Venus Prime 5 - The Diamond Moon by Arthur C. Clarke; Paul Preuss

Author:Arthur C. Clarke; Paul Preuss
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Outer Space, Science Fiction, General, Jupiter (Planet), Fiction
ISBN: 9780380753499
Publisher: Avon Books
Published: 1990-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

16

Here it came: a hemisphere bulging with mountains of orange sulfur, flooded with red sulfur lava, wind-swept with yellow sulfur dust, pitted with burned black sulfur cinders, drifted with white sulfur frost…

The first humans to see Io, in reconstructed video data sent back by Voyager 1, had called it a “pizza pie.” What would it have been called if those first observers had lived not on the outskirts of Los Angeles but in Moscow or Sao Paolo or Delhi?

Or seen it as Randolph Mays and Marianne Mitchell were seeing it now…? The videoplate of their tin can capsule showed the fast-approaching moon in real time, at the same angular spread as if they’d been looking out the hatch with their own eyes. Io did not look much like a pizza pie to Marianne. It looked like hell frozen over; not counting the insides of various spaceships, it was the ugliest thing she had seen in her travels yet. But Io’s ugliness was so bold and wild, its elemental forces so immodestly displayed, that she found it almost arousing.

She was glad she’d let Randolph bully her into this—literally canned!—tourist adventure. She smiled and let her eyes wander from the ruddy moon. Her gaze lingered fondly on his craggy looks.

He seemed lost in thought, his own eyes not focused on the landscape of Io but somewhere infinitely far beyond.

A voice she had learned to regard as background noise interrupted her thoughts: “Four active volcanos are visible from the current range and position of your Moon Cruiser, with plumes ranging from thirty to over two hundred kilometers in altitude…”

Mays managed to keep his inner concentration even when the robot voice of the capsule chimed in with one of its periodic sightseeing lectures. He was like a Zen monk, sitting calmly, thinking nothing, knowing nothing but the incoming and outgoing of his breath.

“…the most easily visible in the lower right quadrant of your screen, near the terminator. Observe the umbrella-shaped plume of material, ejected from the vent at a velocity approaching one kilometer per second, more than a third of Io’s escape velocity. If you wish to see the larger globe of crystallized gases surrounding the volcano’s inner solid plume, tune your videoplate to the ultraviolet spectrum…”

Now their capsule was approaching Io so fast that their movement toward it was perceptible. What had been a detailed and fascinating but still-distant landscape took on a new dimension; Marianne was reminded of her visit to the Grand Canyon on Earth, standing at an overlook, admiring distant vistas of buttes and mesas, when suddenly the gravel beneath her foot slipped and carried her a few inches toward the edge…

She was seized with terror. “Randolph, we’re falling!”

“Mm, what’s that, dear?”

“Something’s wrong! We’re falling right into it … into that volcano!”

Mays suppressed a smile. “If for a moment you can tear your eyes away from our impending doom, let me switch to the schematic.”

Idealized graphics replaced the more immediate reality on the screen. He tapped the controls, adjusting the scale to include the surface of Io.

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