That would not have happened on a test centrifuge or aboard a watchship under full thrust, where a person could sit or lie at ease.
Danu raged. Stratospheric impact made the boat shudder, bounce about, buck like a mustang. Deeper down, at low relative speed, she encountered winds to send her tumbling. If not skillfully met, they might have torn her wings off.
Designed for Earthlike worlds, she was aerodynamically poor on this one. Nor did skill alone compensate, when the whole sky was strange. More than once, Joelle herself was taken by surprise, as some violence erupted which she had not had the data to predict. However swift her response, it must be spoken, which ate seconds. From a Betan mother ship she could have piloted directly, could virtually have been the vessel. Dozsa and Rueda, though, must cope however they were able, till they got a word to help them.
Twice they passed through storms. Blindness clamped down, until lightning turned flying cloud wracks incandescent. Thunder followed; it was like being inside a cannon. The gales racketed and snatched. Each drop through turbulence ended with spinejarring force. Roll, pitch, and yaw flung bodies against harnesses. Once hailstones crashed against the hull, once a Noah’s rain engulfed it.
Throughout, Caitlin watched. She could do nothing else, except now and then tap a shoulder and point to a thing in the distance that looked sinister –
mountain-tall cloud, vortex of turbulence, snake’s nest of lightning, or a wildness for which humans had no ready word. Otherwise she refrained from bothering the men. She watched, she sent her whole being outward, she laughed Side 119
Anderson, Poul – Avatar, The for happiness.
Williwaw won through. Occasionally it seemed doubtful she would, despite computations giving her favorable odds, but she did. Reaching the altitude whence the broadcasts originated, more or less, she found peace. Here the air was thick and warm and had no haste. Thermal currents welled from below to help upbear her. The autopilot could take over. She lazed through a broad circle and began a broadcast of her own, taped signals on various Danaan wavebands. A beam carried Rueda’s dull tone aloft: “We are safe. Repeat, we are safe. Give us a few minutes to rest, and we’ll report.”
Like Dozsa, he slumped, chin falling on chest. Caitlin leaned forward to touch both men. “Oh, my poor tired dears-” She stopped, for she grew aware of what was around her.
Without light amplification, she would have been blind. Given it, she saw widely. The foreignness was such that she needed a while before vision could truly register; but an onrush of beauty came at once.
Above, heaven was indigo at the horizon, lightening to violet at the zenith. Single clouds wandered there, faerie shaped, colored for a Colorado sunset. The sun itself stood high in a rainbow ring. Below, a cloud deck lay like an ocean, but no ocean that men had ever sailed. Its reach was imperial; it had peaks, canyons, smoky plains, great slow cataracts, infinitely intricate yet never twice the same. Aureate, it was touched with reds, streaked with blues and greens and browns, shadowed where it plunged into mysteries.
A flock went by afar. Were they winged, were they finned? They were gone too fast to see; but they had gleamed.
There came a lulling sound from outside, from the calmly flowing wind.
Caitlin reclined her chair and let aches begin to drain away. The heaviness upon her was only like a strong, over-kindly hand.
After a while the humans recovered enough to talk with their ship, take readings, record views, and talk some more. A while after that, certain Danaans arrived.
* * *
Caitlin saw them first. Her partners were busy again, not as frantically as on the descent, but worriedly. Communication to space had cut off. The speaker gave nothing but crackle, buzz, chaos, no matter what Rueda tried.
Somewhere above them, in that serene-looking heaven, some electric event had somehow made the upper atmosphere opaque to every frequency at his command. This was not a possibility, or at least a likelihood, that the holothetes had foreseen. They were not gods, they had had less information to go on than a Betan expedition would have gathered, and besides, every world in the universe is unique. Dozsa feared the trouble portended an equally sudden change in the air. Dense as it was, its pressure close to the limit of what the hull could withstand, might not currents go through it, Gulf Streams of gas whose borders were roiled and dangerous? Without overmuch hope, he sought hints from instruments and from the feel of the boat.