John Varley - The Ophiuchi Hotline

One of the objects did orbit Jupiter. The other changed course at the last moment and headed for Earth. It landed in the Pacific Ocean, near the equator. That was the Year One of the Occupation of Earth. (Flat newsreel footage of Invader ship, twenty-kilometer sphere sitting half-submerged in water, dull-surfaced, pocked with holes.)

What little we know of Invaders comes from Purunkita and Mizinchikov, the only people known to have entered one of the ships and returned. This is what happened to them. (The alien ship matches with the U Thant , swallows it. Camera follows P. M. and infant daughter through water-filled stone tunnels.) They met Doctor Ellen Bronson and her two companions, who had entered the ship that landed in the Pacific. They had been in the ship no more than a day, but had entered on the day of landing. On that day, the astronauts had still been three months from Jupiter.

If the story the astronauts told is true, space and time exist in a different manner inside the ships. There is little reason to doubt the story.

Doctor Bronson is thought to be the only human ever to have seen the aliens themselves and survived. (B alone, entering large chamber, as big as the interior of an engineered asteroid. It is half-full of water. In the distance, special-effect distortions represent Invaders. Tight shot of B's face, indicating shock and fear. She turns and runs.)

Bronson claimed to have had a strange experience. Things were told to her in a mysterious way, and she could never account for it when she told Purunkita and Mizinchikov. (Five figures gathered around a fire on a beach within the ship, whispering.) No one knows whether to believe her story, but it's the only one we've got. This is what she said.

The Invaders come from a gas giant planet like Jupiter. Their purpose in coming to the solar system was not the invasion of Earth, but unknown motives concerned with the inhabitants of Jupiter. Bronson said there are intelligent Jovians who are much like the Invaders. (Animation sequence in the Jovian atmosphere. Huge shadowy shapes swim by.)

The invasion of Earth was secondary. It was done for the benefit of the three intelligent species of Earth: sperm whales, "killer" whales, and bottle-nosed dolphins. (Stock footage of aquatic mammals.)

Bronson said there are levels of intelligence in the universe. On top are the Jovians and Invaders. One step below are the dolphins and whales. Humans, birds, bees, beavers, ants, and corals are not considered intelligent.

No one knows if any of this is right. But it's all we have.

There were no explanations given to humanity. No ambassadors appeared, no ultimatums were offered. Humans resisted the Invasion, but the resistance was ignored. H-bombs would not go off, tanks would not move, guns would not fire. (Panic in the streets, helicopter shots of jammed highways.) No one ever saw an Invader. Pictures show distortions in the sky that no observer noticed at the time, like blind spots in the human eye. Perhaps these things were the Invaders. (Still, flat photos of buildings toppling, streets being uprooted, with colorful whirlpools in the sky.)

As far as anyone knows from information sent up before the transmitters went dead, the Invaders never killed a human. What they did was destroy utterly every artifact of human civilization. In their wake they left plowed ground, sprouting seedlings, and grass.

In the next two years, ten billion humans starved to death.

Poseidon is an irregular chunk of rock. It is the most distant object of any size that Jupiter can be said to claim. Being retrograde and inclined one hundred and fifty degrees from Jupiter's equator, it is one of the more difficult bodies in the solar system to rendezvous with.

The Earthhome II was a free-faller, a cargo ship designed to carry bulky, nonpriority freight. It traveled by hyperbolic orbits, not the straight lines of a high-booster.

"Congratulations, Captain," Lilo said. "That was a neat bit of work."

"Huh? Oh, you mean the approach?" He shrugged, but she saw he was pleased. She had gotten to know him pretty well on the twenty-nine-day trip to Jupiter.

"Really," she said. "Most ship pilots are like slide-way operators nowadays. They make travel pretty dull."

"Yeah, I won't argue with you on that."

"You make me think of the days when people just set out. Nothing on the other end, no refueling stations, no air, nothing at all. And I think you like it."

He smiled at her. "I guess I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't. I always felt born in the wrong age, though. No adventure. This run is about the most dangerous thing you can do, and it's illegal. You must have wondered how we get away with this, going to Jupiter." Iphis explained Tweed's system.

It was illegal to assume a closed orbit around Jupiter, or to land on any of the moons. The loophole was that it was legal to use Jupiter to alter an orbit on the way to somewhere else. Passenger ships never did it—too many people were afraid to approach Jupiter at all. But there were plenty of independent operators who were willing if it would save them time and fuel.

The trick was to have two ships. Tweed had obtained one at Pluto, listed as missing and presumed lost. An identical ship had been purchased openly. Now both ships bore the same registration numbers. More important, they had the same captain. Lilo went to Jupiter in the Earthhome II , captained by Iphis II. But there was an Earthhome I , and an Iphis I, a clone, whom number two had never met and probably never would.

"Customs, by its nature," Iphis explained, "is only interested in incoming ships. I take off for Titan, listing only Vaffa as a passenger. I come to Jupiter, and meanwhile my clone and another Vaffa are on their way down from Poseidon. He takes my place on the course I was traveling. Everything's airtight at Titan, because he'll get there carrying only what I declared at Luna. If anyone's ever noticed my exhaust out here in the moons, no one's ever said anything about it. They probably think it's Invaders up to something."

Lilo sobered at the mention of Invaders. It had been twenty hours since they had swung around Jupiter. It was not something she liked to recall.

She looked out the port again. "Isn't it about time you thought about landing us?" The moon was getting uncomfortably large; she could no longer see the edges. Something moved on the surface. With a shock, she realized it was a person. They were that close.

"Don't worry. You don't land a ship like this on a pebble like that. You could fart your way right into orbit." He glanced out the port, and his hands went to the controls. With a few pops from the attitude jets, they seemed stationary. "Now they'll pull us in with ropes and tie us down. You can get out now, if you want to." He vaulted from his couch. It astounded Lilo how graceful he was. She knew that legs were encumbrances in weightlessness, too overpowered for any job they might be called on to do. She had not realized they were actually dangerous. She had nearly split her head three times on the first day of the flight. All her traveling had been done on one-gee ships.

She found herself looking around for something. Her suit. A deeply ingrained reflex was trying to keep her from stepping into the lock in only her vest and kilt. Those horrible seconds escaping from the Institute came back to her. She repressed the memory. It annoyed her to be prey to unreasoning fears. She knew the null-suit worked; it had come to life a few hours from Jupiter, when the radiation level in the ship had become dangerous.

Sealing herself into the lock as soon as Iphis and Vaffa had gone out, she pressed the cycle button. Goose pimples broke out on her bare skin; then the suit came on and she was fighting for breath. She suppressed the reflex to gasp.