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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (20 page)

BOOK: Venus
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We were being tossed along that wave front, like a surfer caught on a gigantic curl, driven across the planet like a very tiny leaf caught in a very large, deliberate, slow but inexorable wave.
While I stood there, gripping the hatch frame with one hand and Marguerite with the other, Fuchs battled to right the ship and break it free of the wave that was blowing us halfway around Venus.
The crew, for once, were not impassive. As Fuchs rattled out orders, their faces showed grim intent, even the wide eyes and gaping mouths of fear.
Fuchs took his eyes off the screens for a moment and saw Marguerite and me standing there, hanging on while
Lucifer
bobbed and pitched in the grip of the massive wave.
“The engines are useless,” he said to us. “Like trying to stop a tsunami with a blowgun.”
The two technicians glanced at him when they heard
tsunami
, but one glare from Fuchs and they got back to their work of trying to hold the ship in trim.
“The only thing we can do is ride it out until we get to the night side again,” Fuchs murmured, thinking aloud. “It ought to damp out over there.”
Yes, I thought. It ought to. But we had believed that the
subsolar wave would be no problem at this depth into the atmosphere. Venus believed otherwise.
Now we were in the grip of a mammoth wave of energy that pushed us along at gale-force velocity, flinging the ship headlong across the planet like a frail dandelion tuft at the mercy of the inexorable tidal wave.
“Deeper,” Fuchs muttered. “We’ve got to go deeper.”
I
stayed at the hatch, clinging to Marguerite, for what seemed like hours. The ship kept bucking and shuddering, riding the massive wave that was driving us halfway across the planet.
But although my body was still, my mind was working furiously. This subsolar wave was like a moving wall that pushed us away from the daylit side of Venus. If the wreckage of
Phosphoros
and Alex’s body were on that side of the planet it was going to be next to impossible to reach them, unless the wave truly did peter out at lower altitude. If it didn’t, we would have to wait a month or more for the planet’s ponderously slow rotation to swing the Aphrodite region to the nightside.
I doubted that Fuchs had supplies enough for us to dawdle down here for several weeks. I know that
Hesperos
certainly hadn’t. I wondered if
Lucifer
, overdesigned though it was, could physically survive in Venus’s thick, hot atmosphere for a month.
We must have stood there at the hatch for hours. It wasn’t until the next watch showed up and pushed past us that Fuchs looked sternly at me and said, “Get back to your quarters, Humphries. You too, Marguerite.”
The ship’s motion had smoothed out considerably, although
Lucifer
was still pitching up and down enough to make my stomach uneasy.
“You heard me!” Fuchs snapped. “When I give an order I want it obeyed! Move!”
“Yes, sir,” I said, and led Marguerite down the passageway toward her compartment.
She slid her door open, then hesitated. Turning to me, she asked, “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” I said. Beyond her I could see the compartment Fuchs had given her. It was spare, utilitarian, probably the quarters for the first mate who had been killed trying to save Rodriguez. It was next to Fuchs’s more luxurious quarters, but there was no connecting door, I saw.
“No problems with the anemia?” she asked.
“We have more immediate problems to worry about,” I said. As if to emphasize my point, the deck lurched, throwing her against me. I held her with both arms.
She disengaged herself, gently, perhaps even reluctantly, I thought. But she did pull away from me.
Yet she seemed genuinely concerned about me. “We have no way of knowing how long the transfusion will help you … .”
“Never mind that,” I said. “What’s he doing to you?”
Her back stiffened. “What do you mean?”
“Fuchs. What’s he doing to you?”
“That’s not your concern,” Marguerite said.
“Isn’t it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“You’re trying to protect me, aren’t you?”
“By sleeping with him, you mean?”
“Yes.”
For an instant I thought I was looking at her mother; her expression went cold, hard as steel.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.
I felt anger flaring through me. “Then you’re sleeping with him to protect yourself.”
“Is that what you think?”
Exasperated, I shot back, “What else can I think?”
Icily, Marguerite said, “I am not responsible for what goes on in your mind, Van. And what is happening between Captain Fuchs and me is our business, not yours.”
“You don’t understand,” I said, “I—”
“No,
you
don’t understand,” she said, her voice venomously low. “You think that I’ll flop into bed automatically with the highest-ranking male aboard, don’t you?”
“That’s what your mother did, isn’t it?” I spat.
For a moment I thought she was going to slap me. She drew back a bit, and I must have inadvertently flinched.
Instead, she hit harder with her words. “You’re jealous, aren’t you? My mother picked Rodriguez over you and now you’re jealous that Fuchs is the top dog in this pack.”
“I don’t want you to be hurt,” I said.
“Worry about yourself, Van. I can take care of myself.”
With that she turned on her heel, stepped into her compartment, and slid the folding door shut. She didn’t slam it, but it banged into place quite firmly.
“I thought I told you to go to your quarters.”
I whirled and saw Fuchs standing just outside the hatch to the bridge, no more than ten meters away. How long he’d been standing there, I had no way of knowing.
“Now!” he snapped.
Right at that moment I wanted to leap at his throat and strangle him. Instead I slunk away toward the crew’s quarters, docile as the defenseless Runt that I was.
 
Even through the self-absorbed funk that I was in, I could sense the tension in the crew’s quarters. None of the burly Asians paid the slightest attention to me as I crawled into my bunk and slid the shoji screen shut. They were all huddled around the long table in the middle of the compartment,
bending their heads together and muttering to one another in their Asian tongue.
I could hear their tone through the flimsy screen: heavy, dark, foreboding. It didn’t sound at all like the jabbering I had heard earlier. I tried to tell myself it was nothing more than my imagination at work, yet I couldn’t overcome the feeling that the crew was definitely unhappy. Something was bothering them, and they were talking about it with grim intensity.
At least, while I lay there trying to get some sleep, the ship’s plunging and lurching smoothed out. We must be on the nightside, I told myself, or deep enough into the atmosphere for the subsolar wave to have damped out.
I fell asleep at last, with the crew’s guttural mutterings serving as a rough sort of lullaby.
I dreamed, but my memory of it is hazy. Something about being weak and sick, and then somehow overcoming it. I think I was sitting up on a dais, like my father did at his birthday party. Marguerite was in the dream, I’m pretty sure, although sometimes she was someone else—maybe her mother.
Whatever, when I woke I trudged out to the galley and put together a meal from the selections in the freezer. Then I showered and pulled on a fresh set of coveralls from the storage drawers built in beneath my bunk. Strangely, my old slippers had reappeared. There they were, in the drawer with the underwear.
There was precious little privacy in the crew’s quarters. I pulled my screen shut when I dressed, but that meant bending and twisting like a contortionist in the narrow space between my bunk and the shoji screen.
I thought I’d have several hours to myself before going back on duty, but the ship’s intercom speakers put an end to that idea.
“MR. HUMPHRIES, REPORT TO THE CAPTAIN’S QUARTERS IMMEDIATELY.”
It was Fuchs’s voice. He said it only once; he expected me to hear it and obey. Which is precisely what I did.
Marguerite was there, sitting in one of the chairs in front of his desk. Fuchs was on his feet, hands clasped behind his back, pacing slowly the length of the compartment, chewing on something; those pills of his, I thought.
“Have a seat,” he said to me.
I took the chair next to Marguerite.
“We’ve lost the better part of a day because of the subsolar wave,” he said, without preamble. “I propose to make it up by diving below the last cloud deck and making best speed back to the Aphrodite region.”
I glanced at Marguerite. She seemed aloof, distant, as if none of this had anything to do with her. Fuchs’s bed was still neatly made up, I saw, but I knew that didn’t mean much.
“The crew seems unhappy with my decision,” he said.
I wasn’t surprised that he had sensed the crew’s tension. “Do you have the entire ship bugged?” I asked.
He whirled on me, fists clenched. I quickly added, “Captain.”
Fuchs relaxed, but only a little. He went to his desk and touched a key on the phone console. A large section of the bare metal bulkhead turned into a display screen. I saw the crew’s quarters from a vantage point up in the ceiling. Several of them still sat huddled around the central table, muttering.
“They’re speaking in a Mongol tribal dialect,” he said, with a disgusted smirk. “They think I can’t understand what they’re saying.”
“Can you?” Marguerite asked,
“I can’t, but the language program can.”
He jabbed a stubby finger on the keyboard again, and the mumbling, guttural voices were overlain by a computer’s flat, emotionless translation:
“ … he is determined to get down to the surface, at all costs.”
“He will kill us all.”
“He wants the prize money. Ten billion dollars is an enormous incentive.”
“Not if we all are killed.”
“What can we do?”
“Take the ship and get the hell out of here.”
I looked from the screen to Fuchs, still standing with his hands clasped behind his back. His face was as unemotional as the computer’s translation.
“But how? He is the captain.”
“We are twelve, he is one.”
“There are the other two.”
“No problem. One woman and one weakling.”
I felt my face redden.
“The captain is no weakling.”
“And Amarjagal will not go along with us, now that she is first mate.”
“Who else would be against us?”
“Sanja, perhaps.”
“I can convince Sanja to stand with us.”
“But if we take the ship and head back to Earth, we won’t get the prize money.”
“To hell with the prize money. My life is more important. You can’t spend money when you are dead.”
Fuchs clicked off the display and the computer’s translation.
“Don’t you want to hear more?” Marguerite asked. “The details of what they’re planning?”
“It’s all being recorded,” he said.
“What are you going to do about this, sir?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“Not a thing. Not yet. So far, they’re just griping. Our little joyride on the wave shook them. If things settle down, if we don’t encounter any more scares, they’ll forget about it. Their share of the ten billion overrides a lot of complaints.”
Marguerite said slowly, “But if we run into more trouble …”
Fuchs snorted. “They’ll try to kill us all. After raping you, of course.”
W
hatever possessed you to hire such a gang of cutthroats?” I demanded.
Fuchs gave me a humorless grin. “They’re a good enough crew. All of ’em learned their trade out in the Belt. They’re rough and unpolished, but they know how to run this ship—and survive.”
I said, “And should we run into any more difficulties—”
“Which we will,” Marguerite interjected.
“They’re going to take over this ship and kill us all,” I finished.
Fuchs nodded somberly. He sat heavily in his desk chair and let out a gust of air that would have been a sigh, had anyone else breathed it. From him, it sounded more like an animal’s growl.
“I suppose a little demonstration is in order,” he said at last.
“A demonstration, sir?” I asked.
He eyed me disdainfully. “Yes. A calculated show of
force. Something to make them more afraid of their captain than they are of Venus.”
“What are you going to do?” Marguerite asked, genuine fear in her voice.
Fuchs made a grisly smile for her. “Something aggressive, I imagine. They’ll understand that. They’ll get my message.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.” Then, as if he’d made his decision and didn’t have to worry about it anymore, he pressed his hands flat on the desktop and pushed himself up out of the chair. “I should be on the bridge. You two, attend to your duties.”
“I’m off watch, sir,” I said.
“Yes, but you’re the closest thing we have to a planetary scientist here. We’ll be poking out below the clouds soon. Get to the observation station up in the nose and make certain all the sensors are recording properly.”
The first thing that flashed through my mind was that I had done my eight-hour stint on the bridge. He had no right to ask me to pull double duty. Almost instantly, I remembered that he was the captain and there was no court of appeals here.
“Yes, sir,” I said, getting to my feet.
Marguerite got up, too. “I’ll go with you,” she said. “I wouldn’t miss this moment for the world.”
 
The view through the observation port up forward was still nothing but blank yellowish-gray clouds. Fuchs’s so-called observation center was little more than a jumble of sensing instruments packed in around a bank of thick viewing ports. The ports themselves had been shuttered when Marguerite and I first got there. Heat shields, of course. It had taken me several minutes to figure out how to raise them.
“It’s warm up here,” Marguerite said. Her face glistened with a sheen of perspiration.
“Not only here,” I replied. “The deeper we go, the hotter it gets.”
She touched the thick port with her extended fingertips, then jerked them back quickly.
“Hot, eh?” I asked needlessly. “You can’t run coolant through the ports, it would ruin their transparency.”
I pulled up the schematic of the ship’s cooling system on the computer terminal built into the bulkhead below the ports. Coolant was piped through the entire hull and carried back to the heat exchangers for recycling. The heat exchangers dumped the accumulated high-temperature fluid into the engines that controlled our flight. The heat of the Venusian atmosphere was helping to drive
Lucifer’
s steering engines. We had built the same type of system into
Hesperos
, naturally. It not only cooled the ship, it helped run the engines.
Still, it was getting hotter. I felt sweat trickling along my ribs, felt my coveralls sticking to my damp skin.
Marguerite made a nervous little laugh. “At least it’s a dry heat. The humidity outside must be zero.”
I glanced at the sensor displays. The air temperature on the other side of our ports was climbing far past a hundred degrees Celsius. And we were still more than thirty kilometers above the surface. Sure enough, there wasn’t enough water vapor in the atmosphere to measure. For all practical purposes the humidity out there was zero.
“He said we’d be breaking out of the clouds,” Marguerite murmured, staring out into the endless yellow-gray haze.
“Yes, but there’s no way of knowing how—”
“Did you see that?” Marguerite cried.
For just the flash of an instant the clouds had thinned enough to see what appeared to be solid ground, far, far below us. But then the mist had closed in again.
“We must be close,” I said.
Then the clouds broke and we were beneath them. Marguerite and I stared down at the distant landscape of barren rock. It was utter desolation, nothing but bare hard stony ground as far as the eye could see, naked rock in shades of gray and darker gray, with faint streaks here and there of lighter stuff, almost like talc or pumice.
“We’re the first people ever to see the surface of Venus,” Marguerite said, her voice low, breathless.
“There’ve been radar pictures,” I said. “And photos from probes …”
“But we’re the first to see it, with our own eyes,” she said.
I had to agree. “Yes, you’re right.”
“Are all the instruments working?” she asked.
I swiftly scanned their displays. “All recording.”
She stared down at the scene of bleak devastation as if unable to pull her eyes away. The ground down there looked hot, baked for aeons, blasted by temperatures hotter than any oven.
“We’ll be passing into the nightside soon,” Marguerite said, more to herself than me.
I was starting to recognize geological formations on the surface. I saw a series of domes, and the wrinkles of a pressure-deformed region. There seemed to be mountains out near the horizon, although that might have been a distortion caused by the density of the thick atmosphere, like trying to judge shapes deep underwater.
“Look!” I pointed. “A crater.”
“It must be fifty kilometers across,” Marguerite said.
“It looks new,” I said.
“Do you think it is? Pull up the map program and check it.”
I did, and the display screen on the bulkhead showed the same crater on the radar map.
“There’s not much erosion going on down there,” I remembered. “That crater will still look new a hundred million years from now.”
Marguerite looked dubious. “In all that heat and that corrosive atmosphere?”
“There’s chemical weathering of the rock, but it goes very slowly,” I told her. “And the heat is steady, constant. There’s no hot-then-cold cycle to make the rocks expand and contract. That’s what erodes rock on Earth, that and water. It just doesn’t happen on Venus.”
Nodding, she asked, “Are the telescopes recording all this?”
For the tenth time I checked the instruments and the computer that monitored the sensors. They were all toiling away faithfully, recording every bit and byte of data: optical, infrared, gravimetric, even the neutron scattering spectrometer was running, although we were much too high above the ground for it to capture anything.
We stayed there for hours, watching the landscape unfold beneath our straining eyes. When
Lucifer
drifted across the terminator and into the night-shadowed side of Venus, we could still see the ground perfectly well. It glowed, red-hot.
“It’s like looking down into hell,” I muttered.
Marguerite said softly, “But there aren’t any doomed souls to see.”
“Yes there are,” I heard myself answer. “We’re the doomed souls. We’ll be lucky to get out of here. It might take a miracle to save us.”
 
We stayed in the observation center for almost exactly eight hours. As the time drew to a close, the ship’s intercom blared in its computer-generated voice: “ALL THIRD WATCH PERSONNEL REPORT TO YOUR DUTY STATIONS IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.”
I realized that I was ravenously hungry. Still, Marguerite and I left those viewing ports reluctantly, as if we were afraid to miss something that might show up, despite the fact that we knew there was nothing to see down there but more heat-blasted bare rock.
Except for the wreckage of a spacecraft.
We were too high to see the wreckage of
Phosphoros
with our naked eyes, but I was hoping the telescopes and their electronic boosters would pick it up. Then I realized that we might also find what was left of
Hesperos
. Maybe even Rodriguez’s spacesuited body was waiting for us somewhere down among those glowering rocks.
We stopped at the galley for a quick snack, then I headed up toward the bridge and dropped Marguerite off at her quarters.
“I’m still hoping to find something biologically interesting down at this altitude,” she told me, “although I doubt that anything could live in such heat.”
I had to grin at her. “Your last biological discovery nearly killed us.”
She didn’t see it as funny. Her face fell, and I mentally kicked myself for reminding her of her mother’s death.
Fuchs was not on the bridge when I reported for duty, but he showed up shortly afterward, looking grim. I wondered what he was planning as his “calculated show of force.” I remembered how he had punched me and wondered if the violence he had spoken of would be something of the same.
All through my eight-hour stint the bridge was quiet and tense.
Lucifer
was cruising lower and lower as we sailed around the nightside of the planet, scanning the surface below with all our sensors, including the radars. We knew Alex’s last reported position; he was drifting along the equator when his beacon stopped transmitting. The last word he had transmitted was that his ship was breaking up and the crew was getting into their escape pod. We calculated that he must have gone down somewhere near the equator, or close enough to it so that our sensors could spot his wreckage as we sailed purposively around Venus’s middle.
The man at the life support console was one of the leaders we had seen conspiring in the crew’s quarters, a sizable Asian named Bahadur. He was a full head taller than I, with broad shoulders and long, well-muscled arms. He kept his head shaved, but a thick dark beard covered his jaw. His skin was sallow, almost sickly looking, and his eyes gave the impression that he was thinking secret thoughts.
Fuchs spoke hardly a word to any of us during the watch. But when we were replaced by the next shift, he stepped out into the passageway after us.
“Humphries,” he called out, “follow me.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “You too, Bahadur.”
He marched us to the sick bay and told Bahadur to stand by the table. There wasn’t enough room in the bay’s narrow confines for the three of us, so I stayed out in the passageway by the open hatch.
“Bahadur, you look unhappy,” Fuchs said, in English.
“I, Captain?” The man’s voice was low and deep, almost a basso. I was surprised that he could speak English, but then I remembered that English was the standard language among space crews.
“Yes, you. Any complaints? Any problems you want to speak to me about?”
Bahadur blinked several times. He was obviously thinking as fast as he could. At last he said, “I do not understand, Captain.”
Fuchs planted his fists on his hips, then switched to the Asian language he used on the bridge. He must have repeated his question.
Bahadur swung his head slowly from side to side. “No, sir,” he said in English. “I have no problems to speak to you.”
Fuchs considered his response for a few silent moments. Then he said, “Good. I’m glad.”
“May I go now, Captain?” With Fuchs standing a hand’s breadth in front of him, Bahadur was pinned against the sick-bay table.
“Are you certain everything is okay?” Fuchs asked, his tone openly mocking now. “I don’t want any member of my crew to be unhappy.”
Bahadur’s brows knitted. Then he replied, “I am happy, Captain.”
“That’s fine. And the rest of the crew? Are they all happy, too?”
“Yes, Captain. Happy.”
“Good. Then you can tell them for me that I would be very unhappy to see them frightened like a bunch of cowardly rabbits.”
Bahadur jerked back as if he’d been slapped in the face.
“Remind them that I explained to each and every one of
you that this would be a dangerous mission. Do you remember that?”
“Yes, Captain,” Bahadur said slowly. “You said there would be dangers.”
“And a great reward at the end. Do you remember that, also?”
“A great reward. Yes, Captain.”
“Good!” Fuchs said, with conspicuously false cheer. “Remind the rest of the crew. Danger, but a great reward afterward.”
“I will do so, Captain.”
“Yes.” Fuchs’s expression became iron-hard. “And tell them that I don’t want my crew to be weeping and wailing like a pack of old women. Tell them that.”
Bahadur’s shaved head was bobbing up and down now like a puppet’s. Fuchs stood aside and the man scuttled past him, through the hatch, and rushed by me like a schoolboy running from the wrath of the headmaster.
BOOK: Venus
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