molecular hydrogen almost sixty thousand kilometers deep. Nearly eight times deeper than the whole Earth’s diameter!
And below that the pressure builds more and more, millions of times normal atmospheric pressure, compressing the hydrogen into solid metal, sending the temperature soaring to tens of thousands of degrees. There might be another ocean deep below those thousands of kilometers of metallic hydrogen, an ocean of liquid helium. On Earth, helium liquefies only a few degrees above absolute zero. Yet deep within Jupiter’s interior, helium becomes liquefied despite the ferocious temperatures at the planet’s core because all that incredible pressure squeezing down from above doesn’t give its atoms room enough to go into the gaseous state.
At the planet’s very heart lies a solid rocky core, at least five times larger than Earth, seething with the appalling heat generated by the inexorable contraction of the stupendous mass of material pressing down to its center. For more than four billion years Jupiter’s immense gravitational power has been squeezing the planet slowly, relentlessly, steadily, converting gravitational energy into heat, raising the temperature of that rocky core to thirty thousand degrees, spawning the heat flow that warms the planet from within. That hot, rocky core is the original protoplanet seed from the solar system’s primeval time, the nucleus around which those awesome layers of hydrogen and helium and ammonia, methane, sulfur compounds—and water— have wrapped themselves.
Jupiter’s core was far beyond any physical probe. Grant had to be satisfied with equations that estimated what it must be like. But that onion-skin ocean of water, that was his domain now. He was determined to learn its secrets, to probe its depths, to resolve its mysteries.
Grant’s task was to learn as much as he could about that huge ocean. The first crewed mission had failed disastrously because they had been unprepared for the conditions to be found down there. Grant drove himself fiercely to make certain that the next human mission into Jupiter’s ocean would not end the same way.
There were currents in that sea, swift vicious currents that tore through the planet-girdling ocean, ferocious jet streams racing endlessly. With the heat flowing from deep below, the Jovian ocean pulsed and throbbed in constant turbulent motion. Storms raced across its surface and roiled the sea with the energy of a million hurricanes.
Muzorawa spent very little time in the lab now; almost his every waking hour was taken by his training for the probe mission. The Sudanese physicist dropped in to the fluid dynamics lab now and then, but for the most part Grant worked alone, struggling with the attempt to map out the major global jet-stream patterns. At first Grant had been upset by his mentor’s increasingly long absences, but as the weeks ground past, Grant realized that Zeb trusted him to do the necessary work. I’m freeing him for the deep mission, Grant told himself. If I weren’t here to do this job, he wouldn’t be able to prepare for the mission.
Late one afternoon Muzorawa stepped into the lab and sagged tiredly into the empty chair next to Grant.
“How goes the struggle, my friend?”
“You’d think that someone would have solved the equations of motion for turbulent flow,” Grant complained, looking up from his work.
“Ah, yes, turbulent flow.” Muzorawa flashed a gleaming smile despite his evident weariness. “In all the centuries that physicists and mathematicians have studied turbulent flow, it still remains unresolvable.”
“It’s chaotic,” Grant grumbled. “You can’t predict its behavior from one blink of the eyes to the next.”
“Is that a new unit of measurement you’ve invented, the eyeblink?” Muzorawa chided gently.