The countdown was three seconds late not at all bad, considering the unknowns involved. From beyond the walls of the capsule came a ghostly sighing, which rose steadily to a high-pitched, screaming roar. The noise was quite different from that of a re-entry on Earth or Mars; in this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, all sounds were transformed a couple of octaves upward. On Jupiter, even thunder would have falsetto overtones.

With the rising scream came mounting weight, within seconds, he was completely immobilised. His field of vision contracted until it embraced only the clock and the accelerometer, fifteen g, and four hundred and eighty seconds to go…

He never lost consciousness, but then, he had not expected to. Kon-Tiki trailed through the Jovian atmosphere must be really spectacular by this time, thousands of miles long. Five hundred seconds after entry, the drag began to taper off, ten g, five g, two… Then weight vanished almost completely. He was falling free, all his enormous orbital velocity destroyed.

There was a sudden jolt as the incandescent renmants of the heat shield was jettisoned. It had done its work and would not be needed again, Jupiter could have it now. He released all but two of the restraining buckles, and waited br the automatic sequencer to start the next, and most critical, series of events.

He did not see the first drogue parachute pop out, but he could feel the slight jerk, and the rate of fall diminished imnediately. Kon-Tiki had lost all its horizontal speed and was going straight down at almost a thousand mi1es an hour. Everything depended on what happened in the next sixty seconds.

There went the second drogue. He looked up through the overhead window and saw, to his immense relief, that clouds of glittering foil were billowing out behind the falling ship. Like a great flower unfurling, the thousands of cubic yards of the balloon spread out across the sky, scooping p the thin gas until it was fully inflated. Kon-Tiki’s rate of fall dropped to a few miles an hour and remained constant. Now there was plenty of time, it would take him days to fall all the way down to the surface of Jupiter.