Battle on Venus
William F. Temple
Battle On Venus
by
William F. Temple
3S XHTML edition 1.0
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contents
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THE ASTRONAUTS WERE EVERYONE’S TARGETS
Earth’s first spaceship to Venus landed amidst a war where strange weapons like the archaic ones used in the old wars on Earth in the Twentieth Century hurled shells at each other. Rut this war had lasted over a thousand years—and by remote control!
George Starkey had to find a way to stop the war before the little group of astronauts became early casualties. But how? Where were the headquarters of the contending sides and how do you tell a robot tank that you’re neutral?
But George had an ally, a Venusian girl who thought stealing was virtuous—and, unknowingly, he had something else that turned out to be the most valuable substance on Venus—a box of chocolate bars!
Turn this book over for second complete novel (proofers note: The Suns Of Amara available as a separate ebook) WILLIAM F. TEMPLE is a London-born Englishman, who was publishing science-fiction long before it became a respectable word. His youthful friends and fellow-authors were Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, and John Christopher. Before World War II the Temple-Clarke flat was the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society (Temple edited its Journal). Then, space travel was regarded as beyond the lunatic fringe. Now, the B.I.S is as respectable as science-fiction. Temple still lives in hopes of becoming respectable also.
He has had numerous science-fiction stories published on both sides of the Atlantic, and many have been anthologized. Besides four science-fiction novels, he has published a straight book on space travel, and a crime thriller.
He has written a good deal of (intentionally) juvenile general fiction, and has two children of his own.
For a brief dark space he was an editor but prefers to pretend it never happened.
ACE BOOKS
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
BATTLE ON VENUS
Copyright © 1963, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved First Ace printing: April, 1963 Second Ace printing: June, 1973
printed as ACE DOUBLE #76380 with THE SUNS OF AMARA Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
I
ON EVERY roll his name was entered as “Captain J. Freiburg.” He signed his checks “J. Freiburg.” Friends called him “Cap” or simply “J.”
He never let on, unless he had to, what “J” stood for. He’d always been sensitive about it and now he was downright superstitious about it. His given name was Jonah; he’d wrecked a ship once, and right now he had a hunch he was on the point of wrecking another. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. It wasn’t a question of skill: he was skillful enough. It was a question of luck. He’d used up a lot of luck on this trip, and he felt the last drops of it oozing away through his boot soles.
Inside the spaceship, the light was becoming unbearably bright. Freiburg felt he was standing at the focus point of a score of naked arc lamps. Meter dials shone like mirrors and defied reading. Handrails blazed like rods of white fire—a man hesitated to grasp them.
But it was all just light, nothing more. The temperature hadn’t risen a single degree, even though the ship was twenty-six million miles nearer the sun than their native Earth: the air-conditioning was that good. Freiburg cupped his hand around the chronometer, shielding it from the glare. He calculated that, at the present rate of deceleration, the ship would reach, tail first, the outer wisps of the clouds of Venus in about fourteen minutes. He said into the mike: “Fasten glare shields.”
From a loud-speaker the mate’s voice acknowledged.
Slowly, with a hand made heavy by two g’s, Freiburg reached out to his cabin’s solitary porthole. He swung an amber disk to cover the quartz, fastened it with a snap. The joint glare from the Venusian albedo and the sun itself was softened into a cool lemon light.
He recalled a time when as a boy he was on an Atlantic liner which ran into heavy sea mist. There was other shipping around. The liner crawled, hooting. Answering warnings sounded from the blank white curtain on all sides. The boy pictured the anxious skipper on the bridge and didn’t envy him. But he trusted him. The skipper, he thought, wouldn’t hold such a position if he weren’t equal to the job. They’d come through, all right. And they did. Now he was the skipper, with his ship about to enter impenetrable cloud. His TV screen showed only that same blank white curtain. But he was in a trickier position than that sea captain. He could neither stop his ship nor reverse it, not now. He’d handed it over to the computer. It was dealing with the mass and speed of the ship, the mass of Venus, and the readings of the radar altimeter. He trusted the computer but not the altimeter. At this distance its measurements were relatively coarse.
The needle flickered indecisively over whole divisions marking a hundred metres. It would fine up as they neared the ground. But if it were just one division out, that could be equivalent to dropping the ship from a height of better than ninety metres—say 300 feet—on Earth.
It would do the ship no good at all, to say nothing of its crew. If only he could see the ground, he would feel happier bringing the ship down by manual control. But the current theory was that the clouds of Venus extended clear to the ground. Hence the handover to instruments. But he didn’t feel he’d handed over his responsibility as part of a package deal. The crew believed that he, personally, was responsible for their safety. That was okay so long as he had complete control and knew what was happening. It was the unexpected or inexplicable events which tended to throw him. He had a deep-rooted hate of the unknown quantity. It seldom turned out to be in his favor. He trusted himself, but not his luck. Gambling lost him that earlier ship. The gale had passed, he risked the take-off, and the gale promptly rushed back like a fury and smacked the ship into a side-slip. There were other near-disasters through unlucky timing and freak happenings.
Yes, his name was Jonah.
And he was losing his nerve and getting too old for pioneering. If he came through this last and most dangerous adventure, he’d retire. George Starkoy came in, working his way slowly along the handrail and sagging a bit at the knees—from two g’s, not from age. Starkey had yet to experience the fading optimism and the growing anxiety of middle age.
“Well, Skip, here goes—third and last strike.”
There was no disciplining Starkey. He wasn’t one of the crew. He was a professional explorer: tenacious, resourceful—and lucky. He’d done enough good work on Mars to qualify for inclusion in this first attempt to make Venus. He had an unquenchable thirst to learn what was on the other side of the hill. Sheer curiosity gave him unflagging energy.
The Captain made no answer to the obvious remark. George looked at the infra-red visi-plate. It showed only a few vague and spotty shadows. He said: “A lot of help that is. If that’s the best it can do, I guess it must be true the clouds reach all the way down.”
“Maybe, Starkey. Or maybe it means the clouds themselves are thick with floating particles.”
“Atmospheric dust?”
The Captain shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe chemical powder on the loose. There’s plenty of carbon dioxide there—but what else?”
“We’ll soon know when Firkin gets his specimen.”
George sank into a sprung chair. The braking drive was steadily increasing. Talking became difficult and they both fell silent. The Captain thought back to his home in Vermont, the porch and the rocking chair, the view of distant woods. George thought forward to Venus. These minutes of e
xcited anticipation; these formed the crown of life. He was one hundred per cent energized.
Venus was the real surprise parcel of the solar system, and yet, excepting the moon, it was Earth’s nearest neighbor. Mars had been interesting, but you knew too much about it before you got there. You knew the so-called canals were only natural fissures. You knew there were no cities, no traces of human life. Still, it was something to confirm the insect life. But the landscape was pretty flat—in all senses—and there wasn’t a great deal to add to the astronomers’
maps.
Venus was something again: the masked sister to Earth. No one had ever seen her face. She might be an ugly sister—or even more beautiful than Earth. He longed to see behind the mask.
Captain J. Freiburg stared at the dull infra-red screen and at the glowing green radar screen, trying to match the hints of contours. He was scared at the thought of mountain peaks. A level area was practically essential. He decided that if he were reading the screens aright, there were no prominences immediately beneath them.
If there was an underside to the clouds, and time and space to maneuver, he might be able to accomplish a little something with the side jets. Meantime, he could only sit and watch and let the increasing up-pressure try to wrap his chair around his ears.
A glacial age passed. It was all of five minutes long. Then they were in the clouds. By moving his eyes (it was nearly impossible to turn his head) Freiburg could cover all the screens and the porthole. The yellow light deepened to amber. It was like a swift dusk. The photo-electric cell responded and the interior lighting snapped on. Beyond the glare shield the daylight faded to a dull glow. The clouds were something more than just water vapor or carbon dioxide.
Around the height of 17,000 metres, the first explosion happened. A flash somewhere outside sent a brief yellow flare into the cabin. The ship rang like a gong and seemed to jump sidewise. It shook and tilted. The gyroscopes pulled it back on balance.
The same thing happened again. Then again. Yellow flashes and the ship jumping every which way, and the thuds of heavy explosions outside. It was hell to sit there inert as lead, unable to speak. The two men questioned each other with their eyes. What’s happening? What’s gone wrong?
The Captain thought: I’ve misread the screens. I’m trying to set her down on an active volcano. The luck of Jonah.
George thought: What are these clouds made of? Have we started a chemical reaction in them through friction?
There was another flash and jarring shock. Then it began to get lighter outside. The Captain was aware of it although he was concentrating on the altimeter now.
11,000 metres.
There was an underside to the clouds and the ship was falling out of it, ever more slowly. Freiburg stole a look at the TV. The surface of Venus was visible, in a dull gray light, like a rainy late afternoon. There were mountains in the distances, whole ranges of them, white-capped. Below was a rolling plain, dun-colored but with patches of dirty green.
During the moments of his glance, the TV registered a white flash some distance away and below. From the flash a ball of black smoke expanded swiftly and shot out ragged tentacles. The ship’s jets tore into the black wisps and shredded them.
Then he understood. The flashes were shell-bursts. They were being fired at by some archaic anti-aircraft artillery or guided missile battery. The motives might be mad but the effects were comprehensible. He felt calmer. He could see what was happening and knew what he must do; take evasive action.
His finger on the chair-arm switched off automatic control. At the same time he eased his foot onto the pedal governing the speed of efflux ejection. To hell with the computer: he’d handle it himself.
The ship, which had been slowing, dropped suddenly like an elevator starting down. This relief from the overplus of g’s lifted them momentarily from their seats.
“Going… to… land?” George asked, in jerks.
“Have to.” The Captain hadn’t time to explain to a nonspaceman just why you couldn’t reverse a rocket in mid-air and have it lift you out of range. The only chance was this sudden duck under and the hope that the guns—if they were guns—would lose you on the ground. Maybe there was a dip or hollow, some dead ground…
There was small opportunity, though, to look for such a spot. They were approaching the ground much too fast. His foot moved again on the pedal. The impetus was checked with a suddenness which drove the air from their lungs with sharp groans.
The harsh check threw the Captain’s foot away from the pedal. He tried to recover control and his breath simultaneously. The ground was awfully near. He got in a last burst before they hit. It was enough to save their lives. But the impact hurled them from their chairs.
The ship was motionless now, nose-upward, erect. A civilian might have thought everything was fine, no harm done. If necessary, the ship could soon take off again and get to hell out of it.
But Jonah Freiburg knew he had wrecked another ship. If only he hadn’t interfered and so invited his own brand of bad luck. The programmed electronic brain wouldn’t have forgotten to lower the landing gear, the spider-legged shock-absorber.
But Jonah Freiburg had forgotten. Blame it on the stress of being under fire, suddenly and unexpectedly, at the critical moment. Blame it on what you like. But Freiburg knew where the blame should be laid, fairly and squarely: upon his own inadequacy.
He also knew what that impact must have done to the ship’s fins. They weren’t designed to stand up to that sort of thing. If they were bent only a little out of straight, it would be suicide to attempt to take off again. The ship would begin to spin and veer and end up out of control.
Freiburg lay on the floor with his eyes shut. He wished he need never open them again. He felt himself sinking into an abyss of misery. George Starkey crawled over to him, laid a hand on his forehead, began to investigate him cautiously for broken bones. The Captain sighed, opened his reluctant eyes, and sat up wearily.
“I’m okay, George.” It marked the first time he’d used the explorer’s given name. He thought, masochistically: Who am I to claim any kind of authority?
George regarded him critically.
“Don’t look so depressed, Skip. You’re not blaming yourself for anything, are you?”
“I forgot to put out the landing gear, George. I must have smashed the fins up.”
“So? We were being shelled, weren’t we?”
“That’s what it looked like.”
“Okay, then, you did the only thing. You saved us. You dropped us out of the line of fire. We’d have been blasted to pieces. We may be a little bent, but we’re in one piece, not pieces. You can’t think of everything when things happen too fast.”
“A captain should always think of everything, ” said Freiburg, with slow emphasis. He got up and reached for the microphone. “You there, mister?”
The mate’s voice was a little shaky. “Yes, sir.”
“How’s everyone? Anybody hurt?”
“A few bruises here, sir, that’s all. I don’t know about Firkin yet, though—I’m just going along to check.”
“Right, mister.”
George pulled back the glare screen and looked out on Venus. It was quiet and still out there. The gray clouds hung high overhead, unbroken so far as the eye could see. They looked dark and full. It seemed as though at any moment rain might come lashing down.
But the earth appeared dry and cracked. It was yellow-brown, with patches of thin grass here and there. Also, it was pockmarked with craters, five, ten, twenty metres in diameter. There was no sign of habitation nor of any living creature. The light was too bad to see the horizon distinctly, but a darker blur seemed to lie along it
The Captain peered over George’s shoulder.
“Hardly the place to spend a sunny holiday,” said George.
“Gloomy.” Freiburg nearly added that it was almost as gloomy as he felt, but restrained himself. He must try to avoid spreading despondency. The loudspeaker c
licked and came alive. The mate’s voice was shakier yet.
“Sir, Firkin appears to be dead.”
Freiburg felt another load laid on his shoulders. Was he to be labeled
“killer” now? It was unfair. A flame of resentment flickered.
“Why ‘appears’? Can’t you tell? What happened?”
“I don’t know, sir. I think you’d better come along to his cabin right away.”
“Coming.”
The Captain hadn’t liked Firkin as a person, and as a person he was small loss. An opinionated, egocentric bore and whiner, alternately boasting or beefing. But a competent and conscientious analytic chemist and valuable to this expedition.
George followed the skipper along the passages, down the ladder. The mate stood guard at Firkin’s door, and he looked worried.
“Don’t go in, sir. Just look through the spy-hole.”
Firkin’s cabin, which was also his laboratory, was airtight. In there he was to carry out analyses of Venusian atmosphere. There was a small glass panel in the door and the drill was that you were to tap and get his indicated okay before you entered. He’d likely be wearing a pressure helmet, while you were unprotected. And you couldn’t know what might have seeped in through the air-lock or out of the specimen bottles.
The Captain looked. Firkin wasn’t wearing his helmet, so he hadn’t started analyzing. He lay on his back, very still, face and body contorted. His mouth was half open. So were his eyes. His face was congested, blue-black. There was wet blood over his chin and there seemed to be spots of it on the floor. It wasn’t easy to be sure, because a thin white mist was swirling around inside the cabin like cigaret smoke, and visibility wasn’t too good. However, two things were plain enough. The broken quartz specimen bottle at his side. The jagged slit in the outer wall of the cabin.
“What do you make of it, George?” asked the Captain. George peered in his turn. “H’m. Looks like he took a specimen of the cloud stratum, as per plan, but a shell splinter came through the wall and broke the bottle under his nose. That cloud-stuff must be poisonous: he’s been coughing up blood.”
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