Jupiter Journey Chp. 2

By: Leo Ji

Tim fell as if in slow motion towards the enveloping arms of the Red Eye. It was like viewing everything through a dream. As he got closer, he felt he was being pulled apart.

Tim thought of the pleasant, happy times he had had with his family and friends, they would remember him. The people on Earth would all remember him and know how he had died. He felt lonely, by himself. He was reminded of Adam and Rick; they would miss him... He had the cabin for company. Then, he entered into the atmosphere, he saw distinctly the cabin in front of him, blocking the heat from Jupiter’s compressing atmosphere. How comforting, that he would die with the object- the thing that had saved his crew mates.

But would he die? Maybe just by chance he would survive, it was just a slim bit of hope. All the same, Tim was roused from his slumber: “I need to survive!”

He would return back to earth and have a great time with his family, Rick, and Adam.

The air pressure was beginning to have effect now. He would certainly die if he was kept in this state. After all, Jupiter’s air density was more than 300 times of Earth. There was only one way to survive: he needed to get into the cabin way ahead of him.

His memory flew back to when he was in college. He had undergone air diving practices, and hated diving with his arms and legs stuck tight to his body. But now was the time to do it, since he needed to catch up with the cabin. He saw it in the distance below him, plummeting down, getting further and further away from him, he felt a desperate feeling, icy cold flowing into his lungs and chest. He had to do it. He forced his arms close to his body and dived, cold air zoomed past him and forcing his arms still closer to his body. The atmosphere of Jupiter was smoothly, gradually turning to liquid the lower he fell. He could see the cabin ahead now. It was in front of him coming closer and closer, its door wide open welcoming him in. He couldn’t make a mistake now, there where walls of crimson strewn with white circling all around him. They were pressing in at him, no it was the air choking him, squishing him: “I ne-eed t-too sur-v-viive!”

The cabin was right in front of him now, the door visible. Then- the cabin door swung tantalizingly away. He made a swish at it and miraculously as if by magic, the door swung back. He was almost suffocating, sliding into unconsciousness and then, he saw out of the corner of his eye, the door welcoming him in. He would be safe- for now. Then Tim fell into an unconscious sleep.

When he awoke, the cabin was shaking violently. Liquid hydrogen and helium were all around the cabin. Then, he saw getting ever and ever closer, a black shape below him. It loomed out of the darkness towards him, and soon details were visible. It was a kind of box and there were electric currents running all around the sides and flowing through the bottom, concentrating in the center getting brighter and brighter, dazzling an electric blue. Then everything was gone. He saw the cabin around him being blasted apart and his body disintegrating. Atom by atom, he was being pulled apart. He imagined his atoms- zooming one by one through a tube towards some unknown place. He was on a planet covered with ice... Then, Tim passed out cold...

He dreamed laying there in his suit, helpless. Tentacles crawled slowly onto him and wrapped around him, then they turned to icy claws. More of the icy claws wrapped and covered him, then they disappeared, leaving him trapped in a thick layer of ice. His nightmares brought him back to reality and Tim now saw that his suit was really frozen around him. Then he was petrified with horror; there was a hole in his suit and there was also something like water trickling down his spine. “How did I manage to survive if oxygen was leaking out of my suit?!” “Was there oxygen in the atmosphere?”

“Where am I?” he thought as he looked around. There was ice everywhere, all around him, forming valleys and mountains. He touched it and found it was water ice. There were also jets of water shooting from under the ground. He also saw Jupiter, dozens of times bigger than the moon, silhouetted against the dark sky. Then, as quick as lightning, the answer dawned on him, “Europa!”

Tim was on Europa, but how had he gotten there? He had seen that black box and he was - here. Tim was puzzled and also frightened: “What if there were aliens who put the box there as a trap? Only very sophisticated beings would manage to build such a mechanism. Maybe it was a teleportation machine?” Then out of the ice a hole appeared, dark and with an air of something slimy inside. Out of it rose a gigantic tentacle blocking the view of Jupiter…