Jetting the pod twenty feet off the surface, Bowman aimed toward the opening of the pit. As he approached that dark, gaping cavity, he suddenly remembered a childhood impression. When he was about ten years old, his father had taken him to the Grand Canyon , and the shock of first seeing that stupendous wound on the face of the earth had left a permanent imprint on his mind. The rectangular cleft toward which he was now drifting was tiny by comparison-but in this setting, on this desolate world, with the ominous half-moon of Jupiter hanging forever fixed in the inky sky-it seemed as awe-inspiring as the Grand Canyon . More so, indeed, for it was far deeper, and he could not guess what it concealed.
He brought the pod to rest a few feet from the brink, and surveyed the smooth, polished walls converging into the depth. The far walls were brilliant in the light of the sun, which ended abruptly in a slashing line of shadow about four hundred feet down. The feebler light of Jupiter, shining straight into the cleft, seemed to lose its power at a distance which Bowman could not even guess. Their was no sign of a bottom; the pit was like a classical exercise in perspective, all its parallel lines meeting at infinity. He tied the small, portable light which hooked onto the side of his space pod to his safety line, and let it fall the full length of the thousand meters. It took three minutes of uncannily slow-motion descent for the line to become taut; then the lamp was a bright star far down against the face of the shadowed wall. It had encountered no obstacles, provoked no reaction. Jupiter V had maintained its usual indifference.
Bowman suddenly decided that he had been cautious long enough. Not only were they running out of time, but there was only limited fuel for the pods. They had to make every minute count.
'I'm going in,' he told Kimball. 'I won't go further than the end of your safety line. Haul me out when I give the signal-or if I don't answer when you call me.'
He could have made a free fall and come back on the jets, but there was no need to waste precious fuel. Kimball could reel him back without difficulty, for the safety line would have an apparent weight of only about five pounds at its end.
'Keep talking all the way, skipper,' said Kimball. 'It's kinda lonely up here.'
Bowman was perfectly willing to comply. No matter how accustomed one became to low gravity, the ingrained responses of a million terrestrial ancestors died hard. He had to keep reminding himself that this pit in which he was dangling was not a miles-deep shaft on earth, down which he could go crashing to destruction if the slim thread of the safety line snapped. Though there might be danger here, it was not from gravity, and he must ignore the insistent warnings of his instincts.
'I must be two hundred feet down now,' he said to Kimball. 'Keep lowering me at the same rate-there's nothing to see yet, but I'll get a better view as soon as I'm out of the sunlight. Radiation count still negligible. There goes the sun-now I'm in the shadow, but there's still plenty of light from Jupiter. Still no sign of a bottom– this thing must be at least five miles deep-I feel like an ant crawling down a chimney-HELLO . . . !'
His voice trailed off in sudden excitement.
'What is it? Do you see something?' Kimball demanded.
'Yes-I think so. Now I'm out of the glare, my eyes are getting more sensitive. There's a light down there– a very dim one-a hell of a long way off. Just a minute while I unship the telescope.'
There were sounds of heavy breathing and metallic clankings from Bowman's pod, now almost half a mile below the surface of Jupiter V. From the lip of the shaft where his own tiny private spacecraft was balanced as far over the brink as he dared risk it, Kimball could see the other pod only as a little group of red and white identification lights. He waited, with mounting excitement and impatience, as Bowman took his time with the telescope.
Then, coming from far below via the speaker of the radio link, came three simple words that chilled him to the bone.
'Oh my God . . .' said David Bowman, very quietly in a tone that conveyed no fear or alarm-only utter, incredulous, surprise.
'What is it?!'
He heard Bowman draw a deep breath, then answer in a voice that he would not have recognized, yet was completely under control.
'You won't believe this, Jack. That light down there-I wasn't mistaken. I've got the telescope on it-the image is perfectly dear. I can see the bottom end of the shaft. And it's full of stars.'
THE IMPOSSIBLE STARS
'Say it again, Dave,' said Kimball. 'I didn't hear you clearly.'
'I said it's full of stars.'
'Do I read you correctly-stars?'
'Yes-thousands of them. It's like looking at the Milky Way.'
'Listen, Dave-I'm going to haul you up and have a look myself-okay?'
To Kimball's surprise, Bowman agreed at once to this change of plan. Usually it was very difficult to divert the skipper from any procedure he had decided upon: he was fond of quoting Napoleon's 'Order plus counterorder equals disorder.' But now, he seemed not only willing but anxious to change places.
The line came up effortlessly; Bowman was obviously using the jets to help. When the pod floated up over the edge of the slot, Kimball peered into the bay-window, and was relieved to see his friend smile back, though in a slightly dazed manner.
'Sure you're okay?' he asked.
Bowman nodded.
'Sure,' he said. 'Go down and look yourself.'
As the flawlessly smooth walls drifted by him, unbroken by any markings, unscarred by age, Kimball could not help recalling Alice 's fall down the rabbit hole. It was an uncomfortable memory, for that strange descent had led to an underworld where magic reigned, and the normal laws of nature were overthrown. For the first time, he began to wonder if this might be happening here.
From the very beginning, they had known that they were dealing with a science greater than man's. But they had not doubted-they dared not doubt-that it was a science that they could ultimately understand. As the light below grew in size and brilliance, Kimball felt the first, appalling intimations that this might not be true.
It was a thought to hold at arm's length, especially in surroundings such as these. He was coming to the end of the line, and was already far below the last reflected rays of the sun. It required an act of physical courage to put the binoculars to his eyes, and to stare steadfastly at the tunnel's glowing end.
Bowman was right. He could have been looking at the Milky Way. The field of the instrument was full of stars– thousands of them, shining in the black core of this tiny, frozen world.
Some facts are so incredible that they are believed at once, for no one could possibly have imagined them. Kimball never doubted the message of his eyes, and did not try to understand it. For the moment, he would merely record what he saw.
Almost at once, he noticed that the stars were moving. They were drifting out of the field on the left, while new ones appeared from the right. It was as if he was looking down a shaft drilled clear through Jupiter V, and observing the effects of its rotation as it turned on its axis every ten hours.
But this, of course, was impossible. They had mapped and surveyed the entire area of the satellite, deliberately searching for any other entrance, and had found nothing but unbroken rock and ammonia ice. Kimball was quite certain that there was no window at the antipodes through which stars could shine.
And then, rather belatedly-he was, after all, a communications engineer and not an astronomer-he noticed something that totally demolished this theory. Those stars were drifting to his left; if the movement had been due to Jupiter V's spin, it should have been in a direction almost at right angles. So the rotation of the little moon had nothing whatsoever to do with it….
That was quite enough for one man, on one visit.
'I'm coming up,' he called Bowman. 'We'd better talk this over with Vic-maybe he has an explanation.'
When he had rejoined Bowman on the surface of the satellite, it seemed to him that the once incredible sight of Jupiter spanning the sky was as familiar and reassuring as a quiet country landscape back on Earth. Jupiter they
