But increasing his numbers also meant increasing the amount of space he required. Since he didn't want to disturb his experiments by the Public Pod, he would need a new site — one where he could use as much land as he needed, and where he was certain nobody would come across his work. Arik only knew of one place within range which guaranteed him the space and seclusion he required: the other side of the wall.
It turned out that getting through the door wouldn't pose much a problem. Arik was able to locate four doors in the security manifest which did not appear on any schematic. He assumed one was the door in the section of the wall almost directly opposite the airlock, and the remaining three were evenly distributed along the rest of the wall. They were all locked, but Arik was able to fix that without being prompted for so much as a password or biometric verification. Whoever engineered the system had relied on the woefully inadequate principle of "security through obscurity" which held that a system was secure as long as no one knew it existed. The flaws were obvious.
Arik was initially planning on trying to talk Cam into letting him go back outside one last time, but he eventually concluded that it was actually better for Cam to remain staunchly opposed. Despite the amount of time Arik had spent outside, he had clearly proven that plenty could still go wrong, and that there was no way to prepare for every possible scenario. Arik had already accepted that he might not come back, but he obviously couldn't expect Cam to accept that, as well. By Cam prohibiting Arik from going outside, Arik hoped that he would feel that he had done everything in his power to prevent an accident. By blatantly disregarding Cam's instructions, Arik was taking responsibility for his own actions, and, should something go wrong, claiming all the blame for himself.
Arik learned through Cadie that Cam had finally been assigned inventory duty. Cadie told Arik that she wouldn't be able to eat with him that day because she and Zaire were having lunch with a mutual friend in the Code Pod. When Arik said he would use the opportunity to try to meet up with Cam, Cadie told him that Cam was working in the warehouse for the week which was why Zaire was free. She was surprised but pleased to see that her husband was determined not to work through lunch that day. He set an automated away message, closed his workspace, grabbed his cricket bag (which he had started storing at work), and left for the Play Pod. If all went well, he told Cadie, he would be back in a few hours, hot and sweaty from a midday pickup game. It was unusual for Arik to show Cadie any affection at work, so she was caught off guard when he paused on his way out to kiss her and tell her how much he loved her.
No one tried to stop Arik as he walked through the shop to the dock. Since it was never explicitly acknowledged that Cam had given Arik EVA training, there was no way Cam could effectively ban Arik from the Wrench Pod, so Arik got all the same nods and waves from the wrenchers that he always got. His routine was slightly different this time, however; today Arik was carrying his cricket bag over his shoulder, and rather than taking his usual path which brought him right past the warehouse entrance, he took the long way around.
There were other subtle differences in Arik's behavior. Rather than leaving his watch in a locker, he extended the strap and put it on over his environment suit, and instead of hanging up his cricket bag, he laid it gently in Betty's trunk. And in addition to the cartridge he loaded into his e-suit, he propped a second one up against the rover's passenger seat and strapped it down.
Arik considered stopping by the Public Pod to check on his experiments on his way out to the wall, but decided not to for two reasons. The first was that he knew the door he was looking for was almost precisely opposite the airlock, so the safest way to locate it was to come out of the airlock and continue on a perfectly straight path. Although it seemed simple enough to stop by the Public Pod first, then head out to the wall from there, Arik had learned the hard way the virtues of reducing all possible variables during an EVA. Even the most innocuous deviations from one's itinerary could provide disaster with just the sort of opportunity for which it relentlessly and tirelessly waited.
The second reason Arik wanted to get out to the wall as soon as he could was that the door's lock was on a timer. The automated away message that he left before closing his workspace triggered a timer that would unlock all four doors around V1's perimeter one hour after it was activated, then lock them all again two hours after that. Arik had ceaselessly debated with himself the logic behind automatically re-locking the doors; it made much more sense to leave them all unlocked, and to simply lock them manually once he was safely inside again. However, he ultimately decided that he had a responsibility to automate the process. Although the prospect of missing the window and getting locked out of V1 was horrifying, he felt he had to leave the colony as well secured as he found it in the event that, for whatever reason, he wasn't able to make it back. Although there didn't seem to be any danger of letting anything harmful out of V1, Arik had no idea what he might be letting in. Even leaving the doors unlocked for just two hours could be putting V1 at risk.
Arik found the wall easily, and the door was exactly where the schematic placed it. It was a massive slab of metal which had somehow gotten slightly dented near the center. There were columns of bolts through the steel, presumably securing it to further layers of steel beneath with alternating grains in order to strengthen it against warping, and it was hung inside of a metal frame by four bulky hinges. Beside the door, protruding from the concrete wall, was a tremendous wheel which Arik assumed provided leverage against a set of screws and gears in order to move the mass of steel. But not yet. He checked his watch and saw that he still had a little more than 13 minutes before his script removed the locks — just enough time to assemble and test the plug gun.
He walked around to the back of the rover and opened his cricket bag. The components inside interlocked and snapped together easily, and the spare environment suit cartridge slid perfectly into place where it activated inside its frame. He took an empty borosilicate glass cylinder from his bag and loaded it through the bottom port, then placed the muzzle carefully against the dirt and leaned into the stock. When he felt that his leverage and balance were right, he pulled back on the action bar. There was a jolt as the pneumatic chamber instantly filled with dirt. When he pushed the action bar forward again, there was a slight kick as the chamber abruptly emptied and the shell ejected from the side with a high pitched and melodious ping.
Arik had built a lot of things in his life, but nothing that made him grin precisely like this.
He laid the plug gun across the back of the rover, checked the time, then pressed both gloved palms against the surface of the door. He hadn't calibrated his watch perfectly with the beginning of the timer, but within a few seconds of his expectation, he felt the vibration of the massive steel bars as they withdrew into the wall. Arik stepped back, and used the tip of his glove to gently press a button on his watch and start the two hour countdown. He would have liked to have waited a few minutes to see if anything happened now that the door was unlocked (had he tripped an alarm? would the door automatically lock again? would someone or something open it from the other side?), but he was already beginning to feel the pressure of the countdown. He stepped to the side and began applying his weight to the massive metal wheel. With every half turn, he could see the giant slab of steel pivot.
When the door was open about half a meter, it occurred to Arik that he should probably have some sense of what was on the other side before opening it the rest of the way. He left the wheel and peered through the gap. As far as he could tell, the other side of the wall was indistinguishable from the side he was on. There was nothing to see but a few meters of rocky ground gradually swallowed up by the thick mustard yellow atmosphere. If there was anything out there, it wasn't coming forward to meet him, but waiting for Arik to come to it.
He went back to work on the wheel. The gears weren't difficult to turn, though when the door was open wide enough that he judged he could get the rover through the gap, he found he was slightly wi
nded and already damp with perspiration. He wondered if he should change his plan and leave the door open since closing it behind him would not only consume additional energy and air, but it would also require him to reserve enough strength to open and close it again on his way back. But he knew he wouldn't have much walking to do since he had the rover, and even if he injected all 100 solutions into the ground, the plug gun was an efficient enough tool that it required very little effort to use. It was better to stick to the plan.
Arik maneuvered the rover carefully through the gap, and as he expected, there was another wheel protruding from the wall directly opposite the one on the inside. For some reason, closing the door was easier than opening it had been, though with every half turn and every few centimeters that the gap narrowed, he found himself increasingly reluctant to cut himself off entirely from V1. He checked behind him several times to look for some hint of what the wall was intended to defend against, but all he could see was the thick yellow haze. Leaving the door open, even slightly, would have made him feel better, but he was committed to following his EVA's program as closely as possible. He had planned it logically and objectively precisely to avoid making spontaneous and emotional decisions which he knew could later reveal themselves to be tragically erroneous.
Before getting back in the rover, Arik removed a small steel canister from an outside pocket in his bag. He unscrewed the top, depressed the nozzle, and applied the supercooled isotopic iodine inside to the surface of the door from as high up as he could reach all the way down to the ground. The liquid would evaporate rapidly in the Venusian heat, but not without leaving behind enough residue to emit a clear radioactive beacon while it decayed over its half-life of eight days. Arik had initially planned to use a simple radio transmitter to help him find his way back, but even the smallest one he could find or build in a reasonable amount of time would have been noticeable to anyone or anything that might happen by the door. The isotopic iodine, on the other hand, was completely invisible without the right equipment, and couldn't be removed or deactivated.
Arik calculated that he would need between 40 and 60 minutes to get all 100 solutions injected into the ground which gave him about 30 minutes to locate an ideal spot. He really didn't know what constituted "ideal" except that it should receive all the remaining sunlight of the Venusian day, and should be inconspicuous but still easy enough for him to locate again sometime in the future. He knew he would probably end up using a piece of ground a few meters down from the door just outside the shadow of the wall, but locating a suitable plot of land was only part the objective of this portion of the EVA. The secondary objective was exploration.
Although his instincts were telling him to lay down his experiments and get back inside as quickly as possible, another part of him was compelled to continue driving slowly away from the wall. Arik was used to being outside by now, but this was something else entirely. He had left V1 in every relevant sense. There were no strobes around him to help him maintain his bearings, and no one standing by in the airlock in the event of an emergency. He was on the other side of a massive wall which neither he nor Cam could even begin to explain, and with every meter he traveled, he burned another second off the timer that could cut him off from everyone and everything he had ever known. Receding behind him was the safety and familiarity of V1, and in front of him, concealed in the thick yellow smog, was both the fear and exhilaration of the unknown.
The rover's suspension and tire pressure had stopped adjusting itself, and Arik suddenly realized that he was driving on a road. He stopped and raised the trajectory of the radar mapping device. On the screen between the hand controls, he could see the well-packed terrain stretch out before him with the rocky Venusian desert on either side. He raised the radar further, ignoring the warning from the navigation system that the trajectory was now out of range, and watched in astonishment as the small screen rendered something he could not understand: massive round structures concealed in the haze ahead, each one several times taller than the tallest section of V1. There were plenty of hills and mountains on Ishtar Terra, but what Arik was seeing was far too perfectly formed to have occurred naturally. He advanced slowly, his eyes flicking back and forth between the rover's screen and the thick yellow atmosphere in front of him until he was close enough that one of the enormous structures began to emerge. At first he thought it was a perfect cylinder, but as it revealed more of itself, it took on the unmistakable hyperbolic shape of a nuclear reactor cooling tower.
As the rover continued forward, additional towers emerged beside flat rectangular structures which Arik assumed housed the nuclear reactors themselves. He knew that none of this could be related to V1's power grid; their entire fusion generator was no bigger than Arik's bedroom, and certainly had no use for a cooling tower. This was clearly a remnant of more primitive nuclear technology when fission reactors generated indirect energy by creating steam which drove turbines, and required massive cooling towers to transfer heat waste to the atmosphere. Arik recalled Cam's story about the original Founders, about an initial colony of unsuccessful settlers. It obviously wasn't a perfect fit, but even the most farfetched folklore sometimes had long tenuous roots that tapped into a distant reality. It was obvious that V1 was not the first settlement on Venus; at least one entire human civilization had come before them, and apparently gone.
Arik continued forward past various dilapidated structures. The last cooling tower he saw was partially destroyed, it's black carbon scoring telling of a quick but violent explosion. In some ways, the settlement had actually been more successful than V1 — at least temporarily. Expansion had clearly been a priority, though they seemed to have struggled to meet their own energy demands. Arik wondered how they supplied themselves with oxygen and food. Most likely, they had been entirely dependent on Earth — so much so that even the smallest disruption in communication or launch delay could have been catastrophic. To these people, the GSA would have been God.
Or maybe this settlement even predated the GSA. If Arik rummaged through the debris, perhaps he'd find the the insignia of the European Space Agency, or even logos from long-defunct NASA. Considering the age of nuclear fission technology, this could very well have been built before the last worldwide economic and environmental cataclysm. Arik tried to imagine what living here would have been like. There was no way they could have had the technology to get home if the settlement had proven unsustainable. While the people on Earth were witnessing economic collapse, global power shortages, and one environmental catastrophe after another, to the Venusian colonists, the entire process would have manifested itself as nothing more than a perfectly good radio signal from Earth one day, and inexplicable dead air the next.
Arik was about to turn the rover around when he noticed the road surface changing and his visibility dramatically improving. He lowered the radar again to safeguard the rover's axles, then checked his watch. If he still wanted to set up his experiments, he would need to get back very soon, however his original EVA objectives now seemed distant and misplaced. Arik had inadvertently discovered an entirely new world — the only world he had ever witnessed outside of V1 — and its secrets and stories were mesmerizing. With the atmosphere clearing, he was starting to be able to see further than he thought possible on Venus, and he wanted to see more.
The rover's tires began slipping, and Arik could see that the terrain had become much finer, almost gritty. He had no idea how the rover's navigation and traction systems would adapt, so he parked and decided to continue a few more meters on foot. He could see as much as a hundred meters ahead of him now so there was no chance of getting lost, and the dark terrain was almost perfectly flat with only occasional gentle outcroppings. The soil was different here, and Arik pulled the plug gun from the back to help him get a better look at what was below the surface.
The ground became increasingly soft as he walked, and his boots began to sink with every step. He approached one of the outcroppings around him — about a six meter lon
g cone-shaped mound which he assumed was basalt or some other type of volcanic rock — but before he reached it, he stopped. He watched the black ground around him carefully and was almost positive that he detected movement. He used the end of the plug gun to prod the surface in front of him to make sure it was secure, and just beside the mound, the muzzle sank below the surface. When he withdrew it, a thick tar-like substance clung to the tube in long viscous threads like black mucous. Arik assumed he was on the edge of an impact crater where the surface was still partially molten, but when he squatted down and inspected the mound next to him, he realized he could not be next to a lava pool.
What he had thought was some sort of a rock was in fact a tremendous skull several times larger than the length of his entire body.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Homeless
Arik knew that he was experiencing some form of shock. He was perfectly aware that he should be monitoring his suit, checking his watch, getting the rover turned around and pointed in the direction of the radiation beacon, but none of those things seemed important anymore. He was fixated on the colossal skull in front of him, and his mind reeled from trying to comprehend its implications.
No evidence of life had ever been discovered on Venus — even simple microbial life. There was no way something of this magnitude could have evolved and gone unnoticed for this long. A creature with a skull that size would have to be between 30 and 40 meters long, weigh hundreds of metric tons, and would have to be the largest terrestrial or aquatic animal in the history of life on Earth.
He experienced short moments of clarity — even moments when everything made perfect sense — but he found that they were impossible to retain. While the brain was perfectly capable of adapting to the gradual changes that invariably accompany the passage of time, it was perfectly incapable of accepting an entirely new reality all at once. Arik logically understood what he had just discovered, but he was unable to accept it.
Containment Page 16