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Authors: Ben Bova

Venus (35 page)

BOOK: Venus
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I heard the clang of metal against metal at precisely the moment I blacked out.
H
e’s coming out of it.”
Those were the first words I heard: Marguerite’s voice, brimming with expectation.
I opened my eyes and saw that I was back in
Lucifer
’s sick bay, flat on my back, looking up at the curving metal overhead. I felt too weak to turn my head, too exhausted even to speak.
Then Marguerite came into my view, leaning over me, smiling slightly.
“Hello,” she said.
I tried to say hello to her but nothing came out except a moaning croak.
“Don’t try to speak,” she said. “It’ll take a while before the fluids rehydrate you properly.”
I managed to blink my eyes, too weak to nod. I could see several intravenous tubes on either side of the table on which I lay. The thought of having needles puncturing my skin normally made my flesh crawl, but the fluids in those tubes looked like nectar and ambrosia to me.
“Your hands will be fine in a few hours,” Marguerite told me. “The ship’s medical supplies included enough artificial skin to hold you until we get back aboard
Truax
and regenerate your own skin tissue.”
“Good,” I whispered.
She moved to one of the IV drips and stabbed a finger at its control box. “I’m taking you off the analgesics now, but let me know if you’re in pain.”
“Only … when I breathe,” I joked feebly.
It took her a moment to realize I was joking. Then she broke into a grin. “Humor is a good sign, I think.”
I nodded weakly.
“Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said, then I realized it wasn’t so. “Yes. A little.” In truth I was too tired to eat, but my stomach did feel empty.
“I’ll get you something easy to digest.”
When she came back, carrying a small tray, I asked, “How long have I been unconscious?”
Marguerite glanced at the digital displays against the bulkhead. “Seventeen hours, a little more.”
“The pod?”
“It’s in the cargo bay, still in
Hecate
’s arms,” she said. Then she touched a button and the table raised up behind my head slightly. Marguerite picked up a plastic bowl from the tray, sat on the edge of the table, and spooned up something from a bowl. “Now eat this.”
It must have been broth of some sort, although it was bland and so tasteless that I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to be. But it was very pleasant having her spoon-feed me. Very pleasant indeed.
“Where’s Fuchs?” I asked.
“The captain’s on the bridge, plotting our ascent back up to orbit so we can rendezvous with
Truax
.”
“We’ll have to go through the clouds again. The bugs …” I didn’t finish the sentence. I didn’t have to.
“He’s trying to estimate the amount of damage they did on the way in,” Marguerite explained as she ladled another
spoonful of soup for me, “so he can work out our best rate of ascent to minimize their effect.”
I swallowed, then nodded. “Once we’re in orbit we’ll be all right, then.”
Marguerite nodded back. “The bugs can’t survive in vacuum.” Then she added, “I hope.”
I must have looked startled, because she laughed and said, “Only joking. I’ve tested them in a vacuum jar. Their cells burst just the way ours would if we didn’t wear spacesuits.”
“Good.” We started talking about the creatures that I’d run into down on the surface. Was it a single organism with many tentacle-like arms, or several different creatures?
“Whatever it was, it’s dead now. It went down to hell when the fissure opened up.”
Marguerite shook her head slightly. “Not entirely. There was a fragment of one arm stuck on
Hecate
’s back when you returned. It must have been torn off when—”
I gasped. “A piece of the monster?”
“Less than a meter long,” she answered, nodding. “Its outer shell is a form of silicone, quite strong yet flexible. And heat-resistant.”
“Silicone,” I muttered. Yes, that made sense. Then I asked her, “What about its innards? What could possibly stay alive at such high temperatures?”
Marguerite said, “I’m working on that. It seems to be made of sulfur compounds, very complex, molecules no one’s ever seen before; a totally new kind of chemistry.”
“You’ll get a double Nobel,” I said. “First the bacteria and now this.”
She smiled down at me.
“Too bad it got killed,” I said, although inwardly I still felt glad that it had fallen into the white-hot fissure.
“There must be more than one of them. Nature doesn’t make merely one single copy of a species.”
“On Earth,” I countered. “This thing might be one single organism. Maybe it’s spread itself all across the planet.”
Her eyes widened.
“That’s going to make the surface even more dangerous than we thought,” I added.
“Unless the whole surface erupts the way Professor Greenbaum expects it to.”
“That’d be a pity,” I heard myself say. “It would kill everything, wouldn’t it?”
Marguerite hesitated, then answered, “I wonder.”
“Based on sulfur compounds, you said.”
“It’s the first form of life we’ve found that isn’t dependent on water.”
“Life’s much more varied than we thought.”
“And much tougher.”
I shuddered. “Tell me about it. It came close to killing me.”
“The main body must be deep underground, and it sends those arms up to the surface to feed, like shoots of a tree.”
“Feed on what?”
She shrugged. “Organic material raining down from the clouds?” she guessed.
“Is there any organic material falling out of the clouds?”
Marguerite shook her head. “None that I can find. If the bugs in the clouds sink toward the surface when they die, they must be totally decomposed by the heat long before they reach the ground.”
“Then what do those things on the ground eat?” I asked again.
“I haven’t the foggiest notion,” she admitted. “That’s why we’ve got to come back and study them more closely.”
The idea of returning startled me for a moment, but then I understood that we had to. Someone had to. We have an entire new world to explore here on Venus. A whole new form of biology.
“What are you smiling about?” Marguerite asked.
I hadn’t realized I was smiling. “My brother Alex,” I said. “We wouldn’t have discovered any of this if he hadn’t come to Venus.”
Marguerite’s face took on a somber expression. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”
“That’s his legacy,” I said, more to myself than her. “His gift to us all.”
 
Marguerite left after a while and I drifted into sleep. I know that I dreamed, something about Alex and my fa—Martin Humphries, that is; but when I awoke the memory of it faded from my conscious grasp like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp. The more I tried to remember the dream, the flimsier its images became, until the whole thing disappeared like a mist evaporated by the morning sun.
I saw that all the IV drips had been disconnected, and wondered how long I’d been asleep. I expected Marguerite to pop into the sick bay; she would probably be carrying a beeper that sounded off when the sensors monitoring me told her I had awakened. But I lay there for a good quarter of an hour all by myself; she didn’t show up. Probably working on the arm
Hecate
had carried back from the surface.
Nettled by her neglect, I pulled myself up to a sitting position. My head throbbed a little, but that was probably from the pounding I’d taken when
Hecate
had gone into its spinning nosedive. I was totally naked beneath the thin sheet and I could see no clothes anywhere in the cramped confines of the sick bay.
That made some sense, I thought. The coveralls I’d worn in
Hecate
beneath the protective suit must have been rank with sweat.
I swung my legs off the table and stood up warily, keeping one hand on the edge of the table. Not bad. A bit wobbly, but otherwise all right. I wrapped the sheet around my middle and proceeded with as much dignity as I could toward my bunk in the crew’s quarters.
Nodon and several others of the crew were sitting around the common table when I got there. They leaped to their feet as I padded in, newfound respect shining in their eyes.
I accepted their plaudits as graciously as I could while
clutching the sheet to my waist with one hand, thinking to myself that being a hero of sorts is rather pleasant. Then I went to my bunk and slid the privacy screen shut.
Six sets of coveralls and underwear were laid out neatly on the bunk, freshly laundered. They had even put out matching sets of slipper socks. A show of appreciation for my retrieving the escape pod? Or had Fuchs simply ordered them to do it?
I dressed, and Nodon insisted on escorting me to the bridge. Amarjagal was in the command chair. Fuchs was in his quarters, I was told. But when I went down the short stretch of passageway to his door, Marguerite was already heading toward me.
“We should inspect the pod,” she said, her face somber.
I drew in a breath. “Yes, you’re right.”
“Are you up to it?”
“Of course,” I lied. Every muscle and joint in my body still ached. My head felt as if it weighed eleven tons. My hands were stiff with the glossy artificial skin she had grafted onto them; the stuff made my hands feel like I was wearing a pair of gloves that were just a half size too small.
But I wanted to get to the pod. My heart was trip-hammering. Whatever was left of Alex must be in that big metal sphere, I knew. My brother. No, he wasn’t my brother. Not biologically. But he’d been my big brother all my life and I couldn’t think of him in any other way. What would I find in the pod? What would be left of the Alex who’d loved and protected me for as long as I could remember?
As we clambered down the ladder toward the cargo bay, Marguerite said, “We’ll have to put on spacesuits. He’s pumped out all the air in the bay.”
Surprised, I snapped, “Why?”
“Vacuum’s clean,” she replied. “He wanted as low a level of contamination as possible.”
“Where is he, anyway?” I demanded. “Why isn’t Fuchs here? Doesn’t he care what’s inside the pod?”
She hesitated a heartbeat before replying, “He’s in his quarters plotting our trajectory back into orbit. I told you that before.”
“Still? How long does it take to plot a trajectory? The computer does all the work.”
Marguerite answered simply, “He’s working out the trajectory and he said he doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
We got to the cargo bay level. There was a locker with four spacesuits alongside the bay’s personnel hatch.
As we began to pull on the suits, Marguerite said, “Your flight in
Hecate
took a lot out of him, you know.”
Aha! I thought. Aloud, I said to Marguerite, “So, he’s resting, then.”
Again that little hesitation. Then she said quietly, “Yes, he’s resting.”
We checked each other’s suits once we had buttoned up inside them, going down the checklist programmed into the computers built into the suit wrists. It seemed a bit odd, speaking through the radio to someone standing only a meter away, but the bubble helmets muffled our voices so much we would have had to shout to make ourselves heard.
Once we went through the airlock and into the cargo bay I saw what a battering poor old
Hecate
had endured. She sat lopsidedly on the deck, one landing skid and its support struts crumpled beneath her hull. The hull itself was scratched and dented, long gouges of metal torn away. I walked slowly around the ship, staring at the damage. The diving plane on her left side was simply gone, nothing there but an ugly gash where it should have been. That entire side was badly banged in; that must have been where she’d slammed against the boulder.
I reached out and patted her poor old pitted flank with a gloved hand. The ship had kept me alive, but she would never fly again.
“You’re treating it as if it’s alive.” Marguerite’s voice came through my earphones, sounding surprised.
“You’re damned right,” I said, startling myself at how strong a bond I felt with this broken heap of metal.
In the cargo bay’s bright lighting I could see Marguerite’s face through the fishbowl helmet. She was smiling at me.
“She’ll find a good home back on Earth,” Marguerite said. “I’m sure the Smithsonian will want her for one of their museums.”
I hadn’t thought of that. The idea pleased me.
Hecate
had served well; she deserved a dignified resting place.
My walk around the battered little ship ended at the escape pod, still clutched in
Hecate
’s mechanical arms. The sphere looked like some relic from a bygone century, heavy and crusted with handgrips, a singular circular hatch, a cluster of rocket tubes here, a mini-forest of stubby antennas there. It was more than twice my height in diameter, solid and thick. No portholes anywhere that I could see.
BOOK: Venus
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