Cold as Ice (33 page)

"But I have to stay, Nell," Jon whispered. "I'll be heading for the
Spindrift
in an hour or two. If you want me to have another try at persuading Dr. Brandt for you—"

"Waste of time. Look at her."

Jon stared at Hilda Brandt's relaxed, kindly face. "She looks approachable enough to me."

"That's because you don't know her. She's
approachable
, but she won't say yes."

"Well, if you want to take a few minutes with me, right now—"

"Why, Jon! You want a quickie? Lovely idea, but I don't think so. I gave those up ten years ago. Now I really like to
wallow
." Nell reached out to pat his cheek. "There, I've shocked you."

"I didn't mean
that
!"

"I know you didn't. You're Mister Innocent. It's just my lewd mind, and I must say that I'm tempted. I want to see you
bare
." Nell hesitated, and finally shook her head. "No. You go do your thing in the
Spindrift,
and keep those sexy hands on the controls. But remember, I'll be back—as soon as I can find a way to wangle it. Europa is where the action is."

* * *

Just my lewd mind.
Jon decided he liked that. He had never known a woman who talked so, at least not to him. He thought about Nell all the way to Blowhole. How had he been smart enough to catch her? And why did
she
call
him
"Mister Innocent?" He was quite experienced, not innocent at all.

When at last he was on Blowhole's descending ramp of ice, he realized that Hilda Brandt had been wiser than he knew. The preliminary descent that he and Wilsa Sheer had made in the
Danae
, at the time unnecessary in Jon's mind, allowed him now to concentrate on the
Spindrift
rather than worry about what came later.

And he
needed
to concentrate. By Europan standards he was an experienced operator of the Blowhole system, so no one had been sent to help him with the ice-to-water launch. But part of his mind was still with Nell.

They were going to be with each other for a long time. They were going to share many wonderful years.

Unless thinking about her killed him first.

He looked up from the ice and found the
Spindrift
moving away from him. But its balance was quite different from the
Danae
's, and as a result he had placed the towing grapnels in the wrong place. The rounded, transparent vessel was tilting far forward. Chasing after it and correcting the list, he misjudged the amount of time left to him. When he looked up again the submersible was halfway along the ice ramp, its hatch wide open. He had to hop aboard and batten down when the submersible was on its last thirty meters of the inclined runway. Even then the seals did not seat cleanly. They finally came into alignment when water was already lapping at the vessel's base.

Then at last the
Spindrift
was balanced and free, gliding smoothly off the ice slipway and into the calm waters of Blowhole. For the first five minutes Jon allowed the submersible to fall uncontrolled, down through the thick-ribbed ice shield that girded Europa. Not until he passed the frozen lower boundary, where the pressure was already up to fifteen Earth atmospheres, did he lift his eyes from the gauges and monitors.

The only thing to strike him as out of place was the unfamiliar green of the pressure/depth indicator. That display had been modified, to change from the tenth of an atmosphere per meter pressure increase of Earth to the puny eightieth of an atmosphere increase per meter appropriate to Europa.

Puny—except that Jon was heading for black depths unheard of in Earth's oceans. More from habit than need (he knew by instinct where he was, and where he was going) he checked the inertial navigation system. Satisfied, he set an unhurried course for Scaldino: forty-seven kilometers down, water pressure six hundred Earth atmospheres. A high-pressure region even by Earth's standards.

He glanced at the new gauge.
Present depth: five and a half kilometers. Pressure: eighty-six atmospheres.

He sent one of the free-swimmers ahead of the vessel and turned on its lights. The water was less clear than he remembered it from his last trip. Either the level of upwelling here was higher, or debris was melting out and falling from the bottom of the ice layer far above. That happened on Earth, too, in the Arctic Ocean. There was one huge difference here. The cloudiness in the Europan water could be from any sort of inorganic compound, but it could not be from the fascinating assorted detritus of living things, the miscellany that made every scoop of Earth water an experiment, a sample that might contain a previously unclassified species of life.

Jon wanted to examine as much of the seabed as possible on the way to Scaldino. He allowed the
Spindrift
to fall until he was within thirty meters of the bottom and could see the floor's jagged contours easily in the clear water. Spikes of rock like blue and black sharks'-teeth jutted dangerously up toward the transparent hull of his vessel. The route was taking him past a northern underwater continuation of Mount Ararat. He skirted the flat, rocky table, which according to his charts rose in places all the way through the ice layer to within a couple of hundred meters of the surface of Europa.

Melt the blanket of ice and it would turn to water, with only nine-tenths of its original volume. The surface level would fall, perhaps far enough to leave this rock table exposed.

Jon thought of the Mobarak fusion project. Its success would turn near-surface submarine shelves like this one into prime candidates for life, abundant life like the coral colonies that populated the underwater shelves of Earth.

And if that happened, could native life compete? Given even minimal warmth and light, Earth's life was vigorous, tenacious, uncompromising. Europa's life might survive only if it were protected by inaccessibility, isolated by fifty kilometers of ocean.

Depth: nineteen kilometers. Pressure: two hundred and sixty atmospheres.

Thinking of the fusion project, Jon's thoughts moved to Camille. Her arrival at Europa on Mobarak's behalf, and her odd disappearance and reappearance, had drawn the others to the moon. They had now retreated to Ganymede, leaving Jon with the uncomfortable feeling that he had missed something important.

He was reminded of another experience, two years earlier. While working the slopes of the PacAnt Ridge in the
Spindrift
he had been following the glowing, yellow-green lights of a great colony of
Spirula
squid, all the way from a kilometer's depth up to within a couple of hundred meters of the ocean's surface. Because he had been below for two days without surface communication, he had not heard about the soliton. A gigantic isolated wave, over fifty meters high and a thousand kilometers long, had been sweeping across the whole southern Pacific, its course uninterrupted by land masses. While Jon was observing
Spirula
, the main crest of the soliton had moved right above him.

Although the solitary wave carried within it uncountable gigawatts of energy, Jon and the
Spindrift
were quite safe. The soliton was so broad that even the floating bases, out on the open surface, had been lifted effortlessly, up and up, and just as easily lowered.

But now Jon's built-in sense of absolute location caught the inexplicable lift and settling of the
Spindrift.
Even before his instruments confirmed the movement and the pressure change, the hair on the nape of his neck stood on end. Here was something profoundly unsettling: an unseen force that could arrive unannounced, quietly do its powerful work, and vanish just as silently and mysteriously.

But why did he think of that
now
, with reference not to the Europan ocean, but to the events on Mount Ararat? Because, momentarily, he had been filled with the same sense of great forces, poised to produce great effects. But like the soliton, those forces had moved on, their energies undissipated, leaving no sign behind that they had ever been. Leaving nothing but that sense of unease, of uncanny powers beyond control . . .

Depth: forty-five kilometers. Pressure: five hundred and seventy atmospheres.

The jagged rock spears were gone, replaced by a smooth, powdery surface, a snowfield of pale blue that ran on as far as the
Spindrift
's lights could follow. No human had ever penetrated so deep into the pure liquid globe of Europa's ocean. Scaldino was supposed to be two kilometers deeper, and according to Jon's data readout the vent was less than one kilometer ahead. But the blue plain in front of him was uniformly flat.

Something had to change. Jon switched to ultrasonic imaging and caught a first glimpse of it. Not far ahead of the submersible the plain showed a crack, as straight and clean and narrow as a ruled line. He reduced speed and eased the
Spindrift
forward.

Two minutes later he was hovering on the brink of a sharp-edged crevasse, less than three hundred meters wide. The external water temperature was an extraordinary twenty degrees Celsius. Room temperature. This was the top of Scaldino, Europa's warmest known vent. The bottom must be even hotter.

Jon set the swimmers for pulsed laser production and moved to high-resolution imaging mode. Brief flashes of light provided him with snapshot glimpses of stark, vertical walls that plunged toward an unseen floor. He set the
Spindrift
to hold at a constant fifteen meters from the cliff face and began to cruise back and forth in five-kilometer sweeps, slowly descending.

He saw nothing of note. After the first hour he began to feel that the search was ridiculous. He was attempting the impossible. To hope to find an isolated pinpoint of life in the twenty-five million square kilometers of Europan seabed . . .

Except that the
Spindrift
was being vectored by an invisible pointer of heat flow. The submersible followed the temperature gradient, along and down the fissure. The external readings rose steadily. To thirty degrees Celsius. To forty. By Europan standards the heat within this rocky cleft was incredible, above blood heat. And Jon's instruments showed that the composition of the ambient water and of the sea cliff was perfect for the development of life: carbonates, sulfur, phosphorites, magnesium. The ingredients were all here, in abundance.

But, of course, life was far more than the right ingredients. Had Shelley Solbourne found merely the components, and mistakenly assumed that their presence and proportions automatically established the existence of living organisms?

He moved on, timing the blinking of his eyes to avoid missing the regular flashes of illumination.

Quite suddenly, at the end of the third hour, the evidence appeared.

Jon brought the submersible to a halt. In one pulse of light from the free-swimmers, he glimpsed a granular cluster of nodules clinging to the wall of the cliff. They were pale blue and rounded. Hair-thin tendrils emerging from their centers floated in the warm water, gently waving as they winnowed the upward current.

Shelley Solbourne had not been mistaken.

Life!

The nodules were tiny, the biggest one less than half a centimeter across. Jon did not orry about that. Size was meaningless. Back on Earth, humans happened to be giants, but almost all of the other forms on the planet were at the millimeter level and smaller.

He used the
SpindriftSpindrift's
remote handlers to detach, clip free, and store half a dozen of the little rounded shells. That was more than enough to provide the data he had come for, and he did not want to disturb a possibly delicate local balance.

He continued down, until upwelling material turned the water around the
Spindrift
to a murky soup through which the swimmers' lights could penetrate only a meter or two. The ultrasonics showed that the cleft was narrowing, to the point where the submersible could go no farther. The water temperature had stabilized at close to forty-three degrees Celsius. It was rich in minerals.

Jon took the
Spindrift
across the few meters to the other wall and increased the buoyancy a fraction. The submersible began to drift upward. Halfway to the lip of the pale-blue plain, he paused again. The smooth cliff face had given way to multiple broken strata whose uneven edges created a series of horizontal cracks. Each of the ledges thus formed was covered by a mass of fat, stubby worms, the biggest of which was as thick as Jon's forearm. The creatures were banded with vivid blue and yellow, like colorful leeches, and they pulsed in a lazy, rhythmic pattern of expansion and contraction, so slowly that it was necessary to watch for minutes to detect movement.

So Europa had its own giants. Jon used the waldoes to tease the writhing bundles delicately apart and placed half a dozen of the monster annelids into the
Spindrift
's pressurized storage units. They would be safe there, even when he returned to the surface and began to analyze them.

Maybe that had been the problem when Shelley Solbourne discovered the Europan life forms. Without pressure storage, the finds would disintegrate and be lost when they were raised. But why hadn't she tried again, making her own sealed containers? That's certainly what he would have done.

Jon stopped trying to second-guess Shelley's motives. He already knew that she was a badly screwed-up lady. Anyway, he was moving up onto his own plane of exultation.
Life on Europa!
There might be a hundred, a thousand, other hydrothermal vents here, each with its own living forms. There might also be hidden-away, far-off life lurking inside the icy snowballs of the Oort Cloud, or on the Earthlike worlds that orbited the suns of Eta Cassiopeiae. There might even be free-space lifeforms, unattached to any parent world.

But Jon was the first human to prove that there was native life on another world and to observe it at close range. He would be the first to return those forms for scientific examination, the first to name them, to establish their taxonomy, to
study
them.

And suddenly his time in the deep ocean was no longer a pleasure. He wanted to begin his investigations. The
Spindrift
was a wonderful vehicle, but the powers of analysis that it offered were limited. They did not allow him to determine cell structure, or to explore cell chemistry. He could not map major organic functions, from digestion to reproduction. He could not look at growth rates, or heat balance, or energy-production mechanisms. For those, he needed microscopes, genomers, low-energy lasers, restriction enzymes. He needed Mount Ararat, and the controlled and precise environment of a pressure lab.