REPORT 7: the Mission to Jupiter

...the Jupship was ready for testing. Neither Lt Tordenskjold nor Senhorita Alexandre were allowed to board the craft until after a first manned flight was successfully executed. We could not risk losing our Envoys to Jupiter in case of mishap in the totally untried Jupship.

The Jupship was designed for a crew of two, a man and a woman, so the flight was performed by Lt Cdr Toshiro Yamahonda and Major Isabelle Deneuve, who took it around the sun, cutting in closer to our star than any manned flight before, actually into the corona itself, where the excesses of heat and gravitation should instantly destroy any ship, with no effect at all upon them. The flight took four days, extremely fast by any non-MEST performance standards, although they had not even tried for a top speed run.

Once the Jupship had been deemed safe, Niels and Marucia were allowed to take command of the vessel. Their first training flight was to Mars, where they landed at Base Burroughs, to much ceremony and media coverage. They returned to SpaceCity after a tour of the outposted planets: the Jupship worked very well, crossing great chunks of space instantly, dipping in and out of the sun, impervious, unstoppable.

"We're ready," Niels announced, "we could go right now." But the designated date was March 15, 2166, so they waited.

Three days before that date they flew from SpaceCity to Callisto, second largest of Jupiter's moons.

Callisto Base had been built as a facility for monitoring and observing Jupiter, not a convention center, and now the population of that moon had grown by several thousand scientists and politicians and media teams. The visitors had to live in their own ships, and take turns coming into the base for authorized meetings. Many meetings were videxed, so that via 3V media coverage, the population of almost the entire planet Earth could be virtually present on Callisto Base.

The Jupship was checked one last time. So were Niels and Marucia. Then they waited for the signal which the Jupiterans had promised.

Exactly at the designated time, there was a bright light shining out of Jupiter, like the sun itself, from the equatorial band just north of the Great Red Spot. A beacon, to lead them in. It was time to go.

The "Cosmic Couple" waved farewell and went into the Jupship, sealed the hatch. The gravwarp engines pulsed and the ship lifted, twirled, and flew gracefully off toward Jupiter, with none of the dramatic smoke and fire of early space exploration, more like starting the family car and cruising along a smooth and empty freeway.

We all watched this event, almost every one of us in the Solar System, via the cameras mounted on the Jupship: the spectacular planet Jupiter filled our 3V screens, the eternal storms clearly seen now, the red spot swirling and twisting itself backwards against the parallel bands of wind, the colors separating as the Jupship penetrated the atmosphere of the gas giant. Beneath the ship, the beacon light grew larger, brighter.

"We're reading 1 atmospheric pressure now," Niels reported, "clouds of fine ammonia ice crystal at this level, the beacon seems to be very close."

Suddenly the viewscreen went blank as it overloaded with light.

"What..?" Marucia felt a moment of panic. "We're going to...HIT it!!"

"Don't worry," Niels assured her, "We're out of phase with the physical universe, otherwise we'd better not dive into Jupiter's atmosphere at all."

They passed through the source of the beacon itself, which was simply an atmospheric phenomenon, a vast swirling disk of ice crystals acting as a mirror to reflect the light of the sun back to Earth and Callisto, and as they passed it shattered and scattered into a mist that was blazed away in the storm, and the light was no more.

"We've lost the beacon!" Marucia called, "We don't know where to go now!"

Niels cut in, "We're continuing the descent. I'm sure we'll get further signs, this atmosphere is clearly too thick for a light to penetrate all the way through from the surface."

On the monitors we could all see the sky growing yellow, brown, ammonia becoming a wet mist now, darker...

They were lost to radio contact 35,000 km in. The last words we received were Niels and Maru talking to each other.

"Are you scared?" He asked her.

"Not now," she answered corageously, "we've survived the Sun. How can Jupiter be worse that THAT?" she replied.


Then the static covered their signal. And has ever since.

They have not been heard from or seen again.

Nor have the Jupiterians sent us any messages, there is only the static. At the time of this writing, 24 years have passed since 21 March 2166. Are Niels and Maru dead? Are they prisoners? Or are they living happily ever after in a Jupiterian Eden?

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The Return