It became a sort of game. She would appear to relent for a while, and
listen to him quite seriously. Then, when he would take her outer
friendliness for encouragement, she would pull the switch and freeze
him colder than Callisto itself. On the seventh day out, she found
herself thinking, _I never knew I could be such a heel. I guess love
can turn any girl into a witch at times._
Rolf’s quick answering thought, _Let’s face it, Lynne, you mean all
the time, don’t you?_ served only to stiffen her wavering resolve to
make him pay through his aquiline nose for this second trick he had
pulled on her. Of course she intended to marry him--but not by any such
drunken, underhanded ruse as he had used on her. Nor did she intend to
let him get away with it. _The marlet!_
His snicker at her thoughts did little to improve her temper.
Then Jupiter loomed up, increasingly, ominously, in the bow vision
screen and, faced with the problem of tracking Callisto and making
a landing in the proper location, Rolf forgot his outraged ego and
concentrated on bringing the tiny spaceship in safely. Lynne, who
admired his rough-hewn efficiency, watched him in adoration, some of
which must have seeped through to warm his frozen id.
Once Rolf said, “A good thing this entity or whatever it is we’re
following seems to be located almost on top of the Earth Interplanetary
Administration outpost. This is supposed to be a frozen hellhole.” He
added a silent, _You should feel right at home there, enchilada_, and
anger once more reigned voiceless but supreme in the little ship.
But the terrifying splendor of Jupiter, seen from such close range,
caused them again to forget their puny problems. Its sulphurous yellow
cloud envelope was almost blindingly bright until, mercifully, they
skirted its twilight edge and emerged into shadow, lit only by the
large inner moons, Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, the last two of
them larger than the planet Mercury. A dazzling spectacle.
Then the frozen sweeps of Callisto were flattening out beneath them,
its frozen air lying in great white drifts in the Moonlike chasms
between the jagged peaks that splintered the horizon on every hand.
It was, Lynne thought, the most desolate sight she had ever seen. She
turned away, shuddering, from the screen, only to be recalled by an
urgent thought-summons from Rolf.
They were over one of the satellite’s few comparatively level surface
areas--and approximately in its center was an unmistakable Earthmen’s
camp--or what had been an Earthmen’s camp! It looked as if it had
been flattened out by a tremendous blow with the heel of some giant
hand. Only a pair of spaceships, sheltered behind a natural craggy
embankment, seemed to have survived intact. And on the frozen air
of the planet, close alongside the desolation, the letters SOS were
spelled out with empty fuel tins.
“Looks as though maybe I followed the right hunch coming out here after
all--with or without E.I.A. authorization,” said Rolf.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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