Through the single window on the ship the man stargazed. With the lights turned off nothing was visible but the stars – trillions of bright specks washed across the void in a dense band like white paint flicked from an artist’s brush. From this unique vantage point somewhere in between Mars and Jupiter he could watch, unadulterated, the stars of his galaxy burning away. Each one creeping towards a supernova, consuming its hydrogen fuel in a cataclysmic nuclear reaction. From this point in space, in the still of the ship’s dormant electronics, where the planets were nothing more than indistinguishable pinpricks of light against the galactic backdrop, he felt as if he were sitting perfectly still, suspended among the stars.
***
To Rod, written in the bold letters on the front page of every news site was the best news he had ever heard in his life.
“WE ARE NOT ALONE” read last Sunday’s New York Times. In light of the biggest discovery ever made, the Times started up its old print center to publish some commemorative physical copies of the paper – a publication that Rod immediately bought and framed to hang in his office. He sat there in his old swivel chair reading it again for the fiftieth time that day.
“In what is the most monumental achievement of humanity to this date, the collective efforts of NASA, the European Space Agency, and the East Asian Aerospace Administration have answered one of mankind’s oldest questions, ‘Are we alone?’ Yesterday, February 24, it was confirmed that the Thalassa probe had discovered life in the sub-glacial ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa...”
“Rod!” Rod snapped back around from his article at the mention of his name. “Hey, congratulations on the discovery!” It was Mary, leaning on the desk in his cubicle in one of her usual technicolor Fair Isle Sweaters, this one composed of bright red and yellow bands with white and green snowflakes and argyle zig-zags densely ornamenting it.
“It was just as much your discovery as mine. Everyone's, for that matter,” said Rod.
“I know! That’s why I’m congratulating everyone,” she said – barely able to squeeze out the words as she hurried away.
Rod heard Mary’s muffled exuberance of congratulations as she made her way down the cubicles of Nerd Row. Rod punched in a few keys on his computer and brought up the microscope slides of the single-celled organisms that he had patiently watched download for nearly forty-eight sleepless hours. He pressed play and the translucent globules began to move about on the screen. ‘They appear to have some sort of flagellum to propel themselves along, and those tiny dark spots floating around inside the cells could indicate the presence of some form of organelles,’ he thought to himself. As to the biochemical function of those spots Rod could only guess. The Thalassa probe was sophisticated, but not that sophisticated.
An abbreviated message popped up on his phone with a polite ding. It was from Frank.
“Be at the con room in 5 min. Big news!” read the text.
***
“Well if it isn’t Dr. Robert Marino himself!” said Dr. Francis Karl as he stood up from a black leather chair to shake Rod’s hand. “Congratulations!”
“We’ve been over this before Frank, and thank you,” said Rod with a sheepish grin.
“Yeah yeah, just plain old Rod. You could at least take a compliment without deferring responsibility. You ran the astrobiological component of the mission, you deserve some credit!”
“Does that mean you’ll give me a real office now?”
“Oh, what good will that do? We both know you’d just spend your time huddled in the lab or camped out in the control room.”
“I’ll have you know I just came from my office.”
“Oh really? You remembered where it was?” Frank laughed. “Ah, take a seat. Take a seat.”
“It’s good to see you kept your lame sense of humor among the top brass,” said Rod, jokingly punching Frank in the shoulder as he sat down.
“Hey watch it, this suit looks like it could be Italian. But yeah, someone’s gotta deal with the congressional brickheads. Sometimes it feels like I’m condensing our work into picture book from so that they’ll understand enough to give us funding. Of course now that we’ve got something to rub in their faces – well I’ve already got offers for budget increases.” Frank brandished a few papers with the microscope slides printed on them and laid them on the table. They both stared intently at the familiar images. “Amazing, isn’t it. Look, I’ll bet you twenty bucks and my mother’s chili recipe that this mark here is some sort of nucleus.”
“I’m still reeling over what their DNA equivalent would look like,” said Rod.
“God, I know! The chemistry of the base pairs alone would revolutionize biology as we know it.”
“So you said you had some big news?”
“Ah yes.” Frank looked around the room. “Well, to tell you the truth, some other high level schmucks were supposed to be here for the announcement but it seems like they’re running late.”
“Probably busy being assaulted by the press.”
“Ah, what the hell. I’ll tell you anyways. Just act surprised when I ‘officially’ announce it later.”
“OK?”
“So with the apparent need for a more in depth study of Europa, we’ve decided to go ahead with a full manned mission. The details will be worked out later, but the main point is we want – no, need – to get boots on the ice over there. Or rather, under it. Given your unique experience, how would you like to be the first confirmed member of the mission?”
Rod slowly leaned back into his chair as the full weight of Frank’s question pressed the air out of him. ‘I would be on Europa,’ he thought. ‘On Europa.’ Rod stared blankly off into space looking straight through the faux-wood paneled walls into the heavens – directly at the icy white moon wrapped in thin red fractures. He nodded.
“I’ll do it.”
***
A large plexiglass cylinder cracked open, letting a few tendrils of steam escape before the rest were sucked away by the ship’s filtration system to be recondensed. Water was precious in space.
Rod ran the small vacuum hose over his thinning sandy hair before pushing himself out of the shower. He enjoyed these few moments early in the day where he could freely float about in the microgravity of the ship – suspended in the sterile air like a dandelion seed. And like a dandelion seed, he would drift ever so slowly to the floor – a product the small acceleration caused by the ship’s thrusters. Though you could only notice it if you stood absolutely still.
Rod opened up a white panel inset on the wall a few feet from the shower. Five identical steam cleaned resistive suits hung in a neat ordered row. Rod grunted as he worked his way into the stiff jumpsuit. The arms and legs had thin posable rods woven into the fabric to make movement difficult and prevent muscle atrophy. It reminded him of the bendable action figures he had played with as a child. Teal-caped Captain Galaxy would board his star cruiser to save earth from the Martians, all with a perfectly molded plastic smile.
“Well, first things first, happy birthday!” said a floating bust of Frank. A telecom message from central base. Rod had worked his way up to the computer room and was going through his notifications. “Hard to believe that it’s been over seven months, right? And only three more to go! There’s not much to report from here, and no, Kowalski still hasn’t compiled that spectroscopy data. Don’t worry, I’ll hide some lab mice in his desk or something. Keep ‘im on his toes. But don’t think I didn’t bring a present. The probe just discovered another ice clinger! Get this – it has what appears to be an exoskeleton. Amazing, right? Here we were thinking all the life would resemble edicarian biota but this is clearly more advanced. I mean, like, wow! Augh! It’s so nerve-wracking waiting for your slow ass to get over there and run some real tests. Anyways, I’m sending all the files on the creepy-crawly over with this message. I’ll keep you updated. Over and out!” Frank’s apparition paused for a second. His eyebrows shifted as if he were trying to remember something he pretended to have forgot. “Oh, and there’s a message from your mother. I have it attached.” With a brush of static, the hologram disappeared.
Rod turned to the control screen and queued up the file. A grainy hologram loaded in the view box. It looked to have been shot with a smartphone and was little more than a bas-relief, not true 3D, so if you looked at it from the wrong angle the illusion broke. Sitting in the center of the box was a thin and wrinkly old woman perched on a wheelchair. She appeared to be entirely held together by the pink wool knit shawl wrapped around her body. Her white hair was barely hanging on to her head and her eyes wouldn’t focus anywhere above her slippered feet.
“Rod?” she asked, turning her head back and forth looking for him. “Rod. They tell me it’s your birthday. I’m so sorry I didn’t get you a present.” Her words were slow and strained. “I’m so sorry. It came up so quickly. It all does. I asked them to take me out to visit you but they just keep me here. Are you all right? They’re helping me send you a message. I’m not sure how, though. Oh, you’re growing up to be so old.” Her lungs lightly rattled as she caught her breath. “They tell me you’re on an important mission. I wish they would tell me what that means. Does that mean you got that job from NASA? I know how much you wanted to work there. Oh, Rod! I forgot to get you a present. And on your birthday even. What would your father say about this? I’m getting so forgetful. I’ll run out to the store later and pick something up. It all came up so quick. I can’t believe I almost missed it on my calendar. Well, you take care dear.” Another brush of static and the image vanished.
Rod pushed himself two feet over to the “kitchen” and pulled a thermos off a rack. He pulled a dissolvable capsule of instant coffee from a breadbox-like compartment. One of his last ten.
It was a special occasion after all.
He filled up the thermos with hot water by plugging it into a wall dispenser and shook it up to mix the coffee. Opening up the breadbox again. he retrieved a plastic-wrapped pastry and green birthday candle. A joke gift that Frank had insisted on sending with him. Frank had even gone as far as to tape a crudely drawn microgravity flame to the end of the candle. A tiny alien sphere around the wick, glowing in a low blue-purple hue – the way they had seen during flame tests on the ISS.
***
***
‘6:55 PM’ blinked on the display of Rod’s computer. Time didn’t mean much in this sunless ether, but it helped to be synchronized with the boys back on earth. His trusty digitized clock also helped him track how long he had spent there – wherever “there” was at the moment – and it helped discern the punctuality of the various organisms he was studying. Right now the time told him that the next Migration should happen very soon, and so he laid in wait in his submarine with the lights down low to not spook them.Rod pressed his face up against the glass of his only window to look out into the depths. It was an engineering marvel, the sub. Powered by state-of-the-art hydrostatic propulsion, six inches of a super-light steel alloy protected him from the crushing pressure of Europa’s ocean. Clinging to the ice above was a constellation of glowing life, a galaxy of thousands of organisms each marking their existence to the world with light, juxtaposed down below by an all encompassing maw of black. Staring into the void, with the low gravity of Europa, it was easy to lose all sense of direction. Up was down, down was up and everything was black... until a tiny white prick began to emerge through the veneer. Like the first snowflake of the storm, the light slowly rose closer. It split up as it grew closer and the individual pricks became discernible. The cloud steadily grew as the pioneers of the swarm first reached the sub’s depth. Scattered at first, then rising in number and intensity, the creatures flowed on until a dense column of lights, easily a mile across, surrounded the sub. Rod marveled at their internalized punctuality. Never early and never late, wherever they were was exactly where they meant to be.'
Rod caught a glimpse of one of the creatures as it passed in front of the porthole. Squidlike in nature, its small body, no bigger than a thumb, formed a thin teardrop, and its wings filled its outline to a rounded arrowhead. In place of a squid’s eight tentacles it had a mass of short feelers – twenty-four to be exact. It was because of these feelers that Frank had wanted to call the creature Satan’s Nose-Hair. Rod opted for Hekatonkheira, a greek mythological figure with a hundred hands. Heka for short.
Off to the side Rod spotted a larger heka. Easily a foot long, it was the largest specimen he had ever encountered. He grabbed the sub’s controls and maneuvered it to get a better look.
It appeared to be struggling to move. Its wings were tattered, the light at its tip had taken on a yellow hue, and it was missing a few feelers. Rod felt a certain rush of excitement at finding the dying animal. He never had a chance to observe their life cycle, and how they aged was a complete mystery. Did they continuously grow through their life? Did they have a set life span? How did they change as they develop? Rod extended the mechanical suction tube arm eager to find some answers.
***
Rod wiped down the plexiglass window encasing the operating surface – a hermetically sealed box to protect against contamination, complete with arm length rubber gloves built right into the window. Inside the chamber was the dead hekatonkheira, bloated and swollen from decompression, medical equipment neatly laid out aside. Rod put his hands into the gloves, picked up the scalpel and began to work. He traced his knife down the center line of the creature, splitting it open like a frog in biology class.
“OK... Notochord appears to be slightly deteriorated and the muscle wall is slightly atrophied,” Rod said aloud to the computer recording his notes. “Most other organs seem to be in place.” He began to carefully pin out each individual system. “Except...the egg sac is greatly enlarged.” He cut it open. “Oh, wow. It appears that this one was ready to deposit eggs. Large and developed.” Rod picked up one of the fingernail sized orbs. “Holy...it appears to be a fully formed fetus – almost identical to the adult. I guess that means the heka fertilizes internally. I’m setting a few aside for further study as well as taking biopic samples of the egg sac.”
Rod pulled himself out of the gloves and sat back to look over his discovery. It was almost neo-gothic, really. The disassembled alien lying in its chamber like Frankenstein’s Monster.
The parade of light outside was still going strong over an hour after it started. Rod thought that he deserved a coffee about now. Only six left.
***
Rod had always been fascinated with biology. He still remembered packing his backpack up with magnifying glasses, notebooks, and granola bars before trekking off into the woods to camp out and watch the ants forage for food. A pulsing stream of skittering back dots betrayed the entrance to their hive, a sign he easily learned to pick up on. He would simply lie down on his Captain Galaxy blanket and track the individual ants as they carried bits of food back to their hive until his mother would call out to him,
“Robby! Bedtime!” He was still called Robby then.
Once on his way to the usual spot he stumbled across a cricket trying to disguise itself on the bark of a tree. It’s bumpy and molted brown body was enough to fool almost anybody. Robby crouched down and held his breath, slowly extending a cupped hand towards the insect’s blind spot. He didn’t ignored the picker bushes pressing against his leg as he stalked his quarry. With a swipe he managed to trap the cricket.
Ten year old Robby picked off its legs and brought it to the ant hill. He dropped it in the ant’s path and set up shop on his blanket with a magnifying glass and juice box. The hive quickly swarmed the cricket once a forager ant stumbled across it. Quickly and efficiently they pined down the much larger insect and began to drag it back to their hill where it would be divvied up and fed to the group. The queen would get the largest portion as it was her role to produce the next generation of workers. He had read that in a book somewhere.
***
“Twenty-four, twenty-five... and twenty-six,” Rod counted aloud, taking the number of orithyia hanging onto the underside of the ice. They had shiny black carapaces segmented into bands like a trilobite; however, their heads peeled away from their belly and stuck out into the water revealing two large compound eyes. On their backs extended two serrated arms folded like a praying mantis’ and pointing away from their legs. The creature was able to see and catch its prey while holding onto the ice with its many legs. In fact, that was exactly what it was doing.
“OK, twenty-six total and seven still feeding.” Rob noted to the computer. The orithyia closest to him was gripping onto the remains of a heka, periodically bringing it up to its crablike mouthparts to tear off a chunk of flesh. “With the latest migration, it appears my hypothesis that the orithyia feed solely on the hekatonkheira is supported. The orithyia, it seems, feed only once every few months during the migration.”
‘Not unlike crocodiles and wildebeest,’ he thought to himself. Rod couldn’t help but smile as he looked back at the glossy black exoskeletoned creature demurely eating its prey, oblivious to him. There was a certain elegance to the balance of it all – birth, life, and death. The organisms here simply went about their business, they didn’t question it. How could they?
***
“Two years,” breathed Rod as a small cryobot zipped around the sub and docked to the structure in front to him. A fully functional permanent base, assembled over the course of two years by robots. Something that Rod had supervised while conducting his research on the side. Two years under the ice living alone out of a cramped submarine and three years away from earth if you counted the time spent in space travel. Rod carefully maneuvered the sub to the docking station underneath the base.
“Hey Rod, I got your report. Good to see that the base is in working order. One less thing to worry about,” said Frank’s hologram. Rod had given the ship a full inspection the night before and sent word to headquarters. Frank’s message must’ve come overnight. “Look, I’m not really supposed to say anything since everything about this situation is up in the air still, but you have a right to know. Washington is in another political pissing contest over the budget and we’re on the chopping block this time. Whatever happens we’ll still have plenty to get you back home but as for sending out the second crew... Well, the launch date in two months is still set and we’re going ahead unless they explicitly tell us not to. Hopefully it’ll all settle down quickly, but just in case someone decides to make a stupid decision, I’m giving you a warning.” Frank let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his eye with the palm of his hand. “The other thing is about your mother. I saw it in the files we’re sending to you. You know I have to preview everything and...ah, a piece of paper like that is so cold, inhuman really. The hospital says that her dementia is getting worse. They...they don’t think she has a whole lot of time left. I just thought you should get this in person. I’m sorry. If you need anything, let me know. I’ll do my best.” The hologram flickered out and all that could be heard was the creaking of the base from shifting currents. Rod leaned back against the cool plastic of his chair before standing up and walking over to the cupboard, pulling out a small capsule of instant coffee. As Rod brewed his last cup he looked at the man-sized cryopod that was designed to shuttle the new team members to and from the surface. He decided to make a trip.
***
In three hours it would be safe. Rod sat waiting in his spacesuit, a bulkier version of the resistive suits he’d been wearing. It had taken nearly twenty-four hours to reach the surface and in a few more Europa would be far enough away from Jupiter's magnetosphere tail to be safe enough to step out of his shielded pod. Rod sat quietly as the minutes slipped by. He didn’t think much over the recent events, he didn’t want to. Soon enough, a buzzer went off signaling that it was finally time.
With a hiss of the pod’s hydraulics, the door swung open and Rod stepped out seeing the surface, of Europa with his eyes for the first time. On the surface, ice was frozen to the hardness of granite in the extreme cold. Rod stepped across the chipped and scarred surface looking up the sky. Jupiter hung overhead taking up most of the sky, its swirling gasses of red and orange clearly visible from his distance. It shone like the harvest moon, casting Europa in a soft yellow glow – a gentle light for the frozen airless desert. Behind it were the stars, that familiar band of milky way galaxy wrapping around everything. Rod had never imagined he’d see anything like it. It was so easy to forget being a member of the human species.
Another buzzer in his suit went off, politely letting him know he was running out of air. Rod hadn’t noticed the three hours pass. He slowly began to make his way to the pod and was about to step in before he bent down to pick up a shard of ice. He sealed it in a baggie from the pod and shut the door. Samples.
Rod flicked the red toggle that initiated the decent to the base. Back to work.
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