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发信人: by (春天的小懒虫), 信区: SFworld
标  题: 2010 (13)
发信站: 哈工大紫丁香 (Wed Oct  6 14:35:24 1999), 转信

                          13
             The Worlds of Galileo

Even  now,  more than three decades after the revelations of
the  first  Voyager flybys, no one really understood why the
four  giant  satellites differed so wildly from one another.
They  were  all about the same size, and in the same part of
the  Solar  System - yet they were totally dissimilar, as if
children of a different birth.
  Only  Callisto,  the  outermost, had turned out to be much
as expected. When Leonov, raced past at a distance of Just
over 100,000 kilometres, the larger of its countless craters
were clearly visible to the naked eye. Through the tele-
scope, the satellite looked like a glass ball that had been used
as a target by high-powered rifles; it was completely
covered with craters of every size, right down to the lower
limit of visibility. Callisto, someone had once remarked,
looked more like Earth's Moon than did the Moon itself.
  Nor was this particularly surprising. One would have
expected a world out here - at the edge of the asteroid belt -
to have been bombarded with the debris left over from the
creation of the Solar System. Yet Ganymede, the satellite
next door, had a totally different appearance. Though it had
been well peppered with impact craters in the remote past,
most of them had been ploughed over - a phrase that
seemed peculiarly appropriate. Huge areas of Ganymede
were covered with ridges and furrows, as if some cosmic
gardener had dragged a giant rake across them. And there
were light-coloured streaks, like trails that might have been
made by slugs fifty kilometres across. Most mysterious of
all were long, meandering bands, containing dozens of
parallel lines. It was Nikolai Ternovsky who decided what
they must be - multilane superhighways, laid out by
drunken surveyors. He even claimed to have detected over-
passes and cloverleaf intersections.
  Leonov had added some trillions of bits of information
about Ganymede to the store of human knowledge, before
it crossed the orbit of Europa. That icebound world, with
its derelict and its dead, was on the other side of Jupiter, but
it was never far from anyone's thoughts.
  Back on Earth, Dr Chang was already a hero and his
countrymen had, with obvious embarrassment, acknow-
ledged countless messages of sympathy. One had been sent
in the name of Leonov's crew - after, Floyd gathered, con-
siderable redrafting in Moscow. The feeling on board the
ship was ambiguous - a mixture of admiration, regret, and
relief. All astronauts, irrespective of their national origins,
regarded themselves as citizens of space and felt a common
bond, sharing each other's triumphs and tragedies. No one
on Leonov was happy because the Chinese expedition had
met with disaster; yet at the same time, there was a muted
sense of relief that the race had not gone to the swiftest.
  The unexpected discovery of life on Europa had added a
new element to the situation - one that was now being
argued at great length both on Earth and aboard Leonov
Some exobiologists cried `I told you so!', pointing out that it
should not have been such a surprise after all. As far back as
the 1970s, research submarines had found teeming colonies
of strange marine creatures thriving precariously in an en-
vironment thought to be equally hostile to life - the trenches
on the bed of the Pacific. Volcanic springs, fertilizing and
warming the abyss, had created oases of life in the deserts of
the deep.
  Anything that had happened once on Earth should be
expected millions of times elsewhere in the Universe; that
was almost an article of faith among scientists. Water - or at
least ice - occurred on all the moons of Jupiter. And there
were continuously erupting volcanoes on Io - so it was
reasonable to expect weaker activity on the world next
door. Putting these two facts together made Europan life
seem not only possible, but inevitable - as most of nature's
surprises are, when viewed with 20/20 hindsight.
  Yet that conclusion raised another question, and one vital
to Leonov's mission. Now that life had been discovered on
the moons of Jupiter - did it have any connection with the
Tycho monolith, and the still more mysterious artifact in
orbit near Io?
  That was a favourite subject to debate in the Six O'Clock
Soviets. It was generally agreed that the creature encoun-
tered by Dr Chang did not represent a high form of intel-
ligence - at least, if his interpretation of its behaviour was
correct. No animal with even elementary powers of reason-
ing would have allowed itself to become a victim of its
instincts, attracted like a moth to the candle until it risked
destruction.
  Vasili Orlov was quick to give a counter-example that
weakened, if it did not refute, that argument.
  `Look at whales and dolphins,' he said. `We call them
intelligent.- but how often they kill themselves in mass
strandings! That looks like a case where instinct overpowers
reason.'
  `No need to go to the dolphins,' interjected Max
Brailovsky. `One of the brightest engineers in my class was
fatally attracted to a blonde in Kiev. When I heard of him
last, he was working in a garage. And he'd won a gold
medal for designing spacestations. What a waste!'
  Even if Dr Chang's Europan was intelligent, that of
course did not rule out higher forms elsewhere. The biology
of a whole world could not be judged from a single speci-
men.
  But it had been widely argued that advanced intelligence
could never arise in the sea; there were not enough chal-
lenges in so benign and unvarying an environment. Above
all, how could marine creatures ever develop a technology
without the aid of fire?
  Yet perhaps even that was possible; the route that human-
ity had taken was not the only one. There might be whole
civilizations in the seas of other worlds.
  Still, it seemed unlikely that a space-faring culture could
have arisen on Europa without leaving unmistakable signs
of its existence in the form of buildings, scientific installa-
tions, launching sites, or other artifacts. But from pole to
pole, nothing could be seen but level ice and a few outcrop-
pings of bare rock.
  No time remained for speculations and discussions when
Leonov hurtled past the orbits of Io and tiny Mimas. The
crew was busy almost non-stop, preparing for the encoun-
ter and the brief onset of weight after months in free-fall. All ,
loose objects had to be secured before the ship entered
Jupiter's atmosphere, and the drag of deceleration produced
momentary peaks that might be as high as two gravities.
  Floyd was lucky; he alone had time to admire the superb
spectacle of the approaching planet, now filling almost half
the sky. Because there was nothing to give it scale, there
was no way that the mind could grasp its real size. He had to
keep telling himself that fifty Earths would not cover the
hemisphere now turned toward him.
  The clouds, colourful as the most garish sunset on Earth,
raced so swiftly that he could see appreciable movement in
as little as ten minutes. Great eddies were continually form-
ing along the dozen or so bands that girdled the planet, then
rippling away like swirls of smoke. Plumes of white gas
occasionally geysered up from the depths, to be swept away
by the gales caused by the planet's tremendous spin. And
perhaps strangest of all were the white spots, sometimes
spaced as regularly as pearls on a necklace, which lay along
the tradewinds of the middle Jovian latitudes.
  In the hours immediately before encounter, Floyd saw
little of captain or navigator. The Orlovs scarcely left the
bridge, as they continually checked the approach orbit and
made minute refinements to Leonov's course. The ship was
now on the critical path that would just graze the outer
atmosphere; if it went too high, frictional braking would
not be sufficient to slow it down, and it would go racing out
of the Solar System, beyond all possibility of rescue. If it
went too low, it would burn up like a meteor. Between the
two extremes lay little margin for error.
  The Chinese had proved that aerobraking could be done,
but there was always the chance that something would go
wrong. So Floyd was not at all surprised when Surgeon-
Commander   Rudenko   admitted,   just  an  hour  before  con-
tact:  `I'm  beginning  to  wish,  Woody,  that  I had brought
along that icon, after all.'

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:-) Helix@163.NET                                                    85958F57
:-( Helix@KALI.COM.CN                                                208CE12C
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