Frank Belknap Long

“ I turned from a quartz port brimming with star-flecked blackness to gaze on my reckless, nineteen-year-old bride. Joan was so strong-willed and competent that it was difficult for me to realize she was scarcely more than a child. A veteran of the skyways, you'd have thought her, with her slim hands steady on the controls, her steely eyes probing space.
"The more conservative astronomers have always been right," I said. "We knew almost as much about the moon back in the eighteenth century as we do now. ”

“ Eight vessels went through Ganymede's ghost shroud into oblivion. There have been twenty-six attempts to conquer Jupiter. A little world cools and solidifies much more rapidly than a big world. You ought to know that."
"But Ganymede isn't so little. You're forgetting it's the biggest satellite in the solar system."
"But still little—smaller than Mars. Chances are it has a solid crust, like Callisto, Io, and Europa."
There was a faint, rustling sound behind us. Joan and I swung about simultaneously, startled by what was obviously a space-code infraction. ”

“ 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 ”

“ But the astronomers knew that the moon was a sterile, crater-pitted world a hundred years ago. They knew that there was no life or oxygen beneath its brittle stars generations before the first space vessel left Earth.
"The astronomers said that Venus was a bleak, mist-enshrouded world that couldn't sustain life and they were right. They were right about Mars. Oh, sure, a few idle dreamers thought there might be life on Mars. But the more conservative astronomers stood pat, and denied that the seasonal changes could be ascribed to a low order of vegetative life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I had talked to Joan about life evolving along parallel lines throughout the Solar System, but I hadn't expected to encounter life as strange and frightening as this—insectlike, and yet composed of some radiant substance that could penetrate solid metal and flow at will through the walls of a ship.
Some radiant substance that had weight and substance and could touch human flesh without searing it. Nothing so ghastly strange and yet—indisputably the creatures were wasplike. And being wasplike their habit patterns were similar to those of so-called social wasps on Earth. ”

“ 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 wasp had carried Darnel right through the wall—from the pilot chamber to the chart room, and back again.
Apparently the great wasps could make us tenuous too! Close and prolonged contact with the energies pouring from them had made Darnel's body as permeable as gamma light. Horribly it was borne in on me that Darnel's anguish was caused by a pervasive glow which enveloped him from head to foot. It was fainter than the radiance which poured from the wasps and was almost invisible in the fluorescent cube-light, but I could see it now. ”

“ The first vessel to reach Mars proved the astronomers right. Now a few crack-brained theorists are trying to convince us that Jupiter may be a solid, cool world."
Joan turned, and frowned at me. "You're letting a few clouds scare you, Richard," she said. "No man on Earth knows what's under the mist envelope of Jupiter."
"A few clouds," I retorted. "You know darned well that Jupiter's gaseous envelope is forty thousand miles thick—a seething cauldron of heavy gases and pressure drifts rotating at variance with the planet's crust."
"But Ganymede is mist-enshrouded too," scoffed Joan. ”

“ A century ago Eddington pictured all matter throughout the universe as alternating between a state of contraction and expansion. Oh, Joan, don't you see? These creatures are composed not of solid matter, but of some form of vibrating energy. They possess an oscillatory life cycle which makes them contract and expand in small-scale duplication of the larger pulse of our contracting and expanding universe. They become huge, then small, then huge again. ”

“ We had talked it over for months, weighing the opinions of Earth's foremost astronomers. No "watcher of the night skies" could tell us very much about Jupiter. The year 1973 had seen the exploration of the moon, and in 1986 the crews of three atomotor-propelled space vessels had landed on Mars and Venus, only to make the disappointing discovery that neither planet had ever sustained life.
By 2002 three of the outer planets had come within the orbit of human exploration. There were Earth colonies on all of the Jovian moons now, with the exception of Ganymede. ”

“ Joan's eyes were shining. "I don't care what they're composed of, Richard. We've got to capture one of those creatures alive."
I shook my head. "Impossible, Joan. If the air outside wasn't poisonous I'd be out there with a net. But there are limits to what we can hope to accomplish on this trip."
"We've siphoned up specimens of the soil," Joan protested. "What's to stop us from trying to catch up one of them in a suction cup?"
"You're forgetting that suction cups have a diameter of scarcely nine inches," I said. "These creatures may be as huge as the dragonflies of the Carboniferous Age." ”

“ 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. ”

“ They may expand and contract a thousand times before they die. Perhaps they—"
A scream from Joan cut my explanation short. "Richard, the web's slackening. I'm going to fall."
Fifteen minutes later we were rocketing upward through Jupiter's immense cloud blanket, locked in each other's arms.
Joan was sobbing. "It's unbelievable, Richard. We were saved by—by a miracle."
"No, Joan—Eddington's oscillations. Although I'll admit it seemed like a miracle when those tiny wasps became frightened by enormous us descending upon them, and flew straight through the quartz port into the mist." ”

“ 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." ”

“ A few species of stinging terrestrial insects possessed organs which combined the functions of both. Evidently the wasps had simply stung us at first—to paralyze us. Now they were completing the gruesome process of providing a feast for their avaricious progeny. One of the wasps had taken Darnel from the web, and deposited a fertile, luminous egg in his flesh. ”

“ Social wasps sting caterpillars into insensibility, and deposit eggs in their paralyzed flesh. When the wasp-grubs hatch they become ghoulish parasites, gruesomely feasting until the caterpillars dwindle to repulsive, desiccated husks. ”

“ There are lizards that resemble fish and fish that are lizardlike. The dinosaur Triceratops resembled a rhinoceros, the duck-billed platypus a colossal. Porpoises and whales are so fishlike that no visitor from space would ever suspect that they were mammals wearing evolutionary grease paint. ”