‘I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn’t possibly survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved forward – bits were breaking off like glass – but it was still advancing toward the ship, a black tidal wave, slowing down all the time.
‘I was still so surprised that I couldn’t think straight and I couldn’t imagine what it was trying to do…’
‘Is there any way we can call him back?’ Floyd whispered urgently.
‘No – it’s too late. Europa will soon be behind Jupiter. We’ll have to wait until it comes out of eclipse.’
‘… climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold – the way termites protect themselves from the sunlight with their little corridors of mud.
‘… tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle – all in slow motion, like a dream.
‘Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the thing was trying to do – and then it was too late. We could have saved ourselves – if we’d only switched off those lights.
‘Perhaps it’s a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered by the sunlight that filters through the icc, Or it could have been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must have been more brilliant than anything that Europa has ever known.
‘Then the ship crashed. I saw the hull split, a cloud of snowflakes form as moisture condensed. All the lights went out, except for one, swinging back and forth on a cable a couple of metres above the ground.
‘I don’t know what happened immediately after that. The next thing I remember, I was standing under the light, beside the wreck of the ship, with a fine powdering of fresh snow all around me. I could see my footsteps in it very clearly. I must have run there; perhaps only a minute or two had elapsed.
‘The plant – I still thought of it as a plant – was motionless. I wondered if it had been damaged by the impact; large sections – as thick as a man’s arm – had splintered off, like broken twigs.
‘Then the main trunk started to move again. It pulled away from the hull, and began to crawl toward me. That was when I knew for certain that the thing was light-sensitive: I was standing immediately under the thousand watt lamp, which had stopped swinging now.
‘Imagine an oak tree – better still, a banyan with its multiple trunks and roots – flattened out by gravity and trying to creep along the ground. It got to within five metres of the light, then started to spread out until it had made a perfect circle around me. Presumably that was the limit of its tolerance – the point at which photo-attraction turned to repulsion. After that, nothing happened for several minutes. I wondered if it was dead – frozen solid at last.
‘Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers opening. In fact I thought they were flowers – each about as big as a man’s head.
‘Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to unfold. Even then, it occurred to me that no one – no thing – could ever have seen these colours before; they had no existence until we brought our lights – our fatal lights – to this world.
‘Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly… I walked over to the living wall that surrounded me, so that I could see exactly what was happening. Neither then, nor at any other time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain that it was not malevolent – if indeed it was conscious at all.
‘There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of unfolding. Now they reminded me of butterflies, just emerging from the chrysalis – wings crumpled, still feeble – I was getting closer and closer to the truth.
‘But they were freezing – dying as quickly as they formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like fish stranded on dry land – at last I realized exactly what they were. Those membranes weren’t petals – they were fins, or their equivalent. This was the free-swimming, larval stage of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on the seabed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of new territory. Just like the corals of Earth’s oceans.
‘I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now to a drab brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly, and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it sensed my presence.
‘Then I noticed that the stamens – as I’d called them – all carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny star sapphires – or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop – aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I watched, the vivid blue faded, the sapphires became dull, ordinary stones.
‘Dr Floyd – or anyone else, who is listening – I haven’t much more time; Jupiter will soon block my signal. But I’ve almost finished.
‘I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.
‘I wondered if it was too late. For a few minutes, nothing happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches around me, and kicked it.
‘Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to retreat back to the Canal. There was plenty of light – I could see everything perfectly. Ganymede and Callisto were in the sky – Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent – and there was a big auroral display on the nightside, at the Jovian end of the Io flux tube. There was no need to use my helmet light.
‘I followed the creature all the way back to the water, encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down, feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath my boots… as it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain strength and energy, as if it knew that it was approaching its natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.
‘It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bubbled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to see if there was anything to salvage – I don’t want to talk about that.
‘I’ve only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they’ll name it after me.
‘And – when the next ship comes home – ask them to take our bones back to China.
‘Jupiter will be cutting us off in a few minutes. I wish I knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I’ll repeat this message when we’re in line of sight again – if my suit’s life-support system lasts that long.
‘This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the destruction of spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice -,
The signal faded abruptly, came back for a moment, then disappeared completely be1ow the noise level. Although Leonov listened again on the same frequency, there was no further message from Professor Chang.
III
DISCOVERY
12
Downhill Run
The ship was gaining speed at last, on the downhill run toward Jupiter. It had long since passed the gravitational no-man’s-land where the four tiny outer moons – Sinope, Pasiphae, Ananke, and Carme – wobbled along their retrograde and wildly eccentric orbits. Undoubtedly captured asteroids, and completely irregular in shape, the largest was only thirty kilometres across. Jagged, splintered rocks of no interest to anyone except planetary geologists, their allegiance wavered continually between the Sun and Jupiter. One day, the Sun would recapture them completely.
But Jupiter might retain the second group of four, at half the distance of the others. Elara, Lysithea, Himalia, and Leda were fairly close together, and lying in almost the same plane. There was speculation that they had once been part of a single body; if so, the parent would have been barely a hundred kilometres across.
Though only Carme and Leda came close enough to show disks visible to the naked eye, they were greeted like old friends. Here was the first landfall after the longest ocean voyage – the offshore islands of Jupiter. The last hours were ticking away; the most critical phase of the entire mission was approaching – the entry into the Jovian atmosphere.