2001. A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Arthur C. Clarke [Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novela, Ciencia ficción
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 1968-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20. The World of the Gods

But they had not yet finished with Jupiter. Far behind, the two probes that Discovery had launched were making contact with the atmosphere.

One was never heard from again; presumably it made too steep an entry, and burned up before it could send any information. The second was more successful; it sliced through the upper layers of the Jovian atmosphere, then skimmed out once more into space. As had been planned, it had lost so much speed by the encounter that it fell back again along a great ellipse. Two hours later, it reentered atmosphere on the daylight side of the planet—moving at seventy thousand miles an hour.

Immediately, it was wrapped in an envelope of incandescent gas, and radio contact was lost. There were anxious minutes of waiting, then, for the two watchers on the control deck. They could not be certain that the probe would survive, and that the protective ceramic shield would not burn completely away before braking had finished. If that happened, the instruments would be vaporized in a fraction of a second.

But the shield held, long enough for the glowing meteor to come to rest. The charred fragments were jettisoned, the robot thrust out its antennas and began to peer around with its electronic senses. Aboard Discovery, now almost a quarter of a million miles away, the radio started to bring in the first authentic news from Jupiter.

The thousands of pulses pouring in every second were reporting atmospheric composition, pressure, temperature, magnetic fields, radioactivity, and dozens of other factors which only the experts on Earth could unravel. However, there was one message that could be understood instantly; it was the TV picture, in full color, sent back by the falling probe.

The first views came when the robot had already entered the atmosphere, and had discarded its protective shell. All that was visible was a yellow mist, flecked with patches of scarlet which moved past the camera at a dizzying rate—streaming upwards as the probe fell at several hundred miles an hour.

The mist grew thicker; it was impossible to guess whether the camera was seeing for ten inches or ten miles, because there were no details on which the eye could focus. It seemed that, as far as the TV system was concerned, the mission was a failure. The equipment had worked, but there was nothing to see in this foggy, turbulent atmosphere.

And then, quite abruptly, the mist vanished. The probe must have fallen through the base of a high layer of cloud, and come out into a clear zone—perhaps a region of almost pure hydrogen with only a sparse scattering of ammonia crystals. Though it was still quite impossible to judge the scale of the picture, the camera was obviously seeing for miles.

The scene was so alien that for a moment it was almost meaningless to eyes accustomed to the colors and shapes of Earth. Far, far below lay an endless sea of mottled gold, scarred with parallel ridges that might have been the crests of gigantic waves.

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