Ben Bova - Death On Venus.pdf - Ben Bova - margozap

Analog -- Death on Venus

July 11 @ 9:00 p.m. EST

Spider Robinson holds Callahan’s Key (The new Callahan

novel from Bantam).

Find out more .

Home

What is Analog?

Forum

Chats

Features

Death on Venus

Ben Bova

My name is Van Humphries. I will be the first human

being to reach the hell-hot surface of the planet Venus, or

I will die in the attempt.

My father gave me no other choice.

All my life my father had looked down on me; despised

me and my illness, sneeringly called me "Runt." Sick from

birth, I’d been born with a form of pernicious anemia

because of my mother’s drug addiction. She had died

giving birth to me, and my father blamed me for her

death. He claimed she was the only woman he had ever

truly loved, and I had killed her.

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

Father--Martin Humphries--lived in Selene City on the Moon where he played his chosen roles of

interplanetary tycoon; megabillionaire; hell-raising, womanizing, ruthless corrupt giant of industry;

founder and head of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.

My older brother, Alex, was the apple of Father’s eye. But three years ago Alex was killed on the first

human mission to Venus. His ship entered the clouds that totally cover our sister planet, but never

came out again.

"It should’ve been you, Runt!" Father howled when we got the news. "It should’ve been you who died,

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Bova,%20Ben%20-%20Death%20On%20Venus.htm (1 of 10)22-12-2006 12:11:47

Analog -- Death on Venus

not Alex."

Father stewed in helpless fury for months, then suddenly announced that he would give a ten-billion-

dollar prize to whoever returned Alex’s remains to him.

Ten billion dollars! I would have thought that half the world would leap at the chance to claim the prize.

But then I realized that no one in his right mind would dare to try.

As beautiful as Venus appears in our skies, the planet itself is the most hellish place in the solar

system. The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed

spacecraft landers as if they were flimsy cardboard cartons. The sky is perpetually covered from pole

to pole with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and

sulfurous gases.

But Martin Humphries wanted his son’s remains returned to him. So he offered his ten-billion-dollar

prize.

And he did one other thing. He cut off my stipend, as of my twenty-fifth birthday. On that date I became

penniless.

I had loved Alex, the big brother who’d protected me as best as he could from Father’s cruel disdain. I

decided that I would go to Venus and find his remains.

If I was successful, I would be financially secure and independent of Father for the rest of my life.

If I failed, I would join Alex on the red-hot surface of Venus.

I was not the only desperate one aiming for the prize money, I discovered. Lars Fuchs, a "rock rat"

from the Asteroid Belt, was also on his way to Venus. From what Father told me, Fuchs was a

monster. I had never seen my father look so disturbed about anyone. My father hated Lars Fuchs, that

was apparent. He was also quite clearly afraid of him.

* * *

We travelled from Earth orbit to Venus orbit in a converted freighter named Truax. Tethered to the

shabby old bucket was Hesperos, the craft that we would ride into the clouds of Venus and down to the

planet’s surface. Hesperos was small but efficient, a cross between a dirigible and submarine that

would glide through Venus’ thick clouds and carry us all the way down to the ground, where the

atmospheric pressure was about the same as the pressure of ocean water more than a kilometer

below the surface.

I had wanted Tomas Rodriguez to captain Hesperos , but Father had insisted on putting one of his

former mistresses in charge, Desiree Duchamp. Tomas reluctantly accepted being bumped to second-

in-command. Captain Duchamp, in turn, brought her daughter along. Marguerite was a biologist, of all

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Bova,%20Ben%20-%20Death%20On%20Venus.htm (2 of 10)22-12-2006 12:11:47

Analog -- Death on Venus

things. Who needed a biologist on a planet as dead and devastated as Venus?

I soon found out two things: Captain Duchamp wanted her daughter with her because my lecherous

father had his eye on her. And Marguerite Duchamp was a clone of her mother.

As Marguerite explained to me, "Mother’s always said she’s never met a man she’d trust to father a

child with her. So she cloned herself and had the embryo implanted in herself. Eight and a half months

later I was born."

It was a tense two months, going from Earth to Venus. At last the day arrived when we were to transfer

from Truax to Hesperos, leaving the old freighter in orbit with a skeleton crew aboard her.

* * *

I took one last look at my stateroom. When we had boarded Truax the single room had seemed rather

cramped and decidedly shabby to me. Over the nine weeks of our flight to Venus, though, I’d grown

accustomed to having my office and living quarters all contained within the same four walls--or

bulkheads, as they’re called aboard ship. At least the smart wall screens had made the compartment

seem larger than it actually was.

Now we were ready to transfer to the much smaller Hesperos . At least, the crew was. I dreaded the

move. If Truax was like a tatty old freighter, Hesperos would be more like a cramped, claustrophobic

submarine.

To make matters worse, in order to get to the dirigible-like Hesperos we were going to have to perform

a spacewalk. I was actually going to have to seal myself into a spacesuit and go outside into that

yawning vacuum and trolley down the cable that linked the two vessels, with nothing between me and

instant death but the monomolecular layers of my suit. I could already feel my insides fluttering with

near panic.

For about the twelve-thousandth time I told myself I should have insisted on a tugboat. Rodriguez had

talked me out of it when we’d first started planning the mission. "A pressurized tug, just so we can

make the transfer without getting into our suits?" he had jeered at me. "That’s an expense we can do

without. It’s a waste of money."

"It would be much safer, wouldn’t it?" I had persisted.

Tomas Rodriguez had been an astronaut; he’d gone to Mars four times before retiring upward to

become a consultant to aerospace companies and universities doing planetary explorations. Yet what

he really wanted was to fly again.

He was a solidly built man with an olive complexion and thickly curled hair that he kept clipped very

short, almost a military crew cut. He looked morose most of the time, pensive, almost unapproachable.

But that was just a mask. He smiled easily, and when he did it lit up his whole face to show the truly

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Bova,%20Ben%20-%20Death%20On%20Venus.htm (3 of 10)22-12-2006 12:11:47

Analog -- Death on Venus

gentle man beneath the surface.

But he was not smiling; he looked disgusted. "You want safety? Use the mass and volume we’d need

for the tug to carry extra water. That’ll give us an edge in case the recycler breaks down."

"We have a backup recycler."

"Water’s more important than a tug that we’ll only use for five minutes during the whole mission. That’s

one piece of equipment that we definitely don’t need to carry along."

So I had let Rodriguez talk me out of the tug. Now I was going to have perform an EVA, a space walk,

something that definitely gave me the shakes.

My jitters got even worse whenever I thought about Lars Fuchs.

Once my father told me that Fuchs actually was racing for the prize money, I spent long hours digging

every byte of information I could glean about him. What I found was hardly encouraging. Fuchs had a

reputation for ruthlessness and achievement. According to the media biographies, he was a merciless

taskmaster, a driven and hard-driving tyrant who ran roughshod over anyone who stood in his way.

Except my father.

The media had barely covered Fuchs’ launch into a high-velocity transit to Venus. He had built his ship

in secrecy out in the Belt--adapted an existing vessel, apparently, to his needs. Unlike all the hoopla

surrounding my own launch from Tarawa, there was only one brief interview with Fuchs on the nets,

grainy and stiff because of the hour-long delay between the team of questioners on Earth and Fuchs,

out there among the asteroids.

I pored over that single interview, studying the face of my adversary on my stateroom wall screen, in

part to get my mind off the impending space walk. Fuchs was a thickset man, probably not much taller

than me, but with a barrel chest and powerful-looking shoulders beneath his deep blue jacket. His face

was broad, jowly, his mouth a downcast slash that seemed always to be sneering. His eyes were small

and set so deep in his sockets that I couldn’t make out what color they might be.

He made a grisly imitation of a smile to the interviewers’ opening question and replied, "Yes, I am

going to Venus. It seems only fair that I should take this very generous prize money from Martin

Humphries--the man who destroyed my business and took my wife from me more than thirty years

ago."

That brought a barrage of questions from the reporters. I froze the image and delved into the hypertext

records.

Fuchs had an impressive background. He had been born poor, but built a sizable fortune for himself

out in the Asteroid Belt, as a prospector. Then he started his own asteroidal mining company and

became one of the major operators in the Belt, until Humphries Space Systems undercut his prices so

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Bova,%20Ben%20-%20Death%20On%20Venus.htm (4 of 10)22-12-2006 12:11:47

Analog -- Death on Venus

severely that Fuchs was forced into bankruptcy. HSS then bought out the company for a fraction of its

true worth. My father had personally taken control and fired Fuchs from the firm that the man had

founded and developed over two decades.

While Fuchs stayed out in the Asteroid Belt, penniless and furious with helpless rage, his wife left him

and married Martin Humphries. She became my father’s fourth and last wife.

I gasped with sudden understanding. She was my mother! The mother I had never known. The mother

who had died giving birth to me six years afterward. The mother whose drug addiction had saddled me

with chronic anemia from birth. I stared at her image on the screen: young, with the flaxen hair and

pale blue eyes of the icy northlands. She was very beautiful, yet she looked fragile, delicate, like a

flower that blooms on a glacier for only a day and then withers.

It took an effort to erase her image and go back to the news file. Fuchs had taken off for Venus in a

specially modified ship he had named Lucifer . The Latin name for Venus as the morning star was

Lucifer. It was also the name used by the Hebrew prophet Isaiah as a synonym for Satan.

Lucifer. And Fuchs. After a high- g flight, he was already in orbit around Venus, more than a week

ahead of me. Sitting there in my stateroom, staring at Fuchs’ sardonic, sneering face on the wall

screen, I remembered that the time had come to transfer to Hesperos . There was no way to get out of

it. I still wished I was home and safe, but now I knew that I had to go through with this mission no

matter what the dangers.

But my thoughts went back to my mother. I had never known that she was once Fuchs’ wife. My father

hardly ever spoke of her, except to blame me for her death. Alex had told me that it wasn’t my fault,

that women didn’t die in childbirth unless there was something terribly wrong. It was Alex who told me

about her drug dependency; as far as my father was concerned she was faultless.

"She was the only woman I ever really loved," he said, many a time. I almost believed him. Then he

would add, cold as liquid helium, "And you killed her, Runt."

A single rap on my door startled me. Before I could respond, Desiree Duchamp slid the door open and

gave me a hard stare.

She wore the same dun-colored flight coveralls as everyone else aboard ship, but on her they looked

crisper, sharper, almost like a military uniform. Her eyes were large and luminous. She might have

been beautiful if she would smile, but the expression on her face was severe, bitter, almost angry.

"Are you coming or not?" she demanded.

I drew myself up to my full height--not quite eye to eye with my captain--and forced my voice to be

steady and calm as I answered, "Yes. I’m ready."

When she turned and headed down the passageway I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to conjure up

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Bova,%20Ben%20-%20Death%20On%20Venus.htm (5 of 10)22-12-2006 12:11:47

Ben Bova - Death On Venus.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: