"Ben Bova - Life As We Know It" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

"Spectrographic data coming in," announced mission control.

All eyes turned to the screen that began to show the smears and bands of colors
from the probe's mass spectrometer. All eyes except mine. I kept my attention on
the images from the laser-illuminated sea. They were becoming cloudy, it seemed
to me.

"There's the ammonia band," someone said.

"And carbon compounds, I think."

"My god, those are organics!"

"Organic compounds in the water!"

"Life."

"Don't jump to conclusions," Lopez-Oyama warned. But his voice was shaking with
excitement.

Allie actually clutched at my shoulder. "Can your cameras see anything?"

The water was cloudy, murky, even where the laser beam swept through; it looked
like a thin fog, glistening but obscuring.

"The ocean's filled with organic chemicals at this level," one of the scientists
said.

"Particles," corrected another scientist.

"Food," somebody quipped.

"For who?"

"Deeper," Sagan said, his voice surprisingly strong. "The organic particles are
drifting downward. If there's anything in that ocean that eats them, it's down
at a deeper level."

The probe was designed to attain neutral buoyancy at a depth of a hundred
kilometers. We were approaching that depth now. It might not be enough.

"How deep can we push it?" Lopez-Oyama asked no one in particular.

Immediately a dozen opinions sprang out of the eager, excited, sweaty chattering
apes. Earlier probes had been crushed like soda cans by the immense pressure of
the Jovian ocean. But I knew that the probe's limits were not only structural,
but communications-based. The probe could not hold more than a hundred
kilometers of the hair-thin optical fiber that carried its comm signals to the
surface of the ocean. So even if it could survive lower depths, we would lose
touch with it.