Hal’s voice crackled in my earphones, “. . . enera five! Great video, pal!”
Terrific. The video got through but our voice link is chopped up all to hell and back.
Then it hit me. If the video link is working, switch the voice communications to that channel. I told them what I was doing while I made the change on the comm panel.
“Can you hear me better now?” I asked, my voice still cracked and dry as dehydrated dust.
No answer. Crap, I thought, it isn’t working.
Then, “We hear you. Weak but clear. Are you okay?”
I can’t tell you how much better I felt with a solid link back to the orbiter. It didn’t really change things. I was just as tired and hot and far from safety as before. But I wasn’t alone anymore.
“According to the signals from your beacon and the return vehicle’s,” the director said, as calmly professional as ever, “you are less than five klicks from the ship.”
“Five klicks, copy.”
“That distance holds good if there’s no atmospheric distortions warping the signals,” he added.
“Thanks a lot,” I groused.
Hal came on again and talked to me nonstop, trying to buck me up, keep me going. At first I wondered why he was doing the pep-talk routine, then I realized that I must be dragging along pretty damned slowly. I put my life-support graph on the helmet screen. Yeah, air was low, water lower, and I was almost out of the heat-absorbing alloy.
I turned around three-sixty degrees and saw the ragged trail of molten alloy I was leaving behind me, like a robot with diarrhea. The alloy was shiny, new-looking against the cracked, worn, old rocks. And there were lines curving along the ground, converging on the trail every few meters.
Snakes! I realized. They like metals. I turned back toward the distant rescue vehicle and made tracks as fast as I could.
Which wasn’t all that fast. Inside the cumbersome suit I felt like Frankenstein’s monster trying to play basketball, lumbering along, painfully slow.
I must have been describing all this into my helmet mike, talking nonstop. Hal kept talking, too.
And then the servo on my right knee seized up. The knee just froze, half bent, and I toppled over on my face with a thump that whacked my nose against the helmet’s faceplate. Good thing, in a way. The pain kept me from blacking out. Blood spattered over my readout screens and the lower half of the faceplate. I must’ve screamed every obscenity I’d ever heard.
Hal and the controller were both yelling at me at once. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
Through the pain of my broken nose I told them while I tried to get back on my feet. No go. My right leg was frozen in the half-bent position; there was no way I could walk. Blood was gushing down my throat.
So I crawled. Coughing, choking on my own blood, I crawled on my hands and knees, scraping along the blazing hot rocks with those damned snakes slithering behind me, feasting on the metal alloy trail I was leaving.
The radio crapped out again. Nothing but mumbles and hisses, with an occasional crackle so loud that I figured it must be from lightning. I couldn’t look up to see if the clouds were flickering with light, but I saw a strange, sullen glow off on the horizon to my left.
“. . . volcano . . .” came through the earphones.
Just what I needed. A volcanic eruption. It was too far away to be a direct threat, but in that undersea-thick atmosphere down on Venus’s surface, volcanic eruptions can cause something like tidal waves, huge pressure waves that can push giant boulders for hundreds of kilometers.
Or knock over a flimsy rocket vehicle that’s sitting on the plain waiting for me to reach it.
I’m not going to make it, I told myself.
“The hell you’re not!” Hal snapped. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words out loud.
“I can’t go much farther,” I said, glad that at least the radio link was back. “Running out of air, water, everything . . .”
“Hang tight, pal,” he insisted. “Don’t give up.”
I muttered something about snake food. I rolled over on my side, completely exhausted, and saw that the snakes were gobbling up my alloy trail, getting closer to the source of the metal—me—all the time.
And then suddenly they all disappeared, reeled back into their holes so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it.
Why? What would make them—
I heard a roar. A high-pitched banshee wail, really. Looking up as far as I could through the bloodied faceplate, I saw the sweetest sight of my life. A squat, bullet-shaped chunk of metal with a cluster of jet pods hanging off its ass end and three spindly, awkward legs unfolding out of its sides.
The return vehicle settled gently on the rocks half a dozen meters in front of me and released its jet pods with an ungainly thump. I crawled over to it with the last bit of my strength. The airlock hatch popped open and I hauled myself up into it.
The airlock was about as big as a shoe box but I tucked myself inside and leaned on the stud that closed the hatch and sealed it. I just sat there in that tight little metal cubbyhole and gasped into my helmet mike, “Take me up.”
The acceleration from the booster rockets knocked me unconscious.
When I came to, I was on an air-cushion mattress in the orbiter’s tiny infirmary. My face was completely bandaged except for holes for my eyes and mouth. They must have pumped enough painkillers in me to pacify the whole subcontinent of India. I felt somewhere between numb and floating.
Hal was there at my beside. And Angel.
They had flown the return vehicle to me, of course, once they got a good fix on my position. The little ship’s cameras even got a good shot of the erupting volcano as it lifted up through the atmosphere—ahead of the pressure wave, thank goodness—and carried me safely to orbit.
“You did a great job, pal,” Hunky Hal said, smiling his megawatt smile at me.
“We were so frightened,” Angel said. “When the radio link went dead we thought . . .”
