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“Jovian biochemistry is pretty well understood, then.”

“Oh, yes. Even in Totti’s day they had a highly developed biotic technology: Earth bacteria had already been synthesized and most gene structures pretty well mapped. The only reason it took so long to diagram Jovian life processes was the technical difficulty, high pressure and so on.”

“When did you actually get a look at Jupiter’s surface?”

“Gray managed that, about thirty years ago. Set a televisor ship down, a ship that lasted long enough to flash him quite a series of pictures. Since then, the technique has improved. We know that Jupiter is crawling with its own weird kind of life, probably more fertile than Earth. Extrapolating from the airborne micro-organisms, our team made trial syntheses of metazoans and—”

Viken sighed. “Damn it, if only there were intelligent native life! Think what they could tell us, Cornelius, the data, the—just think back

how far we’ve gone since Lavoisier, with the low-pressure chemistry of Earth. Here’s a chance to learn a high-pressure chemistry and physics at least as rich with possibilities!”

After a moment, Cornelius murmured slyly, “Are you certain there aren’t any Jovians?”

“Oh, sure, there could be several billion of them.” Viken shrugged. “Cities, empires, anything you like. Jupiter has the surface area of a hundred Earths, and we’ve only seen maybe a dozen small regions. But we do know there aren’t any Jovians using radio. Considering their atmosphere, it’s unlikely they ever would invent it for themselves—imagine how thick a vacuum tube has to be, how strong a pump you need! So it was finally decided we’d better make our own Jovians.”

Cornelius followed him through the lab into another room. This was less cluttered, it had a more finished appearance; the experimenter’s haywire rig had yielded to the assured precision of an engineer.

Viken went over to one of the panels which lined the walls and looked at its gauges. “Beyond this lies another pseudo,” he said. “Female, in this instance. She’s at a pressure of two hundred atmospheres and a temperature of 194 absolute. There’s a … an umbilical arrangement, I guess you’d call it, to keep her alive. She was grown to adulthood in this, uh, fetal stage—we patterned our Jovians after the terrestrial mammal. She’s never been conscious, she won’t ever be till she’s ‘born.’ We have a total of twenty males and sixty females waiting here. We can count on about half reaching the surface. More can be created as required. It isn’t the pseudos that are so expensive, it’s their transportation. So Joe is down there alone till we’re sure that his kind can survive.”

“I take it you experimented with lower forms first,” said Cornelius.

“Of course. It took twenty years, even with forced-catalysis techniques, to work from an artificial airborne spore to Joe. We’ve used the psibeam to control everything from pseudo insects on up. Interspecies control is possible, you know, if your puppet’s nervous system is deliberately designed for it and isn’t given a chance to grow into a pattern different from the esman’s.”

“And Joe is the first specimen who’s given trouble?”

“Yes.”

“Scratch one hypothesis.” Cornelius sat down on a workbench,

dangling thick legs and running a hand through thin sandy hair. “I thought maybe some physical effect of Jupiter was responsible. Now it looks as if the difficulty is with Joe himself.”

“We’ve all suspected that much,” said Viken. He struck a cigarette and sucked in his cheeks around the smoke. His eyes were gloomy. “Hard to see how. The biotics engineers tell me Pseudocentaurus sapiens has been more carefully designed than any product of natural evolution.”

“Even the brain?”

“Yes. It’s patterned directly on the human, to make psibeam control possible, but there are improvements—greater stability.”

“There are still the psychological aspects, though,” said Cornelius. “In spite of all our amplifiers and other fancy gadgets, psi is essentially a branch of psychology, even today-or maybe it’s the other way around. Let’s consider traumatic experiences. I take it the … the adult Jovian fetus has a rough trip going down?”

“The ship does,” said Viken. “Not the pseudo itself, which is wrapped up in fluid just like you were before birth.”