The physicist bent over and took a paperweight off a desk. “One of the boys made this for fun,” he said, “but it’s a pretty good model of Joe. He stands about five feet tall at the head.”
Cornelius turned the plastic image over in his hands. If you could imagine such a thing as a feline centaur with a thick prehensile tail—The torso was squat, long-armed, immensely muscular; the hairless head was round, wide-nosed, with big deep-set eyes and heavy jaws, but it was really quite a human face. The overall color was bluish gray.
“Male, I see,” he remarked.
“Of course. Perhaps you don’t understand. Joe is the complete pseudojovian: as far as we can tell, the final model, with all the bugs worked out. He’s the answer to a research question that took fifty years to ask.” Viken looked sideways at Cornelius. “So you realize the importance of your job, don’t you?”
“I’ll do my best,” said the psionicist. “But if . . . well, let’s say that tube failure or something causes you to lose Joe before I’ve solved the oscillation problem. You do have other pseudos in reserve, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” said Viken moodily. “But the cost—We’re not on an unlimited budget. We do go through a lot of money, because it’s expensive to stand up and sneeze this far from Earth. But for that same reason our margin is slim.”
He jammed hands in pockets and slouched toward the inner door, the laboratories, head down and talking in a low, hurried voice:
“Perhaps you don’t realize what a nightmare planet Jupiter is. Not just the surface gravity—a shade under three gees, what’s that? But the gravitational potential, ten times Earth’s. The temperature. The pressure . . . above all, the atmosphere, and the storms, and the darkness!
“When a spaceship goes down to the Jovian surface, it’s a radio-controlled job; it leaks like a sieve, to equalize pressure, but otherwise it’s the sturdiest, most utterly powerful model ever designed; it’s loaded with every instrument, every servomechanism, every safety device the human mind has yet thought up to protect a million-dollar hunk of precision equipment.
“And what happens? Half the ships never reach the surface at all. A storm snatches them and throws them away, or they collide with a floating chunk of Ice VII—small version of the Red Spot—or, so help me, what passes for a flock of birds rams one and stoves it in!
“As for the fifty percent which do land, it’s a one-way trip. We don’t even try to bring them back. If the stresses coming down haven’t sprung something, the corrosion has doomed them anyway. Hydrogen at Jovian pressure does funny things to metals.
“It cost a total of—about five million dollars—to set Joe, one pseudo, down there. Each pseudo to follow will cost, if we’re lucky, a couple of million more.”
Viken kicked open the door and led the way through. Beyond was a big room, low-ceilinged, coldly lit, and murmurous with ventilators. It reminded Cornelius of a nucleonics lab; for a moment he wasn’t sure why, then recognized the intricacies of remote control, remote observation, walls enclosing forces which could destroy the entire moon.
“These are required by the pressure, of course,” said Viken, pointing to a row of shields. “And the cold. And the hydrogen itself, as a minor hazard. We have units here duplicating conditions in the Jovian, uh, stratosphere. This is where the whole project really began.”
“I’ve heard something about that,” nodded Cornelius. “Didn’t you scoop up airborne spores?”
“Not I.” Viken chuckled. “Totti’s crew did, about fifty years ago. Proved there was life on Jupiter. A life using liquid methane as its basic solvent, solid ammonia as a starting point for nitrate synthesis—the plants use solar energy to build unsaturated carbon compounds, releasing hydrogen; the animals eat the plants and reduce those compounds again to the saturated form. There is even an equivalent of combustion. The reactions involve complex enzymes and . . . well, it’s out of my line.”
“Jovian biochemistry is pretty well understood, then.”
“Oh, yes. Even in Totti’s day, they had a highly developed biotic technology: Earth bacteria had already been synthesized and most gene structures pretty well mapped. The only reason it took so long to diagram Jovian life processes was the technical difficulty, high pressure and so on.”
“When did you actually get a look at Jupiter’s surface?”
“Gray managed that, about thirty years ago. Set a televisor ship down, a ship that lasted long enough to flash him quite a series of pictures. Since then, the technique has improved. We know that Jupiter is crawling with its own weird kind of life, probably more fertile than Earth. Extrapolating from the airborne microorganisms, our team made trial syntheses of metazoans and—”
Viken sighed. “Damn it, if only there were intelligent native life! Think what they could tell us, Cornelius, the data, the—Just think back how far we’ve gone since Lavoisier, with the low-pressure chemistry of Earth. Here’s a chance to learn a high-pressure chemistry and physics at least as rich with possibilities!”
After a moment, Cornelius murmured slyly: “Are you certain there aren’t any Jovians?”
“Oh, sure, there could be several billion of them,” shrugged Viken. “Cities, empires, anything you like. Jupiter has the surface area of a hundred Earths, and we’ve only seen maybe a dozen small regions. But we do know there aren’t any Jovians using radio. Considering their atmosphere, it’s unlikely they ever would invent it for themselves—imagine how thick a vacuum tube has to be, how strong a pump you need! So it was finally decided we’d better make our own Jovians.”
Cornelius followed him through the lab, into another room. This was less cluttered, it had a more finished appearance: the experimenter’s haywire rig had yielded to the assured precision of an engineer.
Viken went over to one of the panels which lined the walls and looked at its gauges. “Beyond this lies another pseudo,” he said. “Female, in this instance. She’s at a pressure of two hundred atmospheres and a temperature of 194 Absolute. There’s a . . . an umbilical arrangement, I guess you’d call it, to keep her alive. She was grown to adulthood in this, uh, fetal stage—we patterned our Jovians after the terrestrial mammal. She’s never been conscious, she won’t ever be till she’s ‘born.’ We have a total of twenty males and sixty females waiting here. We can count on about half reaching the surface. More can be created as required.
“It isn’t the pseudos that are so expensive, it’s their transportation. So Joe is down there alone till we’re sure that his kind can survive.”
“I take it you experimented with lower forms first,” said Cornelius.
“Of course. It took twenty years, even with forced-catalysis techniques, to work from an artificial airborne spore to Joe. We’ve used the psibeam to control everything from pseudoinsects on up. Interspecies control is possible, you know, if your puppet’s nervous system is deliberately designed for it, and isn’t given a chance to grow into a pattern different from the esman’s.”
“And Joe is the first specimen who’s given trouble?”
“Yes.”
“Scratch one hypothesis.” Cornelius sat down on a workbench, dangling thick legs and running a hand through thin sandy hair. “I thought maybe some physical effort of Jupiter was responsible. Now it looks as if the difficulty is with Joe himself.”
“We’ve all suspected that much,” said Viken. He struck a cigarette and sucked in his cheeks around the smoke. His eyes were gloomy. “Hard to see how. The biotics engineers tell me Pseudocentaurus sapiens has been more carefully designed than any product of natural evolution.”