Down I swam. I really was swimming now, thrashing my arms and legs, making the suit’s servomotors wheeze and grind with the effort. I was sweating a lot now, blinking at the stinging salty drops that leaked down into my eyes, asking myself over and over again if Hal was worth all this. A guy could get killed!
The ground came up ever so slowly. I felt like an old wooden sailing ship sunk in battle, sinking gently, gently to the bottom of the ocean. On a world that had never seen wood, or liquid water, or felt a foot on its baking stony surface.
At last I touched the ground. Like a skin diver reaching the bottom of the ocean, I eased down the final few meters and let my heavily booted feet make contact with the red-hot rock.
“I’m down,” I said, for the record. I didn’t know if they could hear me, up in orbit, but the suit’s recorders in their “black box” safety capsules would store my words even if I didn’t make it back up.
I glanced at the radar plot. My antennas were picking up the return vehicle’s beacon loud and clear. It was only seven kilometers from where I stood.
Seven klicks. In four hundred fifty degrees. Just a nice summer stroll on the surface of Venus.
Despite the triple layer of clouds that completely smothered the whole planet, there was plenty of light down at the surface. Sort of like an overcast day in Seattle or Dublin. I could see all the way out to the horizon. The air was so thick, though, that it was sort of like looking through water. The horizon warped up around the edges of my vision, like the way water dimples in a slim glass tube.
The suit felt damned heavy; it weighed more than eighty kilos on Earth, and just about 90 percent of that here on Venus. Call it seventy-some kilos. If it hadn’t been for the servomotors on the suit’s legs I wouldn’t have been able to go more than a few meters.
So I started plodding in the direction my radar screen indicated. Clump with one boot, squeak, groan, click go the servomotors, thump goes the other boot. Over and over again.
I kept up a running commentary, for the record. If and when I got back to Hal and the others, they would morph his voice for mine and have a fine step-by-step narration of the first stroll on Venus. Ought to get a nice bonus out of it, even if it went to my heirs because I got fried to a crisp walking that walk.
Come to think of it, I didn’t have any heirs. No family at all. Orphan me. My family had been Hal and the guys we worked with. Including Angel, of course. Our crew was fully integrated. No biases allowed, none whatsoever.
It was hot. And getting hotter. After a while I started to feel a little dizzy, weak in the knees. Dehydration. At least I wasn’t sweating so much. But I knew if I didn’t drink some water and swallow a salt pill I’d be dead before long. Trouble was, every sip of water I drank meant less water for the suit’s cooling system. And there wasn’t a recycler in the suit; no room for it. Besides, I was only supposed to be on the surface for an hour or less.
“Anyway,” thoughtful Hal had told the safety engineers, “who wants to drink his own recycled piss and sweat?”
I wouldn’t mind, I thought. Not here and now.
On I walked, creeping closer to the return vehicle. I tried to go into a meditative state while I was walking, letting the servomotors’ wheezing and groaning lull me into a blankness so I could keep on moving automatically and let all this pain and discomfort slip out of my thoughts.
Didn’t work. The suit’s left leg was chafing against my crotch. Both my legs were tiring fast. My back itched. The air seemed to be getting stale; I started coughing. My vision was blurring, too.
And then the snake made a grab for me.
Venusian snakes have nothing to do with the kinds of snakes we have on Earth. They are feeding arms of underground creatures, big bulbous ugly sluglike things that live under the red-hot surface rocks. Don’t ask me how anything can live in temperatures four or five times hotter than boiling water. The scientists say they’re made of silicones and have molten sulfur for blood. All I saw was a set of their damned feeding arms—snakes.
There’s a basic human reaction to the sudden sight of a snake. Run away!
The snake suddenly popped up in front of me, slithering out of its hole. I hopped a meter and a half, even with the weight of the suit, stumbled, and fell flat on my back. Well, not flat on my back, there was too much equipment strapped onto me for that. But I hit the ground and all the air whooshed out of my lungs.
Faster than an eye blink three snakes wrapped themselves around me. I saw another two wavering in the air, standing up like quivering antennas.
“No metal!” I screamed, as if they could hear or understand. “No metal!”
That didn’t seem to bother them at all. They had latched onto me and they weren’t going to let go. Could they sense the metal beneath my suit’s plastic exterior? Could they burn their way through to it? Liquid sulfur would do the job pretty damned quick.
I couldn’t sit up, not with their greedy arms wrapped all over me. I grabbed one of the snakes and pried it off me. It took both hands and all the strength of my servo-aided muscles. The underside of the thing had long, narrow mouths, twitching open and closed constantly. Disgusting. There were some kind of filaments around the lips, too. Really loathsome.
Fighting an urge to barf, I bent the snake over backwards, trying to break it. No go. It was rubbery and flexible as a garden hose. Blazing hot anger boiled up in me, real fury. These brainless sonsofbitches were trying to kill me! I twisted it, pounded its end on the red-hot rock, fought one leg loose, and stomped on it with my boot.
It must have decided I wasn’t edible. Or maybe I was giving it more pain than it wanted. All of a sudden all the snakes let loose of me and snapped back into their holes as if they had springs attached to their other ends. Zip! and they were gone.
Shaking inside, I slowly got to my feet again. Some scientists have a theory that the snakes are all connected to one big, huge, underground organism. Or maybe there’s more than one, but they communicate with each other. Either way, once it—or they—decided I was too much trouble to deal with, I wasn’t bothered with ’em again.
But I didn’t know that. I staggered on toward the return vehicle, scared, battered, bone weary, and very, very hot.
And there was the old Russian craft, up ahead. At first I thought it was a mirage, but sure enough it was the spacecraft, sitting on a little rise in the ground like a forgotten old monument to past glory.
Maybe I was just too tired to care, but it looked very unimpressive to me. Not much more than a small round disc that had sagged and half-collapsed on one side to reveal the crumpled remains of a dull metal ball beneath it, sitting on those baking, red-hot rocks. It reminded me of an old-fashioned can of soda pop that had been crushed by some powerful hand.
I staggered over to it and touched the collapsed metal sphere. It crumbled into powder. Sitting there for more than a century in this heat, in an atmosphere loaded with corrosive sulfur and chlorine compounds, the metal had just turned to dust. Like the mummies in old horror shows. Nothing left but dust.
I walked slowly around it anyway, letting my helmet camera record a full three-sixty view. History. The first man-made object to make it to the surface of another planet.
Just like me. I was going to be history, too. I was baking inside my suit. The temperature readout was hitting fifty; damned near two hundred in the old Fahrenheit scale, and that was inside the suit. I was being broiled alive. If it weren’t for my monomolecular long johns my skin would’ve been blistering.
Plodding along. I left old Venera 5 behind me, following the beep-beep of the return ship’s beacon, hoping it was working okay and I was heading in the right direction. Can there be an electronic mirage? I mean, could I be wandering off into the oven-hot wilderness, chasing a signal that got warped somehow and is leading me away from the return vehicle?
Is there a return vehicle at all? I started to wonder. Maybe this is Hal’s way of getting rid of me. Get the competition out of the way. Then it’s him and Angel without any complications. No, that doesn’t make any sense, I told myself. You’re getting paranoid in this heat, going crazy.
I pushed on, one booted foot in front of the other. Wasn’t making footprints, though; hot though it may be, the surface of Venus is solid rock. At least it is here. Solid and scorching hot. Over on the nightside, from what I’d heard, you can see the ground glowing red-hot.
“. . . get through?” crackled in my earphones. “Do you copy?”
“I hear you!” I shouted, my throat so dry that my voice cracked. The storm, the electrical interference, must have ended. Or moved off.
Nothing but hissing static came through. Then the director’s voice, “. . . signal’s weak . . .up gain?” His message was breaking up. There was still a lot of interference between the orbiter and me.
“Am I on the right track?” I asked. “According to my radar plot I’m still five klicks from the ship. Please confirm.”
