would lead him to the Fishnet Jungle, through a cleft of the Seven Peak Mountains, and after that along the shores of the Turquoise Ocean. The points were fairly familiar in his mind, but the jungle was the main thing that worried him—how he was going to pick his way through its weird mass.
Finally he pushed his compass back in place on his back and swiftly checked over his heavily shielded equipment—first-aid pack, down to a common container of smelling salts, tabloid provisions, and an oxygen-jet pistol, the only practicable weapon of destruction in an atmosphere containing vast preponderances of hydrogen and ammonia. Not much equipment, but enough in a world where every scrap of weight added to an already crushing burden.
Cardew braced himself and emerged from his protection into the full blast of the eternal wind. Since dawn had arrived about an hour ago, he had about eight clear hours in which to make further progress; with a bit of luck he might reach the Fishnet Jungle in that time. That it was already quite visible to him in the weak daylight filtering through the writhing clouds signified nothing. There were always the tycane and the constant down-drag to be reckoned with. He moved with labored effort, the strain bathing him in perspiration inside his hot, heavy suit.
To the rear, now far distant, gleamed the sunken dome of the penal settlement, and farther away still the governor’s habitation. To left and right there was naught but hard red ground. Once it had all been like the Red Spot; now it had cooled to produce an effect as dreary as anything that could be imagined.
Only the Fishnet Jungle, with its blunted trees and weird tracery branches—from which the fanciful name was derived—provided any relief in the otherwise crushed monotony. Even the highest summit of the distant Seven Peak Mountains only reached a thousand feet in height, held down by the mighty gravitation.
Cardew struggled on, forcing his weight-anguished body into the teeth of the tycane. He found it hard to believe that the wind outside his helmet was absolute poison, that the trees of the distant jungle were basically ammonium carbonate, living in a temperature of a hundred and twenty degrees below centigrade zero.…
Mad, idiotic world! It was populated, too, by creatures as mad as their environment. Cardew had heard of them—mighty strong things with a fairly high scientific intelligence—known as the joherc, derived from Jovian Hercules. Where they abided, however, was something of a mystery; since they were rarely seen on the surface.
Grunting with effort. Cardew went on slowly, slipping and sliding on ground of enormous hardness, one wary eye fixed on the distant, quivering upspoutings of molten matter from the Great Red Spot. No telling when it might decide to erupt. It had a nasty habit now and again of covering thousands of square miles of Jupiter with molten chemicals. That, in a landscape normally bitterly cold, produced effects almost too cataclysmic for imagination—certainly death for a lone traveler.
Occasionally the fitful gleams of sunlight through the dense scurrying clouds made the scene even more desolate, painted it with weak, washy colors, like some redstone plane of Earth at twilight. Gloom, depression, and barrenness—mighty Jove had all these attributes.
Cardew stopped only once, to nourish himself, on his journey toward the jungle. He moved a switch on his helmet and a spring, releasing itself, dropped into his open mouth a vitamin pellet, following it with a rejuvenating drink-essence tablet. Neither of them were more than quarter of a centimeter in size, but so potent in effect that he felt renewed strength surge into his aching limbs.
He rose up again from the rock against which he had been lounging and staggered on—onward all through the drab afternoon, battling the eternal wind, muttering threats, in good American, upon Jupiter and all it contained.
As he had calculated, he reached the outskirts of the Fishnet at dusk. The twilight was brief, dimmed from murky drabness into night, relieved only slightly by the clouded glow of the attendant moons.
With lackluster eyes he peered into the shadows beneath the Fishnet trees. In every direction about their boles sprouted the weird, below-zero forms of Jovian plants, bearing not the vaguest relation to Earthly vegetation, but patterned in some incomprehensible surrealist style, full of bars, cubes, oblongs, and angles, more crystal than vegetational in form. Flowers there were none. Jovian vegetation, in the main, reproduced itself by fission and lived in the slow, creeping style of the unicell. There was something almost disgusting about the way the growths occasionally popped noisily and became two, growing with extreme slowness thereafter toward maturity and further reproduction. Cardew heard them bisect quite distinctly through his sensitive external helmet detector as he plodded onward—
Until he gained a Fishnet tree with branches lower than the rest— To scramble into them, though they were only six feet from the ground, demanded enormous effort—took thirty minutes of muscle-wrenching strain. But once he was in their firmly spread, bed-like mass he relaxed with a sigh, satisfied that he was safe from the weird ammoniacal crawlers.
Beyond a wish that he could get out of his space suit and have a real breath of honest fresh air, he had no regrets. So far, so good. His eyes closed with leaden weariness; the tree branch moved up and down in the grip of the tycane slowly, ceaselessly—
As he half dozed, the detector phones brought in a medley of vaguely familiar noises above the wind’s whine, chief amongst which were the weird, half-human twittering of the ostriloath—strange, birdlike creature crossed vaguely between ostrich and sloth—and the deep bass grunting of the feather-sphere, the porcupine of Jove, rolling everywhere at terrible speed like a heavily flaked cannon ball. Familiar sounds all—
Then, suddenly, Cardew jolted violently upright, wide awake, his heart slamming painfully with the sudden intensity of his effort, his ears still ringing with what had definitely been a human shout of fear!
“Damned delusions!” he breathed quickly, staring round and below at the crazy jungle. “Couldn’t have been—”
He frowned in bewilderment. A scream from inside a helmet would be carried to the amplifier on the helmet exterior; even the slightest cry from anybody would be instantly enormously amplified by the dense atmosphere. But nobody else could be in such a cockeyed spot, surely—
Cardew broke off in his quick reflections and stared with amazed eyes through the clear patch between the nearest Fishnet trees. The light of Europa shone down through cloud breaks upon a space-suited figure lying flat on the ground, struggling against the gravity to tug out an oxygen pistol. A little distance away a hideous little-headed sican, violently strong, sheathed in an armor plating of frozen scales, fixed his intended prey with enormous glassy eyes. It was the largest of all Jovian animals, measuring five feet in length and nearly the same in width. Then it began to advance slowly on its six immensely powerful legs.
Almost as quickly as the danger registered in Cardew’s mind, he had dropped violently to the ground and tugged out his own oxygen pistol. With ponderously dragging feet, the ghastly pull of a nightmare’s dragging chains, he tried to run forward—fired his gun as he went.
Immediately a vicious stream of devastating flame spouted through the moonlight, momentarily lighted the mad glade with bluish-yellow fire. The force of the jet struck the sican clean in the center of its body, sent it rearing upward in a sudden paroxysm of searing pain.
Maddened, it twirled round and jumped dangerously near the sprawling, motionless figure. Then, at another vicious cut across its hideous face, it twisted round and traveled at high speed on its enormously strong legs into the jungle fastness.
Cardew felt the sweat of relief suddenly start to pour down his face. He replaced his gun and clumped slowly forward against the raging wind, turned over the prostrate figure with considerable effort. Jerking out his torch, he flashed the beam through the dense face glass, then started
