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"Fishing once more? "jumbo pencils jumbo pencilstjumbo pencilse 128 .In using this system, absentee voters werejumbo pencils instructed to mark their ballots with number two pencils. The optical scanner rejected ballots which were marked withjumbo pencils instruments other than number two pencil. 2006, Barbara Slater Stern, curriculum and teaching dialogue: V. 8, page 33."Mrs. Landry, I for But there was one last duty, and that was hardest of all. He was still sufficiently human to put it off until the very end.

 

Now what's she up to? the duty nurse asked herself, zooming the TV monitor onto the old lady. She's tried lots of tricks, but this is the first time I've seen her talking to her hearing aid, for goodness sake. I wonder what she's saying?

The microphone was not sensitijumbo pencilsve enough to pick up the words, but that scarcely seemed to matter. Jessie Bowman had seldom looked so peaceful and content. Though her eyes were closed, her entire face was wreathed in an almost angelic smile while her lips continued to form whispered words.

And then the watcher saw something that she tried hard to forget because to report it would instantly disqualify her in the nursing profession. Slowly and jerkily, the comb lying on the bedside table raised itself in the air as if lifted by clumsy, invisible fingers.

On the first attempt, it missed; then, with obvious difficulty, it began to part the long silver strands, pausing sometimes to disentangle a knot.

Jessie Bowman was not speaking now, but she continued to smile. The comb was moving with more assurance, and no longer in abrupt, uncertain jerks.

How long it lasted the nurse could never be certain. Not until the comb was gently replaced on the table did she recover from her paralysis.

Ten-year-old Dave Bowman had finished the chore which he always hated but which his mother loved. And a David Bowman who was now ageless had gained his first control of obdurate matter.

Jessie Bowman was still smiling when the nurse finally came to investigate. She had been too scared to hurry; but it would have made no difference anyway.

 

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35

Rehabilitation

 

The uproar of Earth was comfortably muted, across the millions of kilometres of space. Leonov's crew watched, with fascination yet with a certain detachment, the debates in the United Nations, the interviews with distinguished scientists', the theorizing of the news commentators, the matter-of-fact yet wildly conflicting accounts of the UFO contactees. They could contribute nothing to the brouhaha, for they had witnessed no further manifestations of any kind. Zagadka, alias Big Brother, remained as blankly indifferent to their presence as ever. And that was indeed an ironic situation; they had come all the way from Earth to solve a mystery - and it looked as if the answer might be right back at their starting point.

For the first time, they felt grateful for the slow velocity of light, and the two-hour delay that made live interviews impossible on the Earth-Jupiter circuit. Even so, Floyd was badgered by so many media requests that he finally went on strike. Nothing more remained to be said, and he had said it at least a dozen times.

Besides, there was still much work to be done. Leonov had to be prepared for the longjumbo pencils journey home, so that it would be ready to depart immediately when the launch window opened. The timing was not at all critical; even if they missed by a month, that would merely prolong the trip. Chandra, Curnow, and Floyd would not even notice as they slept their way toward the Sun; but the rest of the crew was grimly determined to leave just as soon as the laws of celestial mechanics permitted.

Discovery still posed many problems. The ship had barely sufficient propellant for the return to Earth, even if it left much later than Leonov and flew a minimum-energy orbit - which would take almost three years. And this would be possible only if Hal could be reliably programmed to carry out the mission with no human intervention except long-range monitoring. Without his cooperation, Discovery would have to be abandoned once again.

It had been fascinating - indeed, deeply moving - to watch the steady regrowth of Hal's personality, from brain-damaged child to puzzled adolescent and at length to slightly condescending adult. Although he knew that such anthropomorphic labels were highly misleading, Floyd found it quite impossible to avoid them.

And there were times when he felt that the whole situation had a haunting familiarity. How often he had seen videodramas in which disturbed youngsters were straightened out by all-wise descendants of the legendary Sigmund Freud! Essentially the same story was being played out in the shadow of Jupiter.

The electronic psychoanalysis had proceeded at a speed totally beyond human comprehension as repair and diagnostic programs flashed through Hal's circuits at billions of bits a second, pinpointing possible malfunctions and correcting them. Though most of these programs had been tested in advance on Hal's twin, SAL 9000, the impossibility of a real-time dialogue between the two computers was a serious handicap. Sometimes hours were wasted when it proved necessary to check back with Earth at a critical point in the therapy.

For despite all Chandra's work, the computer's rehabilitation was still far from complete. Hal exhibited numerous idiosyncrasies and nervous tics, sometimes even ignoring spoken words - though he would always acknowledge keyboard inputs from anyone. In the reverse direction, his outputs were even more eccentric.

There were times when he would give verbal replies, but would not display them visually. At other times he would do both - but refused to print hard copy. He would give no excuses or explanations - not even the stubbornly impenetrable 'I prefer not to' of Melville's autistic scrivener, Bartelby.

However, he was not actively disobedient so much as reluctant, and only where certain tasks were concerned. It was always possible to win his cooperation eventually - 'to talk him out of his sulk', as Curnow put it neatly.

It was not surprising that Dr Chandra was beginning to show the strain. On one celebrated occasion when Max Brailovsky innocently revived an old canard, he almost lost his temper.

'Is it true, Dr Chandra, that you chose the name Hal to be one step ahead of IBM?'

'Utter nonsense! Half of us come from IBM and we've been tryijumbo pencilsng to stamp out that story for years. I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic.'

Afterward, Max swore that he could distinctly hear the capital letters.

In Floyd's private opinion, the odds were at least fifty to one against flying Discovery safely back to Earth. And then Chandra came to him with an extraordinary proposal.

'Dr Floyd, can I have a word with you?'

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After all the weeks and shared experiences, Chandra was still as formjumbo pencilsal as ever - not only to Floyd, but to all the crew. He would not even address the ship's baby, Zenia, without the prefix 'ma'am'.

'Of course, Chandra. What is it?'

'I've virtually completed the programming for the six most probable variations on the Hohmann return orbit. Five have now been run on a simulation, without any problems.'

'Excellent. I'm sure that no one else on Earth - jumbo pencilsin the Solar System - could have done it.'

'Thank you. However, you know as well as I do that it's impossible to program for every eventuality. Hal may - will - function perfectly, and will be able to handle any reasonable emergency. But all sorts of trivial accidents - minor equipment failures that could be fixed with a screwdriver, broken wires, stuck switches - could leave him helpless and abort the whole mission.'

'You're absolutely right, of course, and it's been worrying me. But what can we do about it?'

'It's really quite simple. I'd like to stay with Discovery.'

Floyd's immediate reaction was that Chandra had gone crazy. On second thoughts, perhaps he was only half crazy. It might indeed make all the difference between success and failure to have a human being - that superb all-purpose trouble-shooting and repair device - aboard Discovery for the long voyage back to Earth. But the objections were completely overwhelming.

'It's an interesting idea,' Floyd answered with extreme caution, 'and I certainly appreciate your enthusiasm. But have you thought of all the problems?' That was a silly thing to say; Chandra would have all the answers already filed away for immediate retrieval.

'You'll be on your own for over three years! Suppose you had an accident or a medical emergency?'

'That's a risk I'm prepared to take.'

'And what about food, water? Leonov doesn't have enough to spare.'

'I've checked Discovery's recycling system; it can be made operational again without too much difficulty. Besides, we Indians can manage on very little.'

It was unusual for Chandra to refer to his origins, or indeed to make any personal statements; his 'true confession' jumbo pencilswas the only example Floyd could remember. But he did not doubt the claim; Curnow had once remarked that Dr Chandra had the sort of physique that could only be achieved by centuries of starvation. Although it sounded like one of the engineer's unkinder wisecracks, it had been made entirely without malice - indeed, with sympathy; though not, of course, in Chandra's hearing.

'Well, we still have several weeks to decide. I'll think it over and talk to Washington.'

'Thank you; do you mind if I start making the arrangements?'

'Er - not at all, as long as they don't interfere with the existing plans. Remember - Mission Control will have to make the final decision.'

And I know exactly what Mission Control will jumbo pencilssay. It was madness to expect a man to survive in space for three, years, alone.

But, of course, Chandra had always been alone.

 

36

Fire in the Deep

 

Earth was already far behind, and the awesome wonders of the Jovian system were expanding swiftly before him, when he had his revelation.

How could he have been so blind - so stupid! It was as if he had been walking in his sleep; now he was starting to awaken.

Who are you? he cried. What do you want? Why have you done this to me?

There was no answer, yet he was certain that he had been heard. He sensed a... presence, even as a man can tell, though his eyes are tightly shut, that he is in a closed room and not some empty, open space. Around him there was the faint echo of a vast mentality, an implacable will.

He called again into the reverberant silence, and again there was no direct reply - only that sense of watchful companionship. Very well; he would find the answers for himself.

Some were obvious; whoever or whatever they were, they were interested in Mankind. They had tapped and stored his memories, for their own inscrutable purposes. And now they had done the same with his deepest emotions, sometimes with his cooperation, sometimes without.

He did not resent that; indeed, the very processing he had experienced made such childish reactions impossible. He was beyond love and hate and desire and fear - but he had not forgotten them, and could still understand how they ruled the world of which he had once been part. Was that the purpose of the exercise? If so, for what ultimate goal?

He had become a player in a game of gods, and must learn the rules as he went along.

 

The jagged rocks of the four tiny outer moons, Sjumbo pencilsinope, Pasiphae, Carme, and Ananke, flickered briefly across his field of consciousness; then came Elara, Lysithea, Himalia, and Leda at half their distance from Jupiter. He ignored them all; now the pock-marked face of Callisto lay ahead.

Once, twice, he orbited the battered globe, larger than Earth's own Moon, while senses of which he had been unaware probed its outer layers of ice and dust. His curiosity was quickly satisfied; the world was a frozen fossil, still bearing the marks of collisions that, aeons ago, must have come close to shattering it. One hemisphere was a giant bull's-eye, a series of concentric rings where solid rock had once flowed in kilometre-high ripples under some ancient hammer blow from space.

Seconds later, he was circling Ganymede. Now there was a far more complex and injumbo pencilsteresting world; though so near to Callisto, and almost the same size, it presented an utterly different appearance. There were, it was true, numerous craters - but most of them seemed to have been, quite literally, ploughed back into the ground. The most extraordinary feature of the Ganymedean landscape was the presence of meandering stripes, built up from scores of parallel furrows a few kilometres apart. This grooved terrain looked as if it had been produced by armies of intoxicated ploughmen, weaving back and forth across the face of the satellite.

In a few revolutions, he saw more of Ganymede than all the space probes ever sent from Earth, and filed away the knowledge for future use. One day it would be important; he was sure of that, though he did not know why - any more than he understood the impulse that was now driving him so purposefully from world to world.

As, presently, it brought him to Europa. Though he was still largely a passive spectator, he was aware now of a rising interest, a focusing of attention - a concentration of will. Even if he was a puppet in the hands of an unseen and uncommunicative master, some of the thoughts of that controlling influence leaked - or were allowed to leak - into his own mind.

The smooth, intricately patterned globe now, rushing toward him bore little resemblance either to Ganymede or Callisto. It looked organic; the network of lines branching and intersecting over its entire surface was uncannily like a world-spanning system of veins and arteries.

The endless ice fields of a frigid waste, far colder than the Antarctic, stretched beneath him. Then, with brief surprise, he saw that he was passing over the wreckage of a spaceship. He recognized it instantly as the ill-fated Tsien, featured in so many of the video newscasts he had analysed. Not now - not now - there would be ample opportunity later.

Then he was through the ice, and into a world as unknown to his controllers as to himself.

It was an ocean world, its hidden waters protected from the vacuum of space by a crust of ice. In most places the ice was kilometres thick, but there were lines of weakness where it had cracked open and torn apart. Then there had been a brief battle between two implacably hostile elements that came into direct contact on no other world in the Solar System. The war between Sea and Space always ended in the same stalemate; the exposed water simultaneously boiled and froze, repairing the armour of ice.

The seas of Europa would have frozen completely solid long ago without the influence of nearby Jupiter. Its gravity continually kneaded the core of the little world; the forces that convulsed Io were working there, though with much less ferocity. As he skimmed across the face of the deep, he saw everywhere the evidence of that tug-of-war between planet and satellite.

And he both heard and felt it, in the continual roar and thunder of submarine earthquakes, the hiss of escaping gases from the interior, the infrasonic pressure waves of avalanches sweeping over the abyssal plains. By comparison with the tumultuous ocean that covered Europa, even the noisy seas of Earth were silent.

He had not lost his sense of wonder, and the first oasis filled him with delighted surprise. It extended for almost a kilometre around a tangled mass of pipes and chimneys deposited by mineral brines gushing from the interior. Out of that natural parody of a Gothic castle, black, scalding liquids pulsed in a slow rhythm, as if driven by the beating of some mighty heart. And, like blood, they were the authentic sign of life itself.

The boiling fluids drove back the deadly cold leaking down from above, and formed an island of warmth on the seabed. Equally important, they brought from Europa's interior all the chemicals of life. There, in an environment where none had expected it, were energy and food, in abundance.

Yet it should have been expected; he remembered that, jumbo pencilsonly a lifetime ago, such fertile oases had been discovered in the deep oceans of Earth. Here they were present on an immensely larger scale, and in far greater variety.

In the tropical zone close to the contorted walls of the 'castle' were delicate, spidery structures that seemed to be the analogy of plants, though almost all were capable of movement. Crawling among these were bizarre slugs and worms, some feeding on the plants, others obtaining their food directly from the mineral-laden waters around them. At greater distances from the source of heat - the submarine fire around which all the creatures warmed themselves - were sturdier, more robust organisms, not unlike crabs or spiders.

Armies of biologists could have spent lifetimes studying that one small oasis. Unlike the Palaeozoic terrestrial seas, it was not a stable environment, so evolution had progressed swiftly here, producing multitudes of fantastic forms. And they were all under indefinite stay of execution; sooner or later, each fountain of life would weaken and die, as the forces that powered it moved their focus elsewhere.

Again and again, in his wanderings across the Europan seabed, he encountered the evidence of such tragedies. Countless circular areas were littered with the skeletons and mineral-encrusted remains of dead creatures, where entire chapters of evolution had been deleted from the book of life.

He saw huge, empty shjumbo pencilsells formed like convoluted trumpets as large as a man. There were clams of many shapes - bivalves, and even trivalves. And there were spiral stone patterns, many metres across, which seemed an exact analogy of the beautiful ammonites that disappeared so mysteriously from Earth's oceans at the end of the Cretaceous Period.

Searching, seeking, he moved back and forth over the face of the abyss. Perhaps the greatest of all the wonders he met was a river of incandescent lava, flowing for a hundred kilometres along a sunken valley. The pressure at that depth was so great that the water in contact with the red-hot magma could not flash into steam, and the two liquids coexisted in an uneasy truce.

There, on another world and with alien actors, something like the story of Egypt had been played long before the coming of man. As the Nile had brought life to a narrow ribbon of desert, so this river of warmth had vivified the Europan deep. Along its banks, in a band never more than two kilometres wide, species after species had evolved and flourished and passed away. And at least one had left a monument behind it.

At first, he thought that it was merely another of the encrustations of mineral salts that surrounded almost all the thermal vents. However, as he came closer, he saw that it was not a natural formation, but a structure created by intelligence. Or perhaps by instinct; on Earth, the termites reared castles that were almost equally imposing, and the web of a spider was more exquisitely designed.

The creatures that had lived there must have been quite small, for the single entrance was only half a metre wide. That entrance - a thick-walled tunnel, made by heaping rocks on top of each other - gave a clue to the builders' intentions. They had reared a fortress, there in the flickering glow not far from the banks of their molten Nile. And then they had vanished.

They could not have left more than a few centuries before. The walls of the fortress, built from irregularly shaped rocks that must have been collected with great labour, were covered with only a thin crust of mineral deposits. One piece of evidence suggested why the stronghold had been abandoned. Part of the roof had fallen in, perhaps owing to the continual earthquakes; and in an underwater environment, a fort without a roof was wide open to an enemy.

He encountered no other sign of intelligence along the river of lava. Once, however, he saw something uncannily like a crawling man - except that it had no eyes and no nostrils, only a huge, toothless mouth that gulped continuously, absorbing nourishment from the liquid medium around it.

Along the narrow band of fertility in the deserts of the deep, whole cultures and even civilizations might have risen and fallen, armies might have marched (or swum) under the command of Europan Tamberlanes or Napoleons. And the rest of their world would never have known, for all those oases of warmth were as isolated from one another as the planets themselves. The creatures who basked in the glow of the lava river, and fed around the hot vents, could not cross the hostile wilderness between their lonely islands, If they had ever produced historians and philosophers, each culture would have been convinced that it was alone in the Universe.

Yet even the space between the oases was not altogether empty of life; there were hardier creatures who jumbo pencilshad dared its rigours. Often swimming overhead were the Europan analogues of fish - streamlined torpedoes, propelled by vertical tails, steered by fins along their bodies. The resemblance to the most successful dwellers in Earth's oceans was inevitable; given the same engineering problems, evolution must produce very similar answers. As witness the dolphin and the shark - superficially almost identical, yet from far distant branches of the tree of life.

There was, however, one very obvious difference between the fish of the Europan seas and those in terrestrial oceans; they had no gills, for there was hardly a trace of oxygen to be extracted from the waters in which they swam. Like the creatures around Earth's own geothermal vents, their metabolism was based on sulphur compounds, present in abundance in the near-volcanic environment.

And very few had eyes. Apart from the flickering glow of the rare lava outpourings, and occasional bursts of bioluminescence from creatures seeking mates, or hunters questing prey, it was a lightless world.

It was also a doomed one. Not only were its energy sources sporadic and constantly shifting, but the tidal forces that drove them were steadily weakening. Even if they developed true intelligence, the Europans must perish with the final freezing of their world.

They were trapped between fire and ice.

 

37

Estrangement

 

'I'm truly sorry, old friend, to be the bearer of such bad news, but Caroline has asked me, and you know how I feel about you both.

'And I don't think it can be such a surprise. Some of the remarks you've made to me over the last year have hinted at it... and you know how bitter she was when you left Earth.

'No, I don't believe there's anyone else. If there was, she'd have told me... But sooner or later - well, she's an attractive young woman.

'Chris is fine, and of course he doesn't know what's happening. At least he won't be hurt. He's too younjumbo pencilsg to understand, and children are incredibly... elastic? - just a minute, I'll have to key my thesaurus... ah, resilient.

'Now to things that may seem less important to you. Everyone is still trying to explain that bomb detonation as an accident, but of course nobody believes it. Because nothing else has happened, the general hysteria has died down; we're left with what one of your commentators has called the "looking-over-the-shoulder syndrome".

'And someone has found a hundred-year-old poem that sums up the situation so neatly that everybody's quoting it. It's set in the last days of the Roman Empire, at the gates of a city whose occupants are waiting for invaders to arrive. The emperor and dignitaries are all lined up in their most costly togas, ready with speeches of welcome. The senate has closed, because any laws it passes today will be ignored by the new masters.

'Then, suddenly, a dreadful piece of news arrives from the frontier. There aren't any invaders. The reception committee breaks up in confusion; everyone goes home muttering disappointedly, "Now what will happen to us? Those people were a kind of solution."

'There's just one slight change needed to bring the poem up to date. It's called "Waiting for the Barbarians" - and this time, we are the barbarians. And we don't know what we're waiting for, but it certainly hasn't arrived.

'One other item. Had you heard that Commander Bowman's mother died only a few days after the thing came to Earth? It does seem an odd coincidence, but the people at her nursing home say that she never showed the slightest interest in the news, so it couldn't possibly have affected her.'

 

Floyd switched off the recording. Dimitri was right; he was not taken by surprise. But that made not the slightest difference; it hurt just as badly.

Yet what else could he have done? If he had refused to go jumbo pencilson the mission - as Caroline had so clearly hoped - he would have felt guilty and unfulfilled for the remainder of his life. That would have poisoned his marriage; better this clean break, when physical distance softened the pain of separation. (Or did it? In some ways, it made things worse.) More important was duty, and the sense of being part of a team devoted to a single goal.

So Jessie Bowman was gone. Perhaps that was another cause for guilt. He had helped to steal her only remaining son, and that must have contributed to her mental breakdown. Inevitably, he was reminded of a discussion that Walter Curnow had started, on that very subject.

'Why did you choose Dave Bowman? He always struck me as a cold fish - not actually unfriendly, but whenever he came into the room, the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.'

'That was one of the reasons we did select him. He had no close family ties, except for a mother he didn't see very often. So he was the sort of man we could send on a long, open-ended mission.'

'How did he get that way?'

'I suppose the psychologists could tell you. I did see his report, of course, but that was a long time ago. There was something about a brother who was killed - and his father died soon afterward, in an accident on one of the early shuttles. I'm not supposed to tell you this, but it certainly doesn't matter now.'

It didn't matter; but it was interesting. Now Floyd almost envied David Bowman, who had come to that very spot a free man unencumbered by emotional ties with Earth.

No - he was deceiving himself. Even while the pain gripped his heart like a vice, what he felt for David Bowman was not envy, but pity.

 

38

Foamscape

 

The last beast he saw, before he left the oceans of Europa, was much the largest. It closely resembled one of the banyan trees from Earth's tropics, whose scores of trunks allow a single plant to create a small forest sometimes covering hundreds of square metres. The specimen, however, was walking, apparently on a trek between oases. If it was not one of the creatures that had destroyed Tsien, it certainly belonged to a very similar species.

Now he had learned all that he needed to know - or, ratjumbo pencilsher, all that they needed to know. There was one more moon to visit; seconds later, the burning landscape of Io lay below him.

It was as he had expected. Energy and food were there in abundance, but the time was not yet ripe for their union. Around some of the cooler sulphur lakes, the first steps had been taken on the road to life, but before any degree of organization had occurred, all such bravely premature attempts were thrown back into the melting pot. Not until the tidal forces that drove Io's furnaces had lost their power, millions of years later, would there be anything to interest biologists on that seared and sterilized world.

He wasted little time on Io, and none at all on the tiny inner moons that skirted Jupiter's ghostly rings - themselves only pale shadows of the glory that was Saturn's. The greatest of worlds lay before him; he would know it as no man had ever done, or ever would.

The million-kilometre-long tendrils of magnetic force, the sudden explosions of radio waves, the geysers of electrified plasma wider than the planet Earth- they were as real and clearly visible to him as the clouds banding the planet in multihued glory. He could understand the complex pattern of their interactions, and realized that Jupiter was much more wonderful than anyone had ever guessed.

Even as he fell through the roaring heart of the Great Red Spot, with the lightning of its continent-wide thunderstjumbo pencilsorms detonating around him, he knew why it had persisted for centuries though it was made of gases far less substantial than those that formed the hurricanes of Earth. The thin scream of hydrogen wind faded as he sank into the calmer depths, and a sleet of waxen snowflakes - some already coalescing into barely palpable mountains of hydrocarbon foam - descended from the heights above. It was already warm enough for liquid water to exist, but there were no oceans there; that purely gaseous environment was too tenuous to support them.

He descended through layer after layer of cloud, until he entered a region of such clarity that even human vision could have scanned an area more than a thousand kilometres across. It was only a minor eddy in the vaster gyre of the Great Red Spot; and it held a secret that men had long guessed, but never proved.

Skirting the foothills of the drifting foam jumbo pencilsmountains were myriads of small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottlings. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city.

They were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the metre band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself.

Nothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes - but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth.

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