A New Career on Europa
by Philip Ekstrom
part 1
For seven years I did my job as mission commander and did it well. It was what I had become and I was satisfied. But then, well, some things happened. Maybe writing it all down will help me understand who I am now. And you? You are my perfect and patient listener, eager to hear anything I care to say. Imaginary, of course. There are no real ones.
* * *
Really, I should have paid better attention when Sandra Dulong started to lose weight, but her intensity always dominated any interaction others had with her. Only when she was looking the other way could you even notice her short black hair and narrow face, how small she was. Whatever had her attention had her full attention, and when you had her attention, she had all of yours.
Ordinarily it was our physician’s job to keep tabs on the crew’s medical signs, but Sandra was that physician. John was her backup and first noticed her getting thin. “It’s on purpose,” she said. “Calorie restriction extends your life span.” Inventing her own diet was clearly out of line on a mission, but John was a Physician’s Assistant, and she was the doctor. She told him to focus on something else.
Eventually I did notice her weight loss. “Sandra, you’re shrinking!” I said.
“Doctor’s orders.”
“Considering who the doctor is, I suspect collusion.”
With a shocked expression: “What, would I do that?’
“Come on, Sandra. Commander’s orders now: eat up.”
She shrugged. And, at dinner, I saw that she didn’t “eat up.”
I let it pass. She was just quietly misbehaving a little. Not worth a big fuss. I would have decided the same way for anyone, I think. The fact that I love her did not change anything.
We all had many roles at the station. Besides being the ship’s MD and now the station’s MD, Sandra was our lead computer system administrator, our backup reactor technician and, like most of us, a construction worker. Until we got all the casing made for the shaft, she operated a machine in our insulation factory.
* * *
We built our station on the surface of Europa, a satellite of Jupiter and another of the solar system’s water worlds. It’s only a little like Earth: one quarter as large, completely covered by ocean and no atmosphere. The ocean is in turn completely covered by a thick layer of ice, miles thick.
We’re here to melt an access hole through the ice and line it with insulation with a heater at the bottom so it won’t freeze again. We built the station on what I guess we have to call a thin spot; only one mile thick.
* * *
We are seven years gone from Earth, 2 1/2 years to get here, 4 1/2 to do our job.
We started out as nine married couples, mostly marriages of convenience to satisfy proprieties for 18 adults living in close quarters for years. That soon rearranged into nine pairs; only two were couples still married. Sandra and I were leftovers from the last swap a year ago. We didn’t know to choose each other, but once together it really worked for us.
* * *
“Party tonight!” yelled Nigel. “We’ve broken through into water!” And party there was. We don’t stock alcohol here, but somehow there was plenty that night. I paid attention to other things.
* * *
The next mission on landing here was to do most of the science. It’s sad that the politics of Earth have gone to hell now. There will be no next mission any time soon. But we are builders. When we get done building, then it is time to go home.
Still, it was planned from the start that we would do at least a little science. No one could stand having us create a way to access the ocean and then just leave. They gave us an underwater drone to use, and we put it into the water as soon as we broke through.
* * *
“Dull down there,” said Stanley, “Dull as a rainy afternoon in Portland. Nothing in the water but salt, nothing in the mud but mud. We’re going to explore in a spiral.”
But then the third day of that exploration, we heard a yell from the drone control station. “What the hell was that? The water temp is off-scale!”
It turned out to be a mid-ocean ridge, with hot water vents much like the ones we have on Earth. That was exciting enough but, when Nigel found living cells in the water sample, the usual task assignments went out the window.
I put everyone with a background in some physical or biological science to work looking hard at data that the drone was recording. We needed to know what it was seeing so we could direct our efforts. Sandra got the sound record to scan.
* * *
At dinner one night, Sandra said, “I’m hearing something really interesting. At the ridge I hear this steady hiss from the vents, but then something else that sounds like badly done music.”
There was more, about cadence and pitch and other details. I listened and heard most of it, but I was distracted and didn’t think through what it might mean. Another partner swap had begun, and it was far from amicable. I had to intervene earlier that day and was mulling over how to handle tomorrow.
The next day I stopped by Sandra’s room on the way to supper and found her at her desk, earphones on, fingers flying, staring hard at her computer screen. I knew the signs and closed the door quietly before going by myself to the mess. When I was halfway through my potatoes and gravy she burst in through the door and announced, “There are persons down there and they are talking! ”
“Aliens.” scoffed Nigel. “Tell me another.”
Sandra stood up to her full height, just under 5 feet and fixed him with the full force of her full attention. “Nigel,” she said, “just listen for once. They really are here, and here they are the natives. We are the aliens.” She paused, thoughtful. “They must have evolved in place right there. You found cells, remember? Some of those cells have clumped together and evolved into something bigger.”
“Sandra.” I said, “Pease sit and tell.”
She sat on the edge of a table and told. “They talk by singing chords to each other. Ugly-sounding chords, discordant to our ears, not even on our musical scale, but always pairs or trios of tones. There is a sequence of chords in quick succession, then a pause like the end of a sentence, then another sentence in a voice with a different sound. Maybe a higher pitch, or different in some other way. Then another in the first voice. It’s a conversation.”
Then on she went on about the computer analysis techniques she had learned in linguistics classes, techniques that could work to build a translation dictionary from scratch and how eager she was to try them on this speech. “I just need a whole lot of conversation to record and process.”
Half an hour later she finally ran down. The room was dead quiet for a minute. Finally, Sally asked “Could we hear some of this speech?”
“Sure, just a minute.” Sandra ducked out of the room and a few moments later ragged-sounding noise erupted from the intercom speaker.
Sandra reappeared and stopped just inside the room. Listening, she frowned. “Well, that is mostly the sound of bubbles coming out of the vents. It’s kind of hard to hear the chords at first. Let me put in a filter.”
Immediately, the character of the noise changed, and indeed I could — just barely — hear other sounds come and go in a cadence much like speech, but I couldn’t hear well enough to get more out of it.
“I don’t hear anything,” said Nigel.
“Me either,” said Stanley.
“I think I can hear something” said Sally, “but it’s really faint, and the noise is really loud. How could you ever recognize words, even if that is what we’re hearing?”
“Yeah. It could be anything,” said Nigel.
In an anguished voice, defensive, Sandra said “It takes a while to start making out the words. The computer can do a better analysis, but it comes out as a string of symbols.” She turned toward me. “It is speech. It can’t be anything else. We can’t go home now, not till we contact them.”
There was a rumble of disagreement from the room, but she turned to the drone pilots, sitting together at the far table. “I’m going to want some drone time to listen and get the data I need and then to try talking.”
Stanley looked turned to me and asked, “How seriously are we going to take this. It’s probably nonsense, and we do have other uses for that drone.”
Everyone looked at me, Sandra’s partner but also the mission commander who must be fair. After a moment I slowly said, “This is the most interesting thing we have found here, and if it is what it appears to be, it will be the most significant. We have to look at it while we can.” I paused. “Still, there are other things to do that have their own worth. Let’s see what Sandra finds in the next few days and what she wants to do. We’ll work out how to share the drone.”
Sandra looked at the pilots. “For now, please don’t let the sonar transmit in places where I can hear chords. It seems to scare them or bother them or something. Whoever or, um, whatever they are. But please do spend some time recording there when you are — I don’t know — taking pictures or something.”
The pilots looked at each other, then Stanley said, “Okay, we’ll try to do that.”
Good, I thought. They will work it out by themselves.
“Aliens,” huffed Nigel on his way out the door. “Or natives or whatever. Bring me a couple to study. Then I might believe it.”
I didn’t wait for her to come to bed that night. In the morning, I found her asleep at her desk, head on the keyboard with a screen full of the letter G.
* * *
For a week, Sandra seemed to be working night and day. More than once, I invaded her room, a gross violation of courtesy at the station, picked her up and carried her, squirming, off to the bed we shared in my room. She would sleep eleven hours, and when she finally awoke to the smell of coffee I had brought in, she would first grumble, then thank me and pull me down for a distracted kiss.
One night, a week later, instead of going back to work she came to bed early. “Steve, sweetie,” she said once we had settled in. “none of the quick things are working. I’ll need much more data. We need to extend the mission.”
“Sandra, I can’t do that. I think I can hear your voices but most of the crew can’t hear anything. We have been sending your best data to NASA, of course, but most of their team looking at the data also hear nothing. They will never approve a change.”
“We could just stay longer. You’re the boss here. With NASA, forgiveness really is easier to get than permission. We’re going to be heroes whenever we get back, no matter how we got delayed. NASA has no choice but to say so.”
“We would be heroes for sure if we made contact with another sapient life form.”
She sat up in the bed. “But you don’t believe we will, do you? That I will. You don’t believe in me enough to risk your precious reputation.”
“Look, I don’t know where this is going, and I have some duties. One is to maintain order here, I can’t ask the crew to sit around with nothing to do, waiting for the next launch window, against a NASA decision and based on something they don’t believe. That is a recipe for real trouble.”
She sat up straighter, legs folded, and looked me in the eye. ”But you could hold the crew together. I know it. I believe in you, even if you don’t believe in me.”
“I do believe in you, but I can’t do what you ask.”
Sandra snatched up her pillow and stalked off to sleep in her own room.
* * *
A week later, Peter Saunders, my second in command, came into my closet-sized office and closed the door. “Sandra has been talking about extending the mission, trying to drum up support. Nearly everybody is against it, some pretty loudly. When she tried to talk to Nigel, he picked her up and set her outside in the hall. I read him the riot act, but he is barely holding himself together till we start home.”
He paused, waiting for my reply. By now, I knew that pause well. “And you are sitting on more of the story?”
“Yes. If you were to announce delaying our departure, against NASA orders, I think there would be actual mutiny. They wouldn’t follow Nigel, but you can guess as well as I who they would follow.”
I looked hard at him “Let’s be clear here. They would follow you. Is that what you are saying?”
Peter looked back hard at me. “You know me better than that!” And he walked out.
He would recover quickly, but I wish I had handled that better.
* * *
“Sandra, we are not going to extend the mission, and you are going to stop pushing for it.”
“Stan, we have to...” she began. Then, seeing my expression, she looked at me steadily for a few moments, then wilted, turned and walked slowly down the hall away from me.
Next morning when I went in to breakfast, she was already there, looking weary. She smiled weakly, but she did smile at me.
I sat down across from her. “How are you this morning? You look like you haven’t slept.”
She smiled ruefully. “Some better, I guess, but yes, I’ve been thinking instead of sleeping.”
There was a long pause, then, “I won’t learn to talk to my people before the ship has to leave. I have accepted that, so I may as well relax. I have 45 hours of conversation already on disk, with more on the way. It may be enough when I have it all assembled.”
She looked me up and down. “Just now, I’d like to pay attention to the big lunk who has been such a good partner this last year.”
That evening, after supper, she began to tell me stories from her past. She started with the agricultural religious commune where she grew up. The leader was charismatic, the adults were devout, the children were obedient, and the community was dedicated to regaining the virtues of an imagined past time.
We carried on the next evening, and it became a regular thing with us. She told what happened when the leader died, his son took over, and he was soon caught sexually abusing some of those obedient children. He went to jail and the commune dissolved.
“For a while, we had to live in a tent, Dad could only pick up a little work as a day laborer, and things were pretty thin for a while. Then Mom got hired as a waitress, and we could move into a seedy apartment.”
Next evening She talked about the culture shock upon entering public school for the first time. “At the commune, they had me praising Jesus in every other sentence, and that lasted about a day in school. Pretty soon, all that religious stuff started looking pretty silly to me.”
Her father often worked with craftsmen at construction sites and picked up skills as an electrician and plumber. He was eventually hired as a regular employee by one of the contractors whose men had seen him work. Soon he was leading teams and gradually assumed management tasks, which he did well. In five years, he was made a partner in the business and eventually took over when the original owner retired.
“In high school, my physics teacher got a bunch of us fired up about his subject and, as soon as Dad could afford it, he sent me off to college to study physics.” But the structure of language increasingly drew her, and she began to take courses that dealt with it. With her physics degree finally in hand, she entered a graduate school program in linguistics.
“You can take the girl out of the church, but you can’t take the church out of the girl,” Sandra said next evening. While she never returned to the religion of her youth, the ethical core of the commune’s teaching, a call to do for others, reasserted itself and sent her, now with a linguistics PhD in hand, off to medical school.
Her intensity put her at the top of her class, but it unnerved patients, and uncomfortable patients worried medical gatekeepers. She found no job.
Copyright © 2026 by Philip Ekstrom
