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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (19 page)

BOOK: Venus
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Before either of us could say anything, Fuchs turned to Marguerite and asked with mock beneficence, “Will that be enough rest and recuperation time for your patient? Never mind answering. It’ll have to do.”
Looking back at me, he said, “Two hours.”
Then he grasped Marguerite’s wrist and led her out of the sick bay. He held her possessively, like a man who felt he owned her. Marguerite glanced back over her shoulder at me, but she went with Fuchs without a word of resistance, without a moment of hesitation.
Leaving me sitting there, hot anger welling up in my gut.
I
served my eight-hour watch on the bridge under Fuchs’s sardonic eye. No sign of Marguerite. I should have eaten a bigger meal; I was ravenously hungry, but I gave no outward sign of it—except for an occasional growl from my hollow stomach.
One of the burly, blank-faced Asians relieved me at the end of my stint. I got up and headed for the passageway, determined to find the ship’s galley.
But instead Fuchs called to me. “Wait right there, Humphries.”
I froze in place.
He shouldered past me and through the hatch. “Follow me,” he said, without turning back.
He led me to his quarters, the compartment stuffed with books and comfortable furniture. The bed was neatly made. I wondered where Marguerite was.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Hungry,” I said.
He nodded, went to his desk, and spoke into the intercom in that Asian language that might have been Japanese.
“Sit down,” he said, gesturing to one of the leather-and-chrome chairs in front of the desk. He himself took the creaking swivel chair behind it.
“I’ve ordered dinner for us. It should be here in a few moments.”
“Thank you.”
“I wouldn’t want you to starve to death on my ship,” he said, with just the hint of a malicious smile.
“Where’s Marguerite?” I asked.
The hint of a smile disappeared. “Where’s Marguerite,
sir,”
he corrected.
“Sir.”
“That’s better. She’s in her quarters, resting.”
I began to ask where her quarters were, but before I could get the first words out he jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “Her quarters are next to mine. It’s the most comfortable compartment on the ship, except for this one. And it allows me to keep a close watch on her. Several of the crew members are very attracted to the young lady—not all of them male, either.”
“So you’re protecting her.”
“That’s right. None of them will dare try anything as long as they know she’s mine.”
“Yours? What do you mean?” I saw his face cloud again and quickly added, “Sir.”
Before he could reply the door slid open and one of the crewmen carried in a large tray filled with steaming bowls. He parceled out the food between us, putting Fuchs’s dinner on his desk and dropping legs from underneath the tray to turn it into a table for me.
I shook my head inwardly at the contradictions I was seeing. Fuchs ran a tightly disciplined ship, yet there were touches of … well, luxury was the only word I could think of. He liked his creature comforts, obviously, although he didn’t care to extend the same level of amenities to the rest of the crew.
I looked around at the books that filled his shelves: philosophy, history, poetry, fiction by old masters such as Cervantes, Kipling, London, and Steinbeck. Many of the volumes were in languages I did not know.
“Do you approve?” he asked, with a pugnacious air.
I nodded, but heard myself answer, “I prefer more modern writers, Captain.”
He snorted with disdain. “I suppose we can dispense with the formalities while we’re alone in here. No need to address me as ‘captain’ or ‘sir’—unless someone else is in the room.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He grunted, almost as if embarrassed by his small concession. Then he pulled a small vial from one of the desk drawers, shook a few tiny yellow pills into his hand, and tossed them into his mouth. Again I wondered if he was a narcotics addict.
I tried to make out the lettering on the spine of the old book on his desk. Its leather cover was cracked and peeling.
“Paradise
Lost,” he told me. “John Milton.”
“I never read it,” I confessed.
“Very few have.”
That made me feel rather uncomfortable. Fishing around in my memory, I came up with, “Isn’t there a line in it that goes, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven’?”
Fuchs grimaced. “Everybody knows that one. I prefer:
Infernal world! And thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor-one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
He spoke with such fervor, such a dark deep-rooted passion, that I was totally taken aback. I didn’t know what to say.
“You may borrow it if you wish.”
“What?”
“The book. You may borrow it if you’d like to.”
My brows must have hiked up to my scalp. Fuchs laughed harshly, “You’re surprised at a show of generosity? You’re surprised that I’m pleased to have someone aboard with whom I can talk about philosophy or poetry?”
“Frankly, I am surprised, Captain. I had thought that you’d want nothing to do with Martin Humphries’s son.”
“Ah, but you forget, you have
my
blood in you now. That’s an improvement. A vast improvement.”
I had no reply for that. Instead, I began, “About Marguerite—”
“Never mind her,” he snapped. “Don’t you want to know about my
Lucifer?
Aren’t you curious about why my ship survived and yours broke apart? Aren’t you wondering about where we are and how close we are to your father’s prize money?”
“Is that all that interests you, the money?”
“Yes! What else is there? Your father took everything else from me: my career, the company I founded, my reputation, even the woman I loved.”
I could see we were moving into dangerous territory, so I tried to change the subject to a safer ground.
“Very well,” I said, “tell me about your ship.”
He stared at me for a long, wordless moment, gazing blankly, those cold, ice-blue eyes of his seemingly looking through me into another dimension. What was going through his mind I have no way of knowing. His face went as blank as a catatonic’s. He must have been revisiting the past, reminding himself of what he had lost, how he had reached this point in space and time. At last his broad, heavy-jowled face regained life; he shook his head slightly, as if clearing it of painful memories.
“Overdesign,” he said at last. “That’s what you learn when you stake your life on a vessel that’s got to carry you across interplanetary distances. Overdesign. That’s the lesson I learned out in the Asteroid Belt. Bigger is better. Thick skin is better than thin.”
“But the weight penalty—”
He snorted again. “Your problem is that you had that astronaut guiding your hand.”
“Rodriguez,” I said.
“Yes. He spent his life on scientific excursions to Mars, didn’t he? Rode out there on elegant, state-of-the-art spacecraft designed to be as efficient as possible, slimmed down to the least possible gram, worried about every cent of cost and every newton of rocket thrust.”
“That’s the way spacecraft have to be designed, isn’t it?”
“Oh, certainly,” Fuchs answered sarcastically. “If you’re working with academics and engineers who’ve never moved their own carcasses farther than the vacation centers on the Moon. They produce highly refined designs, so highly refined that they use the very latest materials, the most sophisticated new systems and equipment they can conceive.”
“What’s wrong with that?” I asked.
“Nothing, if you’re designing the craft for someone else to use. If you’re worried about spending the boss’s money. If your design philosophy is to give your master a vessel that has the very latest of everything
and
is built at the lowest possible cost. An impossible contradiction, don’t you see?”
“Yes, but—”
“But if you’re prospecting out among the asteroids,” Fuchs went on, overriding my objection, “then you learn pretty quickly that your ship has got to be strong, powerful, with as many redundant systems as you can pack onto it. You’re a billion kilometers from anywhere out in the Belt; you’re on your own. You can’t expect somebody to come out and repair you or bring you a fresh pot of coffee when you run out.”
He was enjoying this lecture, I could see. He was smiling with unfeigned pleasure.
“So here we are, you and me, both determined to get to the surface of Venus. You allow your astronaut to design as dainty a vessel as he can, sleek and slick and pared down to a hairsbreadth in every detail. Why? Because that’s the way
he’s always operated. Because his attitude, his training, his whole life has been spent in demanding the most elegant designs the engineers can create.”
And we failed, I admitted silently.
Hesperos
broke up and crashed. And
Phosphoros
before her, I finally realized.
“Now me,” Fuchs tapped his chest with two fingers of his right hand, “I’m not elegant. I’m a prospector from the Asteroid Belt. A rock rat. I was out there with Gunn and the other pioneers, before your father even dreamed about sticking his grubby fingers into asteroidal mining.
“I saw that the ships that succeeded were the overdesigned, overbuilt, overequipped clunkers that could take a beating and still bring their crews back alive. Now which type of vessel do you think would do better against the … uh,
rigors
of the Venusian environment?”
I asked, “Did you suspect that there would be metal-eating organisms in the upper clouds?”
“No. Not for a minute. But I knew that my ship had to have a skin thick enough to take whatever Venus could dish out. Not a cockleshell like yours.”
“The bugs are eating away at your hull, too, aren’t they?”
He waved a hand. “Not anymore. We’re so deep into the second cloud deck that the outside temperature is rising to well over a hundred degrees Celsius: the boiling point of water.” He made a sardonic smile. “The bugs are roasting nicely.”
“And there aren’t any other organisms at this level?”
“I’ve assigned Marguerite to sample the clouds. So far, no signs of bugs. I suspect that the hotter it gets out there, the less likely that anything could live in it.”
I nodded agreement. He spoke on and on about the superior design of
Lucifer
and how well the ship was holding up to the constantly increasing pressure and high temperature of the atmosphere outside the hull.
“In another ten or twelve hours we’ll break out below the clouds into clear air. Then we can begin the search for what’s left of
Phosphoros.”
“And my brother’s body,” I mumbled.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m looking forward to seeing your father’s face when he has to hand me that ten billion. That should be something worth waiting for!” He chortled with unalloyed glee.
His laughter was cut short. The ship lurched as if some giant hand had slapped it sideways. My dinner bowls clattered off the tray-table and onto the carpeted floor. I nearly slid off my chair. An alarm started hooting.
Fuchs gripped the arms of his swivel chair, his face turning into blind rage. He pounded a fist on the phone keyboard and roared something in that Asian language the crew used. I could not understand the words but easily recognized the tone: “What the hell’s happening?”
A high-pitched, frightened voice replied in a rapid staccato over the keening of the alarm.
Fuchs jumped out of his chair. The deck was slanting noticeably as he came around the desk. “Come with me,” he said grimly.
We staggered along the passageway, walking uphill the few steps it took to reach the bridge. The alarm’s wail cut off, but the deck beneath our feet continued to buck and toss.
Fuchs went straight to his command chair. The other crew stations were occupied, so I stood by the hatch, holding on to its rim. Marguerite came up behind me, and I slid an arm around her waist to steady her without thinking about it.
The bridge’s main screen showed a bewilderingly rapid flow of graphs, sharply curving lines in many different colors laid out over a gridwork of lines.
Fuchs spat out an order and the screen cleared momentarily. Then a computer-enhanced image came up that made no sense to me. It showed a circle with a dot off to one side and pulsing rings of light flowing outward from it, like the ripples made in a pond when you throw a stone into the water.
“Subsolar point,” Fuchs muttered. “Even down at this level.”
I understood what he meant. Venus turns so slowly on its axis that the spot on the planet directly beneath the Sun stays at “high noon” for more than seven hours at a time. The atmosphere beneath that subsolar point heats up tremendously, as if a blowtorch were blazing away at it hour after hour.
That terrible heating is what drives the superrotation winds, high up in the Venusian atmosphere, where the air is thin enough for winds of four hundred kilometers per hour to race around the planet. Lower down, where the atmosphere is much thicker, such winds are damped down.
But not completely, we were finding. Like sluggish ripples in a thick, soupy pond, there were waves flowing out from the subsolar point even at the depth to which
Lucifer
had already penetrated.
BOOK: Venus
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