Perhaps, he thought to himself, that was why men pitched camps on the South Cal of Everest, sailed ships across the seven seas, and held reunion dinners year after year to share nostalgic memories of school or army days. The challenges and the hardships that they faced together forged bonds between them that the protective cocoon of normal society could never emulate and awakened an awareness of qualities in themselves and in each other that could never be erased. He knew then that, like the sailor or the mountaineer, he would return time after time to know again the things that he had found on Ganymede.
Danchekker, however, was less of a romantic.
“I don’t care if they discover seven-headed monsters on Sat-
urn,” the professor said as they boarded the transporter. “Once I get home again I’m staying there. I’ve lived quite enough of my life already surrounded by these wretched contraptions.”
“I bet you find you’ve developed agoraphobia when you get there,” Hunt told him.
At Main there was another round of farewells to go through before they were driven out, now wearing spacesuits, to the S/iapieron’s lowered entrance section; they could not be flown directly up into the ship’s outer bays because the telescopic access tubes that projected from the buildings of the base-affording direct entry to UNSA ships and vehicles-were not designed to mate with the airlocks of Ganymean daughter vessels. Members of the Ganymean crew received them at the foot of the entrance ramp and conducted them up into the stern section, where an elevator was waiting to carry them up into the main body of the ship.
Three hours later loading was complete and the final departure preparations had been~rnade. Garuth and a small Ganymean rear-guard exchanged formal words of parting with the base commander and some of his officers, who had driven out to the ramp for the ceremony. Then the Earthmen boarded their vehicle and returned to the base while the Ganymeans withdrew into the S/iapieron and the stern section retracted upward into its flight position.
Hunt was alone in the cabin that had been allocated to him, taking in his last view of Main from a mural videoscreen, when ZORAC announced that takeoff was imminent. There was no sensation of motion at all; the view just started to diminish in size and flatten out as the ground fell away beneath. The Ganymedean landscape flowed inward from the edges of the picture and the surface details rapidly dissolved into a uniform sea of frosty whiteness as the ship gained altitude. Soon even the pinpoint of reflected light that was Main faded into the background, and an arc of blackness began advancing upward across the view as Ganymede’s dark side moved into the picture. At the top, the curvature of the moon’s sunlit side appeared, ushering in a gaggle of attendant background stars. The bright strip left in the center of the screen continued to narrow steadily, and at last its ends slipped in from beyond the edges of the frame to reveal it as a brilliant crescent hanging in the heavens, and already shrinking as he watched.
Then the crescent and the stars seemed to dissolve into diffuse smudges of light that flowed into one another until the whole screen was reduced to a uniform expanse of featureless, iridescent fog. The ship was now under main drive, he realized, and temporarily shut off from information coming in from the rest of the universe-information carried as electromagnetic waves anyway. He wondered what the Ganymeans used instead-to navigate by, for instance. Here was something he would raise with ZORAC.
But that could wait for now. For the moment he just wanted to relax and prepare his mind for other things. Unlike his voyage out aboard Jupiter Five, the journey to Earth would be measured in days.
chapter seventeen
And so the Ganymeans came at last to Earth.
After the failure of the various governments to reach agreement among themselves as to where the aliens should be received in the event of their accepting the invitation to visit, the Parliament of the United States of Europe had voted to go it alone and make their own preparations anyway-just in case. The place they selected was an area of pleasant open country on the Swiss shore of Lake Geneva, where, it was hoped, the climate would prove agreeable to the Ganymean constitution and the historical tradition of nonbelligerence would add a singularly appropriate note.