Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (9 page)

BOOK: Venus

13.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

“Wha … yes. Yes, I’m all right.”

“Don’t freeze up on us now,” the astronaut said. “We’ll be ready to move soon’s Duchamp gets herself connected to the trolley.”

I couldn’t take my eyes off Venus. She was a brilliant saffron-yellow expanse, glowing like a thing alive. Goddess of beauty, sure enough. At first I thought the cloud deck was as solid and unvarying as a sphere of solid gold. Then I saw that I could make out streamers among the clouds, slightly darker stretches, patches where the amber yellowish clouds billowed up slightly.

I was falling in love with a world.

“I’m secured. Let’s get moving.” Duchamp’s terse order broke my hypnotic staring.

Turning my entire body slightly, I saw the seven other figures bobbing slightly around the trolley, which was nothing more than a motorized framework of metal struts that could crawl along the Buckyball cable.

I looked down the length of the cable toward
Hesperos
, which seemed to be kilometers away. Which it was: three kilometers, to be exact. At that distance the fat dirigible that was our spacecraft looked like a toy model or a holographic image of the real thing. At its nose the broad cone of the heat shield stood in place like a giant parasol, looking faintly ludicrous and totally inadequate to protect the vessel from the burning heat of entry into those thick yellow clouds.

“All right, by the numbers, check in,” Duchamp commanded.

Nothing happened. Silence.

“I said, by the numbers.” Duchamp repeated, her voice taking on an edge. “Mr. Humphries, as owner of this vessel, you are number one. Or have you forgotten
everything
from the simulation runs?”

I twitched with surprise. “Oh! Yes, of course. Number one, secured.” As I said the prescribed words I yanked on my tether to make certain they were true. It held firmly.

Rodriguez answered next, then Marguerite. As the other crew members checked in I thought again of what a farce Marguerite’s “official” title of mission scientist was. But I was glad she was with us. I could talk to her. She didn’t lord it over me as her mother did; even Rodriguez made it clear, without realizing he was doing it, that he regarded me as little more than a rich kid playing at being a scientist.

“All right, then,” Duchamp said. “Captain to
Truax
. We are ready for transfer.”

“Copy you ready for transfer, Captain.
Hesperos
main airlock is cycled, outer hatch open and waiting for your arrival.”

“Systems check on
Hesperos?
” Duchamp asked.

“All active systems in green except for APU, which is off-line.”

The auxiliary power unit was off-line? My ears perked up at that. But neither Duchamp nor any of the others seemed to be worried about it.

“The main airlock is green?” Duchamp asked sharply.

“No, sir,” came the immediate reply. “Main airlock is blinking red.”

“That’s better,” she said. The airlock indicator should blink red when its outer hatch is open. I could sense Duchamp’s bitter smile at catching the EVA controller in a minor slipup.

“Activate trolley,” she commanded.

“Activating.”

I felt a very slight tug on my tether, and then all of us
were moving toward the distant
Hesperos
, accelerating now, sliding down the long Buckyball cable like a small school of minnows flashing across a pond.
Hesperos
seemed to be coming up at us awfully fast; I thought we’d crash into her, but I kept silent. Sometimes you’d rather die than make an ass of yourself.

Sure enough, the trolley smoothly decelerated, slowly coming to a stop as the seven of us swung on our tethers like a trained team of acrobats in a silent ballet until we were facing down toward
Hesperos
. I marveled that we went through the maneuver without bumping one another, but Rodriguez later told me it was simple Newtonian mechanics at work. My respects to Sir Isaac.

The trolley stopped about ten meters from the open airlock hatch, with us hanging by our tethers with our boots a mere meter or so from
Hesperos
’s hull. As we had done in the virtual reality simulations, Duchamp unhooked her tether and dropped to the hatch, her knees bending as her boots hit the hull soundlessly.

She stepped into the airlock, disappearing into its shadowed depths for a moment. Then her bubble helmet and shoulders emerged from the hatch and she beckoned to me.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Humphries,” she said. “As owner, you should be the first to board
Hesperos
. After me, of course.”

VENUS ORBIT

I
’ve tried to contact him a dozen times, Mr. Humphries,” said the communications technician.”He simply doesn’t answer.”

It was the longest sentence the comm tech had spoken to me since I’d first met her. Her name was Riza Kolodny. She was a plain-looking young woman with a round face and mousey brown hair that she kept short, in the chopped-up look that had been fashionable a couple of years earlier. Like the other two technicians, she was a graduate student picked by Rodriguez and okayed by Duchamp. According to her dossier she was a first-rate electronics specialist. She certainly did not look first rate in any way, not to me.

I was bending over her shoulder, staring at the hash-streaked communications screen. Riza was chewing something that smelled vaguely of cinnamon, or perhaps it was clove. She seemed apprehensive, perhaps afraid that she was displeasing me.

“I’ve tried all the comm freaks,” she said, lapsing into jargon in her nervousness, “starting with the frequency
Captain Fuchs registered with the IAA. He just doesn’t answer.”

Hesperos
was not built for creature comforts. The tubular gondola that hung beneath the vessel’s bulbous gas envelope housed a spare and spartan set of compartments that included the bridge, galley, a single lavatory for all eight of us, work spaces, infirmary, supply lockers, and our so-called living quarters—which were nothing more than slim, coffin-sized berths partitioned off for a modicum of privacy. There was no room aboard
Hesperos
for anything but utilitarian efficiency. We all felt crowded, cramped. I had to fight off incipient claustrophobia whenever I slid into my berth; I felt like Dracula coming home for a good day’s sleep.

The bridge was especially cramped. The comm center was nothing more than a console shoehorned in a bare few centimeters from the captain’s command chair. I had to twist myself into a pretzel shape to get close enough to Riza’s chair to see her screen. I could feel Duchamp’s breath on the back of my neck; she was ignoring me, her dark eyes intently focused on the EVA displayed on the main screen before her. Rodriguez and the two other techs were outside in their spacesuits, clambering over the heat shield, checking every square centimeter of it.

“Maybe Fuchs’s ship has broken down,” I thought aloud. Wishful thinking, actually. “Maybe he’s in trouble.”

Riza shook her head, fluttering her butchered hairdo. “
Lucifer
is telemetering its systems status back to IAA headquarters on the regular data channel, same as we are. The ship’s still in orbit with all systems functional.”

“Then why doesn’t he answer our call?” I wondered.

“He doesn’t want to,” said Duchamp.

I turned to face her, not exactly an easy thing to do in the jammed confines of the bridge.

“Why not?”

She gave me a frosty smile. “Ask him.”

I glared at her. She was making a joke of my effort to contact Lars Fuchs. There were only the three of us on the bridge; Rodriguez’s chair was empty.

“I could relay our call through IAA headquarters,” Riza suggested. “He might reply to us if the request came through them.”

“He won’t,” Duchamp said flatly. “I know Fuchs. He’s not talking to us because he doesn’t want to. And that’s that.”

Reluctantly, I accepted her assessment of the situation. Fuchs was going to remain silent. The only way we would learn of what he was doing would be to access whatever data he was sending back to the International Astronautical Authority in Geneva.

“Very well,” I said, squeezing between Duchamp and the display screen she was watching. “I’m going to the observation port to do my news broadcast.”

“Stay clear of the airlock,” Duchamp warned. “Tommy and the others will be coming back in less than ten minutes.”

“Right,” I said as I ducked through the hatch. The main passageway ran the length of the gondola; it was so narrow that Rodriguez joked that a man could fall in love squeezing past someone there.

Before we left Earth the question of news coverage had come up. Should we bring a reporter along with us? Back when I thought I’d be bringing some of my friends along on the journey, I had been all in favor of the idea. I thought the nets would
love
to send a reporter to Venus, and I had several friends who could have qualified for the role. For a while I even considered asking Gwyneth to be our reporter/historian.

Live broadcasts from the mission couldn’t fail to get top ratings, I figured. Unfortunately, the net executives saw it differently. They pointed out to me that newscasts from
Hesperos
would be interesting the first day or two, but they’d quickly become boring on the long voyage out to Venus. They admitted that once we got there, live reports from Venus would be a sensational story—again, for a day or two. But afterward the story would lose its glamour and become nothing but colorless, tedious routine.

“It’s science stuff,” one of the junior executives—a sometime friend of mine, in fact—told me. “Science stuff is boring.”

They certainly were not willing to pay a reporter’s expenses and insurance. It was Duchamp who suggested that I serve as the expedition’s reporter, the face and voice of the
Hesperos
’s mission. “Who better?” she asked rhetorically. I liked the idea. It eliminated the need to carry an extra person along with us. I would file a personal report on the expedition’s progress every day. I would become a household figure all around the Earth/Moon system. I really thought that would be terrific. Even if the nets wouldn’t feature my broadcasts every day, people could access them whenever they wanted. I often wondered, as I went through my daily report, if my father ever watched me.

Duchamp was no fool. Removing the need to bring a reporter with us, she also removed any possible objections I could raise about her replacing our astronomer with a biologist. Her daughter. Fait accompli. She had manipulated me beautifully and I hardly even minded it, although we both knew we didn’t need a biologist aboard. Duchamp did it for personal reasons.

Yet I didn’t mind. I was actually pleased that Marguerite was with us. Except for my daily news report I had no real duties aboard
Hesperos
. Time hung heavily as we coasted out to Venus and then established orbit around the planet. Marguerite had little to do, also, as far as ship’s duties were concerned, although she usually seemed busy enough when I went looking for her.

Often she was in the little cubbyhole that had been converted into her laboratory. After leaving the bridge and heading for the observation port in the nose of the gondola, I naturally passed by her lab. It was smaller than a phone booth, of course.

The accordion-fold door was slid back, so I stopped and asked her, “Are you busy?”

“Yes,” said Marguerite. It was a silly question. She was
pecking at the keyboard of a laptop, one of several she had propped along the compartment’s chest-high shelf. There was no room in her lab for a chair or even a stool; Marguerite worked standing up.

“Oh. I was on my way to do my news report and I thought I’d stop in the galley for a few minutes …” My voice trailed off; she was paying no attention to me, tapping at the keyboard of one laptop with a finger while she clicked away on a remote controller with her other hand, changing the images on one of her other screens. The images looked like photomicrographs of bacteria or something equally distasteful. Either that or really bad primitive art.

I shrugged, conceding defeat, and continued down the narrow passageway to the galley. It was nothing more than a set of food freezers and microwave ovens lining one side of the passageway, with a single stark bench on the other side, where one of the gondola’s oblong windows showed the massive, curving bulk of the planet below, gleaming like a gigantic golden lamp.

I slumped down on the bench and gazed out at Venus’s yellowish clouds. They shifted and changed as I watched. It was almost like staring into a fire, endlessly fascinating, hypnotic. The clouds’ hue seemed to be slightly different from one orbit to another. At the moment they looked almost sickly, bilious. Maybe it’s just me, I reasoned. I felt like that, sad and sick and alone.

“Mind if I join you?”

I looked up and there was Marguerite standing over me. I shot to my feet.

“Pull up a section of bench,” I said brightly.

She sat next to me and I caught a scent of perfume, very delicate, but a wonderful contrast to the metallic starkness of the ship.

“I’m sorry I was short with you back there,” she said. “I was running the latest UV scans of the atmosphere. Sometimes it gets pretty intense.”

“Oh, sure. I understand.”

Marguerite was still wrapped up in her work. “
Something
down in those clouds absorbs ultraviolet light,” she said.

“You think its biological? A life-form in the clouds?”

She started to nod, then thought better of it. As if she were a long-experienced scientist, she buried her enthusiasm and answered noncommittally, “I don’t know. Perhaps. We won’t know for certain until we get down into the clouds and take samples.”

Without thinking I argued, “What about all the sampling the unmanned probes did, years ago? They didn’t find any evidence of living organisms.”

Suddenly Marguerite’s dark eyes snapped with annoyance. “They weren’t equipped to. They all carried nephelometers to measure droplet size, but not one of them carried a single instrument that could have detected any biological activity. A Shetland pony could’ve flown by and those dumb-ass robots would never have noticed.”

“There weren’t any biological sensors on any of the probes?”

“Not one,” she said. “Venus is a dead planet. That’s the official word.”

“But you don’t believe it.”

“Not yet. Not until I’ve looked for myself.”

I felt a new respect for Marguerite. She could be just as much a tigress as her mother in matters that she cared about.

“How much longer will we stay in orbit?” she asked.

I hunched my shoulders. “We’re scanning the equatorial region with radar, looking for any sign of the wreckage of my brother’s ship.”

“Wouldn’t it be all smashed into small pieces?”

“Probably not,” I answered. “The atmosphere’s so thick that his ship would’ve gone to the bottom like a ship sinking in the ocean, back home. I mean, the pressure down at the surface is like our oceans, a kilometer or more below sea level.”

She thought about that for a moment. “So it wouldn’t be like a plane falling out of the sky on Earth.”

“Or like a missile hitting the ground. No. More like the
Titanic
settling on the bottom of the Atlantic.”

“You haven’t found anything yet?”

“Not yet,” I admitted.
Hesperos
was in a two-hour equatorial orbit; we had circled the planet thirty times, so far.

“How much of a chance is there that you’ll spot something?”

“Well, we know where he first entered the atmosphere, the latitude and longitude. But we can only guess where he might have drifted while he was in the clouds.”

“He didn’t have a tracking beacon?”

“Its signal broke up a lot once he went into the cloud deck, so we’ve got to scan a pretty wide swath along the equator.”

Marguerite looked past me, out at the clouds swirling across the face of Venus. She stared at them as if she could get them to part by sheer willpower. I watched the profile of her face. How much she looked like her mother! The same face, yet somehow softer, kinder. It made me think about how little I looked like my father. Alex resembled Father. People had often exclaimed that Alex looked like a younger replica of Martin Humphries. But I resembled my mother, they said. The mother I never knew.

Marguerite turned back to me. “Are you really a planetary scientist?”

The question surprised me. “I try to be,” I said.

“Then why aren’t you working at it? There’s your planet, right out there, and yet you spend your time wandering around the ship like a little lost boy.”

“I’ve got a complete set of instruments taking data,” I said. It sounded weak and defensive, even to me.

“But you’re not doing anything with the data. You’re not analyzing it or using it to change the sensors’ operating parameters. You’re just letting everything chug along on their preset programs.”

“The data goes back to Professor Cochrane at Caltech. If
she wants the instruments changed, she tells me and I make the changes.”

“Like a graduate student,” Marguerite said. “A trained chimpanzee.”

That stung. “Well … I’ve got other things to do, you know.”

“Like what?”

“I send in my news reports every day.”

Her lips pulled down disapprovingly. “That must take all of ten minutes.”

Strangely, I felt laughter bubbling up in me. I normally don’t take kindly to criticism, but Marguerite had hit me fairly and squarely.

“Oh no,” I answered her, chuckling. “It takes more like half an hour.”

BOOK: Venus

13.29Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads