Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  Tim and Hawk sat on the floor, next to each other, knees drawn up tight. Every muscle in Tim’s body ached, every nerve was pulled tight as a bowstring. And the twister kept howling outside, as if demanding to be allowed in.

  At last the roaring diminished, the drumming rain on the roof slackened off. Neither Tim nor Hawk budged an inch, though. Not until it became completely quiet out there.

  “Do you think it’s over?” Tim whispered.

  Hawk shook his head. “Maybe.”

  They heard a bird chirping outside. Hawk scrambled to his feet and went to the window on the other side of the Prof’s bed. He eased the shutter open a crack, then flung it all the way back. Bright sunshine streamed into the room. Tim noticed a trickle of water that had leaked through the window and its shutter, dripping down the wall to make a puddle on the bare wooden floor.

  The Prof seemed to be sleeping soundly, but as they tiptoed out of the bedroom, he opened one eye and said, “Check outside. See what damage it’s done.”

  A big pine had fallen across the house’s low roof; that had been the crash they’d heard. The water pipe from the cistern was broken, but the cistern itself—dug into the ground—was unharmed except for a lot of leaves and debris that had been blown into it.

  The next morning the Prof felt strong enough to get up, and he led the boys on a more detailed inspection tour. The solar panels were caked with dirt and leaves, but otherwise unhurt. The boys set to cleaning them while the Prof mended the broken water pipe.

  By nightfall the damage had been repaired and the house was back to normal. But not the Prof. He moved slowly, painfully, his breathing was labored. He was sick, even Tim could see that.

  “Back in the old days,” he said in a rasping whisper over the dinner table, “I’d go to the local clinic and get some pills to lower my blood pressure. Or an EGF injection to grow new arteries.” He shook his head sadly. “Now I can only sit around like an old man waiting to die.”

  The boys couldn’t leave him, not in his weakened condition. Besides, the Prof said they’d be better off waiting until the spring tornado season was over.

  “No guarantee you won’t run into a twister during the summer, of course,” he told them. “But it’s safer if you wait a bit.”

  He taught them as much as he could about his computers and the electrical systems he’d rigged to power the house. Tim knew how to read some, so the Prof gave him books while he began to teach Hawk about reading and writing.

  “The memory of the human race is in these books,” he said, almost every day. “What’s left of it, that is.”

  The boys worked his little vegetable patch and picked berries and hunted down game while the Prof stayed at home, too weak to exert himself. He showed the boys how to use his high-powered bow and Tim bagged a young boar all by himself.

  One morning well into the summertime, the Prof couldn’t get out of his bed. Tim saw that his face was gray and soaked in sweat, his breathing rapid and shallow. He seemed to be in great pain.

  He looked up at the boys and tried to smile. “I guess I’m . . . going to become immortal . . . the old-fashioned way.”

  Hawk swallowed hard and Tim could see he was fighting to hold back tears.

  “Nothing you can do . . . for me,” the Prof said, his voice so weak that Tim had to bend over him to hear it.

  “Just rest,” Tim said. “You rest up and you’ll get better.”

  “Not likely.”

  Neither boy knew what else to say, what else to do.

  “I bequeath my island to you two,” the Prof whispered. “It’s all yours, boys.”

  Hawk nodded.

  “But you . . . you really ought to warn . . . your people,” he gasped, “about the ice . . .”

  He closed his eyes. His labored breathing stopped.

  That evening, after they had buried the Prof, Tim asked Hawk, “Do you think we oughtta go back and tell our folks?”

  Hawk snapped, “No.”

  “But the Prof said—”

  “He was a crazy old man. We go back home and all we’ll get is a whippin’ for runnin’ away.”

  “But we oughtta tell them,” Tim insisted. “Warn them.”

  “About something that ain’t gonna happen until we’re grandfathers? Something that probably won’t happen at all?”

  “But—”

  “We got a good place here. The crazy old coot left it to us and we’d be fools to leave it.”

  “What about Colorado?”

  “We’ll get there next year. Or maybe the year after. And if we don’t like it there we can always come back here.”

  For the first time in his life, Tim not only felt that Hawk was wrong, but he decided to do something about it.

  “Okay,” he said. “You stay. I’m goin’ back.”

  “You’re as crazy as he was!”

  “I’ll come back here. I’m just goin’ to warn them and then I’ll come back.”

  Hawk made a snorting noise. “If they leave any skin on your hide.”

  For a week Tim patched up their boat and its ragged sail and filled it with provisions. The morning he was set to cast off, Hawk came to the pebbly beach with him.

  “I guess this is good-bye for a while,” Tim said.

  “Don’t be a dumbbell,” Hawk groused. “I’m goin’ with you.”

  Tim felt a rush of joy. “You are?”

  “You’d get yourself lost out there. Some sea monster would have you for lunch.”

  “We can always come back here again,” Tim said, grunting, as they pushed the boat into the water.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “We hafta warn them, Hawk. We just hafta.”

  “Shut up and haul out the sail.”

  For several days they sailed north and east, back along the way they had come. The weather was sultry, the sun blazing like molten iron out of a cloudless sky.

  “Ice age,” Hawk grumbled. “Craziest thing I ever heard.”

  “I saw pictures of it in the books the Prof had,” said Tim. “Big sheets of ice covering everything.”

  Hawk just shook his head and spit over the side.

  “It really happened, Hawk.”

  “The weather don’t change,” Hawk snapped. “It’s the same every year. Hot in the summer, cool in the winter. You ever known anything else?”

  “No,” Tim admitted.

  “You ever seen ice, except in the Prof’s pictures?”

  “No.”

  “Or that stuff he called snow?”

  “Never.”

  “We oughtta turn this boat around and head back to the island.”

  Tim almost agreed. But he saw that Hawk made no motion to change their course. He was talking one way but acting the other.

  They fell silent. Tim understood Hawk’s resentment. Probably nobody would listen to them when they got home. The elders would be pretty mad about the two of them running off and they wouldn’t listen to a word the boys had to say.

  For hours they skimmed along, the only sound the gusting of the hot southerly wind and the hiss of the boat cutting through the placid water.

  “It’s all fairy tales,” Hawk grumbled, as much to himself as to Tim. “Stories they make up to scare the kids. What do they call ’em?”

  “Myths,” said Tim.

  “Myths, that’s right. Myths.” But suddenly he jerked to attention. “Hey, what’s that?”

  Tim saw he was looking down into the water. He came over to Hawk’s side of the boat.

  Something was glittering down below the surface. Something big.

  Tim’s heart started racing. “A sea monster?”

  Hawk shook his head impatiently. “I don’t think it’s moving. Leastways it’s not following after us. Look, it’s falling behind.”

  They lapsed into silence again. Tim felt uncomfortable. He didn’t like it when Hawk was sore at him.

  Apologetically, he said, “Maybe you’re right. The old man was most likely a little crazy.”

&
nbsp; “A lot crazy,” Hawk said. “And we’re just as crazy as he was. The weather don’t change like that. It’s just not possible. There never was a Flood. The world’s always been like this. Always.”

  Tim was shocked. “No Flood?”

  “It’s one of them myths,” Hawk insisted. “Like sea monsters. Ain’t no such thing.”

  “Then what did we see back there?”

  “I dunno. But it wasn’t no sea monster. And the weather don’t change the way the Prof said it’s goin’ to. There wasn’t any Flood and there sure ain’t goin’ to be any ice age.”

  Tim wondered if Hawk was right, as their boat sailed on and the glittering stainless steel stump of the St. Louis Gateway Arch fell farther and farther behind them.

  When the human race begins to expand its habitat through the solar system, it won’t be only scientists and engineers who go to other worlds. There will be entrepreneurs like Sam Gunn and Dan Randolph, visionaries like Chet Kinsman and Jamie Waterman, saints, sinners, pilgrims, adventurers . . .

  Adventurers. Some people make adventure their business. And what a business opportunity the hellishly hot surface of the planet Venus will be!

  HIGH JUMP

  The things a man will do for love.

  I had been Hal Prince’s stunt double for more than five years. To the general public he was the greatest daredevil that ever lived, the handsome star of the most exciting adventure videos ever recorded, the tall sandy-haired guy with the flashing smile and twinkling eyes who always did his own stunts.

  Well, I had known him when he was Aloysius Prizanski, back before he got his nose fixed, when he’d been a wannabe actor hungry enough to jump into a pool of blazing petrol from the bridge of an ocean liner.

  Back then he did his own stunts, sure enough, but once he got so popular that he could command half a bill just for signing a contract, the insurance people insisted that he was just too goddamned valuable to risk.

  So I did his stunts. His old pal. His asshole buddy. Ugly old me. It was no big secret in the industry, but as far as the general public was concerned, it was Handsome Hal himself who’d risked his own neck riding the hundred-gee catapult at Moonbase into lunar orbit and sledding down the dry-ice-coated flank of Olympus Mons in nothing more than a Buckyball suit.

  To say nothing of skydiving into Vesuvius while it was boiling out steam and the occasional blurp of hot lava. That one cost me three months in a burn recovery center, although I never let Hal know it. He thought I’d just gotten miffed at him and taken off to sulk.

  Now I was going to do the high jump for him. On Venus, yet. Pop myself out of an orbiting spacecraft and drop all the way down to the planet’s red-hot surface.

  And I mean red-hot. The ground temperature down there is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is almost a hundred times what it is at sea level on Earth; like the pressure in the ocean, more than a kilometer down.

  And by the way, Venus’s air is almost all choking carbon dioxide. The clouds that cover the planet from pole to pole are made of sulfuric acid. And they’re filled with bugs that eat metal, too.

  The stunt was to jump from orbit and go all the way down to the ground. I had just come back from the patch-up job after the Vesuvius barbecue. Truth to tell, I was scared into constipation over this stunt.

  But I didn’t tell Hal. Or anybody else.

  We all have our little secrets. My doubling for him was Hotshot Hal’s secret. But I had a few of my own, too.

  Angel Santos doubled for Hal’s female co-stars; if it weren’t for her toughness and quick thinking I’d have been fried inside old Vesuvius.

  Angel was really beautiful: a face to die for, with big wide-set cornflower blue eyes, full bust, narrow waist, long legs—the works. Don’t strain your eyes looking for her in any of Hal’s videos, though; like me, she was strictly a stunt double, wearing whatever wigs and rigs that were necessary to make her look like Hal’s female co-star—whoever she happened to be.

  Angel could’ve been a star in her own right, but she had absolutely no interest in acting. She was hooked on the challenges of danger, just like me. We got along together great, two of a kind. She made me feel really good about myself, too. People looked up from their dinners when I walked into a restaurant with Angel on my arm. I mean people never looked at me. Especially when Heroic Hal was anywhere in sight. Okay, I knew they were looking at Angel, not me, but I got respect for having her on my arm, at least. Boosted my machismo rating with the dumbshit ordinary folks.

  But once Angel met with Hedonistic Hal she got hooked on him. I didn’t realize it at first. We’d all go out together, the three of us. It didn’t take long, though, before they started going out without me, just the two of them. I was left out in the cold.

  Then came the Venus jump.

  I was thinking about packing it in. Let Hal the Heartbreaker get somebody else. He wasn’t thinking about me at all anymore; he only had eyes for Angel. And she clung on him like he was the last lifeboat on the Titanic. She wasn’t even involved in this Venus stunt, it was my trick alone. But she came along for the ride, all the way out to Venus—with Hal the Hunk.

  But then I decided I’d do the stunt, after all. I wanted to be noticed; I wanted to break the lock the two of them had on each other, and the only way I knew to do that was to go through with the toughest, most daring and dangerous stunt that’d ever been tried. Admiration, that’s what I was after. I wanted to make their eyes shine—for me.

  The High Jump: from Venus orbit all the way to the ground. And back, of course. None of the publicity flaks even mentioned the return trip, but I thought about that part of it a lot.

  Okay, so we’re in orbit around Venus—Hal, Angel, me, our crew of technicians and our tech directors, plus the ship’s crew. We had decided to keep the ship’s crew in the dark about me doubling for Hal. As far as they were concerned I was just another techie. The fewer people outside the industry who knew about my doubling for him, the better.

  So Hal’s doing the mandatory media interview, all dolled up in a space suit, no less, with the helmet tucked under one arm. Standing there by the airlock hatch, he looks like a freaking Adonis, so help me, a Galahad, literally a knight in shining armor. And Angel’s right there beside him, hanging on his arm, gazing up into his sparkling green eyes as if she’s about to have an orgasm just looking at him.

  The media people were all back on Earth, of course. We didn’t want them on the ship with us, too much of a chance of them finding out about Hal’s little secret. Since it took messages more than eight minutes to travel from them to us (and vice-versa) they had prerecorded their questions and squirted them to us a couple of hours earlier.

  Now Homeric Hal stood there like a young Lancelot and spoke foursquare into the camera, replying to each of their questions after only an hour or so to study the lines his publicity flaks had written for him.

  “Yes,” he said, with his patented careless grin, “I suppose we could use computer graphics for these stunts instead of doing them live. But I don’t think the public would be so interested in a computer simulation. My fans want to see the real thing! It’s the unexpected, the element of danger and risk, that excites the viewers.”

  The next questioner asked why Hal was so eager to risk his beautiful butt on these stunts.

  He did his bashful routine, shrugging and scratching his head. “I don’t really know. I guess I got hooked on the excitement of it all, and . . . and . . .”

  He hesitated, as the script required. I thought sourly that what he’s really hooked on is the money. Mucho bucks in this game. He let me take over the dangerous part of it easily enough.

  “. . .and . . . well I guess it’s the thrill of taking enormous risks and coming out alive. It makes your heart beat faster, that’s for sure. Gets the old adrenaline pumping!”

  His adrenaline was pumping, all right. But it wasn’t about the risks of the Venus jump. It was Angel, draped over him and drinking in every syllable he uttered.r />
  The media interview ended at last. Hal’s smile winked off. “Okay,” he said, starting to peel off his suit. “Let’s get to work.”

  To his credit, Hal gave me a farewell hug just before I stepped into the airlock. It was an awkward hug, with me in the bulky thermally insulated space suit that we’d had specially built for this stunt.

  “Take care of yourself, pal,” he said, his voice gone husky.

  “Don’t I always?” I said back to him.

  I stepped into the airlock and turned around to face him again. And there was Angel, right beside him. I blew a kiss as the hatch closed and sealed me in—not an easy thing to do from inside my heat-proofed helmet.

  There were two technicians already outside, in space suits of course, to help click me into the aeroshell. It wasn’t a spacecraft, just a heat shield that carried the bare minimum of equipment I’d need to make it down to the surface. I mean, that Humphries kid had reached Venus’s surface a couple of years earlier, but he’d never walked on the planet’s rocky ground, as I was going to do. He’d been inside a specially designed submersible; it touched down on the surface, not him on his own two feet. And he was supported by an even bigger ship that cruised a few kilometers above him, at that.

  Plus, he’d landed in the highland mountains of Aphrodite. It’s only four hundred degrees Celsius up there. Big deal. I was going down to the lowlands, where it’s four-fifty, minimum, and doing it without a ship. Just me in a thermal suit and a handful of equipment.

  Plus the heat shield, yeah, but that was just to get me through the entry phase. I mean, we were orbiting Venus at just about seven kilometers per second. You can’t dip into the atmosphere in nothing but your high-tech long johns at that speed—not unless you want to make yourself into a shooting star.

  I had no intention of becoming a cinder. The heat shield was flimsy enough, nothing more than a shallow bathtub coated on one side with a heat-absorbing plastic that boils off when it reaches fifteen hundred degrees. The boiled-off goop carries the heat away with it, leaving me safe on the other side of the shield. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

  Believe me, the heat shield looked damned flimsy as I climbed into it. The techs checked out all my suit’s systems and the connections, then clamped me into the shield’s shallow protection. None of us said much while they got me properly clicked in.