Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  She stepped into the airlock, disappearing into its shadowed depth for a moment. Then her bubble helmet and shoulders emerged from the hatch and she beckoned to me.

  “Welcome aboard, Mr. Humphries,” she said. “As owner, you should be the first to board Hesperos. After me, of course.”

  “I’ve tried to contact him a dozen times, Mr. Humphries,” said the communications technician. “He simply doesn’t answer.”

  It was the longest sentence the comm tech had spoken to me since I’d first met her. Her name was Riza Kolodny. She was a plain-looking young woman with a round face and mousey brown hair that she kept short, in the chopped-up look that had been fashionable a couple of years earlier.

  I was bending over her shoulder, staring at the hash-streaked communications screen. Riza was chewing something that smelled vaguely of cinnamon, or perhaps it was clove. She seemed apprehensive, perhaps afraid that she was displeasing me.

  “I’ve tried all the comm freaks,” she said, lapsing into jargon in her nervousness, “starting with the frequency Captain Fuchs registered with the IAA. He just doesn’t answer.”

  Hesperos was not built for creature comforts. The tubular gondola that hung beneath the vessel’s bulbous gas envelope housed a spare and spartan set of compartments that included the bridge, galley, a single lavatory for all eight of us, work spaces, infirmary, supply lockers, and our so-called living quarters—which were nothing more than slim, coffin-sized berths partitioned off for a modicum of privacy. There was no room aboard Hesperos for anything but utilitarian efficiency. We all felt crowded, cramped. I had to fight off incipient claustrophobia whenever I slid into my berth; I felt like Dracula coming home for a good day’s sleep.

  The bridge was especially cramped. The comm center was nothing more than a console shoehorned in a bare few centimeters from the captain’s command chair. I had to twist myself into a pretzel shape to get close enough to Riza’s chair to see her screen. I could feel Duchamp’s breath on the back of my neck; she was ignoring me, her dark eyes intently focused on the EVA displayed on the main screen before her. Rodriguez and the two other techs were outside in their space suits, clambering over the heat shield, checking every square centimeter of it.

  “Maybe Fuchs’s ship has broken down,” I thought aloud. Wishful thinking, actually. “Maybe he’s in trouble.”

  Riza shook her head, fluttering her butchered hairdo. “Lucifer is telemetering its systems status back to IAA headquarters on the regular data channel, same as we are. The ship’s still in orbit with all systems functional.”

  “Then why doesn’t he answer our call?” I wondered.

  “He doesn’t want to,” said Duchamp.

  I turned to face her, not exactly an easy thing to do in the jammed confines of the bridge.

  “Why not?”

  She gave me a frosty smile. “Ask him.”

  I glared at her. She was making a joke of my effort to contact Lars Fuchs. There were only the three of us on the bridge; Rodriguez’s chair was empty.

  “I could relay our call through IAA headquarters,” Riza suggested. “He might reply to us if the request came through them.”

  “He won’t,” Duchamp said flatly. “I know Fuchs. He’s not talking to us because he doesn’t want to. And that’s that.”

  Reluctantly, I accepted her assessment of the situation. Fuchs was going to remain silent. The only way we would learn of what he was doing would be to access whatever data he was sending back to the International Astronautical Authority in Geneva.

  “Very well,” I said, squeezing between Duchamp and the display screen she was watching. “I’m going to the observation port to do my news broadcast.”

  “Stay clear of the airlock,” Duchamp warned. “Tommy and the others will be coming back in less than ten minutes.”

  “Right,” I said as I ducked through the hatch. The main passageway ran the length of the gondola; it was so narrow that Rodriguez joked that a man could fall in love squeezing past someone there.

  Before we left Earth the question of news coverage had come up. Should we bring a reporter along with us? Back when I thought I’d be bringing some of my friends along on the journey, I had been all in favor of the idea. I thought the nets would love to send a reporter to Venus, and I had several friends who could qualify for the role. Live broadcasts from the mission couldn’t fail to get top ratings, I figured. Unfortunately, the net executives saw it differently. They pointed out to me that newscasts from Hesperos would be interesting the first day or two, but they’d quickly become boring on the long voyage out to Venus. They admitted that once we got there, live reports from Venus would be a sensational story—again, for a day or two. But afterward the story would lose its glamour and become nothing but colorless, tedious routine.

  “It’s science stuff,” one of the junior executives—a sometime friend of mine, in fact—told me. “Science stuff is boring.”

  They certainly were not willing to pay a reporter’s expenses, and insurance. It was Duchamp who suggested that I serve as the expedition’s reporter, the face and voice of the Hesperos’s mission. “Who better?” she asked rhetorically. I liked the idea. It eliminated the need to carry an extra person along with us. I would file a personal report on the expedition’s progress every day. I would become a household figure all around the Earth/Moon system. I really thought that would be terrific. Even if the nets wouldn’t feature my broadcasts every day, people could access them whenever they wanted. I often wondered, as I went through my daily report, if my father ever watched me.

  Duchamp was no fool. Removing the need to bring a reporter with us she also removed any possible objections I could raise about her replacing our astronomer with a biologist. Her daughter. Fait accompli. She had manipulated me beautifully and I hardly even minded it, although we both knew we didn’t need a biologist aboard. Duchamp did it for personal reasons.

  Yet I didn’t mind. I was actually pleased that Marguerite was with us. Except for my daily news report I had no real duties aboard Hesperos. Time hung heavily as we coasted out to Venus and then established orbit around the planet. Marguerite had little to do, also, as far as ship’s duties were concerned, although she usually seemed busy enough when I went looking for her.

  Often she was in the little cubbyhole that had been converted into her laboratory. After leaving the bridge and heading for the observation port in the nose of the gondola, I naturally passed by her lab. It was smaller than a phone booth, of course.

  The accordion-fold door was slid back, so I stopped and asked her, “Are you busy?”

  “Yes,” said Marguerite. It was a silly question. She was pecking at the keyboard of a laptop, one of several she had propped along the compartment’s chest-high shelf. There was no room in her lab for a chair or even a stool; Marguerite worked standing up.

  “Oh. I was on my way to do my news report and I thought I’d stop in the galley for a few minutes . . .” My voice trailed off; she was paying no attention to me, tapping at the keyboard of one laptop with a finger while she clicked away on a remote controller with her other hand, changing the images on one of her other screens. The images looked like photomicrographs of bacteria or something equally distasteful. Either that or really bad primitive art.

  I shrugged, conceding defeat, and continued down the narrow passageway to the galley. It was nothing more than a set of food freezers and microwave ovens lining one side of the passageway, with a single stark bench on the other side, where one of the gondola’s oblong windows showed the massive, curving bulk of the planet below, gleaming like a gigantic golden lamp.

  I slumped down on the bench and gazed out at Venus’s yellowish clouds. They shifted and changed as I watched. It was almost like staring into a fire, endlessly fascinating, hypnotic. The clouds’ hue seemed to be slightly different from one orbit to another. At the moment they looked almost sickly, bilious. Maybe it’s just me, I reasoned. I felt like that, sad and sick and alone.

  “Mind
if I join you?”

  I looked up and there was Marguerite standing over me. I shot to my feet.

  “Pull up a section of bench,” I said brightly.

  Marguerite was a physical duplicate of her mother. Younger, of course, not so taut or intimidating, yet the same tall, slim figure. The same sculptured cheekbones and strong jaw. The same jet black eyes and raven hair.

  Where her mother was demanding and dominating, though, Marguerite seemed troubled, uncertain of herself. The mother wore her shoulder-length hair severely pulled back; the daughter’s flowed softly, and was considerably longer.

  Marguerite sat next to me and I caught a scent of perfume, very delicate, but a wonderful contrast to the metallic starkness of the ship.

  “I’m sorry I was short with you back there,” she said. “I was running the latest UV scans of the atmosphere. Sometimes it gets pretty intense.”

  “Oh, sure. I understand.”

  She was still wrapped up in her work. “Something down in those clouds absorbs ultraviolet light,” she said.

  “You think it’s biological? A life form in the clouds?”

  She started to nod, then thought better of it. As if she were a long-experienced scientist she buried her enthusiasm and answered noncommittally, “I don’t know. Perhaps. We won’t know for certain until we get down into the clouds and take samples.”

  Without thinking, I argued, “What about all the sampling the unmanned probes did, years ago? They didn’t find any evidence of living organisms.”

  Suddenly Marguerite’s dark eyes snapped with annoyance. “They weren’t equipped to. They all carried nephelometers to measure droplet size, but not one of them carried a single instrument that could have detected any biological activity. A Shetland pony could’ve flown by and those dumbass robots would never have noticed.”

  “There weren’t any biological sensors on any of the probes?”

  “Not one,” she said. “Venus is a dead planet. That’s the official word.”

  “But you don’t believe it.”

  “Not yet. Not until I’ve looked for myself.”

  I felt a new respect for Marguerite. She could be just as much a tigress as her mother in matters that she cared about.

  “How much longer will we stay in orbit?” she asked.

  I hunched my shoulders. “We’re scanning the equatorial region with radar, looking for any sign of the wreckage of my brother’s ship.”

  “Wouldn’t it be all smashed into small pieces?”

  “Probably not,” I answered. “The atmosphere’s so thick that his ship would’ve gone to the bottom like a ship sinking in the ocean, back home. I mean, the pressure down at the surface is like our oceans, a kilometer or more below sea level.”

  She thought about that for a moment. “So it wouldn’t be like a plane falling out of the sky on Earth.”

  “Or like a missile hitting the ground. No. More like the Titanic settling on the bottom of the Atlantic.”

  “You haven’t found anything yet?”

  “Not yet,” I admitted. Hesperos was in a two-hour equatorial orbit; we had circled the planet thirty times, so far.

  “How much of a chance is there that you’ll spot something?”

  “Well, we know where he first entered the atmosphere, the latitude and longitude. But we can only guess where he might have drifted while he was in the clouds.”

  “He didn’t have a tracking beacon?”

  “Its signal broke up a lot once he went into the cloud deck, so we’ve got to scan a pretty wide swath along the equator.”

  Marguerite looked past me, out at the clouds swirling across the face of Venus. She stared at them as if she could get them to part by sheer willpower. I watched the profile of her face. How much she looked like her mother! The same face, yet somehow softer, kinder. It made me think about how little I looked like my father. Alex resembled Father. People had often exclaimed that Alex looked like a younger replica of Martin Humphries. But I resembled my mother, they said. The mother I never knew.

  Marguerite turned back to me. “Are you really a planetary scientist?”

  The question surprised me. “I try to be,” I said.

  “Then why aren’t you working at it? There’s your planet, right out there, and yet you spend your time wandering around the ship like a little lost boy.”

  “I’ve got a complete set of instruments taking data,” I said. It sounded weak and defensive, even to me.

  “But you’re not doing anything with the data. You’re not analyzing it or using it to change the sensors’ operating parameters. You’re just letting everything chug along on their preset programs.”

  “The data goes back to Professor Cochrane at Caltech. If she wants the instruments changed, she tells me and I make the changes.”

  “Like a graduate student,” Marguerite said. “A trained chimpanzee.”

  That stung. “Well . . . I’ve got other things to do, you know.”

  “Like what?”

  “I send in my news reports every day.”

  Her lips pulled down disapprovingly. “That must take all of ten minutes.”

  Strangely, I felt laughter bubbling up in me. I normally don’t take kindly to criticism, but Marguerite had hit me fairly and squarely.

  “Oh no,” I answered her, chuckling. “It takes more like half an hour.”

  Her expression softened, but only a little. “Well then, let’s see. I’ll give you eight hours for sleeping and an hour and a half for meals . . . that leaves fourteen empty hours every day! If I had fourteen hours on my hands I’d build a whole new set of biosensors for when we dip into the clouds.”

  “I could help you,” I said.

  She pretended to consider the offer. “Uh-huh. Do you have any background in cellular biology?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “Spectroscopy? Can you take apart one of the mass spectrometers and realign it to be sensitive to organic molecules?”

  I must have been grinning like a fool. “Um, do you have a manual for that? I can follow instruction manuals pretty well.”

  She was smiling now, too. “I think you’d better stick to your own specialty.”

  “Planetary physics.”

  “Yes. But get active about it! There’s more to science than watching the readouts of your instruments.”

  “I suppose so. But so far the sensors aren’t showing anything that the old probes didn’t get, years ago.”

  “Are you certain? Have you gone through the data thoroughly? You mean to tell me there’s nothing different? No anomalies, no unexplained blips in the incoming data?”

  Before I could think of an answer, Duchamp’s voice came through the intercom speaker built into the overhead. “Mr. Humphries, radar scan has picked up a glint that might be wreckage. Could you come to the bridge, please?”

  Rodriguez was back on the bridge when we got there, and with all three chairs occupied, the bridge was simply too small for both me and Marguerite to squeeze in. I ducked halfway through the hatch and stopped there. Marguerite stayed behind me, in the passageway, and looked in over my shoulder.

  The main screen, in front of Duchamp’s command chair, showed a frozen radar image: dark shadows and jumbled shapes of land forms with a single bright glint at its center. Rodriguez was leaning forward in his chair, studying the image, perspiration beading his brow.

  “That could be it,” he said, pointing to me. “It’s definitely metal; the computer analysis leaves no doubt.”

  I stared hard at the blob of light. “Can we get better resolution? You can’t tell what it is from this image.”

  Before Riza could reply from the comm console, Duchamp snapped, “We’ve amplified it as much as we can. That’s the best we can get.”

  Rodriguez said, “It’s within the footprint that your brother’s craft would be expected to have, knowing what we know about when and where he went down. Nothing else metallic has shown up in the region.”

  “We’ll have
to go lower for better resolution,” Duchamp said. “Get under the cloud deck and use the telescopes.”

  “What region is that?” Marguerite asked, from behind me.

  “Aphrodite,” said her mother.

  “It’s a highland region, more than two kilometers higher than the surrounding plains,” Rodriguez said.

  “Then it must be cooler,” I said.

  Duchamp smiled humorlessly. “Cooler, yes. The ground temperature is down to a pleasant four hundred degrees Celsius.”

  The lowland surface temperature averages above four hundred fifty degrees, I knew.

  “Are we set for atmosphere entry?” I asked.

  “The heat shield’s been checked out,” Duchamp replied. “Propulsion is ready.”

  “And still no word from Fuchs?”

  Riza answered from the comm console, “He entered the cloud deck two hours ago, halfway around the planet. I got his entry position from the IAA.”

  “Then he hasn’t seen the wreckage?”

  Duchamp shook her head. “If we’ve seen that glint, he has, too.”

  “The plane of his entry was almost exactly equatorial,” Riza said, almost apologetically. “He’ll most likely come out of the clouds in the same region as the glint.”

  I felt a dull throb in my jaw and realized that my teeth were clenched tight. “Very well then,” I said. “We’d better get under the clouds, too.”

  Duchamp nodded, then touched a stud on her chair’s left armrest. “Captain to crew: Take your entry stations. Stand by for atmospheric entry in ten minutes.” She lifted her hand and looked directly at me. “Clear the bridge of all nonessential personnel.”

  I took her unsubtle hint and backed out into the passageway. Marguerite was already striding away.

  “Where are you going?” I called after her.

  “To my lab. I want to record the entry.”

  “The automatic sensors—”

  “They’re not programmed to look for organic molecules or other exotic species. Besides, I want to get the entry process on video. It’ll look good for your news report.”