Venus (15 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Venus
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“They’re recovering!” she said happily. “Look at how vigorously they’re swimming around!”
“But where’s the suit material?” I asked.
She turned from the laptop to stare at me. “It’s gone. They’ve digested the cermet. It’s food for them.”
I
raced along the passageway to the bridge. Duchamp was in her command chair, as usual. I could hear Yeats’s voice, puffing with exertion:
“ … going a lot slower than I expected. This is tough work, let me tell you.”
“You’ve got to bring them back inside!” I said to Duchamp. “Now! Before the bugs kill them.”
Rodriguez was not on the bridge. Riza Kolodny, at the comm console, looked at me and then the captain and finally turned her face resolutely to her screens, not wishing to get involved.
Before Duchamp could reply, I said, “The bugs eat cermet. It’s like caviar to them, for god’s sake!”
She leveled a hard stare at me. “You have proof of this?”
“Your daughter has the proof in her lab. It’s true! Now get those two people back inside here!”
Duchamp looked as if she would have preferred to slice my throat, but she touched the communications stud on her
chair arm and said crisply, “Yeats, Sakamoto, come back inside. Now. That’s an order.”
“Okay by me,” Yeats said, with obvious relief. She was not accustomed to much physical exertion, clearly.
“Yes, Captain,” said Sakamoto, so even and unemotional that the words might just as well have come from a computer.
Duchamp called Rodriguez back to the bridge and Marguerite came up from her lab. She and I crowded the hatchway as she displayed her experiment’s results on the main screen. Within minutes, Dr. Waller, Yeats, and Sakamoto came up, making a real crowd in the passageway. I could feel them pressing me, pushing their sweaty bodies against me. My heart was racing; I felt queasy and breathless at the same time.
“I’m still checking air samples for the signature of the cermet materials,” Marguerite was telling her mother, “but so far there is none. The organisms seem to have digested every molecule.”
If this information rattled our steely-eyed captain, she did not show it. Turning to Rodriguez, she said, “What do you think?”
Rodriguez’s brow was already deeply creased with worry. “We’ve got a catch-twenty-two situation here. We need to repair the shell or sink, but if we go outside the bugs will degrade our suits so badly we’ll be at risk of total suit failure.”
“You mean death,” I said. “Someone could get killed.”
He nodded, a little sheepishly, I thought.
Marguerite added, “Meanwhile the organisms are eating away at the shell. They could damage it to the point where … where …” She drew in her breath, realizing that if the shell failed, we would all go plunging into the depths of the atmosphere.
Is this what happened to Alex? I wondered. Was his ship devoured by these hungry alien bugs?
Then I realized that the organisms weren’t alien at all. This was their natural environment. We were the aliens, the
invaders. Maybe they were instinctively fighting against us, trying to drive us out of their world.
Nonsense! I told myself. They’re just bugs. Microbes. They can’t think. They can’t act in an organized way.
I hoped.
Duchamp looked straight at me as she said, “This is what we’re going to do. Each of us will take turns at repairing the shell. None of us will stay outside longer than Tom and Mr. Humphries did.”
“But our suits were damaged,” I objected.
“We will keep the excursions shorter than your EVA was,” Duchamp said. “Short enough to get back inside before the bugs can damage the suits.”
From behind me Yeats grumbled, “Then it’s a race to see if we can plug the leaks faster than the bugs can eat through the shell.”
Duchamp nodded. “In the meantime, I intend to go deeper.”
“Deeper?” Riza blurted.
“There’s a layer of clear air between this cloud deck and the next, about five kilometers below us,” Duchamp said.
Rodriguez grinned humorlessly. “I get it. No clouds, no bugs.”
I could feel Yeats start to object, but before she could the captain went on, “Willa, I want you to estimate the maximum time we can work in the atmosphere out there before we run into danger of suit damage.”
“Yes, Captain,” Yeats said glumly.
“Tom, you take the conn. Mr. Humphries and I will take the first shift. Everyone else will take a turn at the work,” she hesitated a moment, looking past me. At her daughter, I supposed. “Everyone except Dr. Waller,” she said.
I felt the doctor’s gusting breath of appreciation on the back of my neck. He was in no physical condition for an EVA, true enough. But I worried about Marguerite; she had no training for this sort of thing. Or did she?
Duchamp got up from her command chair. Everyone in the passageway flattened themselves out to make room for
her to pass by. I followed her, fighting down the fears that were shaking me.
In a sense, of course, none of us had any training for this sort of EVA. Virtual reality simulations were all well and good, as far as they went, but nothing could prepare you for being outside in those clouds, with the wind gusting against you and the ship shuddering and bucking like a living animal. Add to that the knowledge that the bugs were chewing away on your suit … it scared me down to my bladder. I felt jittery, almost light-headed.
But it had to be done, and I wasn’t going to back away from my share of the responsibility.
 
It wasn’t easy, that’s for certain. Even though we worked inside the shell, grappling along its curving bulkhead, dangling from the structural support beams by our suit tethers was far more demanding than climbing mountains.
And it was dark inside the shell. Outside, even in the clouds, there was always a yellowish-gray glow, a sullen twilight that was bright enough to see by, once your eyes adjusted to it. Inside the shell we had to work by the light of our helmet lamps, which didn’t go far. Their glow was swallowed up by the yellowish haze pervading the shell’s interior. It reminded me of descriptions of London fogs from long ages ago, groping along in the misty gloom.
“Riza,” I heard Duchamp call over the suit radio, “get Dr. Waller to put together as many lamps as he can take from stores. We need working lights in here.”
“Yes, Captain,” came the comm tech’s reply.
Despite everything, I had to smile inside my helmet. Duchamp wasn’t allowing our ship’s doctor to sit idly while the rest of us worked.
We sprayed epoxy all across the shell’s enormous interior. And it was huge in there; the vast curving space seemed measureless, infinite. The darkness swallowed the pitiful light from our helmet lamps. I began to think about Jonah
in the belly of the whale or Fuchida exploring the endless caverns inside Olympus Mons on Mars.
There was no way to know precisely where the leaks were; the shell wasn’t instrumented for that and the leaks weren’t so big that you could see daylight through them. We concentrated our spraying on the aft end of the envelope, naturally, because that’s where we had seen the charring.
Duchamp and I spent an exhausting half hour in the shell, then Rodriguez and Marguerite replaced us. Duchamp would have had the entire crew in there at once and gotten the job over with, except for the fact that we had only two epoxy spray guns aboard.
So, two by two, the crew worked hour after hour on sealing the leaks in the gas envelope. Exhausted as I was, I took another turn, this time with Sakamoto. Rodriguez actually went out three times. So did Yeats, grumbling every inch of the way.
When my second tour was over, I half collapsed on the deck just inside the airlock, too weary even to think about peeling off my suit. I simply lifted off my helmet and sat there, not even taking off my backpack. It wasn’t only the physical exertion, although just about every muscle in my body was shrieking. It was the mental strain, the knowledge that the ship was in trouble, serious trouble, and we were all in danger.
Sakamoto, standing above me, pulled his helmet off and gave me a rare smile. “Work is the curse of the drinking man,” he said, then started to get out of his suit. I couldn’t have been more surprised if he had sprouted wings and flown back to Earth.
Finally it was finished. I had crawled into my berth to inject an enzyme shot into my arm when the intercom blared, a scant six centimeters from my ear, “MR. HUMPHRIES TO THE BRIDGE, PLEASE.”
Bleary-eyed, I finished the injection, then slid out of the berth and padded in my stocking feet toward the bridge, not even bothering to smooth out the wrinkles in my coveralls.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew I was sweaty and far from sweet-smelling, but I didn’t care.
Duchamp was in her command chair, as flinty as ever. Rodriguez must have been grabbing a few winks of sleep. Yeats was at the comm console.
As soon as I ducked through the hatch, Duchamp said to Yeats, “Tell him, Willa.”
Looking far from jocular, Yeats said, “I have good news and bad news. Which do you want to hear first?”
“The good news,” I snapped.
“We stopped the leak,” she said. But her face did not show any sign of joy. “The ship is back in trim and we’ve broken out of the clouds into the clear air.”
“We’re pumping out the air we took in during the descent through the cloud deck,” Duchamp added, “and replacing it with the ambient air, outside.”
I nodded. “Good.”
“Now the bad news,” said Willa. “Every one of our suits is damaged, at least slightly. Not one of them would pass a safety inspection. They all leak.”
“That means we can’t go EVA?”
“Not until we repair them,” Yeats said cheerlessly.
“All right,” I said. “That’s not as bad as it might have been.”
“The question is,” Duchamp said, “will there be more bugs in the deeper cloud decks?”
“It gets awfully hot down there,” I said. “More than two hundred degrees Celsius. And that’s thirty, forty kilometers above the surface.”
“So you don’t think we’ll have any problems from the bugs?”
“We should ask Marguerite. She’s the biologist.”
Duchamp nodded. “I’ve already asked her. She said she doesn’t know. No one knows.”
I heard myself say, “There can’t be anything living at such high temperatures! It gets up to four hundred degrees and more at the surface.”
“I wonder,” she murmured.
From being a total skeptic about the bugs, the captain had swung to suspecting them to be lurking in the next cloud deck, waiting to devour us.
Then another thought struck me. “Where’s Fuchs? Has he gone down into the second cloud deck yet?”
She nodded. “No. He appears to be hovering in this clear area, just as we are, according to the latest word from the IAA.”
“I wonder if he …” Duchamp and the bridge wavered out of focus, as if someone had twisted a camera lens the wrong way. I put out a hand to grasp the edge of the hatchway, my knees suddenly rubbery.
I heard someone ask, “What’s the matter?”
Everything was spinning madly around me. “I feel kind of woozy,” I heard my own voice say.
That’s the last thing I remember.
I
opened my eyes to see Dr. Waller, Rodriguez, and Marguerite bending over me. They all looked grim, worried.
“Do you know where you are?” Waller asked, the lilt in his voice flattened by concern.
I looked past their intent faces and saw medical monitors, green worms crawling across their screens. I heard them beeping softly and smelled antiseptic.
“The infirmary,” I said. My voice was little more than a croak.
“Good!” Dr. Waller said approvingly. “Full consciousness and awareness. That’s very good.”
Marguerite looked relieved. I suppose Rodriguez did too.
It didn’t take much mental acumen to see that I was lying on the infirmary’s one bed. Located back at the tail of the gondola, the infirmary was the only place on Hesperos with space enough for people to stand at bedside. Our bunks were nothing more than horizontal closets.
“What happened?” I asked, still not feeling strong enough to do anything but lie there on my back.
“Your anemia came up and bit you,” said Dr. Waller.
I glanced at Marguerite. I had never mentioned my condition to her, but apparently Waller had told her everything while I was unconscious. She looked concerned, but not surprised. Rodriguez had known about it, of course, but he still looked very worried, his forehead wrinkled like corduroy.
“But I’ve been taking my shots,” I said weakly.
“And engaging in more physical exertion than you have ever done in your life, I should think,” said the doctor cheerily. “The hard work caught up with you.”
“A few hours … ?”
“It was enough. More than enough.”
Talk about depressing news. Here I thought I was doing my share, working alongside Rodriguez and even Duchamp, facing the same dangers and duties as the rest of the crew. And my god-cursed anemia strikes me down, shows everybody that I’m a weakling, a useless burden to them all. Father was right: I’m the runt of the litter, in every imaginable way.
I felt like crying, but I held myself together as Waller fussed around me and Rodriguez left, half apologizing that he had to get back to the bridge.
“We’re getting ready to enter the next cloud deck,” he said. “We decided just to skim in and out, take some samples of the cloud droplets and see if there are any bugs in ’em.”
I nodded weakly. “Good thinking.”
“It was Dee’s idea—Captain Duchamp’s.”
I turned my head slightly toward Marguerite. “It’s a good thing we brought a biologist along with us,” I said.
She smiled.
Rodriguez grabbed my hand and said, “You take care of yourself now, Van. Do what the doc tells you.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “Why not?”
He left. Marguerite remained at my bedside.
“How long will I have to stay here?” I asked Dr. Waller.
“Only a few hours, I should think,” he replied, his face as
somber as ever. “I’m running diagnostics on your red cell count and oxygen transfer to your vital organs. It shouldn’t take very long.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position, expecting to feel my head spin. Instead, it felt fine. Marguerite hurriedly pushed up my pillows so I could sit back against them.
“You make a good nurse,” I said to her. I actually felt pretty good. My voice was coming back to its normal strength.
“You scared the wits out of everyone, collapsing like that.”
“How should I have collapsed?” I joked.
“Humor!” said Dr. Waller. “That’s good. A certain sign of recovery.”
“There’s nothing really wrong with me,” I said, “except this damned anemia.”
“Yes, that’s true. Except for the anemia you are in fine physical condition. But as Mercutio says to Romeo, the wound may not be as deep as a well or as wide as a church door but ‘tis enough, ’twill serve.”
Marguerite understood. “You have to be careful, Van. Your condition could become serious if you don’t take proper care of yourself.”
There was a part of me that was perfectly happy to be lying on a sickbed and having her looking so concerned about me. But how long would that last? I asked myself. I’ve got to get up and be active. I don’t want pity. I want respect.
“What you’re telling me,” I said sharply to the doctor, “is that if I have to do any serious physical exertion I should take extra enzyme shots.”
He nodded, but pointed out glumly, “We only have a fixed amount of the enzyme supply in our medical stores. And we do
not
have the equipment or resources to make more. Your supply is more than adequate for normal usage, with a healthy additional amount in reserve. But still—you
should pace yourself more carefully than you have today, Mr. Humphries.”
“Yes. Of course. Now, when can I get up and back to my work?”
He glanced at the monitors lining the infirmary’s wall. “In two hours, more or less.”
“Two hours,” I said. “Fine.”
 
I was actually on my feet much sooner. I had to be.
Marguerite brought me a handheld computer to work with while I sat in the infirmary bed, waiting for Dr. Waller to finish his diagnostics. He left the infirmary for a while, humming to himself as usual. I checked with IAA headquarters back in Geneva and, some ten minutes later, got a reply that Fuchs had entered the second cloud deck more than an hour earlier.
He was ahead of us again. And apparently he had suffered no damage from the bugs that had attacked our gas envelope. Why not? Was his
Lucifer
made of different materials? Had he been damaged and then repaired his ship more quickly than we had been able to do?
Sitting there staring at the printed IAA report, I began to wonder what would happen if Fuchs actually did get to the surface first and recovered Alex’s remains. He’d get Father’s ten billion in prize money and I’d be penniless. Totally cut off. I wouldn’t even be able to afford my home in Majorca, let alone the apartments I maintained here and there.
I wondered what my friends would do. Oh, they’d put up with me for a while, I supposed. After all, it would be egregiously impolite to just drop me immediately because I’d lost all my money. But sooner or later they’d turn away from me. I was under no illusions about that. They were my friends because I was their social equal or—many of them—because I had the money to support their operas and plays and dabbles at scientific research.
Penniless, I would also become friendless quite quickly. Gwyneth couldn’t afford to stay with me; she needed someone to pay her bills.
What would Marguerite do? I asked myself. I couldn’t see her abandoning me because I’d become poor. On the other hand, I couldn’t see her supporting me, either. We didn’t know each other that well, really, and besides, I doubted that she had the kind of money it would take to support me.
That’s what was whirling through my mind as I sat on the infirmary’s lone bed, waiting for Dr. Waller to come back from wherever he’d disappeared to and give me permission to get—
The ship lurched. I mean,
lurched.
We had bounced and shuddered when we were in the superrotation winds up higher, but once we’d sunk down to the clear region between the first and second cloud decks the air pressure had become so thick that the winds were smothered and our ride had become glassy smooth.
But now everything suddenly tilted so badly that I was nearly thrown off the bed. I clutched its edges like a child riding a coaster down a snowy hillside.
Through the closed hatch of the infirmary I could hear alarm bells blaring and the thundering slams of other hatches swinging shut automatically.
The infirmary seemed to sway. For an instant I thought I was getting dizzy again, but then I remembered that I was in the tail section of the gondola and it was the gondola itself that was swinging beneath the gas envelope. Somewhere an alarm siren started shrieking.
I jumped out of bed, glad that Waller hadn’t stripped off my coveralls. The floor beneath me tilted again, this time pointing downward like an airplane starting to dive. Something behind me crashed to the floor.
“ALL HANDS STRAP IN!” the intercom blared. Great advice. I had to clutch the bed to keep from sliding down to the infirmary hatch.
The hatch swung outward and banged against the bulkhead. Dr. Waller was on the other side, his red-rimmed eyes wide with terror.
“We’re sinking!” he screamed. “The gas shell has collapsed!”

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