The Jupiter Plague

Someone called it the Reef and the name stuck. Whether it was the only reef, or one of many in that nightmarish, frigid sea they didn’t care. They didn’t try to look for any more like it. Their probe was down and others followed it. If there were other reefs lost in that planet-wide ocean of frigid and liquefied gas it was not important. They had only a limited number of probes — and now they had a positive target to direct them to. One by one they were expended and their information collected and examined. The radar probes found one edge of the reef, but that was all. More time could not be wasted finding out just how big the reef was. At first there was some speculation that it might be floating free in that stupendous ocean, but it turned up exactly on schedule every ten hours as the planet’s rotation brought it back to the same spot.

An image of the surface began to slowly emerge. There was a cruel mountain range, but that could easily be avoided. An immense plain stretched out from it, and that was the site they chose for landing. The probes had sent back indications of wind direction while they were falling free and a rough picture was also constructed of the torrents of rushing gas that made up the atmosphere. They were separated into invisible rivers, and bit by bit some knowledge of their relationships was assimilated by the computer.

“We only have one shot,” Captain Bramley said, looking through the sheets of detailed printout. “Once we’re committed to an orbit that is it. Large as our fuel supplies are they are also finite. We can land — and we can take off again. Nothing else.”

“I know, sir,” Rand said. He tapped the sheets. “But this is a good orbit. I’ve checked it eight ways from Sunday and so has everyone else. It will get us down.”

“No doubts?”

“No, sir.”

“All right. Feed it in and prepare to implement during the next window. I’ll let the crew know.”

Four hours later the computer actuated the braking jets and the long fall to the landing site began. Down through the hurtling torrents of the atmosphere the bulky form of the “Pericles” dropped, pitting its mass and the thrust of its thundering jets against the gravitational pull of Jupiter and the attacking weight of the dense atmosphere. Screaming winds buffeted it, tried to turn it from its plotted course, but sensitive instruments detected the deviation even as it began and informed the computer: the incandescent finger of an atomic jet flared, then another, making the constant compensations and balances that kept the ship’s fall under control. Lightning crackled through the soup-thick atmosphere that was compressed by a gravity almost three times greater than Earth’s, while methane and ammonia rain hammered at the rocket’s metallic skin.

No echo of the tempest outside penetrated to the control room, where the ordered calm was disturbed only by the distant hum of the air vent and an occasional rustle as one of the three men in the deep chairs changed position and spoke a few words in a low voice. The thick and insulated walls cut off all sound and sight, the few tiny direct-vision ports were sealed and capped, and only one viewscreen held a televised view of the surging atmosphere outside, a dark and roiling cloud mass of no interest. The display on the other screens was far more relevant, the course plot, altitude, speed, radar soundings. The ship fell.

“On course so far without readable deviation,” the second officer, Commander Rand, said. “We’re going to sit down right in the middle of that iceberg.” He was a blond man with a mild expression, and seemed too young for the naval rank of commander, even though it was a technical rank earned by his prowess in the mysteries of computer control. He had programmed this landing precisely and completely, so that now all he had to do was sit back and watch it happen.

“I wish you would not refer to the Reef as an iceberg,” First Officer Weeke said with slow Dutch thoroughness. “It is made of ice not as we know it on Earth but instead compacted to an incredible hardness. The radio probes have shown that and we have all the readings to prove this is a solid object on which we can land with impunity—”

“Wind velocity is below a hundred m.p.h. What’s the air temperature?” Captain Bramley asked.

“Minus one hundred fifty degrees,” Rand said. “Just a few degrees lower than the Reef temperature. We’re almost down.”

They watched the indicators in silence, alert for the emergency that never came, and in each sweep of their eyes across the crowded boards they rested longest on the trajectory display screen where the red blob of their position was sliding down the white line of the selected course toward the rising bulk of the Reef.