CONTROL CENTER
Grant told no one of his conversation with the director. He’s a fanatic, Grant realized. He’s just as crazy in his own way as the Zealots or any other radical extremist. I wonder if any of the others know how he really thinks.
Yet he spoke of it to no one. Not even Lane or Zeb or the others who must already know about it. Grant agreed with the director in one respect: The fewer people who know what’s really going on, the better.
Wo’s concept of a quarantine was very loose, Grant found. He and the other members of the mission team took their meals in a conference room and worked together, but they still slept in their own quarters and were able to mingle with the rest of the station’s personnel. It was more a matter of attitude, of a sense of responsibility, that kept them from talking about the mission with the “outsiders.”
Krebs reinforced the attitude in her own grim style. The first evening that Grant had dinner with the team, she showed up in the conference room, glaring at everyone.
“You will discuss our work with no one,” she said, out of a clear sky. “That is vital! Maximally vital! Each of you has signed a security agreement. Violate that agreement and you will suffer the full penalties of the law. Nothing less.”
Then she sat down to eat. No one sat within three chairs of her.
Grant forgot about his thesis work, his research on the Jovian ocean’s dynamics. If those things really are living creatures, if they’re intelligent… we’re sitting on top of the biggest discovery in history! Maybe what the cameras saw are really submarines, giant mobile underwater habitats. Maybe the Jovians have a technology equal to our own. Or better.
Then a voice in his mind warned, You’re sitting on top of the biggest powder keg in history. Watch your steps carefully. You could get yourself killed over this.
The control center, he found, was an unremarkable chamber crowded with six computer-topped desks and communications gear that looked to Grant as if it had been shoehorned into a compartment several sizes too small to accommodate it all. There was barely enough room to squeeze into the little wheeled desk chairs. Director Wo had a separate desk all to himself, though, smack in the middle of the room, with an aisle from the corridor door straight to it—the only open space in the compartment.
The wallscreens were connected to the simulations chamber down at the aquarium, so Grant got to see Muzorawa and O’Hara and the others every shift, at least onscreen. And Karlstad, too, looking tense and almost frightened as he stood at his underwater post, anchored to the deck by plastic loops set into the flooring.
Dr. Wo placed Grant at the console that monitored the submersible’s electrical power systems. Frankovich, at the life-support console alongside him, was assigned to teaching Grant what he had to know.
“So he sucked you into this, too,” Karlstad said through his face-mask radio when Grant first showed up in the control center and said hello to the crew in the tank.
“We’re just one tight little family,” Grant replied.
“Never think that,” Karlstad muttered. “We’re prisoners. Puppets on his strings. He wiggles his fingers and we do the dancing for him.”
Krebs splashed into the simulator tank and Karlstad went silent.
Grant turned to Frankovich, sitting at the console beside his. “You’d better start showing me what I’m supposed to do here,” Grant said, sliding awkwardly into the tight little chair.
“Trying to get on Wo’s good side?” Frankovich asked lightly. “That’s a dubious procedure. I’m not certain our revered leader has a good side.”
Evenings Grant spent with Sheena, no matter how tired he was from the long hours in the control center. He understood Wo’s interest in the gorilla and the dolphins now. How do we communicate with another species? How do we make ourselves understood to creatures that have nothing whatsoever in common with us?
Often Grant took his dinner down to the aquarium and ate with the gorilla. Karlstad twitted him about it, of course, but Grant wanted Sheena to accept the neural net headgear with as little commotion as possible. After several nights of feeling silly with the wires draped over his head, Grant brought an extra set and offered it to the gorilla.
Sheena seemed torn between curiosity and fear. At first she merely looked at the headgear, one set draped over Grant’s sandy hair, the other lying casually on the floor beside him.
Grant was sharing his fruit cup dessert with Sheena when she picked up the net from the floor with her syrup-sticky fingers. She held it in front of her face, studying it, the electrode-studded wires hanging in her massive hand like some arcane set of jewelry.
Tapping his own net, Grant smiled and said, “Funny hat, Sheena”
“Funny hat,” she echoed in her painful whisper.
“I brought it for you.”
The gorilla’s deep-brown eyes shifted from the dangling net to Grant’s face and then back again.
Grant said nothing.
Sheena slowly lifted the net higher and then clumsily plopped it on her head. It slid to the floor with a metallic clicking noise.
“Let me help you,” Grant said, reaching for the wires.
“No.” Sheena pushed Grant back, just a brush of her hand, but it was almost enough to bowl him over. He’d forgotten how strong the gorilla was. I’m taking her for granted, he thought. That’s a mistake.
Sheena fumbled with the net, using both hands this time, and draped it over her head once more. It was lopsided and came down over one eye, but it stayed put.
Grant wanted to laugh at the ludicrous sight, but he held himself to a broad grin. “Good girl, Sheena!” he approved.
“Funny hat,” said the gorilla.
“Funny hat,” Grant agreed, patting his own head.
In a week or so we can connect the net and start taking readings of her brain patterns, he thought. Let her get accustomed to it first. And I’ll get Pascal to show me how to work the console. No sense bringing strangers in here. It would just upset Sheena.
His ribs twinged when he took a deep breath. No, Grant told himself, I certainly don’t want to upset Sheena.
BOOK III
For he sees that even wise men die … But man in his pomp will not endure; He is like the beasts that perish.
FINAL REHEARSAL
The month flashed past like a single brief day. Grant worked double shifts in the mission control center, squeezed in beside Frankovich, watching as the wallscreens showed Lane, Karlstad, Irene Pascal, and Muzorawa working in the aquarium on the simulators under Dr. Krebs’s baleful eyes.
At first they used only the manual controls in the simulator tank, but after a few days they began to link through the biochip electrodes with the ship systems.
Wo sat at the central console in the control chamber during each simulation run, but to Grant’s eyes the director often looked distracted, unresponsive to what was going on in the aquarium tank. He’s worrying about that IAA inspection team on its way here, Grant thought. They’re due to reach the station exactly seven days after the mission is launched.
Each evening they ate in the conference room and hashed over the day’s work. Krebs rarely had dinner with them, and when she did she was almost completely shunned by the others, eating alone at the head of the table, glowering. The only words she had for the team were warnings about security and complaints that their work in the simulator was sloppy or downright poor.
Most evenings Grant stole away early to spend some time with Sheena; the others were so intent on the mission that they barely mentioned Grant’s “dates” with the gorilla. Even Karlstad had found a new topic for dinner-table discussion.