Venus (29 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Venus
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At last he shook his head, pulled himself together. “Okay, come along. I don’t have more time to waste on this.” He jabbed a thumb toward the ladder that led up into the airlock.
As we made our way back to his quarters I wondered why he had bothered showing me
Hecate
at all. Was it pride? Did he want me to admire the little ship, and the thinking that had gone into it? His thinking, of course.
Yes, I thought as we neared the bridge, he wanted to show off to somebody. To me.
And he certainly seemed to be his old, strong self again. Not a shred of uncertainty or infirmity in his appearance. He was looking forward to piloting
Hecate
down to the surface of Venus.
Then it struck me. He brought me down there not merely to show off his ship. He wanted to gloat over it, to show me how much smarter and stronger he was than I, to rub my nose in the fact that he was going to go down to the surface and claim the prize money while I sat up here in
Lucifer
like a hapless, helpless dimwit.
My hatred for him boiled up again. And to tell the truth, I enjoyed the emotion.
 
I served my watch on the bridge and then made my way back to the main pumping station. Fuchs had the ship circling above the wreckage now, some five thousand meters above the jutting peaks that surrounded whatever was left of my brother and his ship.
I had been fighting off the growing alarm signals that my body was sending to my brain. All through my watch at the pumps I felt the tingling and weakness in my legs slowly spreading to my arms. My vision went slightly blurry, no matter how hard or often I rubbed at my eyes. It took a conscious effort to lift my rib cage and breathe. I even began to feel chilled, fluttery inside.
I stuck it out for the duration of my watch, but I knew I couldn’t last much longer without help. Like a drunk trying to prove he’s still in command of his faculties I walked stiffly up the passageway, past the bridge, past Fuchs’s quarters and then Marguerite’s, heading for the sick bay.
She wasn’t there. The sick bay was empty. I felt so wiped out that I wanted to crawl up onto the table and close my eyes. But maybe I’d never open them again, I thought.
She had to be somewhere. If my brain had been functioning right I would have used the intercom system to track her down. But I wasn’t reasoning very well. She had to be somewhere, that much I knew. Perhaps in her quarters.
I forced myself back down the passageway and rapped on her door. It rattled, but there was no answer. She
ought
to be here, I said to myself, nettled. I slid the door open; it was unlocked. Her quarters were empty.
Where in the seven golden cities of Cibola could she be? I raged to myself.
Fuchs’s quarters! That’s where she is. She claims she’s not sleeping with him but she’s in his quarters, just the two of them by themselves together.
It was only three or four steps to Fuchs’s door. I didn’t bother to knock. I yanked on the door and it slid open easily.
He was on the bed, half naked. And she was bending over him.
M
arguerite must have heard me as I stepped into Fuchs’s compartment. She turned her head. The expression on her face was awful.
“He’s had a stroke,” she said.
I realized that she was fully dressed. Tears were running down her face.
“He came off the bridge and called me here,” she said, all in a rush. “The instant I came in he collapsed. I think he’s dying.”
The first thing that flashed through my mind, I’m ashamed to say, was that I needed Fuchs alive for another transfusion. The second, even worse, was that if he died I could drain all his blood and use it; that would be enough to keep me going until we got back to
Truax
. I felt like a vampire, but those were my thoughts.
Fuchs opened his eyes. “Not dying,” he growled. “Just need … medication.” His speech was slurred, as if he were drunk.
“Medication?” I asked.
Fuchs raised his left hand slightly and pointed shakily toward his lavatory. His right arm lay inertly by his side.
Marguerite got up from the bed and rushed to the lavatory.
“Kit …” Fuchs called weakly after her. “Under … the sink …”
I wasn’t feeling all that strong myself, so I dragged up a chair and plopped into it, facing Fuchs on the bed.
The right side of his face was pulled down slightly, the eye almost closed. It might have been my imagination, but that side of his face seemed gray, washed out, almost as if it had been frozen.
“You don’t … look so good,” he said, weakly.
“Neither do you.”
He made a sardonic rictus of a half smile and murmured, “Two of a kind.”
Marguerite came back with a small black plastic case. She already had it open and was reading from the printout on the display screen set into the back of its lid.
“I’m going to inject you with TPA,” she said, her eyes on the screen.
Fuchs closed both eyes. “Yeah …”
“TPA?” I asked stupidly.
Fuchs tried to answer. “Tissue plasmino …” He ran out of strength.
“Tissue plasminogen activator,” Marguerite finished for him as she slapped a preloaded cylinder into the metal syringe from the medical kit. “It will dissolve the clot that’s blocking the blood vessel.”
“How can you be sure—”
“Clot buster,” Fuchs said, his words blurred as if his tongue wasn’t working right. “Works … every time.”
I saw in the open medical kit that Marguerite had dropped on the bed beside him that several loops where cylinders had once been stored were now empty.
“How many times has this happened to you?” I blurted.
He glowered at me.
“He’s had several mini-strokes,” Marguerite said as she pressed the microneedle head of the syringe against Fuchs’s bare biceps. Its hiss was barely audible. “This one’s the worst yet, though.”
“But what’s causing it?” I asked.
“Acute hypertension,” Marguerite said. Fuchs turned his glower on her.
I was stunned. “What? High blood pressure? Is that all?”
“All?” Marguerite snapped, her eyes suddenly blazing. “It’s causing these strokes! It’s killing him!”
“But blood pressure can be controlled with medication,” I said. “Nobody dies of high blood pressure.”
Fuchs laughed bitterly. “Very reassuring …
Doctor
Humphries. Feel better … already.”
“But …” I was confused. Hypertension was something you treated with pills, I knew. That was the pills he’d been chewing! If he had the medication he needed, though, why was he having strokes?
“The medication controls the blood pressure only up to a point,” Marguerite said, a little more calmly. “But it doesn’t do anything about the root causes.”
“Does that mean I’m going to come down with it, too?” I asked. After all, I was getting his blood; did his disease come along with it?
Fuchs’s expression turned to contempt, or perhaps it was disgust. He started to shake his head.
“Not from the transfusions,” Marguerite said. “It’s not carried by the blood.”
“But doesn’t his medication help?” I asked.
“It helps, but not enough not counteract the stress he’s under.”
“Stress?”
“Do you think captaining this ship isn’t stressful?” she demanded. “Do you think dealing with this crew has been easy?”
“Not the stress,” Fuchs mumbled. “The rage. How do
you stop … the rage? Inside me … every minute … every day …”
“Rage,” I echoed.
“Medication … can’t control it,” he said weakly. “The fury inside … the hate … even my dreams … nothing can control it. Nothing.”
The rage. That boiling anger within him was what drove Fuchs. His hatred of my father. His blazing frustrated fury seethed within him like those red-hot rocks of hell below us, burning, boiling, waiting to burst loose in a torrent of all-consuming vengeance.
Every minute, he’d said. Every hour of every day. All those years with that hot relentless rage burning inside him, eating away at him, twisting his life, his being, his every moment waking or sleeping, into a brutally merciless torment of hate and implacable fury.
It was killing him, driving his hypertension relentlessly, pushing his blood pressure to the point where the microscopic capillaries in his brain were bursting. He always seemed in complete control of everything and everyone around him. But he couldn’t control himself. He could keep the rage hidden, bottled up within him, but now I saw what a merciless toll it was taking on him.
“It’s a vicious circle,” Marguerite went on, as she pulled out one cylinder from the syringe and pressed in another. “The medication loses effectiveness so he increases the dosage. But the cause of his hypertension is still there! The stresses are getting worse, and so are the strokes.”
He was suffering strokes. This tough, hard-handed captain was suffering from blockages in the blood supply to his brain. I stared at him with newfound awe. A normal person would be hospitalized for at least a few days, even with the mildest kind of stroke. I wondered what it felt like, how I would react.
I didn’t want to find out.
“What are you doing now?” I asked.
She nodded toward the little display screen as she prepared
the syringe. “VEGF to stimulate blood vessel growth and then an injection of neuronal stem cells to rebuild the damaged nerve tissue.”
I had asked enough dumb questions, I thought. Later on I checked and found that vascular endothelial growth factor made the body build bypass blood vessels to reroute the circulation around the vessel damaged by the clot. Stem cells, of course, had the potential to build any kind of cells the body required: brain neurons, in this case, to replace those damaged by the stroke.
“If we had proper medical facilities we could treat him and get his pressure down to normal,” Marguerite was muttering as she pressed the microneedle syringe home. “But here aboard ship—”
“Stop talking about me in the third person,” Fuchs grumbled.
We sat and watched him for long, silent minutes. Vaguely I recalled reading that hypertension makes the blood vessels thicken and stiffen, which raises the blood pressure even more, and so on and so on. It can lead to strokes, I remembered, and even heart failure, all kinds of ailments. Fortunately, if you catch a minor stroke quickly enough, you can prevent most of the long-term damage to the brain. Or so I seemed to remember.
At last Fuchs struggled up to a sitting position. Marguerite tried to make him lie back down, but he pushed her hands away.
“It’s all right,” he said, his speech stronger, surer. His face was back to its usual color. “The clot buster worked. See?” He lifted his right arm and wiggled his fingers. “Almost back to normal.”
“You need rest,” Marguerite said.
Ignoring her, Fuchs pointed a thick finger at me. “The crew isn’t to know about this. Not a hint of it! Understand me?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Are you going to tell him the rest?” Marguerite asked.
His eyes went wide. I had never seen Fuchs look startled before, not even when he was flat on his back from the stroke, but he did at that instant.
“The rest of what?” I asked.
“You’re going to make the flight down to the surface,” Fuchs said.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. You’re relieved of your duties on the bridge. Spend the time in the simulator, learning how to pilot
Hecate
.”
My jaw must have dropped open.
“You’re a qualified pilot,” he said. “I read that in your résumé.”
“I can fly a plane, yes,” I said, then added, “on Earth.” It never occurred to me to ask when and how he saw my résumé.
“Don’t think you can claim the prize money because you actually go to the surface,” Fuchs added. “I’m still the captain of this ship, and that prize is mine. Understand me? Mine!”
“I don’t care about the prize money,” I said. My voice sounded hollow, far away.
“Oh no?”
I shook my head. “I want to find my brother.”
Fuchs looked away, glanced up at Marguerite, then back at me.
“Very noble,” he mumbled.
But Marguerite said, “That’s not what I meant.”
He said nothing. I sat there like a sack of wet laundry, feeling physically exhausted, emotionally coiled tight, my mind jumping and jittering. How can I pilot Hecate with only a few hours of simulator time as training? No matter, I’ll do it. I’ll get down to what’s left of
Phosphoros
and Alex. I’ll do it. I will.
“You need another transfusion, don’t you?” Fuchs asked gruffly.
“You can’t!” Marguerite cried.
“Don’t you?” Fuchs repeated sternly to me.
“Yes,” I answered, “but in your condition …”
He made a dismissive gesture with one hand. “In my condition another transfusion will be helpful. It’ll lower my blood pressure, won’t it, Maggie?”
Her eyes flashed sudden anger, but then she half-smiled and nodded. “Temporarily,” she said.
“You see?” Fuchs said, with mock geniality. “It’s a win-win situation. We both gain something.”
“That still isn’t what I meant,” Marguerite said to him, so softly I barely heard her.
Fuchs said nothing.
“It would be better if he heard it from you,” she said.
He shook his head.
“If you don’t tell him, I will.”
“He won’t believe you,” he said sourly. “He won’t believe me, either, so forget about it.”
I spoke up. “I don’t like being talked about in the third person any more than you do, you know.”
“He’s your father,” Marguerite said.
I blinked. I couldn’t have heard her correctly. She couldn’t have said what I thought she had. My ears must be playing tricks on me.
But the look on her face was utterly somber, completely serious. I turned my eyes to Fuchs. His features seemed frozen in ice, hard and cold and immobile.
“It’s the truth,” Marguerite said. “He’s your father, not Martin Humphries.”
I wanted to laugh at her.
“I was born six years after my mother left him and married my father,” I said. “If you’re implying that she had an affair while she was married to my father …” I couldn’t finish the sentence, the very thought of it made me so furious.
“No,” Fuchs said heavily. “Your mother wasn’t that kind of woman.”
“That’s right,” I snapped.
He glanced at Marguerite, then said to me, “We were really in love, you know.” His voice was gentler than I had
ever heard it before. Or perhaps he was simply exhausted from the ordeal he’d just gone through.
“Then why did she leave you?” I demanded, even though Nodon had told me why.
“To save my life,” he said, without an instant’s hesitation. “She agreed to marry your father as the price for his letting me live.”
“That’s … unbelievable,” I said.
“You don’t believe that your father’s had people killed? You never heard of the Asteroid War, the battles the corporations fought to drive out the independent prospectors?”
“In school …”
“Yes, I’m sure they told you all about it in your fancy schools. They taught you the official, sanitized version, nice and clean, no blood, no atrocities.”
“You’re getting off the subject,” Marguerite said.
“If my mother hadn’t seen you for six years before I was born, how can you claim to be my father?” I challenged him.
He let out a deep, painful sigh. “Because when we were living together we had some of her ova fertilized with my sperm and then frozen.”

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