“The Red Spot area,” said Flandry. “Or, rather, the fringe of it. We must be on an outlying berg, or whatever the deuce they’re called.”
“Our guide appears to have abandoned us, sir.”
“Hell, he got us into this mess. On purpose! I now know for a fact there’s at least one Ymirite working for the enemy—whoever the enemy is. But the information won’t be much use if we become a pair of grease spots.”
The ship shuddered and canted. Flandry grabbed a stanchion for support, eased himself down on the bunk, and said, very quickly, for destruction roared around him:
“You’ve seen the Red Spot from space, Chives. It’s been known for a long time, even before space travel, that it’s a … a mass of aerial pack ice. Lord, what a fantastic place to die! What happens is that at a certain height in the Jovian atmosphere, the pressure allows a red crystalline form of ice—not the white stuff we splash whisky onto, or the black allotrope down at the surface, or the super-dense variety in the mantle around the Jovian core. Here the pressure is right for red ice, and the air density is identical, so it floats. An initial formation created favorable conditions for the formation of more … so it accumulated in this one region, much as polar caps build up on cozier type planets. Some years a lot of it melts away—changes phase—the Red Spot looks paler from outside. Other years you get a heavy pile-up, and Jupiter seems to have a moving wound. But always, Chives, the Red Spot is a pack of flying glaciers, stretching broader than all Terra. And we’ve been crashed on one of them!”
“Then our present situation can scarcely be accidental, sir,” nodded Chives imperturbably. “I daresay, with all the safety precautions built into this ship, Horx thought this would be the only way to destroy us without leaving evidence. He can claim a stray berg was tossed in our path, or some such tale.” Chives sniffed. “Not sportsmanlike at all, sir. Just what one would expect of a … a native.”
The cabin yawed. Flandry caught himself before he fell out of the bunk. At this gravity, to stumble across the room would be to break a leg. Thunders rolled. White vapors hissed up against crimson in the surviving screen.
“I’m not on to these scientific esoterica,” said Flandry. His chest pumped, strugging to supply oxygen for muscles toiling under nearly three times their normal weight. Each rib felt as if cast in lead. “But I’d guess what is happening is this. We maintain a temperature in here which for Jupiter is crazily high. So we’re radiating heat, which makes the ice go soft and—We’re slowly sinking into the berg.” He shrugged and got out a cigaret.
“Is that wise, sir?” asked Chives.
“The oxygen recyclers are still working,” said Flandry. “It’s not at all stuffy in here. Air is the least of our worries.” His coolness cracked over, he smote a fist on the wall and said between his teeth: “It’s this being helpless! We can’t go out of the cabin, we can’t do a thing but sit here and take it!”
“I wonder, sir.” Slowly, his thin face sagging with gravity, Chives pulled himself to the pack of equipment. He pawed through it. “No, sir. I regret to say I took no radio. It seemed we could communicate through the pilot.” He paused. “Even if we did find a way to signal, I daresay any Ymirite who received our call would merely interpret it as random static.”
Flandry stood up, somehow. “What do we have?” A tiny excitement shivered along his nerves. Outside, Jupiter boomed at him.
“Various detectors, sir, to check for installations. A pair of spacesuits. Sidearms. Your burglar kit, though I confess uncertainty what value it would have here. A microrecorder. A—”
“Wait a minute!”
Flandry sprang toward his valet. The floor rocked beneath him. He staggered toward the far wall. Chives shot out his tail and helped brake the man. Shaking, Flandry eased himself down and went on all fours to the corner where the Shalmuan squatted.
He didn’t even stop to gibe at his own absent-mindedness. His heart thuttered. “Wait a minute, Chives,” he said. “We’ve got an airlock over there. Since the force-bubble necessarily reinforces its structure, it must still be intact; and its machinery can open the valves even against this outside pressure. Of course, we can’t go through ourselves. Our space armor would be squashed flat. But we can get at the mechanism of the lock. It also, by logical necessity, has to be part of the Terra-conditioned system. We can use the tools we have here to make a simple automatic cycle. First the outer valve opens. Then it shuts, the Jovian air is exhausted from the chamber and Terrestrial air replaces same. Then the valve opens again … and so on. Do you see?”