Read Venus Online

Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (25 page)

BOOK: Venus
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I watched in fascinated horror as the blinking cursor that represented their pod crawled slowly, ever so slowly, along the curve that represented their trajectory. They were solidly in the clouds now. I remembered how
Hesperos
had been eaten away by the aerobacteria. But that had taken days; the escape pod would be in the clouds only for minutes, less than half an hour.
It would have been better to fire it straight up and get out and above the clouds as quickly as possible, I thought as I stared at the screen. But to establish orbit the pod had to be moving parallel to the planet’s surface. The only way to do that was to follow a curving course, up and over, like the lob of a ball that’s being thrown completely around the world.
No, I told myself. You could fire straight up, and once at a high-enough altitude, make a course change that moves you into a parallel with the ground. But that would take much more rocket propellant than the pod could carry. They had to get through the clouds more slowly. I only hoped that it was fast enough.
I glance over at Fuchs. He was staring at the screen, too, but grinning slightly. He reminded me of a Roman emperor watching gladiators battle to the death in the arena. Which one will die? Will those three poor miserable people in the escape pod make it to orbit, to safety?
I wondered why I cared. They had killed Sanja. They would have killed Fuchs, too. And me. They were mutineers
and murderers. Yet I was worried about them, hoping that they would get through their ordeal alive.
Fuchs had no such conflicts. He had known they’d have to get through the clouds; he had remembered the bugs. He hadn’t forgiven them for their crimes. This was his kind of justice.
The yellow message light started blinking at me. I clamped on the headset and pulled the microphone close to my lips. Then I touched the key that put the message on the small screen on the right side of my console.
Bahadur’s face was frantic. “We are losing pressure!” his voice wailed in my ear. “The bugs are destroying the seal around our main hatch!”
“Put that on my screen,” Fuchs commanded before I could turn to inform him.
I did. Bahadur’s chest was heaving, his hands waving up and down. “The bugs! They are eating away at us!”
Fuchs said nothing.
“We must do something!” Bahadur screeched. “Pressure is falling!”
Behind him the other crewman and the woman were sitting tensely, safety harnesses crisscrossed over their chests, their faces grim and accusing.
“There’s nothing to be done,” Fuchs said, his voice cold and hard. “Just hang on and hope that you get through the clouds before the seal fails.”
The woman burst out in a long string of sibilant words.
Fuchs shook his head. “I can’t save you. Nobody can.”
“But you must!” Bahadur was on the verge of hysteria, his eyes popping, chest heaving, hands windmilling in the air. If he hadn’t been strapped into his seat, I thought, he would have been running around the pod’s cramped little compartment like a madman. “You must!” he kept repeating.
“Turn off the sound,” Fuchs said to me.
I reached for the keyboard, hesitated.
“Turn it off!” he snarled.
I tapped the key. Bahadur’s frantic pleading cut off, but
we could still see his face and the panic in his eyes.
There was no telemeter link between the pod and
Lucifer
. We had no way of monitoring the conditions inside their compartment. But I watched the terror on their faces as their pod flew through the bug-laden clouds. I was holding my breath, I realized, staring alternately at them and the graph showing their progress through the clouds.
The blinking white cursor inched toward the upper edge of the cloud deck slowly; seconds seemed to stretch into hours. All the while Bahadur and his two companions were goggle-eyed and stiff with horror, their mouths screaming silently, their hands windmilling with frustration and panic.
Then they broke through the clouds. The cursor climbed above the top of the cloud deck, into clear space.
“They’ve made it!” I shouted.
Fuchs replied sardonically, “Have they?”
“They’re establishing orbit,” I said.
“Good,” said Fuchs.
Bahadur was still wide-eyed, I saw, his chest heaving. But in a few moments he’ll realize that he’s safe, I thought.
Instead, his face turned blood-red. His eyes bulged and then—exploded. Blood burst from every pore in his skin. The two others, as well.
“Explosive decompression,” Fuchs said flatly. “The bugs must have chewed through enough of their hatch seal to weaken it too far to hold the air inside their pod.”
With a strangled cry, I snapped off the video imagery.
“Turn off the graph, as well,” Fuchs said calmly. “It doesn’t matter where their pod is now.”
I couldn’t move my hands. I squeezed my eyes shut, but still the picture of those three people bursting into showers of blood filled my mind.
“Turn it off!” Fuchs growled. “Now!”
I did. The screen went blank.
Fuchs took a deep breath, ran a hand across his broad jaw. “They had a chance. Not much of one, I admit, but they had a chance.”
“Yes, they certainly did,” I heard myself say.
He glared at me.
“You knew it all along. You knew they couldn’t make it through the clouds. You sent them to their deaths.”
He shot to his feet. I saw his fists clench and for a moment I thought he was going to haul me out of my chair and beat me senseless. I felt myself cringing inwardly and tried my best not to let it show.
Instead, Fuchs stood there for a few undecided moments, then turned and stalked out of the bridge. Before I could say or even think anything else, one of the other crewmen came in and took the conn.
I
finished my watch, went off duty, and stood another watch, all without seeing a trace of Fuchs. He was in his quarters the entire time as the ship spiraled lower and lower, deeper into Venus’s hot, dense atmosphere.
Between watches I checked on the ship’s pumps, which were now manned by the propulsion engineer who had doubled as Sanja’s assistant, the Mongol named Nodon. Strong and agile as a young chimpanzee, he was wiry, all bone and tendon, with a wispy black moustache and ornamental spiral scars on both his cheeks that were meant to make him look fierce. But Nodon was at heart a gentle person. It was impossible for me to guess his age; even though he had probably never been able to afford rejuvenation therapy, he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty, I thought. Unlike the other crewmen, he spoke English rather well and didn’t hesitate to converse with me.
He had been born in the Asteroid Belt, the son of miners who had fled their home in Mongolia when the Gobi desert engulfed the grasslands on which the tribes had lived since time immemorial. He had never been to Earth, never set foot on the Mother World.
We were in the main pump station, one level below the bridge and captain’s quarters. Kneeling on the metal mesh deck plates, I could feel the throb of the engines, separated from the pump bay by nothing more than a thin partition. Nodon was explaining how the pumps could be powered by hot sulfur dioxide from the heat exchangers.
“It saves electrical power for those systems that cannot run on heat,” Nodon was saying, patting the round metal pump housing as if it were a faithful hound.
“But the nuclear generator provides plenty of electricity, doesn’t it?” I asked.
He nodded and smiled cheerfully. “Yes, true. But when the world outside gives us so much free energy, why not accept the gift? After all, we are guests in this world. We should be grateful for anything it offers to us.”
A different attitude, I thought. I began to ask him more about the pumps when a shadow fell over Nodon’s face. Literally. His smile vanished. I turned and saw the captain standing behind us.
“Learning the pumps, eh? Good.”
I couldn’t say that he looked cheerful; Fuchs never seemed to show good humor. But he wasn’t glaring or angry. My little outburst up on the bridge the day before had apparently been forgotten. Or more likely, I thought, tucked away in memory for later retrieval.
Nodon and I both scrambled to our feet.
Fuchs clasped his hands behind his back and said to me, “When you’re finished here, Humphries, report to the observation center. We have several radar images to check on.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Teach him well, Nodon,” he said to the youth. “Once he learns the pumps, I can bring you up to the bridge.”
“Yes, sir, Captain!” Nodon said, beaming.
 
I grew weary of Nodon’s explanations long before he did. He seemed truly to be in love with the pumps, their importance to the ship’s performance, their intricacies, their nuances, every weld and part and vibration of them.
I thought I could learn just as much from the computer’s files on the pumps, but I patiently endured Nodon’s smiling, eager dissertation for seemingly endless hours.
At last I excused myself and went up the ladder to the main deck. The observation center was up in the nose, but there was something else that I wanted to do first.
I went down the passageway to the sick bay. It was empty, so I walked down to Marguerite’s door and tapped at it. No reply. I rapped harder.
“Who is it?” came her muffled voice.
“Van.”
No response for several moments. Then the door cracked open. “I was sleeping,” she said.
“May I come in? Just for a couple of seconds?”
She slid the accordion-fold door all the way and I stepped into her quarters. The bed was rumpled, but otherwise the compartment looked neat and orderly. Marguerite had pulled on a pair of wrinkled, faded coveralls. I realized that my own were not all that clean and sweet.
“What do you want, Van?” she asked tightly.
It was the first time we’d been alone in a while. She looked tired, hair tousled, her eyes puffy from sleep, but still very beautiful. The lines of her cheek and jaw would have inspired any sculptor, I thought.
“Well?”
“I’m sorry I disturbed you,” I began.
“That’s all right,” she said, a little more lightly. “I had to get up anyway; someone was pounding at my door.”
My brows knit with confusion. “But I was … oh, I see! It’s a joke.”
“Yes,” she said, smiling a little. “A joke.”
“I wanted to ask if you were able to get my medical records from
Truax
.”
She nodded and gestured toward the laptop computer sitting open on the compartment’s desk. “Yes, no problem.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“Can you synthesize the enzyme for me?”
Marguerite sighed wearily. “Not yet. Probably not at all.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
Frowning, she asked, “How much biochemistry do you understand?”
With a shrug I admitted, “Very little.”
“I thought as much.” She sighed again. Or perhaps it was a stifled yawn. “I have the formula for your enzyme. The computer file gave me the complete breakdown for it: all the amino acids and the order in which they need to be put together.”
“So what’s the problem?” I asked.
“Two problems, Van. One is getting the proper constituents; most of the factors have to come from someone’s blood.”
“Well, you can get Fuchs’s blood, can’t you?”
“The second problem,” she went on, ignoring my comment, “is the equipment. We simply do not have the necessary equipment for this kind of biochemical synthesis.”
“Can’t you rig something together?”
She scowled at me. “What do you think I’ve been trying to do for the past day and a half? Why do you think I’ve been pushing myself so hard I started to fall asleep in the sick bay an hour ago and came back here for a nap?”
“Oh. I didn’t realize …”
She focused her jet-black eyes on mine. “I’m trying, Van. I’m working as hard as I can on it.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“Do you?”
“I don’t want to have to keep getting transfusions from Fuchs. I don’t want to be obligated to him for my life.”
“But you are.”
“I am what?”
“Obligated to him for your life.”
“Because of a couple of transfusions?”
Marguerite shook her head. “That, and much more.” “What do you mean by that?”
She looked as if she was on the verge of answering me, but then she said, “Nothing. Forget it.”
“No, tell me.”
Marguerite shook her head.
“I don’t owe Fuchs anything,” I said, feeling anger welling up in me. “The man’s a monster.”
“Is he?”
“I had to sit on the bridge and watch him kill three of the crew,” I snapped.
“He executed three murderers.”
“He toyed with them the way a cat plays with a mouse. He tortured them.”
“He saved your life, didn’t he?”
“All he’s done is what you forced him to do.”
“No one forced him to rescue us from your ship,” Marguerite answered hotly.
“No. He was trying to save your mother, not me.”
“He loved her!”
“And now he’s loving you,” I yelled.
Marguerite slapped me. It stung.
“Get out of my quarters,” she said. “Get out!”
I scowled at her, feeling the heat of her fingers against my cheek.
Pointing to her mussed-up bed, I growled, “At least it’s good to see that you sleep by yourself once in a while.”
Then I left quickly, before she slapped me again.
BOOK: Venus
9.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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