I was talking to Dad about it that night over a game. Peggy had a Girl Scout meeting and Molly was off somewhere; we were alone for once. The baby's mother had raised particular Ned, just as if there had really been something wrong—I mean, what can happen in a space ship? The kid couldn't fall overboard.
Dad said her reaction was perfectly natural.
I said, "See, here, George, does it seem to you that some of the emigrants don't have what it takes to be colonists?"
"Mmmm ....ossibly."
I was thinking of Noisy but the ones I mentioned were Mrs. Tarbutton, who gave up and didn't even come along, and that female—Mrs. Grigsby—who got in trouble and had to wash dishes. And another fellow named Saunders who was continually in trouble with the council for trying to live his own life, wild and free, no matter what it did to the rest of us. "George, how did those characters get past the psycho tests?"
George stopped to peg fifteen-four, then said, "Bill, haven't you ever heard of political influence?"
All I said was, "Huh?"
"It's a shocking thought I know, but you are old enough to get used to the world as it is, instead of the way it ought to be. Take a hypothetical case: I don't suppose that a niece of a state councilor would be very likely to fail the psycho tests. Oh, she might fail the first tests, but a review board might find differently–if the councilor really wanted her to pass."
I chewed this over a while. It did not sound like George; he isn't the cynical type. Me, I'm cynical, but George is usually naive. "In that case, George, there is no use in having psycho tests at all, not if people like that can sneak past."
"Contrariwise. The tests are usually honest. As for those who sneak past, it doesn't matter. Old Mother Nature will take care of them in the long run. Survivors survive." He finished dealing and said, "Wait till you see what I'm going to do to you this hand. You haven't a chance."
He always says that. I said, "Anybody who would use public office like that ought to be impeached!"
George said mildly, "Yep. But don't bum out your jets, son; we've got human beings, not angels, to work with."
On the twenty-fourth of August Captain Harkness took spin off and started bringing us in. We decelerated for better than four hours and then went into free fall about six hundred thousand miles out from Jupiter and on the opposite side from where Ganymede was then. Weightlessness still wasn't any fun but this time we were ready and everyone got shots for it who wanted them. I took mine and no nonsense.
Theoretically the Mayflower could have made it in one compound maneuver, ending up at the end of deceleration in a tight circular orbit around Ganymede. Practically it was much better to sneak in easy and avoid any more trouble with meteorites—with the "false rings," that is.
Of course Jupiter doesn't have rings like Saturn, but it does have quite a lot of sky junk traveling around in the same plane as its moons. If there were enough of it, it would show up like Saturn's rings. There isn't that much, but there is enough to make a pilot walk on eggs coming in. This slow approach gave us a fine front seat for a tour of Jupiter and its satellites.
Most of this stuff we were trying to avoid is in the same plane as Jupiter's equator, just the way Saturn's rings are—so Captain Harkness brought us in over the top of Jupiter, right across Jupiter's north pole. That way, we never did get in the danger zone until we had curved down on the other side to reach Ganymede—and by then we were going fairly slow.
But we weren't going slow when we passed over Jupiter's north pole, no indeedy! We were making better than thirty miles a second and we were close in, about thirty thousand miles. It was quite a sight.
Jupiter is ninety thousand miles thick; thirty thousand miles is close—too close for comfort.
I got one good look at it for about two minutes from one of the view ports, then had to give up my place to somebody who hadn't had a turn yet and go back to the bunk room and watch through the vision screen. It was an odd sight; you always think of Jupiter with equatorial bands running parallel across it. But now we were looking at it end on and the bands were circles. It looked like a giant archery target, painted in orange and brick red and brown— except that half of it was chewed away. We saw it in half moon, of course.
There was a dark spot right at the pole. They said that was a zone of permanent clear weather and calm and that you could see clear down to the surface there. I looked but I couldn't see anything; it just looked dark.
As we came over the top, Io—that's satellite number one—suddenly came out of eclipse. Io is about as big as the Moon and was about as far away from us at the time as the Moon is from the Earth, so it looked about Moon size. There was just black sky and then there was a dark, blood red disc and in less than five minutes it was brilliant orange, about the color of Jupiter itself. It simply popped up, like magic.
I looked for Barnard's satellite while we were close in, but missed it. It's the little one that is less than one diameter from the surface of Jupiter—so close that it whirls around Jupiter in twelve hours. I was interested in it because I knew that the Jovian observatory was on it and also the base for Project Jove.
I probably didn't miss anything; Barnard's satellite is only about a hundred and fifty miles in diameter. They say a man can come pretty close to jumping right off it. I asked George about it and he said, no, the escape speed was about five hundred feet per second and who had been filling me up with nonsense?
I looked it up later; he was right. Dad is an absolute mine of useless information. He says a fact should be loved for itself alone.
Callisto was behind us; we had passed her on the way in, but not very close. Europa was off to the right of our course nearly ninety degrees; we saw her in half moon. She was more than four hundred thousand miles away and was not as pretty a sight as the Moon is from Earth.
Ganymede was straight ahead, almost, and growing all the time—and here was a funny thing; Callisto was silvery, like the Moon, but not as bright; Io and Europa were bright orange, as bright as Jupiter itself. Ganymede was downright dull!
I asked George about it; he came through, as usual "Ganymede used to be about as bright as Io and Europa," he told me. "It's the greenhouse effect—the heat trap. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to live on it."
I knew about that, of course; the greenhouse effect is the most important part of the atmosphere project When the 1985 expedition landed Ganymede had a surface temperature a couple of hundred degrees below zero—that's cold enough to freeze the milk of human kindness! "But look, George," I objected, "sure, I know about the heat trap, but why is it so dark? It looks like the inside of a sack."
"Light is heat; heat is light," he answered. "What's the difference? It's not dark on the ground; it goes in and doesn't come out—and a good thing, too."
I shut up. It was something new to me and I didn't understand it, so I decided to wait and not pound my teeth about it.
Captain Harkness slowed her down again as we came up to Ganymede and we got in one good meal while she was under drive. I never did get so I could eat at free fall, even with injections. He leveled her off in a tight circular orbit about a thousand miles up from Ganymede. We had arrived—just as soon as we could get somebody to come and get us.
It was on the trip down to Ganymede's surface that I began to suspect that being a colonist wasn't as glamorous and romantic as it had seemed back on Earth. Instead of three ships to carry us all at once, there was just one ship, the Jitterbug, and she would have fitted into one of the Bifrost's compartments. She could carry only ninety of us at a time and that meant a lot of trips.