5 – Leonov

   The months contracted to weeks, the weeks dwindled to days, the days shrivelled to hours; and suddenly Heywood Floyd was once more at the Cape – spaceward-bound for the first time since that trip to Clavius Base and the Tycho monolith, so many years ago.
   But this time he was not alone, and there was no secrecy about the mission. A few seats ahead of him rode Dr Chandra, already engaged in a dialogue with his briefcase computer, and quite oblivious to his surroundings.
   One of Floyd's secret amusements, which he had never confided to anyone, was spotting similarities between human beings and animals. The resemblances were more often flattering than insulting, and his little hobby was also a very useful aid to memory.
   Dr Chandra was easy – the adjective birdlike sprang instantly to mind. He was tiny, delicate, and all his movements were swift and precise. But which bird? Obviously a very intelligent one. Magpie? Too perky and acquisitive. Owl? No – too slow-moving. Perhaps sparrow would do nicely.
   Walter Curnow, the systems specialist who would have the formidable job of getting Discovery operational again, was a more difficult matter. He was a large, husky man, certainly not at all birdlike. One could usually find a match somewhere in the vast spectrum of dogs, but no canine seemed to fit. Of course – Curnow was a bear. Not the sulky, dangerous kind, but the friendly good-natured type. And perhaps this was appropriate; it reminded Floyd of the Russian colleagues he would soon be joining. They had been up in orbit for days, engaged in their final checks.
   This is the great moment of my life, Floyd told himself. Now I am leaving on a mission that may determine the future of the human race. But he did not feel any sense of exultation; all he could think of, during the last minutes of the countdown, were the words he had whispered just before he had left home: 'Goodbye, my dear little son; will you remember me when I return?' And he still felt resentment toward Caroline because she would not awaken the sleeping child for one final embrace; yet he knew that she had been wise, and it was better that way.
   His mood was shattered by a sudden explosive laugh; Dr Curnow was sharing a joke with his companions – as well as a large bottle that he handled as delicately as a barely subcritical mass of plutonium.
   'Hey, Heywood,' he called, 'they tell me Captain Orlova's locked up all the drinks, so this is your last chance. Château Thierry '95. Sorry about the plastic cups.'
   As Floyd sipped at the really superb champagne, he found himself cringing mentally at the thought of Curnow's guffaw reverberating all the way across the Solar System. Much as he admired the engineer's, ability, as a travelling companion Curnow might prove something of a strain. At least Dr Chandra would not present such problems; Floyd could hardly imagine him smiling, let alone laughing. And, of course, he turned down the champagne with a barely perceptible shudder. Curnow was polite enough, or glad enough, not to insist.
   The engineer was, it seemed, determined to be the life and soul of the party. A few minutes later he produced a two-octave electronic keyboard, and gave rapid renderings of 'D'ye ken John Peel' as performed successively by piano, trombone, violin, flute, and full organ, with vocal accompaniment. He was really very good, and Floyd soon found himself singing along with the others. But it was just as well, he thought, that Curnow would spend most of the voyage in silent hibernation.
   The music died with a sudden despairing discord as the engines ignited and the shuttle launched itself into the sky. Floyd was gripped by a familiar but always new exhilaration – the sense of boundless power, carrying him up and away from the cares and duties of Earth. Men knew better than they realized, when they placed the abode of the gods beyond the reach of gravity. He was flying toward that realm of weightlessness; for the moment, he would ignore the fact that out there lay not freedom, but the greatest responsibility of his career.
   As the thrust increased, he felt the weight of worlds upon his shoulders – but he welcomed it, like an Atlas who had not yet tired of his burden. He did not attempt to think, but was content to savour the experience. Even if he was leaving Earth for the last time, and saying farewell to all that he had ever loved, he felt no sadness. The roar that surrounded him was a paean of triumph, sweeping away all minor emotions.
   He was almost sorry when it ceased, though he welcomed the easier breathing and the sudden sense of freedom. Most of the other passengers started to unbuckle their safety straps, preparing to enjoy the thirty minutes of zero gravity during the transfer orbit, but a few who were obviously making the trip for the first time remained in their seats, looking around anxiously for the cabin attendants.
   'Captain speaking. We're now at an altitude of three hundred kilometres, coming up over the west coast of Africa. You won't see much as it's night down there – that glow ahead is Sierra Leone – and there's a big tropical storm over the Gulf of Guinea. Look at those flashes!
   'We'll have sunrise in fifteen minutes. Meanwhile I'm rolling the ship so you can get a good view of the equatorial satellite belt. The brightest one – almost straight overhead – is Intelsat's Atlantic-1 Antenna Farm. Then Intercosmos 2 to the west – that fainter star is Jupiter. And if you look just below that, you'll see a flashing light, moving against the star background – that's the new Chinese space-station. We pass within a hundred kilometres, not close enough to see anything with the naked eye -,
   What were they up to? Floyd thought idly. He had examined the close-ups of the squat cylindrical structure with its curious bulges, and saw no reason to believe the alarmist rumours that it was a laser-equipped fortress. But while the Beijing Academy of Science ignored the UN Space Committee's repeated requests for a tour of inspection, the Chinese only had themselves to blame for such hostile propaganda.
   The "Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov" was not a thing of beauty; but few spacecraft ever were. One day, perhaps, the human race would develop a new aesthetic; generations of artists might arise whose ideals were not based upon the natural forms of Earth moulded by wind and water. Space itself was a realm of often overpowering beauty; unfortunately, Man's hardware did not yet live up to it.
   Apart from the four huge propellant tanks, which would be dropped off as soon as the transfer orbit was achieved, Leonov was surprisingly small. From heat shield to drive units was less than fifty metres; it was hard to believe that so modest a vehicle, smaller than many commercial aircraft, could carry ten men and women halfway across the Solar System.
   But zero gravity, which made walls and roof and floor interchangeable, rewrote all the rules of living. There was plenty of room aboard Leonov even when everyone was awake at the same time, as was certainly the case at the moment. Indeed, her normal complement was at least doubled by assorted newsmen, engineers making final adjustments, and anxious officials.
   As soon as the shuttle had docked, Floyd tried to find the cabin he would share – a year hence, when he awoke – with Curnow and Chandra. When he did locate it, he discovered that it was packed so tightly with neatly labelled boxes of equipment and provisions that entry was almost impossible. He was wondering glumly how to get a foot in the door when one of the crew, launching himself skilfully from handhold to handhold, noticed Floyd's dilemma and braked to a halt.
   'Dr Floyd – welcome aboard. I'm Max Brailovsky – assistant engineer.'
   The young Russian spoke the slow, careful English of a student who had had more lessons with an electronic tutor than a human teacher. As they shook hands, Floyd matched the face and name to the set of crew biographies he had already studied: Maxim Andreievitch Brailovsky, age thirty-one, born Leningrad, specializing in structure; hobbies: fencing, skycycling, chess.
   'Glad to meet you,' said Floyd. 'But how do I get inside?'
   'Not to worry,' said Max cheerfully. 'All that will be gone when you wake up. It's – what do you say? – expendables. We'll eat your room empty by the time you need it. I promise.' He patted his stomach.
   'Fine – but meanwhile where do I put my things?' Floyd pointed to the three small cases, total mass fifty kilograms, which contained – he hoped – everything he needed for the next couple of billion kilometres. It had been no easy task, shepherding their weightless, but not inertialess, bulk through the ship's corridors with only a few collisions.
   Max took two of the bags, glided gently through the triangle formed by three intersecting girders, and dived into a small hatchway, apparently defying Newton's First Law in the process. Floyd acquired a few extra bruises while following him; after a considerable time – Leonov seemed much bigger inside than out– they arrived at a door labelled CAPTAIN, in both Cyrillic and Roman. Although he could read Russian much better than he could speak it, Floyd appreciated the gesture; he had already noticed that all ship's notices were bilingual.
   At Max's knock, a green light flashed on, and Floyd drifted inside as gracefully as he could. Though he had spoken to Captain Orlova many times, they had never before met. So he had two surprises.
   It was impossible to judge a person's real size over the viewphone; the camera somehow converted everyone to the same scale. Captain Orlova, standing – as well as one could stand in zero gravity – barely reached to Floyd's shoulders. The viewphone had also completely failed to convey the penetrating quality of those dazzling blue eyes, much the most striking feature of a face that, at the moment, could not be fairly judged for beauty.
   'Hello, Tanya,' said Floyd. 'How nice to meet at last. But what a pity about your hair.'
   They grasped both hands, like old friends.
   'And nice to have you aboard, Heywood!' answered the captain. Her English, unlike Brailovsky's, was quite fluent, though heavily accented. 'Yes, I was sorry to lose it – but hair's a nuisance on long missions, and I like to keep the local barbers away as long as possible. And my apologies about your cabin; as Max will have explained, we suddenly found we needed another ten cubic metres of storage space. Vasili and I won't be spending much time here for the next few hours – please feel free to use our quarters.'
   'Thank you. What about Curnow and Chandra?'
   'I've made similar arrangements with the crew. It may seem as if we're treating you like cargo -'
   'Not wanted on voyage.'
   'Pardon?'
   'That's a label they used to put on the baggage, in the old days of ocean travel.'
   Tanya smiled. 'It does look rather that way. But you'll be wanted all right, at the end of the trip. We're already planning your revival party.'
   'That sounds too religious. Make it – no, resurrection would be even worse! – waking-up party. But I can see how busy you are – let me dump my things and continue my grand tour.'
   'Max will show you around – take Dr Floyd to Vasili, will you? He's down in the drive unit.'
   As they drifted out of the captain's quarters, Floyd gave mental good marks to the crew-selection committee. Tanya Orlova was impressive enough on paper; in the flesh she was almost intimidating, despite her charm. I wonder what she's like, Floyd asked himself, when she loses her temper. Would it be fire or ice? On the whole, I'd prefer not to find out.
   Floyd was rapidly acquiring his space legs; by the time they reached Vasili Orlov, he was manoeuvring almost as confidently as his guide. The chief scientist greeted Floyd as warmly as his wife had.
   'Welcome aboard, Heywood. How do you feel?'
   'Fine, apart from slowly starving to death.'
   For a moment Orlov looked puzzled; then his face split into a broad smile,
   'Oh, I'd forgotten. Well, it won't be for long. In ten months' time, you can eat as much as you like.'
   Hibernators went on a low-residue diet a week in advance; for the last twenty-four hours, they took nothing but liquid. Floyd was beginning to wonder how much of his increasing light-headedness was due to starvation, how much to Curnow's champagne, and how much to zero gravity.
   To concentrate his mind, he scanned the multicoloured mass of plumbing that surrounded them.
   'So this is the famous Sakharov Drive. It's the first time I've seen a full-scale unit.'
   'It's only the fourth one ever built.'
   'I hope it works.'
   'It had better. Otherwise, the Gorky City Council will be renaming Sakharov Square again.'
   It was a sign of the times that a Russian could joke, however wryly, about his country's treatment of its greatest scientist. Floyd was again reminded of Sakharov's eloquent speech to the Academy, when he was belatedly made Hero of the Soviet Union. Prison and banishment, he had told his listeners, were splendid aids to creativity; not a few masterpieces had been born within the walls of cells, beyond the reach of the world's distractions. For that matter, the greatest single achievement of the human intellect, the Principia itself, was a product of Newton's self-imposed exile from plague-ridden London.
   The comparison was not immodest; from those years in Gorky had come not only new insights into the structure of matter and the origin of the Universe, but the plasma-controlling concepts that had led to practical thermonuclear power. The drive itself, though the best-known and most publicized outcome of that work, was merely one byproduct of that astonishing intellectual outburst. The tragedy was that such advances had been triggered by injustice; one day, perhaps, humanity would find more civilized ways of managing its affairs.
   By the time they had left the chamber, Floyd had learned more about the Sakharov Drive than he really wished to know, or expected to remember. He was well acquainted with its basic principles – the use of a pulsed thermonuclear reaction to heat and expel virtually any propellant material. The best results were obtained with pure hydrogen as a working fluid, but that was excessively bulky and difficult to store over long periods of time. Methane and ammonia were acceptable alternatives; even water could be used, though with considerably poorer efficiency.
   Leonov would compromise; the enormous liquid hydrogen tanks that provided the initial impetus would be discarded when the ship had attained the necessary speed to carry it to Jupiter. At the destination, ammonia would be used for the braking and rendezvous manoeuvres, and the eventual return to Earth.
   That was the theory, checked and rechecked in endless tests and computer simulations. But as the ill-fated Discovery had shown so well, all human plans were subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.
   'So there you are, Dr Floyd,' said an authoritative female voice, interrupting Vasili's enthusiastic explanation of magnetohydrodynamic feedback, 'Why didn't you report to me?'
   Floyd rotated slowly on his axis by gently torquing himself with one hand. He saw a massive, maternal figure wearing a curious uniform adorned with dozens of pockets and pouches; the effect was not unlike that of a Cossack trooper draped with cartridge belts.
   'Nice to meet you again, Doctor. I'm still exploring – I hope you've received my medical report from Houston.'
   'Those vets at Teague! I wouldn't trust them to recognize foot-and-mouth disease!'
   Floyd knew perfectly well the mutual respect felt between Katerina Rudenko and the Olin Teague Medical Center, even if the doctor's broad grin had not discounted her words. She saw his look of frank curiosity, and proudly fingered the webbing around her ample waist.
   'The conventional little black bag isn't very practical in zero gravity – things float out of it and aren't there when you need them. I designed this myself, it's a complete minisurgery. With this, I could remove an appendix – or deliver a baby.'
   'I trust that particular problem won't arise here.'
   'Ha! A good doctor has to be ready for everything.'
   What a contrast, thought Floyd, between Captain Orlova and Dr – or should he call her by her correct rank of Surgeon-Commander? – Rudenko. The captain had the grace and intensity of a prima ballerina; the doctor might have been the prototype of Mother Russia – stocky build, flat peasant face, needing only a shawl to complete the picture. Don't let that fool you, Floyd told himself. This is the woman who saved at least a dozen lives during the Komarov docking accident – and, in her spare time, manages to edit the Annals of Space Medicine. Consider yourself very lucky to have her aboard.
   'Now, Dr Floyd, you're going to have plenty of time later to explore our little ship. My colleagues are too polite to say this, but they've work to do and you're in the way. I'd like to get you – all three of you – nice and peaceful as quickly as we can. Then we'll have less to worry about.'
   'I was afraid of that, but I quite see your point of view. I'm ready as soon as you are.'
   'I'm always ready. Come along – please.'
   The ship's hospital was just large enough to hold an operating table, two exercise bicycles, a few cabinets of equipment, and an X-ray machine. While Dr Rudenko was giving Floyd a quick but thorough examination, she asked unexpectedly: 'What's that little gold cylinder Dr Chandra carries on the chain around his neck – some kind of communications device? He wouldn't take it off – in fact, he was almost too shy to take anything off.'
   Floyd could not help smiling; it was easy to imagine the modest Indian's reactions to this rather overwhelming lady.
   'It's a lingam.'
   'A what?'
   'You're the doctor – you ought to recognize it. The symbol of male fertility.'
   'Of course – stupid of me. Is he a practising Hindu? It's a little late to ask us to arrange a strict vegetarian diet.'
   'Don't worry – we wouldn't have done that to you without fair warning. Though he won't touch alcohol, Chandra's not fanatical about anything except computers. He once told me that his grandfather was a priest in Benares, and gave him that lingam – it's been in the family for generations.'
   Rather to Floyd's surprise, Dr Rudenko did not show the negative reaction he had expected; indeed, her expression became uncharacteristically wistful.
   'I understand his feeling. My grandmother gave me a beautiful icon – sixteenth century. I wanted to bring it – but it weighs five kilos.'
   The doctor became abruptly businesslike again, gave Floyd a painless injection with a gas-gun hypodermic, and told him to come back as soon as he was sleepy. That, she assured him, would be in less than two hours.
   'Meanwhile, relax completely,' she ordered. 'There's an observation port on this level – Station D.6. Why don't you go there?'
   It seemed a good idea, and Floyd drifted away with a docility that would have surprised his friends. Dr Rudenko glanced at her watch, dictated a brief entry into her autosec, and set its alarm thirty minutes ahead.
   When he reached the D.6 viewport, Floyd found Chandra and Curnow already there. They looked at him with a total lack of recognition, then turned once more toward the awesome spectacle outside. It occurred to Floyd – and he congratulated himself on such a brilliant observation – that Chandra could not really be enjoying the view. His eyes were tightly closed,
   A totally unfamiliar planet hung there, gleaming with glorious blues and dazzling whites. How strange, Floyd told himself. What has happened to the Earth? Why, of course – no wonder he didn't recognize it! It was upside down! What a disaster – he wept briefly for all those poor people, falling off into space..
   He barely noticed when two crew members removed Chandra's unresisting form. When they came back for Curnow, Floyd's own eyes were shut, but he was still breathing. When they returned for him, even his breathing had ceased.

II – TSIEN

6 – Awakening

   And they told us we wouldn't dream, thought Heywood Floyd, more with surprise than annoyance. The glorious pink glow that surrounded him was very soothing; it reminded him of barbecues and the crackling logs of Christmas fire. But there was no warmth; indeed, he felt a distinct though not uncomfortable coldness.
   Voices were murmuring, just too softly for him to understand the words. They became louder – but still he could not understand.
   'Surely,' he said in sudden amazement, 'I can't be dreaming in Russian!'
   'No, Heywood,' answered a woman's voice. 'You're not dreaming. It's time to get out of bed.'
   The lovely glow faded; he opened his eyes, and had a blurred glimpse of a flashlight being withdrawn from his face. He was lying on a couch, held against it by elastic webbing; figures were standing around him, but they were too out of focus to identify.
   Gentle fingers closed his eyelids and massaged his forehead.
   'Don't exert yourself. Breathe deeply... again... that's right... now how do you feel?'
   'I don't know... strange... light-headed... and hungry.'
   'That's a good sign. Do you know where you are? You can open your eyes now.'
   The figures came into focus – first Dr Rudenko, then Captain Orlova. But something had happened to Tanya since he had seen her, only an hour ago. When Floyd identified the cause, it was almost a physical shock.
   'You've grown your hair back!'
   'I hope you think it's an improvement. I can't say the same about your beard.'
   Floyd lifted his hand to his face, finding that he had to make a conscious effort to plan every stage of the movement. His chin was covered with short stubble – a two or three days' growth. In hibernation, hair grew at only a hundredth of its normal rate.
   'So I made it,' he said. 'We've arrived at Jupiter.'
   Tanya looked at him sombrely, then glanced at the doctor, who gave a barely perceptible nod.
   'No, Heywood,' she said. 'We're still a month away. Don't be alarmed – the ship's fine, and everything's running normally. But your friends in Washington have asked us to wake you up ahead of time. Something very unexpected has happened. We're in a race to reach Discovery – and I'm afraid we're going to lose.'

7 – Tsien

   When Heywood Floyd's voice came from the comset speaker, the two dolphins suddenly stopped circling around the pool and swam over to its edge. They placed their heads on the rim and stared intently at the source of the sound.
   So they recognize Heywood, thought Caroline, with a twinge of bitterness: Yet Christopher, crawling around his playpen, did not even stop playing with the colour controls of his picture book as his father's voice came loud and clear across half a billion kilometres of space.
   '... My dear, you won't be surprised to hear from me, a month ahead of schedule; you'll have known for weeks that we have company out here.
   'I still find it hard to believe; in some ways, it doesn't even make sense. They can't possibly have enough fuel for a safe return to Earth; we don't even see how they can make the rendezvous.
   'We never saw them, of course. Even at its closest, Tsien was more than fifty million kilometres away. They had plenty of time to answer our signals if they wanted to, but they ignored us completely. Now they'll be much too busy for friendly chat. In a few hours they'll hit Jupiter's atmosphere – and then we'll see how well their aerobraking system works. If it does its job, that will be good for our morale. But if it fails, well, let's not talk about that.
   'The Russians are taking it remarkably well, all things considered. They're angry and disappointed, of course – but I've heard many expressions of frank admiration. It was certainly a brilliant trick, building that ship in full view and making everyone think it was a spacestation until they hitched on those boosters.
   'Well, there's nothing we can do, except watch. And at our distance, we won't have a much better view than your best telescopes. I can't help wishing them luck, though of course I hope they leave Discovery alone. That's our property, and I bet the State Department's reminding them of it, every hour on the hour.
   'It's an ill wind – if our Chinese friends hadn't jumped the gun on us, you wouldn't have heard from me for another month. But now that Dr Rudenko's woken me up, I'll be speaking to you every couple of days.
   'After the initial shock, I'm settling down nicely– getting to know the ship and its crew, finding my space legs. And polishing up my lousy Russian, though I don't have much chance of using it – everyone insists on speaking English.
   What shocking linguists we Americans are! I sometimes feel ashamed of our chauvinism – or our laziness.
   'The standard of on-board English ranges from absolutely perfect – Chief Engineer Sasha Kovalev could earn a living as a BBC announcer – down to the if-you-talk-fast-enough-it-doesn't-matter-how-many-mistakes-you-make variety. The only one who isn't fluent is Zenia Marchenko, who replaced Irma Yakunina at the last moment. Incidentally, I'm glad to hear that Irma made a good recovery – what a disappointment that must have been! I wonder if she's started hang-gliding again.
   'And speaking of accidents, it's obvious that Zenia must also have had a very bad one. Though the plastic surgeons have done a remarkable job, you can tell that she must have been severely burned at some time. She's the baby of the crew and the others treat her with – I was going to say pity, but that's too condescending. Let's say with special kindness.
   'Maybe you're wondering how I get on with Captain Tanya. Well, I like her very much – but I'd hate to make her angry. There's no doubt exactly who runs this ship.
   'And Surgeon-Commander Rudenko – you met her at the Honolulu Aerospace Convention two years ago, and I'm sure you won't have forgotten that last party. You'll understand why we all call her Catherine the Great – behind her broad back, of course.
   'But that's enough gossip. If I run overtime, I hate to think of the surcharge. And by the way, these personal calls are supposed to be completely private. But there are a lot of links in the communications chain, so don't be surprised if you occasionally get messages by – well, another route.
   'I'll be waiting to hear from you – tell the girls I'll be speaking to them later. My love to you all – I miss you and Chris very badly. And when I get back, I promise I'll never leave again.'
   There was a brief hissing pause, then an obviously synthetic voice said: 'This terminates Transmission Four Hundred Thirty-two Stroke Seven from Spacecraft Leonov.' As Caroline Floyd switched off the speaker, the two dolphins slid beneath the surface of the pool and glided out into the Pacific, leaving scarcely a ripple in the water.
   When he realized that his friends were gone, Christopher began to cry. His mother picked him up in her arms and tried to comfort him, but it was a long time before she succeeded.

8 – Transit of Jupiter

   The image of Jupiter, with its ribbons of white cloud, its mottled bands of salmon pink, and the Great Red Spot staring out like a baleful eye, hung steady on the flight-deck projection screen. It was three-quarters full, but no one was looking at the illuminated disk; all eyes were focused on the crescent of darkness at its edge. There, over the nightside of the planet, the Chinese ship was about to meet its moment of truth.
   This is absurd, thought Floyd. We can't possibly see anything across forty million kilometres. And it doesn't matter; the radio will tell us all we want to know.
   Tsien had closed down all voice, video, and data circuits two hours before, as the long-range antennas were withdrawn into the protective shadow of the heat shield. Only the omnidirectional beacon was still transmitting, accurately pinpointing the Chinese ship's position as it plunged toward that ocean of continent-sized clouds. The shrill beep... beep... beep... was the only sound in Leonov's control room. Each of those pulses had left Jupiter more than two minutes earlier; by this time, their source might already be a cloud of incandescent gas, dispersing in the Jovian stratosphere.
   The signal was fading, becoming noisy. The beeps were getting distorted; several dropped out completely, then the sequence returned. A plasma sheath was building up around Tsien and soon would cut off all communications until the ship re-emerged. If it ever did.
   'Posmotri!' cried Max. 'There it is!'
   At first Floyd could see nothing. Then, just off the edge of the illuminated disk, he made out a tiny star – gleaming where no star could possibly be, against the darkened face of Jupiter.
   It appeared quite motionless, though he knew it must be moving at a hundred kilometres a second. Slowly it grew in brilliance; and then it was no longer a dimensionless point, but was becoming elongated. A man-made comet was streaking across the Jovian night sky, leaving a trail of incandescence thousands of kilometres in length.
   One last badly distorted and curiously drawn-out beep sounded from the tracking beacon, then only the meaningless hiss of Jupiter's own radiation, one of those many cosmic voices that had nothing to do with Man or his works.
   Tsien was inaudible, but not yet invisible. For they could see that the tiny elongated spark had indeed moved appreciably away from the sunward face of the planet and would soon disappear into the nightside. By then, if all had gone according to plan, Jupiter would have captured the ship, destroying its unwanted velocity. When it emerged from behind the giant world, it would be another Jovian satellite.
   The spark flickered out. Tsien had rounded the curve of the planet and was heading over the nightside. There would be nothing to see, or to hear, until it emerged from shadow – if all went well, in just under an hour. It would be a very long hour for the Chinese.
   To Chief Scientist Vasili Orlov and communications engineer Sasha Kovalev, the hour went extremely quickly. There was much they could learn from observations of that little star; its times of appearance and disappearance and, above all, the Doppler shift of the radio beacon gave vital information about Tsien's new orbit. Leonov's computers were already digesting the figures, and spitting out projected times of re-emergence based on various assumptions about rates of deceleration in the Jovian atmosphere.
   Vasili switched off the computer display, spun around in his chair, loosened his seat belt, and addressed the patiently waiting audience.
   'Earliest reappearance is in forty-two minutes. Why don't you spectators go for a walk, so we can concentrate on getting all this into good shape? See you in thirty-five minutes. Shoo! Nu ukhodi!'
   Reluctantly, the unwanted bodies left the bridge – but, to Vasili's disgust, everyone was back again in little more than thirty minutes. He was still chiding them for their lack of faith in his calculations when the familiar beep... beep... beep... of Tsien's tracking beacon burst from the loudspeakers.
   Vasili looked astonished and mortified, but soon joined in the spontaneous round of applause; Floyd could not see who first started the clapping. Rivals though they might be, they were all astronauts together, as far from home as any men had ever travelled – 'Ambassadors for Mankind', in the noble words of the first UN Space Treaty. Even if they did not want the Chinese to succeed, neither did they wish them to meet disaster.
   A large element of self-interest was also involved, Floyd could not help thinking. Now the odds in Leonov's own favour were significantly improved; Tsien had demonstrated that the aerobraking manoeuvre was indeed possible. The data on Jupiter was correct; its atmosphere did not contain unexpected and perhaps fatal surprises.
   'Well!' said Tanya. 'I suppose we should send them a message of congratulations. But even if we did, they wouldn't acknowledge it.'
   Some of his colleagues were still making fun of Vasili, who was staring at his computer output in frank disbelief.
   'I don't understand it!' he exclaimed. 'They should still be behind Jupiter! Sasha – give me a velocity reading on their beacon!'
   Another silent dialogue was held with the computer; then Vasili gave a long, low whistle.
   'Something's wrong. They're in a capture orbit, all right – but it won't let them make a rendezvous with Discovery. The orbit they're on now will take them way beyond Io – I'll have more accurate data when we've tracked them for another five minutes.'
   'Anyway, they must be in a safe orbit,' said Tanya. 'They can always make corrections later.'
   'Perhaps. But that could cost them days, even if they have the fuel. Which I doubt.'
   'So we may still beat them.'
   'Don't be such an optimist. We're still three weeks from Jupiter. They can make a dozen orbits before we get there, and choose the most favourable one for a rendezvous.'
   'Again – assuming that they have enough propellant.'
   'Of course. And that's something we can only make educated guesses about.'
   All this conversation took place in such rapid and excited Russian that Floyd was left far behind. When Tanya took pity on him and explained that Tsien had overshot and was heading for the outer satellites, his first reaction was: 'Then they may be in serious trouble. What will you do if they appeal for help?'
   'You must be making a joke. Can you imagine them doing that? They're much too proud. Anyway, it would be impossible. We can't change our mission profile, as you know perfectly well. Even if we had the fuel...'
   'You're right, of course; but it might be difficult to explain that to the ninety-nine per cent of the human race that doesn't understand orbital mechanics. We should start thinking about some of the political complications – it would look bad for all of us if we can't help. Vasili, will you give me their final orbit, as soon as you've worked it out? I'm going down to my cabin to do some homework.'
   Floyd's cabin, or rather one-third of a cabin, was still partly full of stores, many of them stacked in the curtained bunks that would be occupied by Chandra and Curnow when they emerged from their long slumbers. He had managed to clear a small working space for his personal effects and had been promised the luxury of another whole two cubic metres – just as soon as someone could be spared to help with the furniture removing.
   Floyd unlocked his little communications console, set the decryption keys, and called for the information on Tsien that had been transmitted to him from Washington. He wondered if his hosts had had any luck in unscrambling it; the cipher was based on the product of two hundred-digit prime numbers, and the National Security Agency had staked its reputation on the claim that the fastest computer in existence could not crack it before the Big Crunch at the end of the Universe. It was a claim that could never be proved – only disproved.
   Once again he stared intently at the excellent photographs of the Chinese ship, taken when it had revealed its true colours and was just about to leave Earth orbit. There were later shots – not so clear, because by then it had been far away from the prying cameras – of the final stage as it hurtled toward Jupiter. Those were the ones that interested him most; even more useful were the cutaway drawings and estimates of performance.
   Granted the most optimistic assumptions, it was difficult to see what the Chinese hoped to do. They must have burned up at least ninety per cent of their propellant in that mad dash across the Solar System. Unless it was literally a suicide mission – something that could not be ruled out – only a plan involving hibernation and later rescue made any sense. And Intelligence did not believe that Chinese hibernation technology was sufficiently far advanced to make that a viable option.
   But Intelligence was frequently wrong, and even more often confused by the avalanche of raw facts it had to evaluate – the 'noise' in its information circuits. It had done a remarkable job on Tsien, considering the shortness of time, but Floyd wished that the material sent to him had been more carefully filtered. Some of it was obvious junk, of no possible connection with the mission.
   Nevertheless, when you did not know what you were looking for, it was important to avoid all prejudices and preconceptions; something that at first sight seemed irrelevant, or even nonsensical, might turn out to be a vital clue.
   With a sigh, Floyd started once more to skim the five hundred pages of data, keeping his mind as blankly receptive as possible while diagrams, charts, photographs – some so smudgy that they could represent almost anything – news items, lists of delegates to scientific conferences, titles of technical publications, and even commercial documents scrolled swiftly down the high-resolution screen. A very efficient industrial espionage system had obviously been extremely busy; who would have thought that so many Japanese holomemory modules or Swiss gas-flow microcontrollers or German radiation detectors could have been traced to a destination in the dried lake bed of Lop Nor – the first milepost on their way to Jupiter?
   Some of the items must have been included by accident; they could not possibly relate to the mission. If the Chinese had placed a secret order for one thousand infrared sensors through a dummy corporation in Singapore, that was only the concern of the military; it seemed highly unlikely that Tsien expected to be chased by heat-seeking missiles. And this one was really funny – specialized surveying and prospecting equipment from Glacier Geophysics, Inc., of Anchorage, Alaska. What lamebrain imagined that a deep-space expedition would have any need – the smile froze on Floyd's lips; he felt the skin crawl on the back of his neck. My God – they wouldn't dare! But they had already dared greatly; and now, at last, everything made sense.
   He flashed back to the photos and conjectured plans of the Chinese ship. Yes, it was just conceivable – those flutings at the rear, alongside the drive deflection electrodes, would be about the right size.
   Floyd called the bridge. 'Vasili.' he said, 'have you worked out their orbit yet?'
   'Yes, I have,' the navigator replied, in a curiously subdued voice. Floyd could tell at once that something had turned up. He took a long shot.
   'They're making a rendezvous with Europa, aren't they?'
   There was an explosive gasp of disbelief from the other end.
   'Chyort voz'mi! How did you know?'
   'I didn't – I've just guessed it.'
   'There can't be any mistake – I've checked the figures to six places. The braking manoeuvre worked out exactly as they intended. They're right on course for Europa – it couldn't have happened by chance. They'll be there in seventeen hours.'
   'And go into orbit.'
   'Perhaps; it wouldn't take much propellant. But what would be the point?'
   'I'll risk another guess. They'll do a quick survey – and then they'll land.'
   'You're crazy – or do you know something we don't?'
   'No – it's just a matter of simple deduction. You're going to start kicking yourself for missing the obvious.'
   'Okay, Sherlock, why should anyone want to land on Europa? What's there, for heaven's sake?'
   Floyd was enjoying his little moment of triumph. Of course, he might still be completely wrong.
   'What's on Europa? Only the most valuable substance in the Universe.'
   He had overdone it; Vasili was no fool, and snatched the answer from his lips.
   'Of course – water!'
   'Exactly. Billions and billions of tons of it. Enough to fill up the propellant tanks – go cruising around all the satellites, and still have plenty left for the rendezvous with Discovery and the voyage home. I hate to say this, Vasili – but our Chinese friends have outsmarted us again.
   'Always assuming, of course, that they can get away with it.'

9 – The Ice of the Grand Canal

   Apart from the jet-black sky, the photo might have been taken almost anywhere in the polar regions of Earth; there was nothing in the least alien about the sea of wrinkled ice that stretched all the way out to the horizon. Only the five spacesuited figures in the foreground proclaimed that the panorama was of another world.
   Even now, the secretive Chinese had not released the names of the crew. The anonymous intruders on the frozen Europan icescape were merely the chief scientist, the commander, the navigator, the first engineer, the second engineer. It was also ironic, Floyd could not help thinking, that everyone on Earth had seen the already historic photograph an hour before it reached Leonov, so much closer to the scene. But Tsien's transmissions were relayed on such a tight beam that it was impossible to intercept them; Leonov could receive only its beacon, broadcasting impartially in all directions. Even that was inaudible more than half the time, as Europa's rotation carried it out of sight, or the satellite itself was eclipsed by the monstrous bulk of Jupiter. All the scanty news of the Chinese mission had to be relayed from Earth.
   The ship had touched down, after its initial survey, on one of the few islands of solid rock that protruded through the crust of ice covering virtually the entire moon. That ice was flat from pole to pole; there was no weather to carve it into strange shapes, no drifting snow to build up layer upon layer into slowly moving hills. Meteorites might fall upon airless Europa, but never a flake of snow. The only forces moulding its surface were the steady tug of gravity, reducing all elevations to one uniform level, and the incessant quakes caused by the other satellites as they passed and repassed Europa in their orbits. Jupiter itself, despite its far greater mass, had much less effect. The Jovian tides had finished their work aeons ago, ensuring that Europa remained locked forever with one face turned toward its giant master.
   All this had been known since the Voyager flyby missions of the 1970s, the Galileo surveys of the 1980s, and the Kepler landings of the 1990s. But, in a few hours, the Chinese had learned more about Europa than all the previous missions combined. That knowledge they were keeping to themselves; one might regret it, but few would deny that they had earned the right to do so.
   What was being denied, with greater and greater asperity, was their right to annex the satellite. For the first time in history, a nation had laid claim to another world, and all the news media of Earth were arguing over the legal position. Though the Chinese pointed out, at tedious length, that they had never signed the '02 UN Space Treaty and so were not bound by its provisions, that did nothing to quell the angry protests.
   Suddenly, Europa was the biggest news in the Solar System. And the man-on-the-spot (at least to the nearest few million kilometres) was in great demand.
   'This is Heywood Floyd, aboard Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, on course for Jupiter. But as you can well imagine, all our thoughts are now focused upon Europa.
   'At this very moment I'm looking at it through the most powerful of the ship's telescopes; under this magnification, it's ten times larger than the Moon as you see it with the naked eye. And it's a really weird sight.
   'The surface is a uniform pink, with a few small brown patches. It's covered with an intricate network of narrow lines, curling and weaving in all directions. In fact, it looks very much like a photo from a medical textbook, showing a pattern of veins and arteries.
   'A few of these features are hundreds – or even thousands – of kilometres long, and look rather like the illusory canals that Percival Lowell and other early-twentieth-century astronomers imagined they'd seen on Mars.
   'But Europa's canals aren't an illusion, though of course they're not artificial. What's more, they do contain water -or at least ice. For the satellite is almost entirely covered by ocean, averaging fifty kilometres deep.
   'Because it's so far from the sun, Europa's surface temperature is extremely low – about a hundred and fifty degrees below freezing. So one might expect its single ocean to be a solid block of ice.
   'Surprisingly, that isn't the case because there's a lot of heat generated inside Europa by tidal forces – the same forces that drive the great volcanoes on neighbouring Io.
   'So the ice is continually melting, breaking up, and freezing, forming cracks and lanes like those in the floating ice sheets in our own polar regions. It's that intricate tracery of cracks I'm seeing now; most of them are dark and very ancient – perhaps millions of years old. But a few are almost pure white; they're the new ones that have just opened up, and have a crust only a few centimetres thick.
   'Tsien has landed right beside one of these white streaks -the fifteen-hundred-kilometre-long feature that's been christened the Grand Canal. Presumably the Chinese intend to pump its water into their propellant tanks, so that they can explore the Jovian satellite system and then return to Earth. That may not be easy, but they'll certainly have studied the landing site with great care, and must know what they're doing.
   'It's obvious, now, why they've taken such a risk – and why they should claim Europa. As a refuelling point, it could be the key to the entire outer Solar System. Though there's also water on Ganymede, it's all frozen, and also less accessible because of that satellite's more powerful gravity.
   'And there's another point that's just occurred to me. Even if the Chinese do get stranded on Europa, they might be able to survive until a rescue mission is arranged. They have plenty of power, there may be useful minerals in the area – and we know that the Chinese are the experts on synthetic-food production. It wouldn't be a very luxurious life; but I have some friends who would accept it happily for that staggering view of Jupiter sprawled across the sky – the view we expect to see ourselves, in just a few days.
   'This is Heywood Floyd, saying goodbye for my colleagues and myself, aboard Alexei Leonov.'
   'And this is the bridge. Very nice presentation, Heywood. You should have been a newsman.'
   'I've had plenty of practice. Half my time was spent on PR work.'
   'PR?'
   'Public relations – usually telling politicians why they should give me more money. Something you don't have to bother about.'
   'How I wish that was true. Anyway, come up to the bridge. There's some new information we'd like to discuss with you.'
   Floyd removed his button microphone, locked the telescope into position and extricated himself from the tiny viewing blister. As he left, he almost collided with Nikolai Temovsky, obviously on a similar mission.
   'I'm about to steal your best quotes for Radio Moscow, Woody. Hope you don't mind.'
   'You're welcome, tovarishch. Anyway, how could I stop you?'
   Up on the bridge, Captain Orlova was looking thoughtfully at a dense mass of words and figures on the main display. Floyd had painfully started to transliterate them when she interrupted him.
   'Don't worry about the details. These are estimates of the time it will take for Tsien to refill its tanks and get ready for lift-off.'
   'My people are doing the same calculations – but there are far too many variables.'
   'We think we've removed one of them. Did you know that the very best water pumps you can buy belong to fire brigades? And would you be surprised to learn that the Beijing Central Station had four of its latest models suddenly requisitioned a few months ago, despite the protests of the mayor?'
   'I'm not surprised – merely lost in admiration. Go on, please.'
   'That may be a coincidence, but those pumps would be just the right size. Making educated guesses about pipe deployment, drilling through the ice and so on – well, we think they could lift off again in five days.'
   'Five days!'
   'If they're lucky, and everything works perfectly. And if they don't wait to fill their propellant tanks but merely take on just enough for a safe rendezvous with Discovery before we do. Even if they beat us by a single hour, that would be enough. They could claim salvage rights, at the very least.'
   'Not according to the State Department's lawyers. At the appropriate moment, we'll declare that Discovery is not a derelict, but has merely been parked until we can retrieve it. Any attempt to take over the ship would be an act of piracy.'
   'I'm sure the Chinese will be most impressed.'
   'If they're not, what can we do about it?'
   'We outnumber them – and two to one, when we revive Chandra and Curnow.'
   'Are you serious? Where are the cutlasses for the boarding party?'
   'Cutlasses?'
   'Swords – weapons.'
   'Oh. We could use the laser telespectrometer. That can vaporize milligram asteroid samples at ranges of a thousand kilometres.'
   'I'm not sure that I like this conversation. My government certainly would not condone violence, except of course in self-defence.'
   'You naive Americans! We're more realistic; we have to be. All your grandparents died of old age, Heywood. Three of mine were killed in the Great Patriotic War.'
   When they were alone together, Tanya always called him Woody, never Heywood. She must be serious. Or was she merely testing his reactions?
   'Anyway, Discovery is merely a few billion dollars' worth of hardware. The ship's not important – only the information it carries.'
   'Exactly. Information that could be copied, and then erased.'
   'You do get some cheerful ideas, Tanya. Sometimes I think that all Russians are a little paranoiac.'
   'Thanks to Napoleon and Hitler, we've earned every right to be. But don't tell me that you haven't already worked out that – what do you call it, scenario? – for yourself.'
   'It wasn't necessary,' Floyd answered rather glumly. 'The State Department's already done it for me – with variations. We'll just have to see which one the Chinese come up with. And I wouldn't be in the least surprised if they outguess us again.'

10 – A Cry from Europa

   Sleeping in zero gravity is a skill that has to be learned; it had taken Floyd almost a week to find the best way of anchoring legs and arms so that they did not drift into uncomfortable positions. Now he was an expert, and was not looking forward to the return of weight; indeed, the very idea gave him occasional nightmares.
   Someone was shaking him awake. No – he must still be dreaming! Privacy was sacred aboard a spaceship; nobody ever entered another crew member's chambers without first asking permission. He clenched his eyes shut, but the shaking continued.
   'Dr Floyd – please wake up! You're wanted on the flight deck!'
   And nobody called him Dr Floyd; the most formal salutation he had received for weeks was Doc. What was happening?
   Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. He was in his tiny cabin, gently gripped by his sleeping cocoon. So one part of his mind told him; then why was he looking at – Europa? They were still millions of kilometres away.
   There were the familiar reticulations, the patterns of triangles and polygons formed by intersecting lines. And surely that was the Grand Canal itself – no, it wasn't quite right. How could it be, since he was still in his little cabin aboard Leonov?
   'Dr Floyd!'
   He became fully awake, and realized that his left hand was floating just a few centimetres in front of his eyes. How strange that the pattern of lines across the palm was so uncannily like the map of Europa! But economical Mother Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly different scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud lanes of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.
   'Sorry, Max,' he said. 'What's the problem? Is something wrong?'
   'We think so – but not with us. Tsien's in trouble.'
   Captain, navigator, and chief engineer were strapped in their seats on the flight deck; the rest of the crew orbited anxiously around convenient handholds, or watched on the monitors.
   'Sorry to wake you up, Heywood,' Tanya apologized brusquely. 'Here's the situation. Ten minutes ago we had a Class One Priority from Mission Control. Tsien's gone off the air. It happened very suddenly, in the middle of a cipher message; there were a few seconds of garbled transmission – then nothing.'
   'Their beacon?'
   'That's stopped as well. We can't receive it either,'
   'Phew! Then it must be serious – a major breakdown. Any theories?'
   'Lots – but all guesswork. An explosion – landslide – earthquake: who knows?'
   'And we may never know – until someone else lands on Europa – or we do a close flyby and take a look.'
   Tanya shook her head. 'We don't have enough delta-vee. The closest we could get is fifty thousand kilometres. Not much you could see from that distance.'
   'Then there's absolutely nothing we can do.'
   'Not quite, Heywood. Mission Control has a suggestion. They'd like us to swing our big dish around, just in case we can pick up any weak emergency transmissions. It's – how do you say? – a long shot, but worth trying. What do you think?'
   Floyd's first reaction was strongly negative.
   'That will mean breaking our link with Earth.'
   'Of course; but we'll have to do that anyway, when we go around Jupiter. And it will only take a couple of minutes to re-establish the circuit.'
   Floyd remained silent. The suggestion was perfectly reasonable, yet it worried him obscurely. After puzzling for several seconds, he suddenly realized why he was so opposed to the idea.
   Discovery's troubles had started when the big dish – the main antenna complex – had lost its lock on Earth, for reasons which even now were not completely clear. But Hal had certainly been involved, and there was no danger of a similar situation arising here. Leonov's computers were small, autonomous units; there was no single controlling intelligence. At least, no nonhuman one.
   The Russians were still waiting patiently for his answer.
   'I agree,' he said at last. 'Let Earth know what we're doing, and start listening. I suppose you'll try all the SPACE MAYDAY frequencies.'
   'Yes, as soon as we've worked out the Doppler corrections. How's it going, Sasha?'
   'Give me another two minutes, and I'll have the automatic search running. How long should we listen?'
   The captain barely paused before giving her answer. Floyd had often admired Tanya Orlova's decisiveness, and had once told her so. In a rare flash of humour, she had replied: 'Woody, a commander can be wrong, but never uncertain.'
   'Listen for fifty minutes, and report back to Earth for ten. Then repeat the cycle.'
   There was nothing to see or hear; the automatic circuits were better at sifting the radio noise than any human senses. Nevertheless, from time to time Sasha turned up the audio monitor, and the roar of Jupiter's radiation belts filled the cabin. It was a sound like the waves breaking on all the beaches of Earth, with occasional explosive cracks from superbolts of lightning in the Jovian atmosphere. Of human signals, there was no trace; and, one by one, the members of the crew not on duty drifted quietly away.
   While he was waiting, Floyd did some mental calculations. Whatever had happened to Tsien was already two hours in the past, since the news had been relayed from Earth.
   But Leonov should be able to pick up a direct message after less than a minute's delay, so the Chinese had already had ample time to get back on the air. Their continued silence suggested some catastrophic failure, and he found himself weaving endless scenarios of disaster.
   The fifty minutes seemed like hours. When they were up, Sasha swung the ship's antenna complex back toward Earth, and reported failure. While he was using the rest of the ten minutes to send a backlog of messages, he looked inquiringly at the captain.
   'Is it worth trying again?' he said in a voice that clearly expressed his own pessimism.
   'Of course. We may cut back the search time – but we'll keep listening.'
   On the hour, the big dish was once more focused upon Europa. And almost at once, the automatic monitor started flashing its ALERT light.
   Sasha's hand darted to the audio gain, and the voice of Jupiter filled the cabin. Superimposed upon that, like a whisper heard against a thunderstorm, was the faint but completely unmistakable sound of human speech. It was impossible to identify the language, though Floyd felt certain, from the intonation and rhythm, that it was not Chinese, but some European tongue.
   Sasha played skilfully with fine-tuning and band-width controls, and the words became clearer. The language was undoubtedly English – but its content was still maddeningly unintelligible.
   There is one combination of sounds that every human ear can detect instantly, even in the noisiest environment. When it suddenly emerged from the Jovian background, it seemed to Floyd that he could not possibly be awake, but was trapped in some fantastic dream. His colleagues took a little longer to react; then they stared at him with equal amazement – and a slowly dawning suspicion.
   – For the first recognizable words from Europa were: 'Dr Floyd – Dr Floyd – I hope you can hear me.'

11 – Ice and Vacuum

   'Who is it?' whispered someone, to a chorus of shushes. Floyd raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance – and, he hoped, innocence.
   '... know you are aboard Leonov... may not have much time... aiming my suit antenna where I think...' The signal vanished for agonizing seconds, then came back much clearer, though not appreciably louder.
   '... relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio – no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA.'
   The signal faded again. A stunned silence followed that no one attempted to interrupt. While he was waiting, Floyd searched his memory furiously. He could riot recognize the voice – it might have been that of any Western-educated Chinese. Probably it was someone he had met at a scientific conference, but unless the speaker identified himself he would never know.
   '... soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadily and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out to check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands – stood – about thirty metres from the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go directly from it and down through the ice. Very thin – not safe to walk on. The warm upwelling...'
   Again a long silence. Floyd wondered if the speaker was moving, and had been momentarily cut off by some obstruction.
   '... no problem – five kilowatts of lighting strung up on the ship. Like a Christmas tree – beautiful, shining right through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first – a huge dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it was a school of fish – too large for a single organism – then it started to break through the ice.
   'Dr Floyd, I hope you can hear me. This is Professor Chang – we met in '02 – Boston IAU conference.'
   Instantly, incongruously, Floyd's thoughts were a billion kilometres away. He vaguely remembered that reception, after the closing session of the International Astronomical Union Congress – the last one that the Chinese had attended before the Second Cultural Revolution. And now he recalled Chang very distinctly – a small, humorous astronomer and exobiologist with a good fund of jokes. He wasn't joking now.
   '... like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera – I stayed to watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was – I've seen pictures of the kelp forests off California – but I was quite wrong.
   '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.
   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.
   Yet that conclusion raised another question, and one vital to Leonov's mission. Now that life had been discovered on the moons of Jupiter – did it have any connection with the Tycho monolith, and the still more mysterious artifact in orbit near Io?
   That was a favourite subject to debate in the Six O'Clock Soviets. It was generally agreed that the creature encountered by Dr Chang did not represent a high form of intelligence – at least, if his interpretation of its behaviour was correct. No animal with even elementary powers of reasoning would have allowed itself to become a victim of its instincts, attracted like a moth to the candle until it risked destruction.
   Vasili Orlov was quick to give a counter-example that weakened, if it did not refute, that argument.
   'Look at whales and dolphins,' he said. 'We call them intelligent – but how often they kill themselves in mass strandings! That looks like a case where instinct overpowers reason.'
   'No need to go to the dolphins,' interjected Max Brailovsky. 'One of the brightest engineers in my class was fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him last, he was working in a garage. And he'd won a gold medal for designing spacestations. What a waste!'
   Even if Dr Chang's Europan was intelligent, that of course did not rule out higher forms elsewhere. The biology of a whole world could not be judged from a single specimen.
   But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence could never arise in the sea; there were not enough challenges in so benign and unvarying an environment. Above all, how could marine creatures ever develop a technology without the aid of fire?
   Yet perhaps even that was possible; the route that humanity had taken was not the only one. There might be whole civilizations in the seas of other worlds.
   Still, it seemed unlikely that a space-faring culture could have arisen on Europa without leaving unmistakable signs of its existence in the form of buildings, scientific installations, launching sites, or other artifacts. But from pole to pole, nothing could be seen but level ice and a few outcroppings of bare rock.
   No time remained for speculations and discussions when Leonov hurtled past the orbits of Io and tiny Mimas. The crew was busy almost non-stop, preparing for the encounter and the brief onset of weight after months in free-fall. All loose objects had to be secured before the ship entered Jupiter's atmosphere, and the drag of deceleration produced momentary peaks that might be as high as two gravities.
   Floyd was lucky; he alone had time to admire the superb spectacle of the approaching planet, now filling almost half the sky. Because there was nothing to give it scale, there was no way that the mind could grasp its real size. He had to keep telling himself that fifty Earths would not cover the hemisphere now turned toward him.
   The clouds, colourful as the most garish sunset on Earth, raced so swiftly that he could see appreciable movement in as little as ten minutes. Great eddies were continually forming along the dozen or so bands that girdled the planet, then rippling away like swirls of smoke. Plumes of white gas occasionally geysered up from the depths, to be swept away by the gales caused by the planet's tremendous spin. And perhaps strangest of all were the white spots, sometimes spaced as regularly as pearls on a necklace, which lay along the tradewinds of the middle Jovian latitudes.
   In the hours immediately before encounter, Floyd saw little of captain or navigator. The Orlovs scarcely left the bridge, as they continually checked the approach orbit and made minute refinements to Leonov's course. The ship was now on the critical path that would just graze the outer atmosphere; if it went too high, frictional braking would not be sufficient to slow it down, and it would go racing out of the Solar System, beyond all possibility of rescue. If it went too low, it would burn up like a meteor. Between the two extremes lay little margin for error.
   The Chinese had proved that aerobraking could be done, but there was always the chance that something would go wrong: So Floyd was not at all surprised when Surgeon-Commander Rudenko admitted, just an hour before contact: 'I'm beginning to wish, Woody, that I had brought along that icon, after all.'

14 – Double Encounter

   '... papers for the mortgage on the Nantucket house should be in the file marked M in the library.
   'Well, that's all the business I can think of. For the last couple of hours I've been recalling a picture I saw as a boy, in a tattered volume of Victorian art – it must have been almost one hundred and fifty years old. I can't remember whether it was black-and-white or colour. But I'll never forget the title – don't laugh – it was called "The Last Message Home". Our great-great-grandfathers loved that kind of sentimental melodrama.
   'It shows the deck of a windjammer in a hurricane – the sails have been ripped away and the deck's awash. In the background, the crew is struggling to save the ship. And in the foreground, a young sailor boy's writing a note, while beside him is the bottle he hopes will carry it to land.
   'Even though I was a kid at the time, I felt he should have been giving his shipmates a hand, not writing letters. All the same, it moved me: I never thought that one day I'd be like that young sailor.
   'Of course, I'm sure you'll get this message-and there's nothing I can do to help aboard Leonov. In fact, I've been politely requested to keep out of the way, so my conscience is quite clear as I dictate this.
   'I'll send it up to the bridge now because in fifteen minutes we'll break transmission as we pull in the big dish and batten down the hatches – there's another nice maritime analogy for you! Jupiter's filling the sky now – I won't attempt to describe it and won't even see it much longer because the shutters will go up in a few minutes. Anyway, the cameras can do far better than I could.
   'Goodbye, my dearest, and my love to you all – especially Chris. By the time you get this, it will be over, one way or the other. Remember I tried to do my best for all our sakes – goodbye.'
   When he had removed the audio chip, Floyd drifted up to the communications centre and handed it over to Sasha Kovalev.
   'Please make sure it gets off before we close down,' he said earnestly.
   'Don't worry,' promised Sasha. 'I'm still working on all channels, and we have a good ten minutes left.'
   He held out his hand. 'If we do meet again, why, we shall smile! If not, why then, this parting was well made.' Floyd blinked.
   'Shakespeare, I suppose?'
   'Of course; Brutus and Cassius before battle. See you later.'
   Tanya and Vasili were too intent upon their situation displays to do more than wave to Floyd, and he retreated to his cabin. He had already said farewell to the rest of the crew; there was nothing to do but wait. His sleeping bag was slung in preparation for the return of gravity when deceleration commenced, and he had only to climb into it – 'Antennas retracted, all protective shields up,' said the intercom speaker. 'We should feel first braking in five minutes. Everything normal.'
   'That's hardly the word I'd use,' Floyd muttered to himself. 'I think you mean "nominal".' He had barely concluded the thought when there was a diffident knock on the door.
   'Kto tam?'
   To his astonishment, it was Zenia.
   'Do you mind if I come in?' she asked awkwardly, in a small-girl voice which Floyd could scarcely recognize.
   'Of course not. But why aren't you in your own cubicle? It's only five minutes to re-entry.'
   Even as he asked the question, he was aware of its foolishness. The answer was so perfectly obvious that Zenia did not deign to reply.
   But Zenia was the very last person he would have expected: her attitude toward him had invariably been polite but distant. Indeed, she was the only member of the crew who preferred to call him Dr Floyd. Yet there she was, clearly seeking comfort and companionship at the moment of peril.
   'Zenia, my dear,' he said wryly. 'You're welcome. But my accommodation is somewhat limited. One might even call it Spartan.'
   She managed a faint smile, but said nothing as she floated into the room. For the first time, Floyd realized that she was not merely nervous – she was terrified. Then he understood why she had come to him. She was ashamed to face her countrymen and was looking for support elsewhere.
   With this realization, his pleasure at the unexpected encounter abated somewhat. That did not lessen his responsibility to another lonely human being, a long way from home. The fact that she was an attractive – though certainly not beautiful – woman of barely half his own age should not have affected the issue. But it did; he was beginning to rise to the occasion.
   She must have noticed, but did nothing to encourage or discourage him as they lay down side by side in the sleeping cocoon. There was just enough room for them both, and Floyd began to do some anxious calculations. Suppose maximum gee was higher than predicted, and the suspension gave way? They could easily be killed...
   There was an ample safety margin; no need to worry about such an ignominious end. Humour was the enemy of desire; their embrace was now completely chaste. He was not sure whether to be glad or sorry.
   And it was too late for second thoughts. From far, far away came the first faint whisper of sound, like the wailing of some lost soul. At the same moment, the ship gave a barely perceptible jerk; the cocoon began to swing around and its suspension tightened. After weeks of weightlessness, gravity was returning.
   Within seconds, the faint wail had risen to a steady roar, and the cocoon had become an overloaded hammock. This is not such a good idea, Floyd thought to himself, already it was difficult to breathe. The deceleration was only a part of the problem: Zenia was clutching him as a drowning person is supposed to clutch the proverbial straw.
   He detached her as gently as he could.
   'It's all right, Zenia. If Tsien did it, so can we. Relax – don't worry.'
   It was difficult to shout tenderly, and he was not even sure if Zenia heard him above the roar of incandescent hydrogen. But she was no longer clutching him quite so desperately, and he seized the opportunity of taking a few deep breaths.
   What would Caroline think if she could see him now? Would he tell her if he ever had the chance? He was not sure she would understand. At a moment like that, all links with Earth seemed very tenuous indeed.
   It was impossible to move, or to speak, but now that he had grown accustomed to the strange sense of weight he was no longer uncomfortable – except for the increasing numbness in his right arm. With some difficulty, he managed to extricate it from beneath Zenia; the familiar act brought a fleeting sense of guilt. As he felt his circulation returning, Floyd remembered a famous remark attributed to at least a dozen astronauts and cosmonauts: 'Both the pleasures and problems of zero-gravity sex have been greatly exaggerated.'
   He wondered how the rest of the crew was faring, and he gave a momentary thought to Chandra and Curnow, sleeping peacefully through it all. They would never know if Leonov became a meteor shower in the Jovian sky. He did not envy them; they had missed the experience of a lifetime.
   Tanya was speaking over the intercom; her words were lost in the roar, but her voice sounded calm and perfectly normal, just as if she was making a routine announcement. Floyd managed to glance at his watch, and was astonished to see that they were already at the midpoint of the braking manoeuvre. At that very moment, Leonov was at its closest approach to Jupiter; only expendable automatic probes had gone deeper into the Jovian atmosphere.
   'Halfway through, Zenia,' he shouted. 'On the way out again.' He could not tell if she understood. Her eyes were tightly closed, but she smiled slightly.
   The ship was now rocking noticeably, like a small boat in a choppy sea. Was that normal? wondered Floyd. He was glad that he had Zenia to worry about; it took his mind away from his own fears. Just for a moment, before he managed to expel the thought, he had a vision of the walls suddenly glowing cherry red, and caving in upon him. Like the nightmare fantasy of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum', which he'd forgotten for thirty years.
   But that would never happen. If the heat shield failed, the ship would crumble instantly, hammered flat by a solid wall of gas. There would be no pain; his nervous system would not have time to react before it ceased to exist. He had experienced more consoling thoughts, but this one was not to be despised.
   The buffeting slowly weakened. There was another inaudible announcement from Tanya (he would pull her leg about that, when it was all over). Now time seemed to be going much more slowly; after a while he stopped looking at his watch, because he could not believe it. The digits changed so slowly that he could almost imagine himself in some Einsteinian time dilation.
   And then something even more unbelievable happened. First he was amused, then slightly indignant. Zenia had fallen asleep – if not exactly in his arms, then at least beside them.
   It was a natural reaction: the strain must have exhausted her, and the wisdom of the body had come to her rescue. And suddenly Floyd himself became aware of an almost post-orgasmic drowsiness, as if he too had been emotionally drained by the encounter. He had to fight to remain awake.
   And then he was falling... falling... falling... it was all over. The ship was back in space, where it belonged. And he and Zenia were floating apart.
   They would never again be so close together, but they would always know a special tenderness toward each other, which no one else could ever share.