DESCENT. Tiny relative to Prometheus, one of the trans- atmospheric shuttles separates and drops down toward the planet. The LOCKHEED-SAAB TAV-37 "VALKYRIE" CLASS SHUTTLE is actually a heavy lifter, a workhorse several times larger and many times more powerful than today's space shuttle.

As the shuttle plunges through high-altitude cloud formations, Josh presses his face against the tiny viewport, eager for a look at the new world. Below he can see mist-shrouded mountains, growing as they descend. The pilot tells them they are over the so-called "Horn" of Australis, the great southern continent, which juts up into the Equatorial Sea.

Josh can see volcanic buttes and mesas towering above a lower cloud blanket, like the Tepuis of Peru. Streamers and whorls of shredded cloud swirl around the mesa tops. Then the pilot tells them that they may get a glimpse of the MONTES VOLANS, the famous "flying mountains", which planetologists say are the rarest phenomena in known space.

Also called the HALLELUJAH MOUNTAINS, they are like floating islands among the clouds.

Literally floating. Mountainous chucks of rock, some over ten miles across, hovering thousands of feet above the ground.

Here's how it works: Polyphemis (the massive planet around which Pandora revolves) has a mother of magnetosphere... a naturally occurring magnetic field a million times more powerful than Earth's. As Pandora rotates and revolves through this field, its molten iron core generates its own field, with "cells" or vortices which are small regions of intensely powerful magnetic force at the surface.

Added to this unique phenomenon is another... Pandora is blessed with a naturally occurring substance a million times more precious than gold. Its joke name of "unobtanium" has stuck, over the years. Unobtanium is a rare-earth mineral, formed volcanically, which is a room- temperature superconductor.