The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [99]
“This is an old trick, but helps to make my point. Place your thumb and finger on either side, not quite touching. That’s right.”
Webster put out his hand, almost but not quite gripping the card.
“Now catch it.”
Falcon waited for a few seconds; then, without warning, he let go of the card. Webster’s thumb and finger closed on empty air.
“I’ll do it again, just to show there’s no deception. You see?”
Once again, the falling card had slipped through Webster’s fingers.
“Now you try it on me.”
This time, Webster grasped the card and dropped it without warning. It had scarcely moved before Falcon had caught it. Webster almost imagined he could hear a click, so swift was the other’s reaction.
“When they put me together again,” Falcon remarked in an expressionless voice, “the surgeons made some improvements. This is one of them—and there are others. I want to make the most of them. Jupiter is the place where I can do it.”
Webster stared for long seconds at the fallen card, absorbing the improbable colors of the Trivium Charontis Escarpment. Then he said quietly: “I understand. How long do you think it will take?”
“With your help, plus the Bureau, plus all the science foundation we can drag in—oh, three years. Then a year for trials—we’ll have to send in at least two test models. So, with luck—five years.”
“That’s about what I thought. I hope you get your luck; you’ve earned it. But there’s one thing I won’t do.”
“What’s that?”
“Next time you go ballooning, don’t expect me as passenger.”
3. The world of the gods
The fall from Jupiter V to Jupiter itself takes only three and a half hours. Few men could have slept on so awesome a journey. Sleep was a weakness that Howard Falcon hated, and the little he still required brought dreams that time had not yet been able to exorcise. But he could expect no rest in the three days that lay ahead, and must seize what he could during the long fall down into that ocean of clouds, some sixty thousand miles below.
As soon as Kon-Tiki had entered her transfer orbit and all the computer checks were satisfactory, he prepared for the last sleep he might ever know. It seemed appropriate that at almost the same moment Jupiter eclipsed the bright and tiny Sun as he swept into the monstrous shadow of the planet. For a few minutes a stange golden twilight enveloped the ship; then a quarter of the sky became an utterly black hole in space, while the rest was a blaze of stars. No matter how far one traveled across the solar system, they never changed; these same constellations now shone on Earth, millions of miles away. The only novelties here were the small, pale crescents of Callisto and Ganymede; doubtless there were a dozen other moons up there in the sky, but they were all much too tiny, and too distant, for the unaided eye to pick them out.
“Closing down for two hours,” he reported to the mother ship, hanging almost a thousand miles above the desolate rocks of Jupiter V, in the radiation shadow of the tiny satellite. If it never served any other useful purpose, Jupiter V was a cosmic bulldozer perpetually sweeping up the charged particles that made it unhealthy to linger close to Jupiter. Its wake was almost free of radiation, and there a ship could park in perfect safety, while death sleeted invisibly all around.
Falcon switched on the sleep inducer, and consciousness faded swiftly out as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. While Kon-Tiki fell toward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second in that enormous gravitational field, he slept without dreams. They always came when he awoke; and he had brought his nightmares with him from Earth.
Yet he never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found himself again face to face with that terrified superchimp, as he descended the spiral stairway between the collapsing gasbags. None of the simps had survived; those that were not killed outright were so badly injured that they had been painlessly “euthed.” He sometimes wondered why he dreamed