The Diamond Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

plaque commemo-rates. And decades of onsite exploration of Jupiter’s sat-ellites had uncovered no trace of a past alien presence. “Despite this, Professor Forster told me, a single clue convinced him that a more thorough search of one of Ju-piter’s moon was justified: it had long been observed that Amalthea radiated almost one third more energy into space than it absorbed from the sun and Jupiter together. It had been assumed that bombardment from Jupiter’s intense ra-diation belts made up the deficit, but Forster looked up the records and noted that, when the radiation flux had been accounted for, a discrepancy at radio wavelengths re-mained—duly noted by planetary scientists but small enough to be ignored as uninteresting, much as the preces-sion of the orbit of Mercury was considered a minor anom-aly, not a threat to Newton, until Einstein’s theory of gravitation retroactively yielded its precise quantitative value two centuries later.
    “Then the medusas of Jupiter sang their song, and Amal-thea erupted. With characteristic spirit, Forster insisted upon pressing ahead with his exploration as already planned and approved, without announcing any design changes that might require bureaucratic meddling. He did make some design changes en route to Ganymede, however, and when I met with him three weeks ago, he and his crew were beginning to implement them—clandestinely.
“What I had to tell him confirmed the correctness of his vision and underscored the need for the changes he had already made in his mission plan. But of course, the Knowl-edge implies more. . . .”
     
Ari could not contain her distress. “It implies that any attempt to proceed without Linda will meet with disaster.”
     
“So I told Professor Forster, and he did not deny the force of the evidence,” Jozsef replied quietly. “Nevertheless he is determined to go ahead, with or without her.”
    “Then he—and all of them, Blake Redfield with them—are doomed to death and worse. He must be stopped . . . that was why you went to Ganymede, Jozsef! Why did you so easily allow him to dissuade you?” But Jozsef returned her demanding stare with nothing better than soft-eyed resig-nation. “Kip— you can stop him,” she said.
“Not even if I wanted to.”
     
“ If . . . ?” Ari looked at him in despairing unbelief.
    “Ari, the Space Board hasn’t the will or—so the people in the line departments claim the resources to maintain the quarantine of Amalthea much longer. The Indo-Asians are applying tremendous pressure at Council level.” He sighed impatiently. “They talk about safety, about energy resources, even about basic science. Meanwhile they’re count-ing lost tourist dollars.”
“What does that have to do with Forster?” she de-manded.
     
“He’s got a narrow window of opportunity. With or without Ellen—Linda, I mean—somebody’s going to land on Amalthea. And soon.”
     
“We’d rather it be Forster,” Jozsef said. “All of us would, I think.”
     
“No.” Ari stiffened. “Not without her.”
     
“But that’s not . . .” Jozsef cleared his throat noisily and left the sentence unfinished. The commander said it for him. “That’s up to her, Ari. Not you.”

IV
    Blake Redfield forced his way through crowded winding corridors, past stalls selling carved jade and translucent rubber sandals in the many colors of jujubes, past shelves of bargain-priced surveillance electronics, past racks of spot-lit fresh-killed ducks with heads and feet attached—while people pushed him from behind, elbowed him aside, and blocked the way in front of him, none maliciously or even with much force, for gravity here was a few percent of Earth’s and too vigorous a shove was as awkward for the shover as for the shovee. More people sat huddled in circles on the floor throwing dice or playing hsiang-ch’i or stood bargaining excitedly before tanks of live trout and mounds of ice clams and piles of pale, wilted vegetables.