The Spheres of Europa

By Gene Brewer

In 2087, a spacecraft is sent to Europa, the second of the four satellites of Jupiter first seen by Galileo, to look for life in the saltwater ocean underlying the icy surface of that frigid moon. It is not an easy journey, and the crew of eight seasoned astronauts face a number of difficulties on that long and dangerous voyage. The expedition is followed by all mankind with mixed feelings as it proceeds to attempt an answer to the age-old question: Are we alone? What the crew finds in that ocean is both surprising and shocking.
In the meantime, an undecipherable message is received by the organization known as SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. A shy, though brilliant, part-time member of that group finally solves the mystery of the message. As a result, she is appointed Special Assistant to the Director of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. As such, she becomes an important member of the team assigned to bring the astronauts on the Europa mission home safely. But is she up to the job? And where did she come from? The book will have your pulse racing from the beginning to the end of this gripping new novel by the author of the acclaimed book and popular film, K-PAX.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9798369415863

Gene Brewer

Before becoming a novelist, Gene Brewer studied DNA replication and cell division at several major research stations. He is the author of ON A BEAM OF LIGHT, K-PAX II and the forthcoming K-PAX III, published in summer 2002, which will complete the K-PAX trilogy. He lives in New York City.

Book preview

Copyright © 2024 by Gene Brewer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Adobe Stock images depicting people are used with their permission and for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Adobe Stock.

Rev. date: 02/01/2024

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

858128

CONTENTS

Prologue (2051 A.D.)

The Mission (2087 A.D.)

One Year Later

Press Conference (January 4, 2090)

Two Months Later

Epilogue (2132 A.D)

Acknowledgment

For Dr. Arthur Humphrey

a

true scientist

who suggested that I write this book

At the turn of the century, the Galileo spacecraft had shown that the icy Jupiter moon Europa held a vast saltwater ocean covered by a several kilometers-thick sheet of water ice. The similarity of this ocean to Earth’s own small oceans immediately suggested to NASA scientists that it might be possible to send an unmanned spacecraft to land on Europa and penetrate its icy shell to determine whether any living organisms resided therein. Such a finding would finally answer the question: Are we alone? Or are we, in fact, surrounded by myriad planets and moons supporting life—if not like our own, then at least similar enough to be recognizable to us—throughout the vastness of the universe?

The Impossible Dream: a Memoir --Aaron C. Rogers, former NASA Administrator

PROLOGUE (2051 A.D.)

T emp. one point two Celsius, solutes 0.18%, turbidity 0.127 ppm, max. color 480 Angstroms. Something with a curved exterior and of variable size and weight is impacting the sensor every 19 minutes on average. Electron analysis of the ocean water shows no microscopic plant or animal life. The tides are very strong, with an average force of 820 Newtons. Camera images are variably dark and fuzzy; one is now nonfunctional. Do you read, Buzz?

Copy all, Neil, and have relayed the data to Mission Control.

One hour and forty-five minutes later: Control has the data, Buzz. Many thanks to both of you. Stand by while we do some programming.

Roger that, Buzz responded automatically, though MC wouldn’t receive the confirmation for another fifty-six.

Throughout the huge Control Center, smiles were passed around, chairs were pushed back, loud sighs expressed. The dim red ambience was brightened, switches were toggled, keyboards tapped. At the front of the room, NASA Administrator Rogers sat beside his assistant, the brilliant and hard-working Dr. Alexandria Nordhoff, with the Science and Engineering Directors to their right and left, respectively. When the commotion had settled down, Rogers strode briskly to the center of the high, if narrow stage. He slipped his hand into a pocket and switched on his lapel mic.

Attention, please, everyone. The room quickly quieted. As you all know, the Europan lander touched down on the ice exactly—uh (he checked his notes)—two months, sixteen days, four hours, and 26 minutes ago. The Santa Maria has reported that the crew has sent a high-speed one point two-centimeter drill successfully through a shallow fissure in the ice and into the Europan ocean at a depth of eight point six kilometers, and are reporting data from the camera and the motion sensors. In addition, analysis of the ocean water has been sent back our partner laboratory. The results suggest that the under-ice saltwater contain no microscopic life. There was an audible intake of breath throughout the auditorium.

Rogers paused and looked over his reading glasses at the several dozen scientists and technicians, who stared back at him from the ghostly glow of their computer screens. "The data do, however, include the observation that something spherical and of variable size, with a maximum diameter of approximately thirty centimeters, is impacting the sensors roughly every twenty minutes!" he said, almost breathlessly, carefully emphasizing each word. (There were cheers from those assembled below him—everyone present in the huge room knew what this meant: there was something moving in the Europan ocean, or perhaps being tossed around by tidal forces, something not microbial, but big enough and fast enough to bump into the sensors and continue on their way.)

When the noise had dissipated, Rogers added, The camera images are too dark and too cloudy to see much of what is down there, but there is a significant chance that they are viable! Whether they are plant or animal, however, remains to be determined. (More cheers, this time prolonged, finally ending abruptly when Rogers raised a hand.) Let’s not get too excited, he added. We don’t yet know whether they are friend or foe." (Laughter all around.)

The AIrobots are still in good working order and functioning at a nominal level, though we expect that to deteriorate in the next few weeks. Remember that the average surface temperature of Europa is six times colder than winter in Antarctica, and the radiation levels are off the charts. We have used the most cold- and radiation-resistant parts and lubricants available to us, but nothing can last forever at those temperatures and radiation levels, which would kill one of us, without formidable protection, in minutes! In short, at the moment, everything looks A-OK, and we’ll celebrate that fact with a bit of liquid refreshment shortly. Before that, however, let’s look at Europa’s surface features.

He nodded to an aide on his right. A huge projection screen slowly unrolled from its ceiling casing. I direct your attention to the image produced by camera six. The screen finished it’s descent with a little jerk, and was suddenly illuminated by someone in the booth. This, of course, is the same image you all have on your monitors, and you’ll recognize the picture as that of Europa sixty kilometers out. We’ve all seen this before. For those watching on video from elsewhere, the moon looks quite like a big, tightly-wound ball of string. It is, in fact, solid ice several kilometers thick, criss-crossed by many thousands of overlapping cracks or fissures, which have re-frozen soon after their formation. But the blow-up might be of some interest to you.

The image on the screen became a close-up. The Administrator’s hand disappeared into another pocket and reappeared with a pointing device. A bright green arrow appeared on the left side of the screen, jiggling slightly from his excitement. I call your attention to this area here. You will all notice, I am sure, that the surface in the landing area is covered—no, that’s not the right word—is sparsely dotted by (indicating with his light pointer) these small curved artifacts. We believe these to be parts of the spherical objects that we believe swim in the ocean below. As you can see, some are larger than others. We don’t yet know what they are, or why they are on the surface. Our best guess is that they were thrown out by the occasional geysers that we see erupting from the ocean. These spherical sectors appear to be frozen into the ice, and we’re not even sure of that.

The room was silent as dozens of glittering eyes stared up at the screen. Another nod, and a third image appeared showing one of the AIRs standing on the ice next to a drilling rig, and behind him, a small space ship, not much bigger than a typical jet aircraft. This is Neil Armstrong, Captain of the Santa Maria, next to the drilling rig. You can clearly see three of the partial spheres lying on or imbedded in the ice nearby. The pointer jumped from one to another.

Rogers pressed his fingers to his eyes for a moment and again gazed out at the audience. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s late. We’ve all been here for nearly forty hours. Let’s have a drop of wine, and then go home and get some sleep, because tomorrow is another big day. You’ll want to be at your best when Neil and Buzz send the camera well below the ocean’s surface to see whatever else is swimming around down there. He paused and sighed. That is, if they know how to swim. (Laughter.) Many thanks everyone, and a good night to you all. A loud round of applause accompanied the well-loved NASA head as he made his way back to his seat, followed by noisy conversation, followed by near silence as champagne was gulped, congratulations exchanged. Soon everyone drifted away, leaving behind countless computer screens watched over by the overnight technicians, who kept all instruments smoothly functioning, the tracking and control equipment in particular. Tomorrow was another day in the ever-turning pages of time.

THE MISSION (2087 A.D.)

T he rocket squatted heavily on the pad, like a huge frog about to leap into a pond. It was the biggest spacecraft ever built. The parts had been tested individually, but never as a unit, and not in space—it would have cost far too much. Even so, the still massive expense was borne by the governments of several countries and regions, including the South American Continental Union and the Southeast Asia Complex, as well as contributions from several of the biggest global corporations and wealthy individuals, each of whom chipped in one billion American dollars. Even the Africans and Australians added what they could. Perks were given, including the naming of any newly discovered Jovian satellites, as well as uncharted asteroids discovered along the way. Russia and China declined to join the effort and, in fact, the latter was planning its own expedition later in the year to the Saturnian moon Encel adus.

The great ship was built primarily by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, with contributions from the Applied Physics Laboratory and the European Space Agency, whose primary function was the construction and testing of the lander, now sunken into the belly of the mother ship.

From video sources all around the world came the first sign that the spacecraft was up and running: T minus forty minutes and counting!

To minimize the expense, the massive spacecraft was constructed on the launch pad, and took a decade to assemble and repeatedly test all the necessary systems, though not the intact rocket itself, except for computer simulations. The ship (named ‘the Titanic’ by the resident of a nursing home who won the privilege by lottery) was powered by the fusion of hydrogen atoms to form helium, the same process that produces the heat and light of the sun. Since the Europa lander (dubbed ‘the Pequod’ by a teenage student picked at random) required relatively little energy compared to the mother ship, it used the old-fashioned (and cheaper) solid fuels. Its mission was to land on Europa, drill into the sub-surface ocean, and to find, capture, and bring back at least one of the putative denizens of the as-yet-unnamed sea, and more if possible.

The retrieval of one of the large thirty-centimeter spheres would have required correspondingly large drilling equipment and supporting casing, whose cost would have been prohibitive. Thus, a much smaller (5 cm. dia.) sampling tube was planned in the hope that an offspring of one or more of the spherical organisms could be obtained and nurtured, perhaps long enough to bring it back to Earth for study.

As the Titanic waited for blast-off, the lander was dark, silent, and uninhabited. It would not be manned until the main vessel was in orbit around Jupiter, tucked behind the icy moon for partial protection from the astronomical ambient radiation levels. Both ships were heavily insulated, of course, but the Pequod would suffer the onslaught more heavily than the mother ship orbiting high above, and was correspondingly even better protected from the relentless radiation levels than was the Titanic itself. The unfortunate names of the ships, incidentally, precipitated considerable discussion and second thoughts among NASA’s decision-makers, but were finally accepted—otherwise, many would think the agency caved to the superstitious among them.

There was no guarantee that the untested rocket would be launched successfully, and the chance that the astronauts would return safely to Earth was variously estimated at between 5 and 25 per cent. Some ‘experts’ even predicted that the great ship would never leave the launch pad. Others were certain that there were too many variables, including the successful launch of the supplementary fuel tanker, to be sent at a later date from the second International Space Station. Nevertheless, the ship was crewed by America’s finest astronauts, who volunteered unanimously for the experimental flight. Every last one of them had willingly agreed to give his or her life, if necessary, in an attempt to answer one of the three seminal unanswered questions long posed by mankind: are we alone in the universe? (The other two, of course, being: is there a God? And: is there an afterlife?) Its primary mission was to determine whether the spherical objects detected in the under-ice ocean of one of the four moons, first seen by Galileo Galilei centuries before, were some heretofore unknown form of life, or merely artifacts of one or another physico-chemical activity taking place in that frigid, radioactive sea.

The entire world was talking about it, had been following the details from the beginning, and most were watching the vid of the final countdown. Virtually every human being of every station and location on Earth knew about the mission, had questions about it, felt a universal excitement about it that had never been experienced in the entire history of Homo sapiens on planet Earth. The landing of the ‘Santa Maria,’ carrying the robotic ‘Neil’ and ‘Buzz,’ to the icy moon was the only event remotely close, but that was like a dot on the sun compared to the upcoming voyage of the Titanic to Europa, which had been visited twice before.

The first, some eighty years earlier, had been a close fly-by, with the American spacecraft ‘Galileo,’ followed by the ‘Juice’ and ‘Clipper’ missions of the 2020s. Their instruments were primitive by today’s standards, but it was clear that a more sophisticated mission would be worth the time and nearly prohibitive expense. It was likely that a craft could land on Europa’s generally flat surface, and could relatively easily send probes through the ice and into the saltwater ocean a few kilometers below, possibly manned by robots who could maneuver around the minefield of geysers and occasional further cracking of the surface.

That visit, thirty-eight years ago, by two ingeniously designed, human-like robots, named after the first visitors to the Earth’s own moon, had suggested that the ocean of Europa was inhabited by something, though the precise nature of the presumed inhabitants remained elusive. Sensors had been driven 8.6 km. through the ice crust and into the ocean, but the cameras had quickly malfunctioned, either because of the extreme cold or the high radiation levels at the surface and below.

The artificial-intelligence robots, commonly called AIRs, had been given ‘personalities’ in an effort to drum up support for the project among the politicians and the general public. This idea backfired when the robots were left to die by radiation poisoning on the frozen world. People all over the world had come to identify with Neil and Buzz, who were still rooted in the ice and long-since ‘dead,’ if they were ever alive. This had been a hot topic of debate among both their makers and the general public. On the one hand, they were considered to be emotionless machines incapable of feeling, yet they were obviously more than that, just as non-human animals were once considered to be without emotions or even thoughts. And when the AIRs, locked in a fatal hug, finally ceased to respond to signals from Mission Control, the world unexpectedly wept. This outpouring of grief from the people at home was elevated to an even higher degree when it was later revealed that Buzz left the relative safety of their spacecraft to be with Neil soon after he had ceased to function.

Philosophers and psychologists around the world tried to understand why people were so distressed by the loss of these metal and plastic entities left on Europa. It profoundly resurrected the old question: what constitutes ‘life’? Was mankind really the central figure in the universe, or were there other beings, intelligent or otherwise, who were more sensitive, thoughtful, even more important, than were human beings? The inclusion of religion in these discussions brought back the realization that Copernicus and Galileo had suffered in that interest, and the church turned out to be monumentally wrong about the importance of the Earth in the universe. Was it wrong again? If there was life in the Europan ocean, even if only primitive life, it would mean, at a minimum, that we were not alone in the solar system, let alone our galaxy, the Milky Way, and beyond. What if living beings existed everywhere? Would we still be the central figure in the catalogue of life? Or some fringe, fleshy blobs on the outer edge of cosmic importance, just as our sun, and even our galaxy are merely average specimens in the overall scheme of the universe?

T minus twenty minutes!

Now, for the first time, real human beings were about to be transported to Europa, a moon about the same size as our own satellite, but far colder. The single-stage rocket was designed to fly directly to Jupiter, without the gravity-assist boost of a long trip around the sun (though it accepted a little help from a pass-by of Mars, which happened to be in the right place at the right time), and to travel at a greater velocity than any manned spaceship had traveled before, achieved by utilizing the far greater thrust of the single nuclear fusion engine, continuously accelerating until the great ship was well past Mars and nearing the asteroid belt, reaching a maximum velocity of nearly 200,000 km./hr. The procedure was unlike that of earlier rockets, which blasted into space at full thrust, then coasted at a more-or-less constant velocity for the rest of the journey. The current atomic-powered voyage would take a mere six and a half months.

But even though the crew would reach Jupiter in record time, it would take several more weeks for the astronauts to set up and activate their equipment: the large drills, pumps, and connecting tubes that, it was generally hoped, would prove that there were at least two heavenly bodies supporting life in our little Solar System. Others were praying that life, and particularly ‘intelligent’ life, for God’s sake, would be restricted to Mother Earth, the only known biblical domain.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) experiments had been a huge disappointment (the so-called unidentified flying objects—UFOs—of the last century or more were discounted as a kind of mass hysteria). After many decades of listening for signals broadcast from space, especially from the direction of thousands of exo-planets known to have environments similar to that of Earth, not a single heavenly body in the known universe seemed to harbor anything generally considered to be ‘intelligent.’ This meant that either 1) other beings sharing our universe were keeping quiet about their presence; 2) intelligent life always destroyed itself before it could make itself known to us (which begged the question of what characterizes ‘intelligence’); 3) there were living species elsewhere, but they were not intelligent in the manner of Homo sapiens; 4) life of an entirely different sort inhabited worlds far and wide; or 5) life as we know it was non-existent elsewhere, and that perhaps God had really produced the entire universe for the exclusive benefit of mankind, even though His chosen species had practically destroyed His handiwork, including most of the other species He had also created, leaving much of the Earth barren of everything but people. The Europa Mission was the first step (discounting the failure of the countless Mars missions to do so) in suggesting that life exists not only throughout the universe, but even in at least two different sites within our own little solar system.

THE DESTINATION

T minus ten minutes and counting!

Of the four Galilean moons (first discovered by Galileo Galilei with his primitive telescope, and easily visible with a good pair of binoculars), Europa is the second-closest to its mother planet, Jupiter. A year on Europa lasts about 3 ½ Earth days, and, like our own unnamed moon, the same side of the icy satellite always faces the giant planet. It’s high radiation levels results from its presence at the center of Jupiter’s radiation belt (6 million kilometers in diameter). Like the Earth, Europa has a core of iron surrounded by a thin shell of silicate rock. The outer ice surface varies from 7-10 km. thick, and covers a saltwater ocean 100 km. deep, far bigger than all of Earth’s oceans combined. The myriad cracking of the ice in all directions is caused by stresses of all kinds, including the powerful ocean tides.

The presence of an ocean under the Europan ice was deduced from data returned by the problem-wracked fly-by Galileo mission of 1997-2004. Its magnetometers had shown a strong magnetic field emanating from the icy moon (this field was induced by the far stronger magnetic field emanating from Jupiter itself). On opposite sides of the giant planet the moon’s magnetic field ‘flipped,’ which suggested that there was a conductor, presumably a saltwater ocean, below the icy surface. This hypothesis was soon verified by telescopic observations of geysers of seawater periodically erupting from the surface, and by the countless cracks in the ice, which resulted from linear breaks in the surface ice followed quickly by re-freezing. Early in the twenty-first century, speculation had already begun that that the sub-surface ocean might well be swarming, at the very least, with microbes.

And then came the AIR mission of 2051, which confirmed the presence of spherical sectors scattered on the icy surface. They varied in size, some suggesting an intact sphere bigger than a basketball. Others were much smaller. The new theory went that if they were alive at one time, they must have been ejected by the geysers, first observed in 1979, or come up through the temporary cracks in the ice and fragmented before they could return to the sea. But what were they? Segments of frozen bubbles? Some kind of underwater animal or plant life? Food for larger creatures? Were they broken up by the violent journey to the surface?

Plans were in place to return to Earth as many specimens as could be found and captured, including any infant spheres that might be brought up, through the drilling tube, from the salty ocean. This scheme depended, of course, on the safe return of the Titanic from its long journey to Europa.

THE MISSION DIRECTOR

T minus two minutes and counting!

Alexandria Nordhoff had worked her way to the top of NASA Command. A serious workaholic, she was tireless in researching every tiny aspect of every space mission she had ever been involved with, and some that she was not.