Jupiter was already larger than the Moon in the skies of Earth, and the giant inner satellites could be clearly seen moving around it. They all showed noticeable disks and distinctive colouring, though they were still too far away for any markings to be visible. The eternal ballet they performed – disappearing behind Jupiter, reappearing to transit the daylight face with their accompanying shadows – was an endlessly engaging spectacle. It was one that astronomers had watched ever since Galileo had first glimpsed it almost exactly four centuries ago; but the crew of Leonov were the only living men and women to have seen it with unaided eyes.
The interminable chess games had ceased; off-duty hours were spent at the telescopes, or in earnest conversation, or listening to music, usually while gazing at the view outside. And at least one shipboard romance had reached a culmination: the frequent disappearances of Max Brailovsky and Zenia Marchenko were the subject of much good-natured banter.
They were, thought Floyd, an oddly matched pair. Max was a big, handsome blond who had been a champion gymnast, reaching the finals of the 2000 Olympics. Though he was in his early thirties, he had an open-faced, almost boyish expression. This was not altogether misleading; despite his brilliant engineering record, he often struck Floyd as naive and unsophisticated – one of those people who are pleasant to talk to, but not for too long. Outside his own field of undoubted expertise he was engaging but rather shallow.
Zenia – at twenty-nine, the youngest on board – was still something of a mystery. Since no one wished to talk about it, Floyd had never raised the subject of her injuries, and his Washington sources could provide no information. Obviously she had been involved in some serious accident, but it might have been nothing more unusual than a car crash. The theory that she had been on a secret space mission – still part of popular mythology outside the USSR – could be ruled out. Thanks to the global tracking networks, no such thing had been possible for fifty years.
In addition to her physical and doubtless psychological scars, Zenia laboured under yet another handicap. She was a last-minute replacement, and everyone knew it. Irma Yakunina was to have been dietician and medical assistant aboard Leonov before that unfortunate argument with a hang-glider broke too many bones.
Every day at 1800 GMT the crew of seven plus one passenger gathered in the tiny common room that separated the flight deck from the galley and sleeping quarters. The circular table at its centre was just big enough for eight people to squeeze around; when Chandra and Curnow were revived, it would be unable to accommodate everyone, and two extra seats would have to be fitted in somewhere else.
Though the ‘Six O’Clock Soviet’, as the daily round-table conference was called, seldom lasted more than ten minutes, it played a vital role in maintaining morale. Complaints, suggestions, criticisms, progress reports – anything could be raised, subject only to the captain’s overriding veto, which was very seldom exercised.
Typical items on the non-existent agenda were requests for changes in the menu, appeals for more private communication time with Earth, suggested movie programmes, exchange of news and gossip, and good-natured needling of the heavily-outnumbered American contingent. Things would change, Floyd warned them, when his colleagues came out of hibernation, and the odds improved from I in 7 to 3 in 9. He did not mention his private belief that Curnow could outtalk or outshout any three other people aboard.
When he was not sleeping, much of Floyd’s own time was spent in the common room – partly because, despite its smallness, it was much less claustrophobic than his own tiny cubicle. It was also cheerfully decorated, all available flat surfaces being covered with photos of beautiful land and seascapes, sporting events, portraits of popular videostars, and other reminders of Earth. Pride of place, however, was given to an original Leonov painting – his 1965 study ‘Beyond the Moon’, made in the same year when, as a young lieutenant-colonel, he left Voskhod II and became the first man in history to perform an extravehicular excursions
Clearly the work of a talented amateur, rather than a professional, it showed the cratered edge of the Moon with the beautiful Sinus lridum – Bay of Rainbows – in the foreground. Looming monstrously above the lunar horizon was the thin crescent of Earth, embracing the darkened nightside of the planet. Beyond that blazed the Sun, the streamers of the corona reaching out into space for millions of kilometres around it.
It was a striking composition – and a glimpse of the future that even then lay only three years ahead. On the flight of Apollo 8, Anders, Borman and Lovell were to see this splendid sight with their unaided eyes, as they watched Earth rise above the farside on Christmas Day, 1968.
Heywood Floyd admired the painting, but he also regarded it with mixed feelings. He could not forget that it was older than everybody else on the ship – with one exception.
He was already nine years old when Alexei Leonov had painted it.
13
The Worlds of Galileo
Even now, more than three decades after the revelations of the first Voyager flybys, no one really understood why the four giant satellites differed so wildly from one another. They were all about the same size, and in the same part of the Solar System – yet they were totally dissimilar, as if children of a different birth.
Only Callisto, the outermost, had turned out to be much as expected. When Leonov raced past at a distance of just over 100,000 kilometres, the larger of its countless craters were clearly visible to the naked eye. Through the telescope, the satellite looked like a glass ball that had been used as a target by high-powered rifles; it was completely covered with craters of every size, right down to the lower limit of visibility. Callisto, someone had once remarked, looked more like Earth’s Moon than did the Moon itself.
Nor was this particularly surprising. One would have expected a world out here – at the edge of the asteroid belt – to have been bombarded with the debris left over from the creation of the Solar System. Yet Ganymede, the satellite next door, had a totally different appearance. Though it had been well peppered with impact craters in the remote past, most of them had been ploughed over – a phrase that seemed peculiarly appropriate. Huge areas of Ganymede were covered with ridges and furrows, as if some cosmic gardener had dragged a giant rake across them. And there were light-coloured streaks, like trails that might have been made by slugs fifty kilometres across. Most mysterious of all were long, meandering bands, containing dozens of parallel lines. It was Nikolai Ternovsky who decided what they must be – multilane superhighways, laid out by drunken surveyors. He even claimed to have detected over-passes and cloverleaf intersections.
Leonov had added some trillions of bits of information about Ganymede to the store of human knowledge, before it crossed the orbit of Europa. That icebound world, with its derelict and its dead, was on the other side of Jupiter, but it was never far from anyone’s thoughts.
Back on Earth, Dr Chang was already a hero and his countrymen had, with obvious embarrassment, acknowledged countless messages of sympathy. One had been sent in the name of Leonov’s crew – after, Floyd gathered, considerable redrafting in Moscow. The feeling on board the ship was ambiguous – a mixture of admiration, regret, and relief. All astronauts, irrespective of their national origins, regarded themselves as citizens of space and felt a common bond, sharing each other’s triumphs and tragedies. No one on Leonov was happy because the Chinese expedition had met with disaster; yet at the same time, there was a muted sense of relief that the race had not gone to the swiftest.
The unexpected discovery of life on Europa had added a new element to the situation – one that was now being argued at great length both on Earth and aboard Leonov. Some exobiologists cried ‘I told you so!’, pointing out that it should not have been such a surprise after all. As far back as the 1970s, research submarines had found teeming colonies of strange marine creatures thriving precariously in an environment thought to be equally hostile to life – the trenches on the bed of the Pacific. Volcanic springs, fertilizing and warming the abyss, had created oases of life in the deserts of the deep.
Anything that had happened once on Earth should be expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that was almost an article of faith among scientists. Water – or at least ice – occurred on all the moons of Jupiter. And there were continuously erupting volcanoes on Io – so it was reasonable to expect weaker activity on the world next door. Putting these two facts together made Europan life seem not only possible, but inevitable – as most of nature’s surprises are, when viewed with 20/20 hindsight.