Unfinished Symphony

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The eternal storms raged below, churning the clouds into cyclones big enough to swallow the Earth entire. Even here, thousands of miles above the melted-ice-cream swirl of the planet, other storms raged, filling space with a hash of radio noise and a sleet of charged particles.

The visitor sailed on, an untroubled tiny speck against star-scattered space and the light show of the atmosphere alike. It had traveled a long and circuitous path from its source, flung out from Earth by a combination of puny rockets and the massive forces of gravity. For five years it had caromed about the inner Solar System, banking off the gravity fields of the Sun and Earth like a well-played shot in a game of cosmic pool. Now after all the waiting, the planning, the improvising—after hopes and dreams and careers built upon it, it was ready to do the job it was designed for.

The spacecraft had not made the trip unscathed. The main antenna stood partially unfurled aind crumpled like a broken butterfly’s wing, useless victim of a mischance in space, millions of miles from any hand to tug it gently open.

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