“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.

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.