The Best of Bova: Volume III, page 36
part #3 of Best of Bova Series
But then I decided I’d do the stunt, after all. I wanted to be noticed; I wanted to break the lock the two of them had on each other, and the only way I knew to do that was to go through with the toughest, most daring and dangerous stunt that’d ever been tried. Admiration, that’s what I was after. I wanted to make their eyes shine—for me.
The High Jump: from Venus orbit all the way to the ground. And back, of course. None of the publicity flaks even mentioned the return trip, but I thought about that part of it a lot.
Okay, so we’re in orbit around Venus—Hal, Angel, me, our crew of technicians and our tech directors, plus the ship’s crew. We had decided to keep the ship’s crew in the dark about me doubling for Hal. As far as they were concerned I was just another techie. The fewer people outside the industry who knew about my doubling for him, the better.
So Hal’s doing the mandatory media interview, all dolled up in a space suit, no less, with the helmet tucked under one arm. Standing there by the airlock hatch, he looks like a freaking Adonis, so help me, a Galahad, literally a knight in shining armor. And Angel’s right there beside him, hanging on his arm, gazing up into his sparkling green eyes as if she’s about to have an orgasm just looking at him.
The media people were all back on Earth, of course. We didn’t want them on the ship with us, too much of a chance of them finding out about Hal’s little secret. Since it took messages more than eight minutes to travel from them to us (and vice-versa) they had prerecorded their questions and squirted them to us a couple of hours earlier.
Now Homeric Hal stood there like a young Lancelot and spoke foursquare into the camera, replying to each of their questions after only an hour or so to study the lines his publicity flaks had written for him.
“Yes,” he said, with his patented careless grin, “I suppose we could use computer graphics for these stunts instead of doing them live. But I don’t think the public would be so interested in a computer simulation. My fans want to see the real thing! It’s the unexpected, the element of danger and risk, that excites the viewers.”
The next questioner asked why Hal was so eager to risk his beautiful butt on these stunts.
He did his bashful routine, shrugging and scratching his head. “I don’t really know. I guess I got hooked on the excitement of it all, and . . . and . . .”
He hesitated, as the script required. I thought sourly that what he’s really hooked on is the money. Mucho bucks in this game. He let me take over the dangerous part of it easily enough.
“. . .and . . . well I guess it’s the thrill of taking enormous risks and coming out alive. It makes your heart beat faster, that’s for sure. Gets the old adrenaline pumping!”
His adrenaline was pumping, all right. But it wasn’t about the risks of the Venus jump. It was Angel, draped over him and drinking in every syllable he uttered.
The media interview ended at last. Hal’s smile winked off. “Okay,” he said, starting to peel off his suit. “Let’s get to work.”
To his credit, Hal gave me a farewell hug just before I stepped into the airlock. It was an awkward hug, with me in the bulky thermally insulated space suit that we’d had specially built for this stunt.
“Take care of yourself, pal,” he said, his voice gone husky.
“Don’t I always?” I said back to him.
I stepped into the airlock and turned around to face him again. And there was Angel, right beside him. I blew a kiss as the hatch closed and sealed me in—not an easy thing to do from inside my heat-proofed helmet.
There were two technicians already outside, in space suits of course, to help click me into the aeroshell. It wasn’t a spacecraft, just a heat shield that carried the bare minimum of equipment I’d need to make it down to the surface. I mean, that Humphries kid had reached Venus’s surface a couple of years earlier, but he’d never walked on the planet’s rocky ground, as I was going to do. He’d been inside a specially designed submersible; it touched down on the surface, not him on his own two feet. And he was supported by an even bigger ship that cruised a few kilometers above him, at that.
Plus, he’d landed in the highland mountains of Aphrodite. It’s only four hundred degrees Celsius up there. Big deal. I was going down to the lowlands, where it’s four-fifty, minimum, and doing it without a ship. Just me in a thermal suit and a handful of equipment.
Plus the heat shield, yeah, but that was just to get me through the entry phase. I mean, we were orbiting Venus at just about seven kilometers per second. You can’t dip into the atmosphere in nothing but your high-tech long johns at that speed—not unless you want to make yourself into a shooting star.
I had no intention of becoming a cinder. The heat shield was flimsy enough, nothing more than a shallow bathtub coated on one side with a heat-absorbing plastic that boils off when it reaches fifteen hundred degrees. The boiled-off goop carries the heat away with it, leaving me safe on the other side of the shield. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Believe me, the heat shield looked damned flimsy as I climbed into it. The techs checked out all my suit’s systems and the connections, then clamped me into the shield’s shallow protection. None of us said much while they got me properly clicked in.
Finally, they each patted my thick helmet and wished me luck. I thanked them, and they clambered through the airlock and shut the hatch. I was alone now, with nothing to keep me company but the automated voice of the computer ticking off the last three minutes of the countdown.
Three minutes can be a long time, when you’re alone hanging outside an orbiting spacecraft, a hundred million kilometers from blue skies and sunny beaches. I was locked into the heat shield, arms and legs stretched out like a guy in a B&D video, with nothing to do but worry about what was coming next.
To keep my nerves from twitching, I looked out through one corner of my faceplate at what little I could see of Venus.
She was gorgeous! The massive, curving bulk of the planet gleamed like a gigantic golden lamp, a brilliant saffron-yellow expanse against the cold blackness of space. She glowed like a thing alive. Goddess of beauty, sure enough. At first I thought the cloud deck was as solid and unvarying as a sphere of solid gold. Then I saw that I could make out streamers among the clouds, slightly darker stretches, patches where the amber yellowish clouds billowed up slightly. I stared fascinated at those fantastically incredible clouds. They shifted and changed as I watched. It was almost like staring into a fire, endlessly fascinating, hypnotic.
A human voice broke into my enchantment. “You okay out there?”
“Sure,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”
“Separation in thirty seconds.” It was the voice of our tech controller in my helmet earphones. “Speak now or forever hold your jockstrap.”
“Let ’er rip,” I said, in time-honored, devil-may-care fashion. Just in case some wiseass was eavesdropping with a recorder.
“Five . . . four . . .” Well, you know the rest. I felt a quiver and then a not-too-gentle push against the small of my back: the latches releasing and then the spring-loaded actuator that pushed my aeroshell away from the orbiting spacecraft.
And there I was, as the flyguys say, watching our orbiter dwindle away from me. Before I had time to grit my teeth the retrorockets kicked in, and I mean kicked. I couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum of space, naturally, but I sure felt it. The whole goddamned aeroshell rattled like a studio set in an earthquake. I heard a kind of a roar inside my head; not sound, really, so much as my bones picking up the vibrations as the rockets tried to shake me to death.
I hung on—nothing else I could do—for the forty-five seconds of retro burn, knowing the cameras from the ship were getting every picosecond of it in glorious full color. Every bone in my body was quivering like a struck gong. I wondered if I’d get out of this with any teeth unchipped.
Then suddenly it all stopped. I was either dead or the rockets had burned out.
“Retro burn complete,” said the controller calmly. “You are go for entry into Venus’s atmosphere.”
Stretched out inside this shallow soap dish of an aeroshell, I nodded inside my helmet. Now comes the fun part, I said to myself.
The first thing I noticed was streaks of bright light flicking past me. Hitting the top of the atmosphere at seven klicks per second heated up the gases to incandescence. Pretty soon I was surrounded with white-hot plasma boiling off the heat shield and billowing out past me. I lay there on my back, helpless as a newborn rat, with white-hot gas streaming past the edges of my shell. I could hear noise now, a high-pitched whining sound that deepened into the kind of roar you hear when you open a blast furnace.
And the shell was shaking again, worse than before. If I hadn’t been latched down, and if my protective suit hadn’t been well padded, I’d have been pummeled to jelly. Mouth protector, I thought as I tasted blood. I should’ve brought a mouth protector. I tried to keep my mouth open so I wouldn’t chew off my tongue or bite a hole through my cheek and cursed myself for the oversight.
The controller tried to tell me something, but the plasma sheath around the rapidly descending aeroshell broke up his radio message into garbled little hashes of static. I tried to focus my eyes on the data screen inside my helmet, next to the faceplate, but everything was jouncing around so bad I couldn’t see anything but a multicolored blur.
Must be close to breakup, I thought.
And bang! The aeroshell clamps unlatched and the shell itself snapped into a dozen separate pieces, just the way it was designed to. Gave me a jolt, let me tell you.
So now I was in free-fall, dropping like a stone toward the top layer of clouds. The shaking eased off enough so I could read the altimeter inside my helmet. I passed eighty kilometers like a doomed soul falling into hell.
My biggest worry was the superrotation winds. They could blow me halfway around the planet and I’d miss my landing spot. That’s where the return rocket vehicle was sitting on the surface, waiting for me in that baking heat and corrosive sulfur-laced atmosphere.
Venus turns very slowly, its “day” is 243 Earth days long—that’s how long it takes the planet to make one complete turn around its axis. So the Sun blazes down on the subsolar point, the spot where the Sun is directly overhead, like a freaking blowtorch. The upper atmosphere, blast-heated like that, develops winds of four hundred kilometers per hour and more that rush around the entire planet in a few days. In a way, they’re like the jet streams on Earth, only bigger and more powerful.
If I got caught in one of those superpowerful jet streams I’d be blown so far away from my landing point that I’d never make it back to the return vehicle. Then I’d have a choice of whether I wanted to be baked to death or suffocate.
So the plan was to cannonball through the superrotation’s jet streams as fast as possible, get down into the lower altitudes where the air pressure thickens into soup and the winds are smothered into sluggish little nothings.
That was the plan.
I was dropping like a brick, headfirst, the wind screeching past me and the billowing sickly yellow-gray clouds rushing up.
“How’m I doing?” I yelled into my helmet mike.
“Drifting off course,” came the director’s voice, calm as a guy ordering a margarita back in L.A.
I looked to the left of my faceplate, at the miniscreen that showed my position. I was a red dot, the return vehicle was a green dot. There were concentric circles around the green dot. If I was within two circles of the center I’d be okay. That red dot was already close to the edge of the second circle.
“Better do some maneuvering,” the director suggested, flat as Kansas.
“Too soon,” I said. The maneuvering jets on the back of my suit only carried so much fuel. Use ’em up now and I’d be helpless later.
But that red dot that was me was drifting past the second circle. I was in trouble.
“Maneuver!” the director snapped. I had to smile; at least I got his blood pressure up a little.
“No sense shovelling shit against the tide,” I said. “I’ll wait until I’m under the jet stream.”
“You’ll be too far!” He was getting really clanked up now.
My eyes flicked back and forth. The miniscreen on my right showed I was passing seventy klicks, almost into the top cloud deck. The super-rotation winds should be dying down. But the radar plot on the left of my faceplate showed my red dot almost off the chart completely.
“Check pressure,” I called out. The altimeter readout was replaced by a rapidly changing set of numbers. According to the probe sampling the air I was falling through, the pressure was rising steeply.
I nodded inside the helmet. Yes, the radar plot showed I wasn’t drifting any farther from the landing spot.
“Cranking up the jets,” I said, wriggling my right arm out of the suit’s sleeve to press the actuator stud on the control board built inside the suit’s chest cavity. We had decided to keep all the controls inside the suit, safe from the corrosive oven-hot atmosphere outside.
“About time,” groused the director.
“No sweat,” I told the him. Which, I realized, wasn’t exactly true. I was perspiring enough to notice it. I wiped my brow before sliding my arm back into its sleeve.
The jets came on, gently at first and then accelerating slowly. I twisted my body around and spread my arms out. That unfolded the airfoils that ordinarily wrapped around my sleeves. Like a jet-propelled bat, I dove into the sulfuric-acid clouds, watching the radar plot as my little green dot started edging closer to the red dot.
My suit’s exterior was all ceramicized plastic, for three reasons. One, the material was a good heat insulator, and I was going to need all the protection from Venus’s fiery hell that I could get. Two, the stuff was impervious to sulfuric acid—of which the cloud droplets had plenty. Three, it would not be attacked by the bugs that lived in those sulfuric-acid clouds.
The aerobacteria had destroyed the first two ships that had entered Venus’s clouds. They feast on metals, gobble ’em up the way a macrovitamin faddist gulps pills. The exobiologists had assured us that those bugs would not even nibble at the plastic exterior of my suit.
There was plenty of metal in the suit, a whole candy store’s worth, as far as the bugs were concerned. But it was all covered by thick layers of plastic. I hoped.
Once in the clouds my vision was reduced to zero. From the outside mikes I could hear wind whistling past, but the altimeter showed that my rate of fall was slowing. The atmosphere was getting thicker, making it harder to gain headway.
The jets burped once, twice, then gave out. Fuel exhausted. And I was only between the first and second circles on the radar plot. I was sailing through the heavier layers of cloud, heading for the rendezvous spot like a soaring bird now.
“Looking good,” the director said encouragingly.
I shook my head inside the helmet. “I’m not going to make the rendezvous.”
Silence for a few heartbeats. Then, “So you’ll have to walk a bit.”
“Yeah. Right.”
The thermal suit would hold up for maybe an hour on the surface. Not much more. The problem was heat rejection.
Down there on the surface, where the freaking rocks are red hot and the air is thicker than seawater, it’s four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. More, in some places. No matter how well the suit is built, that heat seeps in on you, sooner or later. So the engineers had built a heat-rejection system into my suit: slugs of special alloy that melted at four hundred Celsius. The alloy absorbed heat, melted, and was squirted out of the suit, taking the heat with it.
It was pretty crude, but it worked. It would keep my suit’s interior reasonably cool, or so the engineers promised. After about one hour, though, the suit would run out of alloy and I’d start to bake; my protective suit would turn into a pretty efficient steam cooker.
That’s what I had to look forward to. That’s why I was trying my damnedest to land as close to that return ship as possible.
I broke out of the top cloud deck at last and for a few minutes I was in relatively clear air. Clouds above me, more clouds below. I was still gliding, but slower and slower as the air pressure built up steeply. At least I was past the bugs. The temperature outside was approaching a hundred degrees, the boiling point of water. The bugs couldn’t survive in that heat.
Could I?
Lightning flashed in my eyes, scaring the bejeesus out of me. Then came a slow, rolling grumble of thunder. The lightning must have been pretty damned close.
That second cloud deck was alive with lightning. It crackled all around me, thunder booming so loud and continuous that I shut off the outside mikes. Still the noise rattled me like an artillery barrage. Had I come down in the middle of a thunderstorm? Was I somehow attracting the lightning? You get all kinds of scary thoughts. As I dropped deeper and deeper into Venus’s hot, heavy air, my mind filled with what-ifs and should’ves.
The lightning seemed to be only in the second cloud deck. I watched its flickering all across the sky as I fell through the brief clear space between it and the third deck. It was almost pretty, at this distance.
The third and last of the cloud decks was also the thinnest. At just a smidge above fifty kilometers’ altitude I glided through its underbelly and saw the landscape of Venus with my own eyes.
I stared down at a distant landscape of barren rock, utter desolation, nothing but bare, hard, stony ground as far as the eye could see, naked rock in shades of gray and darker gray, with faint streaks here and there of lighter stuff, almost like talc or pumice.
I saw a series of domes, and farther in the distance the bare rocky ground seemed wrinkled, as if something had squeezed it hard. There were mountains out near the horizon, although that might have been a distortion caused by the density of the thick atmosphere, like trying to judge shapes deep underwater.
Below me was an immense crater, maybe fifty klicks across. It looked sharp-edged, new. But they’d told me there wasn’t much erosion going on down there, despite the heat and corrosive atmosphere. It took a long time for craters to be erased on Venus; half a billion years or more.
