And there's Ganymede coming up after him, and Europa behind him.
Talk about eclipses! they must be about as common here as thunderstorms
are with us."
"We don't have a thunderstorm every day--at least not at home,"
corrected Zaidie, "but on Jupiter they must have two or three eclipses
every day. Meanwhile, there goes Jupiter himself. What a difference
distance makes! This little thing is only a trifle larger than our Moon,
and it's hiding everything else."
As she was speaking the full-orbed disc of Calisto, measuring nearly
three thousand miles across, swept between them and the planet. It shone
with a clear, somewhat reddish light like that of Mars. The _Astronef_
was feeling his attraction strongly, and Redgrave went to the levers and
turned on about a fifth of the R. Force to avoid too sudden contact with
it.
"Another dead world!" said Redgrave, as the surface of Calisto revolved
swiftly beneath them, "or at any rate a dying one. There must be an
atmosphere of some sort, or else that snow and ice wouldn't be there,
and everything would be either black or white as it was on the Moon. We
may as well land, however, and get a specimen of the rocks and soil to
add to the museum, though I don't expect there will be very much to see
in the way of life."
In another hour or so the _Astronef_ had dropped gently on to the
surface of Calisto at the foot of a range of mountains crowded with
jagged and splintery peaks, and a mile or two from the edge of a sea of
snow and ice which stretched away in a vast expanse of rugged frozen
billows beyond the horizon.
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