"Is tat te carboning te man was talking about?" asked the Martian innocently.
"I'm—afraid—so." Ray shook his head. "We'll have to land somewhere before the rockets quit altogether. Then it'll take a week for the radioactivity to get low enough so we can go back there and clean them out."
"And all the Yovian army, navy, police, and fire department out chasin us by now," said Dyann. Her clear brow wrinkled. "I fear that Ormun is offended because I left her amon the heathen back there. I am afraid our luck is runnin' low."
"And," said Ray bleakly, "how!"
IV
They used the last sputter of flame to sit down in the wildest and remotest valley they could find. Looking out the port, Ray wondered if they hadn't perhaps overdone it.
Beyond the little ship there was a stretch of seamed and gullied stone, a rough craggy waste sloping up toward the fang-peaked razorback ridge of the hills, weird flickering play of shadows between the looming boulders as the thin wind blew a veil of snow across the deep greenish-blue sky. Jupiter was an amber scimitar low on the northern horizon. They were near the south pole with a sprawling panorama of sharp stars around it fading out near the tiny sun. Snow lay heaped in drifts beyond the wind-scoured rocks, and the far green blink of glaciers reflected the pale heatless sunlight from the hills.
Snow—well, yes, thought Ray, it was snow of a sort. All the water on Ganymede was of course solid ice. So were the carbon dioxide and ammonia. But the temperature often dropped low enough to precipitate methane or nitrogen. The moon's atmosphere what there was of it, consisted mostly of argon, nitrogen, methane, and vapors of the frozen substances—not especially breathable.
The colonists used the standard green-plant air-renewal system, obtaining extra oxygen from its compounds and water from the ice-strata, and heated their dwellings from the central atomic-energy units. Ray hoped the ship's equipment was in working order.