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.
The air was so thick now that I was scuba diving, rather than gliding. The bat wings were still useful, but now I had to flap my arms to push through the mushy atmosphere. The servomotors in my shoulder joints buzzed and whined; without them I wouldn’t have the muscular strength to swim for very long.
I was still a long way from the rendezvous point, I saw. Inching closer, but only inching.
Then I got an idea. If Mohammed can’t make it to the mountain, why not get the mountain to come to Mohammed?
“Can you hop the ship toward me?” I asked.
Nothing but static in my earphones.
I yelled and changed frequencies and hollered some more. Nothing. Must’ve been the electrical storm in the second cloud deck was screwing up my radio link. I was on my own, just me and the planet Venus.
She looks so beautiful from a distance, I thought. She glows so bright and lovely in the night sky that just about every culture on Earth has named her after their goddess of beauty and love: Aphrodite, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Venus. I’ve watched her when she’s the dazzling Evening Star, brighter than anything in the sky except the Sun and Moon. I’ve seen her when she’s the beckoning Morning Star, harbinger of the new day. Always she shines like a precious jewel.
Even when we were in orbit around her, she glowed like an incredible golden sphere. But once you see her really close up, especially when you’ve gone through the clouds to look at her unadorned face, she isn’t beautiful anymore. She looks like hell.
And that’s where I was going, down into that inferno. The air was so thick now that I was really pushing myself through it, slowly sinking, struggling to get as close as possible to the spot where the return vehicle was waiting for me. If I hadn’t been encased in the heavy thermal suit I guess I would’ve hovered in the atmosphere, floating like a chunk of meat in a big stewpot, slowly cooking.
I was passing over a big, pancake-shaped area, a circular mass of what must have once been molten lava. It was frozen into solid stone now, if “frozen” is a word you can use for ground that’s more than four times hotter than boiling water. I caught a glimpse of mountains off to my left, but I was still so high they looked like wrinkles.
My radar tracking plot had gone blank. The link from the ship up in orbit was shot, together with my voice channels. Pulling my arm out of its sleeve again I poked on the control panel until my radio receiver picked up the signal from the return vehicle’s radar beacon. I displayed it on my miniscreen. Now my position was in the center of the display; the ship was more than sixty kilometers off to my left.
Sixty klicks! I’d never make that distance on foot. Could I sail that far before hitting the ground?
We had picked the rendezvous site for two reasons. One, it was about as low—and therefore as hot—as you could get in Venus’s equatorial region. Second, it was the area where the old Russian spacecraft, Venera 5, had landed more than a century ago. The video’s producers thought it’d be a neat extra if we could bring back imagery of whatever’s left of the old clunker.
