A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 16: Touchdowns PART II: THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK SNOW

A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 16: Touchdowns PART II: THE VALLEY OF THE BLACK SNOW

The landing was just as anticlimactic as Captain Smith had hoped. It was impossible to tell the moment when Universe made contact; a full minute elapsed before the passengers realized that touchdown was complete, and raised a belated cheer. The ship lay at one end of a shallow valley, surrounded by hills little more than a hundred metres high. Anyone who had been expecting to see a lunar landscape would have been greatly surprised; these formations bore no resemblance at all to the smooth, gentle slopes of the Moon, sand-blasted by micrometeorite bombardment over billions of years. There was nothing here more than a thousand years old; the Pyramids were far more ancient than this landscape. Every time around the Sun, Halley was remoulded - and diminished - by the solar fires. Even since the 1986 perihelion passage, the shape of the nucleus had been subtly changed. Melding metaphors shamelessly, Victor Willis had nevertheless put it rather well when he told his viewers: 'The "peanut&quo…