The Jupiter Plague

This time the hole was much smaller and whatever had made it withdrew instantly. There was only a single spurt of the frigid hydrogen-helium atmosphere that was cut off as something else came in through the opening, a thin brown tendril that projected a full yard into the room before it began to sag. When it touched the deck it ceased growing in length but the end began to swell as though the tendril were a tube that was inflating it. No one spoke as they watched the shape expand until it was the size and shape of a barrel covered with a shining and transparent coating. The top of the object writhed and shaped itself into a collection of nodules and there it stopped.

“What — what can it be?” Commander Rand asked, phrasing the question for all of them. The captain looked at it with fierce concentration.

“It’s alien, it could be anything — but I’m hoping that it is a communicator of some sort.” He switched on the phone in the engine room. “Hello — hello — can you hear me?”

A slit opened and gaped in the top of the barrel in the midst of the nodules and a pulsating, high-pitched sound bubbled out.

“Ha-rrr-rrr-ooo…” it screamed in vile imitation of a human voice. “Harrrooo…”

They worked with it during the coming weeks -

and learned to accept it. The men would have been rebellious and frightened if it weren’t for the endless gravity that dragged at them and made life a continual torment. They were spending most of the time in the float beds where their bodies displaced the water so that the drag of gravity was relieved at least for a time. The captain and the ship’s officers were taking turns teaching English to the biological communicator, which is what they thought the alien thing — they called it the barrel — to be. It seemed to have no intelligence of its own, yet it was alive underneath the hard coating that shielded it from the oxygen atmosphere. At first they read to it through a loudspeaker but when it showed no signs of either emotion or aggression they stayed in the compartment with it, near the door in case of emergency. The barrel would refuse to answer any questions — other than those directly involved with the language lessons — and after a few days they stopped trying. There had to be an eventual end to the instruction and they would find out what they wanted to know then. In the meantime the lessons were vitally important; they had to learn to communicate with the Jovians before they could find a way to convince them that they should remove the magnetic field that held them trapped.

In the middle of a lesson, at the end of the seventeenth day, the barrel suddenly stopped talking and withdrew the single eye that it had grown to look at the display screen for the computer that was used for demonstrations. Rand, who was reading at the time, ran for the door and sealed it behind him. He watched.from the control room with the others and when the eye opened again after a few minutes it had changed color and seemed to have a quality of intelligence about it that had been lacking before.

“What thing are you…?” the barrel asked.

The conversation between the two differing life forms had begun.

Words and the simple mechanics of communication were easy enough for the Jovians to master, their memories appeared to be eidetic and no word was ever forgotten once explained. But referents were another thing. Nouns that could be pointed out, chair, glass, knife, were simple enough to convey, as well as easily demonstrable verbs, such as walk, run and write. When abstractions were reached communication of meaning became difficult and there were entire areas of misunderstanding.

“You come from where…?” the Jovian asked, and when informed that they were from Earth, the third planet from the sun in this solar system, they asked, “What is earths? What is planets? What is suns…?”

Buried here, at the bottom of hundreds of miles of near-liquid atmosphere covered by solid layers of clouds, they had never seen the stars nor had they any inkling of knowledge that worlds other than their own existed. Yet they seemed to understand when it was explained to them, though they had very little interest and let the matter drop quickly and went on to something else. This was a pattern they seemed to follow — if they could be said to be following any pattern at all. They would pick a subject up, ask questions, then quickly abandon it. They (or it, the men in the ship never knew if they were talking to one or more Jovians) seemed to lack the simplest knowledge of the mechanical sciences, though they apparently absorbed explanations easily enough. There was only one ^thing that held their attention, that they kept coming back to: they never seemed satisfied with the answers.

“What thing are you…?”

It was the captain who first understood something about them.

“The biological sciences,” he said, “chemistry when it is biochemistry, neurophysics and all the rest. And electricity… of course! Bioelectricity.”