Chapter 3: What the Camera Showed

A half hour later we had our recordings. Joan sat facing me on the elevated pilot dais, her head swathed in bandages. Dawson and the two other members of our crew stood just beneath us, their faces sombre in the cube-light.

They had miraculously escaped injury, although Dawson had a badly shaken up look. His hair was tousled and his jaw muscles twitched. Dawson was fifty-three years old, but the others were still in their early twenties—stout lads who could take it.

The fuel unit control pilot, James Darnel, was standing with his shoulders squared, as though awaiting orders. I didn’t want to take off. I had fought Joan all the way, but now that we were actually on Jupiter I wanted to go out with her into the unknown, and stand with her under the swirling, star-concealing mist.

I wanted to be the first man to set foot on Jupiter. But I knew now that the first man would be the last. The atmospheric recordings had revealed that there were poisons in Jupiter’s lethal cloud envelope which would have corroded our flesh through our space suits and burned out our eyes.

Joan had been compelled to bow to the inevitable. Bitterly she sat waiting for me to give the word to take off. I was holding a portable horizon camera in my hand. It was about the smallest, most incidental article of equipment we had brought along.

The huge, electro-shuttered horizon camera which we had intended to use on Ganymede had been so badly damaged by the jar of our descent that it was useless now. We had projected the little camera by a horizontal extension tripod through a vacuum suction lock and let it swing about.

I didn’t expect much from it. It was equipped with infra-red and ultra-violet ray filters, but the atmosphere was so dense outside I didn’t think the sensitive plates would depict anything but swirling spirals of mist.

I was waiting for the developing fluid to do its work before I broke the camera open and removed the plates. We had perhaps one chance in ten of getting a pictorial record of Jupiter’s topographical features.

I knew that one clear print would ease Joan’s frustration and bitterness, and give her a sense of accomplishment. But I didn’t expect anything sensational. Venus is a frozen wasteland from pole to pole, and the dust-bowl deserts of Mars are exactly like the more arid landscapes of Earth.

Most of Earth is sea and desert and I felt sure that Jupiter would exhibit uniform surface features over nine-tenths of its crust. Its rugged or picturesque regions would be dispersed amidst vast, dun wastes. The law of averages was dead against our having landed on the rim of some blue-lit, mysterious cavern measureless to man, or by the shores of an inland sea.

But Joan’s eyes were shining again, so I didn’t voice my misgivings. Joan’s eyes were fastened on the little camera as though all her life were centered there.

“Well, Richard,” she urged.

My hands were shaking. “A few pictures won’t give me a lift,” I said. “Even if they show mountains and crater-pits and five hundred million people gape at them on Earth.”

“Don’t be such a pessimist, Richard. We’ll be back in a month with impermeable space suits, and a helmet filter of the Silo type. You’re forgetting we’ve accomplished a lot. It’s something to know that the temperature outside isn’t anything like as ghastly as the cold of space, and that the pebbles we’ve siphoned up show Widman-statten lines and contain microscopic diamonds. That means Jupiter’s crust isn’t all volcanic ash. There’ll be something more interesting than tumbled mounds of lava awaiting us when we come back. If we can back our geological findings with prints—”