Venus (27 page)
Authors: Ben Bova
“I’m not sleeping with him,” Marguerite said. “I’ve never slept with him. He’s never asked me to sleep with him.”
“But …”
“He may have been attracted to my mother once, many years ago. I remind him of her, of course. But he’s a different man now. Your father changed him.”
“He was in love with my mother, too,” I snapped. “Or so he said.”
“He told me that your father killed her.”
“He’s a liar!”
“No,” said Marguerite. “He might be wrong, but he’s not lying. He’s convinced that your father killed your mother.”
“I don’t want to hear that.”
“He believes your father had your mother murdered,” Marguerite said, her voice edged in steel.
I couldn’t stand it. I turned on my heel and fled from the sick bay.
But even as I ran, her words echoed in my mind:
I’m not sleeping with him. I’ve never slept with him. He’s never asked me to sleep with him.
I’m not sleeping with him. I’ve never slept with him. He’s never asked me to sleep with him.
I
knew it was a dream even while I was dreaming it.
knew it was a dream even while I was dreaming it.
Marguerite and I were making love, slowly, languidly, on the beach of some undiscovered island beneath a big gibbous tropical Moon. I could feel the warm sighing breeze coming in off the ocean, hear the soft thrumming of the surf along the coral reef that ringed the lagoon.
There was no one else on the island, no one else in the world as far as we were concerned. Only the two of us, only this timeless place, this haven of tenderness and passion.
Far, far away, though, I heard a distant voice calling my name. It was barely a whisper at first, but it grew more urgent, stronger, more demanding. I realized at last that it was Marguerite whispering in my ear, her breath warm and alive against my bare skin.
“He killed her,” she whispered, so softly I could hardly make out her words. “He killed your mother. He murdered her.”
“But why?” I begged her to answer me. “How could he kill her? Why would he do it?”
“You know what it’s like to feel jealousy. You’ve felt the rage that boils inside.”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I know. I’ve felt it.”
“He has the power to give vent to his fury. He has the power to destroy people.”
And there was Fuchs standing over us, snarling, “I’ll kill you! Just as I killed Bahadur and all the others!”
Marguerite had vanished. Our tropical island had disappeared. We were standing on the hellish surface of Venus, standing in nothing more than our coveralls on those searing hot rocks, breathing that poisonous air, ready to fight to the death.
I
awoke with a start and sat up on my bunk like a jack-in-the-box popping up. I was soaked with sweat, my cover-alls a soggy, smelly mess.
awoke with a start and sat up on my bunk like a jack-in-the-box popping up. I was soaked with sweat, my cover-alls a soggy, smelly mess.
The digital clock set into the partition at the foot of the bunk told me it was time to start another watch at the pumps. Sliding my battered shoji screen back, I saw that the other crew members were getting ready for duty, too. They quite conspicuously ignored me, turning their backs to me as I stepped out of my compartment.
Only Nodon, smiling broadly, paid any attention to me. He seemed very pleased with my understanding of the pumping system. He was looking forward to leaving the pumps to me and being promoted to the bridge.
“You will handle everything by yourself this watch,” he told me, with a crooked little grin, as we headed for the main pumping station. “I will observe only.”
I nodded and focused my attention on the dials and gauges that monitored the pumping system. It seemed odd, when I thought about it, but Nodon did almost all the talking
between us. Where he was concerned, I was the taciturn, dour one, hardly ever speaking. An ancient scrap of wisdom drifted through my memory, something to the effect that when it comes to learning, it’s best to keep one’s mouth shut and ears open.
between us. Where he was concerned, I was the taciturn, dour one, hardly ever speaking. An ancient scrap of wisdom drifted through my memory, something to the effect that when it comes to learning, it’s best to keep one’s mouth shut and ears open.
The pumps chugged along smoothly enough, although I saw that one of them was beginning to overheat. I had to take it off-line and bring the backup into action.
Then I had to disassemble the ailing pump to find the cause of its overheating. A gas bearing had clogged slightly, causing enough friction to send the pump’s temperature rising. With Nodon watching over my shoulder, I pulled the bearing out and began the laborious task of cleaning it while Nodon watched me intently.
“The captain,” I said to him as I worked. “How long have you known him?”
“All my life,” he replied. “He was a great friend to my father even before I was born.”
I shook my head. “I have a difficult time imagining him as a friend to anyone.”
Nodon nodded somberly. “But you did not know him when he was a happy man. He was very different then. The war changed him.”
“War?” I looked up from the pump-bearing parts scattered on the deck.
Nodon told me about the Asteroid War. I had read about it in history classes, of course, and seen all the videos: the struggle between competing corporations to gain major shares of the asteroid mining business. The histories told of the economic competition, and how major corporations inevitably bought out most of the small, independent miners and prospectors.
But Nodon was there, and he saw a savagely different kind of conflict. The term “war” was not a metaphor, the corporations hired mercenary troops to hunt down the independents and kill them. Out there in the eternal darkness of
deep space battles were fought between spacecraft armed with lasers originally designed to bore through nickel-iron asteroids. Men in spacesuits were shredded with rapid-firing flechette guns. Women, too. Neither side made any distinctions. It was a war of annihilation.
deep space battles were fought between spacecraft armed with lasers originally designed to bore through nickel-iron asteroids. Men in spacesuits were shredded with rapid-firing flechette guns. Women, too. Neither side made any distinctions. It was a war of annihilation.
Lars Fuchs was a leader of the independents, a strong and brave young man who had built up a small but highly successful company of his own. He was smart, as well: too wily to be captured by the mercenary troops who combed the Belt to find him. He led the counterattack, raiding the corporate facilities on Ceres and Vesta, battling the mercenaries ceaselessly, driving up the corporations’ costs and the mercenaries’ body counts, driving men such as my father to rage and desperation.
Fuchs was on the verge of winning the Asteroid War when my father—Nodon told me—crushed him. Not with troops, not with death-dealing weapons, but with a single slender woman. Fuchs’s wife. My father’s corporate security forces captured her and threatened to kill her. Fuchs surrendered, even though he knew they would murder him as soon as he handed himself over. Instead, though, his wife made a deal with my lecherous father—who had quickly become enamored of her beauty. She offered to marry my father if he let Fuchs live.
That is how my mother returned to Earth to become Martin Humphries’s fourth and final wife. And Lars Fuchs remained in the Asteroid Belt, a broken man, robbed of his company, his leadership, and of the woman he had loved. The Asteroid War ended then with the corporations’ victory. Independent miners ceased to exist, although a few prospectors still roamed through the vast reaches of the Belt, under contract to the corporations. Fuchs became a rock rat, one of the prospectors who lived at the sufferance of the almighty corporations, a bitter man, hard and burning with inner rage.
“Then he heard of this prize being offered to recover the remains of your brother,” Nodon said, his voice soft and
faraway with old memories. “He jumped at the chance! It was a cosmic irony to him. That is how he described it: a cosmic irony.”
faraway with old memories. “He jumped at the chance! It was a cosmic irony to him. That is how he described it: a cosmic irony.”
By now I had cleaned the bearing and was putting the pump back together.
“How did he build this ship, then?” I asked. “If he had no money, no resources.”
Nodon smiled gently. “He had friends. Friends from the old days, survivors of the war, men and women who knew him and still respected him. Together, they built this ship, out there in the Belt. In secret. I helped, you know. It was our way to get back at the corporations, our pitiful way to gain just a little bit of revenge against men like your father.”
I closed the pump covering and started it up. It thrummed to life immediately. Nodon and I both beamed with satisfaction as the gauges showed it working in its normal range.
“And this crew?” I asked. “They all came from the Belt, too?”
His pleased smile evaporated. “Yes, from the Belt. But most of them are scum. Very few people were brave enough to join his crew.”
“Venus is a very dangerous place,” I said.
“Yes, that is true. But what they were afraid of was to be seen helping Captain Fuchs. It was one thing to help build his ship, deep in the Belt, unseen by prying eyes. But to openly join his crew? Very few had the courage to do that. He had to hire cutthroats like Bahadur.”
The memory of poor Sanja dead in his bunk flashed through my mind. And of Bahadur, exploding into a shower of blood.
“Do not think badly of the captain,” Nodon told me. “He is a man who has suffered much.”
At the hands of my father, I added silently.
W
e were sinking lower and lower as we drifted slowly toward the planet’s nightside. It was a planned decrease in altitude that Fuchs calculated would bring us above the eastern highlands of Aphrodite Terra, where
Phosphoros
most probably lay. I only hoped Alex’s ship had come to rest low enough so that we could spot it against the bright radar reflections of the mountain’s upper slopes.
e were sinking lower and lower as we drifted slowly toward the planet’s nightside. It was a planned decrease in altitude that Fuchs calculated would bring us above the eastern highlands of Aphrodite Terra, where
Phosphoros
most probably lay. I only hoped Alex’s ship had come to rest low enough so that we could spot it against the bright radar reflections of the mountain’s upper slopes.
I felt the need for a shower after my shift at the pumps but didn’t have the time. Instead I merely pulled on a clean set of coveralls, popped my pile of ripe-smelling ones into the automated laundry unit, and then hurried up to the bridge.
Fuchs frowned at me as I took over the comm console, but said nothing. I couldn’t help staring at him. If I had been in his place, if I had gone through what he’d gone through, how would I feel about having Martin Humphries’s son aboard my ship? Why didn’t he just let me die? What was going on in that angry, bitter mind of his?
Toward the end of the watch, a call came through from the heat-exchange station. I slipped the receiver plug into my ear and tapped into the translator program.
“Captain, sir, it will be necessary to shut down the central unit for maintenance now,” the technician was saying. The computer’s flat unemotional translation took all the expression out of the message, but I could hear the technician’s guttural, growling dialect in the background.
I swiveled my chair slightly so I could see Fuchs’s face reflected in one of my empty screens. He frowned sourly.
“It is necessary, Captain, sir, if we are to avoid a failure of the main heat exchanger,” the technician went on.
“I understand,” Fuchs said. “Proceed.”
“Should I alert the crew—”
“You do your maintenance job,” Fuchs snapped. “I’ll handle the crew.”
“Yes, sir.”
To me, Fuchs called, “Humphries, put me on the ship’s intercom.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, with a crispness I did not really feel.
“This is the captain speaking,” Fuchs said. “We’re going to get a little warmer for a few hours while one section of the main heat exchanger is down for maintenance.”
He thought it over for a moment, then said, “That is all.”
As I closed the intercom circuit, he ordered me, “Get Dr. Duchamp onscreen, Humphries.”
I got no answer from her quarters. She was in the sick bay.
“You heard my warning about the heat?” Fuchs said to her image on his main screen.
“Yes, Captain,” she said. “I’m in the sick bay, preparing for heat-related complaints.”
“Good,” he said. “Don’t let anyone go off duty unless they’ve collapsed with heat prostration. Understand me?”
Marguerite’s lips curved slightly. “You don’t want me to … what’s the word? Mollycoddle?”
Fuchs grunted.
“You don’t want me to mollycoddle the crew,” Marguerite finished.
“That’s right,” he said. “No pampering.”
“Yes, Captain.”
It was probably my imagination but it seemed to get hotter in the bridge almost immediately. Or could it be my anemia? I wondered. No, fever had never been a symptom I’d experienced, I told myself. The temperature in here is rising. And fast.
We were down to within ten kilometers of “sea level,” the arbitrary altitude the planetary scientists had picked as a baseline for measuring the heights of Venus’s uplands and the depths of her craters. The Aphrodite Terra region rose a bit more than three klicks from its surrounding plains, so we had plenty of leeway in altitude. Aphrodite Terra was the size of Africa, and most of it looked fairly rugged on our radar maps. Finding the wreckage of one lost spacecraft was not going to be easy.
For the first time, my mind began to picture what we looked like: a minuscule metal pumpkinseed floating in the dark, still, thick atmosphere of Venus; a tiny artifact from a distant world bearing fragile creatures who needed liquid water for their existence, drifting slowly through a murky soup hot enough to boil water three or four times over, groping our way across this strange, barren, alien landscape, seeking the remains of others of our own kind who had perished in this harsh, inhospitable place.
It was madness, pure and simple. No one but a madman would come here and try this. No one but a maniac such as Fuchs could look out at that blasted, scorched landscape where the rocks were hot enough to melt aluminum and find a fierce kind of
beauty
there. I should have been home, in my house by the gentle sea, where I can walk out in the open green hills and breathe the cool, wine-sharp air, brisk and free and safe.
beauty
there. I should have been home, in my house by the gentle sea, where I can walk out in the open green hills and breathe the cool, wine-sharp air, brisk and free and safe.
Instead, here I was, locked in a metal womb with a tyrant who was by any unbiased judgement as insane as Nero or
Hitler, comparing himself to Satan incarnate, defying man and nature alike and telling himself it was better to be supreme
here
, in this hell, than to serve some other master back on Earth or out in the Belt.
Hitler, comparing himself to Satan incarnate, defying man and nature alike and telling himself it was better to be supreme
here
, in this hell, than to serve some other master back on Earth or out in the Belt.
And I was just as crazy, undoubtedly. Because in my own foolish, haphazard way I had worked just as hard to be in this place and—I shook my head with the realization of it—I was just as determined to play this game until the last, bitter moment.
That moment would end in death, I knew. Either for me or for Fuchs. For the first time in my life, I resolved that I would not be the one to die. I would not be the passive little Runt. I would not let others steer my life, not my father, not my frailties, not even my illness. I was going to survive, no matter what I had to do. I swore it to myself.
Which was easy enough to do, within my own mind. Making it work in the real world was another matter entirely.
But I was determined, for once, to make it work, to make something of myself, to be equal to the love and trust that Alex had shown me.
Suddenly the yellow message light beneath my main screen began blinking urgently. I tapped the keyboard and the display screen spelled out: INCOMING MESSAGE FROM
TRUAX.
TRUAX.
Swiveling in my chair, I called out, “Captain, we have—”
“So I see,” he said. “Put it on my main screen, but under no circumstances are you to acknowledge receiving it. Understand me?”
“Understood, sir.”
One of
Truax
’s technicians appeared on the screen; she looked puzzled, intent.
Truax
’s technicians appeared on the screen; she looked puzzled, intent.
“
Truax
to
Lucifer
. Our sensors have just detected a seismic disturbance of some kind in the Aphrodite region. It might be a volcanic eruption. Please acknowledge.”
Truax
to
Lucifer
. Our sensors have just detected a seismic disturbance of some kind in the Aphrodite region. It might be a volcanic eruption. Please acknowledge.”
Volcanic eruption? I immediately remembered Professor Greenbaum and Mickey, their theory about Venus’s surface overturning.
The technician’s face was replaced by a radar display of the western end of Aphrodite. A blinking red dot marked the site of the disturbance.
“That’s nearly a thousand kilometers from our position,” Fuchs grumbled. “No problem for us.”
I started to say, “But it might be—”
“Maintain course and speed,” Fuchs said, ignoring me and clicking off the display.
“Should I tell
Truax
we received their message, sir?” I asked.
Truax
we received their message, sir?” I asked.
“No. No contact.”
“Sir,” I tried again, “that eruption might be the beginning of a major tectonic upheaval.”
He scowled at me. “Then we’d better get to the
Phosphoros
pretty damned quick, hadn’t we?”
Phosphoros
pretty damned quick, hadn’t we?”
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