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"Fishing once more? "lead pencil lead penciltlead pencile 128 .In using this system, absentee voters werelead pencil instructed to mark their ballots with number two pencils. The optical scanner rejected ballots which were marked withlead pencil instruments other than number two pencil. 2006, Barbara Slater Stern, curriculum and teaching dialogue: V. 8, page 33."Mrs. Landry, I forgot to bring my number two pencils! Does that mean I flunk this test?" Big tears filled Joey's eyes. A standard, ordinary number 2 pencil, one which is not colored or mechanical or lead pencilin We are professional number2 pencil manufacturer of China, making any kind of 2b pencil for our 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 wlead pencilanted on the flight deck!'

And lead pencilnobody 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?'

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'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 alead pencilbsolutely 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.'

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'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 atlead pencil 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 alead pencilt 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 lead pencilthe 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.'

 

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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 Lelead pencile 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 lead pencilI 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 thilead pencils 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 liglead pencilht, 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 manylead pencilof 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 colead penciluld 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 alead pencil 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.

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'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 ceaslead penciled; 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.

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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.

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