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been offered emergency accommodations at the Spaceport Commons, they opted to remain aboard their ship. Before they slept they speculated about Johnny and his motives.
    “He’s so nice,” said Mary, “and I’m not getting any hostility from him ... only concern. As I see it we’re the ones who are being hostile. I really think we surprised him so much he refused to believe we were running.”
    “It’s no fun winning if the other one isn’t playing,” said Alex. “I have so much trouble disliking him. That’s the problem. Somehow he reminds me of my dad.”
    Mary looked at Alex quizzically. “Your dad was a drunkard; a laborer from Earth ... never trusted anyone. Had a dark beard. I don’t see a connection.”
    “I know,” said Alex.
    Alex and Mary slept fitfully that night, waking every hour as though an alarm had gone off. The spaceport can be a noisy place, but their ship, while modest in size, was well built and amply insulated. The polyceramic hull, the latest thing in molecular manufacturing, was a closed cell foam ceramic that would deflect intermediate sized space debris and 98% of all electromagnetic radiation.
    Alex had fitted Diver with a Null-Gee field effect generator which could literally nullify the ship’s mass for speed and maneuverability at near-relativistic speeds. Diver was as secure sleeping quarters as could be found on a planet with no breathable atmosphere. But to Alex it was his only connection to a future. Call it what he would, Diver was a stolen ship, and the only reason he wasn’t in jail was that a disaster of gargantuan proportions had erased his records at his assigned mining base on Jupiter’s moon, Io. Ra Patera base was Io’s primary supplier of hydrogen, nitrogen and helium, and Alex was a grunt, a man entrusted to follow orders.
    Alex had broken every rule, but he had done it quietly and cunningly. His nights had been spent studying the Great Red Spot on Jupiter and planning a means to explore it.
    The result of two years work was Diver , formerly the Dover; a medium class gas cracker that was derelict and slated to be scrapped. Alex had persuaded a mechanics chief to let him ‘tinker’ with her. It went on a long time and the friend was killed in what they called a blue flame geyser accident. His scout craft was caught in a jet of gas that came from the bowels of the moon. Squeezed and heated by Io’s magma, these jets would burst unexpectedly and violently, often launching boulders into orbit. It was one such jet that caught the chief’s vessel amidships and sent him to a grave on the frozen sulphur flats of Io.
    Alex had never told the man why he wanted to work on the ship, and with the man’s death the ship was effectively his. At least there was no one to stand in his way.
    Alex had seen so much death on Io. He had served on too many rescue missions and seen men die in bizarre ways: from those that had been exposed to the vacuum of space to those that had sunk into molten black sulphur. Getting them out was hardest ... they’d been frozen and roasted at the same time. The memories of those incidents were part of what compelled Alex to focus on his belief that a vast reef of life gave the Great Red Spot its stability and longevity. Everyone called it a Jupiter-sized hurricane; everyone but Alex. He had wondered why it had its strange color, why it didn’t just blow away, and why it never changed its shape.
    The idea had hit him as he watched a whirlpool in a flooding river back on Earth. He watched debris collect in the vortex and stay there until it sank.
    In the back of his mind he began developing his idea. What if ...
    He had shared the idea with his mentor Harry Stubbs, Professor Emeritus at MIT on Earth, saying he believed that the massive vortex of gas and cloud had been a collecting place for organic material for a billion years, allowing time enough for the evolution of a unique ecology. The Professor had been kind enough to answer all of his letters