Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  Finally, they each patted my thick helmet and wished me luck. I thanked them, and they clambered through the airlock and shut the hatch. I was alone now, with nothing to keep me company but the automated voice of the computer ticking off the last three minutes of the countdown.

  Three minutes can be a long time, when you’re alone hanging outside an orbiting spacecraft, a hundred million kilometers from blue skies and sunny beaches. I was locked into the heat shield, arms and legs stretched out like a guy in a B&D video, with nothing to do but worry about what was coming next.

  To keep my nerves from twitching, I looked out through one corner of my faceplate at what little I could see of Venus.

  She was gorgeous! The massive, curving bulk of the planet gleamed like a gigantic golden lamp, a brilliant saffron-yellow expanse against the cold blackness of space. She glowed like a thing alive. Goddess of beauty, sure enough. At first I thought the cloud deck was as solid and unvarying as a sphere of solid gold. Then I saw that I could make out streamers among the clouds, slightly darker stretches, patches where the amber yellowish clouds billowed up slightly. I stared fascinated at those fantastically incredible clouds. They shifted and changed as I watched. It was almost like staring into a fire, endlessly fascinating, hypnotic.

  A human voice broke into my enchantment. “You okay out there?”

  “Sure,” I snapped. “I’m fine.”

  “Separation in thirty seconds.” It was the voice of our tech controller in my helmet earphones. “Speak now or forever hold your jockstrap.”

  “Let ’er rip,” I said, in time-honored, devil-may-care fashion. Just in case some wiseass was eavesdropping with a recorder.

  “Five . . . four . . .” Well, you know the rest. I felt a quiver and then a not-too-gentle push against the small of my back: the latches releasing and then the spring-loaded actuator that pushed my aeroshell away from the orbiting spacecraft.

  And there I was, as the flyguys say, watching our orbiter dwindle away from me. Before I had time to grit my teeth the retrorockets kicked in, and I mean kicked. I couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum of space, naturally, but I sure felt it. The whole goddamned aeroshell rattled like a studio set in an earthquake. I heard a kind of a roar inside my head; not sound, really, so much as my bones picking up the vibrations as the rockets tried to shake me to death.

  I hung on—nothing else I could do—for the forty-five seconds of retro burn, knowing the cameras from the ship were getting every picosecond of it in glorious full color. Every bone in my body was quivering like a struck gong. I wondered if I’d get out of this with any teeth unchipped.

  Then suddenly it all stopped. I was either dead or the rockets had burned out.

  “Retro burn complete,” said the controller calmly. “You are go for entry into Venus’s atmosphere.”

  Stretched out inside this shallow soap dish of an aeroshell, I nodded inside my helmet. Now comes the fun part, I said to myself.

  The first thing I noticed was streaks of bright light flicking past me. Hitting the top of the atmosphere at seven klicks per second heated up the gases to incandescence. Pretty soon I was surrounded with white-hot plasma boiling off the heat shield and billowing out past me. I lay there on my back, helpless as a newborn rat, with white-hot gas streaming past the edges of my shell. I could hear noise now, a high-pitched whining sound that deepened into the kind of roar you hear when you open a blast furnace.

  And the shell was shaking again, worse than before. If I hadn’t been latched down, and if my protective suit hadn’t been well padded, I’d have been pummeled to jelly. Mouth protector, I thought as I tasted blood. I should’ve brought a mouth protector. I tried to keep my mouth open so I wouldn’t chew off my tongue or bite a hole through my cheek and cursed myself for the oversight.

  The controller tried to tell me something, but the plasma sheath around the rapidly descending aeroshell broke up his radio message into garbled little hashes of static. I tried to focus my eyes on the data screen inside my helmet, next to the faceplate, but everything was jouncing around so bad I couldn’t see anything but a multicolored blur.

  Must be close to breakup, I thought.

  And bang! The aeroshell clamps unlatched and the shell itself snapped into a dozen separate pieces, just the way it was designed to. Gave me a jolt, let me tell you.

  So now I was in free-fall, dropping like a stone toward the top layer of clouds. The shaking eased off enough so I could read the altimeter inside my helmet. I passed eighty kilometers like a doomed soul falling into hell.

  My biggest worry was the superrotation winds. They could blow me halfway around the planet and I’d miss my landing spot. That’s where the return rocket vehicle was sitting on the surface, waiting for me in that baking heat and corrosive sulfur-laced atmosphere.

  Venus turns very slowly, its “day” is 243 Earth days long—that’s how long it takes the planet to make one complete turn around its axis. So the Sun blazes down on the subsolar point, the spot where the Sun is directly overhead, like a freaking blowtorch. The upper atmosphere, blast-heated like that, develops winds of four hundred kilometers per hour and more that rush around the entire planet in a few days. In a way, they’re like the jet streams on Earth, only bigger and more powerful.

  If I got caught in one of those superpowerful jet streams I’d be blown so far away from my landing point that I’d never make it back to the return vehicle. Then I’d have a choice of whether I wanted to be baked to death or suffocate.

  So the plan was to cannonball through the superrotation’s jet streams as fast as possible, get down into the lower altitudes where the air pressure thickens into soup and the winds are smothered into sluggish little nothings.

  That was the plan.

  I was dropping like a brick, headfirst, the wind screeching past me and the billowing sickly yellow-gray clouds rushing up.

  “How’m I doing?” I yelled into my helmet mike.

  “Drifting off course,” came the director’s voice, calm as a guy ordering a margarita back in L.A.

  I looked to the left of my faceplate, at the miniscreen that showed my position. I was a red dot, the return vehicle was a green dot. There were concentric circles around the green dot. If I was within two circles of the center I’d be okay. That red dot was already close to the edge of the second circle.

  “Better do some maneuvering,” the director suggested, flat as Kansas.

  “Too soon,” I said. The maneuvering jets on the back of my suit only carried so much fuel. Use ’em up now and I’d be helpless later.

  But that red dot that was me was drifting past the second circle. I was in trouble.

  “Maneuver!” the director snapped. I had to smile; at least I got his blood pressure up a little.

  “No sense shovelling shit against the tide,” I said. “I’ll wait until I’m under the jet stream.”

  “You’ll be too far!” He was getting really clanked up now.

  My eyes flicked back and forth. The miniscreen on my right showed I was passing seventy klicks, almost into the top cloud deck. The super-rotation winds should be dying down. But the radar plot on the left of my faceplate showed my red dot almost off the chart completely.

  “Check pressure,” I called out. The altimeter readout was replaced by a rapidly changing set of numbers. According to the probe sampling the air I was falling through, the pressure was rising steeply.

  I nodded inside the helmet. Yes, the radar plot showed I wasn’t drifting any farther from the landing spot.

  “Cranking up the jets,” I said, wriggling my right arm out of the suit’s sleeve to press the actuator stud on the control board built inside the suit’s chest cavity. We had decided to keep all the controls inside the suit, safe from the corrosive oven-hot atmosphere outside.

  “About time,” groused the director.

  “No sweat,” I told the him. Which, I realized, wasn’t exactly true. I was perspiring enough to notice it. I wiped my brow before sliding my arm b
ack into its sleeve.

  The jets came on, gently at first and then accelerating slowly. I twisted my body around and spread my arms out. That unfolded the airfoils that ordinarily wrapped around my sleeves. Like a jet-propelled bat, I dove into the sulfuric-acid clouds, watching the radar plot as my little green dot started edging closer to the red dot.

  My suit’s exterior was all ceramicized plastic, for three reasons. One, the material was a good heat insulator, and I was going to need all the protection from Venus’s fiery hell that I could get. Two, the stuff was impervious to sulfuric acid—of which the cloud droplets had plenty. Three, it would not be attacked by the bugs that lived in those sulfuric-acid clouds.

  The aerobacteria had destroyed the first two ships that had entered Venus’s clouds. They feast on metals, gobble ’em up the way a macrovitamin faddist gulps pills. The exobiologists had assured us that those bugs would not even nibble at the plastic exterior of my suit.

  There was plenty of metal in the suit, a whole candy store’s worth, as far as the bugs were concerned. But it was all covered by thick layers of plastic. I hoped.

  Once in the clouds my vision was reduced to zero. From the outside mikes I could hear wind whistling past, but the altimeter showed that my rate of fall was slowing. The atmosphere was getting thicker, making it harder to gain headway.

  The jets burped once, twice, then gave out. Fuel exhausted. And I was only between the first and second circles on the radar plot. I was sailing through the heavier layers of cloud, heading for the rendezvous spot like a soaring bird now.

  “Looking good,” the director said encouragingly.

  I shook my head inside the helmet. “I’m not going to make the rendezvous.”

  Silence for a few heartbeats. Then, “So you’ll have to walk a bit.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  The thermal suit would hold up for maybe an hour on the surface. Not much more. The problem was heat rejection.

  Down there on the surface, where the freaking rocks are red hot and the air is thicker than seawater, it’s four hundred and fifty degrees Celsius. More, in some places. No matter how well the suit is built, that heat seeps in on you, sooner or later. So the engineers had built a heat-rejection system into my suit: slugs of special alloy that melted at four hundred Celsius. The alloy absorbed heat, melted, and was squirted out of the suit, taking the heat with it.

  It was pretty crude, but it worked. It would keep my suit’s interior reasonably cool, or so the engineers promised. After about one hour, though, the suit would run out of alloy and I’d start to bake; my protective suit would turn into a pretty efficient steam cooker.

  That’s what I had to look forward to. That’s why I was trying my damnedest to land as close to that return ship as possible.

  I broke out of the top cloud deck at last and for a few minutes I was in relatively clear air. Clouds above me, more clouds below. I was still gliding, but slower and slower as the air pressure built up steeply. At least I was past the bugs. The temperature outside was approaching a hundred degrees, the boiling point of water. The bugs couldn’t survive in that heat.

  Could I?

  Lightning flashed in my eyes, scaring the bejeesus out of me. Then came a slow, rolling grumble of thunder. The lightning must have been pretty damned close.

  That second cloud deck was alive with lightning. It crackled all around me, thunder booming so loud and continuous that I shut off the outside mikes. Still the noise rattled me like an artillery barrage. Had I come down in the middle of a thunderstorm? Was I somehow attracting the lightning? You get all kinds of scary thoughts. As I dropped deeper and deeper into Venus’s hot, heavy air, my mind filled with what-ifs and should’ves.

  The lightning seemed to be only in the second cloud deck. I watched its flickering all across the sky as I fell through the brief clear space between it and the third deck. It was almost pretty, at this distance.

  The third and last of the cloud decks was also the thinnest. At just a smidge above fifty kilometers’ altitude I glided through its underbelly and saw the landscape of Venus with my own eyes.

  I stared down at a distant landscape of barren rock, utter desolation, nothing but bare, hard, stony ground as far as the eye could see, naked rock in shades of gray and darker gray, with faint streaks here and there of lighter stuff, almost like talc or pumice.

  I saw a series of domes, and farther in the distance the bare rocky ground seemed wrinkled, as if something had squeezed it hard. There were mountains out near the horizon, although that might have been a distortion caused by the density of the thick atmosphere, like trying to judge shapes deep underwater.

  Below me was an immense crater, maybe fifty klicks across. It looked sharp-edged, new. But they’d told me there wasn’t much erosion going on down there, despite the heat and corrosive atmosphere. It took a long time for craters to be erased on Venus; half a billion years or more.

  The air was so thick now that I was scuba diving, rather than gliding. The bat wings were still useful, but now I had to flap my arms to push through the mushy atmosphere. The servomotors in my shoulder joints buzzed and whined; without them I wouldn’t have the muscular strength to swim for very long.

  I was still a long way from the rendezvous point, I saw. Inching closer, but only inching.

  Then I got an idea. If Mohammed can’t make it to the mountain, why not get the mountain to come to Mohammed?

  “Can you hop the ship toward me?” I asked.

  Nothing but static in my earphones.

  I yelled and changed frequencies and hollered some more. Nothing. Must’ve been the electrical storm in the second cloud deck was screwing up my radio link. I was on my own, just me and the planet Venus.

  She looks so beautiful from a distance, I thought. She glows so bright and lovely in the night sky that just about every culture on Earth has named her after their goddess of beauty and love: Aphrodite, Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Venus. I’ve watched her when she’s the dazzling Evening Star, brighter than anything in the sky except the Sun and Moon. I’ve seen her when she’s the beckoning Morning Star, harbinger of the new day. Always she shines like a precious jewel.

  Even when we were in orbit around her, she glowed like an incredible golden sphere. But once you see her really close up, especially when you’ve gone through the clouds to look at her unadorned face, she isn’t beautiful anymore. She looks like hell.

  And that’s where I was going, down into that inferno. The air was so thick now that I was really pushing myself through it, slowly sinking, struggling to get as close as possible to the spot where the return vehicle was waiting for me. If I hadn’t been encased in the heavy thermal suit I guess I would’ve hovered in the atmosphere, floating like a chunk of meat in a big stewpot, slowly cooking.

  I was passing over a big, pancake-shaped area, a circular mass of what must have once been molten lava. It was frozen into solid stone now, if “frozen” is a word you can use for ground that’s more than four times hotter than boiling water. I caught a glimpse of mountains off to my left, but I was still so high they looked like wrinkles.

  My radar tracking plot had gone blank. The link from the ship up in orbit was shot, together with my voice channels. Pulling my arm out of its sleeve again I poked on the control panel until my radio receiver picked up the signal from the return vehicle’s radar beacon. I displayed it on my miniscreen. Now my position was in the center of the display; the ship was more than sixty kilometers off to my left.

  Sixty klicks! I’d never make that distance on foot. Could I sail that far before hitting the ground?

  We had picked the rendezvous site for two reasons. One, it was about as low—and therefore as hot—as you could get in Venus’s equatorial region. Second, it was the area where the old Russian spacecraft, Venera 5, had landed more than a century ago. The video’s producers thought it’d be a neat extra if we could bring back imagery of whatever’s left of the old clunker.

  Down I swam. I really was swimmin
g now, thrashing my arms and legs, making the suit’s servomotors wheeze and grind with the effort. I was sweating a lot now, blinking at the stinging salty drops that leaked down into my eyes, asking myself over and over again if Hal was worth all this. A guy could get killed!

  The ground came up ever so slowly. I felt like an old wooden sailing ship sunk in battle, sinking gently, gently to the bottom of the ocean. On a world that had never seen wood, or liquid water, or felt a foot on its baking stony surface.

  At last I touched the ground. Like a skin diver reaching the bottom of the ocean, I eased down the final few meters and let my heavily booted feet make contact with the red-hot rock.

  “I’m down,” I said, for the record. I didn’t know if they could hear me, up in orbit, but the suit’s recorders in their “black box” safety capsules would store my words even if I didn’t make it back up.

  I glanced at the radar plot. My antennas were picking up the return vehicle’s beacon loud and clear. It was only seven kilometers from where I stood.

  Seven klicks. In four hundred fifty degrees. Just a nice summer stroll on the surface of Venus.

  Despite the triple layer of clouds that completely smothered the whole planet, there was plenty of light down at the surface. Sort of like an overcast day in Seattle or Dublin. I could see all the way out to the horizon. The air was so thick, though, that it was sort of like looking through water. The horizon warped up around the edges of my vision, like the way water dimples in a slim glass tube.

  The suit felt damned heavy; it weighed more than eighty kilos on Earth, and just about 90 percent of that here on Venus. Call it seventy-some kilos. If it hadn’t been for the servomotors on the suit’s legs I wouldn’t have been able to go more than a few meters.

  So I started plodding in the direction my radar screen indicated. Clump with one boot, squeak, groan, click go the servomotors, thump goes the other boot. Over and over again.