Hence… and here the Wuj’s heart sank and he began to realize the true enormity of what he had done!… hence when the two “impostors” whom he had threatened with legal punishment ‘phoned earlier in the day… they had been the real Emily and Ajax! The Wuj’s curious Martian mind reeled at the import of all this.
“Will my beloved leader forgive me,” he whispered sadly. “I called him a criminal impostor… alas, I have torn my web for good this time! The old family spinnery shall never see my face again, and all my eggs shall be scrambled for this unforgivable mistake! Should I ever dare set foot in the spinnery, the ancestral Web will vibrate with humiliation for my shame! Woe is me! Woe…”
For a moment, the Wuj gave way to unrestrained woe-saying, but the little spider-being was made of sterner stuff. Resolutely, he squared all eight shoulders, metaphorically speaking, and muttered in a determined little voice:
“The error is mine and mine alone. I should have known, now that I think of it, that no conceivable impostor—no matter how clever his disguise—could ever have guessed the code recognition-phrase my master and I arranged together in strict secrecy! Yet, of course, at the time he called, it seemed somehow to be a perfectly natural assumption… after all, the beloved leader and his nest-mate-to-be were right there in the next room all the time!”
The Wuj lifted his furry little chin doggedly. Through his carelessness, the kingdom of Ajaxia had fallen into grave times. It was almost within the hands (pseudopods, rather) of the Saturnian Empire, along with the scientific treasure trove of weapons it doubtless contained. And he and he alone was to blame for this fact.
Therefore, it was up to him to do something about it.
“Fear not, dear leader, the Wuj will defend the realm to the last drop of his faithful blood!” he said grimly.
XI
The Destiny fell slowly towards the vast curve of Jupiter. The bulk of the giant planet filled more than half the sky. It glowed with dim light, its surface a seething turbulence of stupendous, tossing streamers of methane and ammonia, underlit with weird radiance. Colossal bands of variegated coloration spread from horizon to horizon: umber, rich browns, lighter bands of palest cream, sharp yellow and sanguine gold and orange. Each of these bands were thousands of miles across; some of them were so enormously huge that the entire planet Earth could fall into them and be lost without a trace.
In comparison, the Destiny seemed to shrink into insignificance, to become a mote lost in immensity. The boiling, cloud-wrapped surface of the upper atmosphere roared with continent-spanning storms of a violence inconceivable to watchers raised amidst the little storms of tiny Earth. Titanic jets of seething gas were forced from the cloudy surface by cataclysmic pressures: among these gigantic plumes, Earth itself would be but a fleck of spinning dust.
The chemical imbalance of the Jovian atmosphere generated lightning storms whose ferocity beggared description or comparison. The energy released by a single one of these king-sized thunderbolts could supply light and power to an entire metropolis, enough to last it a good month. And the size of the blazing bolts was on a similarly Brobdingnagian scale: the jagged flare of exploding energy flickered across abysses into which the entire Atlantic Ocean could be put a dozen times over.
Emily Hackenschmidt shuddered delicately, and shut her eyes to close out the awful vision of Nature in one of her most titanic rages. She knew their chances of survival amidst such a convulsion were miniscule. Were the trim little yacht to fall into the upper regions of that seething turbulence, the craft would be shattered to atoms within moments. No man-made structure, regardless of its strength, could resist the stupendous forces that raved and raged below. She turned to Ajax helplessly.
“What can we do, anything? Anything at all?” she asked despairingly.
It was at moments like this that the very best that was in Ajax Calkins came to the fore.
“There’s just one chance,” he said thoughtfully. “I’ve got to admit it’s a mighty slim one, Emily, but even a slim chance is better than none.”
“What’s your idea?”
“Just this. We’re being pulled straight down into that boiling inferno—with our main drive shot out, we can’t command enough oomph to fight that pull and push ourselves back up into a stable orbit. But—our auxiliary and lateral steering jets combined should give us enough pazazz to push sideays against the pull…”
She didn’t get it, obviously. “Sideways? For what? Sideways to what?”
“To one of the moons,” he said calmly.
Her blue eyes widened as the sheer simplicity and beauty of his plan hit her.
“Ajax!” she marveled. “What a perfectly lovely idea! Of course… it’s so logical it, why it takes my breath away!”
“It’s nothing,” he grinned. “I’ve got a million of ‘em! Now—hop over to the scopes and start finding me a moon. Quick now!”
She hopped. Her EMSA training included a full course in spaceship control operations and she knew how to manipulate many of the most sophisticated concoctions devised by modern technology. She spun the wheel with deft hands, and began a search-pattern.
“This has got to work the first time, or never,” he said tightly. “Yon rising moon has got to match our elevation just about right on the nose… we haven’t enough juice in the tanks to do much flying to keep in horizontal flight against the pull of that monster down there .. .”
“Here’s one!” she said. “Elevation twenty point four…”
“No good. We’re at sixteen-point-nine, and we couldn’t get that high. Next please.”
The sudden relief from tension engendered by Ajax Calkins’ lovely scheme lent a mildly hysterical note of holiday gaiety to Emily’s spirits. Even though they were not yet out of the woods by a wide margin, she felt confident and happy.
“Next it is!” she sang. “Would you believe Semele, at eighteen-point-two… or little old Alcmene, now marked down to thirteen-point-six?”
“Semele is for the birds,” he said impolitely, “but Alcmene is just what the astronaut ordered. Give me a distance reading—hurry, we’re dropping even faster now!”
She read off the figures, and he relaxed with a deep wheeze of relief.
“Righto, I’ll buy Alcmene—that’s the little goofball that goes backwards, I believe? Well, here goes nothing…”
He spun the gyros on manual and kicked over the ship, bringing the small auxiliary jets into their strongest play. They engaged with a keen whine that steadily deepened into a drone that sounded like a Metropolitan Opera baritone gargling mouthwash. Imperceptibly, at first, their descent lessened, then, gradually, slowed as their lateral progress intensified. Wobbling along on its emergency jets, the little craft fought against the overpowering gravitational pull of the largest giant in the Solar System next to the Sun itself.
Bit by bit they inched across the face of Jupiter. The famous Red Spot, that vast ocean of seething crimson vapor, glared up at them like an angry Cyclopian eye. The giant roared with its storm-voice; it was hungry, and saw a succulent steely mote escaping.
Alcmene, the mystery moon that had puzzled astronomers for a century, drew steadily closer.
The main drive worked, of course, on plutonium ingots. The auxiliary jets in the tail, and the lateral steering jets set about the midsection of the ship like a belt, were powered only by highly compressed chemical fuel, and thus had a strictly limited firing-time. The flight to Alcmene, as the computer read it, was pushing the margin of safety perilously close. Ajax kept this uncomfortable fact to himself, seeing no point in scaring Emily. But it would certainly be heartbreaking, if the jets died before they had safely maneuvered into Alcmene’s field—heartbreaking and ship-breaking, for that matter.