“And yet I glanced at the pictures taken out near Vixen, just before we left. And Fenross, may he fry, is right. Those blunt ships were made on a planet similar to Terra, but they have Ymirite lines … the way the first Terran automobiles had the motor in front, because that was where the horse used to be … It could be coincidence, I suppose. Or a red herring. Or — I don’t know. How am I supposed to find out, one man on a planet with ten times the radius of Terra? Judas!” He drained his glass and held it out again.
Chives refilled, then went back to the clothes locker. “A white scarf or a blue?” he mused. “Hm, yes, I do believe the white, sir.”
The flitter plunged onward. Flandry needed a soberjolt by the time he had landed on Ganymede.
There was an established procedure for such a visit. It hadn’t been used for decades, Flandry had had to look it up, but the robot station still waited patiently between rough mountains. He presented his credentials, radio contact was made with the primary planet, unknown messages traveled over its surface. A reply was quick: yes, Captain, the governor can receive you. A spaceship is on its way, and will be at your disposal.
Flandry looked out at the stony desolation of Ganymede. It was not long before a squat, shimmering shape had made grav-beam descent. A tube wormed from its lock to the flitter’s. Flandry sighed. “Let’s go,” he said, and strolled across. Chives trotted after with a burden of weapons, tools, and instruments — none of which were likely to be much use. There was a queasy moment under Ganymede’s natural gravity, then they had entered the Terra-conditioned bubble.
It looked like any third-class passenger cabin, except for the outmoded furnishings and a bank of large viewscreens. Hard to believe that this was only the material inner lining of a binding-force field: that that same energy, cousin to that which held the atomic nucleus together, was all which kept this room from being crushed beneath intolerable pressure. Or, at the moment, kept the rest of the spaceship from exploding outward. The bulk of the vessel was an alloy of water, lithium, and metallic hydrogen, stable only under Jovian surface conditions.
Flandry let Chives close the airlock while he turned on the screens. They gave him a full outside view. One remained blank, a communicator, the other showed the pilot’s cabin.
An artificial voice, ludicrously sweet in the style of a century ago, said: “Greeting, Terran. My name, as nearly as it may be rendered in sonic equivalents, is Horx. I am your guide and interpreter while you remain on Jupiter.”
Flandry looked into the screen. The Ymirite didn’t quite register on his mind. His eyes weren’t trained to those shapes and proportions, seen by that weirdly shifting red-blue-brassy light. (Which wasn’t the real thing, even, but an electronic translation. A human looking straight into the thick Jovian air would only see darkness.) “Hello, Horx,” he said to the great black multi-legged shape with the peculiarly tendrilled heads. He wet his lips, which seemed a bit dry. “I, er, expect you haven’t had such an assignment before in your life.”
“I did several times, a hundred or so Terra-years ago,” said Horx casually. He didn’t seem to move, to touch any controls, but Ganymede receded in the viewscreens and raw space blazed forth. “Since then I have been doing other work.” Hesitation.
Or was it? At last: “Recently, though, I have conducted several missions to our surface.”
“What?” choked Flandry.
“Merseian,” said Horx. “You may inquire of the governor if you wish.” He said nothing else the whole trip.
Jupiter, already big in the screen, became half of heaven. Flandry saw blots march across its glowing many-colored face, darknesses which were storms that could have swallowed all Terra. Then the sight was lost; he was dropping through the atmosphere. Still thee step-up screens tried loyally to show him something: he saw clouds of ammonia crystals, a thousand kilometers long, streaked with strange blues and greens that were free-radicals; he saw lightning leap across a purple sky, and the distant yellow flare of sodium explosions. As he descended, he could even feel, very dimly, the quiver of the ship under enormous winds, and hear the muffled shriek and thunder of the air.
They circled the night side, still descending, and Flandry saw a methane ocean, beating waves flattened by pressure and gravity against a cliff of black allotropic ice, which crumbled and was lifted again even as he watched. He saw an endless plain where things half trees and half animals — except that they were neither, in any Terrestrial sense — lashed snaky fronds after ribbon-shaped flyers a hundred meters in length. He saw bubbles stream past on a red wind, and they were lovely in their myriad colors and they sang in thin crystal voices which somehow penetrated the ship. But they couldn’t be true bubbles at this pressure. Could they?
A city came into view, just beyond the dawn line. If it was a city. It was, at least, a unified structure of immense extent, intricate with grottos and arabesques, built low throughout but somehow graceful and gracious. On Flandry’s screen its color was polished blue. Here and there sparks and threads of white energy would briefly flash. They hurt his eyes. There were many Ymirites about, flying on their own wings or riding in shell-shaped power gliders. You wouldn’t think of Jupiter as a planet where anything could fly, until you remembered the air density; then you realized it was more a case of swimming.
The spaceship came to a halt, hovering on its repulsor field. Horx said: “Governor Thua.”
Another Ymirite squatted suddenly in the outside communication screen. He held something which smoked and flickered from shape to shape. The impersonally melodious robot voice said for him, under the eternal snarling of a wind which would have blown down anything men could build; “Welcome. What is your desire?”
The old records had told Flandry to expect brusqueness. It was not discourtesy; what could a human and an Ymirite make small talk about? The man puffed a cigaret to nervous life and said: “I am here on an investigative mission for my government.” Either these beings were or were not already aware of the Vixen situation; if not, then they weren’t allies of Merseia and would presumably not tell. Or if they did, what the devil difference? Flandry explained…
Thua said at once, “You seem to have very small grounds for suspecting us. A mere similarity of appearances and nuclear technology is logically insufficient.”
“I know,” said Flandry, “It could be a fake.”
“It could even be that one or a few Ymirite individuals have offered advice to the entities which instigated this attack,” said Thua. You couldn’t judge from the pseudo-voice, but he seemed neither offended nor sympathetic: just monumentally uninterested. “The Dispersal has been nonstimulate as regards individuals for many cycles. However, I cannot imagine what motive an Ymirite would have for exerting himself on behalf of oxygen breathers. There is no insight to be gained from such acts, and certainly no material profit.”
“An aberrated individual?” suggested Flandry with little hope. “Like a man poking an anthill — an abode of lesser animals — merely to pass the time?”
“Ymirites do not aberrate in such fashion,” said Thua stiffly.
“I understand there’ve been recent Merseian visits here.”
“I was about to mention that. I am doing all I can to assure both empires of Ymir’s strict neutrality. It would be a nuisance if either attacked us and forced us to exterminate their species.”
Which is the biggest brag since that fisherman who caught the equator, thought Flandry, or else is sober truth. He said aloud, choosing his words one by one: “What, then, were the Merseians doing here?”