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.”
