Chapter 1: Out in Space

I was out in space with Joan for the sixth time. It might as well have been the eighth or tenth. It went on and on. Every time I rebelled Joan would shrug and murmur: “All right, Richard. I’ll go it alone then.”

Joan was a little chit of a girl with spun gold hair and eyes that misted when I spoke of Pluto and Uranus, and glowed like live coals when we were out in space together.

Joan had about the worst case of exploritis in medical history. To explain her I had to take to theory. Simply to test out whether she could survive and reach maturity in an environment which was hostile to human mutants, Nature had inserted in her make-up every reckless ingredient imaginable. Luckily she had survived long enough to fall in love with sober and restraining me. We supplemented each other, and as I was ten years her senior my obligations had been clear-cut from the start.

We were heading for Ganymede this time, the largest satellite of vast, mist-enshrouded Jupiter. Our slender space vessel was thrumming steadily through the dark interplanetary gulfs, its triple atomotors roaring. I knew that Joan would have preferred to penetrate the turbulent red mists of Ganymede’s immense primary, and that only my settled conviction that Jupiter was a molten world restrained her.

We had talked it over for months, weighing the opinions of Earth’s foremost astronomers. No “watcher of the night skies” could tell us very much about Jupiter. The year 1973 had seen the exploration of the moon, and in 1986 the crews of three atomotor-propelled space vessels had landed on Mars and Venus, only to make the disappointing discovery that neither planet had ever sustained life.

By 2002 three of the outer planets had come within the orbit of human exploration. There were Earth colonies on all of the Jovian moons now, with the exception of Ganymede. Eight exploring expeditions had set out for that huge and mysterious satellite, only to disappear without leaving a trace.