Over the years, the earlier probes had shown that beneath those gaudy colorful swirling clouds there was an ocean ten times larger than the whole Earth. An ocean of water. Heavily laced with ammonia, to be sure, but water nonetheless. There was only one other world in the solar system where liquid water existed—Earth. We knew that liquid water meant life on Earth. Did it on Jupiter?
“Jupiter represents our best chance for finding extraterrestrial life.” Lopez-Oyama had said those words to the congressional committee that ruled on NASA’s budget, when he went begging to them for the money to fund our mission.
“Life?” asked one of the congressmen, looking startled, almost afraid. “Like animals and trees and such?”
I watched those hearings on TV; we all did, sitting on the edges of our chairs in the center’s cafeteria while the politicians decided if we lived or died. I had picked a seat next to Allie, although she barely acknowledged my presence beside her. She stared unwaveringly at the screen.
With a tolerant little shake of his head, Lopez-Oyama replied, “It probably won’t be life as we know it here on Earth, sir. That would be too much to hope for.”
“Then what will it be like?”
“We just don’t know. We’ve never found life on another world before.” Then he added, “But if we don’t find life on Jupiter, then I doubt that life of any form exists anywhere else in the solar system.”
“Do you mean intelligent life?” asked the committee chairwoman sharply.
Lopez-Oyama smiled winningly at her. “No, ma’am,” he said. “Intelligent life would be too much to expect. I’ll be happy if we find something like bacteria.”
Now, as the moment of truth approached, the scientists cramming mission control were busily spinning theories about what the cameras would find in Jupiter’s global ocean. They couldn’t wait for the actual pictures, they had to show how clever they were to impress the reporters and each other. A bunch of alpha male apes, preening and displaying their brains instead of their fangs. Competing for primacy and the attention of the news reporters who were clustered around them, goggle-eyed, tape recorders spinning. Even the women scientists were playing the one-upmanship game, in the name of equality.
To her credit, Allie remained quiet. She was as clever a scientist as any of them, but she refused to involve herself in the primate competition. She didn’t have to. Her ranking in the hierarchy was as secure as could be.
None of them paid the slightest attention to me. I was only the engineer who had built the imaging system. I wasn’t a scientist, just the guy with dirt under his fingernails who made the machinery work. I’d be ignored unless something went wrong.
To tell the truth, I paid damned little attention to them and their constant gabbling. My eyes were focused on long-legged Allie, by far the most desirable female in the pack. How could I make her notice me? How could I get her to smile in my direction instead of clinging so close to the boss? How could I get to be an alpha male in her lustrous eyes?
“Data coming through.”
From nearly a thousand million kilometers away, my cameras were functioning. Had already functioned, as a matter of fact, more than eight hours ago. It took that long for the telemetry signal to travel from Jupiter to our antennas out in the desert.
Suddenly all their jabbering stopped. Mission control fell absolutely silent. The first images began to raster across the main display screens, line by line. Live, from beneath the endless cloud deck of Jupiter.
Each display screen showed imagery from a different wavelength. We had blue, green, red, infrared, and even radar imaging systems. Despite all their theories, none of the scientists had been able to tell me which wavelengths would work best beneath Jupiter’s cloud deck.
I had asked them how much sunlight filtered through the clouds. None of them could tell me. Which wavelengths of sunlight penetrated the clouds? None of them knew. I had to grope blindly and include as broad a spectrum of instruments as possible.
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.
