I imagine a mess of food down in the bowels of the pantry magazines, exploded food packets spoiling in the open air after exposure to whatever germs or microbes we’re carrying with us. Maybe the air has been smelling different, and maybe this is why. How will it play out? Like some bad shipwreck movie, maybe, one of those ones where there are four or five people adrift on a lifeboat on the high seas with two chocolate bars and a jug of water and they have to eat one little square and drink a capful of water every day, so they start fishing and trying to gather rainwater…but of course for us this isn’t the sea, it’s emptiness…
There is no point panicking. I know this. I’m aware of all the possibilities. We all are. Being brave doesn’t mean being unaware of danger, it means facing danger, which I’m doing, and taking action, which I’m not doing yet. And you need information to take action: speculation won’t do.
I am waiting for the radio to come back on. Waiting for a distraction from all of this. And yet I also wish it wasn’t communications time; I wish I had time to really investigate this. We need to do an inspection, figure out whether this is really happening...
“Explorer, Houston, everyone’s assembled here at last, and you’re all set.” A cheerful voice, distant and oblivious, jarringly disconnected from my problems. “We’re handing off the mike to…well, Mike.”
I cock my head towards the radio, but I can’t give it all my attention, not right now; I’m floating down towards the floor to inspect the smear of food…and it is food, mashed potatoes, and as I open the pantry door, I can see that it is coming from a burst packet, one I can just barely see at the bottom of the stack that’s pushing up through the pantry magazine…
“Hey, dad. I’m sorry we’re late. I know how important it is to be on time for these windows. Mom is really sorry, too. She had a play rehearsal, and she had a flat tire heading home, so she had to walk to the gas station and use their pay phone to get ahold of me…”
“I…” I want to interject, but of course it’s pointless; I bite my tongue and listen. Or try to listen: I imagine us inventorying the remainder of the food and rationing the remainder carefully, realizing that we have enough food for one or two of us but not all three, but still of course trying to keep all three of us alive, wasting away for the next eight months, starving slowly, or drawing straws to decide…no, this is still speculation.
“…over.” When I hear this, I realize I’ve missed the last of whatever Mike was saying, and now I’m wondering if I should tell them that we have to postpone the rest of the conversation while I sort this out. Then I think: No, I don’t want them to get everyone all worked up…
“Houston, Explorer. It’s…uhh…” (I realize I sound distracted, unenthused.) “…it’s great to hear from you guys! Mike, it’s still hard for me to believe you’re driving everyone now. I trust you’re driving responsibly and setting a good example; it won’t be long before your brother and your sister are behind the wheel…”
As I talk, I’m thinking about how we’re going to inventory the food now, too: should we unload the magazine from the top? That would take a while. Then again, maybe there’s a way to remove the panels from the hallway floor, a simple screw removal, although the screwdriver is in the tool kit in the equipment bay of the command module…
I talk distractedly with the kids, asking about reporters; I am a little curious to see if there’s anyone staking out the house yet. But mostly I’m just waiting for the conversation to be over so I can let Shepard know what’s going on. And as soon as I’m done talking, I stick my head down there and summon him.
“A burst food packet?” He looks up at me perplexedly through the hatchway.
“There could be a lot more. It’s at the bottom of the stack, we don’t even know what’s going on beneath it.”
“I’m sure it’s fine. There’s dividers in there, everything was fine on the test mission…”
I cut him off. “That was three months. We’ve been up here four. We need to pull up the panels, take a look down there. Maybe do an inventory.”
“Jesus, Buzz.”
“I know it’s not something we want to do tonight, but…”
“No, it’s not.” His gaze freezes over. “We do not have time for this. Flyby is tomorrow. If there is a problem, it’ll still be here after that.”
He turns away, and I close the curtain to the sleeping chamber. According to my watch, my words are still racing to Earth, an invisible smattering of radio waves struggling through the darkness. So I’ve got a few minutes. I float up to the command module to try and find the toolkit, at least…
•••
“Explorer, Houston! Good morning from planet Earth. It is Saturday, July 22rd, 1972, the day of the great Venus flyby, and here’s the news from back home.” Crippen’s capcom again; his voice is smooth and comfortable and familiar. “Fighting is intensifying in the central highlands of South Vietnam between Republic of Vietnam forces and regular units of the North Vietnamese Army. The Johnson Administration is reportedly weighing a request from the South Vietnamese government for military assistance in beating back the attacks. Meanwhile, the North is threatening a full-scale offensive should the United States re-enter the war.”
“Protests erupted in major American cities yesterday, inspired by rumors of renewed American involvement. In Washington, D.C, hundreds of thousands gathered on the Mall, while in Chicago, protestors clashed with police in scenes reminiscent of the 1968 Democratic convention.”
“California Governor Ronald Reagan, the presumptive Republican nominee, strongly criticized the Johnson Administration’s handling of the war, saying the withdrawal of U.S. forces during the peace process has effectively given the communists a free hand in Southeast Asia. Reagan said it is time for new and strong leadership, but did not say whether he favored reintroduction of U.S. ground forces should the fighting continue.”
“A series of bombs ripped across Belfast yesterday, killing nine people and injuring over a hundred others. As many as twenty devices went off in the space of eighty minutes, plunging the city center into what one observer described as ‘total chaos.’ British authorities say the devices…” (Crackle.) “…r to have been planted by the Irish Republican Army in response to the breakdown of peace talks. July is now shaping up to be the most violent month in Northern Ireland since the current round of troubles began three years ago.”
“And the crew of the Inner Solar System Exploration Mission is nearing the planet Venus after a four-month voyage, with a flyby and spacewalk scheduled for today and tomorrow.” Crippen pauses, then deadpans. “Son of a gun. How about that.”
“Glad to see we made the papers, at least,” I observe, as Crippen rattles off the baseball scores.
Kerwin and I float up through the tunnel and into the command module so we can start the morning’s checklist. The cameras attached to the telescope have been clicking away all night in automatic mode; we have to activate the additional flyby instrumentation in the equipment bay on the side of the service module, the mapping radar and the infrared cameras.
“Instrumentation panel, pushing circuit breakers 6, 7, 8 and 9,” I read.
“Here we go. 6, 7, 8, 9,” Kerwin replies.
The flyby itself won’t be until the late evening, but given the tight timeline and the speed of our approach, we are eager to confirm everything’s up and running. Also, at this point in our trajectory, we are still able to make observations on the dark side of the terminator, the line separating the sunlit side of a heavenly body from the part that’s in shadow.
“Indicators are all gray,” Kerwin calls out.
“And we are transmitting data,” I add.
When I float back into the manned module, Shepard is hovering right there in the pantry hallway, looking at the floor plates and scowling. He’s topsy-turvy relative to me, of course.
“Hey, we’ve finally turned that frown upside-down,” I joke.
“What happened to this panel?” he asks, poking nea
r the base of the pantry stacks.
I don’t say anything.
“Did you crack open the floor panel last night, Buzz?”
There’s no point avoiding this. And none of us got to where we were by being dishonest in uncomfortable situations. So: “Yep.”
He glares. “What did I say last night?”
“We don’t have time for this right now,” I say. “It’s almost time for the flyby. If there is a problem, it’ll still be there tomorrow.” I’m quoting him; there’s a vague part of me that suspects this isn’t the wisest or most professional thing to do.
Sure enough, he looks about as mad as I’ve seen him. His jaw clenches, and at last he says: “We do not have time for this right now.”
“Great! I agree completely.” I try to float past, to get back to the work. When he doesn’t budge, I explain: “You said we don’t have time for an inventory. So I didn’t do an inventory. I pulled up the panel to take a look. I couldn’t see too much.”
Again he glares.
“Look, I…” I stop. There’s obviously no point explaining this to him. “We don’t have time for this now. We’ll talk about this later.”
“We most certainly will,” he says.
Kerwin and I take up positions by the telescope console. “All right, let’s focus here,” he says with a little grin.
“Yes, focus,” I echo. “Focus focus focus.”
But first I look out the window, and I get chills. Venus is right there, 250,000 miles away but closing fast, as big as the Earth from the moon; it’s taking up more than two degrees of sky now, very bright on the sunward side, close enough now I can see at last that it is not pure white, more like a stained cue ball, with faint smudges stretching as far as we can see. And whatever issues I’ve had with the mission, no one has ever seen this like this, not in all of human history, and that at least counts for something.
“Switching to VOX,” I say: time for the play-by-play. Then: “Houston, Explorer, we are beginning today’s visual observations. From what we see of the sunward side, the planet is completely covered in cirrus clouds, with no breaks whatsoever. There’s very little differentiation visible; the color ranges from a pure white to a tan off-white, almost like a coffee stain. There are a couple cloud bands parallel to the Equator that appear to encircle the planet completely. There’s a whitish one near the planet’s north pole, and a whiter one close to the south pole. That band of clouds is between about 60 and 65 degrees of latitude, and it stretches from the terminator all the way around the sunward side. And…” (I find myself at a loss for words; what else is there to say about it?) “…we’re going to take some pictures with the Hasselblad.”
We are moving fast now, almost three-and-a-half miles per second relative to Venus. But it doesn’t feel like we’re zooming towards it; it’s more like watching your watch, how you only really notice the change when you look away. I raise the camera and snap a few shots.
“That should be good for now,” Shepard says, even though I’ve barely started. “We’re gonna go ahead and rotate the spacecraft to begin telescopic observations.” Before either of us can agree, he punches commands into the computer, and Venus moves back out of sight.
“All right, then.” I put the lens cap on and place the camera in the air over our heads.
“All right,” Kerwin announces. “I have coordinates. Steering the telescope onto the terminator.” As he moves the controller, we can see the picture changing on the console TV monitors. “Picking up some cloud details through the telescope. It’s hard to see much.”
“Should we try the spectroheliograph? Might be better detail.”
“Worth a shot.” He turns the dial on the console, then throws the switches to change the TV inputs. The streaks in the clouds now look darker, more pronounced. “There we go. Much better in UV. Near the poles, the cloud streaks seem more or less continuous, and it looks like they are going around the entire circumference. I count maybe…seven or eight streaks between the south pole and, oh, we’ll say forty-five degrees latitude…”
I do the math. A circumference of 37,000 miles gives you about 103 miles per degree of latitude, and eight streaks in forty-five degrees comes out to 5.65 degrees per streak, which means each streak is over five hundred miles wide…
“That’s gotta be pretty heavy winds at altitude, to make those patterns,” Kerwin observes.
“Say goodbye to your floating cities,” Shepard smirks.
I give him a look. “Let’s wait and see what the probes have to say, at least.”
•••
Meanwhile the probes have been ranging on ahead of us. I’ve been tracking them on the VHF, listening to the lonely metallic beeps as the dropsondes peeled off from their delivery vehicle and began their staggered deployment sequence. Thanks to the solid rockets, the first one’s now more than 100,000 miles ahead of us, and by the time we’re done with lunch, it’s getting ready to enter the Venusian atmosphere; per the mission plan, we have set up our S-Band antennae to retransmit their data back to Earth. We don’t have the means to decipher it ourselves, so we’re stuck listening to Crippen narrating it all after the fact.
“Terminator probe…seeing some heavy deceleration.” As he starts his delayed play-by-play, we divide our attention, ears perked up for the distant voices in our headsets as we continue our telescope observations of the advancing planet. “9 gs. Communications blackout.” I imagine the heat shield ablating in the flame of the alien atmosphere, ionized gasses blocking transmission. We continue to work. Then, a couple minutes later: “And we’re back. 2 gs. Still slowing.” And finally: “1 g. And we have parachute deployment. Everything holding steady. We’re calling it a clean deployment.”
“All right.” I exhale. It’s only one of six, but still, that’s something. The others nod a little.
(Crackle.) “…re getting good telemetry. Estimating 2 degrees south Venusian latitude. Altitude a little over 92,000 feet.”
“How about that,” Shepard says.
We get back to work, observing the coffee-colored cirrus streaks of the high-altitude clouds, trying to cobble together a picture of the Venusian weather patterns. The floaters will tell us more, but I’m starting to suspect it’s a very windy place.
Crippen’s distant play-by-play cuts back in. “Atmospheric pressure 1.25 atmospheres. Temperature 175 degrees Fahrenheit and rising.”
“Little balmy,” Kerwin says.
“No kidding.” I glance at the telescope screen. What it would be like in a floating city here? Thick and hot. A desert city above the clouds where you’d need a mask just to go outside and feel the sun on your skin. A scuba dive in the sky, but unpleasantly warm. Would you bother having streets? Maybe balloons full of air with habitation modules beneath, and tunnels linking all the modules. But of course, if the wind speeds are too high, you couldn’t hold together something that big; a little turbulence would tear it to shreds…
As if he’s reading my mind, Crippen comes back on. “Wind speeds…based on the data, they’re saying close to 200 miles per hour. 2 atmospheres now. 240 degrees Fahrenheit.”
“Ouch.”
Shepard chimes in: “That’s, what? Tornado speeds.”
“Severe tornado, extremely severe hurricane,” Kerwin says. “Across the whole planet, I’d bet.”
I don’t want to say it out loud, but Shepard was right: no floating cities. A single balloon with a module might be a possibility. With a small enough structure, you could float along with the winds and they wouldn’t be as noticeable…
“4.8 atmospheres, temperature 300 degrees.”
Then again, you’d need something to power your instruments if you were staying up there for any length of time. Solar panels wouldn’t work with winds like that; you’d also be at risk of drifting onto the nightward side of the planet, getting stuck in the doldrums like some 18th century frigate…you’d have to try to use radiothermal generators, like on the floaters…but you’d still have to get back up int
o orbit at some point…
“335 degrees, 5.6 atmospheres.”
“And we’re still pretty high up, right?” Kerwin asks.
(Crackle.) “…8 atmospheres now and 394 degrees.”
“Yeah,” I answer.
“9.4 atmospheres, 480 degrees. And we’ve lost signal. Altitude just below 60,000 feet. They are printing out and analyzing the atmospheric composition data. We should have some numbers for you shortly.”
“Houston, Explorer, we copy. If it’s like that at altitude, I hate to think what it’s like on the surface,” Shepard calls.
A couple minutes later, Crippen’s back. “And we have some composition numbers for you: CO2, nine six point four percent. N2, three point five percent, just over a hundredth of a percent of sulfur dioxide, possibly sulfuric acid, even less water vapor.”
“Not much hydrogen,” Kerwin observes, with a nod towards the radio.
I float around to face him. “What do you mean?”
“All that talk of terraforming, you’d need enough water for photosynthesis. You’ve got plenty of CO2, but if the water’s that limited...” Kerwin trails off in a way that seems to say: it’s hopeless. “We are looking at a very hot and dry and nasty planet.”
It is depressing. Whatever notions we’ve entertained about our nearest neighbor now seem like foolish fantasies. We work on. I do not feel quite as energetic as I had in the morning. It’s something else that keeps us going now: duty, rather than hope.
Over the course of the afternoon, the other probes follow in succession: a dark side one halfway between the terminator and the antisolar point, another on the light side, yet another at the antisolar point, one more at the subsolar, and one near the north pole. The temperature readings are remarkably consistent, even on the dark side. And everywhere, high winds.
Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3) Page 12