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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (32 page)

BOOK: Venus
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“Wait,” Fuchs said. “We’re getting a message from
Truax
.”
What would
Truax
be sending? I wondered. A warning, the other side of my mind answered. Yes, but a warning about what?
It only took a few moments to get the answer.
Fuchs’s voice came back into my earphones. “It’s another volcanic eruption.”
“Another eruption?”
“Nothing to worry about. It’s four hundred kilometers away.”
I swallowed hard and tried not to think about Greenbaum. But in my imagination I could see the glee on his face. This might well be only the second Venusian volcano blast in half a billion years. And he’d be getting data from us on it!
Unless we got killed first.
I
stared too long at that sullen pinkish glow on the horizon, thinking about volcanoes and Greenbaum and the whole surface of the planet below me opening up and frying me with the stored heat of half a billion years suddenly released into my face.
Two volcanoes within days of each other meant either that Greenbaum was wrong or that Venus was beginning to boil over.
“You’re spraying the wreckage!” Fuchs shouted in my earphones.
“What?”
“The exhaust!” he yelled, exasperated. “You’re letting it spray over the wreckage.”
The molten metal from
Hecate
’s heat sink, I realized. The ship was spitting the melted alloy out from its rear, carrying the built-up heat away from me. Venusian guano, I thought wryly. It was settling over the wreckage.
“Point her nose properly!” Fuchs demanded. “You’re covering up the whole blasted wreck!”
He was excited, up there. Hovering high above me in
Lucifer
, Fuchs must have felt completely frustrated at having to sit on his bridge and watch my clumsy efforts to do what he thought he could perform flawlessly.
I wondered what that was doing to his blood pressure as I fought to orient
Hecate
so that I spiraled ever closer to the wreckage without burying it under the ship’s excretion of molten alloy.
Could that be the strange lines crisscrossing the wreckage? I wondered. But a quick look at the scene below me showed it was not. Those lines were thin and mostly quite straight, although some of them curved here and there—rather gracefully, actually.
Hecate
’s hot droppings clearly splashed when they hit the ground, forming bright new-looking puddles of liquified metal.
Some of the droppings had spattered one end of the crushed gas envelope. Nothing important had been covered by the alloy, I saw. Fuchs was getting worked up over very little, it seemed to me.
I blinked sweat from my eyes as I worked
Hecate
lower and lower. And then I saw something that made my eyes pop wide.
One of those lines moved. No, more than one. Several of them whipped across the oven-hot rocks to converge on the splashes of alloy that had dropped from
Hecate
.
“You only have fifty-five minutes left on the heat sink,” Fuchs’s voice warned, a bit more calmly now.
“Did you see that?” I yelled, excited, more puzzled than afraid. “Those lines moved!”
“Moved?”
“Yes! Didn’t you see them?”
“No.”
“They went to the alloy puddles,” I said, almost shouting, trying to convince him.
Fuchs was silent for a few moments, then he replied, “I don’t see any movement.”
“But I saw them move! And fast, too! Like lightning.”
“You can attend to that later,” he said, his voice betraying
his doubts about my powers of observation. “Get to the escape pod. The clock keeps ticking.”
The plan was to use the manipulator arms to open up the escape pod and see if Alex had made it inside successfully. But if he had retreated into it as his ship went down, wouldn’t it be better to leave it sealed and bring it up in its entirety? That way, if he really was inside, his body would remain protected from the Venusian atmosphere; at least, as much protection as the pod could give.
“Can
Hecate
lift the whole pod, intact?” I asked into my helmet mike.
No response for a few moments. Then Fuchs asked, “How much does it weigh?”
“I have no idea,” I admitted. “A ton or so, I guess.”
“Very precise,” he said acidly.
“How much can
Hecate
carry?”
Another pause. I imagined him hurriedly scanning the computer files. It was getting hot in the cockpit, despite the heat sink and the ship’s cooling system. Really hot. My suit was sloshing with sweat. I felt as if I were lying facedown on a big, soaking-wet sponge.
“
Hecate
can lift four tons,” Fuchs replied at last, “once the ballast is off-loaded.”
“That should be more than enough to take the pod,” I said.
“Right,” he agreed. “Should be enough space in the cargo bay to hold it, too.”
“All right, then. I’m going to inspect the gondola first and then bring up the pod intact.”
Marguerite’s voice came through. “Even if your brother was in the pod, Van, there’s practically no chance that any organic matter could survive this long.”
I was almost close enough to the ground to touch it. The heat was getting ferocious.
“You mean there won’t be any physical remains of his body,” I said to Marguerite.
“Yes, I’m afraid that’s what you’ve got to expect,” she said. “Even if he got into the pod.”
Nodding inside my helmet, blinking stinging sweat out of my eyes, I replied, “I’m still going to go for returning the whole pod. Is that all right with you, Captain?”
Fuchs immediately answered, “Okay. Proceed.”
Edging
Hecate
toward the burning hot rocks, feeling the glare of the heat on my face even through the ship’s thick ports and my helmet, I worked carefully, slowly to keep the ship’s tail end pointing away from the wreckage.
“We read ten meters,” Fuchs said tensely.
“Ten meters, right.”
I had the radar altimeter displayed on the observation port, so I could see the ground inching up toward me and the altitude numbers at the same time.
“Five meters … three …”
I felt a short of crunching, grinding sensation as the landing skids beneath little
Hecate’
s hull grated across the bare rocks. Very little noise. Then the ship lurched to a stop.
“I’m on the ground,” I said. I should have been exultant, I suppose, but instead I was almost exhausted from tension and the searing, overpowering heat.
“Word is being telemetered back to Earth,” Fuchs said. “You’ve touched down on the surface of Venus.”
A moment of triumph. All I felt was hot, sopping with sweat, and anxious to get the job done and get out of this hellish furnace.
“I’m activating the manipulators,” I said, touching the stud on the control panel that powered up the remote grippers and the outside flood lamps.
Then all the lights went out. The control panel blacked out completely and the steady background hum of electrical equipment died away.
I damned near wet myself. For a breathless moment I was completely in the dark, except for the angry glow of Venus’s red-hot rocks, just on the other side of my observation port. I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears.
And then a really scary noise: a kind of a thump, light but definite, as if someone had dropped a cable across the top of the ship.
Before I could say anything, the auxiliary power came up. The control panel glowed faintly. The pumps gurgled somewhere in the back of the ship. Fans whined to life again.
“Power’s out,” I said, surprised at how steady my voice sounded.
Fuchs sounded worried. “Must be an overload from the manipulator motors.”
“And the floodlights,” I added.
“Shut them down and try to restart the main batteries.”
I did that and, sure enough, the ship powered itself up nicely. I blew out a breath of relief.
Then I realized that if I couldn’t use the manipulators there was no point being down here by the wreckage.
A very powerful urge to light off the thrusters and get up and away almost overcame me. I actually had both boots on the thruster pedal before I realized it.
But I stopped and fought back the itch to flee. Think, dammit, think! I raged at myself. There’s got to be a way to fix this.
“We’re scanning your telemetry,” Fuchs said, his voice sounding edgy in my earphones. “Looks like the servo motors in the manipulators are drawing almost twice as much power as they were designed to do. Might be from the heat.”
“Listen,” I said, my mind racing, “what if I put the manipulators and lamps on the backup power system? The auxiliaries can power the arms and lights while the main batteries run everything else.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Fuchs replied, “Then you’d be without backup power if the main goes out again.”
“It’s a risk,” I admitted. “But we’ve got to do
something.
There’s no sense being down here without the manipulators working.”
“You could get trapped down there!” Marguerite chimed in.
“I want to try it,” I said. “Tell me how to reset the manipulators.”
“You’re sure you want to do this?”
“Yes! Now stop wasting time and tell me how to get the manipulators on the auxiliary system. And the lamps.”
It seemed to take hours, but actually within less than ten minutes I had the manipulators powered up from the backup electrical system while the rest of the ship ran as normal on the main batteries. The floodlights seemed dimmer than they had been in the VR simulation, but still bright enough to light the area that the arms would be working in.
“All right,” I said at last. “I’m going to poke into the gondola now.”
“Okay,” said Fuchs.
That’s when I found out that my hands wouldn’t fit into the waldoes while I had my gloves on.
I could have screamed. I wanted to pound the control panel with my fists. They had fit all right in the virtual reality simulator, but here aboard the real
Hecate
the cursed-be-to-hell-and-back waldo fittings were too tight for me to get my hands into them while I was wearing the heat suit’s gloves.
It was the servomotors on the gloves’ backs, I saw. Those spiny exoskeletons that powered the gloves and boosted my fingers’ natural strength jutted out from the backs of the gloves about two centimeters or so, just enough to prevent me from sliding my hands into the waldoes that controlled the manipulator arms and grippers.
The clock was ticking. I was running out of alloy ballast to keep the ship barely livable, running out of time.
“What’s going on down there?” Fuchs demanded. “What’s the holdup?”
“Wait a second,” I mumbled. No sense telling him what the problem was; neither he nor anyone aboard
Lucifer
could do a cursed thing about it.
I hesitated only a moment longer, then started to pull off the gloves. The air inside the cockpit was at Earth-normal pressure, there was no danger of decompression, as there would be if I’d been in space. It was hellishly hot, though.
And if
Hecate’
s hull got punctured, I’d be dead meat without my suit fully sealed up.
So be it. I yanked both gloves off and stuck my hands into the waldoes.
“Ow!” I yelled involuntarily. The metal was
hot.
“What’s the matter?” Fuchs and Marguerite asked simultaneously.
“Bumped my hand,” I lied. The metal of the waldoes was hot, all right, but I could stand it. At least, it would take a while before the skin of my hands started to blister.
It was like pushing my fingers into boiling water, but I gritted my teeth and began to work the manipulators. The arms reacted sluggishly, not at all the way they did in the simulator, but I got them extended and gripped the torn edge of the gondola in their metal pincers.
“I’m opening up the gondola. Looking inside,” I reported.
“Get the camera lined up with the manipulators,” Fuchs snapped.
I pulled my left hand out of its waldo and blew on it, then worked the camera control, slaving it to the manipulators. Wishing I had the time to rip the servomotors off my gloves, knowing I didn’t, I stuck my hand back into the waldo. It was like having your face wrapped in a steaming hot towel, except that the waldo didn’t cool off. If anything, it was getting hotter.
The remote arms peeled back the thin metal of the gondola. Actually, the metal broke away, snapping like brittle panes of glass. Inside I saw two spacesuits still hanging limply in their open lockers. The helmets were on the deck, though, rather than on the shelves above the suits. The inner airlock hatch was ajar. Another suit was draped over the bench in front of the lockers, a pair of boots sitting precisely where a person’s feet would be while he or she began putting on the suit.
But there were no human remains to be seen. Nothing but a whitish powder sprinkled here and there.
And a strange, pencil-thin wire or cable of some sort running up and over the broken side of the hull and down along
the center of the deck. It disappeared into the darkness beyond the pool of light from
Hecate’
s floodlamps.
That’s when I heard it. A dull, low growling noise, like the rumble of distant thunder, but longer, more insistent, growing louder and stronger until I could see the ground beneath
Hecate’
s skids shaking.
Earthquake? It couldn’t be! It was
Hecate
itself that was shaking, rattling, skidding across the oven-hot rocks with a brittle piece of
Phosphoros‘
s hull clamped in its manipulator pincers. I could see the wreckage skittering away from me as I banged around inside
Hecate’
s cockpit, rolling and sloshing on my belly while the ship skidded across the ground as if some giant hand were shoving it along.
BOOK: Venus
2.83Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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