the first page of history had been written, a huddled figure had
painfully scrawled the last page of a story that Hunt had read so
recently in an office in Houston, a quarter of a million miles
away. He thought of the time that had passed since those events had
taken place-of the empires that had grown and fallen, the cities
that had crumbled to dust, and the lives that had sparkled briefly
and been swallowed into the past-while all that time, unchanging,
the secret of these rocks had lain undisturbed. Many minutes passed
before Hunt reemerged and straightened up in the dazzling sunlight.
Again he frowned up toward the ridge. Something tantalizing was
dancing elusively just beyond the fringes of the thinking portions
of his mind, as if from the subconscious shadows that lay below,
something insistent was shrieking to be recognized. And then it was
gone.
He clipped the flashlight back into position on his belt and walked
across to rejoin Alberts, who was studying some rock f ormations on
the opposite wall.
chapter twenty
The giant ships that would fly on the fifth manned mission to
Jupiter had been under construction in Lunar orbit for over a year.
Besides the command ship, six freighters, each capable of carrying
thirty thousand tons of supplies and equipment, gradually took
shape high above the surface of the Moon. During the final two
months before scheduled departure, the floating jumbles of
machinery, materials, containers, vehicles, tanks, crates, drums,
and a thousand other items of assorted engineering that hung around
the ships like enormous Christmas-tree ornaments, were slowly
absorbed inside. The Vega surface shuttles, deep-space cruisers,
and other craft also destined for the mission began moving in over
a period of several weeks to join their respective mother ships. At
intervals throughout the last week, the freighters lifted out of
Lunar orbit and set course for Jupiter. By the time its passengers
and final complement of crew were being ferried up from the Lunar
surface, only the command ship was left, hanging alone in the void.
As H hour approached, the gaggle of service craft and attendant
satellites withdrew and a flock of escorts converged to stand a few
miles off, cameras transmitting live via Luna into the World News
Grid.
As the final minutes ticked by, a million viewscreens showed the
awesome mile-and-a-quarter-long shape drifting almost imperceptibly
against the background of stars; the serenity of the spectacle
seemed somehow to forewarn of the unimaginable power waiting to be
unleashed. Exactly on schedule, the ifight-control computers
completed their final-countdown-phase checkout, obtained “Go”
acknowledgment from the ground control master processor, and
activated the main thermonuclear drives in a flash that was visible
from Earth.
The Jupiter Five Mission was under way.
For the next fifteen minutes the ship gained speed and altitude
through successively higher orbits. Then, shrugging off the
restraining pull of Luna with effortless ease, Jupiter Five soared
out
and away to begin overtaking and marshaling together its flock of
freighters, by this time already strung out across a million miles
of space. After a while the escorts turned back to~ward Luna, while
on Earth the news screens showed a steadily diminishing point of
light, being tracked by the orbiting telescopes. Soon even that had
vanished, and oniy the long-range radars and laser links were left
to continue their electronic exchanges across the widening gulf.
Aboard the command ship, Hunt and the other UNSA scientists watched
on the wall screen in mess twenty-four as the minutes passed by and
Luna contracted into a full disk, partly eclipsing that of Earth
beyond. In the days that followed, the two globes waned and fused
into a single blob of brilliance, standing out in the heavens to
signpost the way they had come. As days turned into weeks, even
this shrank to become just another grain of dust among millions
until, after about a month, they could pick it out only with
difficulty.
Hunt found that it took time to adjust to the idea of living as
part of a tiny man-made world, with the cosmos stretching away to
infinity on every side and the distance between them and everything
that was familiar increasing at more than ten miles every second.