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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (21 page)

BOOK: Venus
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I turned from the crewman’s retreating back to Fuchs, still standing there with his fists planted on his hips. So this was the captain’s “calculated show of force.” He had cowed the man completely.
“Surprised?” Fuchs asked, sneering at the awe that must have been clearly written on my face. “What did you expect me to do? Beat him to a pulp?”
I
have to confess that that was exactly what I had expected Fuchs to do: unleash the same kind of furious violence on the crewman Bahadur that he had vented on me the first time we met face-to-face.
But he was far cleverer than that. He had cowed the big Mongol with moral superiority and a caustic, withering tongue. Would it be enough, I wondered as I started back to the crew’s quarters. Would the big technician stay cowed?
“I wouldn’t go back there just now,” Fuchs said to me as I started down the passageway.
I turned back toward him. “Sir?”
With a sardonic little smirk he explained, “They probably think you’re spying on them.”
My eyes nearly popped out of my head. “Me? Spying?”
“How else would I know about their grumbling?”
“Don’t they realize you have cameras watching them?” I asked. “Microphones listening? Computers to translate their language?”
Fuchs actually laughed, a harsh, bitter barking. “They’re
tearing their quarters apart right now, searching for my bugs. They won’t find any.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’ve crawled away on their built-in wheels, down along the air shaft and into my compartment.” He looked smugly pleased with himself. “Want to see ’em?”
Without waiting for my reply he headed down the passageway. He didn’t bother to look back. I followed, as he knew I would.
“I’m sure they’re doing an especially good job of ripping your bunk apart,” he said as we reached the door to his quarters. “When they find nothing, they’ll be certain that you’re the spy in their midst.”
“That’s why you had me come with you when you braced Bahadur!” I realized.
Fuchs’s only reply was a sly grin.
We entered his compartment. He went to his desk and pulled a slim flat black object from the top drawer. He pressed a thumb against it and several tiny lights winked green on across its top.
“Remote controller,” he explained. “Set to operate only when it’s activated by my thumbprint. Otherwise, it runs the wall screen.”
The wall screen stayed blank, though. Fuchs aimed the remote at the ventilation grid in the overhead. The lights blinked briefly, and then a pair of miniature metallic objects crawled through the grid and along the metal overhead toward him.
No bigger than my thumb, they looked like minuscule metal caterpillars. Midget-sized wheels lined their lengths. Looking closer, I saw that they were actually ball bearings.
“Magnets hold them against the overhead,” Fuchs said, almost as if speaking to himself. “Nanomotors provide propulsion.”
“But nanotechnology is outlawed,” I said.
“On Earth.”
“But—”
“This is the real world, Humphries. My world.”
“Your world,” I repeated.
“The world your father exiled me to, more than thirty years ago.”
“My father exiled you?”
Fuchs turned off the remote and sat heavily in his desk chair. The two bugs clung to the overhead, inert.
“Oh, the old humper didn’t have me officially driven out. I still have the legal right to return to Earth. But I could never build my own company there. Your father saw to it that I’d never be able to raise a penny of capital. None of the major corporations would even take me on as an employee.”
“Then how did you survive?” I asked, taking one of the chairs in front of the desk.
“It’s different off-Earth. Out on the frontier you’re worth what you can accomplish. I could work. I could control other workers, supervise them. I could take risks that nobody else would even think of taking. What did I care? Your father had stolen my life, what difference did it make?”
“You built your fortune off-Earth.”
“What fortune?” he snorted. “I’m just a derelict, a man who’s captained ore ships and run prospecting probes out in the Belt. One of thousands. A rock rat. A drifter.”
My eyes turned to the battered book on his desk. “‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,”’ I quoted softly.
He laughed bitterly. “Yes. The original sour-grapes line.”
“But you’ll be a very wealthy man when you come back from Venus.”
He stared at me a moment, then said, “Satan sums it up neatly:
All is not lost—the unconquerable will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield.”
I had to admire him. Almost. “That’s how you feel?” I asked.
“That is precisely how I feel,” he said, with fervor.
“All these years you’ve nursed a hatred against my father because he beat you in business.”
“He
stole
my company! And stole the woman I loved. She loved me, too.”
“Then why did she—”
“He killed her, you know.”
I should have felt startled, I suppose, but somehow I had almost expected that from him.
Seeing my disgust, Fuchs leaned forward intently. “He did! She tried to be a good wife to him but she still loved me. All that time, she still loved me! When he finally understood that, he murdered her.”
“My father’s no murderer,” I said.
“Isn’t he? He killed your brother, didn’t he?”
“No, I can’t believe that.”
“And now he’s killing you, as well.”
I shot to my feet. “I may not be on very good terms with my father, but I won’t listen to you making such accusations.”
Fuchs started to frown, but it turned into a sneering, maddening chuckle.
“Go right ahead, Humphries. March off in righteous dudgeon.” He waved a hand in the general direction of the door. “They ought to be finished tearing your bunk apart by now. Be careful what you say to them. They’re convinced you’re spying on them for me, you know.”
 
The atmosphere in the crew’s quarters was as thick and venomous as the Venusian air outside the ship. They all stared at me in sullen silence.
My bunk was torn to shreds. They had ripped apart my sheets, my pillow, even the mattress. The drawers beneath the bunk were pulled out, thoroughly rifled. Even my shoji screen had been slashed, every single pane.
I stood beside my bunk for a long moment, my heart
pounding in my ears. It felt hot in the crowded compartment, oppressively hot and sticky. Hard to breathe.
I turned to face eight hostile Asian faces staring at me, eight pairs of hooded brown eyes focused accusingly upon me.
I licked my lips, felt sweat trickling along my ribs. Their overalls looked stained with sweat, too. They must have been working very hard to find the captain’s bugs.
I looked directly at the tall and broad-shouldered Bahadur, his shaved head rising above all the others.
“Bahadur, you understand English,” I said.
“We all do,” he told me, “but most of us do not speak it well.”
“I am not the captain’s spy,” I said firmly.
They did not reply.
“He has planted electronic bugs in the air shaft. He uses the computer to translate your language.”
“We searched the air shaft,” Bahadur said.
“His bugs are mobile. He takes them away when you search for them.”
One of the women pointed at me and spoke in a rapid, flowing tongue.
“She says you are the bug,” Bahadur translated. “You spy on us.”
I shook my head. “Not so.”
“The captain likes you. He shares meals with you. You are the same race as he.”
“The captain hates me and my father,” I said. “He is watching this scene now and choking with laughter.”
“The punishment for spying is death,” said one of the men.
“Go ahead and kill me, then,” I heard myself say. “The captain will enjoy watching you do it.” I had no idea where such foolish courage came from.
Bahadur raised a hand. “We will not kill you. Not where it can be seen.”
Whatever shred of courage I had in me evaporated with
those words. It took a real effort of will to stand there facing them all. My knees wanted to collapse. And a voice in my mind was screaming at me,
Get away! Run!
Before I could say anything aloud, though, the captain’s voice blared through the loudspeaker, “EMERGENCY! ALL HANDS TO EMERGENCY STATIONS! THE PRIME HEAT EXCHANGER HAS FAILED. THE SHIP IS DANGEROUSLY OVERHEATING. ALL HANDS TO EMERGENCY STATIONS!”
T
hey all raced past me and out the hatch, leaving me standing suddenly alone in the crew’s quarters. My bunk was a mess and the others had just threatened my life. But I found myself ridiculously worried over the fact that I hadn’t the faintest idea where my emergency station was.
The captain would know, of course. So I trotted down the passageway to the bridge. All the stations were occupied, I saw.
Fuchs looked up from the display screens. “Mr. Humphries. So pleased you decided to join us.”
His sarcasm was like acid. I simply stood at the hatch, not knowing what I should be doing.
“Take over the comm console, Humphries,” he snapped. Then he spat out a harsh command to the woman already seated there.
She got up and quickly left the bridge. I took over the comm console. I saw that, despite the emergency, the communications systems were running quite normally. Our
automated telemetering beacon was functioning as it should. Intercom channels within the ship were filled with jabbering voices that I couldn’t understand.
“Should I send out a distress call, sir?” I asked.
“To whom?” he snapped.
“IAA headquarters in Geneva, Captain. At least, we should let them know what’s happening to us.”
“The telemetering data will give them the full picture. We will maintain silence otherwise.”
I knew that a distress call wouldn’t help us one iota. We were ninety million kilometers from any possible rescue. Not even
Truax
, up in orbit above us, could enter the atmosphere and come to our aid.
We sat in tense silence on the bridge for hours. I was sweating, and not merely from the rising heat. I was frightened, truly frightened. A nasty voice in my mind told me with biting irony that if the crew was able to repair the heat exchanger and save the ship, their next action would be to murder me. Maybe it would be better if we all went down, I thought.
It had been madness, every millimeter of the way, this insane expedition to Venus. What had ever made me do it? I racked my brain, seeking answers for my own foolish behavior. It wasn’t the money, I told myself. It wasn’t even my feeble hope of earning some respect from my father. It was Alex. All my life, Alex had been the one person I could rely on. He had protected me, encouraged me, taught me by his example how a boy should grow into manhood. He had been all that a big brother should be, and more.
I’m doing this for you, Alex, I said silently as I watched the communications screens. I could see the faint reflection of my own face in the main screen in front of me. I didn’t look at all like Alex. No two brothers could look less alike.
But Alex had loved me. And I was ready to give my own life to be worthy of that love, that trust. It was a vain, self-serving excuse, I told myself. But it was also true.
“Let me see the heat exchanger bay,” Fuchs commanded.
I roused myself from my thoughts and punched up the
ship’s inboard schematic, then tapped the area marked HEAT EXCHANGER BAY. The screen filled with an image of four crew members stripped to their waists, sloshing in sweat, as they labored over the malfunctioning exchanger. Bahadur seemed to be their chief. With something of a jolt I realized that two of the bare-chested crew were women. Their comrades paid no attention to their nudity.
Fuchs began to speak to Bahadur in his own language, growling and snarling at him. I slipped a phone plug into my right ear and activated the translation program.
I might as well have listened to their native tongue. They were using such heavy tech-talk jargon that I barely understood anything. Apparently there was a blockage in one of the main tubes that resulted in a growing hot spot that threatened to erode the high-temperature ceramic that coated the inner walls of the tubing. Fuchs spoke sarcastically of “hardening of the arteries” to the laboring crew.
“We must take the main exchanger off-line to make the necessary repairs,” Bahadur said. I got that much clearly.
“For how long?” Fuchs asked.
“Two hours. Maybe more.”
Fuchs tapped swiftly on the keyboard built into his armrest, then stared hard at his main display screen. It showed a graph that was meaningless to me, except that it shaded from light blue through a bilious pink to a blaring fire-engine red. A single curve arched across the gridwork, with a blinking white dot hovering on the edge of the blue-shaded region.
“All right,” Fuchs said. “Take it off-line. You’ve got two hours, no more.”
“Yes, sir,” said Bahadur.
It took more than two hours, of course.
Fuchs gave orders to lift the ship to a higher altitude, where it was slightly cooler. I realized that we were dealing with a few tens of degrees now, desperately hoping that we could tolerate two hundred degrees Celsius for a bit longer than two hundred and fifty.
The ship rose slowly. Our altitude readings inched higher, but the temperature outside the hull did not fall more
than a few degrees. And it was growing constantly hotter inside.
We sat at our stations on the bridge, literally sweating out the repairs to the heat exchanger. The temperature rose steadily. I watched that blinking white cursor travel along the graph’s curve from the blue into the pink, heading inexorably toward the red area that marked danger.
Marguerite called from the sick bay. “I have a man here suffering from heat prostration, according to the diagnostic program.”
I could see past her worried face one of the crewmen lying flat on the table, eyes closed, his face bathed in sweat, his coveralls soaked.
“Baldansanja,” Fuchs muttered. “I need him at the pumps. We have to climb out of this soup, get up to a cooler altitude.”
“He’s totally exhausted.”
“Give him a couple of salt tablets and get him back to the pumps,” Fuchs commanded.
“But the diagnostic program says he needs rest!” Marguerite pleaded.
“He can rest after we’ve repaired the heat exchanger,” Fuchs snapped. “I need every joule of work those pumps can give us, and Sanja’s the man who knows those pumps better than anyone else. Get him on his feet! Now!”
Marguerite hesitated. “But he—”
“Inject saline into him, give him a handful of uppers, do whatever you have to do to get him back at those pumps,” Fuchs demanded. It was the first time I had seen him appear to be worried.
The man on the table stirred and opened his eyes. “Captain,” he pleaded in English, “please forgive this weakness.”
“On your feet, Sanja,” Fuchs said, in a more conciliatory tone. “The ship needs you.”
“Yes, sir. I understand, sir.”
Fuchs punched off the channel from the sick bay before Marguerite could say anything more. In a few minutes Baldansanja
reported from the pump station, back at the aft end of the ship. He sounded weak, but Fuchs seemed satisfied to have him on duty again.
After nearly three hours Bahadur called in. In English he reported, “The heat exchanger is back on-line, Captain.”
The man looked happy: grimy, his bald head glistening with perspiration and rivulets of sweat trickling into his beard, but a big toothy grin spreading almost from one dangling gold earring to the other. I had seen that kind of expression on people’s faces before. It was the exhausted yet triumphant smile of an athlete who has just broken a world record.
I looked from his image to the graph. The white cursor was blinking on the edge of the red zone.
Fuchs gave no congratulations. “How long will it stay on-line?”
“Indefinitely, Captain! For as long as we need it!”
“Really?”
“If we step up the maintenance routine,” Bahadur amended. “Inspect and clean one tube at a time, every twenty-four hours, sir.”
Rubbing a hand across his broad jaw, Fuchs replied, “Yes, I think that’s in order.”
He pointed at me. “Get me the pump station, Humphries.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Baldansanja was back there, sitting grimly in front of a maze of dials. His face was dry, his eyes wide, pupils dilated. I wondered what medication Marguerite had given him.
“Sanja,” said Fuchs, “we’re going down again. The emergency is over. Report to sick bay.”
“I will monitor the pumps, Captain,” he said doggedly.
“Report to the sick bay. Don’t make me repeat my order again.”
The man’s eyes went still wider. “Yes, Captain. I will go.”
It took a while for the bridge to cool down to a relatively comfortable level. Fuchs called off the emergency, but by then it was time for my normal watch so I stayed at the
comm console. Fuchs gave me a ten-minute break to get something to eat and relieve myself. I was back on duty in nine minutes and thirty seconds.
“Have you ever heard of Murphy’s Law, Humphries?” he asked from his command chair.
“If anything can go wrong, it will,” I replied, then hastily added, “Sir.”
“Do you know the reason behind Murphy’s Law?”
“The reason behind it, sir?”
He gave me a disdainful huff. “You think of yourself as something of a scientist, don’t you? Then you ought to be interested in the reasons behind phenomena. Root causes.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Why does the air-conditioning system break down during the hottest weather of the year? Why did our heat exchanger fail when we needed it most?”
I saw where he was heading. “Because that’s when the maximum strain is put on it.”
“Exactly,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “Now tell me, what else is going to fail? Where will Murphy strike next?”
I had to think about that. We needed the heat exchanger to keep us from cooking to death as we descended deeper into Venus’s atmosphere. We also needed the life support systems, but no more so now than we did the day the crew came aboard, back in Earth orbit.
“Well?” Fuchs goaded.
“The pumps,” I guessed. “The pumps keep the gas envelope filled with outside air so we keep descending.”
“And stay in trim,” he added.
“And when we’re ready to go up again,” I reasoned aloud, “we’ll be dependent on the pumps to drive the air out of the envelope and lighten us.”
“Very good, Humphries,” Fuchs applauded mockingly. “Very astute. As soon as you end your watch, I want you to go to Sanja and start learning how to run the pumps.”
“Me?”
“You, Mr. Humphries. Your talents are wasted here at the communications console. That’s much too simple a task for a man of your brilliance.”
He was jabbing at me; why, I had no idea. The two other technicians on the bridge were as blank-faced as usual, although I thought I saw their eyes meet briefly.
“Yes, Humphries,” Fuchs went on, “it’s time you got those lily-white hands of yours dirtied a little. A bit of honest work will make a man of you, mark my words.”
I definitely saw the glimmerings of a smile on the navigation technician’s lips before she could mask it. I was the butt of Fuchs’s scornful humor. But why?
 
Fuchs left the bridge shortly afterward, and Amarjagal, the first mate, took the conn. She gave me a sour look, but said nothing.
When I finished my watch, I left the bridge, intending to find Baldansanja and start learning about the pumps. But I only got as far as the open door to the captain’s quarters.
“Take a look at this, Humphries,” he called to me.
That was an order, not a request, I knew. I stepped through the doorway and saw that his big wall screen showed the ground below us, glowing hot in the darkness of the Venusian night.
“Like Milton’s lake of fire,” he said, staring grimly at the bleak barren rock.
He touched a control on his desk and the overhead lights went out. There was no illumination in his compartment except the eerie hellish glow from those red-hot rocks more than thirty kilometers below us. Their fiery light made his face look evil, satanic—and yet exultant.
“A dungeon horrible,” he quoted,
“on all sides round
As one great furnace flamed; yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible …”
He turned to me, still smiling devilishly. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
I stared at him.
“No, of course not,” he answered his own question. “How could you? How could anyone? Look at it. Just look at it! Terrible and magnificent. Awesome and beautiful in its own ghastly way. This is what hell must have looked like before Lucifer and his fallen angels were condemned to it.”
I was speechless. Not so much with the view of the ground, but with Fuchs’s obvious fascination.
“A whole world to explore,” he said, still staring at the screen. “An entire planet, so much like our own in size yet so utterly, confoundedly different from Earth. How did it get this way? What made Earth into paradise and Venus into hell?”
BOOK: Venus
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