Their knobs buttons and pressure sensitive surfaces in esthetically pleasing design. The doors could have been closed by somebody accidentally leaning.

Now? Focusing here. ” His hand came forward demonstrating. “Intensity here. It’s quite simple to operate and should provide you many hours of enjoyment” Enjoyment? Ruth thought. Slowly she turned looked up at Kelexel. There was. cheap valtrex 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. "What's that?" In the hazy light a dark shape drifted by too distant to make out any detail. "Follow it!" Lopez-Oyama snapped. Then his face reddened. It would take some ten hours for his order to reac! h the probe. In his excitement he had forgotten. Allie turned to me. "Are the close-up cameras working?" They were. I gestured toward the screens that showed their imagery. The dark hulk whatever it was had not come within the narrow focus of either of the close-view cameras. Both screens showed nothing but the cloudy water tinted sickly green by the laser light. "Another one!" somebody shouted. This time the shape drifted past the view of one of the close-up cameras briefly. We saw a bulbous dark dome almost spherical with snake-like appendages dangling from its bottom. "Tentacles!" "It's an animal! Like an octopus!" I scanned the numerical data on the bottom of the screen. The object whatever it was was three and a half kilometers from the probe. And it was four hundred and thirty-two meters long from the top of its dome to the tip of its tentacles. Huge. Fifteen times bigger than a blue whale. Immense. "It's not moving. " "It's drifting in the current. " "The tentac! les are just hanging there. No activity that I can see. " "Conserving energy?" "Maybe that's the way it hunts for prey. " "Trolling?" It looked dead to me. Inert. Unmoving. It drifted out of the close-up camera's view and all the heads in the room swivelled to the wide-angle view. The dark lump did nothing to show it might be alive. "What's the spectrograph show?" "Not a helluva lot. " "Absorption bands lots of them. " "Chlorophyll?" "Don't be a butthead!" Allie was the only one who seemed to realize the significance of what we were seeing. "If it's an animal it's either in a quiescent resting phase . . . or it's dead. " "The first extraterrestrial creature we find and it's dead " somebody groused. "There'll be more " said Lopez-Oyama almost cheerfully. I looked across the room at Sagan. He was leaning forward in his wheelchair eyes intent on the screens as if he could make something more appear just by concentrating. The reporters were gaping not saying a word for a blessed change forgetting to ask questions while the underwater views of t! he Jovian ocean filled the display. dw6daw53w35zxw3456dry444