Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  Kerwin chimes in, perhaps to fill the silence. “As for the news, Venus is sounding better and better. When you get a chance, work up a PAD so we can do an orbital insertion burn when we get there. We might want to stick around for a bit.”

  Shepard and I chuckle. There’s no way to know if Houston finds the joke funny, though, not yet. I feel suddenly awkward, like when you say the wrong thing at a party and the whole room falls silent.

  “You can hold off on that PAD, Houston,” I feel the need to add; it kills whatever was left of the mood.

  Shepard talks again, all business now: “FYI, Houston, once we’re all cleaned up here, we’ll be ready for command module power-up. Standing by for timeline adjustments. Over.”

  We finish cleaning up, getting ready for the day. I steal a glimpse of myself in the mirror by the toilet: there is a dark spot on my skin, near the neckline. I don’t remember seeing it before. Also, my beard has grown in thickly. Nobody seems to care.

  •••

  It is a moderately exciting day, actually, a bright oasis in the desert of routine: we’re firing up the command module for a checkout and possible course correction.

  Shortly after breakfast, we strap ourselves in up there, in front of the old familiar console, which now looks strange and new. We work methodically through the checklist, pressing circuit breakers and flipping switches, providing Houston with a running commentary all the while.

  For all of the testing they did on the earlier test mission, all of the work on shutdown and restart procedures, you always feel a flicker of emotion in your chest when you are doing these things for real. There’s always the simple knowledge that the more extreme the situation, the less the margin for error. So there are moments of blessed relief when the systems come back on line, needles on ammeters and voltmeters springing into position, and all the indicator lights as bright as they’ve ever been.

  But relief is a pale substitute for excitement.

  It turns out there’s no real need for a course correction burn, other than as a test of the main engine. So they hold us to five seconds at ten percent thrust, just enough to make sure the engine is gimbaling correctly, swiveling as it fires to keep us straight and steady.

  We radio back for permission to give the attitude control thrusters a quick workout.

  We’ve all been pushing for this; it’s a chance for a fresh look at our destination, visual proof that these seemingly infinite days are, in fact, taking us somewhere.

  The delay in their response feels especially ponderous. (We’ve trained for this, of course, but it’s still annoying. Waiting all the while would fill your days with dead empty time, so you tend to transmit with one eye on your wristwatch, so as to work for a few minutes while the signals make their slow round trip. Then when the time is up, you stop what you’re doing and float there, pen and pad in hand, patiently anticipating the voices in your headset, the chance to snatch the transmission and scribble it down. You can, of course, set up the the magnetic reel-to-reel machine to record the conversations and play them back, but chances are if you can’t understand the transmission live, you won’t be able to get it when the Data Storage Equipment plays it back, either, and you’ll waste a lot of time trying. So you pay attention to the transmissions, and you try to catch them the first time around. Because if you don’t…well, it’s annoying enough in normal conversation to ask someone to repeat themselves, but here, it’s excruciating.)

  “Explorer, Houston. You can go ahead and enable the quads,” they say at last. “Instructions as follows...”

  To conserve fuel, they radio up the exact set of controller movements that will put Venus in the center of the large window with the lowest fuel expenditure. Given the orientation of the spacecraft stack, it hasn’t been easy to see Venus during our normal operations, and I’ve been making it a point not to look for it. So I’ve been eager about this: not my first glimpse of Venus, of course, but my first chance to see that it’s different from every other point of light in the firmament: an island of clouds in a sea of stars.

  When I rotate the spacecraft stack, I see: a white BB pellet, mostly in shadow, with only a small crescent sliver showing on the sunward side. It still looks incredibly far away.

  “We are going somewhere, right?” I ask.

  “Shit, I hope so,” Shepard replies.

  •••

  13 JUL 1972

  A day of unpleasant news from home. A glimpse of another world. We’re ten days out but still three million miles away. It does not look like much.

  •••

  On Friday, it’s time for some public relations work. We’ve used up most of the telescope film, and we want to save the rest of the magazine for the Venus approach; we won’t be able to replace it until my spacewalk. So we’ve decided to cancel a few days of solar observation and make science films for the kids back home.

  Shepard fiddles with the television camera and curses, while Kerwin floats near the telescope console and reviews his handwritten script. This little film we’re about to make was his idea, but it was one I enthusiastically supported, which means two thirds of the crew is on board, so to speak. We’re going to explain to our children, and all children, why we’re up here.

  I float over to check on our leader. “Doing all right there, Al?”

  “Fucking connector doesn’t want to go in,” Shepard says. “Bullshit P.R. I thought I didn’t have to spend any time in the barrel until AFTER we get back.”

  “On this trip, we’re all in the barrel,” I point out.

  “Be glad you’re behind the camera,” Kerwin adds.

  “Rank has its privileges,” he replies. And to me: “And you’re the only one that’s gonna get OUT of the barrel for the next eight months.”

  “I am, aren’t I?” I grin. I am looking forward to the EVA.

  “Bite me,” Shepard says.

  “Come on, Al! Turn that frown upside-down!” Joe says.

  He glares. “All right. I think it’s up. Let’s just fucking do this. Back to VOX.”

  I flip the switch. “Houston, Explorer, we are starting the transmission on the S-band antenna.” They’ll be picking it all up and editing it together later.

  “Hello to the schoolchildren of America,” Kerwin starts. “We’re here to…”

  Right then I sneeze violently, cutting him off. I try to get my hand in place to cover it; the body movement sets me tumbling, and I bump into the bulkhead.

  “Jesus,” Shepard looks over his shoulder, suddenly amused. “You’re gonna throw us off course!”

  Kerwin chuckles. “When asked why the spacecraft crashed into Venus, NASA had no answers, but acknowledged they were investigating a violent burst of sound heard on its last transmission…”

  “Come on, I was trying to save us all from…dodging floating sneeze droplets for the rest of the day!” I smile a little at last. The bad mood has lifted.

  “All right.” Shepard raises the camera. “Let’s try this again.”

  “Hello to the schoolchildren of America,” Kerwin intones. “We’re…”

  It seems like I’m about to sneeze again; I “ah” but catch myself before “choo.”

  “Come on,” Shepard says. “Didn’t they teach you any military discipline at that school of yours?”

  “All right. Military discipline. No sneezing. Let’s go.”

  Again Shepard raises the camera.

  “Hello to the schoolchildren of America. We’re sending you greetings from a classroom of our own, over 33 million miles away. Here on the longest voyage in human history, we’re taking a few minutes of our time to remind you that learning is a lifelong process, a journey that never ends. It’s also a trip you cannot take alone. The passing of knowledge from teacher to student, the sharing of knowledge with one another as you grow and perhaps become teachers one day yourselves: these things remind us that learning isn’t something we do for ourselves, but for the good of all mankind. With that in mind, we’re here to share some k
nowledge about the sun, which we’ve been studying in detail for the past few months, and Venus, which we’ll be seeing more of soon.

  “Astronomers have known for some time that the sun is far more than a simple bright ball of fire in the sky. Long ago, they identified and named three distinct visible layers. The outermost of these is the corona, the ‘crown of the sun.’ It does look like a crown, but it’s usually only visible during solar eclipses. Next comes the chromosphere, or ‘color sphere.’ This layer actually sends out red light; like the corona, it’s usually only visible during eclipses, and even then, just the edge of it. Because underneath that is the photosphere, or ‘light sphere,’ which is far brighter.”

  I’m waiting for Kerwin to flub a line or make a mistake, but he plows on, impressively erudite.

  “But even this seemingly bland bright ball is more complicated than it seems. Oriental astronomers sometimes saw dark spots when the sun was setting or rising. Still, it wasn’t until Galileo and his contemporaries, and the invention of the telescope, that we were able to really study these sunspots. By watching them, we learned that the sun rotates. And soon astronomers were drawing them in great detail. But we still didn’t understand them. We thought they were clouds. Sir William Herschel, the man who discovered Uranus…” (He carefully pronounces it YOUR-a-niss, so as not to send the kids into fits of giggling.) “…was one of the first to speculate that they were actually holes through which we were observing a darker layer below. But he thought there were aliens walking around down there, strange creatures we couldn’t imagine. Why didn’t astronomers know any more? Because they hadn’t yet learned to combine astronomical observation with a real understanding of physics. And this shows us why the sharing of knowledge is important. Physics, astronomy, chemistry: all the sciences need to talk to one another to make sense of our sun, and our universe.

  “Long before Herschel, Sir Isaac Newton understood that light was made up of a spectrum of many colors. Then an Englishman named William Wollaston, working around the same time as Herschel, realized that when you looked carefully at sunlight that had been split with a prism, there were lines in the spectrum. Not long afterwards, a German named Joseph von Fraunhofer invented the spectroscope, which allowed us to split the light more carefully and see the lines more clearly. Two other German scientists, Bunsen and Kirchoff, realized that these lines were caused by different chemicals and the way they released light when heated to certain temperatures. You may have heard one of those names before, for one of these men invented a device that may have found its way into a few of your classrooms: the Bunsen burner.

  “All of this sharing of knowledge helped scientists learn still more about the sun. An American astronomer, Charles Young determined that the photosphere gave off light across the spectrum, except for those dark absorption lines, but the chromosphere ONLY gave off light in those parts of the spectrum. So by using telescopes with filters that blocked out those other frequencies, we were able to see the entire chromosphere, even when there wasn’t an eclipse. And we realized that sunspots were cooler than the rest of the sun’s surface; another American, George Hale, discovered that they were caused by giant arcing magnetic fields; these fields pushed material out of the way and caused it to arrange itself in a way that resembled magnetic field lines. In fact, magnetic fields are a major driving force for solar activity.

  “We’ve done our part to build on this knowledge. Our spacecraft carries telescopes and instruments that can see in wavelengths that are blocked by Earth’s atmosphere, so we’ve learned still more about activity on the surface of the sun. We’ve photographed huge storms on the sun, loops of gas that are large enough that you could roll all of planet Earth through them, with room to spare. We’ve seen enormous flares, and learned a great deal. But now it’s time to turn our attention towards a new target: Venus.”

  Here I’m sure Kerwin’s going to take a break, but he plows ahead.

  “Even in ancient times, man knew there was something special about this brilliant spot in the sky. When our ancestors began studying the heavens, they realized that most of the points of light were fixed in place in relation to one another, but some of them were brighter and moved around in the night sky. These restless roamers got their own name: planet, which means ‘wandering star.’

  “And one planet was brighter than the others, brighter than anything else besides the sun and the moon. But it didn’t get one name, because we didn’t know it was one object. It appeared in the sky at two distinct times: close to dusk, and close to dawn. So for centuries, it was both ‘evening star’ and ‘morning star.’ For the Greeks, ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorous,’ for the Romans, ‘Vesper’ and ‘Lucifer.’ This name sounds evil to us, of course, but for them, it just meant ‘Bringer of Light’ or ‘Bringer of the Dawn.’

  “At some point, the ancients realized these were both one object. And the Romans eventually named it, and all the other planets, after their deities. But unlike all the others, which were named after gods, they named this one after a goddess. Venus, the goddess of love and beauty.

  “Even before Galileo, astronomers had observed Venus in transit across the face of the sun, and hypothesized that it was between Earth and the sun, which explained why it was only visible in the morning and the evening. But it took us a long time to learn much more about Venus. In the late 1700s, astronomers realized it had an atmosphere, and that it was shrouded in clouds. But the atmosphere made it difficult for us to realize other things, like the planet’s rate of rotation. We were only able to get a rough measurement in the 1950s, and even on this mission, we’re working to refine those observations.

  “In the absence of information, imaginations run wild. Especially the collective imagination. Back then, writers imagined a lush jungle world, with vast oceans and giant trees, and creatures of all shapes and sizes. And given the advances in rocketry that were going on at the time, it seemed only a matter of time before man would land on Venus. But these science fiction dreams were long on the fiction and short on the science. Sooner or later, the facts had to catch up.

  “In 1962, we launched Mariner 2. We discovered some things we don’t like about Venus. The surface is around 800 degrees Fahrenheit, for instance, which is one of the reasons we won’t be able to land any time soon. This happens in part because the atmosphere is full of thick carbon dioxide, which creates a greenhouse effect, trapping heat from the sun’s rays.

  “But there is still room for hope. One of our scientists, a man named Carl Sagan, thinks we might be able to introduce genetically modified bacteria that would reverse this effect, removing carbon from the atmosphere and creating oxygen, much the way plants do for us on Earth. Also, since the atmosphere is so thick, we could potentially float massive balloons using ordinary oxygen. Humanity’s never attempted anything remotely like this, and it may be beyond our abilities for some years to come. But we owe it to ourselves not just to dream big dreams, but to put in the work it takes to make them real. Centuries from now, some of our ancestors might be living in the Venusian atmosphere, floating under massive blimps, or even creating cities in the clouds.”

  Shepard puts down the camera; I can tell he’s impressed.

  “There we go,” Kerwin says.

  “Some of our descendents,” I point out.

  He doesn’t understand the correction. “Descendents?”

  “You said ‘Centuries from now, some of our ancestors…’ I think you mean ‘some of our descendents.’ Our ancestors are never gonna make it to Venus unless we dig them up.”

  Kerwin shakes his head. “Man, it’s always the little things.”

  “We’ll fix it in post-production,” Shepard says.

  “I can rerecord that that last little bit,” Kerwin offers. “Maybe they can splice together the audio, put some visuals over it.”

  “We don’t have a lot of visuals,” I point out.

  “He has given ‘em enough to fantasize, at least,” Shepard says.

  “Well, yo
u do have a walk outside coming up.” Kerwin gives me a little smile. “You can provide the visuals.”

  •••

  “Spacecraft’s getting gross,” I observe as I pass out the food trays.

  “A little,” Shepard replies, which seems to me to be a quintessential bit of New England understatement.

  We’ve been keeping up with the housework as best we can. After every meal, our trash goes in the vacuum airlock, which we’ve been rigorously maintaining so it won’t get jammed up; on the other side of that, our debris ends up in an expandable net, exposed to the vacuum of space, sterile and hygienic. And we wipe everything down in the mess area as best we can. But there’s a good amount of food spatter inside the grating for the intake vent; every little fleck of mashed potatoes or pureed carrots that misses our mouths ends up circulating up there eventually. And while the lack of gravity means the toilet doesn’t have quite the same spatter issues one might expect from three men living on their own, there have been…accumulations in the tubing.

  “We should really remove that kitchen grating eventually,” I suggest.

  “I’m afraid to remove that grating. We might have an unknown lifeform lurking up in there.”

  I give him a look.

  “We’ll do it, we’ll do it. The rest of the ship’s still gonna smell like a locker room, though.”

  “Probably,” I concede.

  We haven’t been using the shower much. Obviously it was designed with zero-g in mind, and we have decent reserves of stored liquid hydrogen and oxygen in the manned module to generate water as needed, but cleaning yourself with water clinging to your body, and then vacuuming it off of you, makes for an annoying and time-consuming process. So we’ve generally stuck to wiping ourselves down with washcloths every few days. And for clothing, we have limited-use garments, but they don’t go in the airlock, so the odors have definitely accumulated.

  “I’m starting to smell us. That’s bad,” Kerwin chimes in.

  “Jim Lovell said when he and Frank were up there for two weeks, he didn’t notice how bad they smelled until after splashdown, when the recovery crews cracked open the spacecraft and…recoiled in horror.”