A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 6: The Greening of Ganymede PART I : THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

A Space Oddessey 2061 Book 3 Chapter 6: The Greening of Ganymede PART I : THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN

Rolf van der Berg was the right man, in the right place, at the right time; no other combination would have worked. Which, of course, is how much of history is made. He was the right man because he was a second-generation Afrikaner refugee, and a trained geologist; both factors were equally important. He was in the right place, because that had to be the largest of the Jovian moons - third outwards in the sequence Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto. The time was not so critical, for the information had been ticking away like a delayed-action bomb in the data banks for at least a decade. Van der Berg did not encounter it until '57; even then it took him another year to convince himself that he was not crazy - and it was '59 before he had quietly sequestered the original records so that no-one could duplicate his discovery. Only then could he safely give his full attention to the main problem: what to do next. It had all begun, as is so often the case, with an apparently trivial observation i…