A Step Beyond (14 page)

“Flawlessly executed,” he said without turning around. “I’ll be in the lab if you need me.”

Endicott moved sideways to avoid facing the astronauts and left the control module. The dark contrast of his back against the antiseptically white corridors remained imprinted on their retinas for several long seconds. It followed the movement of their eyes. There was a long silence.

“Brunnet,” Nelson ventured.

Carter, having already guessed the cause of the peculiar behavior, somberly nodded in agreement.

D
r. Takashi Satomura was monitoring three screens, situated side by side, each divided into multiple windows. His head barely moved, but his eyes were constantly scanning back and forth between the screens. He was humming the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth. The screens contained data from the
Greenhouse
probe, which was scheduled to impact with the Venusian atmosphere in six minutes and twenty-three seconds. The sensors aboard the probe had been activated fourteen minutes earlier. Every few minutes he would type in a command to alter the presentation of the output.

As a result of Brunnet’s death, Satomura was to take a more active role in the
Greenhouse
mission. He was to monitor the data as it poured from the probe’s high-gain antenna onto his screen. To Satomura it was like riding the probe itself. He would be the first to see the data. And when the probe landed he was to direct Nelson where to steer the rover, which had been Brunnet’s role. Other probes had landed on Venus, but this was the first one with a rover.

“Five minutes until impact,” Vladimir announced. Satomura’s nose drew closer to the center screen. The data he had been receiving up to that point was of little significance. There was not that much the probe’s instruments could detect outside the Venusian atmosphere. It was mostly a vacuum. As signs of positively charged ions began to appear on the center monitor, his humming grew noticeably louder.

“Thirty seconds until impact.”

Sweat began to gather at Satomura’s brow. He paused to listen as Vladimir counted the final seconds.

“Impact.”

The data on all three screens froze and remained frozen for several minutes. A ball of fire had engulfed the probe as it passed through the upper layers of the stratosphere, producing a barrier of ionized particles through which the high-gain telemetry was unable to pass. The probe was protected by an aeroshell of aluminum and ceramic. Suddenly the screens turned white with data. Several of the windows were a blur. Satomura focused on the slower windows, those that contained the high-level analysis. He was pleased to see that every window was active, which meant all of the probe’s sensors had survived the four-hundred-g impact.

“How does it look?” Komarov asked, peering over the scientist’s shoulder. The screens were meaningless to him.

Satomura did not respond. He did not hear the question. The monitors had his entire attention. He flinched as the numbers from the accelerometer jumped erratically, and his fingers tightened around the ends of the keyboard almost as if he were bracing himself. The change in acceleration had not been unexpected. The probe was passing through a thermal layer in the atmosphere.

“How does it look?” Komarov repeated.

“All instruments functioning,” Satomura responded.

The probe was seventy kilometers above the surface when it struck the first layer of clouds. It was traveling much slower now, the friction and heat were much less, and the fire that had surrounded
Greenhouse
was gone. The probe fell another twenty kilometers before the parachutes opened.

“Parachute deployment at fifty kilometers,” Vladimir said. The opening of the parachute was confirmed by the sudden change in velocity reported by the accelerometer. Moments later the high-definition camera attached to the side of the probe began filming. All eyes, including Satomura’s, turned to the monitor with the images. The screen was mostly white with streaks of yellow and lemon. They were looking at the inside of a cloud.

“Sulfuric acid, eighty percent,” Satomura read automatically, almost mechanically. “Acid droplet diameters ranging from zero-point-zero-zero-five to zero-point-zero-zero-nine millimeters. Crystal particles with a diameter of zero-point-zero-three millimeters composed of iron chloride. Good. Very good.”

“How frightening,” Tanya whispered.

The whiteness that filled the screen suddenly vanished and was replaced by a yellowish orange sky accentuated by a jagged horizon composed of volcanoes and mountains that curved inward and bounced awkwardly with the camera. The surface, obscured by a hot steam bath of haze, was reddish orange and dark.

“Welcome to hell,” Vladimir said.

“Temperatures increasing,” Satomura announced. “Three hundred and fifty K.”

“Beginning to detect some water vapor,” Satomura continued. “Zero-point-zero-two percent. Carbon dioxide, ninety-six percent. Nitrogen, three-point-five percent.”

“The probe appears to be shaking more than during the simulation,” Tanya commented.

“It is passing through a strong westerly wind,” Satomura responded. “Nearly ninety-eight meters per second. The winds will decrease as the probe descends.” He paused for a moment, then assaulted the keyboard with his long fingers. He anxiously watched the monitor on his right for the results. “The probe has entered a convective layer.”

“Convective layer?” Tanya asked.

“A section of the atmosphere where hot air rises and cold air descends.” He stopped abruptly. “That’s peculiar. The water vapor has increased to one-tenth of a percent. That’s considerably higher than anything measured before. I did not expect this at all. The temperature reading is four hundred K. If only I had the proper instruments.”

“Instruments for what?” Komarov asked.

“There is some speculation that if life were to exist on Venus, it would exist as microbes floating in the atmosphere in a region such as this. It’s not likely. But with the proper sensors we would know for certain one way or another.”

“From what I see they would have to be very hearty microbes.” “It certainly doesn’t look like a friendly place,” Vladimir said. Tatiana and Vladimir approached the monitor until they were only inches away. The bleak and unforgiving horizon it portrayed filled them with a sense of how tenuous their hold on the universe actually was.

“Two and a half kilometers,” Satomura announced.

“To what?” Vladimir asked, looking at the event timer and finding nothing scheduled to happen.

“The convective layer was two and a half kilometers deep. The turbulence should ease up now.”

And as the last word left his lips, the surface of the planet stopped bouncing. Although the probe was still being buffeted by high winds, winds greater than seventy meters per second, the program that processed the images was able to stabilize the picture. The planet did not look any friendlier. They watched in silence as
Greenhouse
slowly descended.

“Forty kilometers,” Satomura said. “The temperature is steadily increasing.”

The surface was obscured by a misty haze of aerosols and dust. Through the haze they were able to make out impact craters and long rift-valleys. The probe was descending just south of a mountainous region known as Aphrodite. The highest peak was five and a half kilometers high and was contrasted by a jagged gash in the ground that dominated the landscape. The gash was a twenty-three-hundred-meter deep chasm.

“The parachute has been released,” Tanya said, “and retro-rockets have ignited.”

The ground began to enlarge very quickly. The impact craters grew in size, and the circular rims that formed their boundaries broke apart into large arcs composed of scattered rocks that grew into misshapen boulders. Many of the boulders glowed from the intense heat at the planet’s surface.

“One kilometer,” Satomura announced. He felt as though it was all happening too quickly, that there was not enough time to absorb the data. Forty-seven minutes had passed since the probe first struck the atmosphere. Only seven remained until it landed.

“Point-five kilometers.”

They watched as Nelson steered the lander away from a region strewn with boulders. Due to the limited capability of the retro-rockets, he could only alter the probe’s course within a radius of a hundred meters of the original landing site. A cloud of dust sprang up and engulfed the ship, blocking their view of the surface.

“Impact,” Tanya announced. “The probe has landed.” “
Greenhouse
has landed,” Vladimir repeated into his microphone for his colleagues back on Earth.

“Checking instrumentation,” Satomura said excitedly. “The nephelometer is down, all other instrumentation checks.”

“Received confirmation on instrumentation check from the Americans,” Vladimir said. “They are preparing to deploy the rover.”

“Temperature is seven hundred and thirty-seven Kelvin.” Satomura was running the fingers of his left hand across the screen and tapping at the keyboard with his right as he read the information out loud. “Surface pressure is ninety-four atmospheres. Wind velocity is one-point-two meters per second.”

Greenhouse
was expected to function three hours and thirty minutes, after which time the electronic components that made up the scientific instruments would melt. The rover was designed to survive twenty-eight minutes before it would suffer a similar fate. Time was critical. Satomura glanced over at the event timer and waited impatiently for Nelson to deploy the rover.

The rover was a small remote-control vehicle, seventy-five centimeters long, thirty-three centimeters wide. Its tires were made of wire mesh and were disproportionately large with respect to the body of the vehicle. Two cameras were perched above the tires in front. They provided the controller with a three-dimensional view of the planet. At the rear a straight-wire antenna relayed data to and from
Greenhouse
. Adjacent to the antenna was a battery pack the size of a soup can. It was heavily encased in order to protect it from the planet’s intense heat. A vertical pole, fifty-one centimeters high, protruded from the center of the vehicle. The pole was a drill designed to extract a single core sample thirty centimeters in length. Surface soil was to be gathered by a strong arm, a multijointed rod with a serrated scoop at the end.

Satomura placed a pair of goggles over his eyes. Two spheres of light illuminated the interior of the probe. The bay door was directly in front of him. He switched on his microphone.

“Satomura, here,” he said.

“This is Nelson,” a voice responded. “Deployment in thirty seconds. Over.”

At two seconds and counting the bay door of the probe slid open, revealing a reddish orange surface of sand and rocks and a dark, yellow sky. The rover leapt out and the bay door slammed shut behind it. Nelson rotated the rover a full 360 degrees. As the cameras swung by
Greenhouse
, Satomura noticed dark streaks on its surface and immediately recognized them as burn marks caused by atmospheric entry.

“Where to?” Nelson asked.

The horizon glowed orange and curved upward. The rover appeared to be in a valley, but Satomura knew that to be an illusion. It was actually on flat terrain. The extreme surface pressure caused light to refract; as a result, the edges of the horizon rose into the sky like distant mountains.

“Proceed northeast twenty degrees for ten meters,” Satomura instructed.

“Roger. Twenty degrees northeast. Ten meters. Over.”

The rocks appeared to pass underneath him. Satomura felt as if he were actually on the surface. The sensation was exhilarating, and despite his desire to remain composed, he could feel his hands trembling with excitement. Superimposed on the surrounding terrain was the time remaining before the rover had to return and the distance in centimeters from the probe. At 1,237 centimeters with twenty-four minutes remaining, the rover stopped on top of a slight mound.

“Rotate right,” Satomura said.

“Roger.”

As far as the eye could see, broken, flat rocks were strewn haphazardly across the planet’s surface. Some of the rocks glowed from the heat. The land was barren. There were no signs of life. No thorns, no dry grass, no ragged claws. Nothing scuttling across the orange sand. Satomura wondered if Earth would meet a similar fate. If left unchecked, he felt certain it would. The wheels had already been set in motion. As he looked around, he felt a strange sort of joy. The surroundings were oppressive, stark, and hellish, yet he felt like a child stepping outside for the first time. The goggles blinked twenty-three minutes.

His first task was to find a suitable site to extract the core sample. He required soft ground, soil the drill could easily penetrate, preferably loose dirt or sand.

“Seven meters at twenty-two degrees,” he said.

“Roger,” Nelson responded. “Seven meters at twenty-two degrees.”

The rover crept slowly around the larger rocks, many of which were porous. They were fragmented chunks of hardened lava.

“Check soil resistance,” Satomura said.

“Checking resistance,” Nelson said.

He used the strong arm to dig into the top layers of the soil. The serrated scoop at the end of the arm cut deeply into the dirt.

“Minimal resistance,” Nelson noted.

Satomura had him check two other locations, each seven meters apart, before he settled upon the first.

“Activate drill,” Satomura announced, and suddenly he felt very tense.

“Activating drill.”

They watched and waited as the drill worked its way through the soil. Their attention was focused on two numbers, both of which were slowly increasing, the depth in centimeters the drill had achieved and the level of resistance it had encountered. If the resistance became too great, the computer would stop the drill, preventing it from being damaged. They breathed a little bit easier as each centimeter appeared on the screen, and they clapped in relief when the drill had reached its desired depth.

“Open block windows,” Satomura said, after checking his monitors.

Block windows were small apertures around the sides of the drill that allowed dirt to tumble inside when opened. The soil had to be loose, noncohesive, or it would not fall through the windows. Their breathing was delayed and intermittent as they waited. After several seconds, a sensor inside the drill was tripped and a flashing green light indicated the soil had been collected.