WHAT THE CAMERA SHOWED
A half hour later we had our recordings. Joan sat facing me on the
elevated pilot dais, her head swathed in bandages. Dawson and the two
other members of our crew stood just beneath us, their faces sombre in
the cube-light.
They had miraculously escaped injury, although Dawson had a badly
shaken up look. His hair was tousled and his jaw muscles twitched.
Dawson was fifty-three years old, but the others were still in their
early twenties--stout lads who could take it.
The fuel unit control pilot, James Darnel, was standing with his
shoulders squared, as though awaiting orders. I didn't want to take
off. I had fought Joan all the way, but now that we were actually on
Jupiter I wanted to go out with her into the unknown, and stand with
her under the swirling, star-concealing mist.
I wanted to be the first man to set foot on Jupiter. But I knew now
that the first man would be the last. The atmospheric recordings had
revealed that there were poisons in Jupiter's lethal cloud envelope
which would have corroded our flesh through our space suits and burned
out our eyes.
Joan had been compelled to bow to the inevitable. Bitterly she sat
waiting for me to give the word to take off. I was holding a portable
horizon camera in my hand. It was about the smallest, most incidental
article of equipment we had brought along.
The huge, electro-shuttered horizon camera which we had intended to use
on Ganymede had been so badly damaged by the jar of our descent that
it was useless now. We had projected the little camera by a horizontal
extension tripod through a vacuum suction lock and let it swing about.
I didn't expect much from it. It was equipped with infra-red and
ultra-violet ray filters, but the atmosphere was so dense outside I
didn't think the sensitive plates would depict anything but swirling
spirals of mist.
I was waiting for the developing fluid to do its work before I broke
the camera open and removed the plates. We had perhaps one chance in
ten of getting a pictorial record of Jupiter's topographical features.
I knew that one clear print would ease Joan's frustration and
bitterness, and give her a sense of accomplishment. But I didn't
expect anything sensational. Venus is a frozen wasteland from pole to
pole, and the dust-bowl deserts of Mars are exactly like the more arid
landscapes of Earth.
Most of Earth is sea and desert and I felt sure that Jupiter would
exhibit uniform surface features over nine-tenths of its crust. Its
rugged or picturesque regions would be dispersed amidst vast, dun
wastes. The law of averages was dead against our having landed on the
rim of some blue-lit, mysterious cavern measureless to man, or by the
shores of an inland sea.
But Joan's eyes were shining again, so I didn't voice my misgivings.
Joan's eyes were fastened on the little camera as though all her life
were centered there.
"Well, Richard," she urged.
My hands were shaking. "A few pictures won't give _me_ a lift," I said.
"Even if they show mountains and crater-pits and five hundred million
people gape at them on Earth."
"Don't be such a pessimist, Richard. We'll be back in a month with
impermeable space suits, and a helmet filter of the Silo type. You're
forgetting we've accomplished a lot. It's something to know that the
temperature outside isn't anything like as ghastly as the cold of
space, and that the pebbles we've siphoned up show Widman-statten lines
and contain microscopic diamonds. That means Jupiter's crust isn't
all volcanic ash. There'll be something more interesting than tumbled
mounds of lava awaiting us when we come back. If we can back our
geological findings with prints--"
"You bet we can," I scoffed. "I haven't a doubt of it. What do you
want to see? Flame-tongued flowers or gyroscopic porcupines? Take your
choice. Richard the Great never fails."
"Richard, you're talking like that to hide something inside you that's
all wonder and surmise."
Scowling, I broke open the camera and the plates fell out into my hand.
They were small three by four inch positive transparencies, coated on
one side with a iridescent emulsion which was still slightly damp.
Joan's eyes were riveted on my face. She seemed unaware of the presence
of the crewmen below us. She sat calmly watching me as I picked up the
top-most plate and held it up in the cube-light.
I stared at it intently. It depicted--a spiral of mist. Simply that,
and nothing more. The spiral hung in blackness like a wisp of smoke,
tapering from a narrow base.
"Well?" said Joan.
"Nothing on this one," I said, and picked up another. The spiral was
still there, but behind it was something that looked like an ant-hill.
"Thick mist getting thinner," I said.
The third plate gave me a jolt. The spiral had become a weaving ghost
shroud above a distinct elevation that could have been either a
mountain or an ant-hill. It would have been impossible to even guess at
the elevation's distance from the ship if something hadn't seemed to be
crouching upon it.
The mist coiled down over the thing and partly obscured it. But enough
of it was visible to startle me profoundly. It seemed to be crouching
on the summit of the elevation, a wasplike thing with wiry legs and
gauzy wings standing straight out from its body.
My fingers were trembling so I nearly dropped the fourth plate. On the
fourth plate the thing was clearly visible. The spiral was a dispersing
ribbon of mist high up on the plate and the mound was etched in sharp
outlines on the emulsion.
The crouching shape was unmistakably wasplike. It stood poised on the
edge of the mound, its wings a vibrating blur against the amorphously
swirling mist.
From within the mound a companion shape was emerging. The second
"wasp" was similar to the poised creature in all respects, but its
wings did not appear to be vibrating and from its curving mouth-parts
there dangled threadlike filaments of some whitish substance which was
faintly discernible against the mist.
The fifth and last plate showed both creatures poised as though for
flight, while something that looked like the head of still another wasp
was protruding from the summit of the mound.
I passed the plates to Joan without comment. Wonder and exaltation
came into her face as she examined them, first in sequence and then
haphazardly, as though unable to believe her eyes.
"_Life_," she murmured at last, her voice tremulous with awe. "_Life
on Jupiter._ Richard, it's--unbelievable. This great planet that we
thought was a seething cauldron is actually inhabited by--_insects_."
"I don't think they're insects, Joan," I said. "We've got to suspend
judgment until we can secure a specimen and study it at close range.
It's an obligation we owe to our sponsors and--to ourselves. We're here
on a mission of scientific exploration. We didn't inveigle funds from
the Smithsonian so that we could rush to snap conclusions five hundred
million miles from Earth.
"_Insectlike_ would be a safer word. I've always believed that life
would evolve along parallel lines throughout the entire solar system,
assuming that it could exist at all on Venus, Mars, or on one of
the outer planets. I've always believed that any life sustaining
environment would produce forms familiar to us. On Earth you have the
same adaptations occurring again and again in widely divergent species.
"There are lizards that resemble fish and fish that are lizardlike. The
dinosaur Triceratops resembled a rhinoceros, the duck-billed platypus
a colossal. Porpoises and whales are so fishlike that no visitor from
space would ever suspect that they were mammals wearing evolutionary
grease paint. And some of the insects look just like crustaceans, as
you know.
"These creatures _look_ like insects, but they may not even
be protoplasmic in structure. They may be composed of some
energy-absorbing mineral that has acquired the properties of life."
Joan's eyes were shining. "I don't care what they're composed of,
Richard. We've got to capture one of those creatures alive."
I shook my head. "Impossible, Joan. If the air outside wasn't poisonous
I'd be out there with a net. But there are limits to what we can hope
to accomplish on this trip."
"We've siphoned up specimens of the soil," Joan protested. "What's to
stop us from trying to catch up one of them in a suction cup?"
"You're forgetting that suction cups have a diameter of scarcely nine
inches," I said. "These creatures may be as huge as the dragonflies of
the Carboniferous Age."
"Richard, we'll project a traveling suction cup through one of the
vacuum locks and try to--"
Her teeth came together with a little click. Startled, I turned and
stared at her. Despite her elation she had been sitting in a relaxed
attitude, with her back to the control panel and her latex taped legs
extended out over the dais. Now she was sitting up straight, her face
deathly pale in the cube-light.
The creatures were standing a little to the right of the rigidly
staring crewmen, their swiftly vibrating wings enveloped in a pale
bluish radiance which swirled upward toward the ribbed metal ceiling of
the pilot chamber.
[Illustration: _The creature was standing, wings swiftly vibrating,
enveloped in a pale, bluish radiance._]
Enormous they were--and unutterably terrifying with their great,
many-faceted eyes fastened in brooding malignance upon us.
Joan and I arose simultaneously, drawn to our feet by a horror such as
we had never known. A sense of sickening unreality gripped me, so that
I could neither move nor cry out.
Dawson alone remained articulate. He raised his arm and pointed, his
voice a shrill bleat.
"Look out, sir! Look out! There's another one coming through the wall
directly behind you."
The warning came too late. As I swung toward the quartz port I saw
Joan's arm go out, her body quiver. Towering above her was a third
gigantic shape, the tip of its abdomen resting on her shoulders, its
spindly legs spread out over the pilot dais.
As I stared at it aghast it shifted its bulk, and a darkly gleaming
object that looked like a shrunken bean-pod emerged from between Joan's
shoulder blades.
Joan moaned and sagged on the dais, her hands going to her throat.
Instantly the wasp swooped over me, its abdomen descending. For an
awful instant I could see only a blurred shapelessness hovering over me.
Then a white-hot shaft of pain lanced through me and the blur receded.
But I was unable to get up. I was unable to move or think clearly. My
limbs seemed weighted. I couldn't get up or help Joan or even roll over.
My head was bursting and my spine was a board. I must have tried to
summon help, for I seem to remember Dawson sobbing: "I'm paralyzed too,
sir," just before my senses left me and I slumped unconscious on the
dais.
How long I remained in blackness I had no way of knowing. But when I
opened my eyes again I was no longer on the dais. I was up under the
ceiling of the pilot chamber, staring down at the corrugated floor
through what looked like a glimmering, whitish haze.
Something white and translucent wavered between my vision and the
floor, obscuring the outlines of the great wasps standing there.
There were five wasps standing directly beneath me in the center of the
pilot chamber, their wings a luminous blur in the cube-light.
My perceptions were surprisingly acute. I wasn't confused mentally,
although my mouth felt parched and there was a dull, throbbing ache in
my temples.
The position in which I found myself and the whitish haze bewildered
me for only an instant. I knew that the "haze" was a web the instant I
studied its texture. And when I tried to move and couldn't the truth
dawned in all its horror.
I was suspended beneath the ceiling of the chamber in a translucent,
hammock-like web. I was lying on my stomach, my limbs bound by fibrous
strands as resistant as whipcords.
Minutes which seemed like eternities passed as I lay there with fear
clutching at my heart. I could only gaze downward. The crewmen had
vanished and the wasps were standing like grim sentinels in front of
the control panel.
I was almost sure that Joan and the crewmen were suspended in similar
webs close to me. I thought I knew what the wasps had done to us.
I had talked to Joan about life evolving along parallel lines
throughout the Solar System, but I hadn't expected to encounter life as
strange and frightening as this--insectlike, and yet composed of some
radiant substance that could penetrate solid metal and flow at will
through the walls of a ship.
Some radiant substance that had weight and substance and could touch
human flesh without searing it. Nothing so ghastly strange and
yet--indisputably the creatures were wasplike. And being wasplike their
habit patterns were similar to those of so-called social wasps on Earth.
Social wasps sting caterpillars into insensibility, and deposit eggs in
their paralyzed flesh. When the wasp-grubs hatch they become ghoulish
parasites, gruesomely feasting until the caterpillars dwindle to
repulsive, desiccated husks.