Zach Hughes - Pressure Man

“And if every little thing doesn’t please you?” J.J. asked.

“My decision,” Dom said. “I will take the responsibility.”

“I just wonder if it would be worth going back if we fail,” J.J. said.

“It’s human to cling to life even when there is no hope,” Dom said.

“Especially if you’ve just been married,” J.J. said.

Dom looked at J.J. levelly. “I resent that, J.J. My private life is my own as long as it doesn’t keep me from performing my duties. I defy you to point out one instance of my private considerations having affected my judgment or the performance of my duties.”

“Sorry, Flash,” J.J. said. “I’m worried, that’s all.”

“We all are,” Doris said.

Dom set the crew to work on dry runs of making the descent run. It was a little early, but they were getting edgy and the rehearsals kept them busy. Privacy time was cut. Dom and Doris deliberately avoided being alone together, as if to prove to the others that their changed status did not affect performance.

Three days before time to go into orbit around the gas giant, the Kennedy’s RDF locked onto the signal from the alien ship. It seemed to be a miracle that the signal was still steady, still the same strength as it was so long ago when the Kennedy was nothing more than a dream and some often-conflicting data in the DOSEWEX computer. The fact that the ship was still down there, beeping away, reinforced the theory that she was trapped and incapable of escaping the gravitational and atmospheric fields of the giant planet.

“If there is anyone or anything aboard her,” Art said, “he, she, or it will be happy to see us.”

Doris was very busy in those last days before going into orbit. She checked and rechecked all data. The task of putting the ship into orbit and then lowering her gently, oh so gently, into the fringe of atmosphere was Doris’ baby. Her fingers and data from the shipboard computer had to be right, had to feed the right information into the automatics and to Neil.

They passed the last picket ship and received a good luck from the crew. As space distances go, they were right next door to the smaller ship, but they did not get a visual on her. The picket ship would stay on orbit to observe as Kennedy went down.

They were there. The mass of Jupiter covered half of space. Moons were visible to the naked eye. The ship moved swiftly around the planet, subjected to radiation, the electrical field, the gravity of the giant. Kennedy functioned flawlessly.

Because of the speed of Jupiter’s spin, and the vast forces of her gravity, Kennedy would have to go in very, very hot. Power would be constant to counteract the gravity. When last-minute drills had been performed there was no formal order. The computer picked the time and Neil’s hands did not touch the controls as the ship began to spiral down.

She was dwarfed by the mass of the planet, a mass which measured two and a half times as heavy as all the other planets of the solar system combined. Slowly, slowly, she went down toward that roiling surface, speed and power and rate of fall regulated by Doris’ computer. Those inside her had the feeling of falling into a hell of bright yellow fire as they orbited on the sunside and began to see with the naked eye the giant hurricane in the southern tropical zone, the Giant Red Spot, blowing for centuries at a force of hundreds of miles per hour.

The bands of atmosphere showed tremendous wind shears as atmospheric movement tossed and buffeted the insignificant mass of the ship. Each of them was aware, as the ship went down and down, that should their power fail, the ship would be seized by the massive gravitational force, yanked through the thin layer of outer clouds to drop, pulled by a force of three Earth gravities, the pressure outside building as they fell through a zone of frozen ammonia crystals, then into liquid ammonia and the zone of colored compounds which gave the atmosphere its distinctive yellow covering. They would, as they were being pulled inexorably downward, pass frozen crystals of ice and then a zone of water vapor, and they would all be dead before the crushed remains of the ship fell into the zone of liquid molecular hydrogen and continued to be compressed as pressures mounted to three million atmospheres at the transition zone between liquid molecular hydrogen and liquid metallic hydrogen, and the temperature would be rising to melt the remains of the tiny Earth ship and the even smaller, more thoroughly crushed Earth people.

On a model of the planet the size of an apple, the zone of operation of the Kennedy could be represented by the thickness of the apple’s skin. Below that very thin layer of operations lay instant death as the hull imploded.

The size of the monster! It was psychologically suffocating. It swallowed the whole of space from the viewports. It had the weight of a sun which failed. It was of incredible mass. It loomed above them as down became up and they felt dizzied. Ellen hid her eyes in her hands as the giant reached out for them with pressure and gravity and electromagnetic discharges registered by the sensors. The Kennedy went down near the orbit of the innermost moon, Amalthea. The moon was above them now, and slightly ahead, the ship between the moon’s orbit and the uppermost layer of cloud. A vast discharge of electricity came, lighting the area between the small moon and the planet, soundless in vacuum, but bright, sudden, startling, and, had the ship been struck, deadly. Again, as Dom held his breath, the tremendous bolt leaped from planet to moon.

“I think it’s trying to tell us something,” Neil said, in an awed voice.

“Old Jove, the god of lightning,” J.J. said. “He’s saying, ‘Look on my majesty, you puny mortals, and despair.’ ”

“I didn’t know you had a poetic soul,” Dom said.

Dom was moved by the vastness of the Jovian mass. It was heavy over him, seemingly over his head, and the Kennedy went down, measuring herself in a thousand ways as she lowered. Hull sensors sent the first recognition of faint traces of atmosphere. Slowly, slowly. She was doing well. Instruments worked and measured and gave their readings and the computer hummed and now scattered molecules of frozen ammonia made for a gradual lessening of vision. The Kennedy continued to fall into a murky sea of crystals. Her hull melted crystals. Temperature was going up, but it was well within operational levels.

“Level her off,” Dom ordered, when the outside pressure was one Earth atmosphere.

Neil took over from the automatics, to get the feel of the ship in case of systems failure. The ship was in a stationary orbit, moving with the surface rotation. Pressure was as predicted.

It was time to test one of the ship’s most crucial weapons for doing battle with the gas giant. Dom ordered two atmospheres in the living compartments. He felt his ears pop as the pressure built. Huge pumps moved clean air from the hold, and to take its place in the hold compartments, the poisonous atmosphere of Jupiter was let in.

Satisfied that the internal pressure system was working properly, Dom ordered a descent until pressure equalized. And then, time after time, the process was repeated. In the murky atmosphere the ship saw only by her instruments, keeping position directly above the alien ship, guided by the continuing signal. That signal, that ship down there, that was the purpose of it all. It had drawn them onward, had inspired a last-ditch crucial effort on the part of the space industry. Only that signal and what was sending it justified the cost of the Kennedy , the risk involved, the use of scarce materials.

And the signal stopped when the Kennedy was only six atmospheres deep into the clouds.