by Carl Conrad
Trapped on Venus
by Carl Conrad
Copyright © 2014 by Carl Conrad
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – The Landing
Chapter 2 – Their First Surprise
Chapter 3 – Exiting the Ship
Chapter 4 – No Communication
Chapter 5 – Encountering Alien Life
Chapter 6 – Trying To Communicate
Chapter 7 – Finding A Solution
Chapter 8 – Fixing the Ship
Chapter 9 – Rescued In Orbit
Chapter 10 – A Change Of Plans
Chapter 11 – Return to Venus
Chapter 12 – Such A Mysterious Planet
Chapter 13 – A Walk On The Surface
Chapter 14 – We Come In Peace
Chapter 15 – A Strange Turn of Events
Chapter 16 – We’ve Got To Get Back To The Ship!
Chapter 17 – Blast Off!
Chapter 1 – The Landing
“Venus Twelve? Venus Twelve? Do you read me? This is Earth Control One. We’ve lost contact with you. Please acknowledge. Over....”
The crackling static of a receiver pointed into the vast, star-spanned galaxy of outer space was unanswered. John Stimson, NASA commander of Earth Control One, busied himself with an assortment of relays and booster switches trying to contact the silent probe.
“Venus Twelve, do you read me? This is Earth Control One. Acknowledge!”
John’s voice was strained with frustration. He stared blankly at the panel in front of him, hoping for a response, yet growing more concerned with each sweep of the long, pencil-thin hand of the clock. Forty-seven minutes had elapsed without word from the three man crew attempting the first landing on Venus by humans. What went wrong, he asked himself? Where are they? Are they... His thoughts froze for a second as he contemplated the possibility. Could they be... dead?
The crackling ceased as the relentless search of the audio intensifier scanned the wave lengths of outer space looking for a signal. The sound became almost rhythmical as it ebbed and gained in volume – first soft, then loud – but there was no human response. Only the persistent sound of static, like sand pelted against a wall of tin, scratched through the loudspeaker and their headphones.
A hum grew faintly from within the sound, and a voice, as if strained through a filter of vast distance.
“Earth Con........... read you............. but.....” The voice was interrupted by spurts of static. “.......trouble with solar rheostat, can’t.......... get weak signa....... open chan...... Over?”
The voice, though faint and cryptic, was that of Scott Jennings, command pilot of the probe. Stimson responded instantly, reaching out to the panel in front of him to track the voice of the astronaut. He slowly twisted the audio modulator to sharpen the reception, hearing the voice waver as he twisted the dial. The signal grew stronger.
“Earth Control One.....” came the voice of the astronaut, “...do you read me? This is Venus Twelve.... Over?”
“Yes... yes, we read you, Twelve. Scott this is Stimson.”
“Had trouble with the audio relay wiring, John,” answered a calm Scott Jennings. “Couldn’t get an open channel. We’re ok now, though. Marty got it fixed.”
John breathed a sigh of relief. The flight and all the planning that went into it were his responsibility. If he had lost the astronauts, not only would he have lost three very close friends, but the future of other missions would have been greatly jeopardized as well.
“Where are you now, Scott? Have you achieved orbit?”
“Affirmative. Now beginning our final checks before initiating landing sequence. All looks GO.”
The noise in the small cabin – the reading and re-reading of endless checklists – bubbled in the background of Scott’s voice. The sequence was readied, and Scott signaled their intentions to Earth Control One which was the brains of the operation, located at NASA Control Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“Everything’s GO, here, Earth One. Beginning separation sequence.”
“We read you, Twelve. Commence when ready.”
Inside the cabin, Scott carefully watched the digital dial revolve in front of him as it counted off the seconds. When the dials reached 0000, his hand pushed the palm-sized disk on the control panel and rockets hammered him deep into his chair. His arms were pushed forcefully against the arm rests, and his body bulged into the thick padding of the chair from the thrust of the rockets. Twenty-three seconds later the rockets ceased. The module twisted in space of its own power, allowing Scott and his co-pilot, Martin Fisk, to glimpse the other half of their craft still spinning in orbit.
“We’re clear, Grayson,” Scott said, confirming the successful separation.
“Roger, Twelve,” answered Colonel Thomas Grayson in the command ship above them. “All systems still GO.”
The landing sequence was a well-practiced, almost mechanical maneuver, performed without the slightest deviation from flight plans. Yet, as the probe reversed its direction, turning in mid-air to position the descent rockets to slow the speed of the free-floating craft, Scott and Martin Fisk became the first men ever to glimpse the planet Venus from this distance. Photographs, terrain readings, atmospheric checks, and many other bits of information had been gathered through the previous three years, making the mission possible; but Scott Jennings and Martin Fisk were seeing the planet as it had never been seen before – through the pyroplastic glass window of a space craft about to land there.
“Thirty-seven seconds to touchdown,” Fisk reported. “Thirty-six... thirty-five... thirty-four...”
“Hold that trim, Marty...”
“Thirty... twenty-nine... twenty-eight.... twenty-seven...”
“Extend pod stabilizing bars....”
“Fifteen... fourteen... thirteen... twelve... eleven....”
“Slowing to 200 feet per second,” Scott said, watching the steady drop of the altimeter. “One hundred twenty... one hundred... seventy-five... Fire secondary engines. Thirty-seven.... twenty-two... ten feet per second... Hold her...”
The craft teetered a moment, then settled firmly on the Venusian soil.
“Touchdown.”
The calm, matter-of-fact tone of Fisk’s voice reporting TOUCHDOWN wasn’t matched with the same restraint at Earth Control One, over 26 million miles away. Charts, graphs, and even champaign corks filled the air in ecstatic jubilation. The astronauts had made it! After four months of surveillance, tracking, and thousands of prayers, the United States of America had finally landed two men on the planet Venus!
Only John Stimson and his small crew of first-line technicians were unable to join in the celebration. They remained at their consoles having just begun the difficult task of checking the probe systems to make certain that everything was functioning properly. Still, a grin from ear-to-ear and the anxious movement of his fingers on the switches and dials of his desk, betrayed Stimson’s excitement. They had made it. After four months of waiting, the astronauts were now on the planet’s surface, executing their duties to perfection.
Stimson turned for a moment, looking over his shoulder at the wives and family of the two astronauts. The women sat patiently behind the glass enclosed area at the back of the room, staring intently and deliberately at the large monitoring board overhead. Their children were squirming and poking at each other, barely old enough to realize the significance of what was happening as, to them, the reality of the mission seemed more like a gigantic electronic circus played out before their eyes.
Their father’s voices were real to them, the special attention they received from the government aides at their sides was real, yet the room, with its countless arrays of buttons, switches, and unfamiliar faces, glossed the event with a kind of dull, Hollywood mysticism.
Stimson turned back to his control panel, continuing his work. He had grown to know the men’s families nearly as well as he knew his own, and understood what they were experiencing; the wives with their silent scrutiny of each operation, helplessly yielding their husband’s future to a room full of men, women, and powerful computers, and the children whose fidgeting and awkward play was merely the release of months of waiting. He knew they were under an enormous strain, each of them contending with it in their own way, and he admired them for their courage. But, because of it, his responsibilities were heightened to a level of immense proportion. He would not let them down.
In the PROBE, millions of miles away, Fisk could not resist a quick glance across the cabin as they landed. Even partially hidden behind the dark glass of his helmet, Fisk could see the smile on Scott’s face. Scott turned to look back at him, and Marty signaled his own excitement by pointing a thumb in the air. Scott responded with the same gesture, then turned to his console and began reading off data.
“Cabin pressure – normal. Solar deflectors – up and functional. Communications – check. Batteries – check. Have you got a fix on us, Grayson?”
Scott raised his eyes upward as if he could see the command module some one hundred forty nautical miles overhead, but he could see only swirling clouds of vapors in the stormy skies of Venus overhead.
“Roger, PROBE. Have you zeroed at section Baker. Looks like you’re right on target.” He chuckled. “Not bad for a fly-boy.”
The reference to Scott’s Air Force background was a long-standing joke between the two. Colonel Thomas Grayson, now orbiting Venus in the command ship, was considered the pride of the Navy’s current crop of astronauts and rarely failed to remind Scott of it. He had even tried to persuade him to join the Navy, but found Scott as devoted to the Air Force as he was to the Navy. Still, Scott found himself enjoying Grayson’s remark as he continued checking the instrument panel, finding that the familiar banter relieved some of the tension of the moment.
“For a fly-boy?” he answered, still busy at this instruments. “I’d like to see what one of you air-borne ducks could do!”
“Just give me the chance, Jennings. Just give me the chance.”
Scott chuckled, momentarily, while still continuing with his work. There were over two hundred readings yet to record, and any delay would only further prolong their departure to the planet’s surface. He once again immersed himself in checking the systems, relaying data back to Earth Control One from the countless dials and gauges which measured everything from the outside atmospheric pressure to today’s date. The calendar dial showed June 2nd in red, luminous letters.
Several hours later, after completing his recordings and a rather lengthy discussion with Stimson at Earth Control One, Scott leaned back in the thick foam of his contoured chair and reached above him for a tube of food concentrate. He pulled an orange container from the pinch clamps holding it in place, and snipped the top from it.
“I think I’ll celebrate our successful landing, Marty, with a little porterhouse steak smothered in fried onions and mushrooms. To go with it, I thought maybe some deviled crab on the half shell, a glass of Rosé, 1937, and for desert, maybe a little...”
“All right, all right, Scott. I get the message.” Fisk turned and smiled at him, then confided: “I think the stuff tastes like paste, too.”
Both Marty and Scott took this time to eat their awkward but substantial tubes of food, squeezing them until all that remained were two, small scrolls of disposable plastic, empty and crumpled. They again rocked back in their chairs to rest, and sleep soon followed.
Chapter 2 – Their First Surprise
The astronauts were allotted only six hours of rest in their closely-crowded schedule before they were to begin preparations to leave the module. It was John Stimson who was responsible for awakening them.
“V-12... Venus twelve? This is Stimson. Your rest period is over. Repeat, your rest period is over. Do you read me?”
Stimson flipped a switch, leaving the channel open for a moment, but received no reply. He nudged it back in place and repeated the message.
“Venus twelve?... This is Stimson. Your rest period is over. Jennings? Fisk? Do you read me?”
The second broadcast awakened Scott. His eyes fluttered a moment, then the voice registered in his memory, bringing him from his dreams to the reality of the space craft. It was a disappointment to be awakened from his wife’s warm and tender embrace, but then it was a dream that had recurred to him time and again during the long flight. Scott leaned forward to note the time on the digital clock, then answered Stimson’s call.
“Roger, Earth One,” he said, still somewhat groggy. “We’re up.”
He turned to Fisk to make certain that he, too, was awake and jostled his arm. Fisk tilted forward in the near-weightless cabin, then stretched and yawned. He was awake.
“V-12,” Stimson went on, “our readings indicate that the surface temperature is even hotter than we originally thought. It’s over 900 degrees Fahrenheit outside. You’ll have to wear the thermal liners.” He paused. “I know they’re awkward, but you wouldn’t last more than ten or fifteen minutes out there without them. Your first walk is scheduled for two hours.”
“Roger, John,” Scott acknowledged, feeling the excitement begin to build within him. He looked over at the temperature gauge inside the craft. “I guess I forgot about the heat. It’s leveling out at about seventy-two degrees in here – just about right for a warm, summer day.”
“It’s warm, all right. That Sun’ll burn you to a cinder if you give it a chance.”
“Thanks for the warning, John.”
Scott let his eyes drift to the tinted heat shield drawn over the pod window, and looked out over the Venusian landscape. The atmosphere was murky with a heavy, wavy sulphuric acid vapor trapping the sunlight as it pierced the clouds in a kind of greenhouse effect that pushed the temperature to well over 900º Fahrenheit while the pressure was a crushing 90 times that of Earth. In fact, if it weren’t for the ingeniously-designed Exo-Caustic Anti-Implosion Suits (ECAIS, or “EKs” as they were called) that balanced the outside pressure against the inside pressure of their suits and were impervious to the poisonously caustic vapor in the air, they wouldn’t last more than a few seconds in the harsh environment as they stepped onto the planet.
The Sun was painfully bright, radiating from the barren but uneven dry and powdery surface with an overwhelming brilliance. Venus, being so much closer to the Sun than the Earth and rotating on its axis only once every 243 Earth days, has a day that is longer than its year. Revolving ever so slowly in the opposite direction from its orbit around the Sun, with a dense cover of sulphuric acid clouds, make Venus a mysterious planet. The unmanned probes preceding Scott and Marty gave the scientists an idea of what to expect, but the Sun’s intensity seemed even more powerful than they had anticipated. The sun shields constructed over the windows filtered out the otherwise damaging rays of light, but still permitted Scott to observe the intense heat outside. As he looked out, shapes were dissolved into soft shadows with vivid heat waves rising from their crests.
It was like looking through a welder’s mask or a pair of very dark sunglasses as Scott gazed through the pod window, yet he noticed a nearly unblemished surface with no ridges or crags where they had landed. The Venusian winds and the tremendous intensity of the Sun seemed to have eroded the landscape into gentle knolls and mounds, making it appear more like a vast desert wasteland than a planet that had fascinated scientists for hundreds of years. But the surface didn’t appear to be composed of sand, as would be a desert; it was more like a shattered window with pieces of a clay-like substance, cracked and segmented, crisscrossing the surface, m
aking it appear much like a mud hole after it had dried out.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it,” Scott remarked to his co-pilot as the winds of sulphuric acid swirled around their ship, looking stormy and overcast.
Fisk, too, had been staring out the small porthole on his side of the craft. He turned in response to Scott’s comment.
“No, I guess if you’re looking for trees and blue skies, it doesn’t. But, from a geological standpoint, it’s fantastic! Look! Do you see the way those cracks are formed?” He pointed out the window, looking almost at the base of the module. “They’re all octagonal, evenly-shaped, almost perfectly symmetrical. That could indicate it’s some new mineral, something we’ve never seen or studied before. You see, everything on Earth breaks apart under this kind of heat – no bonding strength. But, for some reason, this stuff – whatever it is – doesn’t. I can hardly wait to get started on my tests. It could be the biggest thing since carbon-14!”
“You geologists never get enough of this stuff, do you, Marty? You and your rocks,” he chuckled.
“Not when I get an opportunity like this. I’ve never seen anything like it, Scott! It’s incredible!”
“We’d better get started, then. It’ll take us long enough just to suit up. Did you hear Stimson? He says we’ve got to wear the liners.”
Fisk was already tugging his silver-skinned liner from the place where it was stored under his chair. “Yeah, I know,” he said without enthusiasm.
It was rather cumbersome working in such a small area, but they persisted, trying to pull their liners from the cylinders mounted near the floor of the craft.
“They sure scrimped on space,” Fisk grunted. “If this thing was in here any tighter, I’d never get it out!”
Scott strained and pulled his liner free, having to tilt his chair forward to get a good grip on it. The men donned their liners, heat compressing the seams to prevent even a single ray of the Sun’s beastly brilliance from reaching them, then depressurized the capsule to equalize the inside and outside pressures as they activated the ladder that would lead them to the surface.