Nick was exhausted. He winced at the pressure in his head; closing his eyes, he swore quietly. He barely felt alive. I need to sleep...

“Forty seconds until Atmospheric Entry Vehicle ejection," came the vapid male voice out of static-filled crasis, “Jovian injection point plotted. Please visually confirm all systems nominal status.” Nick’s muscles flinched involuntarily. He couldn’t withdraw enough to cut off the outside world. Cut off the voices. Cut off the pain. He was so tired...

Monitors floated in front of his eyes—for all the world solid, tangible things instead of merely retinal projections—awash in color and ever-shifting movement. Sliding bars, virtual meters, virtual gauges. Graphical and numerical data in a constant state of flux. He could see his vital signs: pulse 70, now 68, now 71, blood pressure 150 over 92. Nick blinked and the monitors shook for a moment as the moisture on the surface of his eyes stabilized. The AEV in which he hung suspended also sent its share of data through the main read, confirming out to the fifth redundancy that everything was functioning normally. With the exception of this artificial world generated by his suit’s computers, he couldn't see anything beyond the margins of his helmet except the smooth, near-featureless inner surface of the vehicle, and the twisted gray webbing which supported his body.

No way to see outside. The engineers had felt there was no need for a window. Nick shifted slightly, but within the AEV there wasn’t much room to shift. Especially with the acceleration webbing linking thousands of points of the vehicle with the snug white skin of the smartsuit which sheathed his body. He stared at the darkness of the AEV’s inner surface and felt his eyes sinking into pain-filled metallic nothingness.

Static hiss. “Thirty seconds, all back-ups are go for transition phasing...” The pain refused to leave him alone, refused to let him forget. It was a never-ending reminder of the living presence of one human being. If you could call her human. “Kathy” Jeung Fei Ling.

Nick felt the physical murmur of hate reverberating inside his head. I’ve got to stop this...stop...this isn’t like me—I’m just too tired to think straight. I’m just too tired....

Hate was a solid thing inside him. It both repelled and attracted him. Next to physical pain and visceral fatigue, this hate was all he could feel. This isn’t me. I’m not like this...the fatigue is getting to me. I’m so tired...so tired...so...damn...am I cracking up...?

This hate wasn’t the prosaic sort one person feels for another who simply irritates, or even the loathing one feels for someone who is somehow—through some mundane personal conflict—detestable. No...

 “Twenty seconds. AEV systems powered, preflight check completion confirmed, all readings nominal. Major Allen, please assume final pre-ejection position. Pre-ignition sequence activating. Going full up on OBEP. Standby.” Reflexively Nick tucked into a semi-cannonball, his knees up against his chest, his arms wrapped around his legs. Placing the faceplate of the smartsuit against his kneecaps, he took a deep breath and closed his eyes.

This hate was deep, tangible—alive.

Nick wanted to kill her. What is wrong with me? I’ve never felt like this before...

It wasn’t normal, not for him at least, to want to kill someone. But “normal” had become frustratingly elusive lately, alien, abstruse. The word didn’t seem to have meaning anymore. Because more than anything, he did want to kill Kathy Jeung. I really am losing it...

“Ten seconds. AMEP sensors activated. Please standby...” Not the quick death of a shot to the head, with its instant organic splattering of consciousness into nothingness, no; but not a long slow tortuous death either. After all, he had ethics. Jeung deserved to die, and she should feel the pain, but it should also be over relatively quickly. A shot to the chest would probably do it. Yes. The murderous bitch would know she was dying before she died—that moment of cognizance was absolutely essential—but it wouldn’t be particularly cruel or drawn out. And, done right, it would be certain. Eyes look your last...the doors of breath seal with a righteous kiss a dateless bargain to engrossing death...Romeo and Juliet, Act Five, Scene...Scene...uh...I never could remember details like that. Where do these thoughts come from, anyway? I’m losing my grip—I’m just too tired...

“Five seconds.”

One shot to the chest.

“Four...”

To the chest.

“Three...”

One shot.

“Two...”

One...

“One...”

Nick’s body jerked, spasmed, slamming into the acceleration webbing. Ejection.

“Primary ignition sequence engaged...” The vehicle lurched. Nick gasped. The initial sharp pain gave way to a familiar dull ache; an ache that churned at the ends of all his nerves. The Atmospheric Entry Vehicle throbbed in syncopation with his head. The ship—he knew without being able to see it—was at his back and receding fast. And ahead lay the inferno.

The darkness around him was broken only by the dimly glowing blurs that were the AEV’s backup indicators. He ignored them.

He felt trapped; there was no way out.

“Altidepth negative fourteen-point-two-three kilometers. Two minutes ten seconds until atmospheric injection. SOMR test sequence transmitting. Please standby...” The drop. Damn. How many times had he done this now? Twenty...twenty-one? It was routine, routine, routine...nobody cared. Nobody but the bureaucrats. And not even them.

He was so tired...

 Day in, day out; eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. And now...how long had he been awake, working for them this time? Forty hours? I need to sleep. Why can’t they let me sleep? This is impossible! Shuddering, he gritted his teeth.

“Altidepth negative seven-point-one-one-five kilometers. One minute five seconds to atmospheric injection. Pick-up probe confirmed online and ready for 23:00 retrieval—two hours ten minutes on mark...and...four, three, two, one, mark. Please standby....” The ache in Nick’s body wasn’t all from the AEV ejection, he knew; it was an ache that never left anymore. They’re driving me too hard—the routine is killing me! He felt like he was dying from the inside out, viscera rotting outward to decompose flesh, brain declining steadily along with his body. I just can’t think....

He felt nauseated. Constantly. I can’t take this anymore! If only there were some way out. A way out....He felt a fresh stab from his ever-present guilt. He knew full well he had no escape. He couldn’t quit, he could never quit; he had—a penance to pay. Alex...I’m sorry...

“Thirty seconds until atmospheric injection. Please complete EVA flight system check...” Without conscious thought his gloved hands fumbled over his rig, checking, testing, confirming all was in order. Habit—routine. Thirty seconds until the drop.

The drop.

“Close your eyes,” echoed a voice from the past. “Now take a deep breath and let it out slowly...imagine you're in freefall...form the picture...your body arched, relaxed, tapping your toes together, relaxed...staying altitude aware...at four-thousand feet you look, reach, pull, arch...got the picture?” He nodded.

“Good, that’s all I want you to do this dive...just relax and enjoy the ride.” He nodded again. The door flew upward and pressed against the underside of the wing. There was a roar of sound. White noise.

“Are you ready?” He glanced out the door at the checkerboard of fields below. “Yes,” he heard himself shouting. He was more scared than he had ever been in his life—but nothing could keep him from going out that door. His desire for that freedom was greater than any fear.

“Have a good skydive!”

He swallowed. Yes. Have a good skydive.

Nick's headphones hissed and crackled. For a moment he thought it was just the air roaring outside the open door of the plane. Then a voice jerked him back into the present. “L-mesosphere entry point approaching. Five seconds to atmospheric injection...four...three... two...one...”

The Atmospheric Entry Vehicle split. The two halves pranged away from him with a jolt, releasing him from suffocating encystment. He was free. The reflected light nearly blinded him for the fraction of a second it took for the faceplate to react to the photo-stimulus and darken. His mind, like some estranged entity, some separate rebel creature, seemed to speak of its own accord. I go and ’t is done; the bell invites me...for ’t is the knell that summons thee to Heaven or to Hell...

 He vaguely knew where the quote came from, but he didn’t care—and he never really had. It had always been the words that mattered to him, the inner dynamics and resonances, not the reference information—or even the context, for that matter.

Arching his body, he stretched his suited arms out to his sides as if to embrace the giant below him, to embrace the maelstrom that was this world. The storm beneath him raged in monstrous, primal splendor.

Freefall.

Nick looked down into the angry red eye of god. He felt awe—a feeling familiar, yet...new. He never got used to this part of it—never. There was something so utterly alien about it, so completely foreign, so...beautiful.

He saw the major magnitude festoon in the southern hemisphere was still growing into the upper atmosphere. The enormous scroll-like feature had split into subsidiaries, which in turn rotated back on themselves to form swirling eddies. Definitely a storm to be reckoned with.

Nick’s muscles flexed against the snug fabric of his pressure suit. The only thing between him and the near-nothingness around him, the thin composite layers looked nothing like the awkward, bulky suits from mere years before. The thought was more reflexive than anything else, briefly touching the surface of his mind each time he exited the AEV and saw the thin white material tightly gripping his skin—gripping it, and supporting it, with its narrow bio-mechanical ridges running across the outline of his muscles. The smartsuit began massaging his lower torso in preparation for the blood-squeezing clench it would put on him in a few minutes.

“Major Allen, please acknowledge telemetry status.” Ignoring the voice Nick clicked his chin-switch sharply to the left and deployed the drogue chute. The bridle snaked out, undulating, then snapped taut. Nick’s sensors blinked and chirped at him, but he ignored them as well. For a single moment he forgot his pain, he forgot his weariness, he forgot his anger and hatred and guilt and...madness. He knew/felt/lived only one thing.

JUPITER.

His was a dantean fervor. It lived, this cicatrized giant. He knew it. It lived, and breathed, and slumbered in its eternal troubled sleep. This was his world. This inferno, this hell, this single majestic raging storm was his. He knew it knew the hate he felt. It knows! It was the thundering apotheosis of his hate.

Jupiter filled his field of vision, stretching out beyond the margins of his peripheral sight, filling his eyes with light and color. He felt nearly overwhelmed by the spectacle. Unlike photographs taken through Earth-bound telescopes, with their soft, hazy bands of color, the planet below Nick showed countless lines that were distinct and sharp, and an abundance of other features unimagined by most people. Swirls, pools, eddies twisting this way and that, monster rivers of molten color, huge ovals of white and blue, concentrated spots of intense red, and flashes of light; lightning discharges as large as the planet Earth. An immense cauldron of seething, marbleized liquid simmered beneath him. Nick felt as if he were falling into a vast ocean of melting caramel, a stewing amalgam stirred by invisible hands.

“Major Allen, please acknowledge telemetry status!” The voice over the radio had a growing edge of urgency. Again Nick ignored it. He continued to plunge downward, staring at the colored layers of red and white and brown and deep in the distance, blue. To hell with them. To hell with...

 A new voice spoke. An old voice. A voice with a decided accent. How could she have lived for all those years in the United States and still have an accent that bad? The thought echoed with the characteristic familiarity of frequent repetition.

“Major Allen, this is Commander Jeung—I order you to respond!” The weariness came crushing back. He was suddenly in a tunnel of darkness, with Jupiter somewhere outside the chasm. Leave me alone! In his mind he could see her face, the icy, pale brown eyes—boring into his pain-filled brain. Those eyes—there was something disconcerting about Jeung’s eyes. No, that wasn’t quite it. They were...perplexing. Strange, like empty voids, almost emotionless. Nick had heard emotion often enough in her voice—usually anger and derision—but the eyes didn’t show it; they didn’t show anything at all. They were simply hard and cold and empty. Almost empty. Nick sensed something there, something hidden—those eyes were twin enigmas...set in a face almost beautiful...almost, except for the fact that it was the face of a murderous bitch...leave me alone...

“Major Allen!”

Leave me alone...

“Major!”

“I can’t function like this,” he croaked. Damn it, he had given in to her; now that he had spoken, he had lost—lost...

He heard a slight chirp and knew what it meant: the Commander had cut off his outside communications, with the exception of the executive line. “Major,” came the supercilious, accented voice into the new silence, “I’ve told you this before, and I will most certainly continue to tell you. Exigencies dictate that this job has to be done—now. The time constraints on this mission are obvious, and they cannot be changed. I am sorry that you are it, but you are—the job simply has to be done.” Like hell she’s sorry! Like hell...

“Let someone else do it!” He knew the foolishness of the words even as they left his mouth. He wasn’t thinking clearly....

She gave a derisive snort. “You know very well that’s utterly ridiculous—you know you’re the only one who can do this job.”

Damn. He had slipped up, letting the Commander glimpse his real emotional state. His inhibitions were going. But he couldn’t stop himself. He lashed out. “Why don’t you tell the brass this is impossible! I can’t function like this!” It came like a gushing stream. He couldn’t stop it. “My reaction times are down, I can’t make critical judgments, I'm not fully effective!”  Shit, I sound like a babbling idiot...

The Commander's voice dripped. “I’m sorry about the physical state you’re in,” the lying bitch! “And I have talked with the Chiefs of Staff, but they assure me there is nothing we can do about it; it’s a bad situation, but they have a deadline to meet.” Deadline! Deadline! An arbitrary deadline, one which they themselves had set! Nick knew the way they worked. “Gentlemen, can we have this operation completed by Friday?” “Mr. President, we’ll get it done by Wednesday!” Deadline—yeah, right! He knew how the Commander had talked to the higher-ups: with ass-kissing and “Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir!” Jeung watched out for Jeung, and no one else. She just wanted to make sure she got her points for promotion.

 Nick hated all bureaucrats; but for Jeung...there was something more. For her Nick had a singular hatred. Hatred that lusted after the squeeze of a trigger. The sharp buck of recoil. The shock of impact. A misty spray of blood from her chest, followed after a beat by an eruptive flow of red. The terrified realization in Jeung’s eyes, turning into the glaze of death.

Nick could taste the caustic sweetness of that gloriously lethal moment. A shot to the chest. A single shot to the chest. One bullet...one bullet...one...I’ve got to stop thinking like this, I’ve got to stop, this isn’t me...

They were both silent for a moment. Palpable tension—straining...straining...

A sensor beeped. Nick focused on the main read and spoke, his voice unable to conceal an emotion-induced waver. “Excuse me,” just go away and leave me the hell alone, “I’ve got primary deployment coming up.”

She paused on the other end, considering, weighing, then, “Allen, I want to see you in my cabin immediately after pick-up.”

Shit.

“Acknowledge!” barked the Commander.

“Yes, sir.” The conditioned response came instantly. He struggled to keep all emotion out of his voice. If only there were some way—any way—out of this hell. A way out...

A heavy pause followed, and then a chirp. The common channel was open again. “Major Allen, please acknowledge telemetry status,” came CAPCOM’s voice.

Nick sighed in defeat. “Encode one-six-three-five-nine—set to confirm in three seconds...two...one; test pattern transmitting.”

There was a pause. “All telemetry confirmed as functional—thank you Major.” Go to hell. Or at least to Jupiter, he laughed sourly to himself. Great, I’m really losing it...

He groaned. Alex always did say I had a lousy sense of humor...Alex...damn...

Looking at the altidepth gauge he saw he was coming up on plus-fifteen kilometers. Not a bad freefall; or drogue fall, as the purists insisted on calling it. He had never gone much deeper into the Jovian atmosphere than this. He clicked his chin switch to the right and released the now unnecessary drogue chute from the rig. He fell away from it swiftly, and it disappeared somewhere above him. Not that it had really been necessary in the first place. The Strato-Jump II Project had conclusively proven a drogue chute wasn't necessary for maintaining stability when the jumper had proper training. But engineers had never lost their “spam-in-a-can” mentality when it came to astronauts, and had insisted on incorporating it in the rig design anyway. Safety parameters, multiple redundancy, removing the “human factor,” whatever. It all amounted to the same thing: drogue chutes. And therefore drogue fall. Drogue fall. U.S. Air Force Captain Joseph Kittinger—now there had been a man’s man. August 16, 1960; twenty miles above the New Mexico desert. Really the first one to show the way, stepping deeply outside the range of the knowns of his day. Oh sure, there had been earlier pioneers, but Joe had made the single largest leap forward. Or rather, downward...

Stupid, stupid; my sense of humor is really working overtime today...

Nick knew, at least to some degree, the feelings Joe must have had as he stepped off the precipice, jumping away from his gondola, a sky as black as night above him, a brightly lit ball of a world beneath him. A single finite speck stepping into a seemingly infinite void. Headlong themselves they threw, down from the verge of Heav’n...

 And those international jerks had refused to acknowledge Joe’s achievement, because he had a drogue chute. Refused him the record. Refused him the recognition. Refused...

A beep sounded. Looking around, Nick saw that the AEV injection had been slightly off; he was marginally into the edge of a plunge wall. Damn it! He should have been over the trough! Those idiots were getting sloppier and sloppier about the exit point. He’d have to fight his way out and over to the lift wall, and ride it back up to mission altidepth. Those jerks! If he hadn’t been so fatigued he would have noticed the problem himself, earlier, noticed it when he’d had time to do something about it. He struck out at the dark pressure in his brain, tried to beat it back. I can’t think...can’t think...

He turned his body and tracked as hard as he could out toward the trough. Tracking: that had been one of the easier skills for him to learn. His body—arms back and cupped next to his hips, shoulders rolled forward, legs extended—formed a rough airfoil which gave him the maximum possible horizontal movement. He glanced at the velocity indicator. H-axis registered 93.56 kilometers per hour. Not too bad. Easily enough to win most tracking contests. V-axis was 321.86 KPH, and decreasing swiftly as he descended into the thicker atmosphere. Mandatory minimum opening altitude was coming up fast; if he didn’t manually deploy his canopy, the Automatic Activation Device would do it for him. Something, something deep inside him, hated relying on the AAD, rebelled at the concept; he had never let the AAD deploy for him before, and he wasn’t about to start now. Only morons who weren't in control of the situation needed AAD’s.

Looking down he realized there was no way he would be able to track all the way out into the trough in time. His body dropped into the clouds of the plunge wall. Well, at least he could also take advantage of the opening shock surge to get him headed in the right direction. He clicked his chin-switch to the left twice and his canopy deployed.

More wing than parachute, a sweet, white canopy formed above his head, and his legs dropped down under him. The hundred-cell manta ram-wing surged forward toward the trough, eagerly sucking in the hydrogen/helium atmospheric mix to inflate and make the zero-permeability fabric rigid.

Early designer’s concepts for this mission had proposed solid-winged probes, like giant gliders, as the vehicles for the human observer-pilot; but the vagaries of the Jovian weather system had been shown to be too fierce. All of the solid aerodynamic bodies tested simply did not have enough structural flex for the environment, and could very conceivably, and easily, be destroyed by the violent meteorological activity. The percentage risk factor had proven unacceptable. But a cloth wing, a cloth wing with its nearly limitless flexibility—and its ability to even collapse and reinflate—a cloth wing; now there was a sublime solution. Something any skydiver would know.

He looked at the time: 21:03:49. A little under two hours to pick up.

 Reaching up, the smartsuit enhancing the movement of his muscles, he clipped the upper edge of his gloves into the toggle control loops. Suddenly he was conscious of the familiar low-frequency—almost electronic—hum that was Jupiter’s constant threshold of sound working its way through the insulation of his helmet. His first few times into the gas giant the sound had been irritating, but now he found something almost comforting about it. Lightning flickered in never-ending patterns around him, flashing off into the eternal distance; spark, glimmer, spark. He felt the buffeting of turbulence, and stared at his heads-up doppler viewdar to give himself—in vibrant artificial colors—a “more real than real” view of the cloud formations immediately around him. The viscous shapes appeared as writhing wisps, almost alive in their twisting, coiling movement.

The altidepth gauge showed him at three kilometers below mission depth, and still sinking with the descending cloud mass. It suddenly occurred to him that he should have deployed high to compensate for the motion of the plunge wall—then he could have gotten to mission altidepth that much easier. In fact, he might not have had to ride the lift wall at all. Damn...just too tired...can’t think straight...

The particulate was beginning to thin. A sudden brightening, a sudden clearing of view—he slipped into the trough.

The trough—extraordinary beauty, painted from a deceptively simple pallet of color, light, and shadow. An immense wilderness of churning sky. Not even in its most raging storms could the Earth muster up this kind of splendor. The sharp contrasts always astonished him. Vast expanses of open sky, punctuated by multi-hued fairy cities of cloud, sweeping storms, both swift and violent, and particulate mountains of color as still as monuments.

Below Nick stretched out a layer of cloud that looked like a smog-stained snow-field. Wisps of vapor swept across these cloud tops, effluvium that danced out its brief life before dissolving into the clearer atmosphere. The field spread before him in an illusion of softly sloped dunes punctuated by darkly plunging crevasses. Through these cracks Nick could dimly see another layer of cloud. Above the snow-field floated puffy masses of coral-shaped gasses, and thicker, stubbier clouds that resembled distorted mushrooms. Soaring towers with surf-like overhangs, giant waves ready to break and come crashing around him, drifted at the same level with Nick. He looked into the distance, where strips of mist floated, for all the world like jet contrails. Above him streaked a silky, flowing fog. An amazing diversity of cloud structures. Beautiful. It was the kind of startling beauty that could drive a man mad. Its horror, and its beauty, are divine...

Am I cracking? It just wasn’t normal to want to kill someone. More than merely want. Lust after, hunger for. Need. One bullet.

Please...just stop...just let me think clearly...

If he could only rest—rest and get away from that bureaucratic bitch—he would be a new man. In a whole lot of ways, actually. He would certainly never look at his fellow human beings the same; he had, of late, hardened into cynicism, particularly a pessimistic outlook on others. On everything. The trend was not entirely new to him, but...this was something more, something different. His mind—his emotions—were dark. Utterly, absolutely.

The main read blurred with slowly scrolling sensor readings. Air hissed past his ears, combined with the static of the radio, and swelled into a tide of hatred. For a moment he didn’t think—he couldn’t think—he just felt. The darkness. The pain. The guilt. Jeung you...murderer...

Humanity was nothing more than a sniveling, snarling mass of animals fighting for a bit of refuse. Ignorant scrabbling monsters who did nothing but indulge in the pursuit of the destruction of others, and of self. Reaching blindly, hungrily for self-nothingness. His experiences of late had been pure explication.

 But at least, if he could get some rest, he'd be able to think straight for the first time in weeks. Or get as close to thinking straight as a human being could hope for. Alex...I need to think...

His head throbbed. The trough, in contrast to the churning walls on either side, looked realtively serene; but he knew better than to get complacent. At any moment a P-cyclone could twist its perpendicular way across the trough and shred the tranquil cumulus formations into ammonia nothingness. And him as well, if he got caught in those furious torque forces. He had seen those monster tornados several times before—but fortunately, only from a distance.

He turned right, then left, staring at his instruments, searching for a cross-current to ride to the lift wall in the distance. His eyes wouldn’t focus, and he shook his head—shaking, shaking, finally pounding it against the inside of the helmet. He wanted to scream, to force his mind awake, truly awake. Force it. He took deep gulping breaths.

“Major Allen,” crackled CAPCOM, “you are off coordinates for current mission description and have failed to initiate corrections in the requisite allotted time margin. You are also in pick-up probe altidepth zone yellow; further decent is not advisable. Please make necessary adjustments—transmitting corrective data on my mark, four, three, two, one, transmission in progress.” Computer code scrolled across the screen of the main read. Go to hell, go to hell, go to hell! LEAVE ME ALONE! His instruments were a blur; the same type, and more, as there would have been on the unmanned Capaneus probe. The probe that would have been him if he weren’t here.

“Distinguished gentlemen and women: what brings each of us here this evening is a united concern about the state of scientific research in this country. Where we may differ is in our approach to a solution to the problem of the dwindling funds for such research. I would like to propose that we lay aside our ideological differences for a moment, and take a hard look at the facts...”

Nick sat stiffly in his dress uniform, but his eyes were not on the Director of Manned Joint Space Endeavors. He had eyes for only one person in the room, and she was sitting directly across from him, staring attentively up at the podium. Marie Alexandria Rawlings. Colonel Marie Alexandria Rawlings. Alex. She looked terrific. Well, she always looked terrific, but tonight she was exceptionally radiant. The strapless red dress looked perfect on her. A waiter stopped at their table to fill Nick’s half-empty glass, and Nick could see him stealing glances at Alex as well.

“In these times of budgetary constraints, the outcry and activism of an ignorant public makes funding...”

Nick was the envy of every other man in the room. Not that it mattered, but it was a statement of fact. Alex was a woman without peer. Her dark brown hair pulled back into a French braid served the wonderful purpose of revealing her features: long neck, aristocratic cheek-bones, full eyebrows, petite nose, perfect mouth. She glanced away from the speaker and caught him looking at her. She smiled that wonderful smile of hers, flashing white teeth. Crinkling her nose, she gestured her head toward the podium, as though chiding Nick for not paying more attention, and then turned her own attention back to the speech.

 “Yes, unmanned space probes are cheaper at the bottom line; yes, unmanned probes send back a substantial percentage of the information a manned expedition would, making them—while by no means the perfect solution—far more cost effective, but these facts do not...”

Nick didn’t care about the speech. He knew that the Director of Manned Joint Space Endeavors was an accomplished politician. The director would eventually have the scientists, the senators, the admirals and generals, eating out of his hand. He was the sort of man who always seemed to be standing in the midst of those rare serendipitous moments when one is able to push all of the right buttons with all of the right people; but that was because his single greatest talent lay in creating those moments. Anyway, Nick had better things to do with his time than listen to the hype. His eyes drank in his companion. Nick never tired of doing this. He had engaged in this activity as frequently as possible ever since he had met her three years ago. She was a joy to look at. He loved to watch Alex for more than just her appearance—her mannerisms were wonderful too: the way she smoothed the lap of her dress, the way she cocked her head slightly when she listened to someone, the way she stroked her right eyebrow when deep in thought, the particular way in which the skin around her eyes wrinkled when she smiled. Alex’s eyes. Twin pools of the darkest brown, eternally sparkling with life. Nick lived for the moments when those eyes were on him. For the moments when they laughed with him, and even at him. For the moments when they were serious, listening to him, letting him know she found what he was saying interesting, engaging, important. Alex was wonderful. Nick had never felt like this with any other person.

“Earth-bound scientists do not have a microscopic percentage of the popular appeal that an astronaut has. Such scientists are not interesting to the public...”

Nick was distracted by the speech for a moment. That old windbag; the “scientist” angle again? When was he going to get some new tricks? Probably, Nick guessed, when the old ones stopped working. The director was an expert at playing on stereotypes, on prejudices, and on the insecurities of the individual; the scientists in the audience were indignant, but deep-down they also felt doubt, wondering if it wasn’t true. Fearing it was. And fear captured people.

“The Capaneus concept should be scrapped! The public is not interested in sending another in a long line of probes to Jupiter. It is high time human beings went there—it is high time that we push forward to again seek new frontiers for humanity!”

The speech ended to applause. Alex touched Nick’s hand, excusing herself to go to the ladies room. Nick watched her walk out of the dining room—as did practically every other man in the room. She had a tight, athletic body, the sort of woman’s body that demands attention—and gets it. She walked with a self-assured air, looking consummately comfortable in her multifaceted role as a scientist, a military officer, an astronaut, and a woman. She was truly an incredible person.

Major John “Nick” Allen had been exuberant when the manned mission finally received approval. He was even more so on the day when, after years of training, they chose him as back-up to the primary mission candidate: Alex. They would both go to Jupiter. Alex...

The pain Nick felt inside, the revenant guilt, was almost physical. Alex....

 The instruments locked onto a promising cross-current, and Nick steered into the flow pattern. He could see on radar—and visually for that matter—that the stream took him into the heart of a sheet of nimbostratus with some major storm activity; policy strictly forbade him venturing where visibility fell below two kilometers.

“Major Allen,” came the ostinato of CAPCOM, “you are approaching a restricted meteorological zone—please make the necessary adjustments.” To hell with them.

The nimbostratus cloud formation filled his view.

“Major Allen, mergence with restricted zone is imminent, please take appropriate evasive action.” Nick plunged into the cloud formation and felt the subsequent, and familiar, turbulence. It was dark here—dark and cold. Methane sleet pelted his face plate. If only he could hide here, if only he could let his anger and hate and guilt dissipate into the surrounding darkness. If only he never had to leave. Come, gentle night; come, loving, black-brow’d night...that all the world will be in love with night, and pay no worship to the garish sun...

“...ajor Allen...*hiss*...turn mark four...*hiss*...leave zone immediatel...*crackle*” Sheets of lightning raged around him. The concussions of thunder battered against the smartsuit, and he could feel the sound even more than he could hear it.

“Maj...*hiss*...Allen...*hiss*” His faceplate instantly went near-opaque as it darkened to cut the luminance of a lightning bolt striking him. He felt tingling as the current passed through him and away again into the clouds. The engineers on the command ship insisted mission after mission he couldn’t possibly feel anything of the sort in his insulated state, that it must be purely psychosomatic, but he knew very well he could really feel something. Where exactly do they get off? What do they know? Get their theoretical asses down here with me, and I’ll give them “impossible.”

He started to relax, watching the living art of this living world, light flashes showing an infinity of shades—started to relax—and felt the instant fire of amphetamines automatically and intravenously releasing into his bloodstream as his mind started to sink toward sleep.

“...ajor...*hiss*” He couldn’t tell whether it was the turbulence or the drugs that made his body shake. Turbulence....

Nick was shaking inside.

“Today we have with us United States Space Force Colonel Marie Rawlings, and her companion is astronaut Major John Allen, who is also known in the popular press as the ‘storm jumper’ or *chuckle* simply ‘that crazy man.’ Major Allen, tell us, what is it like to skydive into a hurricane? And why even do it?” The studio audience looked like a pack of ravening wolves circling for the kill, hungry, sniffing about; Nick wished he had never agreed to do this interview. He felt terribly uncomfortable in this sort of setting. People were just gluttonous for the new, the different, the “bizarre.” But Alex had insisted he needed to get out of his “shell,” and she had twisted his arm into accompanying her on the talk show. Not that it had taken much twisting—if anyone could talk Nick into doing something he didn’t want to do, Alex could. She had done it often enough.

 “Well, uh, Bob, let me address your second question first—uh, there is a great deal of scientific value to be had here, and as in the manned space program, um, robotic instrumentation is really not enough. The human observer-pilot can make the type of qualitative decisions which a simple probe cannot.” He wasn’t coming across too well, he could feel it. He looked to Alex for help, but she just gave him a quick taste of that smile of hers. He had a love-hate relationship with that damned smile. Her eyes twinkled mischievously.

“Yes, but isn’t this really just all part of an effort to outdo yourself, you know, outdo your stunt of two years ago?” The audience shifted forward, Nick could sense it, waiting for him to respond to the allegation. Damn, he had known this would come up, but he still wasn’t sure how to deal with it. It was absolutely essential that he not give any credence to it.

“Um, well, actually, I really wouldn’t describe the, uh, project as a ‘stunt.’ It was really a scientific research project, a joint operation between NASA, the USAF and the USSF—we never intended it to be a ‘stunt’ in any sense of the word.” He was struggling too hard—struggling too hard to sound rational and intelligent, but he sounded worse and worse. He was losing what little control he might have had over the situation.

“You call skydiving from outside of the earth’s atmosphere and setting the world absolute freefall record not a stunt? C’mon Major, you’ve got to be kidding!”

He was drowning; the room was closing in. Why wouldn’t Alex say anything? She’d always been far better at this personality game than him. “Uh, well Bob, making a parachute jump from 56 kilometers, uh, 30 knots, uh 35 miles,” he was really sweating now, “is not really outside of the earth’s atmosphere—”

The talk-show host cut him off; “C’mon now Major, let’s not quibble, the point is that you seem to be a thrill-seeker, maybe even someone with a death wish, and the country—the world—has followed your exploits with a sort of morbid interest. How can you pretend that jumping into major storms is serious business?”

He had a terrible headache. He just wasn’t good at this political stuff. He had to get through this without screwing up too badly or his career would be finished. The military didn’t like bad publicity. He needed to buy some time so he could think. He saw motion from the corner of his eye and turned to find Alex leaning forward in her chair. She spoke. “Bob, I think it is essential at this juncture to point out that the death-wish image of skydiving has been shown quite conclusively by the psychiatric community to be nothing more than a popular myth; as for the meteorological research applications of dropping someone into a storm, the results speak for themselves. For example, the data from this project has been used in a number of very important ways, including the ground-breaking study co-sponsored by the National Weather Service and the International Meteorological Aviation Institute which finally proves that...”

She was a marvel. Nick could have almost reached out and kissed her. Almost, that is, if he had that kind of relationship with her, which he didn’t. They were just friends—and he was too afraid of messing that up by complicating the relationship in the pursuit of anything more intimate. He didn’t want to lose her. Didn’t want to lose...

A warning sounded and jerked Nick back into reality. Or what passed for reality. Doppler radar showed some kind of anomalous break in the clouds ahead, beyond which was something BIG.

 “Major Allen...*hiss*...plea...*crackle*...spond...*hiss*.” Something, some sixth sense perhaps, cued him that something was terribly wrong. He had no time to think about it. He came sweeping out of the darkness and found himself at the fringe of a hydrosulfide mountain, a monster cloud that stretched away, reaching upward in a furious bid to touch the endless night of space above. Storm winds roared around him in a rising shriek.

“Major Allen,” came the straining voice of CAPCOM through static, “please respond.” In a moment of doubt, a moment of uncertainty, he didn’t react, he didn’t think—he simply reached up and wiped the methane residue from his faceplate with a gloved hand. The action was not an appropriate response. The super-cumulonimbus cloud grabbed him, like the billowing hand of some malevolent god—an angry and vengeful Jove—and pulled him upward into the turmoil. Upward, surging upward, toward jet-stream Gamma.

Fear clenched his heart. If he got caught in that streaming river of stratospheric hydrogen, that invisible supersonic torrent, he would never make it back for pick-up.

He paused. The thought was almost tempting...

“Arm cut-away sequencer,” he ordered the onboard computer. Three quick beeps, followed by a flashing green light. With a jerking nod of his head he released the main canopy—he felt, more than heard, a click at his shoulders and then he was falling. If he could get below this monster, he could go to his primary reserve and catch a current under and past it. As he accelerated downward away from the abandoned white wing he looked up to see it collapse into a writhing ball of cloth, dragged up into the fury of the storm cloud. A writhing ball of the most expensive fabric ever woven, millions of dollars worth of genetically engineered spider-silk wasted—soft and flexible and stronger than the strongest synthetic fiber ever created, millions and millions of dollars, wasted, dragged upward, upward, away, gone. Freefall.

“Major Allen, we have sensor reportage and video-tap confirmation that you have cut away from your main canopy; please state reason for this action, and go immediately to your primary reserve...*crackle*...we have a class C emergency situation imminent: you will be entering pick-up probe altidepth zone red in seventeen seconds. Repeat, emergency situation imminent—go immediately to your primary reserve.” The fools, with their inadequate, inapposite regulations! The same type of thing that had...

Nick ignored the order. If there were only some way out, some escape, from those fools. If only he could quit, could escape.

The white cliff wall of the cloud next to him swept by. He loved this feeling; body flight was his only—thin—thread to sanity. When he flew, stretching out his arms and legs, turning and swooping, soaring over the landscape—or cloudscape, as the case might be—he felt alive. Oftentimes...we had giv’n our bodies to the wind, and all of the shadowy banks on either side came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still the rapid line of motion...as if the earth had roll’d with visible motion her diurnal round...

Body flight. There had been many days when a simple leap from a plane had been all the tonic he needed to cut through the emotional fog and simply find himself. He had always been a freefall junkie. Back when he was a jet-jockey, he'd gone by the nick-name “body pilot.” Most of the other pilots had assumed the name was sexual rather than literal. He’d never bothered to enlighten them.

“Major Allen, please respond,” pleaded the voice. “You will enter pick-up probe zone red in five seconds....We are initiating remote reserve deployment....”

 “Override RRD,” Nick said to the computer. The main read flashed confirmation. An idea started to form—slowly, slowly, not instantly leaping into conscious thought, but more an itch that grew at a subliminal level, waiting for its moment to come to fruition. Lurking in the milieu of his private hell. Escape.

Freefall...the atmosphere moving around his body growled its familiar noise through his suit. He felt free, if only for the moment. Nick did a revised-rules style series: a back flip, a three-sixty degree turn right, stop on heading; a three-sixty degree turn left, stop; a forward flip—then a reverse series. He'd been great in his day. He still wasn't bad.

Tucking up his knees, he flipped over onto his back and relaxed in an arm-chair position. He was falling in a canyon between clouds, a canyon far deeper than the Grand Canyon—or Valles Marineris, for that matter. The mind couldn’t really grasp the true immensity. Nearly sheer walls rose as high as the eye could see. White, with streaks of color, they looked as solid as any cliff from which Nick had BASE jumped back on Earth. Like solid cliffs of snow and ice in some mutant, exaggerated world. The illusion abruptly shattered as he passed through the edge of an outcropping in the wall. The particulate burst and swirled visible vortices into the burble caused by the passage of his body.

“Major Allen,” came the voice again, “please respond!” He fell ten kilometers before he got to the base of the super-cumulonimbus, and he let himself fall another two kilometers for a safety margin before deploying his primary reserve. After all, there might be any number of strange wind currents around the base of the monster storm. He did a barrel-roll to get face-to-Earth—or rather face-to-Jupiter—arched slightly, two clicks of the chin to the right, and looked up.

The ram-wing parachute sniveled for a second, streamering, then a white canopy formed above his head—white except for a single black stripe just offset left of center. The second of four chutes, and the first reserve.

“Major Allen!” The thought in his subconscious continued to grow, to lurk, waiting. Some way to escape.

Using his instrumentation he located a cross-current heading south and caught it for a ride. Glancing at the main read, he saw that he hovered less than twenty kilometers above the one-bar level.

“Major...” As he passed into the twilight under the storm, the radio died into a gentle sussuration. It took him a moment to realize that CAPCOM wasn’t merely pausing mid-sentence, but had actually been cut off by the meteorological activity. Cut off...

He was alone! Alone! A terrible weight lifted from his mind. He felt exhilaration.

Complete exhilaration...

“You did it! You did it!” The ground crew pounded him on the back, pounded him on the shoulders, pounded, pounded. He felt like he was being battered into oblivion, but it felt good. So this is what it’s like to make the winning touchdown. A vagrant thought, churned up from some dark corner of his unconscious mind he had yet to explore. “You did it!”

 I did it! He could hardly believe it himself. As he stood among these people, still geared up in his silver pressure suit, stood motionless amidst the crowd of technicians, ground support crew, scientists, and others, he felt suddenly alone. As alone as he had felt when he climbed from the containment sphere at the edge of space a mere ten minutes before, and dropped into the void at 56 kilometers. For a moment everything seemed to go quiet around Nick. The South Dakota desert in front of him stretched away as far as the eye could see, a great empty wasteland. A golden eagle soared overhead, gliding toward white hills in the distance. The multicolored cloth of Nick’s parachute caught in the arid breeze and fluttered around his legs.

At that moment, Alex rushed up to him, a brilliant smile on her face. He suddenly felt weak. Staggering, he went to his knees. There were cries of concern. He looked up at the sky and felt an abrupt wave of vertigo. I did it! He felt faint. He was shivering. The world started to blur. Myriad hands helped him lie down on the ground, and paramedics scrambled to get a stretcher to rush him to the waiting med-evac helicopter.

“...something wrong with the oxygen supply,” said someone, “let’s get that thing off of him....”

Alex unclipped his helmet, twisted it slightly and pulled off—then she cradled his head in her arms. A warm, dusty breeze blew across his face. He looked up at the sky. I did it, Nick, I did it, I did it...

“John?...talk to me—tell me what’s wrong....C’mon, its Alex, talk to me...”

Nick...

Nick had died in the attempt. Nick Piantanida. Nick! I did it, I did it! I did it as much for you as for me! Nick I took your dream with me! I took your spirit with me! I did it!

He could hear the familiar chop of helicopter blades somewhere.

“...pupils are dilated, complexion pale—get me an IV ready....Get his blood pressure...”

I did it...

Nick’s image was there with him: exactly as he remembered him, remembered him that day he had shaken the man's hand in Minneapolis. Shaken his hand as a very small boy, looking up in awe at this giant of a man who was going to go to the edge of space; go to the edge of space, and jump.

He had clipped every article, every news-bit, and pasted them in a scrapbook. Every one. Someday, I’m going to be somebody too. I’m going to be like Nick. I’ll be a hero.

He had cried real tears when he heard of Nick’s death months later. Cried...he felt nauseated.

“...who are you?” The male voice came from miles away. There was something familiar about that voice. Nick?

“C’mon, talk to us....” said a female voice.

“...pressure 78 over 40—pulse 130...in shock...” came another voice, “...symptoms of hypoxia....some oxygen here...want to go double IV’s—give me two large-bore needles...”

“What is your name?” the first voice asked again urgently.

Through the darkness he spoke. “Nick?”

The female voice laughed musically. He heard something strained in that laugh, but it did nothing to take away from the musical quality of it. “Nick?” she said, “Who’s Nick?”

He felt a sharp pain in his right arm. “...hand me that saline...” the voices faded.

From that moment on, Alex had called him “Nick.” And then everybody else did too. The name stuck. John “Nick” Allen. Major John “Nick” Allen. He never did tell anyone why he'd spoken that name.

 Nick.

Since hearing of Nick Piantanida’s death, he'd never shed tears again. His sorrow had been for his hero alone. Lightning flashed across the Jovian cloudscape. He swallowed; his throat was hard. I have drunk of Siren tears, distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within...

To hell with heroes. More drugs pumped from the smartsuit into his veins; he was on fire—filled with liquid hate. The thought nurturing in Nick’s subconscious stirred. Escape. He looked around at the panoply of cloud formations with a new sense of clarity. The lines were almost painful, they were so sharp. What is happening to me? Jupiter was suddenly vivid. A dull throb of headache swelled somewhere deep in Nick’s brain. He felt strange, decentered. He thought of Alex...

A sudden renewed eruption of hate surged up inside him; Jeung you murdering bitch, I’m going to kill you, one way or another!

One bullet. I’m going to kill you! One bullet. Kill you...one way or another...

He felt overpowering futility, knowing the impossibility of the consuming desire. If only he had some way out. Some way. Doubt, frustration, hopelessness tore a void in his emotions. Into the gap sprang the new-born thought.

At first he rejected the urge outright. Don’t be ridiculous! What good would that do? But as he stared into the viscous dark around him, the craving to escape his living hell remained; and grew. It gnawed at him. It stroked him pleadingly. Kill yourself. He mulled it over, weighing the pros and the cons of it. What, am I seriously considering this? I am cracking.

But as he thought it over, it started to make a sort of sense. I really can kill Jeung. I’ll kill what’s important to her. I’ll kill her career...

But would it work? Could he really destroy the woman? His suicide would certainly destroy the project, but...

He began to feel light-headed. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut; open, shut, open. He took a deep, shuddering, breath. The sound of the sensors humming busily, irritatingly, in the confines of his helmet grew to deafening proportions.

Seeing movement from the corner of his eye, he turned to find a figure suspended next to him under an open canopy.

Alex!

The figure grinned at him. “Downplane,” the blue-black jump-suited woman shouted. Nick grinned back. In a matter of moments they were clinging to each others’ rigs, head to feet, feet to head, the two ram-wing’s mouths facing straight down to earth, as they rushed toward the ground. He had never done any canopy relative work until he met Alex, but he was a fast learner.

The wind hissed past his ears.

 Nick had never felt ground-rush like this, not before doing CRW, not before learning to clasp two canopies, two parachutists, together in a “downplane,” in a position that forced both straight down toward the ground in a screaming dive; he was definitely hooked on this particular pump. Thirty meters off the ground they let go and soared away from each other; he was downwind again. He looked at the windsock, and smiled in mild chagrin. Somehow Alex always seemed to be the one to line up right into the wind. Alex insisted it was luck, but Nick had his doubts. The consistency was too much for mere coincidence. After all, Alex was the best skydiver Nick had ever met.

And she was a prankster. Good thing he liked her, because otherwise she would have had hell to pay many times in the past. As a matter of fact, Nick had often been tempted to deliver some retribution himself—maybe in the form of an old fashioned spanking. Not that she would have just stood by and taken it—but the attempt would have been interesting.

Anyway, Nick wasn’t buying the “luck” angle.

Alex...

Nick had never met anyone like her before, someone who seemed to like, well, everyone. Alex just seemed at peace with herself and the world. Frankly, she was, well, kind of weird that way. Nick didn’t even pretend to understand what made her tick. Nick hook-turned his canopy in an attempt to line up into the wind. Too low, too low...

He tried to flare it out, tried to bury the toggles into deep-brakes, but there just wasn’t room enough or time. The ground reached up and smacked his left ankle, his left hip, his left shoulder. He felt bones snap with a crunching sound. Pain.

“Major Allen, please respond!” The inquisitors were back. His left side still ached at the memory. Alex had never stopped apologizing for that incident, even though it wasn’t really her fault. Not even after years.

“Major Allen, I order you to respond!” snapped the voice of Jeung. Go to hell. He focused and found himself close to the lift wall. How had he gotten this far? He couldn’t remember covering the intervening distance.

“Major Allen!” He was going to do it. Escape.

Kill yourself.

“Major Allen!” I’m going to do it.

“Major!” Jeung’s icy cool exterior started to show some cracks, Nick could hear them in her voice as it choked out the word. “Major!”

Now the question was how to go about the logistics of the suicide? He could get rid of his primary reserve, but the secondary reserve had an Automatic Activation Device, and it would activate at an altidepth of plus-fifty kilometers—even if he were only traveling at forty percent of terminal velocity—deploying his canopy without any input whatsoever from him. And the secondary reserve had AI sensors that would not allow the canopy to be cut-away unless it detected a legitimate malfunction. While not making rendezvous with the pick-up probe would certainly be suicide, he didn’t particularly want to go out slow, hanging around under canopy waiting for the end. He wanted to go out fast.

Speed. Speed had always been his passion. Speed and flight.

“SKYDIVING: The Highest Speed Non-Mechanized Sport!” proclaimed the bumper-sticker. “I’d Rather Be Skydiving,” said the license plate holder. He pulled up and parked next to the car, in a parking lot that held about a dozen cars. Well, why not? He had always intended to do it one of these days. What else did a teenage kid have to spend his money on? At least he wasn’t spending it on something stupid, like drugs. Beyond some hangars a small twin-engine plane growled its way into the air.

 It was a shoddy rationalization, as he knew full well he should be saving his money for stuff like college, but it was a sufficient excuse for him at the moment. Or at least he kept telling himself it sufficed. He didn’t need to talk himself into jumping, just into ignoring his guilt. He got out of his car and walked around to the front of the hangar. A large sign proclaimed that this was the Cedar Hills Paracenter, and an arrow pointed to some stairs that led down.

He walked down the stairs.

“Major Allen, if you don’t respond I will have you court-marshalled!”

He was so tired...

Let’s see, the reserves, the secondary reserve. Hmm. There had to be a way around that Automatic Activation Device. Some way to keep that second reserve from deploying. Some way...

And then the tertiary reserve would be no problem; as a last-resort redundancy unit, the designers meant it as more of a “never intended for use” fail-safe than anything else. It had a reserve static line lanyard, but he could disconnect that easily enough. In fact, as he thought about it, he reached up onto his left shoulder and unclipped it; now it could only be deployed manually.

His heart pounded. It would be the ultimate freefall; no one would ever break the record. Down into the heart of the giant planet. He would probably survive for at least a few hundred kilometers. Then...immolation. Dissolution. Peace. Sunset and evening star, and one clear call for me...twilight and evening bell, and after that the dark....

“Major!” The voice reverberated through his body.

If only he could fool the AAD, somehow fool it into not deploying the secondary reserve. “Major! I order you to answer!”

Enough of that! Looking down at his hip and the telemetry/radio transmitter there, he grabbed several connectors and violently yanked them loose. He plunged into the gentle near-silence of his onboard recorders and systems. Let her deal with that.

The AAD was now his main problem, and it felt good, felt relaxing, refreshing, to put his mind to the task of solving some technical problem. Even if it was his own demise. Let’s see, with the increase of atmospheric pressure to that of altidepth plus-fifty and the descent rate at greater than forty percent terminal, a pyrocharge fires, cutting the closing loop which subsequently releases the spring-loaded freebag pilot chute, extracting bag and suspension lines, and the reserve deploys. Hmm. Where in that process is the weak link?

He could fool the sensor into reading an altidepth higher than the real altidepth by turning his body in such a way as to create an envelope of semi-vacuum around the sensor, putting the sensor in his burble, but that would be an indefinite situation—it would simply deploy the reserve somewhat lower than originally intended. On Earth that could kill you, but here, here on this giant gas ball, there was no ground to impact. A few hundred meters would mean nothing. No good.

Could he tamper with the pyrocharge? AAD’s had been known to malfunction when the explosive charge was out of alignment. He moved his arms around, trying to reach back and grip the AAD line, but he couldn’t reach it; if he hadn’t been in this damned pressure suit he could have done it, but smartsuit or not, it still limited his flexibility too much.

The suit. He could always depressurize, and die that way. Nick Piantanida had died like that. Sudden, catastrophic, depressurization.

 No. He felt deep horror at the thought. Nick killed himself too—by accident.

He felt himself starting to lose his suicidal resolve, felt himself starting to waver, when abruptly the solution came to him, catapulting him into action. Of course! He was being too complicated about the whole thing! He was just too tired to think straight. After all, what was a cut-away but “cutting away?”

Fumbling in his right leg pouch he pulled out an ultrasonic hook-knife. He had insisted on having it as part of his gear, in case he somehow got wrapped up in a malfunctioning canopy and lines. Once he had been in a funneled CRW jump with three other skydivers, and had seen a friend go all the way to the ground wrapped in another diver’s canopy for lack of a hook-knife. It had been the first time he had ever actually seen anyone “bounce.”

Without pausing, he cut-away from his primary reserve and activated the secondary. So much for the AAD. He fell face forward for a second and then was jerked upright again. White canopy; two black stripes offset from center. “Override any remote attempt to activate the EBD,” he said to the computer. Not that it was very likely that they could do it now, with the current radio situation, but he would just as soon not take chances.

Reaching up with the knife, he pressed the actuator and slashed through the risers at his shoulders. The canopy swept upward and away from him, and he was in freefall. A malfunction indicator began flashing. He whooped, long and loud—the sound reverberated inside his helmet, battering against his eardrums like the sound of a square-wave, buzzing almost painfully. He felt calm. Finally he was at peace—or at least a pretty good facsimile.

He felt guilty. “You're carnal, sensual, and devilish!” His mother didn’t speak the words, but he could see them in her eyes, and he wished again that he were somewhere else. No, she didn’t speak the damning homiletic words—she didn’t really speak to him at all anymore—but she had spoken them before, countless times. “Your heart has waxed cold toward your fellow men!”

It was like some sort of surreal comic-book dream. A neo-fundamentalist nightmare. He didn’t know what to say. He never had. His mother functioned on a wavelength completely alien to him. She continued to stare at him from beneath the black veil, her eyes hard, unforgiving. He looked away and toward the casket.

The congregation sang. “Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee...”

He didn’t know whether it was his imagination, or what, but it seemed as if he could still feel his mother looking at him. He refused to look in her direction. Staring at the casket, he knew that he should cry, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“Be of sin the double cure, save from wrath and make me pure,” the congregation sang, “not the labors of my hands can fill all thy law’s demands.”

The organ ebbed and swelled with the notes. Why did I come here? I don’t know these people, I don’t understand them, I’m not one of them. I don’t belong here.

 Something nagged at a subliminal level. Maybe he was looking for something. He had regrets about his father, about their relationship. He had admired his father to a greater degree than not, admired him for taking a stand and honestly trying to be what he thought a “man” should be. There was certainly something to be said for that. Though they had disagreed on many fundamental aspects of living, his father had been real, and had lived his life pretty much at peace with the world. Nick couldn’t say as much; he couldn’t quite define his own feelings about life. Or peace, for that matter.

He sometimes wished he could be at peace. Maybe that explained why he was here. He continued to stare at his father’s casket. Am I looking for peace? Not the same peace my father had, but is it peace I seek, nonetheless?

“While I draw this fleeting breath, when mine eyes shall close in death, when I rise to worlds unknown, and behold thee on thy throne, Rock of Ages, cleft for me, let me hide myself in thee.”

Plus-eighty kilometers said the altidepth gauge.

“While I draw this fleeting breath...”

Plus-eighty-five kilometers.

“When mine eyes shall close in death...”

Plus-ninety.

“When I rise to worlds unknown...”

Plus-ninety-five.

“Worlds unknown...”

Plus-one-hundred.

...worlds unknown...let me hide myself in thee...

Nick plunged through a layer of dun-colored clouds, and an ocean of blue gasses spread beneath him—the deepest layer observable from outside Jupiter’s atmosphere. Away in the distance, here and there, light broke through in staggered tiers, streaking rays that dimly illuminated this empty world between cloud stratum. The atmosphere sandwiched between the layers stretched away into unseeable distance in all directions. Nick could imagine how he must look, a solitary speck falling in a vast sea of air, vaulting ammonium hydrosulfide sky above, boundless carpet of water particles beneath. He gazed into the distance and tried to picture someone falling out there—and felt overpowering awe.

There was movement. Nick looked down. The substratum blanket of stratocumulus cloud mass moved up toward him in a sudden relative perception of speed and he plunged into the seamless mass of particles suspended in vapor. Visibility dropped to almost nothing.

He remembered the first time he had “punched” a cloud; he had been ecstatic. He smiled at the memory. But there would be no popping out the bottom of this particular cloud.

Plus-one-hundred and five kilometers said the altidepth gauge.

No one had ever been this far—no one had ever been half this far. His onboard recorders and instruments whirred busily, measuring, analyzing, recording. He noted a substantial—relatively speaking—volume of water here, recording; the temperature passed a balmy 295 degrees K, recording; there was marked evidence for the deep-mix effect, with its uniform blending of atomic and molecular constituents, even though he was barely into the top fraction of a percentage of the troposphere—recording, recording, recording—data that no one would ever receive. No one—especially not Jeung. I’d sooner see her in hell!

Once again came the thought that this gas giant came about as close to “hell” as one could find in a planetary body, at least in this solar system. And Nick would just as soon not see her here. He laughed.

His long-range radar buzzed warningly. What the...?

 Something—something solid—returned an echo from below. There's no way...

Other sensors started to flash and beep, showing readings like none he had ever seen before. Relatively significant amounts of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen, and traces of phosphorus and sulfur. He couldn’t see very well through the face plate, and the shorter range viewdar display had locked up for some reason. Staring into the murky near-dark, he found himself falling into the thick of what looked like a “snow” storm. But the snow was made up of hydrocarbon chains.

Hydrocarbon...

The off-white colored stuff caked his suit as he plummeted through it, covering him in a sheet of organic particles. Sensors started showing prebiotic compounds in significant percentages, amino acids, purines, pyrimidines, carbohydrates, fatty acids...

The radar continued to beep with the blip. The blips. The original reading began to fragment. They were only twenty-five kilometers below him now. A few other echoes started to show deeper and to the sides of the original echo. What in the...? He was suddenly, completely, awake. For the first time in, well, weeks it seemed. He looked at the readings flashing at him. Altidepth: one-hundred and fifty kilometers. Temperature: 340 degrees Kelvin; which is, let’s see, about 140-150 degrees Fahrenheit.

The blips registered at twenty kilometers below him, and the other deeper echoes increased in frequency. Could it be?

When he'd come to Jupiter, Nick had entertained fanciful hopes they might find, well, life. Not that he’d been optimistic about it. Every previous probe—to any planet—had failed to show any sign, and as far as humanity knew they were completely alone in the universe. Scientists had grown cynical and defensive on the subject. Too many weirdos had taken up the banner of extraterrestrial life.

Life was the apparently the ultimate freak of nature. The cruelest of fate’s cruel jokes.

Ten kilometers away. Seven kilometers. Five, four, three, two...

With surprising suddenness he dropped among them. Without conscious thought he clicked his chin to the left and deployed his tertiary reserve, the opening shock pulling him upright once again.

He couldn’t see anything. The heads-up viewdar was still messed up—it was absolutely useless in this soup. A rhythmic pounding sound thrummed through his suit, as though a monster hammer beat at the forge of some ancient god. His whole body shuddered with each blow. What is that?

Somewhere, here, right around him, were...something. The radar continued returning blip echoes, but in the short-range mode they were mushy echoes now, as though the objects didn’t reflect radio waves very well—he couldn’t get any firm range data. But they were all around him. All around. They were moving together in the same direction, he and the blips, in some slowly streaming current of the atmosphere. Reaching up he grabbed the toggles and turned slightly to the right. The blips mimicked his change in flight path, remaining at their indeterminate distances. He turned again, and again the blips followed suit. This is really weird...

 Suddenly he felt something. Inside himself. Something both warm and cool, clear and opaque, small and infinitely large, and, and...it was perplexingly indefinable. As though whenever he tried to grasp it, it slipped through his mental fingers. It pulsed inside his head, or heart, or somewhere. He wasn’t exactly sure. It felt like, but unlike, a surge of emotion. But he was positive it didn't come from himself. It seemed somehow as if he were immersing his body in warm water, only this was happening inside him—as if he were immersing his soul, or something, in some regenerative liquid. His brain felt distinctly sharp and clear, and he no longer felt tired. What is happening to me...?

He was both afraid and not afraid. Nick struggled with the abstract feeling for a moment, trying to define it, but getting his mental fingers around it proved an impossible task, so finally he gave up. He let himself relax. He let himself go.

Immediately it was as though a light came on inside his mind. Pure luminance—he could see things clearly. As if his brain had leaped to some higher world, some higher plane of thought. He now could see lights around him, pulsating with life, with purpose, with being. Not with his eyes, but somehow with some other sense. And there was something else. He tried to probe out and touch it—there was some kind of...thought. Of incredible complexity, incredible insight. Out in front of him somewhere. He couldn’t reach it. He tried again. And again. Godlike enlightenment seemed to stand before him, just beyond his reach. I’ve got to have it...!

Nick felt an incredible, almost painful hunger for that enlightenment; a consuming, protean need to have it. It felt as if the mind of the universe lay before him. He wanted to touch, to grasp, that undiluted knowledge more than anything else he had ever wanted in his life.

He pulled down on a toggle, turning sharply to the right, trying to crab across the wind flow. Trying to get closer to the...thought. The canopy slipped into a high speed hook-turn.

Collision warning sensors screamed immediately and he slammed into...something. Something big, something dark, something solid. Solid, but giving somewhat with his impact. His head and face smacked forward onto his instruments. A flash of white sprayed inside his head as his brain reacted to the jarring impact. His canopy collapsed and he dropped away from...whatever it was....

He felt the external source of feeling react with a sudden surge of surprise, or pain, or...something. He didn’t understand it. And Nick’s mind went abruptly dark, the mental luminescence of a few moments before clicking off like a switch.

He was falling.

Warm liquid trickled from his forehead and down his cheek. It took him a few moments to clear his head, to react. Holy...

Pumping his toggles desperately, he tried to get atmosphere into the streamering cloth wing. It wasn’t happening—damn it, it isn’t happening. He felt the same surge of anxiety he'd felt during his first malfunction, years ago. Can I make it work? That time it had been a streamer too, and he hadn’t been able to fix it; he had had to cut-away. But this time, there was nothing else to go to; he was on his last reserve. He was getting line twists—he furiously pedaled his legs to stop the twisting, to reverse it. He pumped and pumped the toggles. For a moment he thought it just wasn’t going to happen, it just wasn’t, and then his accelerating descent stopped abruptly. He heaved a sigh.

His body shook.

 What was that? He looked at the radar. Huh?

The blips were retreating rapidly, disappearing off the edge of the radar’s range. How can they be moving that fast? Had his unexpected descent taken him into an anomalous wind flow? Or were the blips moving away under their own power? The instruments were going crazy, the meteorologic activity around him was too violently mercurial—he just couldn’t tell. Great.

What had he seen? He tried to make his mind isolate that single moment, when his eyes had seen the...thing, whatever it was. It had looked...dark...but the surface had been textured, mottled and scarred looking. Gray? Yes...maybe. What else? He strained to remember, strained, strained...but that was it. He had no idea what it had been. But whatever it had been, it certainly wasn’t normal, not in any sense of normalcy Nick was familiar with. It was a bit too solid to be a cloud, of that he felt certain.

Nick smirked sourly. Well, my alleged sense of humor is still obviously functioning at peak levels. He was awake, at least.

Or was he? He felt sudden doubt—had he been hallucinating? After all, he was suffering from extreme fatigue, and emotional distress. I mean, I even wanted to murder somebody—it’s not like I’m exactly in my right mind! With the radar now empty, he couldn’t be sure that he had seen anything at all. What about that feeling, that incredible feeling? Fatigue-induced euphoria? He suddenly realized that the pounding sound was gone too. I did, I saw something—I know I did!

Doubt lingered.

Only the onboard recorders would be able to tell the truth—would be able to tell, that is, if he were going back to the command ship. But he couldn’t. Could he? In his newly alert state he was having serious doubts about his suicidal ambitions. I’m tired—just so tired!

So? The argument didn’t seem to carry as much weight as it had mere minutes before. What about Jeung? Nick’s anger and hatred remained strong, but...why should he die because of someone like Jeung? That would be the ultimate victory for her. She’s been trying to kill me all along.

Nick groaned. Am I turning paranoid now? He sighed. His tired brain strained for some semblance of lucidity. Well, Jeung might not have been deliberately trying to kill Nick, but her bureaucratic mentality had nearly driven him over the edge. So much for being at the pinnacle of civilization. Mankind might be the most intelligent species it knew, but that was no testimony to its qualifications for being classified as truly sentient.

Nick’s thoughts returned to the, well, thing—creature? What was it?

He didn’t know. He just didn’t know. He stared at the instruments. Could he even make it back for rendezvous? Altidepth two-hundred kilometers...Unless he got out of this muck, he wouldn’t really be able to tell.

“Activate EBD,” he ordered the on-board computer. There was a pause, and then a red light came on, followed by the main read flashing the message, “Emergency Buoyancy Device malfunctioning and inoperable. Probable cause: rupture in hydrogen containment envelope.” Great. He was in deep trouble now.

 Deep trouble...His mind snagged on the thought and found it funny, even though it wasn’t. I have really, totally, completely lost it...

That was it then. Without the emergency balloon to give him the necessary lift, he didn’t have a prayer of getting back to pick-up altidepth.

...necessary lift...

His mind wouldn’t let go of the thought.

The floods are ris’n...the floods lift up their waves; the waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horrible...

The sensor lights inside his helmet went into an unfocused blur. Lift—I need lift...lift....Great, of course I need lift, any moron could figure that out—what good does verbalizing that do? But it wasn’t that. It was something about the word itself. Something about the word. And words had always been important to Nick, even outside of their contexts. His weary brain struggled to work.

Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud...the tumult of thy mighty harmonies will take from both a deep, autumnal tone...

Lift. What was it about lift? And for that matter, what was it about context?

I to the hills will lift mine eyes, from whence cometh my aid...

Context...

Holy...it was staring him right in the face! The lift wall! It was a monster thermal rising from the furnace of the planet’s core! And it should be right around here somewhere!

A quick scan of his instruments indicated a general upswelling which he assumed to be the edge of the lift wall or at least some appendage of it. He couldn’t be absolutely sure, but he had little choice other than to give it a shot. Time was running out. He turned swiftly in the indicated direction.

As he flew toward the upswelling, he thought about the super-cumulonimbus storm he had run into earlier. If he hit anything like that again, he would be dead. He now hung beneath his very last canopy—there would be no freefalling out of any more problems, as testified to by his “adventure” with the collapsed canopy of mere moments ago. He had wasted two perfectly good canopies—what a great idea that was. That profligate act might very well cost him his life yet. And that suddenly didn’t seem like a very attractive idea.

Well, that fit his picture of humanity, didn’t it? It wasn’t as if he were exempt from the inherent faults of his own species.

He hit the upsurge, and began rising sharply with the gaseous elevator.

His mind snagged on that last thought; he felt as if he had been jolted with a mild electric charge. Cogency. It wasn’t as if he were exempt from the inherent faults of his species. After all, he was human too. I don’t know. I need to think...

Nick suddenly very much wanted to live. He still couldn’t think, couldn’t think clearly, but he knew he didn’t want to die.

Not that Nick felt any sudden urge to forgive Jeung. The bitch! In fact he mentally committed to indulge himself by planting his fist swiftly and firmly in that hard, icy face. Nothing like a senseless act of violence to relieve stress. Yeah, right. He knew he wouldn’t do it; anymore than he had been capable of putting a bullet into Jeung’s chest. It was an impotent lust at best.

 But...but, maybe Alex had known something like this too. Humanity was just that, human. Damn it, Alex...

Nick didn’t know whether this nascent realization would do him any good. He didn’t know whether it was some kind of mystical road to the peace he sought. But in a sense it didn’t matter; at least he had something to think about.

And he’d certainly have to think about it. Later. Right now he was too tired. He felt an inner, sickening, visceral vibration, a sense of not quite being completely in touch with his body. Fatigue. He had to get back and get some sleep. And Jeung could suck rocks.

Nick snickered. Geez, he was tired, using terminology straight from his childhood. Nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, nyeh, Jeung sucks rocks! He grinned.

The altidepth gauge read one hundred kilometers—the probe would only descend to a maximum of twenty. He looked at the time. 22:26:11. Pick-up was scheduled for 23:00. He might, might, just make it. If he was at all close to the rendezvous coordinates when he got back up into the lower stratosphere. That was a big “if.”

He suddenly realized that he felt dry, dehydrated, desiccated. No wonder about that—he hadn’t taken a single drink in the last two hours. Sipping at the liquids nozzle he tasted lemonade and clicked it over to water. He was so parched it hurt to swallow.

The particulate concentrated around him began to visibly lighten—and then, whoosh, he soared out of the Jovian floor, and could see through the thinning clouds to his right that he was, indeed, into the edge of the lift wall. He pointed himself out toward the trough. Slowly, but steadily, he neared the edge. As he reached the margin of the wall, he turned—S-turning back and forth—keeping himself just in the edge of the lifting mass. His sensors came alive again, now that they were freed from the impenetrable sludge below. He wasn’t too far off mission coordinates. It might just be livable; tight—real tight—but livable. Maybe. There were just so many variables.

Altidepth fifty kilometers. Time 22:40:45. He was close; too close to even call. He hardly dared let himself hope.

Altidepth forty kilometers. Thirty. He skirted, flirted, to the very edge of the lift wall. The question was whether to ride the lift higher than twenty and risk not getting to pick-up coordinates, or to leave at twenty and risk something going wrong and him not being at minimum pick-up altidepth when the probe got there. He did some quick mental calculations. Not much choice after all; the margin for error was too small, if indeed he had any margin. He had to get out at twenty, and simply hope nothing went wrong.

Altidepth plus-twenty kilometers. He shot out into the trough.

His whole world was now inside the helmet of his suit, as he flew IFR toward the invisible line that was his intersecting axis with the probe; a line five and a half kilometers long, at some point along which he needed to be perched in order to make pick-up. It really was flying by instruments only, not because he had no visibility, but because the only thing that really mattered was what the sensors had to say about his current position and his target destination. Visuals meant nothing.

 He caught each bit of current heading in roughly his designated direction, or which would take him to a promising current heading the right way, and played with them, manipulating, massaging, milking. He had to squeeze the optimum amount of help from each, but get out before they took him too far off-line.

He was sweating, but he felt oddly good. The feeling reminded him of the surge he got from playing a game, a sport. Someone had once defined for him “freedom sports” as any activity in which you pit yourself against your own limitations and against nature; if that was the case, then this was certainly the ultimate freedom sport.

Time 22:57:13.

He allowed himself a quick glance out of the faceplate into the distance, and his heart froze.

In the near distance, coming toward him, a P-cyclone twisted savagely, roiling between the Niagara-like plunge wall in the distance and the upward sluicing lift wall behind him. A child born of the violently opposed motions of the rising and sinking clouds of vapor, it looked like a monster writhing worm, with each end buried in the opposing walls. A giant killer worm. Under other circumstances it might almost have been funny. Then again, maybe not.

The tornado, a brute that made earth-bound twisters look like simple, gentle spring breezes, swelled, straining toward him.

He hung almost on top of the rendezvous axis, the axis along which the pick-up probe would intersect and make its run in just over two minutes; and the axis along which the P-cyclone even now traveled. Nick quickly calculated: if he tried to drop under the monster he would definitely be outside the tolerances of the probe’s run-path options with no concrete hope of getting back up in time; and he couldn’t go over the top of the tornado, he just didn’t have that kind of lift. Getting to the other side of it was a no go.

Shit. It seemed that his only option was to get to the farthest point away from the P-cyclone on the pick-up axis, and hope that the probe could get to him in time. He yanked his right toggle, turned sharply, watching the main read; he traveled the line.

A buzzer sounded. He was there. He started doing S-turns, playing with the local currents in order to stay in place.

Time 22:58:04. Two minutes; the probe would intersect this last possible point in two minutes. This invisible, intangible point which the P-cyclone would also intersect, in something that looked like it would be very near two minutes.

Anxiety. Another buzzer. Contact with the probe confirmed. He looked at his radar and saw the flight path of the oncoming probe. Looking up, eyes straining, he saw the slender black shape in the distance.

The P-cyclone roared closer. And closer...

It was going to be close; damn—as close as anyone could ever hope to call it. Time 22:58:58.

It’s too close—it’s just too close! His stomach twisted into a knot. Every instinct shrieked for him to get out of there. Primal fear. The slender shape of the probe filled out into the distinctive, familiar, black flying wing. And the P-cyclone became an enormous rolling pin, bearing down on Nick in a seething bid to crush him into nothingness. 22:59:35.

The probe wasn’t going to make it...

22:59:40.

It wasn’t going to make it!

 22:59:45. The P-cyclone completely filled Nick’s view.

It’s not going to make it!

Nick stalled the parachute, shoving the toggles downward as far as they would could go, shoved violently—the canopy v-stalled, dropped, almost collapsing, dropped down beneath the oncoming behemoth, and in that fraction of a second Nick saw the probe impact the P-cyclone. The raging worm grabbed the black wing, the wing with its lowered snare-hook, grabbed it and swallowed it, shredded it; tore it particle from particle into oblivion.

It was gone.

In that same micro-second Nick was fighting for his life. The edge of the vortex caught him, spun him upward and inward. He banked hard, so hard he began to black-out; his vision started to fade. He was pushing the outside envelope of the smartsuit’s capabilities. Struggling, he physically flexed every muscle in his lower body, squeezing, forcing the blood back into his brain. If...he...could...just...get...his...angle...right...

He had been in storms before, many, many times; hurricanes, gales, typhoons. But nothing like this. Nothing like this. He called on every bit of experience, every bit of strength and skill, everything he had. He had to play the winds, stay in the margin of the vortex, stay at the outside edge, stay out—if the parachute got a deeper bite in those grinding air-currents, he would immediately get sucked in, and he’d die an instant later.

Stay in the margin winds!

It was a monster, it was alive, it was a dynamic heaving screaming nightmare.

Stay in the margin...!

It whipped him, shook him, battered him about.

Stay...!

It sucked him around and in sudden final violence threw him spinning across the sky into the distance.

He was free! He was alive...

Alive...

His body trembled uncontrollably. The P-cyclone receded away in the distance. Drained, Nick hung limply beneath the canopy. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. No one, no one, had ever flirted with a tornado, no one, not ever; let alone a tornado of Jovian proportions. Well, whether I like it or not, I guess I actually am the “storm jumper.” He had really hated that label. Oh well. He smiled weakly.

He had survived. I survived, damn it, I survived...I...

Not that it mattered. He was a dead man anyway. The probe was gone; unless....Unless he could fix the transmitter unit he had impulsively damaged earlier. Nick looked down at the transmitter, grasped the connectors he had torn loose, examined them carefully. It didn’t take him long to assess the situation—but it took a moment before he allowed the reality to sink in, a moment to indulge in the urge to deny it.

Great.

That’s all he needed; another testimony to his moronic kinship with humanity. He had done too good a job on the transmitter. He couldn’t fix it, no way, not in his present position. No way in hell. Or Jupiter...

 He smirked. Oh well. He had tried—at least he had tried. And that was all any man could ever do. At the very minimum mankind had that. They tried.

He relaxed. Well...at least he had set a new record.

He sure had—in a big way! Nobody had ever freefallen for as far as he had. Nobody. He had descended to two-hundred kilometers: let’s see, from around thirty-five—give or take—that meant he had made a freefall of one-hundred and sixty-five kilometers. Or wait a second, that last bit had been after the collision with the...thing; he had been at about one-seventy-five when he first went to his tertiary reserve, so that made it one-hundred and forty kilometers. Still a new world record! New world; now there was a bad pun.

He snorted. There was something else humanity had—a sense of humor. Even if it was a lousy sense of humor.

Well. He looked around and sighed. He felt strangely good. Without question, this was a beautiful world, though in a terrifying sort of way. Clouds above and below...colors. Supernally beautiful. I have bedimm’d the noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds, and twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault set roaring war; to the dread rattling thunder have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak with his own bolt...

It really wasn’t such a bad place to spend one’s last few hours. Not bad at all. Nick looked upward into the cirrostratus clouds, toward a brilliant spot of a sun, nearly five times more distant than it was from Earth. He felt surprised to see a double rainbow-halo refracted in the clouds around the star.

Beautiful.

He wished Alex had been able to make it here, to see this. She had wanted it more than Nick had, and that was saying something. Alex...

“Nick, I’ve got a problem!” He heard something in Alex’s voice he had never heard before. His skin prickled.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I’ve, well, I’ve got some kind of propellant leak. The AEV’s sensors show propellant in the cavity with me. Pressure’s increasing. I think...I ruptured a line somehow.”

Nick knew the tone of that last statement. He had heard it a number of times before, usually from test pilots who were moments away from auguring in. It was the “Oh shit, I’ve really screwed up this time” tone of voice. Nick felt fear; real, raw. This was just an exercise, just an en route rehearsal for the real thing. This wasn’t supposed to be happening.

“I’m bringing you in.”

“You can’t do that.” said Alex. “There’s too much of a chance of an onboard explosion.”

“Alex, if we don’t get you out of there now, you’re going to die!”

The propellant was extremely corrosive. Nick knew it wouldn’t take long to get through Alex’s suit and rig. Anything that wasn’t coated with teflex was soluble. Absolutely anything...

“What is going on here?” demanded Jeung's irritatingly accented voice over the intercom line into Nick’s headphones.

The on-duty SYSOP answered before Nick could. “Sir, we’ve got a class A emergency with Colonel Rawlings—there is a fuel leak on board the AEV.”

“I’m bringing her back onboard,” said Nick.

 “Negative!” barked the Commander. “Regulations clearly prohibit such an action—the danger to the rest of the crew is too great.”

Nick spun in his seat and looked through the window separating his control station from the master control room. Jeung stood at the shoulder of the SYSOP, looking at a monitor. “She’s going to die out there!”

“I’m sorry,” said Jeung in her icy, intransigent voice. “The safety of the rest of the crew is paramount.” The crew hell, she was just watching out for her own worthless ass!

Alex suddenly sounded panicked. “Nick! It’s getting through! Oh no—I can feel it! Nick!”

Nick instantly moved to bring the AEV back onboard. With a click, his controls went dead. He looked back at the Commander and their eyes locked. A meeting of fire and ice. “Major Allen, I am over-riding your maneuvering controls—I cannot allow you to disobey my orders.”

“Nick! Oh no...Nick!”

Nick felt terror, agony. Helplessness. “Alex is dying out there!”

The cold voice replied, “I am sorry.”

He wanted to cry. Tears welled somewhere deep inside him. There was an enormous pressure building, but his eyes stayed dry. He had sworn to himself as a boy, after one of many whippings by his mother, that he would never cry again, and, with the single exception of Nick Piantanida’s death, he had kept that promise. But now that he needed to cry, desperately wanted the release, he couldn’t do it.

The only sounds from the AEV were short, sporadic gasps of tightly controlled breathing. Nick choked, struggling to get the hellish lump out of his throat. “Alex...Alex!” He couldn’t just sit there—he had to do something. Tearing off the belts which held him in his seat, he punched the button to open the door separating the two rooms and jumped toward the master control console.

Jeung shouted “Stop him!” and quickly moved to put herself between him and the controls. They collided.

They grappled for a moment while three other crew members leaped forward and grabbed at Nick. Finally they pulled him away from the control board, and away from Jeung. He struggled, but could not free himself from their grasp. “You bastards, let me go...!”

It was useless.

He sagged. The Commander used the back of her hand to wipe away blood that trickled from the corner of her mouth. Her eyes showed no emotion. A voice came over the radio, a voice that was almost Alex’s voice, but not quite. It was...different.

“Nick,” strained the voice, “Nick, are you there?”

“Yes...yes, I’m here.” Tears, that could not stream down his face, were a raging storm inside him.

“Nick—Nick, I’m sorry I can’t go with you. I’m sorry, I wanted it so bad...”

The world was a blur; the inability to externalize his tears felt excruciating. He needed a release, but it was lost to him. “I know,” Nick said.

“Nick, end it...please. It’s too much to bear. End it. Please...oh Nick...please...”

“Alex...Alex, I can’t...”

 “I cannot allow the destruction of the AEV this close to the command ship,” said Jeung quietly. For a split second she revealed a glimmer of emotion in those clear eyes, a touch of...pain, perhaps? And then it was gone.

“Then what do you propose!” lashed out Nick. He didn’t want it to happen either, didn’t want it to happen at all, but...the pain must be nearly unbearable. He could scarcely imagine it...

He wanted to puke.

There was silence for a moment. Then, “We will have to move the AEV away before detonation.”

Alex groaned, low, an inhuman sound of suffering. Through the blur, Nick could see the red of the detonator. As the mission officer and CAPCOM for the exercise it was his responsibility, if necessary, to destroy the AEV. Of course he was in no position to do so at the moment. With a crew member at either side of him, he had apparently been relieved of that duty. Sensors showed the AEV starting to move away from the command ship.

“NICK...!” Alex’s voice caught itself sharply and returned to the unreal control of a moment before. “Nick, you gotta do it....Nick...”

“Alex...”

“Nick, please...it hurts....”

He was in emotional turmoil, a seething hell. Alex gave a choking gasp. “Nick,” Alex’s voice was a whisper. “Nick...I’d do it for you.”

Nick acted. With a desperate burst of strength he tore himself free, leaped forward and flipped up the fail-safe protector on the detonator. His voice was a harsh hiss of a whisper, “Goodbye Alex...”

“Major Allen,” said Jeung, “I order you to wait until...!”

The startled crew members scrambled toward him.

Nick pressed the button.

“Nick...I love you...blue skies...” said Alex. A dull thud of sound. Then nothing.

Alex...

Nick was being crushed under an unendurable weight.

I killed her...

Tears streamed down his face. Tears. I killed her...I killed her...dear God, I killed her! The cloud formations around him seemed to know his grief, understand it, reflect it. Alas! She’s cold...death lies on her like an untimely frost upon the sweetest flower of all the field...death, that hath taken her hence to make me wail, ties up my tongue and will not let me speak...

Nobody seemed to have even considered the possibility that Alex might die en route. They had imagined the danger would be encountered on arrival at the gas giant. On arrival. Not en route. Not a senseless, impossible, stupid accident. Not the death of the best person Nick had ever known. And I, like Judas of old, killed the one I loved...

Tears washed down his face, warm and wet, welcome balm for Nick’s suffering soul. He felt release, and relief, at last. Well, pretty soon he’d be dead too. Jupiter was not the mythological god of death, but it was the final victor this time nonetheless. Well Alex, you know the Great Unknown; and I’m about to find out too.

 Abruptly he became aware of the warm smell of sweat in the cool dry air blowing across his face. Awareness. He felt distinctly alive. He could hear the gentle hissing of the circulation system, hear the humming of his instrumentation, hear the pulsing murmur of his own heart. He felt alive. He could feel the dull ache of muscles flexed countless times in isometric tension, taste the fading residue of nervous bile in his mouth, see the light of an alien world reflecting off the clouds and spraying the interior of his helmet with color. He was alive, very much alive, perhaps for the very first time. Finally alive, in the briefest instant before death. He sighed.

He was startled to find that he was at peace. Peace.

Not particularly the situation he would have hoped to find it in, but...he was finally at peace. The guilt which had possessed him, had lashed him forward, had driven him, unable to quit, unable to stand up to Jeung, unable to stop, was gone. If after every tempest come such calms, may the winds blow till they have waken’d death...and let the laboring bark climb hills of seas Olympus-high, and duck again as low as hell’s from heaven...

Alex—you didn’t make it here yourself, but damn it, you made it anyway; I brought you with me.

Nick mentally scattered her ashes to the Jovian winds. Goodbye Alex. I will always love you...and wherever you are, may the winds softly carry you home, and the skies eternally bathe you in their blue....

He sighed; physically, mentally, emotionally.

Well...

He looked around again. A massive black storm raged in the near distance. Lightning flashes sparked again and again from various depths within the cloud formation, like the erratic pulsing of the storm god’s own heart. Sometimes Nick could see the jagged bolts themselves, but mostly he just saw pulses of light inside the dark. A murky gray wedge of cloud covered a quarter of the sky, cutting diagonally through his view and blocking any perspective above him to the east. Away to his left floated a mound of cloud that looked something like a 19th century clipper ship. Sometimes he and Alex had spent hours just lying on a lawn at a park, picking out shapes in the clouds. It was something she had always loved doing. She had told him that when she was a very little girl, three or four years old, her father had pointed out a shape in the clouds and said that it looked like her. She had been hooked. The clipper ship seemed to call to him. Come my friends! ’T is not too late to seek a newer world...push off, and sitting well in order smite the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths of all the western stars, until I die...

Well, why should I go out slow? That wasn’t like him. And anyway, he had a reputation to look out for. Yeah! Why not? He’d go for the absolute ultimate freefall! C’mon ‘storm jumper,’ let’s ride this inferno! He could even beat his own record. With a grin he pulled out his hook-knife.

There was a beep. What?

He looked at his radar. A blip approached from above. What the...?

He looked up, trying to get a visual on it, but he couldn’t see anything. A cloud mass stood between him and...whatever it was. It was approaching fast.

Fast...

Something about that particular speed struck a chord of familiarity. It was like...

 A pick-up probe roared through the cloud. Its onboard sensors detected his canopy; the ship banked, leveled out and dropped its snare-hook. Well, what do you know...

The hook grabbed the canopy, and abruptly jerked Nick into tow. Carefully, carefully the hook retracted, pulling its living cargo into the womb of the flying wing.

Once he got inside the probe, it sealed, then blasted him with super-heated steam for decon; perhaps decon for the first time for a reason.

His thoughts wandered back to the Jovian depths and...possibilities. He mentally reached out and patted the suit’s onboard recorders affectionately. If there was something down there...well, we’ll see. We’ll see. The final vestiges of organic residue sluiced away from his suit, his rig. The probe’s filter system gathered in the last bits for later analysis, confirmed a sterile environment, and pressurized the cabin. With awkward, stumbling movements, Nick removed his helmet and fell to the floor.

“Major Allen?” came the voice of CAPCOM over the loud speakers.

Nick was tired—bone tired. “Yes?” he replied softly.

He could hear enthusiastic cheers as the command ship crew erupted in relief. They were whooping and shouting. He felt warm. “Sir, sir, I knew we would find you; I knew it!” CAPCOM’s voice sounded slightly choked up. “I knew it! If we just sent a second probe! I knew it...”

“Thank you,” said Nick wearily. “Thank you...”

“Major Allen!” snarled Jeung’s voice, “I want you in my cabin the minute you are debriefed!”

Nick just felt too drained to care. And too...at peace. I’m surprised she even let them send a second probe. Then again, the Commander’s career had, after all, been on the line. True to nature.

“Go to hell,” he said softly, and was mildly gratified to hear the Commander choke in consternation. Not that standing up to her really meant all that much now; it was merely symbolic of the fact that she was no longer the primary element shaping the margins of who he was. Jeung just didn’t matter anymore. She wasn’t worth the energy.

Nick did, he really did, still feel at peace. It was truly remarkable.

“I knew we would find you, I knew it....” repeated CAPCOM, as though still trying to convince himself. Ragged cheers could still be heard in the background.

Maybe mankind wasn’t so bad after all. Or maybe he just thought that because he had such a keen and intellectual sense of humor. Yeah, right. That definitely has to be it....

He smiled tiredly. We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little life is rounded with a sleep....“The Tempest,” Act Four...Scene...uh...One...ah, I remembered. I was never any good at remembering those scene numbers. The text is one thing, the extraneous details are something altogether different...

For just a moment it seemed there were two other people on board the probe with him; for just the barest fleeting moment.

He waved his arm wearily in their direction. Goodnight Nick—I took your dream with me all the way...all the way....Goodnight Alex—you were the best, the absolute best.

The best...

 Goodnight...

Major John “Nick” Allen dozed off.
 

Copyright 1998 James Gladu Jordan
 
You can e-mail James  j-g-jordan@juno.com