The Jupiter Plague

Now they were landing on it. Rocket exhausts lanced down slowing the ponderous “Pericles” almost to a stop, jamming the men deep into their acceleration couches, as radar waves probed the surface below looking for the optimum spot for a landing. Then lateral rockets fired, easing them over as they dropped so that they could come to rest on the flattest surface. Hotter and faster burned the jets digging into the ice and sending out clouds of steam that instantly froze and were whipped away by the ceaseless wind, until finally the great mass was suspended above the surface almost unmoving, dropping at inches a second. In spite of this the ship jarred and creaked as they struck and when the jets went off it was gripped by Jupiter’s trebled gravity. The structure of the ship groaned and settled to rest under the load. They were down.

“Feels like we’re still decelerating,” Rand said, pushing himself painfully forward in the chair.

Captain Bramley did not answer until after he had made a visual check of all the stations and exchanged a few words with the men there. This took less than three minutes since the total complement of the “Pericles” was just forty-one, while only a third of this number were even indirectly involved in the operation of the fully automated ship.

“We’re down and in one piece and no one injured,” the captain said, sinking back into the chair. “These 3G’s are going to be hard to live with.”

“We’ll only have to take it for a week,” Rand said, just as the instrument board went wild.

It was unprecedented and unallowed for in any of the instructions that the computer had ever received and, after running through all the possible solutions in its memory bank within nanoseconds and finding no answers, bank after bank of lights flashed red on the boards. The ship’s officers took over then, testing and clearing circuits, fighting to find out the trouble and correct it before they were destroyed. Bit by bit, as urgent messages proved that the hull was sound and that no alien atmosphere was leaking in, they regained some of their composure and began to cross check. There was nothing wrong that they could discover easily since it was the instruments themselves that were acting wildly and producing impossible observations. They cut them out one by one and it was First Officer Weeke who finally located the trouble.

“It is a magnetic field, a tremendous one that must be over ten thousand kilogauss to cause this trouble. It is low down in the ship, near to the ground, near to the ice I should say, since there is no ground here, and it is affecting all the instruments within range. It came on suddenly, an unusual phenomenon.”

Just how unusual they discovered two hours later when the affected instruments had been taken out of circuit and a measurement had been made of the interfering field.

“Very simple,” Captain Bramley said, staring at the typed sheet that had just emerged from the computer. “It is an incredibly powerful field and we have enough steel in the stern of the ship to be affected strongly by it. The attraction of this field just about equals our maximum thrust under full jet.”

“Do you mean…”

“Exactly. This field is holding us down and if we try to take off while it is still there we will blow ourselves up. For the present moment at least we are effectively trapped on Jupiter.”

“It is impossible phenomena,” Weeke protested. “Even if this onaagenaam planet is a natural cryogenic laboratory for creating magnetic fields of this strength.”

“Perhaps the field is not natural,” Captain Bramley said, very quietly, just as the signal lights came on indicating that something was moving against the lower portion of the hull.

There were floodlights in armored housings on the outer hull and over half of these had survived the landing. The captain ran his fingers rapidly over the testing circuits, cut out the damaged units, then switched on all the remaining lights at once.

Outside was eternal night since no visible light from the sun could penetrate the banked clouds and Jupiter’s compressed, two-hundred-mile-thick atmosphere, where only the occasional flare of lightning lit the darkness. There was light now, intense burning light that picked out every detail of the icescape and clearly revealed the Jovians.

“They are not what I would call handsome,” Weeke said.

There may be a law of natural selection that states that an intelligent creature should have its organs of vision placed high for effectiveness, its organs of locomotion low for mobility and its organs of manipulation at the end of flexible extremities for dexterity. This is a crude description of a man although a much more accurate one of a Jovian. They did look like caricatures of homo sapiens, a waddling pack of squashed down, broadened, elephant-hided men with tree-trunk limbs and wrinkled saurian heads.

“The light doesn’t seem to be bothering them, sir,” Rand said. “You’d think it would blind them.”