Jovian

PART 1

JUPITER

1

A STIFF HYDROGEN wind screamed past Jarls, making a din in his helmet and threatening to tear him loose from the floater’s outer scaffolding. He tightened his grip on a strut and leaned cautiously outward for a respectful look at the immense salmon-colored cloudscape below him. Lightning flashed in its crevices; violent eddies of raw color churned its seething surface. Above, a tiny sun cast a broad shimmering path on the cloud deck. In the distance, Jarls could see Port Elysium, an iridescent bubble that contained farmlands, well-stocked lakes, and the villages of the twenty thousand people he called his neighbors. It was riding the storm well, twisting slowly in the maelstrom of the Great Red Spot’s approach, but remaining stable.

A hand as hard as iron clamped itself around his upper arm, making itself felt even through layers of padded thermal suit. Time to go inside, his uncle said through a howl of radio noise.

Jarls turned his head. The bulky shape clinging next to him was massively overdeveloped even for a Jovian, with a chest like a packing crate and treetrunk legs. Uncle Hector was a comforting presence to have on a work detail.

Jarls himself had grown to a pretty good size. On Earth he might have passed for a rather solid young man whose hobby happened to be weight lifting. But no earthborn weight lifter could have attained the density of muscle that bulged at Jarls’s thighs and upper arms, or quite matched the thickness of his torso. The unyielding hardness of his body, molded by Jupiter’s crushing gravity, was needed to support a Jovian weight of close to five hundred pounds.

I’m going to ride it down out here, Jarls replied.

Hector lifted a shaggy eyebrow. Sensible people don’t take chances. I’ve got to stay outside to ride herd on the siphon. But even the latching crew’s sitting out the descent inside the cabin.

I want to know what it feels like, not see it through a porthole.

All right. Hector cracked a grudging smile of approval. I guess you’re old enough to make up your own mind.

Commencing to trim, a laconic voice buzzed in Jarls’s ear. There was no second warning. On Jupiter, people learned early in life to pay attention.

The superfluous personnel on the work platform below started to file up the ladder to the floater’s belly cabin. A half-dozen spread-eagled shapes remained clinging to the outside strutwork of the great silver egg, like Jarls and Hector. One of them began edging toward them. Jarls recognized the well-worn suit belonging to Gord Murdo, the foreman.

Hang on, Uncle Hector said.

Jarls didn’t need to be told. A thousand kilometers below the seething orange cloud deck lay the surface of a hydrogen sea that no man had ever seen, or ever could see. If you lost your grip and fell, you didn’t have to worry about splashing into it. Long before you reached its indeterminate boundary the increasing pressure would crush you into a shapeless blob, and the steadily rising temperatures would cook what was left of you. Below that strange ocean lay a stranger realm yet-a core of hydrogen so compressed that it turned to a liquid metallic form. There, at pressures of more than three million atmospheres and temperatures above 11,000 degrees K, the dissociated molecules that once had been your precious self would float in eternal suspension.

Jarls wiped the unsettling image from his mind and waited. It took a long time to reach negative buoyancy. The vacuum shell was big—it had to be in Jupiter’s lightweight upper atmosphere of hydrogen laced with helium. The early floaters had been little more than hot-hydrogen balloons. But the combination of hydrogen and the inevitable oxygen leaks from suits and cabins had proved too dangerous. So the huge egg enclosed nothing but vac- uum-the one thing in the universe that is lighter even than heated hydrogen—and the trimming was done with helium filtered out of the outside atmosphere.

There was the tiniest of shudders, and the blimplike vehicle began to sink, almost imperceptibly at first. Jarls checked its progress with a glance at the floating anchor rig, hovering about a mile farther east. It was just visible past the curve of the floater’s shell, a tall tetrahedron with a froth of flotation bubbles at its top. The thick monomolecular hose that ran from it to the floater was a looping arc that dwindled to invisibility after the first quarter mile.

Pull in those lines! the radio said sharply in Uncle Hector’s voice. Snub that hose end before you lose it!

Jarls looked down at the work platform, where four burly roustabouts were struggling to restrain the gigantic coupling that had lifted dangerously on its fastenings when the descent began. He began automatically to inch downward to help; on Jupiter, you didn’t wait to be asked.

They can handle it, Hector said. The iron fingers gripped Jarls’s arm again.

The work gang beneath hauled in on the guy lines, and with pure brute force wrestled enough hose inboard to wrap a bight around a stanchion. The hose was thick as a log and obstinately rigid, but Jovian muscles were equal to a task that would have taken a donkey engine on Earth. They lashed it efficiently into place. There was a jerk that made the floater sway, and then, as some distant capstan came unstuck, the hose commenced to unreel smoothly.

Nice going, Gord Murdo said, coming up next to Hector and helping himself to a handful of strut. He acknowledged Jarls’s presence with a nod. Jarls noticed that the foreman had made the crawl across the vac egg without bothering to use a safety line; a bad example, but it wasn’t up to him to comment.

The roustabouts beneath received the compliment with raised faces and a thumbs up. They were three men and a woman, hulking bruisers all of them.

Hector grunted. We don’t need a loose coupling whipping around. Not this close to the Spot.

Lot of turbulence, Murdo agreed. That’s what probably pulled the siphon loose in the first place.

Jupiter’s sloshy outer layers rotated at different speeds, depending on latitude, and the immense whirlwind that was the Great Red Spot periodically passed Port Elysium to the south. It never came closer than about 15,000 kilometers—a margin wider than the planet Earth-but that was close enough. Port Elysium always battened down during the passage. But the floating city couldn’t do without its water and oxygen, and these could only be obtained from the ice crystal layers below the ammonia clouds.

Port Elysium had to tend its wells, no matter what.

A vast chasm opened in the layer of ammonia clouds, and the huge silver ovoid dropped straight through. Abruptly, the marble- size sun was cut off. The floater lay in deep shadow. Jarls caught his breath at the scary majesty of his surroundings. The cloud walls on either side were inky black, and darting forks of lightning crackled within them. There was an almost continuous roll of thunder in Jarls’s ears now. Jupiter’s hydrogen-helium atmosphere transposed sounds a couple of octaves higher, but there were always deeper sounds waiting on the threshhold of human perception to be heard in turn.

Ammonia snowflakes were beginning to melt against Jarls’s helmet, making rivulets down his faceplate. He wiped them off with a sleeve. It was cold in the upper clouds-about 130 degrees below zero—but the pressure here was still a comfortable one atmosphere. About fifteen kilometers down, the floater reached the bottom of the rift and was swallowed by pink mist. The blankness was disorienting for someone used to Jupiter’s vast horizons.

Then the floater broke through into another clear stratum. Jarls drank in the sight of a new cloudscape, stretching to infinity.

Well, how do you like it, youngster? Murdo said. First time down this deep?

The unbroken carpet of clouds was more brownish in color than the orange-pink ceiling above. It was composed of ammonium hydrosulphide crystals, precipitated out of the hydrogen atmosphere at the differing pressure and temperature levels here. Already, Jarls could notice that it was getting warmer. He switched off his suit heater.

No, I’ve seen it before, Jarls replied. But only through a porthole.

The foreman nodded soberly. Nothing like the real thing, eh? I’ll tell you one thing. It’s a sight no Earthman will ever see with his own eyes.

Uncle Hector said sourly, Earthies don’t have to come down here. They can sit in their corporate dens on Callisto and Olympus Habitat and skim our wealth from orbit. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Come now, Hec, Murdo protested. Jupiter gets a royalty on every load of hydrogen the mining satellites scoop out of our atmosphere. And the surface jobs we do for them help our credit balance. You’ve worked for them yourself.

Royalties! Hector exploded. "One tenth of one percent on a gigatonne? It’s robbery! And we’ve only been getting that since ’32, when one of Earthcorp’s orbital siphons crashed through the North Equatorial aerostat and killed thirty thousand people. As for Earth wages, they can keep them! We’re a source of cheap local labor for them, that’s all. They treat us like peasants. We’re being exploited. That’s why Jupiter’s the backwater of the solar system."

You always were a radical, Hec, the foreman said. But his own face had clouded at the recitation.

The political talk made Jarls uncomfortable. It came from getting old, he decided, all this endless palaver about abstractions that had nothing to do with real life. Real life was about being young, and feeling your juices, and doing things and going places. He looked down at the giant planet spread around him. Now that was real-the hydrogen winds that tried to pluck you from your grip, the immensity of the roiling cloudscape below, the sound of thunder in your ears, the nagging lifelong pull of Jupiter’s two and one-half gravities against your muscles and your body’s joy in defeating it.

We’re being skinned and you know it, Hector said. Jovian hydrogen keeps the solar system running, and everybody makes money on it except us.

It’s the gravity, Murdo said defensively. That’s what keeps us isolated. You know what it costs to raise a ship out of this gravity well. The whole planet doesn’t own more than twenty ships, and it takes ten or fifteen cities going shares just to lift one. It’s just too expensive for the rest of the solar system to trade with us. That’s why off-planet goods are so high.

They’ve got their foot on our neck, Hector growled. We’re here to be plucked. The South Temperate Zone consortium tried to break the hydrogen monopoly by orbiting a siphon of their own, and look what happened. They couldn’t sell one miserable cargo anywhere in the solar system. It’s all under the thumb of the Earth-Venus cartel. Twenty cities went broke, and their children are still paying for it.

We’re still a young planet, Hec. Some day the Deep Tap project will pay off, and Jupiter will take its rightful place in the solar system.

You and I will never live to see it, Gord.

The Deep Tap’s technically feasible, Murdo insisted. The hypercarbons able to withstand the heat and pressure have been around for a couple of centuries. We’ve reached depths of over a thousand kilometers. A lot of good men and women have died trying to sink more sections of it. If we could just get the financing to carry it through…

Hector’s voice sounded tired. We’ll never get the financing from off-planet. Not from the steely-eyed gnomes who run Earth. They’d be cutting their own throats. It’s up to us Jovians, us against them.

That kind of talk…

Jarls was glad to be able to interrupt. Look!

They followed his pointing gauntlet. Some kilometers away, a flock of flapping dots flew in loose echelon, making a broad arc against the rust-colored clouds. There were twenty or thirty of them.

A hunting party, Hector said. Heading toward the Great Red Spot.

A little out of their depth, aren’t they? Murdo said.

Must’ve got caught in an updraft. But the air’s soupy enough for them here. Feels like about six atmospheres.

Jarls had noticed the increasing thickness of the atmosphere himself as they sank. It slowed down your movements, but it also took away some of the terrible drag of gravity, like lying in a bathtub.

Hector’s craggy face had come alive. Good hunting for the flapjacks when the Great Red Spot comes around, he explained to Jarls. Means an upwelling of organic molecules for fifty thousand kilometers around, and an explosion of the small life forms. And that attracts those big floating colanders that the flapjacks prey on.

Jarls strained to see the distant specks. Jovian life was plentiful, and the small thistledown forms that inhabited the upper atmosphere liked to congregate around Port Elysium. But he had seen these big hunters of the middle depths only on holo.

As he watched, the formation veered. Jarls’s heart thumped in his chest.

They’re changing course!

Hector nodded. Looks like they’re coming over for a visit.

2

THE GREAT flapping shapes grew in size, matching the drop rate of the floater. Jarls could make out their contours plainly now—they were immense flat pancakes, easily acres in extent, undulating gently to stay aloft. Their scalloped outer edges served as limbs of a sort, curled around thousand-foot cartilaginous spears and coils of what looked to be rope. They wore harnesses, too, crisscrossed bands from which dangled carrying pouches the size of barns.

Jarls didn’t fully appreciate the tremendous scale of the creatures until they came to rest about a quarter mile from the floater. Not one of them would have fit in the biggest enclosed space he could think of-Port Elysium’s stadium. It dawned on him that the spears they carried must have come from the skeletons of creatures that were larger still. They arranged themselves in a shallow curve, obviously looking over the human vehicle with whatever Jovian natives used for senses.

Jarls could feel their attention, though their flat gray expanses were featureless. They maintained position against the gale-force wind with apparent effortlessness, billowing in slow rhythm. Jarls could see them making small adjustments by curling and uncurling the projections on their outer mantles. They tilted slightly toward the floater, blotting out sky and dwarfing the human artifact into insignificance.

What do they want? he asked his uncle. Do they want to trade?

Hector shook his head. They’re just curious. Came over for a closer look at us midges.

Too bad, Murdo said. We could make more money out of the exotic organics in just one of those skin bags than we’re getting paid for this little repair excursion.

That’s not the way they like to do things, Hector said.

I guess you ought to know, Hec, the foreman replied.

Hector had been a trader himself in his youth, among all the other jobs that Jovians had to do to scratch out a living; Jarls’s father had been a partner in that and a host of other enterprises before the deep-fishing accident that had crippled him.

You know how what old-timers call the Shadow Trade works, don’t you? Hector said to Jarls.

Sort of. Jarls had heard the stories often enough while growing up.

But Hector was not to be deterred. "We send down a balloon loaded with trade goods, and leave it. They load it with things they think we might want—usually skins, or some of their cartilage artifacts. Then they leave. If we accept the deal, we take the stuff, and then they come back to collect. If we don’t, they add more. If they don’t like the deal, we add more. When both parties are satisfied, we make the exchange. Usually we never see the parties we trade with. They’re cautious but honest."

You’re attributing too much intelligence to them, Hec. Murdo said. A dog can be taught to fetch. We taught them a complicated reflex over the years, that’s all.

Hector declined to rise to the bait, though Jarls knew he was a passionate believer in the reasoning capacity of the Jovian natives. Arguments could get pretty heated between opposing camps on the issue, but Hector limited himself to observing mildly: There are different kinds of intelligence, Gord. It took us a couple of hundred years to learn that about dolphins.

A sudden gust tipped one of the flying pancakes, almost making it drop its spear. It righted itself with a casual ripple of its vast body and resumed its scrutiny of the floater.

What if one of them bumps us? Jarls asked nervously.

No danger, his uncle said. They’re careful with their bodies. They’re fragile despite their size. Lightweight, like all Jupiter’s aerial life.

I mean by accident.

So do I. It’s us humans who’re clumsy. They’re made for this environment. They’ve got keen senses, like any hunters. Right now they’re bouncing sonar, radar, and God knows what else off us. And taking infrared snapshots with their whole bodies. They’re probably tasting us by our stray molecules, too!

Murdo gave a short bark. You can’t blame the youngster for being a little nervous. Those spears give me the jitters myself. What if they decided the floater was good to eat? Imagine one of those shafts through our vacuum bag.

Now Gord, you know as well as I do that they don’t do that. There’s never been a recorded case of a flapjack intentionally harming a human being.

He turned back to Jarls. Those spears they carry come from the keels of those floating sieves that strain out the atmospheric plankton. I once saw a flapjack throw one. Whirled around and around like a pinwheel, picking up spin, then let loose. Usually they position themselves in a circle above their prey and drop their harpoons straight down. In this gravity, they fall like thunderbolts. But this fellow’s shaft must’ve been flying fast enough to straighten itself out. Ripped right through the big gasbag it was hunting. The other hunters got harpoon lines into it before it started to sink too fast, and they flew away with that mile-wide carcass hanging between them. Can’t be many men alive who’ve seen such a sight.

It made a vivid picture. Jarls couldn’t help glancing over at the line of disklike creatures hanging in loose formation around the floater. Most of them carried their spears sensibly at the vertical, well above the balancing point, but a few carelessly held shafts drooped like basket handles under Jovian gravity. Jarls tried to imagine the kind of kinetic energy it would take to straighten one out enough to be flung at the horizontal, and was impressed anew.

Hector was staring thoughtfully at the visitors too. If only we could get them to work for us in some sort of reliable fashion, he mused. We might be able to get somewhere with the Deep Tap project—and there’d be a future for this planet.

Huh? It came as a snort from Murdo.

These fellows are fishers as well as hunters. They bring up catches that must come from all the way down to the hydrogen sea. The life chemistry’s different from the aerial forms whose skins and lipids they usually trade.

So what? All Jovian organics are weird. That’s why they fetch a good price outside.

My point is that we don’t know how far down the flapjacks can operate, but it has to be a lot deeper than we can go. If we could get their help in setting up rigs just another thousand kilometers down-below the transition point between gaseous and liquid hydrogen, out of reach of atmospheric storms—we’d have stable platforms that might be able to take the Deep Tap down all the way.

You’re dreaming, Hec.

They cooperate with one another. Why not with us?

The hovering giants seemed to have lost interest in the floater and the tiny specks that moved around on it. With one accord, they tilted themselves on edge and dived down through the cloud bank below. The floater rocked with their passage, and Jarls found himself scrabbling for a better handhold until the swaying ceased.

The floater was falling faster now, and within two or three minutes it, too, was submerged in clouds. A brownish mist swallowed the vacuum egg and the people clinging to it.

There were several minutes of obscurity. Jarls used a mitten to wipe off the rust-colored scum of ammonium hydrosulphide forming on his faceplate. Then the floater emerged into blue sky, with cottony white clouds billowing below.

There’s our water-ice layer, Hector said to him. Now all we’ve got to do is find the pumping station.

The flock of natives was nowhere to be seen. Jarls scanned the broad sandwich of a horizon and found no trace of them.

The floater stopped its headlong descent with a jerk, and Jarls had to try for a new grip. The vacuum egg was drifting west along with the scudding clouds. The long tether of hose vanished obliquely into the sky, punctuated every few kilometers by brightly colored, hot-hydrogen balloons.

How are you taking the pressure, youngster? Murdo asked.

He’s taking it just fine, Hector answered for him. He’s a Jovian, isn’t he?

The air was thick as syrup by now. It dragged at Jarls’s every movement He maintained a stoic silence. People worked down here all the time, and the pay was better than it was upstairs. Hector had had to pull a few strings to get him the job.

We’re about a hundred kilometers down at this point, the foreman informed him. Pressure’s about twenty atmospheres here. An Earthie would have to wear a hard suit to get down this far. We don’t go much lower ourselves without hard suits. Gets a lot hotter from here on down, too.

Sweat was already trickling down Jarls’s face and neck. It was like a steambath inside his suit. Jarls resisted turning on his suit’s thermoacoustic cooler until he saw that Hector and Murdo had already turned on theirs.

There’s a buoy, Hector said suddenly.

Jarls saw a brightly painted balloon, red with yellow bands. It was perfectly spherical, not onion-shaped, which showed that it was a small vacuum shell rather than a hot-hydrogen balloon. The less maintenance the better at these depths.

It’s too low, Murdo said. The pumping station’s sinking.

Jarls kept his eye on the bright marker, and after several minutes it became apparent that it was being pulled down through the stratum of white clouds. He could sense the foreman’s frustration at the floater’s inability to move faster, though it was squirting hydrazine at full throttle. The striped ball disappeared through the cloud blanket just before the floater reached it.

We’re going to have to dive for it, Murdo called over the general frequency. Everybody hang on.

The floater pilot didn’t bother to wait for a formal order. The silver egg lurched downward as its empty buoyancy cells sucked in atmospheric helium at high velocity. Droplets began to form again on Jarls’s helmet as they plunged through the clouds, only this time it was water ice crystals that were melting.

Hector saw him wiping his faceplate off. You’re looking at Port Elysium’s life, he said. Never forget it. The flapjacks’ life, too. The cold weather flora and fauna we see upstairs is ammonia-based.

A dim squarish bulk rushed at them through the fog, and the floater halted its fall with a whoosh of exhaled helium. They hovered just above a rack of long vacuum pontoons, while the pilot fought the winds that were trying to tear the vehicle away. Already, roustabouts were climbing down extension ladders and beginning to latch the floater in place.

Jarls saw twisted wreckage, gaping holes in two of the pontoons. The shredded remnants of what had been the rig’s other marker buoys were whipping in the wind, somewhere underneath the hanging fields of condenser plates.

Murdo studied the damage, sucking his lip. You can see why the rig lost its siphon hose—there’s a whole corner torn off. But there are pontoons breached along one side, too. What could have caused that kind of havoc?

Jarls couldn’t understand it either. Jupiter’s atmosphere was violent, but there was nothing being flung around by it that was substantial enough to have caused the jagged destruction he was looking at now. Even one of the mile-wide dirigible creatures, caught in a sudden gust, would have ripped its gauzy tissues to tatters against the rig’s hard edges.

I’ll tell you what caused it, Hector said harshly. It was one of the hydrogen consortium’s orbital siphons, dropping its hose end where it wasn’t supposed to be.

No, Hec, it couldn’t be, Murdo said. Jarls could hear the shock in his voice.

What’s orbital velocity at the heights the mining satellites skim? Must be something like fifty thousand kilometers an hour. Probably the nozzle just grazed the rig. At that speed, it’d be enough.

They’re supposed to stay away from the inhabited latitudes. It’s in the treaties.

Since when have treaties meant anything to Earth?

Jarls was stunned by the enormity of the danger to Port Elysium. Old holo images of the North Equatorial aerostat disaster of ’32 raced through his mind… a whole city crumpling and falling like a stone into the Jovian depths.

He blurted, Isn’t there anything we can do?

We’ll tell the City Council when we get back. They’ll lodge a protest through the Jovian League.

In the meantime we’ve got to stabilize this rig before we lose it, Murdo cut in. There aren’t enough hard suits to go around, so we’ll have to work fast… before it sinks much further. We’ll need every man and woman.

We can use the spare buoyancy pods we brought along for the hose and dippers, Hector said. He did a calculation in his head, comparing the lifting power of hot hydrogen and vacuum. About forty of ’em plus our own vac egg ought to buy us enough time while a couple of crews seal those pontoons and pump them out.

Murdo was already barking out orders. People bustled in slow motion under the pressure. More of them poured out of the floater’s belly pod and swarmed down the extension ladders to the crippled pumping station.

Murdo’s eye fell on Jarls. More than you bargained for, eh, youngster? You can help the roustabouts wrestle girders. The pressure’s going to go up another ten atmospheres before we stop sinking, and the wind’s getting worse. Think you’re up to it?

Of course he’s up to it, Hector said gruffly. He’s strong as an ox.

The phrase had persisted, though there were no oxes on Jupiter—or any other large terrestrial land animals either. Actually, it was a misstatement. Any Jovian male Jarls’s age was a good deal stronger than an ox.

As Jarls turned to go, there was the sudden, bright snap of a spark in the vicinity of Hector’s faceplate; Hector jumped and said, Damn!

You’ve got an oxygen leak, Hec, Murdo said. You’d better see to it.

It’s this old suit. Been patched too many times. It’s not serious. Just a loose hose connection. It’ll hold up till we finish this job. I’ve just been trapping too much gas between me and the eggshell by staying in one spot too long and jabbering with you, that’s all.

Go on inside. You can take one of the hard suits.

It’s tough enough to move around in this molasses. Save the suit for someone who’s used to them.

All right. But keep moving. And stay away from electrical equipment. You can hang balloons.

Jarls left them and clambered down to the work platform, refastening his six feet of safety line every few rungs, as Hector had impressed on him. The roustabouts put him to work without ceremony. Grab the end of that beam and hold it in place until Maryann can weld it.

Jarls did as he was told. Maryann was a brawny giantess, freckled and red-haired. Her welding torch used no oxygen. It would have been insanely dangerous in a hydrogen atmosphere, even with controlled release. Instead, the torch simply forced a stream of available atmospheric hydrogen between two electrodes, tearing the molecules into single atoms. When the atoms recombined into the molecular form, you got the intense heat you needed.

That oughta hold the sucker, Maryann said cheerfully as she finished. Wanna get me another girder, kid.

Jarls soon found that his safety line was a luxury. It slowed him down too much and made his coworkers impatient with him. None of the roustabouts used them for traverses, except to cross really tricky gaps. Where they were useful was when you were working in one place and wanted both hands free. Otherwise you trusted to an iron grip and good reflexes.

But the tilt of the pumping rig was improving as more balloons tugged at it, encouraging overconfidence. And maybe fatigue was starting to set in, though Jarls’s workmates wouldn’t admit it. At one point Jarls found himself carrying one end of a girder with a taciturn slab of meat named Brok. Brok missed his footing between handholds. Unfortunately, he’d been shifting his grip on the girder at the same time, and he went windmilling backward, made another false step, and took a pratfall over eternity.

Jarls dropped his end of the girder. His right arm shot out without his thinking about it, while his left hand retained its grip on the handhold he’d been using. He snagged Brok by the toolbelt. The jolt almost pulled his arm out of its socket. But he had five hundred pounds of roustabout dangling from his fist.

The two men at the other end of the girder couldn’t hold on after Jarls let go-they were now at the end of a very long lever. The girder went tumbling down through the wispy fog, picking up speed like a bullet. Jarls watched it for a full two seconds before it was swallowed up. The swiftness of its departure was a useful reminder of Jupiter’s special perils.

By then the other two men were at his side. One hooked an arm around Brok’s thick waist, the other grabbed an ankle, and in short order, they had Brok beached on a level surface.

Brok picked himself up and dusted himself off. He didn’t bother to thank Jarls. The only comment was from one of the other roustabouts, who gave Jarls a fishy look and observed that Murdo was going to give them hell for losing a girder.

Maryann was already calling for more steel—the term was still used, though the girders were actually an aluminum-matrix composite. Jarls went back to work on the double.

When he had a breathing space, he looked around to see what was happening. The pumping rig was almost level now; one of the pontoons was fully repaired, and enough of the temporary buoancy pods had been hung to make up most of the difference. There had been another mishap—a swinging hook had smashed someone’s ribs, and she was now out of action in the cabin—but otherwise Jupiter had claimed no victims.

Jarls looked for Hector and found him about fifty meters away, sitting astride a projecting girder. He was making fast a tether for one of the last of the hot-hydrogen balloons. The balloon itself was swinging below him like a pendulum, waiting to be inflated. He hadn’t taken a break yet. The end of Jupiter’s ten-hour day was approaching, and Murdo wanted to get the trickiest portion of the job finished before dark.

Hector saw him and waved, a wide squarish figure silhouetted against a background of cottony mist, veined with the constant flicker of lightning. Jarls waved back, and Hector pointed out over the abyss.

Puzzled, Jarls followed the gesture, and then he saw what Hector had called his attention to—a scattering of shadowy flat shapes hovering just at the limits of visibility.

The flapjacks, he said to Maryann. They’ve come back.

Huh? She gave a disinterested glance, then went back to an inspection of her last weld.

I wonder why they’re hanging around.

Maybe they’re hoping we’ll drop another girder.

It was Jarls’s turn to say, Huh?

Yeah, they like metal. They’ll scavenge it whenever they get the chance. It’s funny, they won’t steal it from our rigs, even though we couldn’t stop them, but just drop a hammer overboard and they’ll dive for it. I don’t know how something that big sees something that small.

I wonder why they’re so interested in metal-I mean metal especially.

They never saw any before humans arrived on Jupiter. I guess it must seem some kind of miracle to them—something that dense and hard. They make ornaments out of it, polished mirror-bright. And knives. The lucky ones that get it, they use it to edge those big triangular bone knives of theirs.

How can they work it without a forge?

You can work metal without a forge—just beat it long enough, cold, the old-fashioned way.

Jarls pondered a moment. If they can see something as small as a hammer, then I guess they can see us, too. I mean, notice us as separate individuals.

Yeah, she said dryly, they’re fascinated by us. Look, you wanna grab that can of flux over there and hand it to me?

Over where Hector was working, the anaerobic burner had ignited, and the balloon was inflating. Unfortunately, a gust of wind had caught it as it started to rise, and the still-sagging gasbag had ensnared itself in its own guylines. It lay trapped under the far end of the girder, pushing futilely upward as it continued to fill. A bluish discharge of Saint Elmo’s fire crackled along its upper surface.

Hector waved off a roustabout who was coming to help. He wrapped an arm and leg around the girder and started to inch upward along the inclined surface to free the guylines. The inflating fabric billowed around him as he worked.

A nearby fork of lightning made the Saint Elmo’s fire flare up, as electrical potential around the floater increased. Hector’s face was invisible behind the reflections in his helmet, but Jarls had the eerie feeling that Hector was looking straight at him.

What happened next could not have been said with any certainty. Perhaps Hector’s exertions had loosened the leaky air hose further. Or perhaps there was an increased oxygen buildup because of the richer mixture everybody was breathing at these depths.

There was an abrupt, blinding flash where Hector had been. Jarls blinked his vision back in time to see a swirl of black ashes whipping away into the wind. The balloon was gone, too. A few shredded pennants flapped at the blackened end of the girder.

The natives had taken off like a flock of startled birds at the moment of the flash. They came fluttering back one by one and settled down to their watching.

The general frequency had gone silent. The only sound came from somebody who was breathing hard, and then he switched off too.

After a while Murdo came on. He sounded shaken. All right, people, that’s it, he said. Go back to work. He had no special word for Jarls. Port Elysium was a small place, and a quarter of the people aboard the floater were probably related to Hector in some degree or another.

There was no time to mourn. That could come later. Jarls clamped his jaw and wrestled steel for Maryann. She bent over her torch, her wide freckled face hardened into an inexpressive mask.

Darkness came swiftly with Jupiter’s rapid rotation, and the outside spotlights were switched on. There were two night shifts in every Jovian working day, but on a job like this, not even the crassest of legal quibblers was keeping track of his time sheet. Jarls worked straight through like the rest, moving through a daze of fatigue and aching muscles.

Pure bad luck and the vagaries of orbital mechanics stepped in at that point. The consortium’s atmospheric mining satellite came around about every five hours in its skewed orbit, which meant that it returned to approximately the same vicinity twice a day, with a variation of only a few thousand miles. It was an arrogant gamble by the consortium—it was easier for them to keep track of their property that way, and minimized the chances of a collision with any inhabited aerostats when they strayed beyond their allotted five percent deviation from equatorial orbit. Jupiter was a big place. They thought the odds were with them, despite the North Equatorial tragedy of ’32.

The siphon nozzle would have whizzed by once already while the floater crew worked, but it must have passed too far away to have been noticed. Now it was due again, and again the odds should have kept it from striking twice in the same place.

Jarls was out on a spar, waiting to receive a crossbeam that was being poked at him from below. The wind had died down somewhat, and he stood with feet braced far apart in order to leave both hands free.

He glanced around to see an unnaturally straight incandescent line drawn against the sky. It was brighter than lightning, and getting rapidly brighter.

Jarls had a fraction of a second to realize what it was. He grabbed for support, but it was too late. The thing flashed by at a distance of less than fifty meters and was gone, leaving nothing but a thunderclap and a glowing afterimage on his retinas. The wind of its passage blew him off his perch.

He tumbled into emptiness, picking up speed at the rate of fifty miles per hour every second. Above him, the rig’s outline shrank with alarming suddenness and disappeared.

He could still feel the scorching heat of the siphon’s transit on his face as he fell. Atmospheric friction at this depth would be terrific.

And then he was aware only that he was falling like a stone into Jupiter’s crushing depths.

The rushing air plucked at the fabric of his suit. He was still accelerating. Soon he would burn up, a living meteor. Stoically, he counted out the few remaining seconds of his life.

And abruptly, there was a blanket under him, a gray blanket that stretched for acres.

It matched velocities with his and broke his fall gently. He sank into rubbery flesh. Not more than twenty seconds had passed since he’d fallen off the rig. But in that time he would have fallen some five kilometers, and would have been traveling at close to supersonic speed.

The flapjack lofted him upward, its outer edges working with powerful strokes. He raised his head cautiously. He was sprawled in the center of a vast, rippling, glossy landscape. It felt tough and resilient underneath him. Its temperature was noticeably feverish-it must be heating hydrogen in its internal spaces. Across the gray vista, near one edge, he could see a girder, small with distance. The crossbeam he’d been working with must have tumbled overboard with him. The flapjack was keeping one of its scalloped projections curled protectively around it; it was toothpick-size in the creature’s colossal grasp.

As the living carpet rose through the mist, Jarls had time to examine the harness the being wore. The straps were as wide as roadways, and were made of something that could have passed for leather. There was a crossroads near him; he crawled gingerly over for a closer look. The juncture was decorated with some kind of badge or buckle of beaten metal. It was hammered wafer-thin, with a diameter of about thirty feet. Jarls remembered what Maryann had said, and decided that the individual he was riding must be an important one to have so much metal at his disposal.

The flapjack didn’t like his touching the badge. The ground under Jarls twitched and deposited him a short distance away.

Jarls wanted to be sure. He got to his hands and knees and started to crawl toward the ornament. Again there was a Brob-dingnagian shrug, and Jarls found himself at a distance.

This time he crawled ten meters in the opposite direction and sat down again. There were no more twitches.

It was a primitive form of communication. Jarls had shown that he understood. The flapjack had exerted itself twice to make a point. Three exchanges constituted a kind of dialogue. It occurred to Jarls that except for the Shadow Trade, this might be the first time in Jovian history that human and flapjack had ever engaged in that direct a give-and-take.

It gave him another idea. He undipped his tool kit from his belt. There was a hammer in it, pliers, a couple of screwdrivers, a small pry bar. He pushed it away to arm’s length, then again retreated a few meters.

It seemed a pathetically small amount of metal to offer to a flying island, but Maryann had said that the Jovian behemoths coveted even a dropped hammer.

The edge of the flapjack folded itself over-it still seemed perfectly able to fly in this lopsided fashion-and one of the scalloped serrations came questing inland toward the toolbox. Jarls backed off another couple of meters.

The fleshy protrusion hesitated, then curled around the toolbox. It swallowed it up, like a human hand engulfing a grain of rice, and tucked it away somewhere in its harness. The flapjack flattened itself out again and went back to flying in its normal mode.

Jarls let out his breath. He’d gone to a