Chapter 20 Chapter 6: Kingdom of the Gods

But they haven't finished dealing with Jupiter.Far in the distance, two probes from Discovery were touching the atmosphere. One of them never fell again; probably because the angle was too straight, it was burned before the information could be sent.Another was more successful; it sliced ​​through the outer layers of Jupiter's atmosphere, brushed past it, and returned to space.As planned, it decelerates through this contact and falls back into a large elliptical orbit.Two hours later it re-entered the atmosphere on the sunward side of the planet at a speed of 70,000 miles an hour. Immediately it was enveloped in white-hot gas, and radio contact was lost.The two observers at the console waited anxiously for several minutes.They wondered if the probe would survive, whether the fusible heat shield would all burn off before slowing down.If burned, the entire instrument will also turn into gas in less than a second.

However, the guards withstood it.Hold until the comet reaches its destination.The charred debris was flung off, and the droid extended its antennae and began observing with its electronic senses.By this time, aboard Discovery, almost a quarter of a million miles away, the radios began to receive the first real news about Jupiter. Thousands of pulses per second report the composition of the atmosphere, pressure, temperature, magnetic field, radiation, and a dozen other kinds of data that only experts on Earth can decipher.One piece of information, however, was immediately intelligible; that was the color television images sent back by the crashing probe.

The robot sent back its first images when it first entered the atmosphere and dropped its protective gear. All I saw was a cloud of yellow mist, speckled with red spots, gliding past the camera with dizzying speed—upward as the probe was falling at hundreds of miles an hour. The fog was thickening; it was difficult to guess whether the camera was pointing at a depth of ten inches or ten miles, because there was no detail to focus the eye on.Judging by the television equipment, the mission appears to have failed.The television equipment was working, but there was nothing to watch in this foggy atmosphere.

Then, suddenly, the mist lifted.The probe must have penetrated the thick clouds and entered the clear sky—probably a region of near-pure hydrogen, scattered with some crystals of ammonia.While it is still difficult to judge the size of the image at this point, the lens is clearly pointing at a depth of several miles. For a moment, this strange sight meant little to eyes accustomed to the colors and shapes of Earth.Far, far below, there was an endless golden mottled sea, strewn with parallel ridges that might have been the crests of huge waves.But it was motionless; the field of vision was too large to see any movement.And that golden vista couldn't be water, because it's still high in Jupiter's atmosphere.It could only be another cloud cover.

Then, the camera caught something very strange, and because of the distance, it didn't seem to be seen.Many miles away, the golden landscape turned into a strangely symmetrical cone, like a volcano.On the top of the volcano there is a circle of small, fluffy clouds - all about the same size, not connected to each other, and alone.The clouds were unnatural and forbidding--if the word "natural" could be used for such a majestic scene. Then, with some disturbance in the denser atmosphere, the probe swerved into another space, and for a few seconds the television screen saw nothing but a blur of gold.Before long, the camera stabilizes; the "sea" is much closer, but still incomprehensible.At this time, patches of darkness can be seen, which may be some holes and gaps in the deeper atmosphere.

The probe is destined not to reach the bottom.With every mile it goes, the gas around it doubles in density, the more it sinks toward the planet's invisible surface.The greater the pressure.Still high above the mystic sea, the image flashed ominously, then vanished, and the first explorer from Earth shattered under the pressure of the atmosphere many miles deep around it. In its short life, the probe scanned perhaps a millionth of Jupiter's surface, and only just approached the planet's surface, which is still hundreds of miles deep under heavy fog.As the image faded from the screen, Bowman and Poole could only sit there, thinking the same thought in unison.

What the ancients did was indeed smarter than what they knew, and actually named this planet the head of the gods (the original text of Jupiter is Jupiter, which is the head of the gods in Roman mythology).If it had life on it, how long would it take to find it?And after that, it would take centuries for man to follow in the footsteps of his first explorer—with what vehicle? However, these matters have nothing to do with "Discovery" and its crew.Their goal was an even stranger world, almost twice as far away as the sun—and half a billion miles through comet-filled space.