Cargo for Callisto

The big rocket freighter was speeding through the star dust of outer space. It was carrying supplies to Callisto (one of the twelve moons of Jupiter) and the Shannons, on another space adventure.

Steve and Sue looked out a window of the freighter at the airless world growing in size. Callisto was a gigantic roughened rock, but it was a globe larger than the planet Mercury. It reminded Steve of a giant cockle-burr hanging in the sky.

Suddenly the children heard a tiny voice behind them say, “Rocket away!”

They turned and Sue exclaimed, “It’s Bud!”

The blue parakeet, a budgy, blinked lazily at them. The twins had met Mr. Whittle’s pet a week ago. He had taken a liking to them from the very start. They didn’t know that a few hours from now their very lives would depend on this little fellow.

“We’d better take him back to Mr. Whittle,” Steve said.

The budgy kept studying them with his flat face and blinking his tiny button eyes. Then he squawked again, “Rocket away!”

“It’ll be ‘rocket away’ for you, young fellow!” Steve said sternly. “Up on my finger, Bud!”

The bird did as he was ordered. They took him down the hall to Mr. Whittle’s room. Bud’s owner, off duty now, was a tall, spidery crewman with a big Adam’s apple. He always gave his pet full run of the ship.

Mr. Whittle whistled to the parakeet, but the bird stayed on Steve’s finger.

Mr. Whittle chuckled. “Hey, I believe he likes you two better than his master!”

“We like him, too,” Sue told the crewman.

“You can keep him for a few days if you want to,” Mr. Whittle said. “I’m going to be pretty busy after we land.”

“Gee, we’d like to look after him!” Steve answered.

“If you take him outside on Callisto, you’ll have to put him in that air-tight cage over there I had made. It’s sort of like a space suit for him.”

Sue and Steve played with Bud in the room they used for games until it was time to “strap down” for landing. Then they went to the couch hall and lay down on cots like the other space travelers were doing. They buckled straps across their bodies to keep them in place.

For a long time, Steve and Sue lay there as the big freighter began cutting its rushing speed. It felt to Steve as if a giant anvil were crushing downward on his chest. Take-off and landing were always the roughest moments in space travel, as the twins had already found out on other space trips.

At last the ship set down on Callisto. The young Shannons went back to the game room. Then with the bird on Steve’s shoulder, the twins looked out the window at the strange new world.

They saw a land bathed in ghostly twilight. Very little light was coming from the sun. It was so far away that it was only a small circle. Most of the light came from a huge shape that looked like somebody’s lost beach ball resting on the ground. Its bottom edge just touched the horizon.

Sue and Steve were joined by their father, who worked for the space freight company.

“That’s His Majesty, Jupiter—the king of planets,” Mr. Shannon told them. “He’s over a million miles away and yet he looks close enough to touch, doesn’t he?”

“Let’s go outdoors, Dad!” Steve begged.

“No reason why we can’t,” Mr. Shannon replied.

After they had put on their space clothes, Steve popped Bud into his warm, air-tight cage.

As they all went outside, they saw the crewmen unloading the cargo.

“There’s the colony over there,” Mr. Shannon said, pointing to a high framework that looked something like an oil derrick.

“They mine here for a mineral called magna. It’s very valuable, because without it we couldn’t have atomic engines. Magna is what keeps our rocket tubes from melting under the terrific heat that goes through them.”

“May we go down into the mines, Dad?” Steve asked.

“We’ll see if we can,” said his father.

As they walked toward the mining place, Mr. Shannon said, “Underneath us are pockets of poisonous gas like that found in Jupiter’s atmosphere. Sometimes it leaks into the mining tunnels causing danger from suffocation.”

“I sure hope the gas stays where it belongs while we’re down there!” Steve said and swallowed the lump of fear in his throat.

They turned their attention to Jupiter. It looked even more like a beach ball now with its stripes of beautiful colors. Mr. Shannon said the bands were floating ice bergs of the poisonous gases he was talking about.

“No ship can land on Jupiter,” he said. “Its gravity would crush a spaceman flat. Gravity pull is much stronger on the larger planets, you know. Jupiter’s atmosphere is many thousands of miles deep. Raging storms are going on beneath it all the time.”

“Ooo!” Sue gasped. “I guess we’re close enough to it then!”

Other wonders of the sky were the round beacons of Jupiter’s other moons, three of which were about the same size as Callisto. They hung like bright searchlights in the starry heavens.

The men at the mining place greeted the Shannons warmly. They had not seen anyone from Earth for so long that they had grown very lonely.