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books, subordinates don't fall over themselves beingfriendly. Secondly, our dealings with a few of the
menhave been unpleasant."
Bigman said thoughtfully, "I met Red Summers to-day, the cobber. There he was coming out of the
engine room and there I was, facing him."
"What happened? You didn't..."
"I didn't do anything. I just stood there waiting forhim to start something,hoping he would start some-
thing, but he just smiled and moved around me."
Everyone aboard theJovian Moon was watching theday Ganymede eclipsed Jupiter. It wasn't a true
eclipse.
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Ganymede covered only a tiny part of Jupiter. Gany-mede was 600,000 miles away, not quite half the
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sizeof the moon as seen from Earth. Jupiter was twice thedistance, but it was a swollen globe now,
fourteen times as wide as Ganymede, menacing and frighten-ing.
Ganymede met Jupiter a little below the latter'sequator, and slowly the two globes seemed to melt to-
gether. Where Ganymede cut in, it made a circle ofdimmer light, for Ganymede had far less of an atmo-
sphere than Jupiter had and reflected a considerablysmaller portion of the light it received. Even if that
hadnot been so, it would have been visible as it cut acrossJupiter's belts.
The remarkable part was the crescent of blackness that hugged Ganymede's rear as the satellite moved
completely onto Jupiter's disk. As the men explained toone another in breathless whispers, it was
Ganymede'sshadow falling on Jupiter.
The shadow, only its edge seen, moved with Gany-mede, but slowly gained on it. The sliver of black cut
finer and finer until in the mid-eclipse region, whenJupiter, Ganymede, and theJovian Moon all made a
straight line with the sun, the shadow was completelygone, covered by the world that cast it.
Thereafter, as Ganymede continued to move on, the shadow began to advance, appearing before it,first
a sliver, then a thicker crescent, until both left Jupiter's globe.
The entire eclipse lasted three hours.
TheJovian Moon reached and passed the orbit ofGanymede when that satellite was at the other end of
its seven-day orbit about Jupiter.
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There was a special celebration when that hap-pened. Men with ordinary ships (not often, to be sure)
had reached Ganymede and landed on it, but no one,not one human being, had ever penetrated closer
thanthat to Jupiter. And now theJovian Moon did.
The ship passed within one hundred thousand miles of Europa, Jupiter Two. It was the smallest of
Jupiter's major satellites, only nineteen hundred miles in diam-eter. It was slightly smaller than the moon,
but its close-ness made it appear twice the size of the moon asseen from Earth. Dark markings could be
made outthat might have been mountain ranges. Ship's tele-scopes proved they were exactly that. The
mountainsresembled those on Mercury, and there was no signof moon-like craters. There were brilliant
patches, too,resembling ice fields.
And still they sank downward, and left Europa'sorbit behind.
Io was the innermost of Jupiter's major satellites, in size almost exactly equal to Earth's moon. Its
distancefrom Jupiter, moreover, was only 285,000 miles, orlittle more than that of the moon from Earth.
But there the kinship ended. Whereas Earth's gentle gravitational field moved the moon about itself in the
space of four weeks, Io, caught in Jupiter's gravity, whipped about in its slightly larger orbit in the spaceof
forty-two hours. Where the moon moved about Earthat a speed of a trifle over a thousand miles an hour,
Iomoved about Jupiter at a speed of twenty-two thousandmiles an hour, and a landing upon it was that
muchmore difficult.
The ship, however, maneuvered perfectly. It cut inahead of Io and wiped out Agrav at just the proper
moment.
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With a bound, the hum of the hyperatomics wasback, filling the ship with what seemed a cascade of
sound after the silence of the past weeks.
TheJovian Moon curved out of its path, finally,subject once again to the accelerating effect of a gravi-
tational field, that of lo. It was established in an orbitabout the satellite at a distance of less than ten thou-
sand miles, so that lo's globe filled the sky.
They circled about it from dayside to nightside,coming lower and lower. The ship's batlike Agrav fins
were retracted in order that they might not be tornoff by Io's thin atmosphere.
Then, eventually, there was the keen whistling thatcame with the friction of ship against the outermost
wisps of that atmosphere.
Velocity dropped and dropped; so did altitude. Theship's sidejets curved it to face stern-downward
toward Io, and the hyperatomic jets sprang into life, cushion-ing the fall. Finally, with one last bit of drop
and the softest jar, theJovian Moon came to rest on the sur-face of Io.
There was wild hysteria on board theJovian Moon. Even Lucky and Bigman had their backs pounded
by men who had been avoiding them constantly all voy-age long.
One hour later, in the darkness of Io's night, withCommander Donahue in the lead, the men of theJovian
Moon,each in his space suit, emerged one by one onto the surface of Jupiter One.
Sixteen men. The first human beings ever to land on Io!
Correction, thought Lucky. Fifteen men.
And one robot!
12
The Skies and Snows of Io
It was Jupiter they stopped to look at. It was Jupiterthat held them frozen. There was no talk about it,no
babble over the helmet radios. It was beyond talk.
Jupiter was a giant globe which, from rim to rim,extended one eighth of the way across the visible sky.
Had it been full, it would have been two thousandtimes as bright as the Earth's full moon, but the night
shadow cut a third of it away.
The bright zones and dark belts that crossed it werenot merely brown now. They were close enough to
showfull clear color: pink, green, blue, and purple, amaz-ingly bright. The edges of the bands were
ragged andslowly changed shape as they watched, as though theatmosphere were being whipped into
gigantic and tur-bulent storms, as most probably it was. Io's clear, thin atmosphere didn't obscure the
smallest detail of thatcolored shifting surface.
The Great Red Spot was heaving ponderously intosight. It gave the impression of a funnel of gas,
swirlinglazily.
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They watched for a long time, and Jupiter did not
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