“Conserving energy?”
“Maybe that’s the way it hunts for prey.”
“Trolling?”
It looked dead to me. Inert. Unmoving. It drifted out of the close-up camera’s view and all the heads in the room swivelled to the wide-angle view. The dark lump did nothing to show it might be alive.
“What’s the spectrograph show?”
“Not a helluva lot.”
“Absorption bands, lots of them.”
“Chlorophyll?”
“Don’t be a butt head.”
Allie was the only one who seemed to realize the significance of what we were seeing. “If it’s an animal, it’s either in a quiescent, resting phase . . . or it’s dead.”
“The first extraterrestrial creature we find, and it’s dead,” somebody groused.
“There’ll be more,” said Lopez-Oyama, almost cheerfully.
I looked across the room at Sagan. He was leaning forward in his wheelchair, eyes intent on the screens, as if he could make something more appear just by concentrating. The reporters were gaping, not saying a word for a blessed change, forgetting to ask questions while the underwater views of the Jovian ocean filled the display screens.
Then I looked at Allie again. Her lovely face was frozen in an expression of. . . what? Fear? Dread? Did she have the same terrible suspicion that was building in my mind?
It was almost another hour before we saw another of the tentacled creatures. The probe had reached its maximum depth and was drifting through the murky water. Particles floated past the cameras, some of them as big as dinner plates. None of them active. They all just drifted by, sinking slowly like dark chunks of soot meandering toward the bottom of that sunless sea.
Then we saw the second of the octopods And quickly afterward, an entire school of them, hundreds, perhaps a thousand or more. The sensors on the probe went into overdrive; the automatic analysis programs would count the creatures for us. We simply stared at them.
Different sizes. Lots of small ones—if something a dozen times the size of a whale can be called small.
“Babies,” Allie murmured.
A family group, I thought. A clan. All of them dead. There was no mistaking it now. My cameras showed them clearly. Big saucer eyes clouded and unmoving. Open wounds in some of them. Tentacles hanging limply. They were just drifting along like ghosts, immense dark shadows that once had been alive.
Time lost all meaning for us. The big mission control center fell absolutely silent. Even the most assertive and egocentric of the male apes among us stopped trying to make instant theories and simply stared at a scene of devastation. A holocaust.
At last Lopez-Oyama whispered, “They’re all dead. The whole fucking planet’s dead.”
Then we saw the city. A sort of collective gasp went through the crowded mission control room when it came into view.
It was a structure, a vast, curving structure that floated in that mighty ocean, graceful despite its immense size. Curves atop curves. Huge round ports and beautifully symmetrical archways, a gigantic city built by or for the immense creatures that floated, dead and decaying, before our camera eyes.
The numbers flickering at the bottom of the screens told us that the city was hundreds of kilometers away from our lenses, yet it filled the screens of the narrow-view cameras. We could see delicate traceries along its massive curving flank, curves and whorls etched into its structure.
“Writing,” someone breathed.
A dream city, built of alien inspirations and desires. It staggered our Earthbound senses, dwarfed us with its immensity and grandeur. It was enormous yet graceful and entirely beautiful in an eerie, unearthly way. It was dead.
As it swung slowly, majestically, in the powerful ocean currents we saw that it was only a fragment of the original structure, a piece somehow torn off from its original whole. Jagged cracks and ragged edges showed where it had been ripped away from the rest of the city. To me it looked like a fragment of a shell from an enormous Easter egg, beautifully decorated, that had been smashed by some titanic unseen malevolency.
“War?” someone’s voice whispered plaintively. “Did they destroy themselves?”
But I knew better. And I couldn’t stand it. I turned away from the screens, away from the views of dead Jupiter, and pushed through the crowd that was still gaping stupidly at my cameras’ views. I was suffocating, strangling. I had to have fresh air or die.
I bolted out the main doors and into the corridor, empty and silent, deserted by all the people who had crammed mission control. The first outside door I could find I kicked through, heedless of the red EMERGENCY ONLY sign and the wailing alarm that hooted accusingly after me.
The brilliant late-afternoon sun surprised me, made my eyes suddenly water after the cool shadows inside the building. I took in a deep raw lungful of hot, dry desert air. It felt like brick dust, alien, as if part of me were still deeply immersed in Jupiter’s mighty ocean.
“It’s all ruined.” Allie’s voice.
Turning, I saw that she had followed me. The tears in her eyes were not from the bright sunshine.
“All dead,” she sobbed. “The city . . . all of them . destroyed.”
“The comet,” I said. Shoemaker-Levy 9 had struck Jupiter twenty years ago with the violence of a million hydrogen bombs.
“Twenty years,” Allie moaned. “They were intelligent. We could have communicated with them!”
If we had only been twenty years earlier, I thought. Then the true horror of it struck me. What could we have told them, twenty years ago? That a shattered comet was going to rain destruction on them? That no matter what they had built, what they had learned or hoped for or prayed to, their existence was going to be wiped out forever? That there’s absolutely nothing either they or we could do about it?
“It’s cold,” Allie said, almost whimpering.
She wanted me to go to her, to hold her, to comfort her the way one warm-blooded primate ape comforts another. But what was the use? What was the use of anything?
What difference did any of it make in a world where you could spend millions of years evolving into intelligence, build a civilization, reach a peak of knowledge where you begin to study and understand the universe around you, only to learn that the universe can destroy you utterly, without remorse, without the slightest shred of hope for salvation?
