The Jupiter Plague

“It’s all on the record,” he said. “The log was kept right up to the very end; the men who manned this ship had guts, but really.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

“The ‘Pericles’ was trapped right after they landed, something to do with a magnetic field that the Jovians’ generated. I skipped over the early part fast but you can go back and hear it for yourself. Then the natives contacted the crew, learned English and killed the captain — just like that, opened him up and called it talking.”

“That’s the same word the Jovian here used— what do they mean by it?”

“I would like to find out the answer to that one myself — I’ve been trying to get through to our specimen, but he won’t answer his phone. Anyway, the men on Jupiter thought that it meant total understanding or total comprehension, or maybe the understanding of basic life processes. The Jovians apparently have no machines and never developed a machine culture — but what they do have is a bioculture. They seem to be able to do whatever they want with living cells. They acted like kids with a new toy when the ship landed with a different life form; they wanted to take them apart to see what made them tick. And they did, one by one, tracked down the crewmen and dissected them…”

“Hell is cold, just as Dante wrote,” General Burke said as he softly stroked the butt of his pistol. “They’re devils right out of the Old Testament, no souls, no feelings. We’re just going to have to outfit this ship again and go back there with a hold full of H-bombs…”

“No, Cleaver, you have it wrong,” Sam said. “They’re a different life form and they obviously think and feel — if they can feel — differently from us. They didn’t ask the crew of the ‘Pericles’ if they wanted to be taken to pieces to be examined, but do we ask laboratory rats if they want to be dissected or do we give the chickens any choice between growing up or being given vile diseases while they are still in the eggs?”

“Nonsense! We can’t ask questions of rats and eggs, nor do we want to…”

“You’re right. So maybe the Jovians can’t ask us the right questions — or maybe they just don’t want to. Perhaps they take each other apart the same way without asking permission, so why should they ask us?”

“That’s what some of them thought on the ‘Pericles' ” Yasumura said. “The first officer, Weeke, he always talked like a stolid Dutchman but he had a real imagination, theoretical physics. He put his theory into the log that the Jovian individuals weren’t really individual but had a single mass mind. If this is true, they wouldn’t care in the slightest if they were killed, as individuals, any more than a fingernail cares when it gets clipped off. And if that’s the only kind of existence they knew, they would automatically assume that we are the same — so they would have started taking us apart with great pleasure.”

“It’s only a theory,” General Burke rumbled.

“But it explains a lot. Either every Jovian is a sizzling genius or there is one mind big enough to handle almost everything. It — or they — learned to speak English just as fast as it could be read to them. And they had never even seen or imagined there would be machines, yet they mastered machine technology in a matter of days, almost contemptuously. They needed to use it to work inside the alien environment of the ship, to build that pressure tank down below and control the ship, so they learned what they had to.”

“Wasn’t there any resistance to all this?”

“A good deal, but all ineffective.” Yasumura turned on the log and began scanning for the entry he wanted. “Maybe in the beginning before the Jovians were established in the ship something might have been done, though it is hard to imagine what. Remember, they couldn’t take off and short of blowing up the ship and themselves with it there was little they could really do. Anyway, here’s how it ended; this is the last entry in the log made by Commander Rand.” He pressed the playback button.

“… May twenty-fourth according to the bridge clock, but we’re not keeping track of the time any more. I shouldn’t say we — they got Anderson a little while ago and he was the last one, I mean outside of me. Those tendril things can go through any kind of metal and they are all through the ship now and there’s no way to cut them. One touch and you’re paralyzed and that’s the end of that. I saw what they did to him too. He’s down on C deck in one of those tanks right next to two of the others. All of them keep getting sick, then getting cured, though they don’t look the same afterward and finally they die. I’ve never seen anything like… they must have mutated the diseases from germs they found in our bodies or I don’t know what…”