‘If we weren’t Jovians, then, in their eyes, we weren’t people. It turned out that a non-Jovian was ‘vermin’ by definition.’

Orloff’s automatic protest was cut off short by Bimam, ‘In their eyes, I said, vermin we were; and vermin we are. Moreover, we were vermin with the peculiar audacity of having dared to attempt to treat with Jovians – with human beings. Their last message was this, word for word – ‘Jovians are the masters. There is no room for vermin. We will destroy you immediately.’ I doubt if there was any animosity in that message – simply a cold statement of fact. But they meant it.’

‘But why?’

‘Why did man exterminate the housefly?’

‘Come, sir. You’re not seriously presenting an analogy of that nature.’

‘Why not, since it is certain that the Jovian considers us a sort of housefly – an insufferable type of housefly that dares aspire to intelligence.’

Orloff made a last attempt, ‘But truly, Mr Secretary, it seems impossible for intelligent life to adopt such an attitude.’

‘Do you possess much of an acquaintance with any other type of intelligent life than our own?’ came with immediate sarcasm. ‘Do you feel competent to pass on Jovian psychology? Do you know just how alien Jovians must be physically? Just think of their world with its gravity at two and one half Earth normal; with its ammonia oceans – oceans that you might throw all Earth int? without raising a respectable splash; with its three-thousand-mile atmosphere, dragged down by the colossal gravity into densities and pressures in its surface layers that make the sea bottoms of Earth resemble a medium-thick vacuum. I tell you we’ve tried to figure out what sort of life could exist under those conditions and we’ve given up. It’s thoroughly incomprehensible. Do you expect their mentality, then, to be any more understandable? Never! Accept it as it is. They intend destroying us. That’s all we know and all we need to know.’

He lifted a gloved hand as he finished and one finger pointed, ‘There’s Ether Station just ahead.’

Orloff’s head swiveled, ‘Underground?’

‘Certainly! All except the Observatory. That’s that steel and quartz dome to the right – the small one.’

They had stopped before two large boulders that flanked an earthy embankment, and from behind either one a nosepieced, suited soldier in Ganymedan orange, with blasters ready, advanced upon the two.

Bimam lifted his face into Jupiter’s light and the soldiers saluted and stepped aside. A short word was barked into the wrist mike of one of them and the camouflaged opening between the boulders fell into two and Orloff followed the secretary into the yawning airlock.

The Earthman caught one last glimpse of sprawling Jupiter before the closing door cut off the surface altogether.

It was no longer beautiful!

Orloff did not quite feel normal again until he had seated himself in the overstuffed chair in Dr Edward Prosser’s private office. With a sigh of utter relaxation, he propped his monocle under his eyebrow.

‘Would Dr Prosser mind if I smoked in here, while we’re waiting?’ he asked.

‘Go ahead,’ replied Bimam, carelessly. ‘My own idea would be to drag Prosser away from whatever he’s fooling with just now, but he’s a queer chap. We’ll get more out of him if we wait until he’s ready for us.’ He withdrew a gnarled stick of greenish tobacco from its case, and bit off the edge viciously.

Orloff smiled through the smoke of his own cigarette, ‘I don’t mind waiting. I still have something to say. You see, for the moment, Mr Secretary, you gave me the jitters, but, after all, granted that the Jovians intend mischief once they get at us, it remains a fact,’ and here he spaced his words emphatically, ‘that they can’t get at us.’

‘A bomb without a fuse, hey?’

‘Exactly! It’s simplicity itself, and not really worth discussing. You will admit, I suppose, that under no circumstances can the Jovians get away from Jupiter.’

‘Under no circumstances?’ There was a quizzical tinge in Bimam’s slow reply. ‘Shall we analyze that?’

He stared hard at the purple flame of his cigar. ‘It’s an old trite saying that the Jovians can’t leave Jupiter. The fact has been highly publicized by the sensation mongers of Earth and Ganymede and a great deal of sentiment has been driveled about the unfortunate intelligences who are irrevocably surface-bound, and must forever stare into the Universe without, watching, watching, wondering, and never attaining.

‘But, after all, what holds the Jovians to their planet? Tho factors! That’s all! The first is the immense gravity field of the planet. Two and a half Earth normal.’

Orloff nodded. ‘Pretty bad!’ he agreed.

‘And Jupiter’s gravitational potential is even worse, for because of its greater diameter the intensity of its gravitational field decreases with distance only one tenth as rapidly as Earth’s field does. It’s a terrible problem – but it’s been solved.’

‘Hey?’ Orloff straightened.

‘They’ve got atomic power. Gravity – even Jupiter’s – means nothing once you’ve put unstable atomic nuclei to work for you.’

Orloff crushed his cigarette to extinction with a nervous gesture. ‘But their atmosphere – ‘

‘Yes, that’s what’s stopping them. They’re living at the bottom of a three-thousand mile-deep ocean of it, where the hydrogen of which it is composed is collapsed by sheer pressure to something approaching the density of solid hydrogen. It stays a gas because the temperature of Jupiter is above the critical point of hydrogen, but you just try to figure out the pressure that can make hydrogen gas half as heavy as water. You’ll be surprised at the number of zeros you’ll have to put down.

‘No spaceship of metal or of any kind of matter can stand that pressure. No Terrestrial spaceship can land on Jupiter without smashing like an eggshell, and no Jovian spaceship can leave Jupiter without exploding like a soap bubble. That problem has not yet been solved, but it will be some day. Maybe tomorrow, maybe not for a hundred years, or a thousand. We don’t know, but when it is solved, the Jovians will be on top of us. And it can be solved in a specific way.’

‘I don’t see how – ‘

‘Force fields! We’ve got them now, you know.’

‘Force fields!’ Orloff seemed genuinely astonished, and he chewed the word over and over to himself for a few moments. ‘They’re used as meteor shields for ships in the asteroid zone-but I don’t see the application to the Jovian problem.’

‘The ordinary force field,’ explained Bimam, ‘is a feeble rarefied zone of energy extending over a hundred miles or more outside the ship. It’ll stop meteors but it’s just so much empty ether to an object like a gas molecule. But what if you took that same zone of energy and compressed it to a thickness of a tenth of an inch. Molecules would bounce off it like this–ping-g-g-g! And if you used stronger generators, and compressed the field to a hundredth of an inch, molecules would bounce off even when driven by the unthinkable pressure of Jupiter’s atmosphere – and then if you build a ship inside – ‘ He left the sentence dangling.

Orloff was pale. ‘You’re not saying it can be done?’

‘I’ll bet you anything you like that the Jovians are trying to do it. And we’re trying to do it right here at Ether Station.’

The colonial commissioner jerked his chair closer to Birnam and grabbed the Ganymedan’s wrist. ‘Why can’t we bombard Jupiter with atomic bombs. Give it a thorough going-over, I mean! With her gravity, and her surface area, we can’t miss.’

Bimam smiled faintly, ‘We’ve thought of that. But atomic bombs would merely tear holes in the atmosphere. And even if you could penetrate, just divide the surface of Jupiter by the area of damage of a single bomb and find how many years we must bombard Jupiter at the rate of a bomb a minute before we begin to do significant damage. Jupiter’s big! Don’t ever forget that!’

His cigar had gone out, but he did not pause to relight. He continued in a low, tense voice. ‘No, we can’t attack the Jovians as long as they’re on Jupiter. We must wait for them to come out – and once they do, they’re going to have the edge on us in numbers. A terrific, heart-breaking edge – so we’ll just have to have the edge on them in science.’

‘But,’ Orloff broke in, and there was a note of fascinated horror in his voice, ‘how can we tell in advance what they’ll have?’

‘We can’t. We’ve got to scrape up everything we can lay our hands on and hope for the best. But there’s one thing we do know they’ll have, and that’s force fields. They can’t get out without them. And if they have them, we must, too, and that’s the problem we’re trying to solve here. They will not insure us victory, but without them, we will suffer certain defeat. And now you know why we need money – and more than that. We want Earth itself to get to work. It’s got to start a drive for scientific armaments and subordinate everything to that. You see?’

Orloff was on his feet. ‘Birnam, I’m with you – a hundred percent with you. You can count on me back in Washington.’

There was no mistaking his sincerity. Bimam gripped the hand outstretched toward him and wrung it – and at the moment, the door flew open and a little pixie of a man hurtled in.

The newcomer spoke in rapid jerks, and exclusively to Birnam. ‘Where’d you come from? Been trying to get in touch with you. Secretary said you weren’t in. Then five minutes later you show up on your own. Can’t understand it.’ He busied himself furiously at his desk.

Bimam grinned. ‘If you’ll take time out, doc, you might say hello to Colonial Commissioner Orloff.’

Dr Edward Prosser turned on his toe like a ballet dancer and looked the Earthman up and down twice. ‘The new un, hey? We getting any money? We ought to. Been working on a shoestring ever since. At that, we might not be needing any. It depends.’ He was back at the desk.

Orloff seemed a trifle disconcerted, but Birnam winked impressively, and he contented himself with a glassy stare through the monocle.

Prosser pounced upon a black leather booklet in the recesses of a pigeonhole, threw himself into his swivel chair and wheeled about.

‘Glad you came, Birnam,’ he said, leafing through the booklet. ‘Got something to show you. Commissioner Orloff, too.’