Wheelers
Ian Stewart
 Wheelers chronicles mankind's first contact with an alien intelligence, a meeting which takes place out of necessity when a rogue asteroid enters the solar system and is set on a collision course with Earth by an advanced and hitherto unknown Jovian species as a way of avoiding a devastating impact to their own world. The story opens with a feeling of anachronism, as two of the novel's central characters (Charles Dunsmoore, a career archaeologist and his volatile graduate student Prudence Odingo) work in the year 2194 to interpret and preserve artefacts found in the vicinity of the Great Sphinx, which is being disassembled in order to save it from the advancing waters of a clogged and flooding Nile River after the collapse of the Aswan Dam. A lover's quarrel between the two sends Prudence off in a blind rage, and leaves Dunsmoore the sole caretaker of an important discovery—a position which catapults his career and sets the tension for the novel's second half. Professionally and personally embittered by the success of Dunsmoore, Prudence begins a life of semi-legal interplanetary exploration (referenced by the book but never fully explained) and makes a living selling cosmic oddities to the highest black market bidder. This dangerous and profitable lifestyle acquaints her with legal authorities as well as the Belters—a group of Zen Buddhists (known as The Order of the Cuckoo) who have populated and mined both Earth's Moon and the asteroid belt that lies between the terrestrial planets and the Jovian worlds of the outer solar system. Her smuggling career culminates with the discovery of a trove of buried, wheeled, and presumably alien artefacts on Callisto. She takes these 'wheelers' to earth intending to sell them, but a government investigation headed by Dunsmoore concludes them to be inauthentic. As the story progresses, another main character materializes in the form of the aptly named Moses Odingo, son of Prudence's sister Charity and animal-handler extraordinaire. His life becomes one of the novel's several core plots, circumstance and apparent fate conspiring to send him on a worldwide journey of hardship and tribulation. During this time, both Earth-bound scientists and the Belters notice that the innermost moons of Jupiter have mysteriously realigned, altering the trajectory of a once unimportant comet and setting in motion a direct collision with Earth. This is courtesy of the stuffily bureaucratic blimps—intelligent extraterrestrials living in the turbulence of Jupiter's upper atmosphere whose advanced gravity technology allows them to alter the orbital plane of the planet's moons and thereby avoid the type of cometary impact which, obliquely, precipitated their exodus from an unknown 'Firsthome' to Jupiter itself. Left with 12 years until impact and now convinced of the wheelers' authenticity, Earth's governmental authorities speed a mission to the Jovian satellites in hopes of contacting the as yet unseen alien lifeforms. Dunsmoore is selected to lead the group, with the assumption that his experience with decrypting anthropological artifacts on earth will aid in establishing communiqué with the Jovians. The years tick by without consequence as Dunsmoore and his team search in vain for evidence of alien life on Jupiter's moons, convinced by terrestrial scientists that the planet itself is entirely inhospitable to life (he is warned of the danger of this erroneous presupposition by, appropriately enough, contemporary science-fiction authors). As the tension on Earth grows unbearable, Prudence Odingo flies her personal craft out to give Dunsmoore's team a push in what she believes to be the correct direction. Hacking into one of the probes that Dunsmoore's been carefully bobbing around the lifeless stratosphere of Jupiter, Odingo's team sends the RCV into the lower atmosphere, immediately encountering alien lifeforms both advanced and simplistic. Through a quirk of fate and timing, her team manages to save a blimp by the name of Bright Halfholder of the Violent Foam, part of a 'skydiving' rebel faction known as The Instrumentality. Odingo encourages Moses, now a young man, to make a harrowing high-speed journey out to the moons, hoping to use his uncanny knack for animal communication to establish a rapport with Halfholder. The ploy works, but the Jovians—who live for millions of years and rely on an arcane and tedious system of legal councils—spend too long arguing and contemplating to successfully redirect the comet. The Instrumentality stages a successful coup, but in the end it is Dunsmoore (who has been redeemed by the threat to his home planet) who hijacks the alien gravity technology and pilots Io into a diversionary orbit around the comet itself, barely saving Earth from total annihilation—though millions die as the remnants of the comet and the sulfurous outgassing of ruined Io cascade into Earth.