Arthur Clarke: A Meeting with Medusa

The sky below was clearing rapidly, completely, as if something was dissolving the solid overcast. An abyss was opening before his eyes. A moment later he sailed out over the edge of a cloud canyon about twelve miles deep and six hundred miles wide.

A new world lay spread beneath him, Jupiter had stripped away one of its many veils. The second layer of clouds, unattainably far below, was much darker in colour than the first. It was almost salmon pink, and curiously mottled with little islands of brick red. They were all oval-shaped, with their long axes pointing east-west, in the direction of the prevailing wind. There were hundreds of them, all about the same size, and they reminded Falcon of puffy little cumulus clouds in the terrestrial sky.

He reduced buoyancy, and Kon-Tiki began to drop down the face of the dissolving cliff. It was then that he noticed the snow.

White flakes were forming in the air and drifting slowly downward. Yet it was much too warm for snow and, in any event, there was scarcely a trace of water at this altitude. Moreover, there was no glitter or sparkle about these flakes as they went cascading down into the depths. When, presently, a few landed on an instrument boom outside the main vieWing port, he saw that they were a dull, opaque white, not crystalline at all and quite large, several inches across. They looked like wax, and Falcon guessed that this was precisely what they were. Some chemical reaction was taking place in the atmosphere around him, condensing out the hydrocarbons floating in the Jovian air.

About sixty miles ahead, a disturbance was taking place in the cloud layer. The little red ovals were being jostled around, and were beginning to form a spiral the familiar cyclonic pattern so common in the meteorology of Earth. The vortex was emerging with astonishing speed, if that was a storm ahead, Falcon told himself, he was in big trouble.

And then his concern changed to wonder and to fear. What was developing in his line of flight was not a storm at all. Something enormous, something scores of miles across was rising through the clouds.

The reassuring thought that it, too, might be a cloud, a thunderhead boiling up from the lower levels of the atmosphere lasted only a few seconds. No, this was solid. It shouldered its way through the pink-and-salmon overcast like an iceberg rising from the deeps.

An iceberg floating on hydrogen? That was impossible, of course; but perhaps it was not too remote an analogy. As soon as he focused the telescope upon the enigma, Falcon saw that it was a whitish, crystalline mass, threaded with streaks of red and brown. It must be, he decided, the same stuff as the “snowflakes” falling around him, a mountain range of wax. And it was not, he soon realised, as solid as he had thought, around the edges it was continually crumbling and re-forming…

“I know what it is,” he radioed Mission Control, which for the last few minutes had been asking anxious questions. “It’s a mass of bubbles, some kind of foam. Hydrocarbon froth. Get the chemists working on… Just a minute!”

“What is it?” called Mission Control. “What is it?”

He ignored the frantic pleas from space and concentrated all his mind upon the image in the telescope field. He had to be sure, if he made a mistake, he would be the laughingstock of the solar system.

Then he relaxed, glanced at the clock, and switched off the nagging voice from Jupiter V.

“Hello, Mission Control,” he said, very formally. “This is Howard Falcon aboard Kon-Tiki. Estimated Time nineteen hours twenty-one minutes fifteen seconds. Latitude zero degrees five minutes North. Longitude one hundred five degrees forty-two minutes, System One.

“Tell Dr Brenner that there is life on Jupiter. And it’s big…

“I’m very happy to be proved wrong,” Dr Brenner radioed back cheerfully. “Nature always has something up her sleeve. Keep the long-focus camera on target and give us the steadiest pictures you can.”

The things moving up and down those waxen slopes were still too far away for Falcon to make out many details, and they must have been very large to be visible at all at such a distance. Almost black, and shaped like arrowheads, they manoeuvred by slow undulations of their entire bodies, they looked rather like giant manta rays, swimming above some tropical reef.

Perhaps they were sky-borne cattle, browsing on the cloud pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark, red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up river beds down the flanks of the floating cliffs. Occasionally, one of them would dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely from sight.

Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer below, it would be at least three hours before she was above those ephemeral hills. She was in a race with the Sun. Falcon hoped that darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape over which they flapped their way.

It was a long three hours. During the whole time, he kept the external microphones on full gain, wondering if here was the source of that booming in the night. The mantas were certainly large enough to have produced it, when he could get an accurate measurement, he discovered that they were almost a hundred yards across the wings. That was three times the length of the largest whale, though he doubted if they could weigh more than a few tons.

Half an hour before sunset, Kon-Tiki was almost above the “mountains’.

“No,” said Falcon, answering Mission Control’s repeated questions about the mantas, “they’re still showing no reaction to me. I don’t think they’re intelligent, they look like harmless vegetarians. And even if they try to chase me, I’m sure they can’t reach my altitude.”

Yet he was a little disappointed when the mantas showed not the slightest interest in him as he sailed high above their feeding ground. Perhaps they had no way of detecting his presence. When he examined and photographed them through the telescope, he could see no signs of any sense organs. The creatures were simply huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that, in reality, were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth. Though they looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of tissue paper.

At close quarters he could see the myriads of cellules or bubbles from which they were formed. Some of these were quite large, a yard or so in diameter and Falcon wondered in what witches’ cauldron of hydrocarbons they had been brewed. There must be enough petrochemicals deep down in the atmosphere of Jupiter to supply all Earth’s needs for a million years.

The short day had almost gone when he passed over the crest of the waxen hills, and the light was fading rapidly along their lower slopes. There were no mantas on this western side, and for some reason the topography was very different. The foam was sculptured into long, level terraces, like the interior of a lunar crater. He could almost imagine that they were gigantic steps leading down to the hidden surface of the planet.

And on the lowest of those steps, just clear of the swirling clouds that the mountain had displaced when it came surging skyward, was a roughly oval mass, one or two miles across. It was difficult to see, since it was only a little darker than the grey-white foam on which it rested. Falcon’s first thought was that he was looking at a forest of pallid trees, like giant mushrooms that had never seen the Sun.

Yes, it must be a forest, he could see hundreds of thin trunks, springing from the white waxy froth in which they were rooted. But the trees were packed astonishingly close together, there was scarcely any space between them. Perhaps it was not a forest, after all, but a single enormous tree, like one of the giant multi-bunked banyans of the East. Once he had seen a banyan tree in Java that was over six hundred and fifty yards across; this monster was at least ten times that size.