We Open on Venus - Starship Troupers 2

by Christopher Stasheff

  I told Chovy, “He’s got an odd sense of humor.”

  “We could use it around here.” Chovy turned back to the road and cut out the autopilot.

  “Just think, a whole new world!” Susanne said, breathless with anticipation.

  “I can’t think it will be much different from the old one, dear,” Lacey sighed—but I think she had to work at it.

  “Once you’ve seen New York, you’ve seen everything, right?” I asked, thinking of the Rocky Mountains. “Okay, Chovy—what’s new?”

  “Nothing, to me,” he rejoined, “but we’ll start with the docks.”

  “Docks?” I looked up, startled. “You sail on the stuff?”

  “ ‘Sail’ is the word,” he confirmed. “A whole flaming planet full of gasoline, and they won’t let us use combustion engines.”

  “Why not?” Larry frowned.

  “’Cause they have sparks inside,” Chovy answered, “and we don’t really want to see a whole flaming planet.”

  “But doesn’t that take oxygen?” Susanne asked.

  ‘Too right it does, sweetheart.”

  “I thought there wasn’t any in your air.” Lacey eyed the outdoors nervously.

  Chovy glanced back with a frown. “Can’t hear you—ah, I see, then. You can take off your masks in here. Interior’s pressurized.”

  “Oh,” I said. “So when you open the top …”

  “A bit of oxygen escapes, yes. Oh, the vacuum comes on automatically and sucks the oxy-nitro back in—but there’s always a little bit leaks out.”

  “Yes, but surely such a small amount couldn’t cause any problems!” Larry protested.

  “Couldn’t it just!” Chovy grinned, showing very white teeth that didn’t quite fit. “That ‘small amount’ adds up like you wouldn’t believe, when a million people let a little bit leak every day. And it all sinks down, you see.”

  “That’s right.” Susanne nodded. “Oxygen’s heavier than helium. So’s nitrogen.”

  I looked at her in pleased surprise, but Marty was staring in surprise, period, and Larry and Lacey were looking at her as if she were some sort of alien monster.

  “Indeed it is.” Chovy’s smile broadened. “And the oceans are lower than the land—what you’d call ‘water level,’ back on Terra, but it’s ‘oil level,’ here. And there’s wind, so the wild oxy-nitro goes out over the seas.” Lacey’s head snapped up in alarm. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “Too right it is, love, if a spark flies loose.”

  “Lightning?” I asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Huge electrical sparks. Natural ones.” But Chovy was looking at me with blank apprehension, so I said, “Skip it.”

  “Oh, storms’” Chovy’s face cleared, and he nodded.

  “Right—I seen ’em in the 3DT. No, we don’t have ’em, here. But some fool’s always trying to puff some weed, or a lorry hits a flint stone wrong down by the docks, and blooey! There it goes.”

  Lacey turned pale, Larry got the shakes—guilty conscience—and Marty wasn’t looking any too hale himself. “You mean this has actually happened?”

  “Every year,” Chovy affirmed, “once or twice, at least.”

  “But how come the whole planet doesn’t just burn to a cinder?”

  “’Cause when the oxy’s used up, there’s no more fire.” Chovy chuckled, turning back to watch the road. “But it always turns a thousand barrels into smoke, maybe more. Filthy stuff, that smoke—and stinks to high heaven.”

  “Sure,” I said, “because heat rises. Wouldn’t it be safer for the Company to send someone out to burn off the oxygen every month or so? I mean, this way, they’re risking a really big explosion.”

  ‘Too right they are, and there’s not been a fire this two years past, so it’s building up for a biggie, right enough.”

  “But how foolish!” Lacey protested. “If they would just burn it off every month, they’d have nothing to fear!”

  “If,” Chovy agreed. “But the blighters can only see profits going up in smoke along with the petrol. No, a fire deliberate’s the last thing they’d do—obscene, they’d call it.” I suddenly understood why all his swear words were connected with fire.

  The car slowed, turned ninety degrees, and stopped. “There she is,” Chovy said, “the Gulf of Oil.”

  The land curved away toward the horizon on both sides, like arms holding a bowl—a bowl full of roiling, greasy liquid, undulating heavily shoreward in wave after wave that broke in a dark froth and spattered the shore with a black film, then receded.

  Lacey shuddered. “That’s all oil? Really oil?”

  “Raw petroleum?” Susanne echoed.

  “No, lubricating oil,” Chovy answered. “There’s no raw stuff here, love—it’s all refined out.”

  “All refined?” Lacey turned about to stare at him. “Lying here open to the air? Oceans of it, already refined! How could that be?”

  “The wonders of nature,” Chovy crooned, and went on to explain.

  The first probe to Alpha Centauri identified four planets, and found that the second planet was shrouded in clouds, just like Venus in the Sol system. It was about the same size and mass, and looked like a pearl in the ocean of night, just as old Venus did. But the second probe found that the clouds were made of hydrocarbons, with a pretty complex ring structure. It took a sample, analyzed it, and sent the findings back to Terra. It was almost indistinguishable from …

  Petroleum. Petroleum vapor.

  There was a huge flurry of interest, and the petroleum conglomerates got hyped to start a black-gold rush—until they did their arithmetic. After all, petroleum had been limited to the production of plastics for five hundred years, ever since the last oil wells in Siberia went dry. Methane, alcohol, and electricity had filled in the gap, and really efficient and comfortable public transportation companies boomed and made huge profits. Private cars were a convenience and a luxury, and electricity was generated by wind, water, Sun, and Earth.

  So who needed petroleum anymore?

  After all, even the plastics industry was busily finding substitutes. When the petroleum companies estimated the cost of gathering all that petroleum vapor, it was competitive with the homegrown product wrung from the shale. When you added in the cost of transporting it from Alpha Centauri to Terra, the price per barrel became …

  Astronomical.

  So New Venus just sat there, an untapped treasure for twenty years, until the Falstaff colony was started on the fourth planet of Haldane’s Star—and the pioneers realized that they needed energy. Low-tech energy—when a colony’s just beginning, it doesn’t have the resources to make high-tech gadgets like fusion reactors and thousand-hour storage cells. Oh, it can import them from Terra, but that costs a hideous amount, and a brand-new colony can’t generate that kind of money—all it can do is export raw materials, and interstellar freight costing what it does, the only exports that make a profit are small-bulk, high-value items, such as gems or furs or pharmaceuticals. So most of what they need, they have to make. That’s why frontier farmhouses still tend to be log cabins or sod huts—very big sod huts, more like sod mansions, but sod nonetheless. Their big industries tend to be farming, logging, mining, and refining—and any tools they need, they make themselves. A village smith’s factory can make shovels and plows from the steel turned out by the nearest mill, and shipped out on railroads. The engines are powered by steam, from burning coal if they have it, or wood, which is plentiful in the early years of a colony …

  Or they can be powered by diesels.

  The colony brings out the dies for internal-combustion engines, and within five years, they’re making their own. Then all they have to do is find oil and drill.

  But Falstaff didn’t have any oil.

  I know, I know, all the rule books said a planet had to develop oil during its evolution—but Falstaff hadn’t quite developed any native dinosaurs when the colony got there. That meant no coal, either—only peat. So the petro
leum companies quickly cliqued together to form Amalgamated Petroleum and started selling New Venus fuels to Falstaff—or bartering them, rather; they swapped oil for gems and some exotic plants whose juices could be distilled into wonder drugs.

  Then the explorers discovered Otranto and found out that the development of life is not inevitable. Otranto was a world almost exactly like Terra, and a million years older; its seas were a virtual broth of amino acids; but for some reason, life just hadn’t started there.

  Needless to say, they didn’t have petroleum, either.

  By the time the IDE had authorized colonization of thirty planets—and suspected that unauthorized splinter groups had colonized a dozen more—the total without petroleum was up to six. Amalgamated Petroleum set up the same deal with them that they’d developed with Falstaff, and the money started rolling in—from Terra, where the Company sold the grain it had bartered for with its oil.

  Because, you see, it turned out that petroleum is cheaper to ship than most cargoes, since it requires less handling—at least, the way Amalgamated Petroleum did it. The ships didn’t even have to land, just sent scoop-ships down to suck in vapor and chill it into liquid. Sure, the reaction mass still cost an arm and a leg, but a tanker is a tanker, and when the oil had been delivered to Falstaff, they flushed out the tanks, relined them, and filled them with grain. Terra’s always hungry, and it has far more people than it can support by itself, especially since they’ve turned so much farmland into housing towers—so the petroleum companies traded oil for wheat and com, then sold the grain on Terra for a good profit. Plus, each shipload of oil always cost a bit more than the official price of the wheat and com, so Falstaff gradually ran up a good, substantial debt that it would be able to pay when its gross national product was big enough—in a century or two. Meantime, there would be constant payments coming in.

  So the oil companies had found another bonanza—but they did some more math, and found out that they could load even more cheaply if their ships could pump up liquid instead of scooping and chilling vapor.

  “But that doesn’t make sense,” Susanne objected.

  “Yeah,” Marty seconded. “It’s got to take a lot more re-

  action mass for a ship to come down to the surface and take off again, than for it just to dip into the cloud layers.”

  “Right enough,” Chovy said, “if all you’re thinking of is one pass through the atmosphere. But you can’t take just one, of course—you have to take three or four. Hundred. Because, you see, when you get done condensing the vapor into liquid, it doesn’t take up much room in your tanks. Not to mention the energy it costs you to do the condensing. No, all things considered, it’s cheaper to just go into orbit and let them bring up a hose.”

  “A hose thousands of kilometers long?” Lacey said with skepticism.

  “It’s a big hose,” Chovy explained, “and it stays there all the time, going from a sea or ocean to an orbital loading platform. If a tanker wants gasoline, he goes to the one over the eastern ocean; if he wants heating oil, he goes to the one over our heads right now. Here, have a look.” He turned the car toward the pier and it rolled out along the plasticrete. We could hear the surf rolling heavily to either side of us, and see it, too, because only one or two ships were moored to the docks that ran out from the pier like right-angled branches on a tree.

  “What do the ships carry?” I asked.

  “Everything people need at the other work-site towns,” Chovy said. “Grain, water, a little meat, vitamins—we import them, or make them, here at Aphrodite, and ship them out to all the folk around the planet who need ’em. Somebody has to take care of the pumping stations, you know. But the biggest cargo is oxygen.”

  “Oxygen?” I stared.

  “And nitrogen, too,” Chovy confirmed. “We make ’em here in Aphrodite—that’s where I work, the oxy plant—and ship ’em out. Not too tough—the pumping stations are all located on the shorelines, of course.”

  “I should think that would be rather dangerous,” Larry stated.

  “Isn’t it just! You’ve never heard of safeguards and fail-safes until you see the ’cautions they take loading and unloading that stuff, nor a more cautious breed of men than the sailors.”

  “But why don’t you just send it by rocket?” Marty asked.

  “Cost, Jack.” Chovy shrugged. “Costs less to use boats. Shipping is still the cheapest shipping, here—’specially when you can actually sail your freighters. We use wind power for that job—no chance of sparks.”

  Lacey shuddered. “Just think what would happen if one of your tankers sprang a leak, and somebody did strike a spark!”

  “We do,” Chovy assured her, rather grimly. “We definitely do.”

  “You seem to know a lot about this,” Lacey said.

  “This kind of history, we’re taught in school,” Chovy said. “Little things like the Roman Republic and Magna Carta and the Charter of Human Rights, no—but the chronicles of petroleum, yes.”

  I frowned at his profile. “But if they’re not taught, how come you know about them?”

  Chovy pulled the car around at the end of the pier, and we had a clear view out over the gulf. “There it is,” he said easily, pointing.

  We looked.

  If I’d been in Nebraska, I would have thought it was a tornado. Out there where the horizon seemed to curve, there was a long, narrow tube running up from the surface—and up, and up, and up. It didn’t disappear into a big cloud overhead—it just disappeared, period: dwindled into a line, then a trace, then wasn’t there at all.

  “A sky-stalk,” I breathed. “How big is it?”

  “Only ten meters wide,” Chovy said, “but it’s twenty-five thousand kilometers long.”

  Marty gulped.

  “How can it hold together?’’ I asked. “It’s own weight should be enough to tear it apart!”

  Chovy shrugged. “I can’t tell you the details, Jack, but I know the outside is steel mesh, and the inside is some sort of flexible plastic that’s fantastically strong. What’s in between, I don’t know-—but there’s plenty of it.”

  “What’s on the other end?” Susanne asked.

  “A space station,” Chovy answered. “An orbital platform in a geostationary orbit, big enough to moor two ships at a time and let ‘em pump.”

  I stared at the narrow tube stretching up forever. “So a ship can just dock at the station and hook up to the tube and fill itself to nearly bursting?”

  “In less than a day,” Chovy confirmed.

  I could feel my eyes trying to pop out of my head, something like the feeling I got the first time I looked at Susanne, but I couldn’t help it. “And there’s one of these over each body of … liquid?”

  “One for each kind of petroleum fraction,” Chovy confirmed.

  “Think of the labor that took!” I gasped.

  “Couldn’t it do a lot of damage if that bottom end got loose?” Susanne asked.

  “To what?” Chovy said. “They brought it down out there, where there’s nothing to hit but oil—and if they churned up a lot of that, so what? It’s just fall back into the drink. Same thing if it got loose today—nothing to hit, as long as the ships stay away—which they do, they do.”

  “But it doesn’t get loose,” Larry said.

  ‘Too right it doesn’t! What good would it do sucking air, hey? No, it’s moored right and tight to the bottom, believe it, and the intakes are round the sides.”

  “Right at the bottom?” Marty asked.

  “Right at—so the pressure of the liquid helps push it up to the platform.”

  “That must have taken a fantastic amount of money to build,” I said.

  “Oh, believe it did, Jack,” Chovy said softly. “The oil companies on good old polluted Terra calculated the cost, found out the capital was too much for any one of them, got government permission to form a limited-purpose cartel—and Amalgamated Petroleum was born.”

  “That’s the Company?”

&nbs
p; “Believe it is—and it’s bound and determined to get back every shekel and a hundred more for each, no matter what it has to do.”

  I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, noticing that he’d started looking awfully grim all of a sudden.

  “But how did they condense all that vapor into liquid?” Marty asked. He had a sharp-eyed look to him that I’d only noticed once or twice before—and whenever he’d had it, I’d heard jokes about the subject the next day. “And how do they keep it all from evaporating again?”

  “By cooling it all down,” Chovy explained.

  “All?” Marty looked like an owl, his eyes were so wide. “A whole planetary atmosphere? What did they use—an ocean of dry ice?”

  “Not a bit,” said Chovy. “They moved the planet.”

  The inside of the car was awfully quiet.

  Then Marty said, “I think I sense a punch line coming. Okay, I’ll play straight man: ‘How do you move a planet?’ ”

  “Very slowly,” Chovy said.

  “I knew it,” Marty said.

  “No, really,” Chovy said. “I had this in tenth grade science, just before they kicked us out of school.”

  “You were kicked out of school?” Susanne asked, wide eyed.

  “Oh, they called it graduation,” Chovy said, a little nettled, “but it came to the same thing—anybody who wanted more schooling was just out of luck.”

  “In tenth grade,” Marty said, “I didn’t know too many boys who wanted to stay in school.”

  “That’s because they had to, bucko. You just see how many want it when they can’t have it … Anyway, Amalgamated moved the planet. I’m a little fuzzy on how, but I think that, when they pooled their money, they had enough to be able to manufacture some quantum black holes.

  I nodded. I’d heard of the process—it had to be carried out in space, of course, well away from any planet—and it consisted of tying two starship engines with H-space convertors back to back and running them both at constant acceleration. They stay in place, since they’re balancing each other out—so they’re trying to pull H-space into normal space, and the result is a knot in the space-time fabric, a very deep but very small gravity well. Voila! You have a singularity. Of course, you lose the engines—we think. Nobody can see inside to say for sure. Then, there’s the little question of what happens when they run out of fuel—and the answer is that the singularity disappears. So do the engines. So they have to calculate the amount of fuel very nicely, to make sure they don’t leave a menace to navigation lying around—or in this case, a rock that will pull the planet too far. “A bunch of them, you say?”