The guide beam reached out in answer to his signal and locked onto him. Home again, he thought. His hands moved across the pilot board, adjusting Vectors more delicately than a pianist controls notes, until the moonship rode a true curve. The cabin throbbed with energies.
Raising his eyes to the viewscreen, he saw Ganymede as half a globe ahead of him. It was a cold sight, mountains like teeth, craters like fortress walls, their shadows long and lengthening across blue-gray plains. Though already nighted, just east of the John Glenn range, Berkeley Ice Field lay high enough to throw Jupiter light back at him, a sheening amber reach that lost itself around the curve of the world.
Southwestward thence, slashing through the heights and a thousand miles over Mare Navium, the scar that was Dante Chasm ran toward the Red Mountains. Not far north of it, almost on the sunset line, Aurora’s visual beacon was now visible, a green star that flickered on and off, on and off. But past the horizon, blackness was aswarm with other and older stars, unblinking diamond sharpnesses.
Not for the first time, he thought, I’d like to know what’s out yonder. But he wouldn’t live that long.
And it didn’t matter. There was sufficient mystery in the Solar System for a lot of human lifetimes yet-yes, and trouble and danger and hope, all scrambled together in life’s careless fashion. Hope reborn on Earth just as hell was letting out for noon on Jupiter-The radio buzzed. “Aurora Space Traffic Control to Moonship 17, that’s one-seven. Acknowledge,”
