She forced a smile. “Happy landing?” she inquired.
“Not so happy,” I muttered grimly. “You were right about Jupiter. It’s a solid world and we’ve landed smack upon it with considerable violence, judging from the way things have been hurled about.”
“Then the cushioning force field—”
“Oh, it cushioned us, all right. If it hadn’t we’d be roasting merrily inside a twisted mass of wreckage. But I wouldn’t call it happy landing. You’ve got a nasty cut there.”
“I’m all right, Richard.”
Joan reached up and patted my cheek. “Good old Richard. You’re just upset because we didn’t plunge into a lake of molten zinc.”
“Sure, that’s it,” I grunted. “I was hoping for a swift, easy out.”
“Maybe we’ll find it, Richard,” she said, her eyes suddenly serious. “I’m not kidding myself. I know what a whiff of absolute zero can do to mucous membranes. All I’m claiming is that we’ve as good a chance here as we would have had on Ganymede.”
“I wish I could feel that way about it. How do we know the atomotors can lift us from a world as massive as Jupiter?”
“I think they can, Richard. We had twelve times as much acceleration as we needed on tap when we took off from Earth.”
She was getting to her feet now. Her eyes were shining again, exultantly. You would have thought we were descending in a stratoplane above the green fields of Earth.
“I’ve a confession to make, Richard,” she grinned. “Coming down, I was inwardly afraid we would find ourselves in a ghastly bubble and boil. And I was seriously wondering how long we could stand it.”
“Oh, you were.”
“Longer than you think, Richard. Did you know that human beings can stand simply terrific heat? Experimenters have stayed in rooms artificially heated to a temperature of four hundred degrees for as long as fifteen minutes without being injured in any way.”
“Very interesting,” I said. “But that doesn’t concern us now. We’ve got to find out if our crewmen are injured or badly shaken up. Chances are they’ll be needing splints. And we’ve got to check the atmosphere before we can think of going outside, even with our helmets clamped down tight.
“Chances are it’s laden with poisonous gases which the activated carbon in our oxygen filters won’t absorb. If the atmosphere contains phosgene we’ll not be stepping out. I’m hoping we’ll find only carbon monoxide and methane.”
“Nice, harmless gases.”
“I didn’t say that. But at least they’ll stick to the outside of the particles of carbon in the filter and not tear our lungs apart.”
“A thought, Richard. Suppose we find nickel carbonyl. That’s harmless until it is catalyzed by carbon. Then it’s worse than phosgene.”
“There are lots of deadly ingredients we could find,” I admitted with some bitterness. “Gases in solid toxic form—tiny dust granules which would pass right through the filters into our lungs. Jupiter’s atmosphere may well be composed entirely of gases in solid phase.”
“Let’s hope not, Richard.”
“We’ve been talking about lung corrosives,” I said, relentlessly. “But our space suits are not impermeable, you know. There are gases which injure the skin, causing running sores. Vesicant gases. The fact that there are no vesicants on Io and Europa doesn’t mean we won’t encounter them here. And there are nerve gases which could drive us mad in less time than it takes to—”
“Richard, you always were an optimist.”
I stared at her steadily for an instant; then shrugged. “All right, Joan. I hope you won’t fall down on any of the tests. We’ve got to project an ion detector, a barometer and a moist cloud chamber outside the ship through a vacuum suction lock, in addition to the atmosphere samplers. And we’ve got to bandage that face wound before you bleed to death.”
III
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 infrared and ultraviolet 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
