To it, each year, came thousands of celebrities, tens of thousands of common tourists. The guest lists of the better hotels read like the social register and every show house and cafe, every night club, every concession, every dive was making money.
And now the Ganymede reunion!
That had been a clever idea. It had taken some string-pulling back in London to get the Solar Congress to pass the resolution calling the reunion and to appropriate the necessary money. But that had not been too hard to do. Just a little ballyhoo about cementing Earth-Mars friendship for all eternity. Just a little clever work out in the lobbies.
This year Satellite City would pack them in, would get System-wide publicity, would become a household word on every planet.
He tilted farther back in his chair and stared at the sky. The greatest sight in the entire Solar System!
Tourists came millions of miles to gaze in wonder at that sky.
Jupiter rode there against the black of space, a giant disk of orange and red, flattened at the poles, bulging at the equator. To the right of Jupiter was the sun, a small globe of white, its searing light and tremendous heat enfeebled by almost 500 million miles of space. Neither lo nor Europa were in sight, but against the velvet curtain of space glittered the brilliant, cold pin-points of distant stars.
Pete rocked back and forth in his chair, rubbing his hands gleefully.
'We'll put Ganymede on the map this year,' he exulted.