‘Do you know how to work one of these?’ he asked, as he screwed onto the jet a flexible tube of metal mesh, at the other end of which was a curiously curved object of thick, clear glass.
‘What is it?’
‘Oxygen nosepiece! What there is of Ganymede’s atmosphere is argon and nitrogen, just about half and half. It isn’t particularly breathable.’ He heaved the double cylinder into position, and tightened it in its harness on Orloff ‘s back.
Orloff staggered, ‘It’s heavy. I can’t walk two miles with this.’
‘It won’t be heavy out there,’ Bimam nodded carelessly upward and lowered the glass nosepiece over Orloff’s head. ‘Just remember to breathe in through the nose and out through the mouth, and you won’t have any trouble. By the way, did you eat recently?’
‘I lunched before I came to your place.’
Bimam sniffed dubiously, ‘Well, that’s a little awkward.’ He drew a small metal container from one of his pockets and tossed it to the commissioner. ‘Put one of those pills in your mouth and keep sucking on it.’
Orloff worked clumsily with gloved fingers and finally managed to get a brown spheriod out of the tin and into his mouth. He followed Birnam up a gently sloped ramp. The blind-alley ending of the corridor slid aside smoothly when they reached it and there was a faint soughing as air slipped out into the thinner atmosphere of Ganymede.
Bimam caught the other’s elbow, and fairly dragged him out.
‘I’ve turned your air tank on full,’ he shouted. ‘Breathe deeply and keep sucking at that pill.’
Gravity had flicked to Ganymedan normality as they crossed the threshold and Orloff after one horrible moment of apparent levitation felt his stomach tum a somersault and explode.
He gagged, and fumbled the pill with his tongue in a desperate attempt at self-control. The oxygen-rich mixture from the air cylinders burned his throat, and gradually Ganymede steadied. His stomach shuddered back into place. He tried walking.
‘Take it easy, now,’ came Birnam’s soothing voice. ‘It gets you that way the first few times you change gravity fields quickly. Walk slowly and get the rhythm, or you’ll take a tumble. That’s right, you’re getting it.’
The ground seemed resilient. Orloff could feel the pressure of the other’s arm holding him down at each step to keep him from springing too high. Steps were longer now – and flatter, as he got the rhythm. Birnam continued speaking, a voice a little muffled from behind the leather flap drawn loosely across mouth and chin.
‘Each to his own world,’ he grinned. ‘I visited Earth a few years back, with my wife, and had a hell of a time. I couldn’t get myself to learn to walk on a planet’s surface without a nosepiece. I kept choking – I really did. The sunlight was too bright and the sky was too blue and the grass was too green. And the buildings were right out on the surface. I’ll never forget the time they tried to get me to sleep in a room twenty stories up in the air, with the window wide open and the moon shining in.
‘I went back on the first spaceship going my way and don’t ever intend returning. How are you feeling now?’
‘Fine! Splendid!’ Now that the first discomfort had gone, Orloff found the low gravity exhilarating. He looked about him. The broken, hilly ground, bathed ip. a drenching yellow light, was covered with ground-hugging broad-leaved shrubs that showed the orderly arrangement of careful cultivation.
Birnam answered the unspoken question, ‘There’s enough carbon dioxide in the air to keep the plants alive, and they all have the power to fix atmospheric nitrogen. That’s what makes agriculture Ganymede’s greatest industry. Those plants are worth their weight in gold as fertilizers back on Earth and worth double or triple that as sources for half a hundred alkaloids that can’t be gotten anywhere else in the System. And, of course, everyone knows that Ganymedan green-leaf has Terrestrial tobacco beat hollow.’
There was the drone of a strato-rocket overhead, shrill in the thin atmosphere, and Orloff looked up.
He stopped – stopped dead – and forgot to breathe!
It was his first glimpse of Jupiter in the sky.
It is one thing to see Jupiter, coldly harsh, against the ebon backdrop of space. At six hundred thousand miles, it is majestic enough. But on Ganymede, barely topping the hills, its outlines softened and ever so faintly hazed by the thin atmosphere; shining mellowly from a purple sky in which only a few fugitive stars dare compete with the Jovian giant – it can be described by no conceivable combination of words.
At first, Orloff absorbed the gibbous disk in silence. It was gigantic, thirty-two times the apparent diameter of the Sun as seen from Earth. Its stripes stood out in faint washes of color against the yellowness beneath and the Great Red Spot was an oval splotch of orange near the western rim.
And finally Orloff murmured weakly, ‘It’s beautiful!’
Leo Birnam stared, too, but there was no awe in his eyes. There was the mechanical weariness of viewing a sight often seen, and besides that an expression of sick revulsion. The chin flap hid his twitching smile, but his grasp upon Orloff ‘s arm left bruises through the tough fabric of the surface suit.
He said slowly, ‘It’s the most horrible sight in the System.’
Orloff turned reluctant attention to his companion, ‘Eh?’ Then, disagreeably, ‘Oh, yes, those mysterious Jovians.’
At that, the Ganymedan turned away angrily and broke into swinging, fifteen-foot strides. Orloff followed clumsily after, keeping his balance with difficulty.
‘Here, now,’ he gasped.
But Birnam wasn’t listening. He was speaking coldly, bitterly, ‘You on Earth can afford to ignore Jupiter. You know nothing of it. It’s a little pin prick in your sky, a little flyspeck. You don’t live here on Ganymede, watching that damned colossus gloating over you. Up and over fifteen hours-hiding God knows what on its surface. Hiding something that’s waiting and waiting and trying to get out. Like a giant bomb just waiting to explode!’
‘Nonsense!’ Orloff managed to jerk out. ‘Will you slow down. I can’t keep up.’
Bimam cut his strides in half and said tensely, ‘Everyone knows that Jupiter is inhabited, but practically no one ever stops to realize what that means. I tell you that those Jovians, whatever they are, are born to the purple. They are the natural rulers of the Solar System.’
‘Pure hysteria,’ muttered Orloff. ‘The Empire government has been hearing nothing else from your Dominion for a year.’
‘And you’ve shrugged it off. Well, listen! Jupiter, discounting the thickness of its colossal atmosphere, is eighty thousand miles in diameter. That means it possesses a surface one hundred times that of Earth, and more than fifty times that of the entire Terrestrial Empire. Its population, its resources, its war potential are in proportion.’
‘Mere numbers – ‘
‘I know what you mean,’ Birnam drove on, passionately. ‘Wars are not fought with numbers, but with science and with organization. The Jovians have both. In the quarter of a century during which we have communicated with them, we’ve learned a bit. They have atomic power and they have radio. And in a world of ammonia under great pressure – a world in other words in which almost none of the metals can exist as metals for any length of time because of the tendency to form soluble ammonia complexes – they have managed to build up a complicated civilization. That means they have had to work through plastics, glasses, silicates and synthetic building materials of one sort or another. That means a chemistry developed just as far as ours is, and I’d put odds on its having developed further.’
Orloff waited long before answering. And then, ‘But how certain are you people about the Jovians’ last message. We on Earth are inclined to doubt that the Jovians can possibly be as unreasonably belligerent as they have been described.’
The Ganymedan laughed shortly, ‘They broke off all communication after that last message, didn’t they? That doesn’t sound friendly on their part, does it? I assure you that we’ve all but stood on our ears trying to contact them.
‘Here now, don’t talk. Let me explain something to you. For twenty-five years here on Ganymede a little group of men have worked their hearts out trying to make sense out of a static-ridden, gravity-distorted set of variable clicks in our radio apparatus, for those clicks were our only connection with living intelligence upon Jupiter. It was a job for a world of scientists, but we never had more than two dozen at the Station at any one time. I was one of them from the very beginning and, as a philologist, did my part in helping construct and interpret the code that developed between ourselves and the Jovians, so that you can see I am speaking from the real inside.
‘It was a devil of a heartbreaking job. It was five years before we got past the elementary clicks of arithmetic: three and four are seven; the square root of twenty-five is five; factorial six is seven hundred and twenty. After that, months sometimes passed before we could work out and check by further communication a single new fragment of thought.
‘But – and this is the point – by the time the Jovians broke off relations, we understood them thoroughly. There was no more chance of a mistake in comprehension, than there was of Ganymede suddenly cutting loose from Jupiter. And their last message was a threat, and a promise of destruction. Oh, there’s no doubt – there’s no doubt!’
They were walking through a shallow pass in which the yellow Jupiter light gave way to a clammy darkness.
Orloff was disturbed. He had never had the case presented to him in this fashion before. He said, ‘But the reason, man. What reason did we give them – ‘
‘No reason! It was simply this: the Jovians had finally discovered from our messages – just where and how I don’t know – that we were not Jovians.’
‘Well, of course.’
‘It wasn’t ‘of course’ to them. In their experiences they had never come across intelligences that were not Jovian. Why should they make an exception in favor of those from outer space?’
‘You say they were scientists.’ Orloff’s voice had assumed a wary frigidity. ‘Wouldn’t they realize that alien environments would breed alien life? We knew it. We never thought the Jovians were Earthmen though we had never met intelligences other than those of Earth.’
They were back in the drenching wash of Jupiter light again, and a spreading region of ice glimmered amberly in a depression to the right.
Bimam answered, ‘I said they were chemists and physicists – but I never said they were astronomers. Jupiter, my dear commissioner, has an atmosphere three thousand miles or more thick, and those miles of gas block off everything but the Sun and the four largest of Jupiter’s moons. The Jovians know nothing of alien environments.’
Orloff considered. ‘And so they decided we were aliens. What next?’
