Gregory Benford - Jupiter Project

We saw no swarms. Nothing on J-11 moved. So the next step was a close reconnaissance—and I got to go.

I suited up and went out onto the hull to check out Roadhog. Maybe it should have been Roadhog II, but that would’ve been pretentious. I clumped around in magnetic boots. Commander Aarons came out to look things over. I repped and verified all systems. He waved to the exploration party of eight that I was to ferry over. They climbed on and belted in.

This was where Roadhog was essential. We couldn’t risk taking the Sagan in close to J-11; any small error in jockeying around could smash the ship into a peak. In the Roadhog a small party could slip down into the fissures and get a good look if they needed to.

Lt. Sharma was in charge. His orders were to nose around and report back. The civilian head of the group was my father, one of his jobs, I was sure, would be keeping an eye on me. After all, I was the kid who disobeyed direct orders and stole a shuttle.

We took our time crossing the thirty kilometers. Jenny and I had fitted extra seats on Roadhog back at the Can and now the exploration party was belted into them behind me. What with equipment lashed to every available pipe and strut, we looked like a gypsy wagon.

Jupiter hung off to the left. This far out it didn’t fill the sky any more; its orange bands were creamy and smooth, with no detail, and Ganymede was a frozen silver dot at its side. The scenery hadn’t really changed that much, considering that we were twenty-two million kilometers from the Can.

J-11 was tumbling slightly and I had to correct several times before we were hanging steady over one spot on its surface. I nudged us in slowly, watching the shadows below shift as the tiny moon rotated in the sunlight.

Nobody said anything; most of them were busy taking pictures and watching their meters. After I fixed our relative position there wasn’t much to do; J-11’s gravity was so weak it would take years to draw us in.

After several minutes I said, “Dad?”

“Yes. son?”

“See that crater down there? The big one, between the twin peaks?”

“Ummmm, yes. What about it?”

“For a minute there I thought I saw a bright flash, like metal reflecting the sun, right down at the bottom.”

“I can’t see the bottom.”

“It’s in shadow now. The rock must be dark there, anyway; I couldn’t see anything even when the sunlight was slanting down into it.”

“Let’s go in closer,” one of the other men said. I looked at Lt. Sharma, who was sitting next to me. “Go ahead,” he said.

I nudged the Roadhog nearer. The crater grew. I was busy watching our trajectory and didn’t look up until someone yelled, “Hey! There’s a hole in it.”

He was right. The “crater” was a bottomless pit, several miles across. Where you would expect to see a flat floor there was nothing, just blackness. Utter, eerie blackness.

There was a lot of chatter over suit radio. I tuned it out and concentrated on my piloting. Every few minutes Lt. Sharma would confer with the Commander and obtain permission to go in closer. One of the men behind me was running a portable television camera so they could follow what was happening back on the Sagan.

The hole remained black. We went in closer. One kilometer, then a half, then four hundred yards. One of the scientists checked the radiation level and found nothing more than the usual background count. I aimed the Roadhog ’s headlights off to the side and got back a few sparkling reflections from the distant walls. The sides of the pit seemed to be fused and melted here and there.

Lieutenant Sharma asked for permission to go into the pit. The Commander argued a little and then granted it.

I took her down. The yawning crater swallowed us in shadow.

The radio was quiet now. No one had anything more to say. Just before we went in I looked to the side and saw the rim of the crater rise up. Then it was blotted out by the edge of the pit. Behind us the Sagan jockeyed to stay within our line of sight; otherwise, we would lose radio contact.

There still wasn’t much to see. The pit walls were far away and most of the rock could have passed for coal; it was dark.

“Lieutenant! I am registering an increased magnetic field.” one of the men behind me said.

“What’s that?” my father asked, pointing. I turned the craft to bring the headlights toward the walls of the pit. A dim coppery ribbon lined the wall. I rotated the Roadhog. The band formed a thin ring completely around the pit. We were passing through the center of the ring.

“What is it?”

“Looks like metal.”

“Impossible.”

“Quiet,” said Lieutenant Sharma, and spoke to the Commander.

I didn’t slacken our speed. Another ring came into view. As we passed through it I thought it looked a little closer to the shuttle. I wondered how such a natural formation could come about. Something to do with the evolution of the asteroid belt? Veins of metal? The rings were at least half a kilometer in diameter, larger than the diameter of the Can.

We came to another. And another. They were getting closer together. Smaller, too. The pit was narrowing.

“Something is reflecting light ahead,” Lieutenant Sharma said, breaking a long silence. His voice was a dry rasp.

I slowed the shuttle. It was hard to make out any detail. We coasted through a chain of rings, each a little smaller than the last. I was beginning to get a creepy feeling.

Something metallic lay ahead; it looked like the same mottled coppery stuff as in the rings. I brought us up to it slowly, ignoring the radio conversations. It wasn’t until we were quite close that I saw that the pit had ended; the metal object was sitting on a wall of dark rock.

We hung about a hundred meters away from the wall. The coppery object was a hemisphere without any visible markings, about ten meters across.

I glanced at Lieutenant Sharma. He was looking off to the side, squinting. He pointed toward the walls of the pit. “That way,” he said.

I was more interested in the metal dome, but I followed orders. We coasted along parallel to the pit floor. Then I saw a blotch ahead that resolved into a rectangle of white.

“Hey!” someone said.

Suddenly the pit floor was gone. I looked down and saw nothing but blackness. There was an opening below us. Lieutenant Sharma pointed at it and nodded to me. I took the Roadhog into the hole, fumbling nervously with the attitude jets.

The walls in this hole didn’t narrow. There was a clearance of about twenty meters. A moment passed before I realized that walls existed only on two sides, the left and right. In the other directions there was only darkness.

What we had thought was the floor of the pit was only something blocking it, like a cork that doesn’t fill the neck of a bottle. Now we were inching around the cork.

Something loomed ahead, and I slowed the shuttle down.

“Looks like a pipe,” someone said.

“Yes, it does,” my father answered. “About five meters in diameter. It comes out of the wall on the right.”

“And connects into the rock on the left,” Lieutenant Sharma said. He pressed his lips together as he studied it.

I inched us around the pipe. In the shuttle’s pale headlights it looked flexible. Where it joined the wall there were folds in the material. Beyond this pipe we could see others, evenly spaced.

“Let’s go back,” Lieutenant Sharma said. “I want to have a look at that white thing.”

There was some argument, but I was taking orders only from the Lieutenant. Eagerly I backed us out, into the clear. The enormity of this thing was just starting to hit me.