Authors: Ben Bova
Venus (28 page)
O
n Earth, nights are usually cooler than days because the Sun is not beaming its heat down onto the ground. On Venus this is not so. It makes no difference if the Sun is overhead or not, the thick sluggish cloud-topped Venusian atmosphere carries the Sun’s heat all the way around the planet, while Venus’s slow, ponderous rotation gives that soupy hot atmosphere plenty of time to spread its heat all across the world from pole to pole.
n Earth, nights are usually cooler than days because the Sun is not beaming its heat down onto the ground. On Venus this is not so. It makes no difference if the Sun is overhead or not, the thick sluggish cloud-topped Venusian atmosphere carries the Sun’s heat all the way around the planet, while Venus’s slow, ponderous rotation gives that soupy hot atmosphere plenty of time to spread its heat all across the world from pole to pole.
So we sweated and grew ever more irritable in the heat as we slowly groped toward the upland of Aphrodite Terra. The heat exchanger came back on line, but still it grew hotter inside the ship. We were floating through an atmosphere as dense as an earthly ocean thousands of meters below the surface. The temperature outside our hull went past two hundred degrees Celsius, then past three hundred.
Still we descended into the murk. My life became a monotonous routine of watches on the bridge, watches at the pumps, and a few hours to eat, wash, and sleep. Nodon was indeed promoted to the bridge, but Fuchs did not free
me from my shifts at the comm console. I still was pulling double duty.
me from my shifts at the comm console. I still was pulling double duty.
I began to feel the first faint tendrils of my old weakness. A slightly dizzy feeling if I moved my head too suddenly. A trembling in the legs, as if they were threatening to fold under me when I walked. I wished I could feel the chill that once accompanied my anemia; a chill would have felt good in the mounting heat.
I fought off the symptoms as much as I could. Mind over matter, I told myself. Sure. But even the mind is based in matter, and when the blood supplying that matter lacks red cells, the mind itself will soon enough collapse.
Marguerite must have been concerned, because Fuchs ordered me to take a medical checkup and I was certain he wouldn’t have thought of that without her prodding him.
“Your red cell count is sinking fast,” she said unhappily. “You’re going to need another transfusion right away.”
“Not yet,” I said, trying to sound brave. “Give him a chance to recover from the last one.”
“Don’t you think—”
“I don’t want to kill him,” I snapped, trying to sound as coldly callous as the captain himself. “I need him alive.”
Marguerite shook her head, but said nothing.
During my watches on the bridge I tapped into the comm console’s translation program and eavesdropped on the crew in their various workstations. Plenty of griping about the heat. Several men reported to the sick bay, complaining of dizziness or exhaustion. The women seemed to take the growing heat better than the men, or perhaps they were merely more stoic.
It was getting
hot
.
hot
.
I wondered if Fuchs still was bugging the ship, or if he felt that his punishment of Bahadur had cowed the rest of the crew sufficiently to eliminate the possibility of mutiny.
He seemed moody, distracted, his mind focused on other things rather than the immediate problems of steering this submersible dirigible toward its ten-billion-dollar destination. It appeared to me that Fuchs was concentrating his
attention on something in the future—or perhaps something from his past. And he was chewing those damned pills of his constantly.
attention on something in the future—or perhaps something from his past. And he was chewing those damned pills of his constantly.
Lucifer
ran well enough. Except for the mounting heat inside the ship, all systems were performing within expected limits. The crew worked fairly smoothly despite their grumbling; after all, they knew that their lives depended on their doing things right. Literally.
ran well enough. Except for the mounting heat inside the ship, all systems were performing within expected limits. The crew worked fairly smoothly despite their grumbling; after all, they knew that their lives depended on their doing things right. Literally.
I began to study the radar imagery as we groped along the planet’s nightside. There was little else for me to do, except log incoming messages from
Truax
that were never answered or even acknowledged. The volcanic eruption had subsided, they told us. The Aphrodite region was seismically quiet once more, like the rest of the planet. I felt decidedly relieved at that.
Truax
that were never answered or even acknowledged. The volcanic eruption had subsided, they told us. The Aphrodite region was seismically quiet once more, like the rest of the planet. I felt decidedly relieved at that.
We were creeping pretty much along the equator, making slow headway in the massively turgid atmosphere by using our engines to force us through the soup. There was no wind to speak of, just a slow, steady current flowing outward from the subsolar region, barely five kilometers per hour. Our engines easily compensated for that.
The elegance of the engines pleased me in a cerebrally aesthetic way. We were using the heat of the planet’s own atmosphere to drive the turbines that ran the big paddle-bladed propellers that pushed us through the thick, hot air.
But each meter of altitude we lost meant the air was thicker and hotter. Heat rejection was becoming a problem. The crew nursed our heat exchangers along, mumbling worriedly over them more and more.
Fuchs paid almost no attention to their fears. His thoughts were obviously elsewhere. I kept searching the radar scans, looking for signs of wreckage down on the surface. I found three strong glints, but they were all far too small to be
Phosphoros
. Only one of them matched the known landing sites of earlier spacecraft probes, though. I wondered what the other two were, and found myself wishing we had enough daylight to use the telescopes.
Phosphoros
. Only one of them matched the known landing sites of earlier spacecraft probes, though. I wondered what the other two were, and found myself wishing we had enough daylight to use the telescopes.
I became fascinated with that strange, stark, utterly hostile landscape drifting below us. Even off-duty I made my way to the observation center up in the ship’s prow to stare for hours on end at the radar imagery unfolding before my eyes. I began to understand Fuchs’s fascination with this alien scenery, glowing red-hot in the darkness of night. It really was like looking down at the surface of hell, a barren, blasted, wretched expanse of total devastation, without a drop of water or a blade of grass, without hope or pity or help for pain.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it?”
I nearly hopped out of my skin. I’d been staring so intently at the radar images and the dull, stygian, sullen glow coming through the observation ports that I hadn’t heard Marguerite come up behind me.
She didn’t notice how startled I was; all her attention was on the views through the ports. The ruddy light from the surface made her face seem mysterious, exotic.
“It’s terrifying and fascinating, both at the same time,” she said in a near whisper. “Horrible and beautiful in its own deadly way.”
I said, “More horrible than beautiful.”
“What’s that?” She pointed to the screen that displayed the radar imagery.
It showed a set of circular fractures, as if something gigantic had smashed the rocky surface like an enormous hammer.
“That’s called a corona,” I said. “An asteroid hit there; a big one. And look here, see these pancake features? Volcanoes, set off by the heat when the asteroid struck.”
“As if it weren’t hot enough down there already,” Marguerite murmured.
“I wonder how old that corona is?” I asked myself more than her. “I mean, we don’t know very much about how fast erosion works down on the surface. Did that asteroid hit recently or was the impact a hundred million years ago?”
“There’s a lot to learn, isn’t there?” she said.
“Not on this trip. We won’t be able to do much science. We’re here for the money this time around.”
Marguerite gave me a strange look. “Do you expect to come back?”
I almost shuddered. But I heard my mouth blabbing, “Maybe. There really is a lot to learn. Greenbaum believes the whole surface of the planet is going to boil over, sooner or later. Maybe I can. use some of the prize money to endow—” And then I stopped short, realizing that it was going to be Fuchs who got the prize money, not me.
Marguerite took a step closer to me, close enough to touch my shoulder with her hand. “Van, you have to start thinking about how much of … I mean, what condition your brother’s body will be in.”
“Condition?”
“There might not be much left to recover,” she said, very gently.
“There’s no oxygen down there to decompose his body,” I mused aloud. “No bacteria or other scavengers.”
“He was in the ship’s escape pod, wasn’t he? Sealed in?”
“Yes, that’s the last word he sent out.”
“Then he was in an oxygen atmosphere when he went down.”
“But still …” I wanted to think that Alex’s body would be preserved, somehow, waiting for me to carry it back home.
Marguerite had no such illusions. “There’s the heat,” she said. “And the pressure. Under those conditions even carbon dioxide becomes corrosive.”
I hadn’t considered that before. “You think he’d be … totally decomposed?”
“Temperatures that high destroy the chemical bonds that hold proteins together,” she said.
“But he’d be in a spacesuit,” I speculated. “In the escape pod. If he had time enough … he knew the ship was going down … .”
“Even so,” Marguerite said.
“Do you think there might not be anything? Nothing at all?”
“It’s a possibility. As you said, we simply don’t know enough about the conditions on the surface, how they affect protein-based tissues.”
If there had been a chair or even a stool in the observation port I would have slumped onto it. My legs felt rubbery, my insides a jumble.
“Nothing at all,” I muttered.
Marguerite fell silent.
I gazed out onto that hellish landscape, then turned back to her. “To come all this way and find … nothing.”
“There’d be artifacts, of course,” she said. “Parts of the ship. Wreckage. I mean, you could certainly prove that you’d reached his ship, what remains of it.”
“You mean Fuchs could prove it.”
“Either way.”
I almost wanted to laugh. “I can just see my father refusing to pay Fuchs because he failed to bring back my brother’s remains.”
“You don’t think he’d do that, do you?”
“Don’t I? It would be the final joke in this whole ridiculous farce.”
“It’s not really funny, is it?” she said.
But the more I thought about it, the more poetically absurd it all seemed. “Fuchs would tear my father’s head off.”
“I don’t think so,” Marguerite countered.
“Oh no? Him with his violent temper?”
“He doesn’t have a violent temper,” she said.
“The hell he doesn’t!”
“He uses violence very deliberately. It’s part of his way for getting what he wants. He’s perfectly cool about it. Ice cold, in fact.”
I didn’t believe a word of it. “That’s crazy,” I said.
“No, it’s the truth.”
I stared at her for several long moments, watching the
glow of Venus’s searing heat playing across the planes of her cheeks, the curve of her jaw, striking sparks in her jet-black eyes.
glow of Venus’s searing heat playing across the planes of her cheeks, the curve of her jaw, striking sparks in her jet-black eyes.
“All right,” I said. “I’m not going to argue with you about it. You know him better than I do.”
“Yes,” Marguerite replied. “I do.”
I took a deep breath and turned away from her. Marguerite seemed willing to call an armistice, as well.
“Are those cliffs?” she asked, pointing to the screen that displayed the forward-looking radar imagery.
It took me an effort to shift mental gears. I studied the screen for a few moments, gathering my wits.
“Yes,” I said, finally recognizing what the radar was showing. “Those cliffs mark the edge of Aphrodite Terra. That’s where the
Phosphoros
went down, most likely.”
Phosphoros
went down, most likely.”
I
slept like a dead man, thankfully without dreams. But when I awoke I felt just as tired as I had when I’d crawled into my bunk. Exhausted. Drained.
slept like a dead man, thankfully without dreams. But when I awoke I felt just as tired as I had when I’d crawled into my bunk. Exhausted. Drained.
The crew’s quarters were hot. The entire ship was uncomfortably hot, soggy, pungent with human sweat and the enervating inescapable heat that was seeping in from the torrid blanketing atmosphere outside our hull. The bulkheads felt warm to the touch, despite the ship’s cooling system. The deck felt slippery, slimy to my bare feet.
At first I thought my exhaustion might have been the symptoms of my anemia coming back. But as I showered and shaved, with a trembling hand, I realized that it was emotional exhaustion as much as the anemia or the heat. My emotions were being whipsawed; it was more than I could deal with.
Marguerite claimed she was not sleeping with Fuchs, yet she seemed tied to him more strongly each time I spoke with her.
There might not be anything left of Alex for us to recover,
and even if there were it would be Fuchs claiming the prize money when we got back, if we got back, not me.
and even if there were it would be Fuchs claiming the prize money when we got back, if we got back, not me.
I needed Fuchs’s blood to stay alive, yet the transfusions were endangering his health. He was obviously not his old powerful, self-confident self. Something was gnawing at him. Were the transfusions sapping that much of his strength? Or was he feeling some form of guilt over the deaths of Bahadur and the two other mutineers?
I couldn’t imagine Fuchs feeling guilt over anything, nor allowing himself to slowly die by giving his blood to me—especially to the son of Martin Humphries, the man he hated more than anyone else.
But Fuchs was weakening, whether it was physically or emotionally or a combination of the two. And that frightened me more than anything else. I realized that I would have preferred to see him at his old tyrannical, demanding self than to watch him sinking into moody, listless malaise. I needed him, we all needed him, to run
Lucifer
. Without Fuchs, the crew would up-ship and leave Venus for good.
Lucifer
. Without Fuchs, the crew would up-ship and leave Venus for good.
Without a strong and vigorous captain, I’d be defenseless against the crew. If I tried to keep them from leaving they would slit my throat just as they’d murdered Sanja.
And without Fuchs to protect her, what would happen to Marguerite?
No wonder I felt overwhelmed and exhausted. And helpless.
I was in the galley, trying to get some breakfast down my throat while the sour body smells of my crewmates were making me gag, when the intercom blared, “MR. HUMPHRIES REPORT TO THE CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS AT ONCE.”
The others sitting around the crowded galley table glared at me. I gladly dumped my meal into the recycler and hurried down the passageway to Fuchs’s compartment.
It seemed slightly cooler in his quarters, but that was probably because there were only the two of us in the compartment. He was sitting on his rumpled bed, tugging on his boots.
“How are you feeling?” he asked as soon as I closed the sliding door behind me.
“All right,” I said warily.
“Marguerite tells me you need another transfusion.”
“Not just yet, sir.”
He got to his feet and went to the desk. His face wore a sheen of perspiration.
“I thought you’d like to see the latest radar pictures,” he said, pecking at his desktop keyboard.
The wall screen lit up. I saw the rugged mountains of Aphrodite and, down in the narrow sinuous cleft, the bright scintillations of a strong radar return.
My heart leaped, “The
Phosphoros?
”
Phosphoros?
”
Fuchs nodded, his face somber. “Looks like it. Has the right profile.”
I stared at the screen. The wreckage of my brother’s ship. Whatever was left of Alex was down there, waiting for me to recover it.
“He could have picked a worse spot,” Fuchs muttered, his eyes also fixed on the screen, “but not by much.”
“That’s a pretty narrow valley,” I said.
Nodding, Fuchs muttered, “On Earth there would be devilish air currents threading through that valley. Here, well … we just don’t know.”
The mountains looked raw, new, even in the radar image: sharp and jagged, as if they had been thrown up only recently. Those mountains couldn’t be new, I thought. Not if Greenbaum and Cochrane were right, and Venus’s plate tectonics had been locked up solid for the past half billion years. Vulcanism was also a puzzle. There were plenty of volcanoes to see, but none of them appeared to be active. Yet
something
had to be pumping sulfur compounds into the clouds, and volcanic eruptions seemed the only reasonable source for the sulfur. But in the century or so that probes had been observing Venus, none had ever seen a volcano erupt. Except for the eruption that
Truax
reported, and that scared me to the marrow with visions of Greenbaum’s theory erupting in our faces.
something
had to be pumping sulfur compounds into the clouds, and volcanic eruptions seemed the only reasonable source for the sulfur. But in the century or so that probes had been observing Venus, none had ever seen a volcano erupt. Except for the eruption that
Truax
reported, and that scared me to the marrow with visions of Greenbaum’s theory erupting in our faces.
I knew that a mere hundred years is less than an eyeblink when it comes to geological processes such as plate tectonics and vulcanism, but still—Earth and Venus are almost exactly the same size. Earth’s interior is still bubbling hot; given such a similar mass and size, Venus’s interior must be just as hot. Hardly a year goes by on Earth without some of that interior heat forcing its way to the surface in a major volcanic eruption. If there were no volcanoes blasting out boiling lava and steam for a whole century on Earth, the geologists would go insane.
Yet for the hundred or so years that spacecraft had been observing Venus there had been no recorded volcanic eruptions, until now. Why? Was Greenbaum right? Was Venus’s crust getting hotter and hotter, edging toward the moment when all the surface rocks actually begin to boil into molten lava? Was it all going to blast right into our faces?
“Come with me,” Fuchs said, snapping me out of my terrifying thoughts.
Turning away from the wall screen, I saw that he was already at the door and already scowling at me in his old impatient way. I almost felt glad.
He led me aft along the central passageway, then down a ladder into a small, bare compartment. A heavy hatch was set into its deck. Fuchs worked the control panel on the bulkhead, and I realized the hatch opened onto an airlock. He clambered down into it, then after a moment or so, popped his head up above the level of the deck again.
“It’s all right, Humphries. There’s pressure on the other side. Come down here.”
I stepped to the lip of the hatch and saw that he had opened the airlock’s bottom hatch and was starting to crawl through it. I climbed down the rungs set into the circular wall of the airlock. The metal was shining, new, hardly used. There was a ladder extended below the bottom hatch and I went down, one rung at a time, and planted both my feet on the deck.
Turning around, I saw that we were in a small chamber, something like a hangar or a narrow boathouse.
And sitting there, filling most of the chamber’s space, was a sleek, arrow-shaped craft of gleaming white cermet. Its pointed nose was transparent. Its flared back end was studded with a trio of jet nozzles.
“What do you think of it?” Fuchs asked, actually grinning at the sight of the vehicle.
“Rather small,” I said.
“One man, that’s all it’ll hold.”
I nodded. Walking slowly around her, I could see several manipulator arms folded tightly against the vehicle’s sides. I also saw the name that Fuchs had stencilled on the side of the ship:
Hecate
.
Hecate
.
He saw the questioning look on my face. “A goddess of the underworld, associated with witchcraft and such.”
“Oh.”
“This ship will take me to the surface of hell, Humphries. You see the allusion?”
“It’s a little rough,” I said.
He huffed. “I’m only an amateur poet. Go easy on your criticism.”
“This ship will maneuver on its own?” I asked. “It won’t be tethered to
Lucifer
?”
Lucifer
?”
“That’s right. No tethers.
Hecate
will move independently.”
Hecate
will move independently.”
“But—”
“Oh, I know you had a regular bathysphere on your ship. It wouldn’t have worked.”
That nettled me. “The best designers in the world built that bathysphere for me!”
“Yes, of course,” Fuchs sneered. “And you were going to hover your
Hesperos
over the wreckage and lower your armored bathysphere to the surface.”
Hesperos
over the wreckage and lower your armored bathysphere to the surface.”
“Right. And the tether connecting us would also be an umbilical that carried my air and electrical power and coolant.”
“So I gathered. Did you think anyone—Duchamp or Rodriguez or God and his angels—could keep your mother ship hovering in place over the wreckage for more than ten
minutes at a time? You’d be swinging back and forth in that stupid ’sphere like a pendulum.”
minutes at a time? You’d be swinging back and forth in that stupid ’sphere like a pendulum.”
“No!” I snapped, with some heat. “We did simulations that showed we could pinpoint the ship’s position. The air’s so dense down there that hovering is no problem.”
“Maybe in a nice open plain with plenty of elbow room, but could you hover precisely in that snaky valley where the wreckage is?” Fuchs scoffed. “What did your precious simulations show you about that?”
I glared at him, but I had to admit, “We didn’t do a simulation of those conditions.”
“But those are the conditions we actually face, aren’t they?” he gloated.
“Do you really expect this vehicle of yours to get you safely down to the surface and back?”
With a confident sweep of his hand, Fuchs answered, “
Hecate
was designed after the submersibles that oceanographers use back on Earth. They get to the bottom of the deepest Pacific trenches, ten kilometers and more below the surface. The pressure down there is six times worse than the pressure here on the surface of Venus.”
Hecate
was designed after the submersibles that oceanographers use back on Earth. They get to the bottom of the deepest Pacific trenches, ten kilometers and more below the surface. The pressure down there is six times worse than the pressure here on the surface of Venus.”
“But the heat!”
“That’s the big problem, right enough,” he said easily. “
Hecate
doesn’t have enough room for heat exchangers and the cooling equipment we’re using on
Lucifer
.”
Hecate
doesn’t have enough room for heat exchangers and the cooling equipment we’re using on
Lucifer
.”
“Then how—”
“
Hecate
’s hull is honeycombed with piping that carries heat-absorbing fluid. Even the observation ports are threaded with microducts.”
Hecate
’s hull is honeycombed with piping that carries heat-absorbing fluid. Even the observation ports are threaded with microducts.”
“But what good does that do?” I demanded. “Just moving the heat from one area of the ship to another doesn’t help much. You’ve got to be able to get rid of the heat, get it off-ship.”
He broke into a wide, wolfish grin. “Ahh, that’s the elegant part of it.”
“So?”
“Most of
Hecate
’s mass is ballast: ingots of a lead-based alloy. A very special alloy, one we developed out in the Belt
just for this purpose. Quite dense. Melts at almost precisely four hundred degrees Celsius.”
Hecate
’s mass is ballast: ingots of a lead-based alloy. A very special alloy, one we developed out in the Belt
just for this purpose. Quite dense. Melts at almost precisely four hundred degrees Celsius.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s simple,” Fuchs said, spreading his hands. “So simple that your brilliant designers didn’t think of it.”
He looked at me expectantly, like a teacher I remember from prep school who always thought I was better prepared for the day’s lesson than I actually was. I turned away from Fuchs, feeling my face twisting into a frown of concentration. A metal alloy. What was the point of carrying ingots of metal for ballast when you’re going down to the surface—
“It’s hot enough down there to melt lead,” I heard myself say.
“Right!” Fuchs clapped his hands in mock applause.
“But I don’t see …” Then I caught on. “The alloy ingots absorb the heat inside the ship.”
“Precisely! And I vent the molten metal off-ship, thereby getting rid of the heat they’ve soaked up.”
“But that will only work for as long as you still have ingots on board.”
“Yes. The calculations show I can spend one hour on the surface. Maybe I can stretch it to seventy, seventy-five minutes. But not longer.”
“It’s …” I searched for a word … “ingenious.”
“It’s ingenious if it works,” he said gruffly. “If it fails then it was a crazy idea.”
I had to laugh at that.
But he was looking past me, past
Hecate
and this tight little chamber.
Hecate
and this tight little chamber.
“I’m going down there, Humphries, down into the pit of hell. I’ll be the first man to reach the surface of Venus. Live or die, no one will ever be able to take that away from me. The first man in hell.”
My jaw fell open. He was looking forward to it, relishing the idea. Nothing else mattered to him. He was totally focused on it, eyes burning, lips pulled back in an expression that might have been a display of ecstacy or a snarl of defiance. And he was not chewing any pills, either.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” he went on, glowing with expectation. “We finally reach a peak of knowledge where we’ve virtually eliminated aging, banished death. We can live and stay young as long as we like! And what do we do? We fight our damnedest to reach the surface of hell. We risk our foolish necks on escapades that only a madman would undertake! There’s human nature for you.”
I was speechless. There were no words in me to equal his fierce, maniacal intensity.
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