And if little Augie had been told there was no home for him to return to, no mother to soothe his tantrum, no one else in the world left for him, what would he have done then? - P17
"Polaris," she said, her voice muffled by the fabric. - P18
The lights were just beginning to come on, brightening slowly to simulate the unhurried daybreak of Earth: a perfectly gradated white dawn. The slow illumination of the compartment was one of the few Earth-like experiences available. Sully made sure she saw it every morning. It was a shame the engineers hadn’t added a little pink, or a smudge of orange. - P24
The dream clung to her.
Her sleep had been full of Jupiter ever since the survey last week:
that overwhelming, unstoppable girth;
the swirling patterns of the atmosphere, dark belts and light stripes rolling in circular rivers of ammonia crystal clouds;
every shade of orange in the spectrum, from soft, sand-colored regions to vivid streams of molten vermilion;
the breathtaking speed of a ten-hour orbit, whipping around and around the planet like a spinning top;
the opaque surface, simmering and roaring in century-old tempests. - P24
And the moons! The ancient, pockmarked skin of Callisto and the icy crust of Ganymede. The rusty cracks of Europa’s subterranean oceans. The volcanoes of Io, magma fireworks leaping up from the surface. - P24
The tension that had led them into deep space—the anxiety that perhaps the mission was beyond them, that they would fail and never be heard from again—evaporated. - P24
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