A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 11: The Lie PART I : THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 11: The Lie PART I : THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

It was many months before Rolf van der Berg could once again turn his thoughts and energies towards Mount Zeus. The taming of Ganymede was a more than full-time job, and he was away from his main office at Dardanus Base for weeks at a time, surveying the route of the proposed Gilgamesh-Osiris monorail. The geography of the third and largest Galilean moon had changed drastically since the detonation of Jupiter - and it was still changing. The new sun that had melted the ice of Europa was not as powerful here, four hundred thousand kilometres further out - but it was warm enough to produce a temperate climate at the centre of the face forever turned towards it. There were small, shallow seas - some as large as Earth's Mediterranean - up to latitudes forty north and south. Not many features still survived from the maps generated by the Voyager missions back in the twentieth century. Melting permafrost and occasional tectonic movements triggered by the same tidal forces operating on the two in…