Black Undertow

"Sure," Levitt answered, thinking: Smarmy bastard.

Hamill Witherspoon, the Chairman of the Space Science Exploration Committee, met them at the door to the sunken monitoring room. The burly black man ushered them into the darkened monitoring theater, subdued lighting shining on his bald head. "Hamill, I believe you know Senator Barry Levitt," smiled Jeffers in an irritating way.

Witherspoon facetiously hunched in obedience to Barry. "I duly humble myself to you, Levitt. Thanks for saving the ass of my project on the Senate floor."

Levitt sought to deflect the praise. "I did it as much for myself as for you, Mister Witherspoon. I'm as interested in seeing this baby fly as you are."

Witherspoon smiled at him, flinging a hand at a row of monitoring seats. "My, I'm overcome by your gracious interest in the project. Here, have a seat, gentlemen."

Back on Earth, it was getting late. Miceli rubbed his eyes; they were tired from staring into the monitors of holo-displays in Barry Levitt's office. He was reviewing the most extraordinary of extra-planetary sightings of unclassified objects. By far, the most spectacular incident was the sighting, from the Mercury base, of large objects in the Mercurian sky. These things were projecting bizarre lights at each other! They were even peppering the soil, near the Caloris base, with detonating projectiles.

I'll bet the lid is on so tight on that one, he mused, only Barry and the two folks who witnessed it know the whole scoop. It's been fifteen years and they're still not talking. Then, however, he found the specific incident he had been looking for, in order to make the case before the Committee: the probes that had landed on the Galilean moons of Jupiter, almost eighty-four years before.

He read them aloud, for the sake of clarity. "Let's see, it says here...the Callisto and Ganymede probes penetrated the ice-layers of those worlds, and found sluggish seas of slushy ice, and nothing else. Didn't get further than a few hundred meters into Ganymede, before the internal pressure stopped the probe there, as well as its transmission. Same fate for the Callisto probe. Only went a hundred meters down, and stopped dead, the same way. But the Europa probe-that was the spectacular one! Let's see-orbital surveys...yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah!

"Penetrometer briefly imaged this object on long-wave IR, before descending into total blackness. A peculiar heat-shape, the size of two city blocks. Damn! That's weird. Explosion on the surface, near the landing site, sends flying debris and takes ARTE out of commission-but not before imaging an exploding wall of ice and hail. Talk about an incredible spectacle-yeah, right. Hell, that sounds like a winter in Buffalo. Yeah...but what about the one object under the ice, in the subsurface sea there? Why so little mention of that? What's the scene, Geraldine?"

After careful perusal, he found what he was looking for. "Drill probe three continued to transmit for another five months, sending back images like these of the dark Europan Sea, one hundred and twenty kilometers deep---what? A hundred-twenty klicks deep???" He was incredulous at the figure. "Let's see...that's as deep as from here to...Ventura County. Whew! Take you a lifetime to get to the bottom of that sumbitch. What kind of thing would be moving around in that, especially with no lights to see by?" He stared intently at the infrared images of the dark sea, down to ninety klicks, before the pressure got so great even IR light was insufficient to see by!

The uplink had been terminated on November 5, 2113. A few dozen plates showed boring pictures of pitch blackness, with some images showing particulate debris floating in the probe’s light-cone. Always the same caption accompanied these photos: ICE DEBRIS OF UNKNOWN COMPOSITION, PRESUMED TO BE BITS OF FROZEN AMMONIA FLOATING UP TO THE CEILING FROM LOWER DEPTHS WHERE PRESSURE INITIATES ICE FORMATION. DATA INCONCLUSIVE.