精华区文章阅读

发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (11)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 14:33:30 1999), 转信

                           11
                 Ice and Vacuum

`Who  is  it?'  whispered  someone, to a chorus of shushes.
Floyd  raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance - and, he
hoped, innocence.
  '...  know  you  are  aboard  Leonov  ...  may  not  have
much time... aiming my suit antenna where I think.
The  signal  vanished  for  agonizing  seconds,  then came
back much clearer, though not appreciably louder.
  ` ... relay  this  information to Earth. Tsien destroyed
three  hours  ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio -
no  idea  if it has enough range, but it's the only chance.
Please  listen  carefully.  THERE  IS  LIFE  ON  EUROPA.  I
repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA... '
  The  signal  faded  again. A stunned silence followed that
no  one  attempted to interrupt. While he was waiting, Floyd
searched  his  memory furiously. He could not recognize the
voice  -  it  might  have been that of any Western-educated
Chinese. Probably it was someone he had met at a scientific
conference,  but unless the speaker identified himself he
would never know.
  ` ... soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadi-
ly  and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out
to  check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands - stood - about
thirty  metres  from  the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go
directly  from it and down through the ice. Very thin - not
safe to walk on. The warm upwelling... '
  Again  a  long silence. Floyd wondered if the speaker was
moving,  and  had  been  momentarily  cut  off  by some ob-
struction.
  '...  no problem - five kilowatts of lighting strung up on
the ship. Like a Christmas tree - beautiful, shining right
through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first - a huge
dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it
was a school offish-too large for a single organism - then it
started to break through the ice.
  `Dr Floyd, I hope you can hear me. This is Professor
Chang - we met in '02 - Boston IAU conference.'
  Instantly, incongruously, Floyd's thoughts were a billion
kilometres away. He vaguely remembered that reception,
after the closing session of the International Astronomical
Union Congress - the last one that the Chinese had attended
before the Second Cultural Revolution. And now he re-
called Chang very distinctly - a small, humorous astron-
omer and exobiologist with a good fund of jokes. He wasn't
joking now.
  '... like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the
ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera - I stayed to
watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly
I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than
alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was - I've
seen pictures of the kelp forests off California - but I was
quite wrong.
  ' ... I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn't possibly
survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its
normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved
forward - bits were breaking off like glass - but it was still
advancing toward the ship, a black tidal wave, slowing
down all the time.
  `I was still so surprised that I couldn't think straight and I
couldn't imagine what it was trying to do...'
  `Is there any way we can call him back?' Floyd whispered
urgently.
  `No - it's too late. Europa will soon be behind Jupiter
We'll have to wait until it comes out of eclipse.'
   ... climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as
it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold -
the way termites protect themselves from the sunlight with
their little corridors of mud.
  '... tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off
first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle -
all in slow motion, like a dream.
  `Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the
thing was trying to do - and then it was too late. We could
have saved ourselves - if we'd only switched off those
lights.
  `Perhaps it's a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered
by the sunlight that filters through the ice. Or it could have
been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must
have been more brilliant than anything that Europa has ever
known...
  `Then the ship crashed. I saw the hull split, a cloud of
snowflakes form as moisture condensed. All the lights went
out, except for one, swinging back and forth on a cable a
couple of metres above the ground.
  `I don't know what happened immediately after that. The
next thing I remember, I was standing under the light,
beside the wreck of the ship, with a fine powdering of fresh
snow all around me. I could see my footsteps in it very
clearly. I must have run there; perhaps only a minute or two
had elapsed...
  `The plant - I still thought of it as a plant - was motion-
less. I wondered if it had been damaged by the impact; large
sections - as thick as a man's arm - had splintered off, like
broken twigs.
  `Then the main trunk started to move again. It pulled
away from the hull, and began to crawl toward me. That
was when I knew for certain that the thing was light-
sensitive: I was standing immediately under the thousand-
watt lamp, which had stopped swinging now.
  `Imagine an oak tree - better still, a banyan with its
multiple trunks and roots - flattened out by gravity and
crying to creep along the ground. It got to within five
metres of the light, then started to spread out until it had
made a perfect circle around me. Presumably that was the
limit of its tolerance - the point at which photoattraction
turned to repulsion. After that, nothing happened for sever-
al minutes. I wondered if it was dead - frozen solid at last.
  `Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the
branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers
opening. In fact 1 thought they were flowers - each about as
big as a man's head.
  `Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to un-
fold. Even then, it occurred to me that no one - no thing -
could ever have seen these colours before; they had no
existence until we brought our lights - our fatal lights - to
this world.
  `Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly... I walked over to
the living wall that surrounded me, so that I could see
exactly what was happening. Neither then, nor at any other
time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain
that it was not malevolent - if indeed it was conscious at all.
  `There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of
unfolding. Now they reminded me of butterflies, just
emerging from the chrysalis - wings crumpled, still feeble -
I was getting closer and closer to the truth.
  `But they were freezing - dying as quickly as they
formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the
parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like
fish stranded on dry land - at last I realized exactly what they
were. Those membranes weren't petals - they were fins, or
their equivalent. This was the free-swimming, larval stage
of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on
the seabed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of
new territory. Just like the corals of Earth's oceans.
  `I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little
creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now, to a drab
brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming
brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly,
and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it
sensed my presence.
  `Then I noticed that the stamens - as I'd called them - all
carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny
star sapphires - or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop
- aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I
watched, the vivid blue faded, the sapphires became dull,
ordinary stones...
  `Dr Floyd - or anyone else who is listening - I haven't
much more time; Jupiter will soon block my signal. But I've
almost finished.
  `I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand-
watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few
tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.
  `I wondered if it was too late. For a few minutes, nothing
happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches.
around me, and kicked it.
  `Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to
retreat back to the Canal. There was plenty of light - 1 could
see everything perfectly. Ganymede and Callisto were in
the sky -Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent - and there was a
big auroral display on the nightside, at the Jovian end of the
Io flux tube. There was no need to use my helmet light.
  `I followed the creature all the way back to the water,
encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down,
feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath
my boots... as it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain
strength and energy, as if it knew that it was approaching its
natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.
  `It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last
dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bub-
bled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it
from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to
see if there was anything to salvage - I don't want to talk
about that.
  `I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the
taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it
after me.
  `And-when the next ship comes home - ask them to take
our bones back to China.
  `Jupiter will be cutting us off in a few minutes. I wish I
knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I'll re-
peat this message when we're in line of sight again - if my
suit's life-support system lasts that long.
  `This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the des-
truction of spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand
Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice -'
  The signal faded abruptly, came back for a moment, then
disappeared completely below the noise level. Although
Leonov listened again on the same frequency, there was no
further message from Professor Chang.

--
           KK   KK    KK    KK     KK    KK
          KK  KK      KK  KK        KK  KK
         KKKK         KKKK           KKKK
        KK  KK        KK  KK          KK  KK
       KK    KK       KK    KK         KK    KK

※ 来源:·BBS 水木清华站 bbs.net.tsinghua.edu.cn·[FROM: 166.111.10.176]

--
:-) Helix@163.NET                                                    85958F57
:-( Helix@KALI.COM.CN                                                208CE12C
                                        简  爱                       CB384F06
                                                                     CC60E9F4
                           你-为-什-么-把-心-给-挖-走-了~~~ ?        54319BC9
                                                                     7EA2D22F

※ 来源:·饮水思源站 bbs.sjtu.edu.cn·[FROM: 202.120.5.220]

--
☆ 来源:．哈工大紫丁香 bbs.hit.edu.cn．[FROM: bingyang.bbs@bbs.sjt]

SFworld 版 (精华区)