"Yes," the robot said. "We are keeping it under our hats until we had more data, but we knew that sooner or later one of you beetlegoosers would see them. They're alive, all right. They've got a colloidal continuum/discontinuum exactly like protoplasm except that it uses liquid ammonia as a sol substrate, instead of water."

"But what do they live on?" Helmuth said.

"Ah, that's the question. Some form of aerial plankton that's certain; we've found the digested remnants inside them, but haven't captured any live specimens of it yet The digested fragments don't offer us much to go on. And what does the plankton live on? I only, wish I knew."

Helmuth thought about it. Life on Jupiter. It did not matter that it was simple in structure, and virtually helpless in the winds. It was life all the same, even down here in the frozen pits of a hell no living man would ever visit. And who could know, if jellyfish rode the Jovian air, what Leviathans might not swim the Jovian seas?

"You don't seem to be much impressed," the robot said. "Jellyfish and plankton probably aren't very exciting to a layman. But the implications are tremendous. It's going to cause quite a stir among biologists, let me tell you."

"I can believe that," Helmuth said. "I was just taken aback, that's all. We've always thought of Jupiter as lifeless"

"That's right. But now we know better. Well, back to work: I'll be talking to you." The robot flourished its tentacles and bent over a workbench.

Abstractedly, Helmuth hacked the beetle off and turned it upward again. Barth, he remembered, was the man who had found a fossil on Europa. Earlier, there had been an officer doing a tour of duty in the Jovian system who had spent some of his spare time cutting soil samples, in search of bacteria. Probably he had found some; scientists of the before spaceflight had even found them in meteors.

The Earth and Mars were not the only places in the universe that would harbor life, after all; perhaps it was everywhere. If it could exist in a place like Jupiter. there was no logical reason to rule it out even on the Sun some animated flame no one would recognize as life. .

He regained the deck and sent the beetle rumbling for the switchyard: he would need to transfer to another track before he could return the car to its garage. It had occurred to him during the ghostly proxy conversation that he had never met Doc Barth, or many of the other men with whom he had talked so often by ham radio. Except for the Bridge operators themselves, the Jovian system was a community of disembodied voices to him. And now, he would never meet them.