Rick Cook: Unfinished Symphony

“Snow,” Ensign sang, “You need more buoyancy. We’re getting a little too close to the clouds. So just relax a little and let your body expand. Can you do that?” Snow shivered, a gesture that might have been agreement. “That’s good. Now just a little bit more. OK? A little more. You’re doing fine.”

“Come on,” Melody chimed in in multi-part harmony with the deep overtones of a mother calling her calf. “Come on, Snow, you can do it. Just a little more. Just a little more.”

With his lower eyes Ensign kept scanning the clouds below. He couldn’t see any sharks but he knew they were down there and probably keenly aware of the the group above them. They were still out of range of a shark’s lunge, but they wouldn’t be much longer. If they couldn’t get Snow to expand soon they’d have to face the sharks in the clouds.

Gradually, with a stream of encouragement from all three of them, Snow started to relax and expand. Once or twice she made convulsive, jerky movements of her wingtips as if she wanted to fly for all she was worth, or worse yet, jet upward on a stream of expended hydrogen. But flapping might have tangled her more in the thing and expending hydrogen would leave her less buoyant.

Then slowly, very slowly, Snow began to rise again. Ensign and Melody stayed beside her, encouraging her and talking to her to keep her relaxed. The Geek drifted back and started examining the thing trailing at the end of the lines.

“It’s getting weaker,” he reported to the others. “It isn’t singing as loudly.” He paused. “I think it’s dying.”

“Keep listening,” Ensign told him. “Let us know if it dies completely” He hoped the thing would relax its grip in death and release Snow. If it didn’t they would have to take more drastic measures.

“Weaker, weaker,” The Geek sang. “Very much weaker. Now, nothing. No song at all.”

Ensign studied the thing with probes of sound. It was much cooler than it had been, but its structure hadn’t changed at all and it showed no sign of releasing Snow.

“All right, we ll have to get it off her,” Ensign sang. He sent a quick message to his remoras, to see if any of them had any songs that dealt with a situation like this. But the only songs about contact between High Folk the remoras carried involved sexual techniques, a kind of Jovian Kama Sutra that wasn’t much help here.

“Snow,” Ensign sang, “bank right. Please forgive me, but I am going to come above and behind you in mating position to try to work it off with my wingtips. Will you trust me for this?”

Again Snow gave a frightened bob of assent.

Ensign maneuvered above and behind the young female, fighting down the arousal the position produced. With Snow banking toward the parachute and probe, part of the canopy slid off her wingtip and instantly billowed out in the hurricane force wind.

The drag threw Snow off balance and Ensign banked desperately to avoid crashing into her. He slid by her, batting at the canopy and shroud lines with a wingtip, trying to scrape them off. Snow turned belly-on to the wind as the canopy’s drag increased and then she was free, the dead thing falling away under its fouled, partially expanded canopy, and dropping into the clouds below. Ensign wondered briefly what the sharks would make of the Sky Seed.

The Sun had long since settled into the Pacific Ocean in a dirty orange smear and it was full night in California. But Rhine and Ed Steveberg, an engineer on loan from the VLA, were hip-pocket deep in the first big surprise of the day and oblivious to the time. Steveberg was young, thin, and blond with a slightly squashed beak of a nose and a bit of a contact squint. Just now his scowl was as deep as Rhine’s.

Beyond the doors of the conference room a carefully concealed air of genteel panic was spreading through the probe team. By tomorrow morning, when most of the staff came in, the panic was likely to be a lot less genteel. Rhine and Steveberg weren’t panicked, but they weren’t real happy either.

“So,” the Rhino growled, “we got two major anomalies and a possible probe glitch: First, the probe signal has no vertical velocity component and apparently no horizontal component either. Second, you think something intermittently blocked the radio beam.” He glanced up. “Let’s go over that again.”

Steveberg tapped the printout with his pen. Everyone else had called the information up on screens, but the Rhino felt more comfortable with printouts. “We see gaps in the data where the signal fades for several seconds at a time. It’s not a problem with the receivers here on Earth because it shows up in all the Earth antennas simultaneously—something happened out there at Jupiter.”

“Intermittent transmitter failure?”

“No, for two reasons. First, when you first turn the transmitter on, it hunts in frequency for a second or so. The frequency of the probe signal is steady—ergo, something blocked it. Secondly, the signal doesn’t just snap off and on—it fades out and in.”

Rhine rubbed his chin and spread his lips in a mirthless smile. He loved a good technical mystery—it made the job worth doing. “How about if the probe were swinging below the parachute? The transmitter antenna is aimed up the shroud lines.”

Steveberg frowned. “If it’s oscillating under the chute, I’d expect a regular fading and return.” He gestured toward the signal history. “This looks pretty much random and intermittent.”

Rhine looked at the displays, glanced at the data summary printouts and took note of the two other engineers assigned to the task. His expression and demeanor were as serious as the occasion demanded, but inside he was grinning and rubbing his hands with glee. He knew he wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, but he relished the detective work ahead, was glad he’d been given the resources and people to get the job done. They’d handed him an interesting task. The fact that a dozen other teams were working on the same problem all around the world didn’t detract one whit from the excitement.

“God,” he muttered under his breath, “I love this job!”

Fourteen hours after the probe stopped transmitting, Galileo approach ed the edge of Jupiter’s disk as seen from Earth. For a while it would be out of touch, hidden by the bulk of this alien world. Just as it started behind the planet, as the image of Earth shimmered and blurred under the effects of the Jovian atmosphere, it broadcast a data stream to eager antennas on the Home Planet. Scientists would note the signal’s absorption and attempt to discern the density and perhaps the composition of gasses in the higher reaches of Jupiter’s clouds.

“Shit,” said F. Gary Rhine as he looked at the latest data reduction from the Galileo probe. The number crunchers had used the whole night to crank on the probe data and they’d gotten a preliminary flight path profile. What the computers had churned out wasn’t comforting.

“I don’t suppose the damn altimeter could have gotten stuck? ”

Ed Steveberg shrugged. “I don’t see how, but that’s Instrumentation’s pigeon.”

“OK,” Rhine said, looking at the group clustered around the table, “I will grant you the circumstances are suspicious as hell. According to our tests everything in the comm pathway is functioning perfectly.” A raised eyebrow told them how likely Rhine thought that was. “But so far we can’t find anything that would cover the facts.”

Another senior engineer stabbed a finger down on the graph of the probe’s path. “Well, the damn thing didn’t just stop halfway down to take a rest.”

“Bad weather?” someone else suggested. “The probe might have gotten caught in an updraft.”

“That would take one hell of an updraft.”