Jamison said obviously from a blister-port where he swung a squat star-telescope from one object to another:
"Noo-o-o. That's a gas-giant. We'd be squashed if we landed there—though that big moon looks promising. I think we'd better try yonder."
"Okay," said Jones in a flat voice. "Center on the next one in, Al, and we'll toddle over."
Cochrane felt the ship swinging in emptiness. He knew because it seemed to turn while he felt that he stayed still.
"We've got a show to put on!" he raged. "We've got to fake something—."
Jamison looked aside from his telescope.
"Tell him, Bell," he said expansively.
"I wrote a script of sorts," said Bell apologetically. "The story-line's not so good—that's why I wanted a castaway narrative to put in it, though I wouldn't have had time, really. We spliced film and Jamison narrated it, and you can run it off. It's a kind of show. We ran it as a space-platform survey of the glacier-planet, basing it on pictures we took while we were in orbit around it. It's a sort of travelogue. Jamison did himself proud. Alicia can find the tape-can for you."
He went back to his cameras. Cochrane saw a monstrous globe swing past a control-room port. It was a featureless mass of clouds, save for striations across what must be its equator. It looked like the Lunar Observatory pictures of Jupiter, back in the Sun's family of planets.
It went past the port, and a moon swam into view. It was a very large moon. It had at least one ice-cap—and therefore an atmosphere—and there were mottlings of its surface which could hardly be anything but continents and seas.