11. Ice and Vacuum
'Who is it?' whispered someone, to a chorus of shushes. Floyd raised his hands in a gesture of ignorance - and, he hoped, innocence.
'... know you are aboard Leonov... may not have much time... aiming my suit antenna where I think...' The signal vanished for agonizing seconds, then came back much clearer, though not appreciably louder.
'... relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio - no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA.'
The signal faded again. A stunned silence followed that no one attempted to interrupt. While he was waiting, Floyd searched his memory furiously. He could riot recognize the voice - it might have been that of any Western-educated Chinese. Probably it was someone he had met at a scientific conference, but unless the speaker identified himself he would never know.
'... soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadily and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out to check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands - stood - about thirty metres from the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go directly from it and down through the ice. Very thin - not safe to walk on. The warm upwelling...'
Again a long silence. Floyd wondered if the speaker was moving, and had been momentarily cut off by some obstruction.
'... no problem - five kilowatts of lighting strung up on the ship. Like a Christmas tree - beautiful, shining right through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first - a huge dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it was a school of fish - too large for a single organism - then it started to break through the ice.
'Dr Floyd, I hope you can hear me. This is Professor Chang - we met in '02 - Boston IAU conference.'
Instantly, incongruously, Floyd's thoughts were a billion kilometres away. He vaguely remembered that reception, after the closing session of the International Astronomical Union Congress - the last one that the Chinese had attended before the Second Cultural Revolution. And now he recalled Chang very distinctly - a small, humorous astronomer and exobiologist with a good fund of jokes. He wasn't joking now.
'... like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera - I stayed to watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was - I've seen pictures of the kelp forests off California - but I was quite wrong.
'I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn't possibly survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved forward - bits were breaking off like glass - but it was still advancing toward the ship, a black tidal wave, slowing down all the time.
'I was still so surprised that I couldn't think straight and I couldn't imagine what it was trying to do...'
'Is there any way we can call him back?' Floyd whispered urgently.
'No - it's too late. Europa will soon be behind Jupiter. We'll have to wait until it comes out of eclipse.'
'... climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold - the way termites protect themselves from the sunlight with their little corridors of mud.
'... tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle - all in slow motion, like a dream.
'Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the thing was trying to do - and then it was too late. We could have saved ourselves - if we'd only switched off those lights.
'Perhaps it's a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered by the sunlight that filters through the icc, Or it could have been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must have been mo…
