If you wish, laughed Viken.
They stood in an outer office of the xenobiology section. No one else was around, for the stations clocks said 1730 GMT and there was only one shift. No point in having more, until Angleseys half of the enterprise had actually begun gathering quantitative data.
The physicist bent over and took a paperweight off a desk. One of
the boys made this for fun, he said, but its a pretty good model of Joe. He stands about five feet tall at the head.
Cornelius turned the plastic image over in his hands. If you could imagine such a thing as a feline centaur with a thick prehensile tail
– The torso was squat, long-armed, immensely muscular; the hairless head was round, wide-nosed, with big deep-set eyes and heavy jaws, but it was really quite a human face. The over-all color was bluish gray.
Male, I see, he remarked.
Of course. Perhaps you dont understand. Joe is the complete pseudojovianas far as we can tell, the final model, with all the bugs worked out. Hes the answer to a research question that took fifty years to ask. Viken looked sidewise at Cornelius. So you realize thb importance of your job, dont you?
Ill do my best, said the psionicist. But if … well, lets say that tube failure or something causes you to lose Joe before Ive solved the oscillation problem. You do have other pseudos in reserve, dont you?
Oh, yes, said Viken moodily. But the cost. . – Were not on an unlimited budget. We do go through a lot of money, because its expensive to stand up and sneeze this far from Earth. But for that same reason our margin is slim.
He jammed hands in pockets and slouched toward the inner door, the laboratories, head down and talking in a low, hurried voice. Perhaps you dont realize what a nightmare planet Jupiter is. Not just the surface gravitya shade under three gees, whats that?but the gravitational potential, ten times Earths. The temperature. The pressure. Above all, the atmosphere, and the storms, and the darkness!
When a spaceship goes down to the Jovian surface, its a radiocontrolled job; it leaks like a sieve, to equalize pressure, but otherwise its the sturdiest, most utterly powerful model ever designed; its loaded with every instrument, every servomechanism, every safety device the human mind has yet thought up to protect a million-dollar hunk of precision equipment. And what happens? Half the ships never reach the surface at all. A storm snatches them and throws them away, or they collide with a floating chunk of Ice Sevensmall version of the Red Spotor, so help me, what passes for a flock of birds rams one and stoves it in! As for the fifty per cent which do land, its a one-way trip. We dont even try to bring them back. If the stresses coming down havent sprung something, the corrosion has
doomed them anyway. Hydrogen at Jovian pressure does funny things to metals.
It cost a total of about five million dollars to set Joe, one pseudo, down there. Each pseudo to follow will cost, if were lucky, a couple of million more.
Viken kicked open the door and led the way through. Beyond was a big room, low-ceilinged, coldly lit and murmurous with ventilators. It reminded Cornelius of a nucleonics lab; for a moment he wasnt sure why, then he recognized the intricacies of remote control, remote observation, walls enclosing forces which could destroy the entire moon.
These are required by the pressure, of course, said Viken, pointing to a row of shields. And the cold. And the hydrogen itself, as a minor hazard. We have units here duplicating conditions in the Jovian, uh, stratosphere. This is where the whole project really began.
Ive heard something about that. Didnt you scoop up airborne spores?
Not I. Viken chuckled. Tottis crew did, about fifty years ago. Proved there was life on Jupiter. A life using liquid methane as its basic solvent, solid ammonia as a starting point for nitrate synthesis:
the plants use solar energy to build unsaturated carbon compounds, releasing hydrogen; the animals eat the plants and reduce those compounds again to the saturated form. There is even an equivalent of combustion. The reactions involve complex enzymes andwell, its out of my line.