The subprobe had been ejected twenty-three days ago, from a compartment at the base of the Mission Module, and had been pushed onto a slowly diverging orbit. Ares was missing Venus by a few thousand miles; the probe, pushed ahead of Ares, was supposed to impact the planet directly, a few minutes before the closest approach of the main craft. The probe would hit in the middle of the dayside, in an upland region called Ishtar Terra.

The probe was contained within its aeroshell deceleration module, a deep, streamlined pie dish. Its TV cameras couldn’t see out of the aeroshell, but there was a radio-transparent window at the top, so the probe could talk to Ares.

Gershon said, “I’m in the atmosphere now, but still above the main cloud banks. Fifty miles up. The temperature’s low here; under a hundred below, in fact. But this is the minimum; it should soon start to rise as I enter the main cloud banks. Here we come to breakout… Three, two, one. Mark. Watch the screen, Natalie.”

At just that moment, somewhere in those clouds, York knew, that fat pie dish was falling apart. A pilot chute would pull away the lid, and the main chute should open above the probe.

There was a break in the monitor’s snowstorm, a yellow, flickering blur.

Gershon whooped. “How about that. We can see out, at last.”

On the TV the pale, jaundiced wash brightened and darkened periodically: the probe was rotating, slowly, under its chute, and that cyclical brightening must be the sun, a glare behind the diffuse haze of sulfuric acid particles.

“Visibility’s dropping. Down to maybe four miles,” Gershon said. “I’ve got a pressure of three-quarters of Earth’s sea-level pressure, and the temperature is around fifty degrees. Yum. Balmy. And I’m still all of thirty-eight miles high.”

Thirty-eight miles Two hundred thousand feet On Earth, that would be the top of the stratosphere: pressure less than a hundredth of sea level.

The haze on the TV screen thinned out. “Whoa,” Gershon said. “Look at that. All of a sudden I can see for miles and miles.”

York found herself looking down on a layer of cloud, thick and unbroken, a pale, washed-out yellow. The clouds were fluffy, Earthlike. Almost friendly. Up above there was a featureless yellow sky; she could no longer tell where the sun was.

The probe dropped into the thick clouds.

“Coming up on twenty-eight miles. I’m through all that sulfuric acid shit. But temperature outside is all of four hundred degrees already. And pressure’s higher than an atmosphere already. Three, two, one. Mark. Chute sep.”

The picture seemed to shudder, then it stabilized again.