The hull sensors told of the changing atmosphere. Frozen ammonia became liquid ammonia, and then they were in the zone of the yellow compounds. Always, inexorably, the pressure built. At two thousand atmospheres the air inside the ship seemed to be sticky, heavy, oppressive. But the ship reacted sweetly to the incredible forces, the mush-bonded seams compressing, folding, the instruments recording within the limits of safety on all hull areas.
Signals went out from the ship, seeking, searching. They found nothing but increasing density of atmosphere. The danger below was beyond imagination. The distance traveled, as the ship orbited, matching the speed of rapid rotation, was not a factor. The winds of Jupiter blew against them with a solid force. And her gravity tugged on them, always ready to seize them, should the power fail, and pull them toward the core of the planet.
The living compartments of the ship were now between two pressures, the outside weight of atmosphere and the compressed bulk of Jovian atmosphere inside the hold. Kennedy had multiplied her weight by taking in the Jovian gases, but the power plant was not even strained.
At three thousand atmospheres Neil began a search, swinging the ship back and forth at the same altitude.
Preliminary analysis of the atmosphere at three thousand atmospheres showed an interesting array of hydrogen and carbon compounds, confirming advance theory that such matter made up the bulk of the yellow layers of Jupiter. In order to obtain pure samples of the yellow layer, the hold was bled and cleaned of the noxious ammonia taken in at the upper levels.
The search continued without success. J.J. took a personal interest in venting the poisonous gases and liquids from the hull, leaving only material collected under maximum pressure in the yellow zone. He seemed to be much too cheerful for conditions, for the search for the alien had produced nothing. When he was satisfied that the huge hold contained only yellow-layer material he came into the control room with a pleased grin on his face.
“Flash, you can take her home anytime you’re ready,” he said.
It had taken three Earth days to vent and fill the hold. “We’ve got a few days left,” Dom said.
“We’ve got what we came for,” J. J. said.
Dom wondered if the strain had blown his mind. “I don’t see signs of an alien ship in the hold,” he said.
“There is no alien,” J.J. said.
“Want to repeat that?” Dom asked.
“There never was an alien,” J.J. said. “The signal came from an Explorer class ship, a drone.”
“At three thousand atmospheres?” Dom asked, examining J.J. closely.
“At a mere ten atmospheres,” J.J. said.
“But the picket ships measured—” Dom began.
“What their instruments were rigged to measure,” J.J. said. “And the transmissions were halted on my orders.”
“I’m trying to understand some of this,” Dom said grimly. Neil was listening with a frown on his face. “You’re telling me we built this ship just to come out here and get a load of Jovian muck?”
“We came out here to win a war,” J.J. said. “Now as I read your specifications, we can vent the load in the hold down to an interior pressure of two thousand atmospheres and go home.”
“I’m waiting for an explanation,” Dom said.
“Did you ever read the Bible?” J.J. asked, grinning.
“Some.”
“Remember the part about manna, my boy? Manna from heaven?”
Well, he was obviously mad. Dom felt a heavy weight of sadness. It was all for nothing. All the work, the brushes with death, the death of Larry, those terrible moments when he felt sure the Firster bomb would go off in his hands before he could jettison it into space, all of it had been done for the sake of a man who was obviously mad.
Manna from heaven. Venus torn full-grown from Jove’s brow.
“Neil,” Dom said, suddenly feeling very tired, “let’s take her home.”
“Roger,” Neil said, looking at J.J. with a mixture of puzzlement and anger.
Chapter Twelve
The ship faced one final test. She had passed many tests to bring them millions of miles on a madman’s quest. She had lifted thousands of tons of water out of the moon’s gravity well. She had brought them through space, and she had resisted the force of pressure. The last test was as crucial as any. If she failed to fight her way upward and beyond the gravity of the gas giant, all the others didn’t count.
Until now her power had been used only to neutralize gravitational attraction in orbit. Now she was called upon to overcome the pull and apply enough force to the hull to move upward and then to attain escape velocity, at more than twice the speed it would have taken her to leave Earth. Most important, she had to stay in one piece, and, if the madman was to be humored, she had to do it with thousands of tons of Jovian atmosphere in her hold.
The computer gave angle of climb, increments of power, times, and the automatics fed it into the engine. Neil followed the motions with his hands, just to get the feel of it. There was a different pitch to the quiet background hum inside her. The acceleration was slight at first. Only instruments could feel it. The ship mushed slowly upward. Full speed could not be attained in the drag of the atmosphere. The upward flight was slow and tedious. It was monitored by thousands of instruments ranging from hull-temperature gauges to nutrino traps measuring the efficiency of the hydroplant.
She was a pure thing of joy, Neil was thinking. He’d flown every type of ship built in the United States and some that were built elsewhere. He’d never flown anything like this one.
“You’re a helluva ship builder,” he told Dom with a grin.
Dom smiled ruefully. Being praised by a man like Neil was pleasant, but it was small compensation. There was, of course, the pride which comes when your own ideas and work bear fruit and prove a successful design. There wasn’t another ship like Folly.
Revealing, of course, that he was thinking of her not as the J.F.K., but as Folly. J.J.’s Folly.
The tension in the control room was not all engendered by the ticklish task of lifting the ship out of the atmosphere into clear space without straining the laden hull, without burning a thruster tube with too much power. Actually, the lifting went on so long it became routine. It was J.J.’s presence which caused most of the tension. Dom felt a sick disappointment. He had not realized, until the moment of J.J.’s surprise announcement, that he’d been counting heavily on that alien ship. There was a personal element in his disappointment. He had been duped into going on the ultimate treasure hunt, a sublight drive the potential reward, and all the time there had been no treasure. He had been promised the stars, and the payload was Jovian soup, thick soup compressed inside Folly’s cargo hold.
In the ideal world, Folly could have been built in the interest of pure research, to prove that it could be done, to obtain samples of Jovian atmosphere, to merely add to knowledge. In an ideal world, however, there would also be plenty of food. That situation had not existed on the world for decades.
Idle thoughts as the ship lifted. From a long-range viewpoint, pure research paid off. The hydrogen engine which powered the Folly had roots in the early space program. Photographs taken during the first Skylab experiment, a pure research project, gave astrophysicists new and startling information about the sun. Questions raised about traditional ideas of the sun’s power way back in the 1970s led to the breakthrough which allowed Folly to rise against the force of Jovian gravity. Had not scientists doing pure research work at an observatory in Arizona discovered that the sun’s entire globe pulsated, the theories which made the hydrogen drive a reality would have been left unformulated. From a long-range point of view, Skylab was worthwhile, but even then there were people who screamed against the expenditure and wanted, instead, to buy butter, or welfare Cadillacs, for that group of non-achievers who are always a festering portion of human society.