The physicist bent over and took a paperweight off a desk. “One of the boys made this for fun,” he said, ‘‘but it’s a pretty good model of Joe. He stands about five feet tall at the head.”

Cornelius turned the plastic image over in his hands. If you could imagine such a thing as a feline centaur with a thick prehensile tail…The torso was squat, long-armed, immensely muscular; the hairless head was round, wide-nosed, with big deep-set eyes and heavy jaws, but it was really quite a human face. The over-all color was bluish gray.

“Male, I see,” he remarked.

“Of course. Perhaps you don’t understand. Joe is the complete pseudojovian—as far as we can tell, the final model, with all the bugs worked out. He’s the answer to a research question that took fifty years to ask.” Viken looked sidewise at Cornelius. “So you realize the importance of your job, don’t you?”

“I’ll do my best,” said the psionicist. “But if…well, let’s say that tube failure or something causes you to lose Joe before I’ve solved the oscillation problem. You do have other pseudos in reserve, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Viken moodily. “But the cost…We’re not on an unlimited budget. We do go through a lot of money, because it’s expensive to stand up and sneeze this far from Earth. But for that same reason our margin is slim.”

He jammed hands in pockets and slouched toward the inner door, the laboratories, head down and talking in a low, hurried voice. “Perhaps you don’t realize what a nightmare planet Jupiter is. Not just the surface gravity—a shade under three gees, what’s that?—but the gravitational potential, ten times Earth’s. The temperature. The pressure. Above all, the atmosphere, and the storms, and the darkness!

“When a spaceship goes down to the Jovian surface, it’s a radio-controlled job; it leaks like a sieve, to equalize pressure, but otherwise it’s the sturdiest, most utterly powerful model ever designed; it’s loaded with every instrument, every servomechanism, every safety device the human mind has yet thought up to protect a million-dollar hunk of precision equipment.

“And what happens? Half the ships never reach the surface at all. A storm snatches them and throws them away, or they collide with a floating chunk of Ice Seven—small version of the Red Spot—or, so help me, what passes for a flock of birds rams one and stoves it in!

“As for the fifty per cent which do land, it’s a one-way trip. We don’t even try to bring them back. If the stresses coming down haven’t sprung something, the corrosion has doomed them anyway. Hydrogen at Jovian pressure does funny things to metals.

“It cost a total of about five million dollars to set Joe, one pseudo, down there. Each pseudo to follow will cost, if we’re lucky, a couple of million more.”

Viken kicked open the door and led the way through. Beyond was a big room, low-ceilinged, coldly lit and murmurous with ventilators. It reminded Cornelius of a nucleonics lab; for a moment he wasn’t sure why, then he recognized the intricacies of remote control, remote observation, walls enclosing forces which could destroy the entire moon.