Starborne

Huw was puzzled by the odd combination of flightiness and profundity that was the Scandinavian man’s mind: the curious episode of the career in the theater with which he had interrupted his scientific work, for example, a thing that made no sense to Huw, and the peculiar medieval yearnings toward some sort of transcendental consummation that he occasionally expressed, and which also seemed pure foolishness to Huw. But despite all that, they quickly found themselves drawn toward one another. They both were fearless, hungry, determined to seek things that lay outside the placidities of the tame housebroken civilization into which they had been born.

So they went to Ganymede together.

Ganymede was the biggest of Jupiter’s moons, an immense ice-ball, cratered by billions of years of battering from space, grooved by the heavings of fierce internal forces. There had been an atmosphere here once, though now it lay in frozen heaps: ammonia, methane. Together the two men skated in Huw’s cunningly shielded sled in eerie pale sunlight over fields of muddy brown ice beneath the mighty eye of Jupiter. The great planet, ceaselessly spewing primordial energy, spit angry swarms of protons against them, but the magnetic fields of their suits deflected the onslaught. Could anything live, endure, replicate, under such a bombardment? In theory, perhaps, yes. They found no sign of life on Ganymede, though, nor on big Callisto nearby. Not a microbe, not the merest speck. Nothing.

But volcanic Io was a different matter. An ocean of molten sulfur with a frozen surface; ice of sulfur dioxide forming white frost clinging to a silicate landscape; geysers spouting fiery plumes of elemental sulfur fifty kilometers high that came raining down as sulfuric snow, pastel yellow and orange with undertones of blue; and volcanoes everywhere, eternally belching, sending dense clouds of sulfur-dioxide debris booming skyward that tumbled back to ground like a rain of cannonballs. Here, on the night side of this dire turbulent terrain, under a black sky glittering faintly with the lethal electrical discharges from Jupiter’s huge relentless magnetosphere, the two explorers collected the first extraterrestrial life ever found: sturdy one-celled entities, closer in nature to bacteria than anything else, sulfur-loving things, bright dots of scarlet against yellow ice, spreading slowly and happily across the face of the frightful little world of which they were the supreme and absolute rulers.

Huw danced wildly, ecstatically, around those little colored splotches, flinging high his hands, shouting thick-tongued nonsensical syllables that he wanted to believe were Welsh. His companion remained motionless, regarding him quizzically.

“Come on, damn you,” Huw cried. “Dance! Dance! A celebration of life, damn you!” He took the other man by the hand, pulled him along with him, led him in a reluctant lurching acknowledgment of their great discovery.

And then it was on to Titan for them, Saturn’s chilly Titan, big enough to have held its atmosphere, a place where methane sleet fell steadily out of a hazy hydrogen-cyanide sky. Luck was with them here too. By the gloomy shores of hydrocarbon lakes, under a thick layer of faintly glowing lemon-colored smog, they stared at sprinkles of orange against a gray shield of ammonia-methane ice. These, too, were living creatures. Biological processes of some sort were taking place here, anabolism, catabolism, ingestion, respiration, reproduction, whatever. Living creatures, altogether different from those of Io and unutterably different from anything native to Earth.

Those two sets of alien splotches are still the only forms of extraterrestrial life that the human race has ever discovered, and the two men who found them stand face-to-face now in the control cabin of the Wotan.

“We’ve been talking about the people who’ll be going on the landing party,” Huw says.

“There’s been no decision about a landing party,” the year-captain replies evenly.

“We can at least speculate about the makeup of the party.”

“You can at least do that. But we don’t have any assurance yet that we’ll want to make a landing at all.”

“If we do,” Huw says. “Let’s assume that much, shall we, old brother?”

“All right. If we make a landing, then.”

“If we do,” Huw says, “my feeling is that a group of three is our best bet: a biologist, a planetographer, and—”

The year-captain says, “Do I understand that you’re proposing yourself as a candidate for my job, Huw?”

Huw, bewildered, snakes his head. “Why do you say that?”