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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (10)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 14:31:34 1999), 转信

                               10
                 A Cry from Europa

Sleeping in zero gravity is a skill that has to be learned; it had
taken Floyd almost a week to find the best way of anchoring
legs and arms so that they did not drift into uncomfortable
positions. Now he was an expert, and was not looking
forward to the return of weight; indeed, the very idea gave
him occasional nightmares.
  Someone was shaking him awake. No - he must still be
dreaming! Privacy was sacred aboard a spaceship; nobody
ever entered another crew member's chambers without first
asking permission. He clenched his eyes shut, but the shak-
ing continued.
  `Dr Floyd - please wake up! You're wanted on the flight
deck!'
  And nobody called him Dr Floyd; the most formal saluta-
tion he had received for weeks was Doc. What was happen-
ing?
  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. He was in his tiny cabin,
gently gripped by his sleeping cocoon. So one part of his
mind told him; then why was he looking at - Europa? They
were still millions of kilometres away.
  There were the familiar reticulations, the patterns of
triangles and polygons formed by intersecting lines. And
surely that was the Grand Canal itself- no, it wasn't quite
right. How could it be, since he was still in his little cabin
aboard Leonov?
  `Dr Floyd!'
  He became fully awake, and realized that his left hand was
floating just a few centimetres in front of his eyes. How
strange that the pattern of lines across the palm was so
uncannily like the map of Europa! But economical Mother
Nature was always repeating herself, on such vastly differ-
ent scales as the swirl of milk stirred into coffee, the cloud
lanes  of a cyclonic storm, the arms of a spiral nebula.
  `Sorry, Max,' he said. `What's the problem? Is something
wrong?'
  `We think so - but not with us. Tsien's in trouble.'
  Captain, navigator, and chief engineer were strapped in
their  seats on the flight deck; the rest of the crew orbited
anxiously around convenient handholds, or watched on the
monitors.
  'Sorry to wake you up, Heywood,' Tanya apologized
brusquely. `Here's the situation. Ten minutes ago we had a
Class One Priority from Mission Control. Tsien's gone off
the air. It happened very suddenly, in the middle of a cipher
message; there were a few seconds of garbled transmission -
then nothing.'
  `Their beacon?'
  `That's stopped as well. We can't receive it either.'
  `Phew! Then it must be serious - a major breakdown.
Any theories?'
  `Lots - but all guesswork. An explosion - landslide -
earthquake: who knows?'
  `And we may never know - until someone else lands on
Europa - or we do a close flyby and take a look.'
  Tanya shook her head. `We don't have enough delta-vee.
The closest we could get is fifty thousand kilometres. Not
much you could see from that distance.'
  `Then there's absolutely nothing we can do.'
  `Not quite, Heywood. Mission Control has a suggestion.
They'd like us to swing our big dish around, just in case we
can pick up any weak emergency transmissions. It's - how
do you say? - a long shot, but worth trying. What do you
think?'
  Floyd's first reaction was strongly negative.
  `That will mean breaking our link with Earth.'
  `Of course; but we'll have to do that anyway, when we go
around Jupiter. And it will only take a couple of minutes to
re-establish the circuit.'
  Floyd remained silent. The suggestion was perfectly
reasonable, yet it worried him obscurely. After puzzling for
several seconds, he suddenly realized why he was so
opposed to the idea.
  Discovery's troubles had started when the big dish - the
main antenna complex - had lost its lock on Earth, for
reasons which even now were not completely clear. But Hal
had certainly been involved, and there was no danger of a
similar situation arising here. Leonov's computers were
small,  autonomous  units;  there  was  no  single controlling
intelligence. At least, no nonhuman one.
  The  Russians  were  still  waiting  patiently for his answer.
  `I  agree,'  he  said  at  last.  `Let  Earth know what we're
doing,  and  start  listening.  I  suppose  you'll try all the
SPACE MAYDAY frequencies.'
  `Yes,  as  soon  as  we've  worked  out  the  Doppler correc-
tions. How's it going, Sasha?'
  `Give  me  another  two  minutes,  and  I'll  have  the auto-
matic search running. How long should we listen?'
  The   captain   barely   paused  before  giving  her  answer.
Floyd  had  often  admired  Tanya  Orlova's  decisiveness, and
had  once  told  her so. In a rare flash of humour, she had
replied:  `Woody,  a  commander  can  be  wrong,  but never
uncertain.'
  `Listen for fifty minutes, and report back to Earth for ten.
Then repeat the cycle.'
  There  was  nothing  to  see  or hear; the automatic circuits
were  better at sifting the radio noise than any human senses.
Nevertheless,  from  time  to  time  Sasha turned up the audio
monitor,  and the roar of Jupiter's radiation belts filled the
cabin.  It  was  a  sound  like  the  waves breaking on all the
beaches  of  Earth,  with  occasional  explosive  cracks  from
superbolts   of   lightning   in  the  Jovian  atmosphere.  or
human  signals,  there  was  no  trace;  and,  one by one, the
members of the crew not on duty drifted quietly away.
  While  he  was  waiting,  Floyd  did  some  mental  calcula-
tions.  Whatever  had  happened  to  Tsien  was  already  two
hours  in  the  past,  since  the  news had been relayed from
Earth.
  But  Leonov  should  be  able  to  pick  up a direct message
after less  than  a  minute's  delay, so the Chinese had already
had  ample  time  to  get  back  on  the  air.  Their  continued
silence  suggested  some  catastrophic  Failure,  and  he  found
himself weaving endless scenarios of disaster.
  The fifty minutes seemed like hours. When they were up,
Sasha swung the ship's antenna complex back toward
Earth, and reported failure. While he was using the rest of
the ten minutes to send a backlog of messages, he looked
inquiringly at the captain.
  `Is it worth trying again?' he said in a voice that clearly
expressed his own pessimism.
  `Of course. We may cut back the search time - but we'll
keep listening.'
  On the hour, the big dish was once more focused upon
Europa. And almost at once, the automatic monitor started
flashing its ALERT light.
  Sasha's hand darted to the audio gain, and the voice of
Jupiter filled the cabin. Superimposed upon that, like a
whisper heard against a thunderstorm, was the faint but
completely unmistakable sound of human speech. It was
impossible to identify the language, though Floyd felt cer-
tain, from the intonation and rhythm, that it was not
Chinese, but some European tongue.
  Sasha played skilfully with fine-tuning and band-width
controls, and the words became clearer. The language was
undoubtedly English - but its content was still maddeningly
unintelligible.
  There is one combination of sounds that every human ear
can detect instantly, even in the noisiest environment.
When it suddenly emerged from the Jovian background, it
seemed to Floyd that he could not possibly be awake, but
was trapped in some fantastic dream. His colleagues took a
little longer to react; then they stared at him with equal
amazement - and a slowly dawning suspicion.
  For the first recognizable words from Europa were: `Dr
Floyd - Dr Floyd - I hope you can hear me.'

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