Christ. “Okay, damn it.” She slammed the Hasselblad back on its surface. “I just saw something no other human being had even seen before, that’s all. I thought it was worth investing in a snapshot.”

“If we don’t get through this encounter on the right trajectory,” Stone murmured, his eyes on the flickering CRT displays before him, “you won’t be going home to get that roll of film developed. Let’s concentrate, guys.”

Yeah, yeah. We’re in operational mode here. Stick to the goddamn mission plan.

York returned her attention to her displays.

Gershon was grinning over his shoulder at her.

The plan was for Ares to skim around behind the dark side of the planet. The slingshot would twist the ship’s trajectory through thirty degrees, and Ares would be hugely accelerated. As Ares had crawled, unpowered, around the sun, it had drawn only a little way ahead of Earth; so Ares was passing between Venus and Earth. The cluster would pass into the shadow of Venus, but it would never be out of Earth’s line of sight.

The members of the crew had their assignments for the Venus encounter phase: Stone was monitoring the cluster’s trajectory, Gershon was to follow the atmospheric-entry subprobe Ares had released, and York was operating the Mission Module’s sensor pallet.

In one of the video monitors she had an image of the cloud tops in ultraviolet light. It showed a wealth of blue-gray detail invisible to the naked eye: cloud structures that swept around the planet, complex bows and cells that distorted and stretched out along the planet’s lines of latitude. The whole thing, in its computer-generated false colors, looked almost Earthlike.

The sensor pallet on its rearview-mirror extensor arm was a collection of fat, awkward-looking tubes and antennae and lenses, all wrapped in foil. There was a TV camera to study the clouds, an airglow experiment to look for ultraviolet echoes of carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen, an infrared radiometer studying cloud temperatures, a magnetometer, charged-particle telescopes. Four horn-shaped radar antennae would be able to penetrate the cloud layer and map the strip of Venus over which Ares passed. The sensors were already working, peering forward from the rearview mirror, the pallet which angled out from the Mission Module’s pressure hull.

“Hey,” Gershon said. “Here goes the probe. I’m passing through the ionosphere. Two hundred fifty miles above the ground. Progressing toward the main cloud layers, at hyperbolic speed… How about that.”

York unhooked herself from her stirrups and drifted over to Gershon. There was a TV monitor at the center of Gershon’s station; the screen showed nothing but a snowstorm of static.