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.
