Гарри Гаррисон - The Jupiter Plague

“The light doesn’t seem to be bothering them, sir,” Rand said. “You’d think it would blind them.”

“It would — if those creases on the top of those neckless heads cover eyes, but we don’t know. We don’t know anything about these creatures except they seem to have enough intelligence to generate a magnetic field to hold us here. We’ll have to find some way of communicating with them.”

“Perhaps they are trying to do the same thing,” Weeke said, pointing to the screen where a group of the Jovians were near the ship’s hull. “They seem to be doing something out there. I cannot see what, since it is outside of the range of the pickup, but it is the area from which we are having the readings of movement against the hull.”

“That’s the port engine room plating,” the captain said, dialing that compartment on the phone. He had just made the connection when the far wall of the engine room rang like a drum. “Turn the pickup around — let me see that wall,” he ordered, and the scene swam on the screen and steadied on the featureless gray panel.

With a clang like a monster forging press the wall bulged inward and from the center of the swelling emerged a red-dish-green rod, no thicker than a man’s thumb and tapering to a blunt point on the end. It penetrated a foot or more into the room and although made of material hard enough to stab through the multiple layers of the specially built and strengthened wall it smoked and changed color in the oxygen atmosphere.

The rod began to move, bending and writhing like a snake.

“Evacuate that compartment!” the captain ordered as he hit the alarm button that began an ear-shattering clanging throughout the ship as the emergency, airtight doors started to close.

It was alive, that was obvious — alien flesh of some Jovian creature that was harder than the hardest steel — yet still sentient and aware. It was burning in the air as they watched the screen, smoking and crumbling yet still moving in that slow questing motion as though seeking something. Then it slithered backward out of the hole and the captain’s roar of warning was drowned out as the pressurized, frigid atmosphere of Jupiter blasted in through the hole.

Two men did not escape from the compartment before the mounting pressure sealed the door. It was pure chance that saved the ship. If any other compartment had been holed the thin interior walls would have gone down, the poisonous vapor would have spread through the ventilation system and they all would have been dead. But the engine rooms were provided against flarebacks from the combustion chambers with thicker walls, heavier doors and automatic vent-seals. They held. Metal strained and creaked as the pressure heaved against its surroundings but nothing gave way.

For nine more ship days the Jovians left them alone. Occasionally one could be seen passing but they ignored the ship as though it were not there. Rapid work with the remote handling controls in the engine room — before they chilled too much to become inoperable — managed to slap a patch over the small opening and weld it into place. Heavy beams were placed to support it until the pressure could be lowered enough to permit a space-suited volunteer through the air lock to fix a more permanent and stronger patch. This was completed and the air painfully cleaned of the contaminents that had been blasted in through the hole and the engine room was back in operation. Not that there was anything to be done there, the fierce magnetic field still held the ship immobile.

They tried to communicate with the Jovians. With much labor they manufactured a solid-state, fixed-frequency television transceiver. There were no moving parts and the screen and orthicon were of the nonvacuum Partini type. When the set was completed it was poured full of plastic, then imbedded in a larger cube of plastic so it was completely resistant to any pressure changes. The external manipulators swung it out and placed the device where it could be seen clearly by any passing Jovian. Captain Bramley’s loudly amplified voice came from it and his image could be clearly seen on the screen and it was ignored completely. Finally one of the Jovians trod on it accidently and crushed it.

“It looks like they’re not interested in talking to us,” Rand said, but no one smiled.

On the ninth day the Jovians began to gather again about the ship and as a precaution the captain had everyone move to the higher levels and sealed all the airtight doors. A good deal of communicating equipment had been installed in the port engine room while the repairs were being made so there was a crystal clear view of what occurred next.

“They’re punching through again at the same place,” someone shouted. Though it wasn’t the identical spot it was very close.

This time the hole was much smaller and whatever had made it withdrew instantly. There was only a single spurt of the frigid hydrogen-helium atmosphere that was cut off as something else came in through the opening, a thin brown tendril that projected a full yard into the room before it began to sag. When it touched the deck it ceased growing in length but the end began to swell as though the tendril were a tube that was inflating it. No one spoke as they watched the shape expand until it was the size and shape of a barrel covered with a shining and transparent coating. The top of the object writhed and shaped itself into a collection of nodules and there it stopped.

“What — what can it be?” Commander Rand asked, phrasing the question for all of them. The captain looked at it with fierce concentration.

“It’s alien, it could be anything — but I’m hoping that it is a communicator of some sort.” He switched on the phone in the engine room. “Hello — hello — can you hear me?”

A slit opened and gaped in the top of the barrel in the midst of the nodules and a pulsating, high-pitched sound bubbled out.

“Ha-rrr-rrr-ooo…” it screamed in vile imitation of a human voice. “Harrrooo…”

They worked with it during the coming weeks -

and learned to accept it. The men would have been rebellious and frightened if it weren’t for the endless gravity that dragged at them and made life a continual torment. They were spending most of the time in the float beds where their bodies displaced the water so that the drag of gravity was relieved at least for a time. The captain and the ship’s officers were taking turns teaching English to the biological communicator, which is what they thought the alien thing — they called it the barrel — to be. It seemed to have no intelligence of its own, yet it was alive underneath the hard coating that shielded it from the oxygen atmosphere. At first they read to it through a loudspeaker but when it showed no signs of either emotion or aggression they stayed in the compartment with it, near the door in case of emergency. The barrel would refuse to answer any questions — other than those directly involved with the language lessons — and after a few days they stopped trying. There had to be an eventual end to the instruction and they would find out what they wanted to know then. In the meantime the lessons were vitally important; they had to learn to communicate with the Jovians before they could find a way to convince them that they should remove the magnetic field that held them trapped.

In the middle of a lesson, at the end of the seventeenth day, the barrel suddenly stopped talking and withdrew the single eye that it had grown to look at the display screen for the computer that was used for demonstrations. Rand, who was reading at the time, ran for the door and sealed it behind him. He watched.from the control room with the others and when the eye opened again after a few minutes it had changed color and seemed to have a quality of intelligence about it that had been lacking before.