At turnaround time, Neil and Jensen swung the mass of the Kennedy and the reverse thrust began to kill the forward speed.
On Earth, the situation had reached an uneasy stability. Both sides had suffered heavy casualties. The defense line was holding on the Chicago-Corpus Christi line, and DOSEWEX was holding out. The propaganda war was still raging, and the masses were beginning to mutter about the shortage of food and consumer goods. Some of the most severe battles had been fought in the grain belt of the great plains. Large areas of fertile farmland had been devastated. There would be difficulty in planting spring crops.
It was no longer possible to brush off the senator from New Mexico with contempt, for he had emerged as the man who was clearly in control of the radical forces, and he was now more often than not referred to by his name, John V. Shaw. He had proved himself to be not only a skillful organizer, but a brilliant military tactician. Shaw was preaching the gospel of revolt to the masses, promising to pull in all the slackers from space, to beat the spaceship hulls into plowshares in order to produce food under a new form of freedom. The exact form of this new freedom was not spelled out. It was clear, however, that the senator’s message was a vital one as food supplies became more and more scarce.
It seemed to the crew of the Kennedy that it was only a matter of time before the hungry millions began to flock to Shaw’s cause. Starvation is the most powerful of persuasions, and vast segments of the metropolitan east faced severe hunger as winter approached.
Time was critical. J.J. talked of a swift completion of their mission, a long run home, an arrival during the Christmas season.
“I think you’re being optimistic, J.J.,” Dom said. “You’re allowing only a short time for the descent into the atmosphere, the location of the ship, and bringing her out.”
“We’ll do it,” J.J. said.
“It’s a big planet,” Art said.
“We can home in on the radio signal,” J.J. said. “We won’t have any trouble locating the ship.”
“There’s always trouble in a new situation,” Neil said. “Keep in mind that we’ll be testing a new and untried ship under severe conditions.”
“What’s to test?” J.J. asked. “It’s a very simple proposition. She does it or she doesn’t. She goes in. That much we know. She’d have to go in to test the hull, so why fool around? We go in. If she doesn’t implode, we come out. Why worry?”
“That’s fine to say,” Ellen said.
“We will not dive in without testing the hull,” Dom said in a firm voice. J.J. looked at him. “I’m not going to lower myself to the level of a Firster,” Dom said. “I value my life. I value each life aboard this ship. So we’ll poke our nose in, test the compression qualities of the hull, and then we’ll lower in easy stages.”
“And if every little thing doesn’t please you?” J.J. asked.
“My decision,” Dom said. “I will take the responsibility.”
“I just wonder if it would be worth going back if we fail,” J.J. said.
“It’s human to cling to life even when there is no hope,” Dom said.
“Especially if you’ve just been married,” J.J. said.
Dom looked at J.J. levelly. “I resent that, J.J. My private life is my own as long as it doesn’t keep me from performing my duties. I defy you to point out one instance of my private considerations having affected my judgment or the performance of my duties.”
“Sorry, Flash,” J.J. said. “I’m worried, that’s all.”
“We all are,” Doris said.
Dom set the crew to work on dry runs of making the descent run. It was a little early, but they were getting edgy and the rehearsals kept them busy. Privacy time was cut. Dom and Doris deliberately avoided being alone together, as if to prove to the others that their changed status did not affect performance.
Three days before time to go into orbit around the gas giant, the Kennedy’s RDF locked onto the signal from the alien ship. It seemed to be a miracle that the signal was still steady, still the same strength as it was so long ago when the Kennedy was nothing more than a dream and some often-conflicting data in the DOSEWEX computer. The fact that the ship was still down there, beeping away, reinforced the theory that she was trapped and incapable of escaping the gravitational and atmospheric fields of the giant planet.
“If there is anyone or anything aboard her,” Art said, “he, she, or it will be happy to see us.”
Doris was very busy in those last days before going into orbit. She checked and rechecked all data. The task of putting the ship into orbit and then lowering her gently, oh so gently, into the fringe of atmosphere was Doris’ baby. Her fingers and data from the shipboard computer had to be right, had to feed the right information into the automatics and to Neil.
They passed the last picket ship and received a good luck from the crew. As space distances go, they were right next door to the smaller ship, but they did not get a visual on her. The picket ship would stay on orbit to observe as Kennedy went down.
They were there. The mass of Jupiter covered half of space. Moons were visible to the naked eye. The ship moved swiftly around the planet, subjected to radiation, the electrical field, the gravity of the giant. Kennedy functioned flawlessly.
Because of the speed of Jupiter’s spin, and the vast forces of her gravity, Kennedy would have to go in very, very hot. Power would be constant to counteract the gravity. When last-minute drills had been performed there was no formal order. The computer picked the time and Neil’s hands did not touch the controls as the ship began to spiral down.
She was dwarfed by the mass of the planet, a mass which measured two and a half times as heavy as all the other planets of the solar system combined. Slowly, slowly, she went down toward that roiling surface, speed and power and rate of fall regulated by Doris’ computer. Those inside her had the feeling of falling into a hell of bright yellow fire as they orbited on the sunside and began to see with the naked eye the giant hurricane in the southern tropical zone, the Giant Red Spot, blowing for centuries at a force of hundreds of miles per hour.
The bands of atmosphere showed tremendous wind shears as atmospheric movement tossed and buffeted the insignificant mass of the ship. Each of them was aware, as the ship went down and down, that should their power fail, the ship would be seized by the massive gravitational force, yanked through the thin layer of outer clouds to drop, pulled by a force of three Earth gravities, the pressure outside building as they fell through a zone of frozen ammonia crystals, then into liquid ammonia and the zone of colored compounds which gave the atmosphere its distinctive yellow covering. They would, as they were being pulled inexorably downward, pass frozen crystals of ice and then a zone of water vapor, and they would all be dead before the crushed remains of the ship fell into the zone of liquid molecular hydrogen and continued to be compressed as pressures mounted to three million atmospheres at the transition zone between liquid molecular hydrogen and liquid metallic hydrogen, and the temperature would be rising to melt the remains of the tiny Earth ship and the even smaller, more thoroughly crushed Earth people.
On a model of the planet the size of an apple, the zone of operation of the Kennedy could be represented by the thickness of the apple’s skin. Below that very thin layer of operations lay instant death as the hull imploded.
The size of the monster! It was psychologically suffocating. It swallowed the whole of space from the viewports. It had the weight of a sun which failed. It was of incredible mass. It loomed above them as down became up and they felt dizzied. Ellen hid her eyes in her hands as the giant reached out for them with pressure and gravity and electromagnetic discharges registered by the sensors. The Kennedy went down near the orbit of the innermost moon, Amalthea. The moon was above them now, and slightly ahead, the ship between the moon’s orbit and the uppermost layer of cloud. A vast discharge of electricity came, lighting the area between the small moon and the planet, soundless in vacuum, but bright, sudden, startling, and, had the ship been struck, deadly. Again, as Dom held his breath, the tremendous bolt leaped from planet to moon.