by Hank Davis
“No doubt,” said the President dryly. “Swanberg and his wife have been less politic, shall we say. However, I feel reasonably sure that his backers tend to be more intellectual, somewhat wealthier, and with more influence per capital. Three bankers and college presidents versus five housewives and mail clerks. Beg pardon, I mean five homemakers and junior executives. What sort of odds will that amount to by the time the next election rolls around? Pretty even, I’d guess.”
The secretary made no answer, but the President filled one in for him and went on: “Bitter? Of course I am. Bitter at how this whole affair has been mishandled, and bitter, with quite a little self-pity, at becoming the goat. The one who has to say, ‘He shall live and you must die.’ I never wanted to play God.”
“You’ll have to, Mr. President.”
“Uh-huh. Right now. I’ve prepared two statements here, one for Holt and one for Swanberg, explaining the reasons why he should be the survivor. They are good, sound, carefully chosen and shrewdly phrased reasons, if I do say so myself.”
“And—?” The secretary stepped close.
“Lend me a quarter, Bob.”
Wordlessly, the coin changed hands. “Heads, Holt,” the President said. “Tails, Swanberg.” He tossed. The coin caught a shaft of sunlight and glittered. He didn’t catch it. It went on the rug. Both men knelt to look.
“Heads,” said the secretary in a whisper.
The President nodded. He got slowly to his feet, like an aging man, and tore the paper with Swanberg’s qualifications into shreds. The other he handed to the secretary. “Give this to the press as my considered reasons for picking Holt,” he said. “Then clear my calendar. I’ll call Buckler myself—I’ve got that much guts left—but I can’t see anyone else today. Nobody.”
“Canaveral to Aeolus. Canaveral to Aeolus. Are you there? Come in, Aeolus.”
Abruptly, Holt knew what the mumble was—two or three syllables leaped out into his understanding—and he turned the volume high with darkness rising ragged before his eyes.
“Aeolus to Canaveral,” said Swanberg across the roar in Holt’s ears. “We read you. Come in, Canaveral.”
How could Bill sit there like a stone toad and talk? Holt wondered for a moment if his own heart was going to explode.
“(Got them for you, sir.) Hello, Aeolus. This is General Buckler. How are you doing?”
“Okay,” said Swanberg. Fighting his pulse rate down toward something reasonable, Holt saw that every trace of color had left the electronician’s face. Yet he spoke with machine precision.
“But we’ll have to begin deceleration soon or our air supply will get dangerously low.”
“That’s understood, Swanberg . . . Bill . . . that is you, isn’t it? Yes. We, uh, we’ve heard from the President. Five minutes ago.”
“What?” asked Swanberg without inflection. Holt clenched his fists until the nails scored the palms.
“I’m sorry, Bill,” Buckler got out.
Swanberg didn’t move a muscle, but the ventilation stirred the yellow hair on his head.
“The President’s message is as follows,” Buckler said. “‘My decision has been impossibly difficult, for both William Swanberg and James Holt are men whose loss will be felt as grievously by their country as by their own loved ones. However, since a decision must be made, in view of the fact that he has more children and that possibly he will make less pilot error in returning the capsule to Earth if he knows he is to live, I recommend that Mr. Holt remain within the cabin. To Mr. Swanberg and his family I can only extend my deepest sympathy and my assurance that none of us will ever forget his service.’”
“Thanks,” Swanberg said. “We’ll get right to work.”
“W-w-we’re trying to contact your wife,” said Buckler.
“No!” Swanberg exclaimed. “Not that. Leave her alone, you hear me?” He snapped off the transmitter with such violence that he almost broke the switch.
I’m going to live, it shouted in Holt. I’m going to live. Then he met Swanberg’s eyes.
They regarded each other a long time. “What can I say, Bill?” Holt managed in the end. He could barely form the words; his tongue felt like a lump of wood.
“Nothing. It’s okay, Jim. No hard feelings.” Swanberg was quite gray, but he extended his hand.
“Damnation, I wish—I almost wish—”
“It’s okay, I tell you.” Swanberg left his hand out, untaken, for Holt hadn’t seen it. “The President’s a good man. Wasn’t easy for him either.”
“N-no. I wish he’d left out that ‘loved ones’ cornball, though.”
“Me too. Well, no sense wasting time. Shake,” Swanberg reminded him.
They clasped hands. Both felt cold.
“Hello, Billy, and you too, Jimmy,” roared the receiver. “This is Tom Zellman down at Base. By special arrangement, at this most solemn moment, the Boys’ Choir of the New York cathedral of your church, Billy, is preparing to sing the hymns chosen by your mother in Twin Falls. We will be bringing you her own voice as soon as we can. Meanwhile, the Reverend Norbert Victor Poole—”
“Oh, no!” Holt breathed.
“Hello, Jimmy,” said the rich baritone. “Yes, you, Jimmy. I am talking to you. For you have a role even more difficult than Billy. He is making the supreme sacrifice and then going to his so fully deserved eternal reward. But you must live. You must use the life your friend is giving you, confidently, inspiringly, so that the youth of America—”
Holt turned him off.
“You’ll have to switch back on,” Swanberg sighed. “To get return instructions. But I daresay they’ll skip the organ music then.” His lips tightened. “Help me on with my helmet, will you? I’ve got to get outside. Before Mother—hurry up, will you?”
Holt sat very still. I don’t have to dance at their show, he thought. I haven’t got strings tied on me. Yet. It was as if someone else entered him. “Wait a minute,” he said, speaking fast so that he wouldn’t get time to interrupt himself for the fear was thick in his chest. “Ease off. I’ve got some say in this, too.”
“You?” Swanberg’s tone hurt. Maybe he didn’t mean the way he spoke, but—
“Yeah,” Holt chattered. “I’ve been here with you a good many hours now, listening to ’em below passing the buck, like a mucking three-stage rocket, Buckler to the President, and meanwhile using us to sell underarm grease. Using Janie, as far as that goes. I wish she’d had Laura’s backbone.”
“Hell,” muttered Swanberg, flushing the least bit, “that’s only a matter of—uh—”
“Lemme finish, damn you! We started this nightmare, you and me, passing the buck ourselves. Now it’s come back to us. Or ought to, at least. We’re the third stage. What the hell am I saying? Mainly, I guess, we don’t have to go along with this farce. The President knows that. Think his words over. He didn’t order, he recommended. He hasn’t got power to give orders. As long as this bucket is aloft, only the captain can give orders that stick, and I’m the captain.”
“What are you getting at?” Swanberg’s big hands reached as if to seize Holt and shake him, but withdrew again, an inch at a time. The ship mumbled, tumbling through endlessness.
“We don’t have to go along with them,” Holt yelled. “I’ve had it, I tell you. Up to here. Shut up, I’m the captain. Listen. I’m not trying to be any hero, but—I don’t know. Maybe I’m afraid you’d come back every night . . . I’ll take full responsibility, when we reach Base. You don’t have to fear any consequences. Buckler, the President, and now me. I’m the third stage and I’ve cut loose and I’m going home under my own power!”
He recognized the hope that flickered so wildly across the other man’s face, and a part of him shrieked with anger at the foolishness of the other part and none of him understood very well what this was about. But having gone this far, he couldn’t retreat. And it was worth it—maybe completely worth it, maybe only almost worth it—to know, for however long he might live, that he was a free ma
n.
“What do you mean?” Swanberg sagged in his harness.
“We’re going to do this right,” Holt answered. He put one hand behind his back. “Odd or even. Match me.”
BECALMED IN HELL
by Larry Niven
Early in his promising career as a new writer of hard sf (and the promises have been more than kept), Larry Niven wrote this story of the first two men on Venus, though, since this was Venus as the latest planetary probes had shown it to be, so “on” needs some clarification. And one of the “men” is more than a bit out of the ordinary, too. This was a sequel to his first published story, “The Coldest Place,” and the advance shown in writing skill and depth of characterization in less than a year (1964, 1965) is enough to make most beginning writers consider a career in computer programming.
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
“There goes a fish,” I said, just to break the monotony.
“So how’s it cooked?”
“Can’t tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish.”
Eric sighed noisily. “Do I have to?”
“You have to. Only way you’ll see anything worthwhile in this—this—” Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
“Searing black calm.”
“Right.”
“Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface.”
I shivered. “What’s the outside temperature now?”
“You’d rather not know. You’ve always had too much imagination, Howie.”
“I can take it, Doc.”
“Six hundred and twelve degrees.”
“I can’t take it, Doc!”
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth-to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric’s job, to regulate the tank’s pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
“Temperature just went up to six-thirteen,” said Eric. “Look, are you through bitching?”
“For the moment.”
“Good. Strap down. We’re taking off.”
“Oh frabjous day!” I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
“We’ve done everything we came to do. Haven’t we?”
“Am I arguing? Look, I’m strapped down.”
“Yeah.”
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We’d spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long. “What’s the trouble, Eric?”
“You’d rather not know.”
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone: he wasn’t making the extra effort to get human expression out of his “prosthetic” vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.
“I can take it,” I said.
“Okay. I can’t feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I’ve just had a spinal anesthetic.”
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. “See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can’t feel them.”
“Okay.” One split second later, “They don’t. Nothing happens. Good thinking though.”
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was, “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I’ve liked being half of this team, and I still do.”
“Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully.”
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin’s forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric’s central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don’t call Eric a cripple, because he doesn’t like it. In a way, he’s the ideal spaceman. His life-support system weighs only half of what mine does, and takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn’t be working.
“Test the others,” said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves might have “gone to sleep” from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyze his own blood sugar, hoping that the “liver” had goofed and was producing some other form of sugar. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric—inside the cabin.
“Eric, you’re healthier than I am.”
“I could tell. You looked worried, son, and I don’t blame you. Now you’ll have to go outside.”
“I know. Let’s dig out the suit.”
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The suit was a segmented armor job. I had watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn’t start again until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed to be staring back.
“You still can’t feel anything in the ramjets?”
“Not a twinge.”
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval armor. Then I thought of something else. “We’re twenty miles up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?”
“No! Wouldn’t think of it. We’ll just have to go down.”
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant until takeoff. When the time came Eric could get extra lift by heating the hydrogen to higher pressure, then cracking a valve to let the excess out. Of course, he’d have to be very careful that the pressure was higher in the tank, or we’d get Venusian air coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally, that would be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve, and down we went.
“Of course there’s a catch,” said Eric.
“I know.”
“The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground level it’ll be six times that.”
�
�I know.”
We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on our tailfins. The temperature rose gradually. The pressure went up fast. I sat at the window and saw nothing, nothing but black, but I sat there anyway and waited for the window to crack. NASA had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles . . .
Eric said, “The blimp tank’s okay, and so’s the ship, I think. But will the cabin stand up to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten miles.”
Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic ion engine that was to take us home. We couldn’t get to it on the chemical rocket alone. The rocket was for use after the air became too thin for the ramjets.
“Four miles. Have to crack the valve again.”
The ship dropped.
“I can see ground,” said Eric.
I couldn’t. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said, “Forget it. I’m using deep infrared, and getting no detail.”
“No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and man-eating plants?”
“All I see is hot, bare dirt.”
But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the cabin wall. My neck and shoulder muscles loosened. I turned away from the window. Hours had passed while we dropped through the poisoned, thickening air. I already had most of my suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-finger gantlets.
“Strap down,” said Eric. I did.
We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back, bumped again. And again, with my teeth rattling and my armor-plated body rolling against the crash webbing. “Damn,” Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above. Eric said, “I don’t know how we’ll get back up.”
Neither did I. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and I got up and went to the airlock.
“Good luck,” said Eric. “Don’t stay out too long.” I waved at his cabin camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred and thirty.
The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a complaining whine. With an empty bucket in each hand, and with my headlamp blazing a way through the black murk, I stepped out onto the right wing.