Now I swivelled my gaze from one screen to the next. The blue system was pretty much of a washout, nothing but a blur, as I had expected. The atmosphere must be filled with haze, a planet wide fog of ammonia and sulfur molecules.
«That looks like wave tops!»
The infrared image indeed looked as if it was plunging toward the surface of a turbulent ocean. Radar showed more detail. Waves, crests and troughs racing madly across the screen. A rough sea down there. A very turbulent, storm-tossed ocean.
«Immersion in three minutes,» said mission control. The probe was going to hit those waves. It was designed to sink slowly to a depth of about a hundred kilometers, where it would—we hoped—attain a neutral buoyancy and float indefinitely.
Of course, if we saw something interesting at a shallower depth, the probe could eject some of its ballast on command and rise accordingly. The trouble was that it took more than eight hours for any of our commands to reach the probe. We had to pray that whatever we found wouldn’t go away in the course of eight hours—almost a full revolution of the planet, a whole Jovian day.
I summoned up all my courage and sidled closer to Allie, squeezing slowly through the crush of bodies. They were all staring at the screens, ignoring me, watching the ocean waves and the streams of low level clouds streaking past. Storm clouds, swirling viciously.
I pushed between Allie and Lopez-Oyama. Not daring to try to say anything to her, I looked down on the boss’s balding pate, and half whispered, «I didn’t think we’d get much from the blue at this level.»
He was so short that he had to crane his neck to look at me. He said nothing, just nodded in his inscrutable way.
Allie was almost my own height. We were nearly eye to eye.
«The infrared is fabulous,» she said. To me!
«It is working pretty well, isn’t it?» Be modest in triumph. All the books of advice I had studied told me that women appreciated men who were successful, yet not boastful; strong but sensitive.
«It won’t work as well once it’s underwater, though, will it?» she asked.
I suppressed the urge to grab her and carry her off. Instead, I deliberately turned to look at the screens instead of her cool hazel eyes.
«That’s when the blue or blue-green should come into its own,» I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling.
«If the laser works,» said Lopez-Oyama. It was almost a growl. He was distinctly unhappy that I had stepped between him and Allie.
Mission control announced, «Impact in ten seconds.»
The whole crowd seemed to surge forward slightly, lean toward the screens, waiting.
«Impact!»
All the screens went blank for a heart stopping instant. But before anyone could shout or groan or even take a breath, they came on again. Radar was blank, of course, and the infrared was just a smudge.
But the blue and blue-green images were clear and beautiful.
«My god, it’s like scuba diving in Hawaii,» Allie said.
That’s how crisp and clear the pictures were. We could see bubbles from our splash-in and light filtering down from the ocean’s surface. The water looked crystal clear.
And empty. No fish, no fronds of vegetation, nothing that looked like life in that ammonia-laced water, nothing at all to be seen.
«Not deep enough yet,» grumbled Lopez-Oyama. If we found nothing, his career was finished, we all knew that. I caught a glimpse of the congressional committee chairwoman, up in the special V.I.P section behind plate-glass windows, staring hard at him.
For more than an hour we saw nothing but bubbles from the probe’s descent. The faint light from the surface dwindled, as we had expected. At precisely the preprogrammed moment, the laser turned on and began sweeping its intense light through the water.
«That should attract anything that can swim,» Allie said hopefully.
«Or repel anything that’s accustomed to swimming in darkness,» said one of the scientists, almost with a smirk.
The laser beam ballooned in the water, of course. I had expected that; counted on it, really. It acted as a bright wide searchlight for me. I wanted to tell Allie why I had chosen that specific wavelength, how proud I was that it was working just as I had planned it would.
But her attention was riveted to the screen, and Lopez-Oyama pushed to her side again, squeezing me out from between them.
Lopez-Oyama was perspiring. I could see drops of sweat glistening on his bald spot.
«Deeper,» he muttered. «We’ve got to go deeper. The ocean is heated from below. Life-forms must be down there.»
I thought I heard a slightly desperate accent on the word «must.»
«Spectrographic data coming in,» announced mission control.
All eyes turned to the screen that began to show the smears and bands of colors from the probe’s mass spectrometer. All eyes except mine. I kept my attention on the images from the laser-illuminated sea. They were becoming cloudy, it seemed to me.
«There’s the ammonia band,» someone said.
«And carbon compounds, I think.»
«My god, those are organics!»
«Organic compounds in the water!»
«Life.»
«Don’t jump to conclusions,» Lopez-Oyama warned. But his voice was shaking with excitement. Allie actually clutched at my shoulder. «Can your cameras see anything?»
The water was cloudy, murky, even where the laser beam swept through; it looked like a thin fog, glistening but obscuring.
«The ocean’s filled with organic chemicals at this level,» one of the scientists said.
«Particles,» corrected another scientist.
«Food,» somebody quipped.
«For who?»
«Deeper,» Sagan said, his voice surprisingly strong. «The organic particles are drifting downward. If there’s anything in that ocean that eats them, it’s down at a deeper level.»
The probe was designed to attain neutral buoyancy at a depth of a hundred kilometers. We were approaching that depth now. It might not be enough.
«How deep can we push it?» Lopez-Oyama asked no one in particular.
Immediately a dozen opinions sprang out of the eager, excited, sweaty chattering apes. Earlier probes had been crushed like soda cans by the immense pressure of the Jovian ocean. But I knew that the probe’s limits were not only structural, but communications-based. The probe could not hold more than a hundred kilometers of the hair-thin optical fiber that carried its comm signals to the surface of the ocean. So even if it could survive lower depths, we would lose touch with it.
«What’s that?»
In the hazy light, a dark shape drifted by, too distant to make out any detail.
«Follow it!» Lopez-Oyama snapped.
Then his face reddened. It would take more than eight hours for his order to reach the probe. In his excitement he had forgotten. Allie turned to me. «Are the close-up cameras working?»
They were. I gestured toward the screens that showed their imagery. The dark hulk, whatever it was, had not come within the narrow focus of either of the close-view cameras. Both screens showed nothing but the cloudy water, tinted sickly green by the laser light.
«Another one!» somebody shouted.
This time the shape drifted past the view of one of the close-up cameras, briefly. We saw a bulbous dark dome, almost spherical, with snakelike appendages dangling from its bottom.
«Tentacles!»
«It’s an animal! Like an octopus!»
I scanned the numerical data on the bottom of the screen. The object, whatever it was, was three and a half kilometers from the probe. And it was 432 meters long, from the top of its dome to the tip of its tentacles. Huge. Fifteen times bigger than a blue whale. Immense.
«It’s not moving.»
«It’s drifting in the current.»
«The tentacles are just hanging there. No activity that I can see.»