Venus (38 page)

Read Venus Online

Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Venus
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No, I saw. The margins were too thin. It would be too much of a risk.
“Approaching dayside,” the navigation technician called out, in English.
Amarjagal nodded wordlessly. Then she turned to me. “We will face the superrotation winds again,” she warned.
“Understood,” I said, imitating the clipped professional talk of the crew.
I turned my attention back to the display screen and called up alternative trajectories. Maybe … no, nothing. All the programs had us lighting up the rockets only after we had cleared the bug-laden cloud deck.
On a hunch, I checked the rocket engines’ specs. They could run for five times longer than the brief burst Fuchs had programmed. I asked the computer to show a trajectory that minimized thrust and maximized burn time. Once the numbers appeared on my screen, I asked for a correlation with our ascent trajectory.
Yes! If we lit the rockets now, as we entered the clouds, they would push us through the cloud deck in twelve minutes and still produce enough thrust to establish us in orbit. Barely.
To me, getting through those waiting bugs in twelve minutes was infinitely better than spending twelve hours in the clouds.
“Amarjagal,” I called to her, “look at this.” And I put the new trajectory on her main screen.
She frowned at the display, brows knitted, the corners of her mouth turned down. But she grasped what I was showing
her, that I could clearly see. After a few moments she turned to me and said, “It does not leave us any reserve for orbital maneuvering.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling crushed. We’d have to be able to maneuver once we got into orbit, to make rendezvous with the rocket engines that would take us back to Earth.
Amarjagal’s frown softened. “The nuclear module has maneuvering jets.”
I blinked at her. “We could get it to maneuver to us?”
She nodded. “If necessary.”
“Then let’s do it!” I said.
“This is not the trajectory your father planned,” she pointed out.
“I know,” I said. “But I’m in charge now.”
For a long moment she said nothing, merely staring at me with those expressionless dark eyes. Then she nodded and said the best two words I’d ever heard.
“Yes, sir.”
We were already in the clouds before she finished making the changes to the guidance and propulsion programs. I imagined I could hear the bugs chewing on our hull.
Amarjagal spoke into her lip mike in her own language, and the computer’s flat voice boomed through the ship: “PREPARE FOR TWO-GEE THRUST IN ONE MINUTE.”
I gripped the armrests of my chair, expecting to be flattened into it as we lit off the rockets. But it wasn’t anywhere near as dramatic as I’d envisioned. The ship shuddered, trembled under the sudden acceleration, but except for the muffled roar of power, lighting off our rockets’ engines was something of an anticlimax, really.
Until I glanced over at the screen that showed our progress. We were sailing through the clouds beautifully, that cursor rising. through the gray region like a rocket-propelled cork popping up to the surface of the sea.
I grinned at Amarjagal and she actually smiled at me.
At last the cursor showed that we had cleared the cloud deck. No alarms ringing. The trajectory plot showed we were on course for rendezvous with the rocket pack. We
had made it through the bug-infested clouds. I exhaled a huge sigh of relief.
“I’d like to see the forward view,” I said to Amarjagal.
She nodded her understanding and said a brief word to Nodon. The main screen showed the dark expanse of infinity, speckled with stars. I smiled gratefully.
“Rear view, please,” I said.
Now I could see Venus again, those swirling cloud tops brilliant with sunlight. We’re safe, I said silently to the goddess. We’ve come through the worst you can throw at us.
That’s when the superrotation wind gripped us. The ship lurched like a prizefighter who’d just taken a punch to the jaw. But I laughed aloud. Go ahead, I said to Venus, blow us a farewell kiss.
I
stayed on the bridge while Amarjagal fought us through the superrotation winds, the ship bucking and shuddering like a thing alive. I could see on the trajectory display that we were being pushed off course, but there was nothing we could do about it except hope that once we reached orbit, the nuke module waiting to propel us back to Earth would be close enough to make rendezvous with us.
The fact that we were accelerating at two gees, rather than passively floating like a dirigible, actually helped.
Lucifer
climbed past the superrotation winds in record time. The jouncing and bouncing died away, but the ship still rattled under the thrust of her rockets.
All of a sudden the engines cut off. One instant we were shaking like a racing car on a rough track with the muted rumble of the rockets in our ears. Half a blink later the noise had snapped off and everything was as smooth as polished glass.
We were in orbit. In zero gravity. My arms floated up off the arm rests and my stomach crawled up into my throat.
Amarjagal was speaking to the technicians on the bridge in their own language. It was crucial that we make rendezvous with the nuclear module; otherwise we’d be stuck in Venus’s orbit.
But there was something even more important for me to do. Unstrapping from my chair, I flung myself toward the hatch. I had to find a lavatory
now
, or throw up all over the bridge.
The nearest toilet was in Fuchs’s quarters. Even in my state of misery I hesitated a moment before barging in. But only a moment. I was really sick, and I knew he was down in the sick bay with Marguerite. I spent a miserable half hour upchucking into the plastic bowl. Every time I thought I was finished, it took only a slight movement of my head to bring on the nausea all over again.
But then I heard the intercom report, “RENDEZVOUS ESTABLISHED. BEGINNING SPIN-UP TO ONE GEE.”
I staggered over to Fuchs’s bed and almost instantly fell asleep.
 
When I awoke, everything seemed normal. All my internal organs were in their proper places and I could turn my head without making the world swim about me.
I sat up cautiously. I lifted one of the captain’s pillows and let it drop to the floor. It fell normally.
I laughed. Amarjagal must have successfully rendezvoused with the nuclear module and now we were spinning at the end of the connecting tether, creating an artificial gravity inside
Lucifer
. Artificial or not, it felt wonderful.
I got out of bed and went down to the crew’s quarters, where I showered and dressed in fresh coveralls. Feeling rested and relaxed, knowing that we would soon be getting my medical supplies from
Truax
and then heading back to Earth, I strolled down to the sick bay.
One look at Marguerite’s face erased the smile from my face.
“He’s dead,” she told me.
Fuchs lay on the narrow table, his eyes closed, his face gray and lifeless. The monitors were silent, their screens dark.
“When?” I asked. “How long ago?”
She glanced at the digital clock. “Five—six minutes. I just finished disconnecting the monitors.”
I stared down at his lifeless body. My true father. I had barely had the chance to know him and now he was gone.
“If we’d been on Earth,” Marguerite said, her voice full of self-reproach, “if we’d had some
real
medical doctors instead of me …”
“Don’t blame yourself,” I said.
“He could have been saved,” she insisted. “I know he could have been saved. Or even preserved, frozen, until they could repair the damage to his brain.”
Cryonics, she meant. Freeze the body immediately after clinical death in the hope of correcting whatever caused its death and eventually reviving the patient. It had been done on Earth. Even at Selene, on the Moon, people had used cryonics to survive their own death.
A wild idea popped into my mind. “Freeze him, then. And quickly!”
Marguerite scowled at me. “We don’t have the facilities, Van. It’s got to be done—”
“We have the biggest, coldest freezer of them all, right outside the airlocks,” I said.
Her mouth dropped open. “Put him outside?”
“Why not? What’s going to harm him out there?”
“Radiation,” she answered. “Meteoroids.”
“Put him in a spacesuit, then. That’ll give him some protection.”
“No, it would take too long. He’s got to be frozen quickly.”
“One of the escape pods, then,” I said. “Open its hatch to vacuum. It’ll cool down to cryogenic temperature in minutes.”
I could see the wheels turning inside her head. “Do you think … ?”
“We’re wasting time,” I said. “Come on.”
It was an eerie sort of funeral procession, Marguerite and I carrying Fuchs’s body down the passageway and ladders, through an airlock, and into one of the escape pods. We were as tender with him as we could be, a strange sort of treatment for a man who had spent so much of his life seething with hate, burning for revenge. But I knew the devils that drove him, I had glimpsed the fury and agony they had caused, and I felt nothing but regret for the life of frustrated rage he had led, a man of enormous strength and enormous capabilities whose life had been wasted utterly. My father. My true father.
We put him down on the narrow decking between empty seats inside the second of our three escape pods. It occurred to me that we ought to say some words of ritual, but neither Marguerite nor I knew any. Death was rare, back on Earth, and although Fuchs might be clinically dead, we hoped there would be a chance to revive him.
“I remember something,” Marguerite said as we stood looking down at him, both of us puffing from the exertion of carrying him.
“What?”
“I remember it from a video I saw, about old-time sailing ships. Something about, ‘in sure and certain hope of resurrection …’ Something like that.”
I felt suddenly irritated. “Come on,” I snapped. “Let’s get out of here and open the outer hatch so he can freeze down.”
 
So we started our two-month journey back to Earth with a dead man lying in one of the ship’s escape pods, its outer hatch open to the cryogenic cold and vacuum of space.
It was exactly a week after we broke orbit around Venus and started home that Marguerite told me about Alex’s remains.
I’d had a long meeting with the captain of the
Truax
, answering as many of his questions as I deemed proper.
Then we’d transferred my medical supplies to
Lucifer
and our two ships started Earthward on their separate trajectories.
I’d appropriated Fuchs’s quarters. I was hesitant about moving into the captain’s compartment, at first, but it seemed like the logical thing to do. If I were to keep the respect of Amarjagal and the rest of the crew, I could hardly remain in my old bunk in the crew’s quarters. I wanted them to know that I was in charge, even if I let Amarjagal run the bridge most of the time. So I moved into the captain’s cabin.
There wasn’t much ship’s business for me to attend to. The crew was happy to be alive and heading home; they were already spending the huge bonuses Fuchs had promised them, in their imaginations. In a few cases, more than imagination was involved. I allowed them to communicate with Earth, and I think some of them spent so freely over the electronic links that they’d actually be in debt by the time we landed.
I was busy talking with Mickey Cochrane and flocks of other scientists, showing them the data and video we had collected on Venus. Perhaps “talking with” is the wrong phrase. Even light waves needed more than nine minutes to travel the distance between
Lucifer
and Earth. We could not have conversations; one side talked and the other side listened. Then we reversed positions.
I was surprised that Professor Greenbaum didn’t get involved, until Mickey told me that he had died.
“Died?” I gasped with surprise. “How?” I could understand people getting killed in accidents, or dying because they didn’t get proper medical treatment in time, like Fuchs. But Greenbaum must have been in the center of a great university. What on earth could have killed him?
Mickey couldn’t hear my blurted question, of course. She simply went on, “The official cause of death was renal failure. But it was really just old age. He never took rejuvenation therapy and his internal organs simply wore out.”
How could a man allow himself to die when he didn’t have to? I simply could not understand the man’s way of thinking. Life is so precious …
“He died a happy man, though,” Mickey added, with a smile. “Your telemetry data about the volcanic eruptions convinced him that he was right, and Venus is starting an upheaval phase.”
I wondered if she thought so, too. When it came my turn to talk, I asked her. Nearly twenty minutes later her reply reached my screen.
“We’ll see,” she said, noncommittally.
It was shortly after that “conversation” with Mickey that Marguerite came to my compartment, looking very serious, very somber.
“What is it?” I asked, gesturing her to a seat in front of the desk. I’d been reading one of Fuchs’s crumbling old books, something about gold mining in the Yukon nearly two centuries ago.
“Your brother,” she said, sitting tensely on the front few centimeters of the chair.
My heart clenched in my chest. “Is there anything left of Alex? Anything at all?”
“There was a fine, powdery residue inside his spacesuit,” Marguerite said.
“Ashes.”
“Yes. Ashes.”
It all flashed before my eyes again: Alex trapped inside the escape pod, broiling alive on the merciless surface of Venus. How long did it take? Did he open his visor and let death come quickly?
As if she could read my thoughts, Marguerite said, “His suit was intact. Apparently he remained in it until the heat overcame him.”
I sagged back in the swivel chair.
“He …” Her voice faltered, then she swallowed hard and resumed, “he left a message for you.”
“A message?” Every nerve in me jangled.
Marguerite reached into her coverall pocket, took out a slim data chip, and reached across the desk to hand it to me. I saw that it had “Van” scrawled across it.
“It was in a thigh pouch of his suit. I presume it’s a message,” she said. “I haven’t run it.”
I held the chip in the palm of my outstretched hand. This is all that’s left of Alex, a voice in my mind told me.
Marguerite got to her feet. “You’ll want to look at it in private,” she said.
“Yes,” I mumbled. It was only when she reached the door that I thought to add, “Thank you.”
She nodded once, then left, gently closing the door behind her.
How long I sat there staring at the chip, I don’t know. I think I was afraid to run it, afraid to see my brother dying. I knew that he wasn’t really my brother, not genetically, but there was no other way that I could think of Alex. He’d been my big brother all my life, and now I realized that he was thinking of me in the last agonized moments of his life.
Had he known that his father was not my father? Unlikely, I thought. Martin Humphries would never tell anyone, not even his much-loved son, that he’d been cuckolded by his most hated enemy.
With enormous reluctance, I clicked the chip into the desktop computer. Strangely, I noticed that my hand was steady. My insides weren’t jumpy, either, not anymore. I felt glacially cold, almost numb, the only emotion I felt a consuming desire to learn what Alex wanted me to know in his last moments of life.
The computer screen lit up and there was Alex, his face barely discernable behind the visor of his helmet. The picture was weak, grainy. He was inside the escape pod, sitting in front of its communications console in his sealed spacesuit.
“I don’t know if this will ever get to you, little brother,” he said. “I’m afraid I’ve made a mess of this mission.”
The audio quality was poor, but it was Alex’s voice, a
voice I thought I’d never hear again. Tears sprang to my eyes. I pawed at them as he continued speaking.
“Van, there’s something in the topmost cloud deck of Venus that’s eroded
Phosphoros
’s gas envelope so badly that we’ve sunk down to the surface. I’ve tried to contact Earth, but it looks as if whatever it is that’s destroyed us knocked out the communications antennas, too.”
I caught myself nodding, as if he could see me.
“I don’t know if this chip will ever get to you. I imagine the only way it could would be for someone to come down to the surface of Venus and find the wreckage, and I doubt that anyone would be foolhardy enough to try that for a long, long time.”
Not unless they were offered a ten-billion-dollar prize, I thought.
“Van, the night before I left I told you that I wanted to help the Greens by bringing back imagery of a world where greenhouse warming has run amok. Well, that’s been a bust, too. A total fiasco.”

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