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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (22 page)

BOOK: Venus
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Despite myself I stepped closer to the screen. It truly was awesome, beckoning in a terrifying, grotesque way, like the old horror tales of vampires luring their prey to them: a vast plain of bare rock glowering sullenly, so hot that it glowed. There’s never darkness on Venus, I realized. Despite the clouds it is never dark down there.
That’s where we were going. That’s where we had to go, down there, into that infernal red-hot hell. Alex was down there; what remained of him, at least.
And Fuchs was fascinated by it. Absolutely enthralled. He stared wordlessly at the searing-hot rocky landscape below us, his lips pulled back in an expression that might have been a smile on any other human face. On him it looked more like a snarl, a look of defiance, the face of a man staring at his archenemy, his nemesis, a foe so powerful there is no hope of overcoming it.
Yet he dared to face this enemy, face him and battle against him with all his might.
How long we stood there staring at the blistering scorched landscape I can’t tell, but at last Fuchs tore his gaze away and turned on the overhead lights. It took a real effort of will for me to turn away from the screen and look at him.
For once, Fuchs was silent. He dropped down into his desk chair, his face somber, thoughtful.
“I could have been a scientist,” he said, looking back at the scorched surface of Venus again. “My schooling wasn’t so good, though; I never had the grades to make it into a university. Or the encouragement. I went to a technical college, instead. Got a job before I was twenty. Earned my living instead of earning a PhD.”
I had no reply for him. There was nothing I could say.
His eyes finally met mine. “Well, once I’ve got your father’s money in my fist, then I can take all the schooling I want. I’ll come back to Venus with a proper scientific mission. I’ll explore this world the way it deserves to be explored.”
He’s entranced by Venus, I finally understood. I pretend to be a planetary scientist, but he’s truly enthralled by this horrible world. In a strange and bizarre way, he’s in love with Venus.
Yet this was the man who had casually set me up for the crew’s suspicions, who had cruelly badgered me on the bridge less than half an hour earlier.
“I don’t understand you,” I murmured.
He cocked a brow at me. “Because I’m fascinated by this alien world? Me, a rock rat, an asteroid bum, excited by the mysteries and dangers we’re facing? You think that only certified scientists with the proper degrees in their dossiers are allowed to become enraptured by the new and unknown?”
“Not that,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s the contradictions in you. You’re obviously a man of intelligence, yet you behave like a barroom tough most of the time.”
He laughed. “What would you know about barroom toughs?”
“Just a little while ago you were ridiculing me in front of the crew.”
“Ah! That hurt your feelings, did it?”
“I just don’t understand how you can do that and still invite me to share your feelings about exploring this planet.”
He clicked off the display, frowning. “We’re not here to explore. We’re here to find your brother’s remains and go back to claim your father’s prize money.”
I must have blinked with surprise a half dozen times before I could find my voice again. “But just now, only a few minutes ago, you said—”
“Don’t mistake dreams for reality,” he snapped. Then he seemed to relent slightly. “Someday, maybe,” he murmured. “Maybe someday I’ll come back. But we’ve got to live through this mission first.”
I shook my head. There was much more to this man than I had realized.
“As for my ragging you on the bridge,” he said, “all I was doing was trying to save your life.”
“Save my life?”
“The crew thinks you’re my spy among them.”
“Thanks to you!”
He whisked a hand through the air, as if brushing away an insect. “Now they might have some doubts. I’ll probably have to kick your butt a few more times to convince them.”
Wonderful, I thought.
“And I shouldn’t invite you into my quarters, of course. That makes them really suspicious. So don’t expect this kind of treatment anymore.”
“I understand … I guess.”
“Yes. I shouldn’t have asked you in right now, but I just couldn’t sit here alone watching the planet unfolding below us. I had to share it with somebody, and Marguerite’s sleeping right now.”
It wasn’t until I was halfway up the passageway to the crew’s quarters that I wondered how Fuchs knew Marguerite was asleep.
T
hat session with Fuchs brought home something important to me. I was supposed to be a planetary scientist, yet I had done precious little to live up to the claim. The instruments that I had put on board
Hesperos
to satisfy Professor Greenbaum and Mickey Cochrane had done their work automatically. I hardly needed to look at them, much less do actual scientific work. And now even they were gone and I was little more than a captive among Fuchs’s crew.
I mean, Alex came to Venus to find out how the planet had turned into a greenhouse hell. He wanted to determine what had happened on Venus to make it so different from Earth, and whether our own world might take the same disastrous turn. Sure, there was plenty of politics involved. The Greens trumpeted Alex’s mission and were all set to use his findings to bolster their own pro-environment, anti-business programs.
But beyond all that Alex was genuinely interested in learning about Venus simply for the sake of knowledge. He
truly was a scientist at heart. I know my brother, and I know that he was using the Greens—accepting their money for his mission to Venus—as much as they were using him.
And me? I had sworn to follow in Alex’s footsteps, but I had done precious little about it. Here was Fuchs, of all people, embarrassing me with his passion about exploring the planet while I stood there like a tongue-tied dolt, a dilettante who’s merely pretending to play at being a real scientist.
No more, I swore to myself as I cleaned up the mess the crew had made of my bunk. I said not a word to them, and they watched me in silent hostility. As I tacked a ripped sheet onto the torn shoji screen, I told myself that I was going to find out as much about Venus as I could and everyone and everything else could be damned, as far as I was concerned.
The trouble was that I didn’t have any of the equipment we had carried aboard
Hesperos
. Still,
Lucifer
bore its own battery of sensors. I resolved to tap their data and begin a comprehensive investigation of the atmosphere. After all, we had an excellent profile from the sampling we had done. Marguerite had her airborne, metal-eating bacteria to study; I was going to learn everything I could about the Venusian atmosphere.
And, in a few days, when we finally reached the surface, I was determined to collect samples of those scorching-hot rocks and bring them back to Earth.
A fine and noble intention. But then my damned anemia began to gnaw at me again.
I ignored the symptoms, at first. Tiredness, shortness of breath, occasional dizzy spells. Forget them, I told myself. Concentrate on your work.
I tried to convince myself that I was merely working harder than normal, between my new duties learning about the pumping systems and my studies of the data Fuchs had accumulated on the Venusian atmosphere. But at heart I knew that my red-cell count was sagging; hour by hour I was growing worse.
Marguerite noticed it. She had turned the sick bay into something of a biology lab, where she pored over the data she had amassed on the Venusian aerobacteria. She had not been able to bring any samples aboard when we had jumped the failing
Hesperos
, and Fuchs would not have allowed samples on his ship anyway, I knew.
“I’m trying to figure out what kind of container we could use to hold them,” Marguerite told me, “so we can collect samples on our way back up and bring them to Earth.”
The little display screen on the sick bay partition showed a chemical analysis of the aerobacteria’s protoplasm, a senseless hash of chemical symbols and numbers as far as I was concerned.
She was biting her lower lip as she studied the screen. “If only I’d had the time to do a DNA workup,” she murmured.
“Assuming they have DNA,” I said. I was sitting on the table, legs dangling. The bay felt slightly chilly to me, but considering the hot atmosphere just on the other side of the hull, I felt no urge to complain.
“The Martian bacteria have helical structures in their nuclei. So do the lichen.”
“And if the Venusian bacteria do too, does that prove that helical structures are a basic form for all living organisms, or does it show that life on all three planets must have come from the same origin?”
Marguerite looked at me with a respect in her eyes that I had never seen before.
“That’s a very deep question,” she said.
I tossed it off nonchalantly. “I’m a very deep fellow.”
Her gaze became more intent. “You’re also a very pale fellow. How have you been feeling?”
I started to put up a brave front, but instead heard myself say, “It’s coming back.”
“The anemia?”
“Yes.”
“The transfusion didn’t work, then.”
“It worked fine, for the past few days,” I said. “But getting a transfusion of whole blood doesn’t cure my anemia.
My
DNA doesn’t make enough red blood cells to keep me alive.”
She looked terribly concerned. “You’ll need another transfusion, then.”
“How often can he give blood?” I wondered aloud.
Marguerite cleared her display screen with the jab of a finger and called up a medical reference. “No one can donate a half-liter of blood every few days, Van. We’d merely be killing the donor.”
“He won’t be that generous, believe me,” I said.
She looked up sharply at me. “How do you know?”
I answered, “Fuchs has a much more active sense of self-preservation than that.”
“Then why did he give you his own blood in the first place?”
“Because you said you’d accuse him of murder if he didn’t, remember?”
“That’s right, I did, didn’t I?” she said, with the hint of a rueful smile touching her lips. “I had forgotten that.”
“I don’t think it would work again.”
“It won’t be necessary,” she said.
“Why not?”
“He’ll donate his blood voluntarily.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said, with great certainty.
“How can you be so sure?” I asked.
She looked away from me. “I know him better now. He’s not the monster you think him to be.”
“You know him better,” I echoed.
“Yes, I do,” she said defiantly.
“He’s sleeping with you, isn’t he?” I demanded.
Marguerite said nothing.
“Isn’t he?”
“That’s none of your business, Van.”
“Isn’t it? When you’re going to bed with him to keep me alive? When you’re doing this for my sake?”
She looked truly stunned. “For your sake? You still think I’d pop into bed with him for your sake?”
“Isn’t that … I mean …”
Marguerite’s dark eyes held me like a vise. “Van, don’t you realize that what I do, what he does, even what you yourself do, is strictly for our own individual benefits? We’re all trying to stay alive here, trying to make the best of what we’ve got to deal with.”
Now I was completely confused. “But … you and Fuchs,” I stammered. “I thought …”
“Whatever you thought is wrong,” Marguerite said firmly. “If I were you I’d stick to the real problem: how to get enough blood transfusions from the captain to keep you alive without killing him.”
I glared at her, feeling as hotly angry inside as the fiery red-glowing ground below us.
“You don’t have to worry about him,” I growled. “He won’t risk his neck for me, and he knows you can’t accuse him of murder if giving me more transfusions will kill him.”
Before she could reply, I pushed past her, out of the sick bay, and up the passageway toward the observation center in the ship’s nose.
I never got that far.
As I passed the open hatch of the crew’s quarters, Sanja called out to me, “Mr. Humphries, come in here, please.”
He was the one crew member who had shown something more than suspicious hostility toward me, the man in charge of the ship’s pumping systems, my direct superior.
I stepped through the hatch and saw that Bahadur and two others—including one of the women—were standing along the bulkhead on either side of the hatch.
Sanja looked distinctly uneasy. He was slightly built, almost birdlike, with darker skin than the others, sort of a cocoa brown.
The other three eyed me in grim silence. Bahadur especially seemed to be glowering menacingly.
“Mr. Humphries, we must go to the secondary pump station,” Sanja told me.
“Now?” I asked, looking around at the others. They seemed like a death squad to me.
With an unhappy nod, Sanja said, “Now. Yes.”
My pulse was thundering in my ears as we trooped down the passageway, past the bridge, heading for the aft end of the ship. Fuchs was not in the command chair when we passed the bridge, I saw; Amarjagal had the conn. The doors to both the captain’s quarters and Marguerite’s were tightly closed as we went by.
Fine, I thought. They’re in bed together while the crew murders me. Bahadur has timed his move perfectly.
I didn’t know what to do. My knees started to shake as we approached the secondary pump station. My palms felt sweaty. Neither Bahadur nor any of the others had spoken a word to me, except for Sanja. For a ridiculous instant I remembered old Western videos that I had watched as a child. This certainly looked like a lynching party to me.
With each step we took Bahadur seemed to grow larger. He was a big man, taller than anyone else aboard, broad in the shoulder and narrow in the hips. His shaved head and bushy beard gave him an appearance of savagery. Baldansanja looked slim and weak next to him, a harmless man driven by the stronger Bahadur. The other man and the woman were both solidly built, a bit taller than I and much more thickly muscled.
The secondary pumping station was two ladder-flights down, at the tail end of the passageway, nothing more than a pie-slice-shaped chamber with a pair of backup pumps housed in hemispherical metal covers.
“Sit there,” Bahadur said, pointing to one of the hemispheres.
“I know you think I’m a spy for the captain,” I started to say, “but that’s entirely wrong. I’m not—”
“Be quiet,” Bahadur said.
But I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. Fear loosens the bowels in some men. In me, apparently, it loosened the tongue. I babbled. I couldn’t stop talking. I gave them chapter and verse of how Fuchs hated my father and me and would congratulate them for murdering me, how they
couldn’t get away with it, how the IAA and the other authorities would find out about this when they returned to Earth and investigate my death and—
The woman slapped me hard across my face. I tasted blood in my mouth.
“Be silent, Mr. Humphries!” hissed Bahadur. “We have no intention of harming you unless you force us to.”
I blinked, the whole side of my face stinging as I swallowed salty hot blood. The woman glared at me and muttered something in her native tongue. I understood the tone: “Shut your mouth, foolish man.”
I sat there in silence. But I couldn’t help fidgeting. My hands refused to stay still. My fingers drummed along the thighs of my coveralls. Every nerve in my body was jangling, quivering.
The others took flat little black boxes from their pockets and scanned the bulkheads, overhead, and deck. Looking for bugs, I figured. The woman grunted and pointed to a plate in the metal overhead. While Sanja stood beside me, looking downcast, they unscrewed the plate and removed a tiny piece of plastic. It looked like nothing more than a speck of dust to me, but Bahadur frowned at it, threw it to the deck, and ground it beneath the heel of his boot.
I looked up at Sanja. “What’s this all about? What are they going to do?”
He shushed me with a finger to his lips.
So I sat there in terrified silence for what seemed like hours. Sanja stood irresolutely beside me, obviously miserable, while the others arrayed themselves on either side of the compartment’s hatch and occasionally peered up the passageway that ran along the keel of the ship.
At last the woman hissed something that sounded like a warning and they flattened themselves out against the bulkhead. Sanja seemed to be trembling just as hard as I was, but he whispered to me, “Be absolutely silent, Mr. Humphries. Your life depends on it.”
Sitting there on the pump housing, a prisoner in a
makeshift cell, I leaned over slightly so I could see up along the passageway. Fuchs was striding toward us, his face a thundercloud, his hands balled into fists.
Bahadur pulled a knife from his coveralls. I recognized it as a steak knife from the galley. The other two drew the same weapons.
I glanced up at Sanja. He seemed paralyzed with fear, biting his lip, staring up the passageway at the approaching captain. I could hear Fuchs’s footsteps now, treading along the metal decking swiftly, firmly.
They meant to kill him, I finally understood. I was nothing more than the bait. This trap had been set for him.
BOOK: Venus
2.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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