“That was a fantastic delivery job, guys,” Crippen says when they’re all in. “This is a remarkable day for planetary science.”
“And we can stop looking around for a landing site,” I joke, and there is silence. I’ve been so caught up in the communal feeling of shared work that I’ve momentarily forgotten how far away they are.
By the time the lander deployments are starting, we’ve finished telescope observations, and rotated back to look at Venus through the main window. I take a few pictures but then stop. What’s the point? I don’t know what I’m feeling about this planet. Not longing, but maybe something else. What could it be, if it could be something different? But it isn’t, and it can’t be. We know that no one will ever go.
“Hell of a scene,” Shepard says at last.
“It is hell, maybe,” Kerwin observes.
“The moon looked uninviting.” I reply. “This looks...innocuous. But it’s worse. Back there, you knew you could go everywhere. You can’t go anywhere here.”
“Explorer, Houston. Landers are entering the atmosphere,” Crippen cuts in.
“Houston, Explorer. We copy. Looking forward to seeing some pictures from the surface,” I say; the landers are probably my favorite probes, little mechanical tourists that are going where we can’t, and taking pictures to show us what we’re missing.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Kerwin says. “You figure any kind of thick atmosphere, how would you be able to land and return?”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, it took all we had to land on the moon,” he goes on. “All the weight they could shave off the LM, all the engineering they could manage, just to land on an airless place with one sixth the Earth’s gravity. And since Venus is almost Earth’s size, and it has an atmosphere, you’d practically need to land a Saturn V on the planet to get back home.”
“We’d figure something out eventually.” I do still want it to be true. “Balloons to get you off the surface, then launch from altitude. Or make it a one-way trip. Just drop in with everything you need. And Earth could send a supply drop every year or so.”
“Jesus, Buzz. Now that would be a lonely life,” Shepard concludes.
“Gentlemen, we’ve lost the landers.” Crippen’s voice is as flat as East Texas.
There is a pang in my chest, and we sing a chorus of damns and shits and fucks.
Crippen, meanwhile, is continuing, oblivious. “…malous wind readings suggesting chute failure, but the instruments started cutting out as well, somewhere above 30,000 feet for both.”
“Houston, Explorer, we copy loss of the landers,” Shepard says flatly. “Apologies if you caught some foul language. Hope you closed your ears before it got there.”
It’s quite a kick in the nuts. These would have been the first pictures from the surface of another planet. I try to put it out of my mind. We continue with the observations, determining wind direction at different latitudes, speculating about atmospheric thickness.
All the while, the planet looms larger and larger and larger.
We work with the anxious knowledge that it is all happening, Venus is rushing towards us; we see it full in glances out the window between bouts of science, a golf ball and a baseball before, and now a basketball, a beach ball, and we have only this one chance to get it all right, to justify our existence, all the millions spent to put us here for these few brief minutes.
And at last we get the call: “Explorer, Houston. Estimating periapsis in five minutes. Altitude: six hundred sixty miles. Velocity just shy of fifteen thousand miles per hour relative to the planet’s surface, just over forty thousand miles per hour compared to us on planet Earth. Fastest men alive.”
Kerwin doesn’t say anything, but simply lifts his face from the eyepiece and floats over to the window. I take my eyes off the gauges and head over as well.
Outside, the planet’s massive, an off-white wall of lightly-streaked clouds, so bright it’s hard to really look at it, so close we can only see the horizons when we’re pressed against the side of the cabin.
“Don’t fog up the windows, guys,” Shepard says as he joins us.
“Time to flat-hat the Venusians, huh?” Kerwin asks. “I don’t think we’ll see beaches or bikinis.”
“You never know,” Shepard smiles.
I’m about to say something, too, when I think better of it. What are words, compared to this? So I just float there, my forehead inches from the glass, from emptiness.
And here we are, arranged around the window as the planet stretches out beneath us. It’s massive now, about 120 degrees of our entire field of view. We are fully over the sunward side, so we can no longer see the terminator, just pure brightness, and it hurts my eyes, like a snow-covered field when the sun’s out and you’ve been inside all day, but in spite of the brightness we can see very slight bits of texture down there, some very small gradation between the darker streaks and the brighter areas. But it doesn’t look anything like when you’re above the clouds on Earth, because here the details are brownish, not silvery-gray; this enormous expanse of wispy cloudscape truly is an alien world. And for whatever issues I’ve had with my crewmates, I feel connected now, one with them, at peace in the face of this gigantic accomplishment. And I’d been afraid that it would be anticlimactic, but it is not that at all, it’s something big and real and unique and amazing and inconceivable, and I’m feeling all of these things but also that sense that I need to remember it now, I need to burn this image into my retinas and etch it into my brain because it will never be there again, and the pictures won’t be able to do it justice, the sheer massive scale of it all; they’ll probably just look like solid white rectangles, and anyway, they always somehow fail to capture things that are this big. (You can’t look at the pictures and feel exactly what you felt; you can only get echoes of the original feeling, fading with time. And more importantly, no one else can feel that same “Oh, wow!” They might say it anyway, but you know they can’t feel it, because if they did, they wouldn’t ask what it felt like, and you wouldn’t need to find the words.)
Of course, none of us want to stay, but we want a few more minutes. Just a few more minutes, and the chance to leave at our leisure. But maybe it’s better that we can’t; maybe it’s better to be left unsatisfied.
“Explorer, Houston, hope you guys have been getting a good look around. We’re getting telemetry from the orbiter and floaters. The orbiter is in a stable orbit and we’ll be starting its radar soon. In the meantime, we are all set up for downlink, so you can take care of the TV broadcast.”
“Houston, Explorer, we copy you are ready for us to transmit.”
“They’re not going to be able to really see anything out the windows,” I point out.
“Yeah, we might want to get the horizon in there, at least,” Kerwin chimes in.
Shepard plugs in a few commands to rotate the spacecraft. Kerwin retrieves the camera, then takes position next to me, in front of the window. He looks a little surprised I’m up here.
“You got this?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
Behind us, there’s a white band of horizon, stark against the blackness. I can’t imagine it’ll look like much on TV. Shepard gives me the signal.
“Greetings, planet Earth! We’re over 40 million miles away from you now, passing the planet Venus at over 4 miles per second. We can’t stay and take our time observing it, unfortunately, so we have to cram in observations while we can. But we wanted to take a quick break from that so all of you could get a look at our nearest planetary neighbor.” I feel the need to sell this planet, to convince people of its worth, even though we’re not convinced.
Shepard bobs weightlessly, the bore of the camera aimed at me like a gun.
“It’s a harsh place, and we already know it has a fairly inhospitable environment, but perhaps your grandchildren or their grandchildren will be able to live there someday, either because we’ve terraformed the planet, or because we’ve built floating
cities high in the atmosphere.” And it hits me again how we now know this won’t happen. Suddenly I feel self-conscious, like a used car salesman trying to sell something I wouldn’t buy; I’m wishing I hadn’t taken this mission, wishing I’d held out for Mars. “Uhh…Joe, did you have anything to say?”
This catches Kerwin off-guard. But he catches up quickly. “It isn’t always easy to see the value in a place like Venus, a place we’re not sure about. But it is in man’s nature to explore, to see what’s out there, to find out whether or not there’s something better. And that’s why we explore, because we don’t know what we’re going to find. Because we have questions and not answers. And it’s better to know the answers than to spend a lifetime wondering.”
Shepard puts the camera down. “Well done, Joe.”
I look back at Venus, this coffee-stained ball now falling away from view, the shadowed side creeping our way again. We still haven’t been able to touch it, not really. So it’s a sad scene now, in a way: a massive empty world, a thick hot sulfuric acid atmosphere covering: what? Rock? Volcanoes? Craters? The orbiter and the floaters are still alive, and they’ll tell us more, at least; there is still hope for some sort of single-celled life floating up there in the high atmosphere. But somehow now the overall reality of Venus is sinking in, in a way it never had before: it’s a big hopeless void, a place that can never be home, with nothing manmade on the surface but the metal carcasses of a few dead machines.
•••
Although it has been a long and demanding day, I cannot just turn off my mind at the end of it. This is it; I’ve seen the greatest thing I’ll see on the trip, and thanks to the godawful realities of orbital mechanics, I’ve seen it after less than four months of travel, with another eight to go before we get home.
“Early climax,” I say as we finish up on the main deck. “I hate that.”
“Look, Buzz, you should probably keep those problems between you and your wife,” Shepard quips.
“It is odd,” Kerwin says. “If this was a story, it’d break every rule of good storytelling. Rising action, a high point near the end…we’re not even a third of the way through the trip.”
“Maybe that’s life,” I reply. “All the excitement comes early, and then there’s this…long dull slog for the last several decades.”
“Jesus, Buzz,” Shepard says, for what must be the millionth time. “Doctor Kerwin, for the overall crew morale, I’m recommending that we keep him outside for the remainder of the voyage.”
“All right, all right, I’ll try to be less of a downer,” I say, then force a little brightness into my tone. “I guess it’s not so bad. We can spend it in the hibernation chambers, right?”
“Hibernation chambers?”
“Yeah, Deke promised me we could put ourselves in suspended animation for the next eight months.” I pause, as if I really believe it. “Wait. That is the plan, right? Sleep for the rest of the mission?”
Kerwin laughs. “Sorry. They didn’t get those installed in time. We’re gonna have to tough it out. And hey, we’ve got the EVA tomorrow, Mercury observations after that, then the deep space stuff…”
It is true. There is at least more to do. There is always more to do.
“I am glad we’re here,” Kerwin continues. “It’s better to know than to spend your life wondering.”
“It is better to know,” Shepard says. “It’s like…when you see a hot woman from across the room. You can spend the rest of the night wondering what she’s really like, or go talk to her. Sometimes it turns out she’s…kinda plain.”
This gets me smiling. “Yeah, Venus, I guess she’s hot, but she’s not.”
Shepard chuckles. “I prefer the phrase: ‘Good from far, but far from good.’”
“And we’re all married anyway,” Kerwin muses, and that’s the end of that.
I steal away to the bathroom, and take a look at myself in the mirror. The dark spot on my neckline is still there. I wonder if it’s cancer and, if so, if all this is worth it.
I tell myself to keep my spirits up. The next weeks will at least be interesting. We’re going to be relatively close to Mercury, 0.59 AU now, and even less as the planet catches up to us. There’s a whole program of telescopic observation scheduled; we should soon be close enough to see some surface details, at least.
Still…Venus…
Down in the sleeping area, I root around in my fireproof book bag for that Ray Bradbury collection, and turn again to “All Summer in a Day.” Again I read about the schoolchildren on that unknown jungle planet version of Venus that’s stuck in near-perpetual rain; I imagine their faces tight against the classroom windows, hoping to see the sun.
It had been raining for seven years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and filled from one end to the other with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus, and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
I feel the soft scrape of yellowed paper on my fingers; the book smells vaguely dusty. And suddenly I’m overcome with this slackness, this heavy sense of the falseness and pointlessness of it all. I’m floating here in a hanging cocoon, with a fan stirring the air in front of my face so my own carbon dioxide doesn’t accumulate around me and suffocate me in my sleep. The planet we’re leaving behind is so different than the one I’m reading about that they only really share a name.
But even though I know the one on the pages doesn’t exist, can never exist, I can’t help but prefer it to the real one.
I burrow deeper in the book; my senses fall away and I’m enchanted by Bradbury’s vision, a lush and gray and writhing jungle under the Venusian clouds. I read on, and spend a few blissful minutes lost in the beautiful lies.
•••
“Good morning, Explorer. Here are the top stories for today, July 23rd, 1972, straight from the AP wires. In space news, you flew past Venus, marking man’s first encounter with a planet. So that was exciting for some of us.”
“Hooray for us,” I say to nobody in particular.
“…eanwhile, back on Earth, North Vietnamese Army units are advancing in the Central Highlands in what now appears to be a full-scale offensive meant to cut South Vietnam in half. Many refugees are attempting to flee Da Nang for the relative safety of Saigon; Pan Am and TWA are reporting flights clogged with passengers, and some even stowing away in aircraft wheel wells. There has been no official comment from the White House, but President Johnson is rumored to be contemplating U.S. airstrikes in support of the beleaguered South Vietnamese forces, despite Congress’s vote earlier this year to rescind the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and protests across the countr…”
“Jesus Christ,” Shepard mutters.
The transmission continues, an ongoing litany of troubles in Vietnam and Ireland and elsewhere.
•••
I still have the spacewalk, at least.
Within a few hours, we are back in the command module, suited up; we have run through all of the checklists, and we’re ready for the final depressurization. Beyond my nose and the helmet glass, the central hatch window beckons, metal gleaming in the sunlight.
At last, the words arrive: “Explorer, Houston, you are GO for depress.”
Shepard answers: “Roger, Houston, the side hatch dump valve is coming open.”
“Pressure coming down,” I narrate for their benefit as our atmosphere hisses away. “3.5. 3.3. 2.9…”
“Readying the camera,” Shepard says.
“…1.8. 1.3...” The air sound is fading. “…0.7. 0.2. 0.0.” Outside my helmet, everything still looks innocuous, but there is that nagging knowledge that it’s hostile now, that one simple turn of a valve wo
uld be fatal. But it’s best not to dwell on these things. “And we are ready to begin.”
“Go ahead and unlatch,” Shepard commands.
I depress the safety lock and squeeze the handle, then gently push the hatch. It opens wide, like a mouth trying to swallow the emptiness.
“And the hatch is open. Jettison bag 1…”
Kerwin hands me a Beta cloth bag full of odds and ends, broken equipment and debris that we hadn’t wanted to put through the trash airlock. Holding on, I ease myself upwards and float a little out of the hatch and look around.
I’m surrounded by stillness, by this tremendous infinite space, and the bright distant sun off low to my right like a giant stage light. There is a pang in my chest. Would Joan call it stage fright? This is opening night, in a sense, and I haven’t rehearsed in months. But I stop and take a breath. Any tension must be in me, for there is none outside, for there is nothing.
I look around again; it’s amazing, disorienting and supreme, and it takes a moment to find what I’m looking for. Venus is of course behind us, trajectory-wise, but given our orientation, it looks like it’s far above, a swollen crescent. With the golden outer visor down, it’s dimmer than normal, and I can’t see as much, but then I flip that up for a second and am overwhelmed by the vastness, stars and galaxies living and bright, and this little alien planet we’ve just flown past, a half-shadowed marble, a fat drop of milk with a little coffee swirled in.
Below, I feel hands on my toes. I look down past the white bag and the snaking umbilical, and I see the top of Kerwin’s helmet, and his gloved fingers. “Just making sure you don’t kick any switches,” he says.
“Roger. Especially ‘Manned Module Jettison.’”
“I think there’s a cover on that one,” he chuckles.
Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3) Page 13