Chapter 14 — HELL PLANET

Space, 3-5-'15—We held a group meeting in due course to discuss our situation. We were the wretched refugee refuse, yearning to breathe free, who had learned the hard way not to believe all that was quoted in the geography texts, but we still had to decide on some course. Where were we to go?

Well, we would not go hungry. We had a full supply of food packs now, courtesy of the surplus stores of rich Jove, and the bodies of our men remained anchored to our hull. I wondered whether the Jupiter Patrol workmen might actually have spotted the nature of those bags and played stupid so as to avoid the awkwardness of having to dispose of them, perhaps even giving them decent burial. It might be politically inexpedient to accept bodies while rejecting living people. Had they inspected those bodies, they would have discovered how they had died, and it would have been more difficult for the Jupiter Patrol to maintain its official ignorance of the pirate problem. Jupiter, like our women, preferred to ignore certain unpleasant realities. Probably they had the physical capacity to deal with the pirates, but lacked the political motivation. It was all understandable—in its sickening fashion.

We knew we could not return to Callisto. Starvation in space would probably be preferable to what the authorities there would do to us to cover their own embarrassment at our very existence. We were, after all, tangible evidence of the failure of their system. They might not care to correct that failure, but they would certainly labor diligently to cover it up. Everywhere, concealment seemed preferable to correction!

Ganymede and Europa were little better. Io was largely uninhabitable, and its few residential domes were reputed to be horribly overcrowded. No salvation there!

That left the outer moonlets—who would hardly be likely to welcome our motley assemblage of women and children. Yet we did have to go somewhere, for we could not live indefinitely in space.

"Hidalgo!" Spirit exclaimed.

Señora Ortega's head turned toward her, and we all paused for consideration. Out of the mouths of babes...

We discussed it. Hidalgo is a planetoid no bigger than Amalthea, in a stretched-out orbit between Mars and Saturn. But it was no ordinary fragment, for a couple of centuries ago Jupiter assumed sovereignty over it, and more recently Hidalgo had become an actual state of the United States of North Jupiter, the only nonplanetary body to be granted that status. It was now a major tourist region. Huge pleasure domes were set on it, spinning on their bases to provide the kind of gravity the tiny planetoid could not. The population there was not Hispanic, but was polyglot and multiracial. Our kind could surely merge with their kind. There was always work for domestics, and that was one thing our women could handle. Our children could get superior schooling there and grow up as free citizens. Hidalgo, we reasoned, was so far out from Jupiter proper that the ban against refugees might not apply. Spirit, in her intuitive fashion, had come up with a truly intriguing prospect.

But there were formidable problems. Hidalgo did swing out past Jupiter's orbit, which was the basis for Jupiter's claim in it, but that did not mean it was close to Jupiter physically. It was a tiny, tiny mote in space, virtually impossible to discover by random search with a clumsy bubble. We would need an ephemeris, a detailed listing of the locations of bodies in space and time. These locations were given as triple-coordinate sets, computer-calculated, so that it was possible to pick a precise date and time and get the exact spacial coordinates of the desired object, relative to the sun and its position in the galaxy. Without the ephemeris, we could look until we died of old age for that grain of sand in the immensity of solar space.

We also did not have a drive system capable of getting us there. The jet we had was barely enough to move us around the Jupiter ecliptic—that is, the plane of the equator and inner moons—and Hidalgo is far outside that. The efficient Jupe workers had recharged our jet, for it, like everything else associated with this bubble, was near exhaustion, but no matter how fresh the jet was, it was grossly insufficient. We needed a powerful ion drive that would accelerate us at a significant fraction of gee, to aid our gravity lenses. To put it in simplest terms: We needed to add a more powerful motor to our sailboat. We could not simply center on a distant speck like Hidalgo and fall in to it; there was not enough gravity there to bring us in within a century or so.

And we needed more supplies: food, oxygen, electricity, all for a much longer journey. Lots of things like that, if we wanted to get there alive.

That was why we decided to raid an outpost on Io. That planet might not be worthwhile to settle on, but it would do just fine for a supply raid. The badlands sections had all sorts of technical facilities for monitoring the volcanoes and radiation intensity and such, and there were many study foundations there performing obscure research. They were well funded and surely had plenty of supplies to spare. Io is the most active planetary body in the Solar System, bar none, and that sort of thing is a magnet for scientists. We knew they had huge supplies of food and medicine and surplus equipment for every type of bubble and ship. Most important, they had complete libraries of ephemeridae.

I think it did not occur to any of us consciously at that time that what we contemplated was, in fact, piracy. All we knew was that we would die in high space if we did not float to a haven somewhere, and that the Jupe authorities had rejected us. It becomes much easier to justify strong measures, even illegal ones, when your life depends on them.

We also could not afford to doubt that everything we required for our extended journey through space would be available on Io. For if we made our play and did not achieve our needs, we were doomed. We were, in fact, making a gamble whose boldness would have appalled us a month before. Experience had altered our horizons drastically.

The period of revolution for Io is one and three-quarters days. You might think that would make it easy to intercept; just park for a day and wait for it to swing around. But it doesn't work that way. We were in orbit ourselves, and as we knew, orbits are not lightly shifted. So we had to use our precious jet to jockey around, letting Io catch up to us, using its gravity to wrestle us back in line. An expert navigator could have done it in a few hours; it took us two days, but we did get there.

Io was formidable as it loomed close. One volcano was bright shades of yellow, orange, brown, and red. The whole planet looked as if it had been recently scrambled—and, geologically speaking, it had.

You see, Io is not like other worlds. That may be the understatement of this narrative. It resembles them as a maddened sabre-tooth tiger on ancient Earth resembles a sleeping denatured pussycat. Other worlds, such as our own Callisto, may seem almost dead; Io is screamingly alive. The closer we got the more I remembered about it, and the less I liked what we planned. It wasn't the human opposition I feared; it was Io herself.

There's really too much to tell here; I'll try to touch on the essence only. Io, just over four hundred thousand kilometers from Jupiter, should have one face locked on Jupiter, the same way it is with Callisto and the others. But Europa, the next moon out, interferes, forcing Io into an eccentric orbit. That means her circuit isn't round and her velocity isn't constant. She moves at different speeds, and turns her face back and forth as though bothered by someone hovering just behind her shoulder. This has to do with the fundamental physics of the situation. Tidal forces develop, and these are not mere little tugs; it is more like a giant hand squishing an overripe orange, making the juices squirt and the peel buckle. That tidal action generates heat, keeping much of the interior of the planet molten. This in turn means constant change. New volcanoes keep popping up and spewing out their stuff and dying down, and the ground shifts restlessly. So maps are soon outdated, and no one can really say ahead of time what the details of the landscape will be—especially on the active face facing Jupiter. That's the bad face, the Gorgon-face, the uninhabitable one that spits sulfur in your eye and pollutes that whole region of space with radioactive debris. The one we were headed for.

But what choice did we have?

We glided in. It was night locally, with the inside face away from the sun, but glowing with its own savage vents. Truly, this was Hell we were coming to! Io is one terrible lady.

We floated along at a reasonably safe elevation, looking for our target. We had to select it by night, then hide the bubble and make a foray afoot, so there would be no hint of our intent. We agreed there should be no violence. We were raiding for what we had to have, but we were not criminals. We would pretend to be a scientific party that got isolated by a vagary of volcanic activity—a completely credible story on wild Io!—and once inside the dome, we would hijack the crew, using a mock bomb, and make them provide the supplies we needed. Peaceful hijacking had for centuries been a staple tool for the impoverished desperate.

It was indeed a desperate strategy. But if we won, it would give us our fair chance for refuge. If we lost, at least it would be quick. We had to do it.

We spotted a dome, but it was too small; it wouldn't have enough supplies. We moved on, and spotted another—too large. We didn't want to tackle any more than we had to; even our minimum requirement might prove to be more than we could handle. Finally, near a massive rocky escarpment, we discovered a medium-sized observation dome with several transport bubbles docked beside it. This was our target.

We floated down behind the escarpment, which resembled a wrinkle in that orange I mentioned before and seemed to be an ideal place to hide our bubble. But as we closed on it, we discovered that perspective and darkness had deceived us; this was a far more massive outcropping than thought. It was a mountain range, with the highest peak some eight or nine kilometers tall. Back on Callisto we had seen no hills beyond a few hundred meters high, so this was awesome. None of us had had experience with this exaggerated type of terrain. That is probably why we erred so disastrously.

We landed in a comfortably small niche in the mountain, tucked down well out of sight of the dome we stalked. Even an observation dome with the most powerful telescopes could not see through a mountain of sulfur. We weren't sure we could complete our mission before dawn, so we wanted the bubble to be properly concealed.

Helse and I were in the raiding party, because we spoke English, the common tongue of scientists in this region of space. My mother and Spirit stayed behind with thirty-four women, while twenty-five women formed the raiding party, in addition to the two of us. Señora Ortega led us. I think we all felt the excitement of adventure—but also knew it was grim business. I had heard it said that a person is most truly alive when death is near, and I think there is some truth in it.

Our first problem was getting down to the dome. We had parked near the base of the mountain—but that little ledge of a kilometer or so became abruptly gargantuan when we approached it afoot. Again, we had perceived it as it would have been on Callisto, a very gradual decline, much broader than it was tall. It was not so. It was the other way around.

The cliff was of sulfur dioxide ice, yellow underfoot. Maybe there was other rock beneath, but that was the surface. It wasn't slippery, fortunately, but it was unfamiliar, and we didn't trust it. There were small cracks and pocks and crevices in its layout, visible in the generous light of Jupiter, but we feared these could mask more dangerous nether flaws in the structure. But we traversed the more or less level portion without untoward event, headed toward the drop-off.

The descent was horrendous. We took one look over that awesome cliff and hastily roped ourselves together like ancient mountain climbers. I think we all suffered from acrophobia in that moment. But we had to get down to the base, where we could proceed on the level to the target dome. We let ourselves down the cliff on the rope, paying it out one person at a time, watching the party leaders step-slide down the steepening slope.

Helse and I were in the middle of the party. Even so, it was one frightening descent. The projecting edges of the mountain were like the blade of a pitted cleaver. We had to chip away the sharp corner and form a niche for the rope, so that it would neither slide nor fray. We wanted it to feed through exactly where and when we wanted it to.

Gravity here seemed to be more than on Callisto, though it is possible our time in low-gee had distorted our perception. Though Io is a smaller moon, it is far more dense. One might suppose that surface gravity would be the same for two worlds of equal mass even if their diameters differed, but that is not so; the smaller one has greater surface gravity, because that surface is closer to the center. So, though Io actually is slightly less massive than Callisto, it is almost twice as dense, and that makes the difference. Io is sized like Earth's lonely moon, but is a little more so in diameter, density, and mass, and a lot more so in activity.

Apart from this, the suits made us clumsy. A suit in vacuum, in a familiar region, is manageable; but in atmosphere and on an awkward surface it becomes more clumsy. There is environmental resistance. There was very little planetary atmosphere here, but we felt it nonetheless.

But mainly, our problem was the sheer height of our start. I hesitate to repeat myself, but it is difficult even to rationalize the impact this elevation had on us. From space a niche in the foothill of a mountain may seem minor, especially when it is down near the larger plain. But one kilometer is, after all, a thousand meters, and that is awesome up close. It seemed that if we fell, we would fall forever—and somehow, perversely, my apprehension made me almost want to fall, to get it over with. A fall at quarter-gee would not be nearly as ferocious as one at full-gee, but my nervous system had evolved on Earth, and it reacted as it would have on Earth. I was almost paralyzed with the fear of that height.

"Close your eyes," Helse told me, helmet to helmet. "Pretend it's only a few yards. Meters."

Coward that I was, I did, and it helped. But soon I was looking again, reminding myself that I hadn't been acrophobic while in the bubble. On the bubble had been another matter—but I believe that was understandable. Out here it was the feel of weight and the uncertainty of the rope that jittered me, rather than the actual elevation. Had I, for example, been using a reliable flying suit, this same elevation and slope would hardly have bothered me. At least, this is what I now prefer to believe.

So I scrambled over the dread ridge in my turn, just as if I felt no fear, and Helse followed me, and with that conquest of my hesitancy, my apprehension abated without actually disappearing. Commitment does seem to help. The women before and after us seemed to have no problems, though I was sure each experienced similar qualms.

The vista below was dramatic. The surface of Io was a tapestry of orange even in the reflected light from Jupiter. Dark runnels showed where some recent flow of sulfur had passed, and bright flame—or whatever it should be called, since no fire as we know it can burn in near-vacuum—showed at a roughly circular vent to the right. The observation dome was near this vent, partly sheltered by a lesser escarpment. It looked precarious to me, but I suppose there's no way to gather significant data on a sulfur volcano except by sitting beside it for a while and making on-the-spot notes. I wondered what the life expectancy of such researchers was. Probably that was a super-strong, super-insulated dome, able to withstand what it had to. But probably, too, the researchers possessed a certain quality of courage. A person did not have to be a muscular warrior to be brave, as the women of our bubble were showing.

We were step-sliding down the steep slope at about five kilometers per hour, so we had a half-hour descent to do. That was all right. But what, I wondered, about the return trip? And how much rope did we have? Not any kilometer length, for certain!

Sure enough, the rest of us had to set ourselves against the slope, clinging to sulfur-ice, while our end-person separated herself and us from the anchor at the top. She left a trailing length, so that we could use it to haul ourselves up the vertical portion of the slope and over the lip, but that was all. On our return trip we would have to climb unaided to that point. I didn't like it.

Now that we were no longer anchored, we proceeded more swiftly. Too swiftly—I tried to brake, for safety, but the onrush of sliding women hauled me along. In moments we were out of control. Inexperience was telling.

I think someone screamed. As I mentioned, it is not a complete vacuum on Io; the sulfur dioxide gas is around, especially near the hot vents where it can't freeze out, so sound is theoretically possible. Maybe it was conducted along the ground, or the rope. Anyway, there was reason to scream. We were sliding toward a sharper drop-off—and, judging from our present angle, this one had to be virtually vertical.

I dug in my feet with renewed desperation, chewing up a mass of chips and dust. So did Helse and the women. But the drag of those in front, who were completely out of control, was too great. We were all being hauled to that dread brink.

Then a woman toward the front drew a knife. She sawed at the rope, and in a moment it parted. Then she dug in her heels, and the rest of us did likewise, and this concerted effort was effective at last, and slowly we slowed.

But as we crunched to a nervous halt, we watched the first five women tumble over the brink, led by Señora Ortega.

Maybe it was just an irregularity, leading to a gentler slope below. In that case they would be all right, just bruised and perhaps angry at the rest of us for cutting them loose. It was an anger we could accept.

We worked our way sidewise, finding a better slope, avoiding the ledge. We each jammed our heels in at each step, making sure we would not get out of control again, though this slowed us enormously. Then we moved down. When we got below the level of the ledge we looked across anxiously, to see what had become of our leading segment.

There was nothing. The ledge overhung a developing crevice that widened into a channel for an avalanche, almost vertical. Those women might as well have fallen straight down.

What could we do but go on? We could not even see the lost women, let alone reach them, let alone help them, in the highly unlikely chance they survived. Even the time it took to make the effort would prejudice the success of our mission.

All of us had known this trek would be dangerous; now we had the proof. A similar fate would befall the rest of us if we didn't complete our mission.

So we paused, helmets bowed in silent mourning for Doña Concha and the others. That was the best we could do.

Io had taken her first victims. I was very much afraid they would not be her last ones.

We continued down. There were other ledges and other crevices, none of them having been evident during our approach in the bubble. We proceeded slowly and avoided them. Once bitten, thrice shy! This mountain had a great deal more character than we had anticipated, and now every trace irregularity loomed monstrously. Had we had any inkling of the enormity of the challenge the descent would represent, we would have landed elsewhere and avoided such a hazard. But that was most of our problem: ignorance and inexperience. Both were being rapidly abated, and we did at last make it to the base. But it took us almost an hour, twice as long as budgeted.

We untied ourselves and marched across the orange surface. The woman who had cut the rope was now our leader. I didn't know who she was, and suspect most of the others shared my ignorance, but it didn't matter. She had tried to decline the title, but the rest of us insisted, by gestures. She had saved herself and the rest of us by her quick action. Her snap judgments promised to be most reliable. There is indeed a place for hasty decisions, and that place is the surface of Io, for there simply is not time to consider all aspects of many alternatives at comfortable leisure.

Our new leader sought the ridges, not trusting the snow-filled recesses. But these ridges, though only a few meters high, were irregular and fragmented, so our firm footing exacted a price of devious routing. We had to jump over crevices, and some of them were pretty wide and deep. Even with low gravity, this was nervous business.

Sure enough, one of our women slipped as she jumped over an especially bad one and fell down into it. The crack was about thirty meters deep, closing into a dark crease. She was wedged down there unmoving.

We started to lower a rope to her, to pull her out. Then we saw her suit: It was deflating. The fall had punctured it; perhaps it had snagged on a sharp projection. Her air was gone. Further effort on our part was pointless. We could not reach her in time to do any good.

As it happened, I recognized the suit of this woman. She was the mother of one of the smaller children. Her loss became more poignant in that moment, as I thought of what we would have to tell that child.

Señora Ortega's grandchildren, too, would have to be told. There was a grim business coming after we returned to the bubble, even if we completed our mission without further casualties. These were real people, not strangers, who were dying.

After that we avoided the worst cracks, though this meant risking the yellow snow. From some of the low areas fumes sprayed up, making little domes of frozen gas and particles like decorative waterfalls. These were really miniature volcanoes, I realized, harmless as long as we didn't step in them. This was the land of volcanoes.

We tramped on for hours, sacrificing time in favor of safety. Dawn came, as the moon's rapid orbit brought it a quarter circle around Jupiter in ten hours—which hours we had used up in our pre-landing survey and then in our suiting-up and organization and slow descent and march. We had grossly underestimated the time such routine required.

On Callisto, dawn outside the dome is pretty but unremarkable since we have our own day-night schedule inside the domes. Here dawn was immediate and forceful—in fact, more savage than we had imagined.

Sulfur dioxide sublimates to gas in the ambience of day on Io. It is frozen only during the night. With the first touch of sunlight, the snow around us began to heat and convert. As that light slowly intensified, this conversion became explosive. The gas expanded upward and outward, filling the vacuum, swirling past the irregular features of the landscape. We were soon amidst an upward-flinging storm.

In addition, the ground quaked. Io was now in the close, swift phase of its orbit about Jupiter, and the tidal force was manifesting. The entire body of this world was being squished—and her molten interior was squirting out of every available pore. This was not a volcano, it was an entire planetary face of eruptions. We were caught in an awakening hell.

And this surely was the physical location of Hell, I realized. Hell did have to be somewhere, if it had any reality at all, and this was conveniently located. Satan could ship the newly damned souls out here at light-speed by the busload, less than an hour's trip from Earth, and dump them out amidst the burning sulfur and leave them to their own miserable devices. Where could they go? And we, like the unlikely fools we were, had come here voluntarily. Our souls would not have far to travel when they departed our bodies.

We had to rope ourselves together again, lest the rising winds of the filling vacuum blow us away. New crevices were yawning, and the constant shaking of the ground was as deeply unsettling to our attitude as to our bodies. We were accustomed to a stable planet. Where could we hide—from this?

We plowed on toward the target dome, huddling against the titanic forces of nature being unleashed about us. When a person fell, two more picked her up. When a segment of our line of people was blown toward a crevice, the rest of the line dug in instantly and pulled them back. We were learning to react correctly.

But vicious Io would not permit us to continue so readily. She opened a battery of jets almost beneath us. The ground cracked open, and a line of ejecta spewed out immediately behind Helse. The sulfur sand and gas rose like the cutting edge of a knife—and what it cut was our rope. Suddenly the last eight women in our line were separated from us; we perceived their suited outlines dimly through the haze.

We tried to rejoin them—but now the vent widened, as if seizing on its advantage, and the wash of gas and sand expanded. The ground beneath the eight of them broke up; fragments of it were blasted out, raining down in a larger pattern. A central plume of eruption formed, surrounded by an envelope of swirling gas. We could no longer see our friends—and I suspected that was just as well. They could not have survived that blast.

It may seem that I lacked emotion as I watched my companions perish. I think this was not the case; my emotion was stifled, suppressed, voided, because I knew there was nothing to be gained by it, for me or the others. I had concerns of survival too pressing to be dissipated by the energy of emotion. So I watched with a kind of numbness, unable to comprehend the larger significance of what I saw, and plodded on.

The woman before me doubled over. I saw her suit deflating; a particle from the eruption had holed it. I tried to clap my hands over the puncture, but it was useless; her remaining pressure leaked out around my clumsy gloves and she was dead before I knew it. I saw her face inside the helmet, bloating out, the eyes—oh, God, depressurization is a terrible thing!

My numbness suffered another jolt. I realized that there was absolutely no merit in my survival. That particle could have holed my suit as readily as this woman's; only pure chance had dictated that she had occupied that spot in its trajectory instead of I. Had we been moving ahead a trifle faster, I would have been there; slower, and the woman ahead of her would have been there. Similarly, it had been luck that cut off the eight women behind us; it could as readily have been nine. That would have taken out Helse. At that point my speculation balked.

There was nothing to do but salvage the dead woman's oxygen tank. Fumblingly I moved it to my suit as a potential spare for whoever might need it. My suit had had about twenty-four hours of service remaining at the start of the Io venture, but some of the other suits might have less. I disconnected her body from the chain and we went on. Already I wished ardently that we had never landed on terrible Io; but it was far, far too late for any change of mind.

The angry planet was not through with us. She would not be satisfied, I realized, until every one of us was dead. A new gas vent opened, this one at a slant, and its blast shoved the twelve of us who remained rapidly forward toward the dome we were headed for. This might have seemed fortuitous—but we already knew the danger of too-swift progress and didn't like this. We tried to slow down, to control our route and our destiny—but the vent only increased its exhalation, while the ground shook violently, impeding our footing, and we had to move at Io's will, not our own.

The consequence of this loss of control was not long in coming. We found ourselves charging a vent overflowing with sulfur lava, the viscous bright-yellow material flowing slowly across out path. It would have been easy enough to avoid—if the wind behind us had not been shoving us directly into it.

We saw it coming and tried to veer left to get around it. But the lead women were already too close; they were carried right into the glowing mass. Their suits inflated like bubbles and burst with the sudden heat overload.

One woman, just at the edge of the flow, managed to brace her feet and turn and point left. Helse and I and the woman now in front of us scrambled desperately left—and the braced woman pulled on the rope, helping us crack the whip, so that we could gain impetus to avoid the lava.

It worked, and we scrambled to relative safety—but the woman who helped us could not maintain her footing and was carried on into the lava. She fell headlong, her suit immersed for a moment before the rapid heat expansion lifted it to the surface and popped it. She died helping us to live and so did several of the women closest to her. The rope burned through, setting our end free.

More sacrifice for us—and we didn't even know their names. They had surely known ours, though, for the sacrifice had been too deliberate; they were preserving us so we could speak English to the scientists of the dome and complete our mission.

I don't care if Io is literal Hell. I am sure those gallant women went to Heaven.

Helse and I and three women cleared the lava. We survived—we five, of the twenty-seven who had started this trek. And we still weren't at the dome.

The lava flow was following a great U-shaped channel. We were now in that channel, ahead of the flow, and knew we had to get out of it quickly. The lava was moving slowly, but that could change quickly—or a reverse gust of a gale could drive us back into it. All low ground was treacherous while lava was spewing!

We spotted the edge of the escarpment that sheltered the observation dome. This rose into a mountain not more than two kilometers high, but it was as jagged as the other. There should be shelter from wind and lava in its lee, as this was not a volcanic structure. It seemed that solid rock floated on the half-molten crust of the planet, much as continents were supposed to do on planets like Earth. We were very glad to have this solidity amidst this horribly living surface. Security was hard to come by, here in Hell!

It was effective. The wind cut off as we passed into the mountain shelter, and the ground was more stable here. We stayed at the base, close in, knowing better than to try to climb the impossibly steep slope looming beside us. Therein was the final error in our judgment of Io.

The foot of the mountain was not a straight line; it wound in and out in a series of sculptured bays. It was really quite pretty in its fashion, with the sulfur changing shades of orange depending on the angle of the sunlight and shadow and the direction from which we viewed it. Massive and somber, an island of stability in this ocean of violence, it seemed almost to lean over us protectively. The sun rose slowly higher as we walked, further warming the region. The yellowish atmosphere was thickening.

Then the avalanche started. I think a volcanic tremor actually set it off, but it was the softening sulfur snow that made it ready to happen. Too late, we realized what we had been flirting with when we cozied up to this mountain.

The entire face of it seemed to slide. Snow flew up in a yellow cloud, obscuring the more solid motion, but we could tell by the rumble that shook our bodies through ground and vapor that there were massive boulders within it. This probably happened every morning as the mountain warmed, while at night the sulfur dioxide solidified and coated it again. The mountain was more or less eternal, as this region went; not so its clothing of snow.

I knew that avalanches tended to flow in channels, as the material took the easiest route down. Thus it would concentrate mostly in one bay or another, by the time it struck the bottom. But which bay? Our survival depended on our choice of locale.

By common consensus we drew into one bay. We would ride it out together. But Helse, at the end, suddenly unlinked herself and bolted, terrified. She had panicked and done the worst possible thing.

I set out after her—and was brought short by the rope that linked me to the three women. With anger and desperation I untied myself, while the rumble swelled around us. Then I launched after Helse. I didn't know whether I could catch her and fetch her back in time, but I had to try. I suppose that was brave of me; I really didn't think about that at the time. I just knew I had to save Helse.

I sprinted after her, making better time than she in the clumsy suits because I had more power. But by the time I caught her, it was too late. The avalanche was upon us.

I wrapped my arms about her and threw her down, seeking to protect her with my body, though knowing it was useless. The mass of the falling material would crush us both to death in an instant. My last thought was that this was as good a way to die as any: embracing the woman I loved.

But—it didn't happen. A few chunks of discolored snow fell beside us; that was all. The noise was all about us, however, swelling to a crescendo—which then stifled out. The horrendous fall of sulfur had come—and we were alive.

We climbed back to our feet, somewhat dazed. I wondered how I had been able to hear so much, and realized that the atmosphere had filled out considerably as the snow sublimated; sound was indeed possible in the normal fashion, now.

The avalanche had settled in the other bay, where the three women waited. Now that bay was filled with the rubble of the mountain.

We examined the monstrous orange pile, cogitated a moment, and went on. As usual, Io had given us no other course.

We trudged on, burdened more by the horror of twenty-five women dead than by the fatigue of the trek. But now we walked some distance out from the base of the mountain, though that put us at the fringe of the wind and belching ground. We knew how far out we had to be to avoid the main mass of an avalanche, because we had just seen an avalanche. We could walk within that range, but had to be ready to bolt out of it at the first sound of a slide.

Sure enough, before long we felt the rumble of another avalanche, and saw the clouds of yellow snow. We were clear of it, but I was developing a profound dislike for that color. I think for the rest of my life I will associate yellow with Hell.

We were beyond the threat of the snowslide, but sympathetic vibrations in the ground opened new crevices at our feet, and we hastened right back toward the mountain snow. Scylla and Charybdis, the perils of the left and right—we had to be alert and quick to avoid them both!

Then we rounded an outcropping and spied the station dome. Never had a structure looked more beautiful to me! We bounded up to it, to the tiny-seeming lock at its base—and were met by a suited man.

He didn't even try to question us. He conducted us right inside, and soon we were in a blessedly warm chamber, breathing fresh air, feeling full Earth gravity. The gravity around the dome must have been reduced, as it was wherever a gravity lens focused the waves, but we hadn't noticed. That shows how far gone we were.

Best of all was the feeling of security. There were no storms in here, no jetting vents, no lava flows, and no avalanches. We could relax without risking prompt extinction. It was like a crushing burden evaporating from our bodies.

The head scientist showed up immediately to question us. He was an older man, obviously from Jupiter. He had short gray hair, large spectacles that would have been fashionable half a millennium ago, and of course he spoke nothing but English.

Our original plan was no good, despite our ability to speak the language. The fake bomb had been lost with our companions and we had no way to hijack this station, even if we had wanted to carry through. Too much had happened; we did not care to honor the memory of the women who had sacrificed themselves by the commission of a crime. Perhaps this was illogical, but it was the way I felt, and I believe Helse agreed. So we simply told the scientist the truth.

The man shook his head in polite amazement. "They actually towed you back out to space?" he asked, referring to an earlier part of our story. "I find that awkward to believe!" That was the word he used: awkward. He was trying to avoid implying that we were not telling the truth.

"Believe it, Mason," an associate told him. "The new administration has instituted a get-tough policy on immigration. No more Hispanics."

"But the governments of the moons are notoriously repressive!" the scientist said. "What other recourse do these people have?"

"Evidently to die in space," the other returned wryly. It was obvious that the scientists were humanitarians, unacquainted with the specifics of political policy.

The scientist, Mason—I was not certain whether that was his given or his surname—returned his attention to us. "So you plotted to hijack this station to obtain supplies—to go where?"

"Hidalgo," I repeated.

"But that's impossible! Hidalgo is on the far side of the Solar System at the moment!"

"We had planned to get an ephemeris to locate it exactly," I said. Such details hardly mattered, now that we had failed.

Mason went to a computer terminal. "Here is our ephemeris," he said, punching buttons. The screen illuminated, showing three-dimensional coordinates. "See—Hidalgo is just about as far away now as it is possible to be. You could travel more readily to Mars or Earth at the moment."

My weight seemed to increase. "We didn't know. We thought it could be close to Jupiter."

"It is close—in season. You happen to seek it at an inopportune time."

"Then we have nowhere to go," I said, thinking again of the twenty-five women who had given their lives for this hopeless mission. We had never had a chance, from the outset. Perhaps some other year I would be better able to appreciate the irony.

Mason pondered. "Politics is not my specialty. But I think you would be well advised to seek asylum on Leda. There is a Jupiter military station there whose commandant is of Hispanic descent. I suspect he would interpret the law more liberally than did those you encountered before."

"You're not arresting us?" Helse put in.

The scientist refocused on her. "Arrest you? For what you have told me? That would be self-incrimination! As I explained, I am not a political man, and if I were, I suspect I would not endorse this particular brand of politics." He shook his head, smiling. "Besides, you remind me too much of my niece."

Helse's face froze. I realized she was thinking of the supposed uncle-niece relationship she had had as a child prostitute. For all the apologies she had made for that system, it was evident that she wanted no more of it.

"Leda," I said quickly. "The next moon out from Callisto, but too small to house a population..."

"Indeed," Mason agreed, returning his attention to me. Helse relaxed, realizing that the scientist's remark had been innocent. "Its diameter is hardly ten kilometers. That would be about six miles in your measurement."

"No, kilometers is fine," I said. He really didn't know our culture. I realized that scientists, while certainly intelligent people, were not educated in things beyond their fields. Miles was his culture's unit of measurement, outside the scientific and technical arena, not mine.

He smiled. "Leda would fit within the shadow of one of our sulfur mountains here! But if you can reach it, I think it would be worth your while."

"We can reach it," I said, optimism returning. "If we can get the supplies we need, and an exact course. It's pretty far out."

"Eleven million kilometers from Jupiter," he agreed, checking his figures on the terminal, though he surely knew them in his head. "About twenty-five times as far out from Jupiter as is Io. But I think we can let you have a good drive jet and sufficient supplies."

Helse came alive again. "You can?"

The scientist smiled. "We suffer frequent losses here, owing to the violence of the geography we study. This is one loss I shall be glad to sustain."

"But we were going to hijack you!" she cried, chagrined.

He looked at her pretty face. "You did, my dear, you did." Then, perceiving her reaction, he asked: "Did I say something wrong?"

I realized we would have to tackle this head-on. "Do you have a picture of your niece?" I asked.

Perplexed, Mason gestured to a desk. There was a picture of a family of three. "My brother and his charming wife, and their daughter Megan, a charming girl."

I stared at the picture. There was an uncanny resemblance between Helse and the pictured Megan. The scientist had not been joking about being reminded of his niece. "How old is she?" I asked.

Mason considered. "I do lose track of time, in a place like this. I can tell you quickly about the past five eruptions of Vent 37C here, but mundane details like the party of my brother's politics or the age of his child—let me see."

"You have it on file," his associate reminded him.

"Oh, yes. Thank you." Mason punched more buttons, and got the information. "She was born in '95; that would make her twenty now, if I have not lost track of the date this year. I fear my picture is becoming dated, too."

So the resemblance was illusory, or at least misplaced; Megan was four years older than Helse, instead of the same age as the picture showed. Still, they might resemble each other in the manner of sisters. But I saw that Megan was full Caucasian, not mixed Latin as Helse was.

Nevertheless, this was enough to reassure Helse. Mason really did have a niece, and obviously adored her, but she had never lived with him, and if she had, he would not have abused her. He reacted to Helse the way he would to a true niece; there was no untoward aspect. My talent told me this now. Sometimes experience makes us overly suspicious.

Helse was blushing now, evidently pursuing a similar series of thoughts. The scientist set about providing us with what we needed, drawing on the expertise of his staff to do a far better job of it than we could have done. Our mission, it seemed, had, after all, been successful.