Chapter 2: Through the Cloud Blanket

I thought of Earth as we fell. Tingling song, and bright awakenings and laughter and joy and grief. Woodsmoke in October, tall ships and the planets spinning and hurdy-gurdies in June.

I sat grimly by Joan’s side on the pilot dais, setting my teeth as I gripped the atomotor controls and stared out through the quartz port. We were plummeting downward with dizzying speed. Outside the quartz port there was a continuous misty glimmering splotched with nebulously weaving spirals of flame.

We were already far below Jupiter’s outer envelope of tenuous gases in turbulent flux, and had entered a region of pressure drifts which caused our little vessel to twist and lunge erratically. Wildly it swept from side to side, its gyrations increasing in violence as I cut the atomotor blasts and released a traveling force field of repulsive negrations.

I thanked our lucky stars that the gravity tug had spared the atomotors and the landing mechanism. We hadn’t anything else to be thankful for. I knew that if we plunged into a lake of fire even the cushioning force field couldn’t save us.

Joan seemed not to care. She was staring through the quartz port in an attitude of intense absorption, a faint smile on her lips. There are degrees of recklessness verging on insanity; of courage which deserves no respect.

I had an impulse to shake her, and shout: “Do you realize we’re plunging to our death?” I had to keep telling myself that she was still a child with no realization of what death meant. She simply couldn’t visualize extinction; the dreadful blackness sweeping in—

Our speed was decreasing now. The cushioning force field was slowing us up, forcing the velocity needle sharply downward on the dial.

Joan swung toward me, her face jubilant. “We’ll know in a minute, Richard. We’re only eight thousand miles above the planet’s crust.”

“Crust?” I flung at her. “You mean a roaring furnace.”

“No, Richard. If Jupiter were molten we’d be feeling it now. The plates would be white-hot.”

It was true, of course. I hadn’t realized it before. I wiped sweat from my forehead, and stared at her with sombre respect. She had been right for once. In her girlish folly she had out-guessed all the astronomers on Earth.