Element 79 (11 page)

Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be so unpleasant after all. Perhaps deep down in himself that was what he really wanted. Perhaps that was the reason for his psychosis.

Dave Johnson looked out of the starboard porthole. There were four of them in the spaceship: Bill Harrison, Chris Yolantis, Stu Fieldman, and himself. This was the end of the line, the end of hard, unremitting training. But there were some things you could train for, and there were others you couldn’t. Take the silence, for instance, the strange, gliding silence. It made you aware of all the little noises you could hear on Earth, even in places that were supposed to be dead quiet. For the first two weeks they’d played records and they’d talked incessantly. But then they’d come to realize they were talking simply to shut out the silence. After that it had seemed somehow better to accept the silence. So there were no long speeches anymore. Most of what they said now was in terse Anglo-Saxon.

Dave doubted that any of them had really recovered from the beginning. Once the shattering effect of the starting blast had worn off, they’d watched the bright ball of the Earth recede away from them. At first it had filled almost half the sky. But day after day it had become smaller and smaller. Now it was a mere point, like Mars or Jupiter. This was the terrible morale destroyer—watching your home receding implacably to huge, pitiless distances. You knew that out there, nearly forty million miles away, people were going about their daily lives—kids to school, commuters to work, housewives busying themselves, cars on the highways, hamburger stands. You knew it, but you couldn’t believe it.

Soon another planet would be filling their sky. On paper everything was easy. They were to enter the atmosphere of Venus, brake down, descend below the white clouds, and then fly several times around. There wasn’t to be a landing, because the scientists were quite certain Venus was covered entirely by ocean. Then they’d simply blast off again and return to Earth.

It was difficult to see where anything could go wrong. The reentry problem into the Earth’s atmosphere had been solved years ago—they themselves had made four flights out from Earth during training. And entry into the Venusian atmosphere should be no different in principle from the case of Earth. The host of space vehicles encircling Venus over the past two decades had shown quite conclusively that the atmosphere contained nothing but harmless gases—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water.

Dave wondered just how far the ideas of the scientists would hold up. The clouds through which the spaceship must soon penetrate were thought to be merely frozen crystals of carbon dioxide—cirrus clouds of dry ice, in fact. But suppose the scientists were wrong. Suppose the clouds continued unbroken right down to the ocean surface. Suppose the oceans were boiling.

The blast-off from Venus would be controlled by radio transmitters on Earth. This was one comfort, at least. It would insure that the ship accelerated into the right orbit for the home trip. They themselves would be down under the Venusian clouds, unable to see out into space, certainly unable to choose the proper homeward trajectory. In fact, at any moment the people back home could take over control of the ship—a precaution just in case they all went crazy.

The spaceship began to bite into the atmosphere of Venus. The finlike wings began to be operated by the gas pressure outside.

Inside the ship, now that the long wait was over, the crew became rational and active. These were critical moments. Harrison, chief pilot, took over at the control panel.

“This is it boys,” he growled. “This is what we came for.”

They watched the speed indicator—down, down, always down. When the pointer reached half the initial entry reading, triumphantly they knew the rest was easy. It was only a matter of minutes now.

Then they were down to cruising speed, twelve hundred miles per hour. Harrison adjusted the powerful motors—it needed little more than the idling rate to keep the speed steady, for the ship was held up now by aerodynamic lift from the gases through which it was moving, like an ordinary airplane.

The clouds below them appeared quite fantastically bright, far brighter than terrestrial clouds. The radio altimeter showed they were fifteen miles above the surface of the planet. Harrison set the ship in a gentle downward glide.

Thirteen miles up… eleven miles… into the clouds themselves. All eyes on the altimeter now. Dave knew just what the others were thinking: “Pray to Christ the thing is still okay.” He noticed the temperature gauge—minus 75°C. outside—so low, the ship must still be high above the surface. The altimeter
was
okay.

Slowly the light intensity decreased. Nine miles up now. At seven miles they came suddenly out of the glaring white wall of cloud, to find that it was all fantastically similar to Earth—the blue glow below them caused by molecular scattering, the unbroken clouds far down there, probably water clouds lying over an ocean. There was one queer thing, though. The light was just about as bright as a clear sunlit day on Earth. But there was no sun here. For the sun was hidden now by the carbon dioxide clouds above them.

The crew whooped around the ship. They clapped one another on the back. There had been nothing to it at all, they roared. And there was nothing at all to what they still had to do. They’d only to fly a few times around this little fish tank. Then out into space again, back to Earth, back to fame—yes, back to FAME, in bright lights, boy. Man, ever since he
was
Man, had looked up at the sky, looked up at Venus—the Morning Star. But they, Dave Johnson and Company, were the first to
see
Venus—to come and claim the goddess for their own. Ecstatically, they gazed at the cloud below them. What did it cover?

Two hours later they found the first rifts. They caught a glimpse of a sea and they yelled in derisive appreciation of the scientists. The bastards had been right after all. But it was one thing to expound learnedly in a safe lecture room and it was quite something else to cross the gulf of space—forty million so-and-so miles of it, for Christ’s sake.

At last, when they came toward the dark side of the planet, the lower clouds thinned and finally disappeared. In the evening light they could see a vast, apparently unlimited ocean below them.

It took a little more than five hours to cross the dark zone. Then, for two hours after reaching the dawnlit part of the planet, they found themselves again over open ocean. More low clouds with occasional rifts followed as they neared the subsolar regions.

After the first circuit, the flight became frankly boring. They would have liked to take the ship lower, but strict instructions were to stay above twenty-five thousand feet. Lower down, the atmospheric density was thought to be too high for a successful takeoff. And because they had no idea of exactly when the moment of takeoff would come, nobody felt tempted to risk dropping down to the ocean.

When the signal for takeoff did in fact come, after the third circuit, not one of them was sorry. It meant they’d gotten fifteen minutes to strap themselves in position, fifteen minutes before the body-searing acceleration hit them-fifteen minutes before they were on their way.

The seconds ticked off, lengthening imperceptibly into minutes. Dave Johnson wondered if he dare take a quick look at his watch. He decided against it. He decided that his judgment of time had gone haywire. With beating hearts they waited. They waited, listening to the purring motors. They waited tensely for a long time before one of them spoke. Yolantis said, “I’m going to take a look, fellers.”

They heard him move. If the motors fired now, Chris would be pulverized—literally pulverized, “Thirty-one minutes,” they heard him mutter. Then Yolantis shouted out in terror. They found him at the main viewing-port. The ship was over clear ocean. They could see waves breaking, perhaps five thousand feet below. Harrison’s face was deathly pale. “The controls are locked,” he whispered. “The transmission from Earth must have gone all to hell. We’re on a downward glide.”

Should it be a quick death or a slow one? If they went in with the ship, they’d plummet instantly to the ocean bottom. If they launched the safety capsule, they’d probably be all right for a while. If the ocean was water, as it seemed to be, the capsule would float. They might be able to last out for a week or two. But it would come to exactly the same thing in the end. They had about five minutes to decide.

Perhaps they still had time to contact Earth? Pray to God that Earth could shift the controls at the very last minute.

Agent 38 watched the U.F.O. fall. He saw a small object, a capsule fastened to a parachute, break loose from it. Once he had found the correct transmission wave band and the right code, the U.F.O. had been almost absurdly easy to bring down. Exultantly, Agent 38 churned his huge whalelike body through the sea, the great transmitter in his head flashing electrical energy into the water.

There was very little salt in the water and his signals would travel a long way. Others would receive them and would come quickly to help him. Because of the eternal high cloud-cover, Agent 38 had never seen anything outside his planet. As he searched the waters methodically and rapidly, he found himself joyously wondering just what strange things he would find inside the capsule.

The NASA budget in 1963 was something over 3.5 billion dollars. Twenty years later it was ten times more. Results justified the increase, not so much in spin-off to industry as in space itself. In the early days, a few prophets of disaster had openly stated their opinion, to the effect that no good of any kind would come out of the space program. By 1984 these dismal fellows had been given the lie. They were derided now as classic examples of fainthearted conservatism, the lack of broad vision which always seems to afflict the human species in some degree.

The first lunar mission achieved its objectives in 1973, only three years behind the original schedule. There were plenty of good reasons for this stretch-out. To begin with, the dust was really nasty stuff. It climbed all over you, head to toe, if you were unlucky enough to step into it. It climbed all over your equipment, into every crevice more than a few microns in size. The dust was like a liquid rising in a mass of capillary tubes, except that the forces were electrostatic, not surface tension. Unfortunately, the Moon has a lot of dust, so not too many places could be found where the first landing module might be safely set down. Indeed, the first pictures from the old Ranger project already showed only a few areas that appeared likely to be more or less free of dust. Later data from soft landings, some of them very soft, confirmed this. However, there were a few such areas, as it finally proved when the first men stepped gingerly out from their cabin. Everywhere around them was flat, hard ground, seemingly of dried-out mud.

The first landing didn’t do much more than that. Down onto the deck, a judicious peek outside, then quickly back to the lunar-orbit rendezvous. Although it had cost the best part of one hundred billion bucks, hardly anybody now doubted that it had been well worthwhile. There was the usual bitching, it was true, from the high-energy physicists, who were having difficulty in acquiring a single lone billion, but once high-energy physics moved under the control of NASA that particular moan soon died away. Getting all funds for science under a single agency began to seem more and more like a good idea. It kept things in perspective and in proportion. It was tidy. The N.S.F. was also moved over.

Since glamour was now off the gingerbread, the second lunar mission had perforce to make up in effectiveness what it lacked in sensationalism. It went to the Moon to work, to survey, to dig, and to probe. The crew on this occasion included both a scientist-astronaut and a scientist-passenger. Ironically enough, the second landing turned out far more sensationally than the first. The disaster was noticed by the men in the rendezvous vehicle. Everything was quite normal for the first two days, they said, then suddenly the landing station was gone. In its place a new crater had appeared about three hundred yards in diameter. The precise mechanism of the disaster was unclear at the time, for it must have happened while the rendezvous vehicle was orbiting on the far side of the Moon. Later research showed, however, that the second landing party had been the unfortunate victims of what came to be known as a “soda squirt.”

For a while there was discussion of cutting back the whole space program. But at length it was decided to press ahead with still greater vigor, in tribute to the space heroes, blown to perdition in some still-unexplained fashion.

Later missions very naturally proceeded with all due caution. It was discovered that ice lay below the dust and mud of the immediate surface of the Moon. There were huge glaciers shielded from space by the thin skin of dust. Wherever the skin was scraped away, the ice melted off into space very quickly. The temperature of the ice was found to increase with depth, which was natural, of course. This meant there must be liquid water low enough down. The water must be under pressure, a pressure generated by the weight of the overlying ice. Given any crack or hole in the solid glacier and, bingo, the water would stream explosively upward like an oil gusher. This was exactly what happened at places where the ice became exposed. More and more of the ice evaporated into space, until what remained became too thin to withstand the pressure of the liquid water below. So up came the water in a huge soda squirt. The water didn’t settle back, it simply fizzed off into space.

These events were watched by the later expeditions from a safe distance. The precaution was necessary, for the rush of the water was extremely violent. Usually it shot out at a speed of about one mile per second, over three thousand miles per hour, sufficient to blow a small crater. It was now easily understood how the hitherto mysterious chains of small craters had been formed; they were strung along the courses of underground rivers, they were the places where the water had managed to punch through to the surface. In the gaunt, gray world of the Moon, the emergence of billions of tons of water was a fantastic and wonderful event, not at all like a terrestrial geyser. It was the colors you were aware of, a blaze of color that filled the whole sky.