The Jupiter Stone

In secret the Almanac set down on Ganymede.
Fidgety rockets flawed pristine landforms.
Captain Sanchez declared it to be fine.
First Officer Doty eyed Jupiter from the port side.
But on Ganymede, on a Galilean moon,
on a rocky satellite held in orbit
by a massive planet,
dim stars prolonged aggressive stares
from the crew taken to rapid breathing.

This is where they found the stone;
the Jupiter Stone, as it is now known,
a name for convenience sake, I should say,
(detracting not from the name, Ganymede).
It was a Rosetta Stone of sorts,
a stone with code unlocking the language
of a civilization that lived eons ago.

Gold color stood out like a novae stand out.
The find was fortuitous, as lasers carved
large blocks from ancient lava flows.
(Operation Mineral remained covert because great
  mineral wealth had been discovered on Ganymede.
  Thus, the Earth Federation had no intention
  of sharing this wealth with alien civilizations
  winging in ships and now as common as comets.)

So they seized the gold and excised the stone.
Ovoid was the stone, about the size of a small sofa.
The stone contained symbols eventually determined
to be mathematical, but any understanding
remained elusive.  Cryptographers worked tirelessly.
(Thoughts of Champollion* and Egypt abounded.)

A modern-day Champollion wondered, Why Gold?
on a moon where gold was not part of the mineral wealth.
(Platinum, yttrium and praseodymium were the mother lode.)
The color grabbed their attention, yet substance was key.
After they applied a mathematical logarithm,
(based on 79--the atomic number of gold),
they deciphered the alien code at last.
Secrecy remains today, yet some mysteries
have been revealed, like the Face on Mars.


40 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
August 18, 2014


*Jean-François Champollion was a French scholar who deciphered of the Egyptian hieroglyphs.
He published the first translation of the Rosetta Stone hieroglyphs in 1822.