Everything seemed frozen and terribly silent, like a Christmas-card scene.
In a hushed voice Kennedy said, “Are we in space?”
“We sure are. You slept through the whole thing, it seems. Blast-off and null-g and everything. We’re a half-day out from Earth. From here till Ganymede it’s all a pretty placid downhill coast, Mr. Kennedy.”
“Is it safe to get out of this cradle?” he asked.
Hills shrugged. “Why not?”
“I won’t float, or anything?”
“Three hours ago we imparted spin along the longitudinal axis, Mr. Kennedy. The gravity in here is precisely one g Earth-norm. If you’re hungry, food’s on in the galley up front.”
He ate. Ship food—packaged synthetics, nourishing and healthfully balanced and about as tasty as straw briquettes. He ate silently and alone, serving himself; the rest of the men had already had their midday meal.
Four of them were playing cards in the fore cubicle that looked out onto the stars. Kennedy was both shocked and amused when he stepped through the unlocked door and saw the four of them, grimy and bearded, dressed in filthy fatigue uniforms, squatting around an empty fuel drum playing poker with savage intensity, while five feet away from them all the splendor of the skies lay unveiled.
He had no desire to break into the game, and they ignored him so thoroughly that it was clear he was not invited. He turned away, smiling. No doubt after you made enough trips, he thought, the naked wonder of space turned dull on you, and poker remained eternally fascinating. The sight of an infinity of blazing suns was finite in its appeal, Kennedy decided. But he himself stared long and hard at the sharp blackness outside, broken by the stream of stars and by the distant redness of what he supposed was Mars.
Mars receded. Kennedy thought he caught sight of ringed Saturn later in the day. Hours passed. He ate again, slept, read.
Two days went by, or maybe three. To the six men of the crew, he was just a piece of cargo—ambulatory, perhaps, but still cargo. He read several books. He let his beard grow until the stubbly shoots began to itch fiercely, and then he shaved it off. Once he started to write a letter to Marge, but he never finished it. He wished bitterly he had brought Watsinski or Dinoli or Bullard along to live on this cramped ship and see Ganymede at first hand.
Even he grew tired of the splendor of the skies. He remembered a time in his boyhood when an uncle had given him a cheap microscope, and he had gone to a nearby park and scooped up a flask of stagnant water. For days he had stared in open-mouthed awe at paramecia and fledgling snails and a host of ciliated creatures, and then the universe in the drop of water had merely given him eye-strain and, bored with his host of creatures, he had impatiently flushed them down the drain.
It was much the same here. The stars were glorious, but even sheer glory palls at length. He could meditate only so long on the magnitude of space, on the multiplicity of suns, on the strange races that might circle red Antares or bright Capella. The vastness of space held a sheerly emotional kind of wonder for him, rather than intellectual, and so it easily became exhausting and finally commonplace. He turned away from the port and returned to his books.
Until finally great Jupiter blotted out the sky, and Sizer came by to tell him that the icy crescent sliver he saw faintly against the mighty planet’s bulk was their destination, Ganymede.
Again he was strapped into the cradle—the deceleration cradle, now; a mild semantic difference. A second time he took a pill, and a second time he slept. When he woke, some time later, there was whiteness outside the port—the endless eye-numbing whiteness of the snowfields of Ganymede.
It was day—“day” being a ghostly sort of half-dusk, at this distance from the sun. Kennedy knew enough about the mechanics of Ganymede from his pseudo-colony work of the past month to be aware that a Ganymedean day lasted slightly more than seven Earth days, the length of time it took Ganymede to revolve once about Jupiter—for Ganymede, like Earth’s Moon, kept the same face toward its primary at all times.
Jupiter now was a gibbous splinter from dayside, a vast chip of a planet that seemed to be falling toward Ganymede’s bleak surface like a celestial spear. Visible against the big planet’s bulk was the lesser splinter of one of the other Galilean moons—Io, most likely, Kennedy thought.
No doubt the dome was on the other side of the ship. From his port, nothing was visible but the ugly teeth of broken mountains, bare, tufted with layers of frozen ammonia, misted by swirling methane clouds.
The ship’s audio system barked. “All hands in suits! Mr. Kennedy, come forward, on the double. We’ve arrived on Ganymede.”
Kennedy wondered how they were going to transport him without a suit. His question was answered before it could be asked; Sizer and one of the crewmen came toward him, swinging the hollow bulk of a spacesuit between them like an eviscerated corpse.
They helped him into it, clamped down the helmet, and switched on his breathing unit and his audio.
Sizer said, “You won’t be in this thing long. Don’t touch any of the gadgets and try not to sneeze. If you feel your breathing supply going bad, yell and yell fast. Everything clear?”
“Yes,” Kennedy said. He felt warm and humid in the suit; they hadn’t bothered to switch on his air-conditioners, or perhaps there weren’t any. He saw men starting down the catwalk in their suits, and he advanced toward the yawning airlock, moving in a stiff, awkward robot-shuffle until he discovered the suit was flexible enough to allow him to walk normally.
He lowered himself through the lock and with great care descended the catwalk. He saw a sprawling low dome to his right, housing several slipshod prefabricated buildings. A truck had popped through an airlock in the side of the dome and was heading toward them. He saw a few figures inside the dome peering curiously outward at the newly arrived spaceship.
A sharp wind whistled about him; paradoxically, he was sweating inside his suit, but he also sensed the numbing cold that was just a fraction of an inch away from his skin. In the wan daylight he could see the cold outlines of stars bridging the blue-black sky. He realized that he had never actually visualized Ganymede despite all his press releases and publicity breaks.
It was a hard bitter place where the wind mumbled obscenities in his spacesuit’s audio pickup and the stars glimmered in the daylight. He looked into the distance, wondering if any of the natives were on hand to witness the new arrival, but as far as he could see the landscape was barren and empty.
The truck arrived. Within its sealed pressurized cab rode a red-bearded man who signaled for them to climb into the back. They did, Kennedy going up next to last and needing a boost from the man behind him to make it. He felt helpless and ashamed of himself.
The truck turned and headed toward the opening airlock of the Ganymede dome.
10
He felt penned in, inside the dome. He met the sixteen men who lived there, who had lived there ever since Corporation money and Corporation skill and Corporation spaceships had let man reach Ganymede. He shifted uneasily from foot to foot, breathing the sharp, faintly acrid synthetic atmosphere of the dome, feeling mildly queasy-stomached at the lessened pull of gravity. Ganymede exerted only eighty-one percent of Earth’s pull on him. He weighed just about one hundred forty-two pounds here.
He half expected to see the big figure of Colony Director Lester Brookman come striding out of the dimness to shake his hand and welcome him to Ganymede, but Brookman was just a myth he had invented one rainy May afternoon. The real head of the Ganymede outpost was a stubby little man with a bushy, gray-flecked beard. His name was Gunther. He was a third-level man in the Corporation, but up here all such titles went by the board.