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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (26 page)

BOOK: Venus
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I
t’s about time you got here,” Fuchs said to me when I arrived at the observation center, up in the ship’s nose.
“Sorry to be late, sir,” I apologized. “I had to stop at—”
“When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed at once, Humphries, without any delays. Understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
It was just as cramped as ever in the observation center, with all the sensors crammed into the compartment. With Fuchs in there it seemed crowded to the point of bursting.
Lucifer’
s nose tapered to a rounded point, glassed in with thick quartz ports that could be shuttered when necessary. They were unshielded now and I could see the seething barren surface of Venus, far below us.
Fuchs stood in the midst of all the instruments and computers like a heavy dark thundercloud, hands clasped behind his back, eyes taking in the unending panorama of devastation below.
“She looks so beautiful from a distance,” he muttered,
“and so desolate up close. Like quite a few women I’ve known.”
From Fuchs, that was an unexpected burst of humor.
“You knew Marguerite’s mother, didn’t you?” I asked.
He looked at me and huffed. “A gentleman doesn’t discuss his women, Humphries”
That ended
that
line of conversation.
Gesturing to the bleak rocky landscape below, Fuchs said, “Radar’s picked up several returns that are apparently metallic. We’ve got to decide which one is your brother’s wreckage.”
There were no chairs in the observation center; no room for them. The sensors were mounted in the bulkhead and decking; their computers lined a shelf that stood at shoulder height. So we remained standing as we reviewed the computer files of the various radar images. Most of them were little more than glints, either random artifacts in the programming or natural projections of rock that gave sharp radar reflections similar to bare metal.
But wherever there were mountains I saw strong radar reflections indicating metal, starting at roughly nine thousand meters. It reminded me of snowcaps on the mountains of Earth: below that nine-thousand-meter line was bare rock, above it, the Venusian equivalent of snow, bare metal.
“The atmosphere’s cooler up at the altitude by about ten degrees or so,” Fuchs told me. “There must be some kind of chemical change in the rock at that temperature and pressure.”
“But what could it be?” I wondered.
He shrugged. “That’s for Venus to know, and us to find out—someday.”
Out of curiosity I called up the computer’s file of radar reflectivities. The metallic returns from the upper slopes of the mountains might have been any of several metals, including iron sulfide: pyrite, “fool’s gold.”
I stared hard at the distant peaks as we cruised through the hot, turgid air. Mountains coated with fool’s gold?
Then a new worry hit me. “If
Phosphoros
’s wreckage
is on a mountainside above the ‘snow line,”’ I mused aloud, “its radar return will be lost in the reflection from the mental.”
Fuchs nodded somberly. “Pray that they hit the ground below nine thousand meters.”
As we drifted across the baking hot landscape of bare rocks and metal-coated mountains, I saw a sharp spike on the graph the computer screen was displaying.
“What’s that?” I said, sudden excitement quickening my pulse.
“It’s nothing,” Fuchs answered, with barely a glance at the screen.
“That can’t be a glitch in the system,” I insisted.
“I agree,” Fuchs said, looking up at the graph, “but it’s too small to be the wreckage of
Phosphoros
.”
“Too small? The return’s peak is like a signal beacon.”
He tapped the screen with a knuckle. “The intensity is high, granted. But the extent of the return across the ground is too small to be a ship.”
“Maybe it’s part of the wreckage,” I insisted. “The ship probably broke up into several chunks.”
But Fuchs was already speaking into the computer’s input mike, “Correlate the displayed radar return with known artifacts on the surface.”
VENERA 9 appeared on the bottom of the screen in blocky white alphanumerics.
“The first spacecraft to return photographic images from Venus’s surface,” Fuchs said.
“Heaven and hell,” I breathed, awestruck. “That thing has been sitting down there for a hundred years!”
Fuchs nodded. “I’m surprised there’s anything left of it.”
“If we could recover it,” I heard myself thinking aloud, “it would be worth a fortune back on Earth.”
Fuchs focused the ship’s full battery of telescopes onto the remains of the old Russian spacecraft, while ordering me to make certain the electronic image enhancers were up and running.
It took almost half an hour to get a decent image on our
computer screen, but fortunately
Lucifer
was drifting slowly in the sluggish lower atmosphere. The slant range between us and Venera 9 actually decreased slightly while we brought the optics into play.
“There she is,” Fuchs said, almost admiringly.
It looked very unimpressive to me. Not much more than a small round disc that had sagged and half collapsed on one side to reveal the crumpled remains of a dull metal ball beneath it, sitting on those baking, red-hot rocks. It reminded me of an old-fashioned can of soda pop that had been crushed by some powerful hand.
“You’re looking at history, Humphries,” Fuchs said.
“It’s so small,” I said. “So primitive.”
He gave a snorting laugh. “It was the height of technology a century ago. A marvel of human ingenuity. Now it’s a museum piece.”
“If we could get it to a museum …”
“It would probably crumble to dust if anybody touched it.”
I wondered about that. In that hot, high-pressure atmosphere of almost pure carbon dioxide, the metal of the ancient spacecraft had held up astoundingly well. That told me that the atmosphere down there wasn’t as corrosive as we’d expected. Perhaps the sulfuric acid and chlorine compounds we had found in the clouds did not exist down near the surface; at least, not in such high concentrations.
All to the good, I thought. That meant that the wreckage of Alex’s
Phosphoros
should be easier to spot. And maybe his body was still fairly intact, after all.
Fuchs was already scanning through the computer’s files for other radar returns. We were close enough only to one of them to use the telescopes. When their electronically enhanced images appeared on the display screen my heart jumped.
“That’s wreckage!” I shouted. “Look … it’s strewn along the ground.”
“Yes,” he agreed, then muttered into the computer’s input microphone.
NO CORRELATION, the screen showed.
“But that’s got to be
Phosphoros!
” I said excitedly. “Look, you can see—”
“
Phosphoros
went down a thousand kilometers farther west,” Fuchs said, “near Aphrodite Terra.”
“Then what …” I stopped myself. I realized what we were looking at. The wreckage of
Hesperos
. My ship. We had been blown far off course by the subsolar wave and now we were just about back where we had been when
Hesperos
broke up.
Fuchs was manually typing in something, and sure enough, the screen displayed HESPEROS with the date when she went down.
I stared at the wreckage. Rodriguez was down there. And Duchamp and Dr. Waller and the technicians. Looking over at Fuchs I saw that he was deep in thought, too, as he gazed at the screen. He was brooding about Duchamp, I guessed. Had he loved her? Was he capable of loving anyone?
He seemed to shake himself and pull his attention away from the screen. “Unfortunately,
Phosphoros
’s wreckage is now over on the night side of the planet. The optics aren’t going to be much use to us.”
“We could wait until it swings back into the daylit side,” I suggested.
He sneered at me. “You want to wait three or four months? We don’t have supplies to last another two weeks down here.”
I had forgotten that the Venusian day is longer than its year.
“No,” Fuchs said, with obvious reluctance, “we’re going to have to find your brother’s wreckage in the dark.”
Great, I thought. Just simply great.
 
So we sailed slowly through that hot, turgid atmosphere, sinking lower all the time, closer to the baked rocks of the surface.
It was difficult for me to keep track of time. Except for
the regular rounds of my watches on the bridge and with Nodon at the pumps, there were no outward cues of day and night. The ship’s lighting remained the same hour after hour. The views outside, when I went to the observation center, seemed unchanged.
I ate, I slept, I worked. My relationship with Marguerite, such as it had been, was in a shambles. Except for Nodon, who was hell-bent on teaching me everything I had to know about the pumps so that he could be promoted to the bridge, the rest of the crew regarded me as a pariah or worse, a spy for the captain.
Strangely, Fuchs was my only companion, yet even he grew distant, distracted. For long periods of time, whole watches in fact, he was absent from the bridge. And when he did take the command chair he seemed distracted, his attention focused somewhere else, his mind wandering. Often I saw that he was chewing on those pills of his. I began to wonder if his drug habit was getting the better of him.
Finally I couldn’t stand it any longer. Taking my courage—or perhaps my self-esteem—in my hands, I went to the sick bay and faced Marguerite.
“I’m worried about the captain,” I said, without preamble.
She looked up from the microscope she’d been bending over. “So am I,” she replied.
“I think he’s addicted to those pills he takes.”
Her eyes flashed, but she shook her head and said, “No, you’re wrong. It’s not that.”
“How do you know?” I demanded.
“I know him much better than you do, Van.”
I suppressed the angry retort that immediately sprang to mind and said merely, “Well then, is he sick?”
With another shake of her head, she said, “I don’t know. He won’t let me examine him.”
“Something’s definitely wrong,” I said.
“It might be the transfusions,” said Marguerite. “He can’t give so much blood and not feel the effects.”
“Have you made any progress on synthesizing the enzyme?”
“I’ve gone as far as I can,” she said. “Which isn’t far enough.”
“You can’t do it?”
Her chin went up a notch. “It can’t be done. Not with the equipment we have here.”
I saw the flare of irritation in her eyes. “I didn’t mean to suggest that you were at fault.”
Her expression softened. “I know. I shouldn’t have bristled. I suppose I’ve been working too hard at this.”
“I appreciate your trying.”
“It’s just that … I know what to do, I even know how to do it—in theory, at least. But we don’t have the equipment. This is a sick bay, not a pharmaceutical laboratory.”
“Then, if we don’t get back to
Truax
quickly …” I let the words fade away. I didn’t want to admit where they were leading.
But Marguerite said it for me. “If we don’t get back to
Truax
in forty-eight hours you’ll need another transfusion.”
“And if I don’t get it?”
“You’ll die within a few days.”
I nodded. There it was, out in the open.
“But if the captain does give you a transfusion,” Marguerite went on, “he could die.”
“Not him,” I snapped. “He’s too hateful to die.”
“Is he? Is that what you think?”
I had touched on a sensitive nerve again. “What I mean is that he won’t allow himself to die just to keep me alive.”
“Is that what you think?” she repeated, more softly.
“Certainly,” I said. “It wouldn’t make any sense. I surely wouldn’t kill myself over him.”
“No,” Marguerite said, almost in a whisper, “you wouldn’t, would you?”
“Why should I?” I growled.
“You’re jealous of him.”
“Jealous? Of him?”
“Yes.”
Before I had time to think it over I answered, “Yes, I’m jealous of him. He has you, and that makes me angry. Furious.”
“Would it change your attitude if I told you he doesn’t have me?”
“I wouldn’t believe you,” I said.
“He doesn’t.”
“You’re lying.”
“Why should I lie?”
I had to think a few moments about that. “I don’t know,” I replied at last. “You tell me.”
BOOK: Venus
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