Venus (18 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Venus
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I
was walking in my garden outside the house on Majorca, Gwyneth at my side. She was wearing something light and so filmy that I could see her naked body beneath the sheer fabric. It billowed when the breeze blew in off the sea.
A mosquito whined past my ear. I became very annoyed. Genetic controls were supposed to have eliminated insect pests from the island. What had happened? What had gone wrong?
I turned to ask Gwyneth but it wasn’t her anymore. It was Marguerite walking beside me in her spacesuit, of all things, carrying its helmet in her gloved hands. Wearing a spacesuit in my beautiful garden by the Mediterranean on a sunny springtime afternoon.
I smiled at her and she smiled back. But then I felt the sting of an insect on my bare arm and slapped at it.
“You’ve got to get into your suit,” she said to me, and it was her mother instead of Marguerite.
“But you’re dead,” I said, not believing my eyes.
“So will you be if you don’t get into your suit!” she replied urgently.
“But I don’t have a suit,” I said. “Why would I keep a suit here?”
Instead of answering she pointed a gloved hand out to the Mediterranean. The sea was boiling away, bubbling and gurgling with a mad hissing roar as immense clouds of steam rose into a sky that suddenly was no longer blue, but a grayish sort of sickly yellow. An immense glowering light was burning through the clouds, the Sun so close and huge and hot that it was like an all-devouring god come to destroy everything it touched.
“Quickly!” she yelled. I couldn’t tell if it was Marguerite or her mother. She was putting on the helmet of her spacesuit.
I turned frantically, searching the garden for my suit. All I found was the beautiful flowers and vines, withering, browning, bursting into flames all around me.
And the insects were crawling all over me, biting, eating my flesh, burrowing into my skin, and chewing on my innards. I could feel them gnawing away inside me and when I tried to scream no sound came out. They had devoured even my voice.
But I heard others screaming. The long, screeching, terrified wails of men and women falling, falling through the boiling hot air, wailing, “Save me! Save meeeee!”
M
y eyes snapped open. I lay on the bunk they had put me on, stiff and sore from the beating Fuchs had given me. My quarters consisted of a tiny section of a larger compartment, screened off from six other bunks by a thin plastic shoji-type sliding door.
How long I lay there, I don’t know. I was unconscious much of the time. I could hear people moving about and talking in a low, guttural foreign language on the other side of my screen.
I felt terribly weak. Without my regular enzyme shots my red cell count would fall until I sank into a coma and died. Maybe that would be for the best, I thought as I lay there, miserable and alone. No one would care if I died. No one would mourn my death. I meant nothing to anyone. It would make utterly no difference to the world if I left it forever.
“Van?” Marguerite’s voice, calling softly from the other side of the shoji screen. I could see her silhouette against the white squares of plastic sheeting.
“Van, are you awake?” she called again.
“Come in,” I said, surprised at how strong my voice was. I certainly didn’t feel strong, not at all.
She slid the screen back. My bunk was flush against the bulkhead, so she simply stood where she was, out in the common area of what I took to be the crew’s quarters. I could see no one else in the compartment; the crew must all be on duty, I thought.
Marguerite was wearing an ill-fitting gray jumpsuit that bagged over her trim frame. She had turned the pants and sleeve cuffs up; they were far too long for her. Her eyes were red; she had been crying. But she was dry-eyed now, and her hair was neatly combed and pulled back from her beautiful face.
“How do you feel?” she asked, almost timidly.
As I looked up at her, I realized that my right eye was swollen almost shut. She bent over me and for a moment I had the inane idea that she was going to kiss me.
No such luck. I reached out to her and she took my hand tenderly in hers. But that’s as far as she was willing to go.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“What difference does it make?” I heard myself say. Whine, almost. “I’ll be dead in a few days.”
Her hand tightened around mine. “What do you mean? You weren’t hurt that badly.”
“My enzyme shots. Without them my anemia will kill me.”
“Ohhh,” she actually groaned. “I had forgotten about your condition.”
“My medical supplies were aboard
Hesperos,”
I said. “Unless there’s an olympic-class biochemist aboard and a warehouse full of pharmaceutical supplies, I’m a dead man.”
Marguerite looked truly distressed. “We don’t even have a ship’s doctor. Fuchs didn’t include one in his crew.”
“Then he might as well have killed me instead of just humiliating me.”
“There must be something we can do!”
“You’re a biologist,” I said, the faintest tendril of hope flickering within me. “Could you … ?”
I let the question dangle between us. Marguerite stared down at me for a long, silent moment. I could see it in her eyes. There was no way she could synthesize the growth hormone I needed. I realized that I didn’t know the hormone’s chemical formula or even its technical name. I always had people around me like Waller to take care of those details.
God is in the details, I remembered hearing somewhere. Death is in the details, I told myself.
Marguerite broke into my thoughts. “He wants to see you,” she said.
“Wants to see me?”
“The captain. Fuchs.”
I actually managed to bark out a bitter laugh. “Why? Does he need more punching practice?”
“He sent me to bring you to his quarters. He said you’ve been resting long enough.”
I growled, “So he’s making medical diagnoses now. That’s why he doesn’t need a physician in his crew.”
“Can you get up?” Marguerite asked.
“Sure,” I said, propping myself on an elbow and then gripping the bunk’s edge with both hands to support myself in a sitting position. My head thundered with pain.
Marguerite grasped my shoulders to steady me as I got to my feet. I wanted to slide an arm around her waist but thought better of it.
“I can stand on my own,” I said, working hard to keep from moaning. Or collapsing.
Someone had taken my slippers. Marguerite checked the drawers built in under my bunk while I stood there and concentrated on standing erect. The slippers were gone.
So I headed for the hatch barefoot. The metal deck felt reasonably warm.
“See?” I said as we ducked through the hatch and out into the passageway. “Nothing to it.”
In truth, I felt better than I had any right to expect. A little
woozy, but that might have been nothing more than my imagination. Plenty of aches and stiffness, and my head throbbed with pain. But I made it down the passageway under my own power.
As we reached the ladder that led up to the bridge level I caught a glimpse of myself in the blank face of a display screen set into the bulkhead. My right eye was swollen and discolored, my hair a disheveled mess. I stopped and smoothed my hair into place. I had to hold on to some shred of dignity when I faced Fuchs again.
Up the ladder we went, down another passageway. Then we stopped in front of an accordion-pleated door labeled CAPTAIN.
I squared my shoulders as best as I could and rapped on the metal door frame.
“Enter,” came Fuchs’s muffled voice.
His quarters were a shock to me. It was only one compartment, but it was spacious enough to contain a real bed, a desk, several comfortable chairs, cabinets, and one entire bulkhead lined with shelves of books. There were even old-fashioned paper books, thick and battered from long use, alongside the cyberbook chips. The floor was carpeted with a large, colorful oriental rug.
Wearing a loose-fitting black tunic over charcoal-gray trousers, Fuchs was standing by what looked like a long picture window, gazing out at the stars. Actually, it was a wall screen, of course.
“The universe,” he said, gesturing with one hand toward the panorama of stars. “I never tire of gazing at heaven.”
I was gaping at the books, I suppose, because he took a couple of steps toward the shelves and said, “When your ship is your home, you bring the comforts of home along with you.”
“Books?” I asked, stupidly.
“What better?” Fuchs countered. “The memory of the human race is there. All the hopes and fears, all the vice and glory, all the loves and hates.”
There was one book on his desk, a leather-bound volume
that looked as if it were centuries old. I tried to make out the title on its spine, but the lettering was too cracked and faded.
“Now then,” Fuchs said crisply, “I want you to spend the rest of the day familiarizing yourself with the communications gear. That’s going to be your post from now on.”
He spoke as if I had been a member of his crew since day one. As if the beating he had given me on the bridge had never happened.
“It’s a fairly standard setup, the comm computer does all the real work,” Fuchs went on, digging his hands into the pockets of his tunic. He pulled something out of his tunic pocket and popped it into his mouth. Pills of some sort. Narcotics? I wondered.
“Being comm tech won’t put too much of a strain on you,” he said, with a sneer. He had forgotten nothing. Neither had L
“For as long as I live,” I said.
His eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“He’s ill, Captain,” Marguerite said.
“Ill?”
“I have a pernicious anemia that was being controlled by enzyme injections that generated red-cell proliferation,” I said, all in a rush. Then I added, “Captain.”
Fuchs glanced from me to Marguerite, then back again.
“My pharmaceutical supplies went down with
Hesperos,”
I went on. “Unless we return to orbit and rendezvous with
Truax
I’ll be dead in a few days.”
He huffed. “Really.”
“Really,” Marguerite said.
Fuchs looked at me intently, chewing on his pills, then paced over to his desk.
“How do I know this isn’t some crackbrain fraud that you’ve cooked up to keep me from winning your father’s prize money?”
I almost laughed at him. “Wait a few days and watch me die.”
With a shrug, Fuchs said, “Okay. That’s what I’ll do, then. In the meantime, you’ll work the comm console.”
“You can’t!” Marguerite blurted.
Fuchs leveled a stubby finger at her. “Don’t presume that my feelings for your mother will allow you to behave disrespectfully to me. I’m the captain of this vessel and you will
not
tell me what I can and cannot do.”
Marguerite drew herself up to her full height, several centimeters taller than either Fuchs or I. Her eyes blazed.
“If you allow Mr. Humphries to die, Captain, I will bring charges of willful murder against you as soon as we reach Earth.”
Strangely, he grinned at her. A mirthless, sardonic grin, almost a grimace. “You’ve got your mother’s spirit, sure enough,” he said.
Then his normal scowl returned and he said to me, “Report to the comm console. Now!”
Marguerite started to object. “But you—”
Fuchs silenced her with a wave of his hand. “You bring up all the charges you want. We’re a long way from Earth, and as long as we’re on this vessel my word is the law. Understand me?”
“But he’ll die!” Marguerite wailed.
“What of it?” Fuchs said.
Neither Marguerite nor I had an answer for him.
S
o I dutifully followed Fuchs to the bridge and sat at the horseshoe-shaped communications console. What choice did I have? I ruefully wondered which hurt more, my bruised face or my bruised ego.
Marguerite came to the bridge also, and just stood near the hatch staring at Fuchs unwaveringly. If she made the man uncomfortable, he gave no outward sign of it. I called up the operations manual for the comm system and concentrated on studying it.
There were two others on the bridge, both silent, stocky, dour-faced Asians. Fuchs had apparently recruited his crew exclusively from the Orient. I started to wonder why. Are they more loyal? Less likely to resent or resist his tyrannical ways? Perhaps they’re willing to work for less pay. Or, more likely, they’re simply more docile and obedient. I was totally wrong in each of my surmises, but I didn’t know it then.
Fuchs had been right about the communications system. If the operations manual was to be believed, the system was
quite simple and logically set up. Its own internal computer did most of the work, and it interfaced with the ship’s central computer very easily.
I saw on one of the console’s screens that there were dozens of messages from
Truax
that had gone unanswered. The communications technicians up there in orbit kept trying to get some answer out of Fuchs, but he refused to speak to them. The messages became demanding, even
Truax’s
captain angrily complaining about Fuchs’s silence.
The screen began to blur slightly. I squeezed my eyes shut and when I opened them everything seemed normal again. But I knew that symptom well enough. It was the first sign that I had missed an enzyme injection. Soon there would be others.
Then I heard Fuchs say, “You’re not needed here on the bridge. Go to your quarters.”
I looked up from my screen and saw that he was speaking to Marguerite, who was still standing by the hatch.
“You have to do something about Mr. Humphries,” she said, without taking her eyes off him.
Fuchs glanced at me, his frown deeper than usual. “There’s nothing that can be done,” he said.
“What about a blood transfusion?”
“Transfusion?”
“If we can’t produce the hormone that promotes his red-cell production, then perhaps transfusions of whole blood will keep him alive.”
They were discussing me as if I weren’t there, as if I were some experimental animal or a specimen in a laboratory. I felt my face burning, and I knew my cheeks must be flame red.
But neither of them was looking at me.
Fuchs barked out a rough laugh. “Do you seriously think any of my crew has a compatible blood type?”
“Perhaps I do,” Marguerite said. “Or you.”
To my shame, I didn’t dare turn around to look at him. I was afraid of him, pure and simple. I expected him to laugh Marguerite’s idea to scorn. Or to get angry. Instead, I heard
nothing but silence. Neither of the other two crew members raised a murmur. For long moments the only sounds on the bridge were the inescapable background hum of electrical power and the faint beeps from some of the sensor systems.
Marguerite broke the lengthening silence. “I can call
Truax
for his medical records.”
“No!” Fuchs snapped. “There will be no communications with
Truax
or anybody else.”
“But why?” she asked. “You’re beaming your telemetering signal back to the IAA on Earth. Why not—”
“Every vessel is
required
to report its status to Geneva,” Fuchs interrupted. “But I’m not required to communicate with anyone else and I’m not going to do it. Nobody’s going to get any claim on my prize money. Understand me? Nobody!”
“You can’t be serious,” Marguerite protested.
Fuchs replied, “The ship’s computer has complete medical dossiers on all the crew. There’s a medical diagnosis system in the sick bay; it may not be state-of-the-art, but it’ll do. When Humphries is finished his watch here on the bridge you can run him through the medical scanners and determine his blood type, then see if anyone aboard matches it.”
Marguerite said, “Thank you, Captain,” in a tone that was far softer than her previous words.
“Now get off the bridge,” Fuchs snapped, as if to make up for the small concession he’d just granted her.
As I returned my full attention to the screens before me, I realized that Fuchs had made his concession to Marguerite, not to me. He actually didn’t care if I lived or died, but he had a much different attitude toward her.
 
A full watch on the bridge was eight hours long, under Fuchs’s command. On
Hesperos
, watches had been the more normal four hours, and Duchamp had been lenient about even that, since the ship was so heavily automated.
Lucifer
carried a crew of fourteen, I eventually found
out. All of them Asians, two-thirds of them men. Only Fuchs’s iron discipline kept order among the crew. They did their jobs with a silent efficiency that was almost eerie. There must have been some sexual relationships among them, but I never caught a hint of any. Of course, they were wary about me. I was definitely an outsider among them.
I tried to work the full eight-hour shift at the comm console, tried as earnestly as I could. It wasn’t just that I was afraid of Fuchs, although I certainly was terrified of his brutality and strength. But there was something more: my own pride. I hated being considered a weakling, a Runt. I was determined to show Fuchs and all the rest of those silent, watchful Asians that I could do a man’s work.
But my body betrayed me. Hardly a full hour into my watch, my vision began to blur again and no amount of blinking or knuckling my eyes could help. It’s all right, I told myself. You can still do your job. Stick with it. Hang tough. Futile words. After another little while I grew light-headed, dizzy. The screen before my blurry eyes began to spin around and around. No matter how I commanded my body to behave, things just got worse. I felt weak and nauseous. I knew that I couldn’t get up from my chair if I wanted to.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt as if someone had clamped a vise around it and I couldn’t lift my ribs to get air into my lungs. I gasped like a hooked fish.
I swiveled the chair around a little, my vision going gray. The last thing I remember was saying, “Captain, I’m not …” Then I slumped out of the chair and sprawled on the deck. Darkness overwhelmed me.
 
I heard voices from a long, long distance away. They echoed hollowly, as if coming through a tunnel.
And I felt a sudden, sharp, stinging pain on my face. Again. And again.
My eyes cracked open slightly.
“See? He’s coming out of it.”
It was Fuchs leaning over me, slapping me. Quite methodically he slapped my face, first one cheek, then the other.
“Stop it! Stop it!” someone was yelling. Not me. The only sounds I could make were faint groans.
I tried to raise my arms to protect myself but couldn’t. Either I was too weak or my arms were strapped down. I couldn’t tell which.
“I’m not hurting him,” Fuchs said.
“He needs a transfusion right away.” It was Marguerite’s voice, concerned, determined.
“You’re certain he’s not faking?” Fuchs asked. I was trying to open my eyes all the way but the effort was too much for me. I let my head turn and tried to see Marguerite but she wasn’t within the range of my vision.
“Look at the monitors!” she said sharply. “He’s dying.”
Fuchs exhaled a long, sighing breath from deep in his barrel chest, almost like the warning growl a dog makes just before it attacks.
“All right,” he said at last. “Let’s get it over with.”
They were going to let me die, I thought. They were going to stand over my prostrate body and watch me die.
I realized at that moment that no matter how much I philosophized or tried to justify the end of my existence, I did not want to die. Maybe I deserved death. Certainly no one would miss me or grieve over me. Not my father. Not Gwyneth or any of my so-called friends. No one.
But I did not want to die. With every atom of my being I wanted to survive, to be strong, to get up and live.
Instead, my eyes closed again and darkness returned to envelope me totally.
I must have dreamed. A weird, mixed-up dream it was. Alex was in it. But sometimes he was Rodriguez. Both of them were dead, killed on Venus.
“Don’t give up,” Alex told me, with his carefree grin. He tousled my hair. “Don’t ever give up.”
But I was falling, plummeting like a stone through dark
roiling clouds that flashed lightning like the strobe lights at a concert. Rodriguez was beside me in his spacesuit, screaming that last primal scream that I had heard when he died.
“Don’t give up!” Alex called to me from afar.
“He’s already given up,” my father’s disdainful voice answered. “He’s got nothing to live for.”
“Yes he does,” Alex insisted. “He’s got me. And he’s got himself. Find me, Van. Find yourself.”
 
I woke up.
I guessed that I was in the sick bay. I was on a thin mattress atop what seemed more like a narrow table than a bed. Medical monitors beeped and clicked all around me. The metal overhead curved low above my eyes.
I felt strong and clear. No blurred vision. No dizziness. I took a deep breath.
“You’re awake.”
Turning my head, I saw Marguerite standing beside my table. She looked fresh, newly scrubbed. She was wearing a crisp jumpsuit of deep blue that fitted her much better than the shapeless bag she’d been wearing before.
“I’m alive,” I said. My throat was dry, but otherwise my voice was almost normal.
“Do you think you can sit up?”
I started to nod, but instead I pulled myself up to a sitting position, no hands.
“How’s that?” I asked, marveling that I felt no giddiness at all.
“Fine,” said Marguerite. She touched the foot of the table with one finger and the mattress inflated behind me to form a pillow that I could sit back against.
“Would you like something to eat?”
I realized that I felt hungry. Starving, in fact. “Yes, thank you,” I said.
Her smile beamed at me. “I’ll fix you a tray.”
She ducked through the hatch behind her. When I flexed
my arms I saw that a plastic bandage had been sprayed onto my left inner elbow. She must have done a blood transfusion.
I looked around. The sick bay was the size of a small closet, crammed with medical sensors. There was no room for a desk or even a chair, only this table I was sitting on. I touched my right cheek. The swelling was down. In the glassy reflection of the nearest display screen, my face looked almost normal.
Marguerite came back with a tray of cold cereal and fruit juice.
“You did a blood transfusion,” I said, rather than asked.
Standing beside me, she nodded.
“Who gave the blood?”
“Captain Fuchs did,” Marguerite said. The expression on her face was unfathomable: quite serious, like a judge about to sentence a felon to a very long term. But there were other things in her eyes as well.
She looked away from me. “He’s the only person on board who has a blood type similar enough to yours.”
I chewed on a mouthful of cereal, then swallowed. It tasted bland, pointless. “Maybe it’ll give me some of his personality,” I muttered.
Marguerite did not smile. “No,” she said, “I wouldn’t want to see that happen.”
Before she could say anything more, Fuchs himself pushed through the hatch. Suddenly the sick bay was overcrowded. I felt distinctly uncomfortable.
But I lifted my chin a notch and said, “Thank you, Captain, for saving my life.”
He sneered at me. “I couldn’t afford to lose another crewman.” Then, gesturing toward Marguerite, he added, “Besides, it wouldn’t do to have Ms. Duchamp here accuse me of murder while I’m claiming your father’s prize money. It would be just like your father to renege on the prize because I let his son die.”
I shook my head. “You don’t know my father.”
“Don’t I?”
“He wouldn’t care about my death.”
“I didn’t say he would,” Fuchs corrected. “I said he’d use your death to renege on giving me the prize.”
He stressed the word
me
ever so slightly, but enough for us both to hear it. I glanced at Marguerite. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“How soon can you resume your duties on the bridge?” Fuchs asked gruffly.
Before I could reply, Marguerite said, “He should rest and—”
“I’m ready now,” I said, pushing my tray aside.
Fuchs made a sardonic little smile. “My blood must be doing you some good.” He looked at his wristwatch. “Jagal’s on the comm console at the moment. You can relieve her in two hours.”

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