Venus (33 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Venus
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“Full power!” I heard Fuchs yelling, whether to me or his own crew I couldn’t tell. “Maintain trim!”
Then with a smashing impact that nearly tore my insides apart
Hecate
hit something and tilted dangerously up on one skid.
And everything went black.
I
must have been unconscious for only a few moments. My head had slammed against the inside of my helmet when
Hecate
banged against whatever it was that stopped our skidding across the landscape.
That low-pitched thundering was still shaking the ship, but except for a throbbing pain in my head there seemed to be no major damage. The panel was lit, no indications of hull puncture. I almost laughed to myself; if the hull had been punctured I wouldn’t be alive to read the panel, not with my gloves off.
“ … the volcanic eruption,” Marguerite was saying in my earphones, her voice tight with fear. “It’s blown us away from your position.”
“I got pushed around, too,” I said, surprised at how calm my voice sounded.
“Are you all right?”
“I think son …” I was scanning the control panel. No red lights, although several were in the amber. I raised my head
to look through the forward port.
Phosphoros
’s wreckage was several hundred meters away now.
“What the hell happened?” I snarled.
“That volcano eruption,” she explained. “The glow we saw off on the horizon.”
“You mean it’s pouring out lava?”
Marguerite’s voice was a little softer now, less tense, but only a little. “It’s too far away to threaten you, Van. That’s no worry.”
No worry for them, I thought, up in the air.
“But the explosion sent a pressure wave through the atmosphere,” she went on, “like an underwater tidal wave. It blew
Lucifer
almost upside down and pushed us at least a dozen kilometers away from you. The captain’s struggling to get the ship trimmed again and back into position above you.”
“I’ve been pushed along the ground like a dead leaf in a gale-force wind,” I said.
Fuchs’s voice came on. “We’re heading back toward you, but it’s taking all the power the engines can give to push against this pressure wave. Get set to lift as soon as I give the command.”
“I have to get the escape pod.”
“If you can,” he said. “When I give the order to lift you pull out of there, whether you have the pod or not.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. But to myself I added, As soon as I have the pod in my grip.
Marguerite’s voice returned. “He’s got his hands full piloting the ship. It’s like riding against a hurricane up here.”
I nodded, checking over the control panel again. Everything seemed all right. But was it?
“This is the first time any human has eye-witnessed a volcanic eruption on Venus,” Marguerite said. She sounded pleased.
I remembered Greenbaum and felt a tremor of near-hysteria quivering inside me. Are these eruptions the
beginning of the cataclysm that Greenbaum had predicted? Was the ground beneath me going to open up and swallow me in boiling magma?
Get away! a voice in my aching head screamed. Get the fuck out-of here and back to safety!
“Not without the pod,” I muttered grimly.
“What?” Marguerite asked instantly. “What did you say?”
“Nothing,” I snapped. “I’m going to be too busy to talk with you for a while.”
“Yes. I understand. I’ll monitor your frequency, in case you need anything.”
Like what? I asked silently. Prayers? Last rites?
I nudged the thruster pedal, to lift off the ground enough so I could make my way back to the wreckage. Nothing happened. I pushed against the bar harder. The ship still wouldn’t move. I could hear the thrusters whining, but no motion.
Taking a deep breath, I considered what choices I had. I punched the ballast release, and felt a clunk rattle through the ship as a block of the heat-absorbing alloy was ejected from its bay. That lightened the ship, but it cut down on the time I could stay on the surface without burning to a crisp.
I tried the thrusters again. The ship quivered but did not rise off the ground. Is something holding me down? I wondered.
Something slithered over the ship’s hull. I could hear it, sliding, scratching across the metal skin above me. The sound made me shudder with fright.
This was no time for half measures. Either I got away from here or I fried, and pretty soon, too. So I tromped on the thruster pedal with both boots, really kicked it hard. The thrusters suddenly howled and
Hecate
lurched up off the ground and wobbled into the air a good hundred meters.
I fought madly to get control of her. For a moment I thought she would flip over onto her back and nosedive into the ground. But
Hecate
came through. My fingers played across her control pads madly and she responded, straightened
out, and pointed her nose toward the wreckage once again.
When we settled down on the rocks I saw that
Hecate
tilted badly over on her left, as if the landing skid on that side had been crushed or ripped away. No matter, I thought, as long as the hull is still intact.
I had put her down alongside Alex’s escape pod. Now I had to slide my blistered fingers back into those damnable waldoes and get the manipulators working again.
I did it, although the pain forced tears from my eyes. I made the metal pincers firmly grip the handholds on the escape pod’s surface, locked them on, and then gratefully withdrew my fingers from the waldoes. For a few moments I simply lay there, awash in perspiration, my fingers sizzling with pain. I pictured myself swimming in the Arctic ocean, playing among ice floes. My hands still hurt.
I should have pulled my gloves back on, that would have been the smart thing to do. The cautious, safety-minded thing to do. But my scorched hands burned too much even to consider it.
“I’ve got the pod,” I reported, “and I’m ready to lift.”
For a heart-stopping moment there was no reply. Then Marguerite’s voice came through. “The captain estimates we’ll be in place above you in ten minutes.”
I let out an inadvertent whistle. They must have been blown a long way off position.
“I’m lifting now,” I said. “I’ll hover at two kilometers’ altitude until you give the order for rendezvous.”
A much longer delay before she answered. I had no desire to stay down on the surface a nanosecond longer than I had to.
Fuchs’s voice came on. “Okay, but keep below two klicks. The
last
thing we want is a midair collision.”
“Agreed,” I said. But I thought, No, the last thing I want is to be stuck down here in this oven.
Trying to use my fingernails on the control pads, to avoid touching them with my seared skin, I began to set up the ship’s controls for liftoff.
Then my eye caught something strange. As if anything in this landscape of hell wasn’t strange.
But some of those lines that had crisscrossed the wreckage had moved again. I was certain of it. In fact, as I stared, goggle-eyed, one of them rose up off the wreckage and wavered in the air like an impossibly thin arm beckoning for help.
And then another. And another.
“They’re alive!” I screeched.
“What?”
“Look!” I babbled. “Look at them! Arms, tentacles, feelers—whatever they are, they’re alive!”
Marguerite said, “We’re barely close enough to see you and the wreck. What are you talking about?”
“Look at the camera imagery, dammit!”
“It’s grainy … the picture’s breaking up too much …”
I tried to calm down and describe what I was seeing. The arms—if that’s what they were—were all up and waving slowly back and forth in the sluggish current of thick, hot air.
“There can’t be anything alive down there,” Marguerite insisted. “The heat—”
“Put your telescope on them!” I yelled. “All your sensors! They’re alive, dammit! Probably the main body lives deep underground, but it sends feelers, antennas,
something
up to the surface.”
“It’s hotter underground than it is on the surface,” Fuchs growled.
“I see them!” Marguerite’s voice jumped an octave higher. “I can see them!”
“What are they doing?” I wondered aloud. “Why are they waving around like that?”
“They weren’t doing that before the tidal wave passed through?” Marguerite asked.
“No, they were lying on the ground. Most of ’em were draped over the wreckage.”
“And now they’ve raised themselves …” Her voice trailed off.
I had forgotten about raising the ship, staring out the port and watching something that should have been impossible. Was there some other explanation? Could they be something that isn’t living?
“Feeding tubes,” Marguerite said at last. “Perhaps they’re taking in nutrients carried in the air from the volcanic eruption.”
“But why here? Why haven’t we seen them anywhere else on the planet?” I asked.
“We haven’t looked this closely at any other area on the surface,” she replied.
I recalled, “They were draped across the wreckage.”
“The bugs up in the clouds ate metal ions,” said Marguerite.
“Like vitamins. You said they needed the metal ions the way we need vitamins.”
“And maybe this underground organism also needs metallic ions,” she said.
“It sensed the wreckage!” We were jumping to conclusions, I knew in the back of my mind. But they seemed to fit what we were seeing.
“Is the pod marked in any way?” she asked, her voice rising again with excitement. “Any scars where the feeding tubes might have been eating on the metal?”
Before I could look, Fuchs’s voice came through, dry and cold. “You have exactly seven minutes’ worth of alloy left. Play at being a biologist once you’re back up here, Humphries.”
That was like a douse of cold water. “Right,” I said. “I’m starting liftoff procedure
now.”
After all, I had the pod in my grip and Marguerite must have every sensor aboard
Lucifer
focused on those feeding arms, or whatever they were. Time to get back to safety.
I quickly scanned the control panel one more time, then pushed on the thruster pedal. The engines whined to life, the ship shuddered—but didn’t budge one centimeter off the ground.
“I
’m stuck!” Inside the helmet, my voice sounded like a terrified shriek.
“What do you mean, stuck?” Fuchs demanded.
“Stuck!” I hollered. “The goddamned ship isn’t moving!”
“Wait … the telemetry shows everything functioning okay,” he said. “Thrusters on full.”
“But I’m not moving!”
Silence from
Lucifer.
I pressed both boots against that damnable thruster bar. I really kicked it hard, again and again. The thrusters growled and
Hecate
shuddered, but I didn’t budge off the ground. How many minutes were left for the heat rejection system? When the alloy ran out the heat inside the cockpit would build up and cook me within minutes.
“All your telemetry checks out,” Fuchs said, an edge in his voice.
“Fine,” I retorted. “Then why doesn’t the ship move?”
“We’re trying to get the telescopes on you. It’s not easy,
that damned tidal wave is still making the air turbulent up at this level.”
For a mad instant I thought I might crawl out of
Hecate
and get into the escape pod that was still lodged in the manipulator arms and use its escape rockets to blast off into orbit.
Great plan, I said to myself.
If
your suit would keep you alive outside the ship, which it can’t, and
if
you could get into the pod before you roast to death, which you couldn’t, and
if
the pod’s escape rockets would work, which they probably wouldn’t.
“Well?” I shouted. “What are you doing up there?”
Marguerite replied, “We have you on-screen now.” Her voice was shaky; she sounded as if she were on the verge of tears.
“And?” I demanded.
Fuchs said, “Four of those feeding arms are wrapped around
Hecate.
They must be holding you down.”
I don’t know what I said. It must have been atrocious because Fuchs snapped, “Calm down! Hysteria won’t help.”
“Calm down?” I screeched. “I’m trapped here! They’re
feeding
on the ship!”
“You’ve tried full power?” Fuchs asked.
“What do you think I’m doing down here?” I raged. “Of course I’ve applied full power!”
“They’re holding you down!” Marguerite stated the obvious.
“What do I do?” I demanded. “What do I do?”
“They’re strong enough to hold the ship down even when the thrusters are firing at full power,” Fuchs said, also stating the obvious. Or perhaps he was thinking out loud.
“They must all be connected underground,” Marguerite said. “It must all be one gigantic organism.”
Wonderful. I’m about to be killed and she’s spinning biological theories.
I heard that slithering noise again. It was the feeding tubes, the arms that were holding me down. They were eating
the ship’s hull! They were going to break into the cockpit and eat me! I wanted to scream. I should have screamed. But my throat was frozen with terror. Nothing but a thin squeak came out of my mouth.
“We can’t get down to him,” Fuchs was saying. “We don’t have the time to attach a tow line and pull him loose.”
“We don’t know if we could pull him loose even if we could attach a line,” Marguerite said.
They were talking about me in the third person. As if I weren’t able to hear them. As if I were already dead. They thought they were running through possible ways of saving me, but to me it sounded as if they were making excuses for letting me die alone down on the rocks.
My mind was churning, working harder than I had ever worked before. Awash with sweat, lying prone in
Hecate
’s cramped cockpit, trapped and alone on the surface of hell, I realized that only one person in the universe could help me, and that was me myself.
How did those feeder arms find me so fast? They were draped over the old wreckage, including the escape pod. But they wrapped themselves around me within minutes.
“Marguerite!” I yelled into my helmet microphone. “The arms that were on
Phosphoros
’s wreckage? Are they still there? Are they still waving in the air?”
A moment’s hesitation, then she answered, “No. They’ve extended from the wreckage to your ship.”
“How many of them are on me?”
“Four … no, there’s five of them now.”
Great. I’m attracting them like flies to garbage. They left the old wreckage for the new meat. But why? Why leave the food they’ve been grazing on for more than three years now?
Think! I screamed silently at myself. The only advantage you might possibly have over this Venusian monster is your brain. Use it!
Why leave the wreckage for me? What sensory organs did they have that told them fresh meat had arrived?
They sensed the metal ions that surged through the air on the volcano’s tidal wave, I remembered. They can sense metal ions even at very low concentrations, they way a human being can sense the nutrients he needs in food: it tastes good.
“Marguerite!” I called again. “Are the arms laid out straight across the ground? Straight from the old wreckage to
Hecate
?”
“No,” she said. “They curl and twist … it looks as if they followed the trail of the alloy you pumped out. Yes! They run along the splashes of alloy on the ground and follow it to your ship.”
That’s what interested them: the alloy I’d been excreting.
“I’ve got to eject the ballast,” I shouted with the realization of it. “All of it! Now!”
“You can’t eject all the ballast,” Fuchs said testily. “It’s your heat sink.”
I yelled, “It’s their picnic food! It’s what’s attracting them to me!”
“But your cooling system will overload!” Marguerite cried.
“I’ve only got a couple of minutes before they break the hull apart! I’ve got nothing to lose!”
Fuchs’s voice, tight with tension, said, “Lower left screen on your main panel. Touch the ballast icon.”
“I know. I know.”
I jabbed at the panel, suppressing a yelp of pain. Even the panel was so hot it burned to touch it. A short menu appeared. Thank god the electronics still worked, despite the heat. But how long would they work once I had tossed the heat sink alloy overboard?
No matter. I was going to fry down here anyway unless I could move those feeder arms off the ship.
My fingertips were scorched, so I used a knuckle to touch the ballast-eject command. I heard the ejector springs bang, rattling the ship.
“Tell me what they’re doing,” I said, fighting to keep my voice level.
Fuchs said heavily, “The ingots fell just a meter or so from the tail of your ship.”
“Are the arms moving?”
“No.”
A new fear cut through me. How much damage had the arms already done to the ship’s hull? They’d been eating on the metal for only a few minutes, I knew, but was that long enough to weaken the hull’s integrity? If I actually could shake loose of them, would
Hecate
fall apart when I applied the thrusters again?
“Any motion?” I asked.
The temperature in the cockpit was soaring. My suit gave me some measure of protection, but still I felt as if I were being roasted alive. The control panel seemed to waver before my eyes. The plastic was starting to melt.
“Anything?”
Marguerite said, “One of them is moving … I think.”
I could hear the pumps in my suit gurgling madly, trying to carry away the heat that was swiftly building up. But there was no place to carry the heat. It was everywhere, all encompassing, smothering me, boiling me in my own juices.
“Definitely moving!” Marguerite said breathlessly.
“How many … ?”
“Two of them. Now a third—my god! They move so fast!”
“Fire the thrusters,” Fuchs commanded.
Everything was swimming, melting. I felt dizzy.
“Fire the thrusters!” he roared. “
Now!
”
I wedged my burned hands against the melting plastic of the control panel and pressed both boots against the thruster bar as hard as I could. The thrusters growled, rumbled. The ship shook.
I realized it wouldn’t be enough. I was still pinned down, helpless, unable to move.
Then she broke loose!
Hecate
lurched forward, shuddered, then shot up from the ground so hard I was pushed back painfully inside my suit.
Fuchs was yelling commands in my earphones. I saw the ground whipping past and then receding. It should feel cooler, I thought stupidly. It ought to feel cooler.
But it didn’t. It was still so hot I was suffocating, boiling inside the protective suit. I wanted to rip it off and be free of it. I think I might actually have started to unfasten the helmet.
Then the ground beneath me opened up. A gigantic crack pulled the solid rock apart with a grinding, terrifying roar that sounded like the howling of all the demons of hell baying at me. Frozen into immobility, stupefied, I stared down into the blinding glare of white-hot magma that blasted a wave of heat up through the thick turgid atmosphere.
Hecate
shot up like a dandelion puff caught in the searing blast of a rocket’s fiery exhaust. Bouncing and shuddering in the blazing breath from the planet’s deep interior, I stared down petrified into the mouth of hell.
What was left of poor old
Phosphoros
tumbled into the widening pit. I saw it melting as it fell deeper into the infernal heat. But the thought that welled up in my mind was, That tentacled monster must be tumbling down into hell, too. Good! Die, you bastard. Go to hell, where you belong.

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