Tales of the Grand Tour

by Ben Bova

  “Bugs in the clouds,” Rodriguez said to me, over his shoulder. “Who would’ve thought you could find anything living in clouds of sulfuric acid?”

  “Marguerite did,” I answered. “She was certain she’d find living organisms.”

  “Really?”

  I nodded to his back. I had just witnessed a great discovery. Duchamp was right, her daughter would get a special Nobel for this, just like the biologists who discovered the lichen on Mars.

  She expected to find living organisms on Venus, I told myself again. Maybe that’s the secret of making great discoveries: The stubborn insistence that there’s something out there to be discovered, no matter what the others say. Chance favors the prepared mind. Who said that? Some scientist, I thought. Einstein, most likely. Or maybe Freud.

  We commandeered Dr. Waller and Willa Yeats to help us into the space suits. Waller hummed quietly as I pulled on my leggings and boots, then wormed into the torso and pushed my arms through the sleeves. Two meters away, Willa chattered like a runaway audio machine as she watched Rodriguez get into his suit. They checked out our life-support backpacks and made certain all the lines and hoses were properly connected. Then we sealed our helmets.

  Rodriguez stepped into the airlock first. I waited for the lock to cycle, my heart revving up until I thought Riza at the comm console on the bridge must be able to hear it through the suit radio. Relax! I commanded myself. You’ve been outside before. There’s nothing to be scared of.

  Right. The last time Rodriguez had nearly gotten himself knocked off the ship. I had no desire to go plummeting fifty-some kilometers down to the rock-hard surface of Venus.

  The airlock hatch slid open again and Rodriguez stepped back among us.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  This close, with the ship’s interior lighting shining through his bubble helmet, I could see the puzzled, troubled look on his face.

  “Got a red light on my head-up.” The suit’s diagnostic system, which splashed its display onto the helmet’s inner surface, showed something was not functioning properly.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Gimme a minute,” he snapped back. Then, “Huh . . . it says there was a pressure leak in the suit. Seems okay now, though.”

  Dr. Waller grasped the situation before I did. “But it went red when you cycled the air out of the airlock?”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  We spent the better part of an hour pumping up the pressure in Rodriguez’s suit until it started to balloon. Sure enough, there was a leak in his left shoulder joint. The suit fabric had a resin compound that self-repaired minor leaks, but the joints were cermet covered with plastic.

  “It looks frayed,” Dr. Waller said, his voice brimming with curiosity. “No, more like it was singed with a flame or some source of heat.”

  “Damn!” Rodriguez grumbled. “Suit’s supposed to be guaranteed.”

  I remembered the old joke about parachutes: If it doesn’t work, bring it back and we’ll give you a new one. It was a good thing the suit’s diagnostics caught the leak in the airlock. Outside, it could have killed him.

  So Rodriguez unfastened his helmet and wriggled out of his suit and put on one of the backup suits. We would have to repair his suit, I thought. We only carried four spares.

  Finally he was ready and went through the airlock. No problems with the backup suit. I heard him call me in my helmet earphones, “Okay, Mr. Humphries. Come on through.”

  I went into the airlock and got that same old feeling of being locked into a coffin when the inner hatch slid shut. The ’lock cycled down—and a red warning light started blinking on my the curving face of my helmet, flashing into my eyes like a rocket’s red glare.

  “Hey, I’ve got a problem, too,” I yelled into my microphone.

  The entire EVA excursion was a bust. Both our original suits were leaking and Duchamp decided to scratch the EVA until we could determine what the problem was.

  I thought I knew.

  “I don’t know,” Marguerite said, frowning with puzzlement. “It’s too soon for me to tell.”

  Her voice was low, tired. The excitement of her discovery had worn off; now I was presenting her with its horrifying consequences.

  We were walking down the passageway from her lab to the galley, where we could sit together in comfort. I was leading the way, for once.

  “It can’t be a coincidence,” I said over my shoulder. “There’s got to be a connection.”

  “That’s not necessarily true,” she objected.

  We reached the galley and I punched the dispenser for a cold cup of juice, then handed it to her. After I got one for myself, I sat beside her on the bench.

  “There are bugs out in the clouds,” I said.

  “Microscopic multicellular creatures, yes,” she agreed.

  “What do they eat?”

  “I don’t know! It’s going to take some time to find out. I’ve spent most of the day jury-rigging a cooler for them to live in!”

  “What’s your best guess?” I demanded.

  She ran a hand through her thick dark hair. “Sulfur oxides are the most abundant compounds in the cloud droplets. They must metabolize sulfur in some way.”

  “Sulfur? How can anything eat sulfur?”

  Marguerite jabbed a forefinger at me. “There are bacteria on Earth that metabolize sulfur. I would have thought you’d known that.”

  I had to grin. “You’d be surprised at how much I don’t know.”

  She smiled back.

  I pulled my handheld computer from my pocket and punched up a list showing the composition of the fibers of our space suits. No sulfur.

  “Would they eat any of these materials?” I asked, showing her the computer’s tiny display.

  Marguerite shrugged wearily. “It’s too soon to know, Van. On Earth, organisms metabolize a wide range of elements and compounds. Humans need trace amounts of hundreds of different minerals . . .” She took a deep, sighing breath.

  “It’s got to be the bugs,” I said, convinced despite the lack of evidence. “Nothing else could have eaten through the suits like that.”

  “What about the railing? That’s made of metal, isn’t it?”

  I tapped on the handheld. “Cermet,” I saw. “A ceramic and metal composite.” Another few taps. “Contains beryllium, boron, calcium, carbon . . . several other elements.”

  “Maybe the organisms need trace elements the way we need vitamins,” Marguerite suggested.

  I went back to the list of suit materials and displayed it alongside the list of the safety rail’s composition. Plenty of similarities, although only the cermet had any measurable amount of sulfur in it, and not much at that.

  Then I realized that both suits had leaked at joints, not the self-repairing fabric. And the joints were made of cermet, covered with a thin sprayed-on layer of plastic.

  “You’ve got to find out what they digest,” I urged Marguerite. “It’s vitally important!”

  “I know,” she said, rising to her feet. “I’ll get on it right away.”

  I thought about the charring along the tail end of the gas envelope. “They might be chewing up the shell, too.”

  “I’ll get on it!” she fairly shouted, then started up the passageway back to her lab. She looked as if she were fleeing from me.

  So I’m pushing her, I thought. But we’ve got to know. If those bugs are eating our space suits and the ship itself we’ve got to get out of here and fast.

  I stood there for a dithering moment, not certain of what I should do next. What could I do, except prod other people to do the things that I can’t do myself?

  I decided to go up to the bridge, but halfway there I bumped into Yeats, who was hurrying down the passageway in the opposite direction.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  “All bad,” she said as she squirmed past me. Her body felt soft and actually pleasurable as she pressed by. I wondered how a man’s go
nads could assert themselves even when his brain was telling him he’s in deep trouble.

  “What is it?” I called after her.

  “No time,” she shouted back, hurrying even faster. I’d never before seen her move at anything more than a languid stroll.

  Shaking my head, in exasperation as much as disbelief, I made my way to the bridge. Duchamp and Rodriguez were both there. Good, I thought.

  “We can’t pressurize the gas envelope until we can determine its structural integrity,” Duchamp was saying, in the kind of stilted cadence that I knew was meant for the ship’s log. “The leak rate is small at present, but growing steadily. If it’s not stopped it will affect the ship’s trim and cause an uncontrollable loss of altitude.”

  She looked up at me as I stopped in the open hatchway. Jabbing a finger on the chair arm’s stud that turned off the recorder, she asked impatiently, “Well?”

  “We’ve got to get out of these clouds,” I said. “The bugs out there are eating the ship.”

  Duchamp arched her brows. “I don’t have time for theories. We’ve developed a leak in the gas envelope. It’s minor, but it’s growing.”

  “The shell’s leaking?” My voice must have gone up two octaves.

  “It’s not serious,” Rodriguez said quickly.

  I turned to him. “We’ve got to get out of these clouds! You were out there, Tom. The bugs—”

  “I make the decisions here,” Duchamp snapped.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said.

  Before I could go further, she said, “With all deference to your position as owner of this vessel, Mr. Humphries, I am the captain and I will make the decisions. This isn’t a debating society. We’re not going to take a vote on the subject.”

  “We’ve got to get out of these clouds!” I insisted.

  “I totally agree,” she said. “As soon as we can repair the leak in the envelope, I intend to go deeper and get below this cloud deck.”

  “Deeper?” I glanced at Rodriguez, but he was saying nothing.

  “Have you forgotten Fuchs? The IAA just sent word that he’s descending rapidly toward the clear air below the clouds.”

  The prize money didn’t look all that enticing to me, compared to the very strong possibility that we would all be killed if the bugs chewed away enough of the ship.

  Rodriguez spoke up at last. “Mr. Humphries, we can’t make an effective decision until we know how badly the gas envelope’s been damaged.”

  “It’s really very minor,” Duchamp said. But then she added, “At present.”

  “But it’s getting worse,” Rodriguez said.

  “Slowly,” she insisted.

  “As long as we stay in these clouds we’re going to have colonies of Venusian organisms feasting on our ship’s metals and minerals,” I retorted hotly.

  “This is no time to panic, Mr. Humphries,” she said.

  I thought it over for half a second. “I could fire you and appoint Tom captain.”

  “That would be tantamount to mutiny,” she snapped.

  “Wait,” Rodriguez said. “Wait, both of you. Before anybody goes off the deep end, let’s repair the envelope and get back in proper condition.”

  “Do we have time for that?”

  Duchamp said coldly, “May I point out that Fuchs is diving deeper while we fiddle around here. If your bugs are eating our ship, why aren’t they eating his?”

  “What makes you think they’re not?”

  “I know Lars,” she said with a thin smile. “He’s no fool. If he thought he was going into more danger by descending he wouldn’t go down.”

  I glanced from her to Rodriguez to Riza, sitting wide-eyed at her comm console, then back to Duchamp.

  “All right,” I said finally. “I’m going back to the bio lab to help Marguerite determine if the bugs caused the damage to our suits. How long will it take you to repair the leak in the hull?”

  “Several hours,” Duchamp said.

  “Yeats is suiting up now, with Akira. They’re going to start the work from inside the shell,” Rodriguez said. “It’ll be safer that way.”

  “But they’ll still be exposed to the bugs, won’t they?” I asked. “I mean, if the outside air is leaking into the shell, the bugs are coming in with it.”

  Duchamp said flatly, “That’s assuming you’re right and it’s the bugs that damaged your suits.”

  “You can’t let them stay out too long,” I insisted. “If the bugs do eat the suits—”

  “The fabric is self-repairing,” Duchamp said.

  “The joints aren’t,” I pointed out.

  There was one quick and dirty way to test whether the bugs were eating the suit material, Marguerite and I decided. I hacked off a small section of the cermet knee joint of my damaged suit to serve as an experimental guinea pig. It wasn’t easy: The cermet was tough. I had to scrounge an electric saw from the ship’s stores to do the job.

  Then I brought it to Marguerite’s lab, where she had set up a spare insulated cooler as an incubator for the Venusian organisms.

  But when I brought the cermet sample to her, she was downcast.

  “They’re dying,” Marguerite said, as miserable as if it was her own child expiring.

  “But I thought—”

  “I’ve tried to duplicate their natural environment as closely as I can,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “I’ve kept the temperature inside the cooler just above freezing, right about where it was in the clouds. I’ve lowered the air pressure and even sprayed it with extra sulfuric acid. But it’s not working! Every sample I take shows them weakening and dying.”

  I handed her the ragged little square of cermet I’d cut out. “Well, here, get this into the cooler with them and let’s see what happens before they all die.”

  She had done a remarkable job of jury-rigging what had once been a spare cooler unit into a laboratory apparatus. The lid was sealed against air leaks, although there were half a dozen sensor wires and two small tubes going through the sealant into the cooler’s interior.

  All in all, it looked very much like the makeshift contraption that it was, the kind of thing that scientists call a kloodge. I once heard of such devices being named after someone named Rube Goldberg, but I never found out why.

  Looking worried, Marguerite deftly sliced my cermet sample into hair-thin slivers with a diamond saw, then inserted half of them into the cooler through one of the tubes.

  “What are you doing with a diamond saw?” I asked.

  That made her smile. “What are you doing without one?” she countered.

  “Huh?”

  “I had hoped we’d pick up samples of Venusian rock. The saw can slice thin specimens for the microscope.”

  “Oh, of course,” I said. I knew that; I simply didn’t think of it at that moment.

  “I would have thought,” she went on, “that a planetary scientist would have this kind of equipment with him for geological investigations.”

  I felt my brow furrow. “Come to think of it, I believe I do.”

  She laughed. “I know you do, Van. I stole this from the equipment stores that you had marked for your use.”

  She’d been teasing me! To hide my embarrassment, I bent over and peered into the narrow little window in the cooler’s lid. All I could see inside was a grayish fog.

  “That’s actual Venusian air inside there?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she replied, frowning slightly. “I was drawing it off from the main probe we’ve been using for the nephelometers and mass spectrometers.”

  I caught her accent on the past tense. “Was?”

  She made an irritated huffing sound, very much like her mother. “The probes have been shut down. Captain’s orders.”

  “Why would she . . . ?” Then I realized, “She doesn’t want to run the risk of having the bugs break loose inside the ship.”

  “That’s right,” Marguerite said. “So I’ve got this sample and that’s all. No replacements.”

 
; “And yet she acted as if she thought I was crazy when I told her the bugs ate the suits and the railing.”

  Marguerite shrugged as if it weren’t important to her. But it was to me.

  “She’s a first-class hypocrite, your mother,” I said, with some heat.

  “She’s the ship’s captain,” Marguerite answered stiffly. “She might think your idea’s crazy, but the safety of this ship and crew is her responsibility and she’s decided not to take any unnecessary risks.”

  I could see the logic in that. But still . . . “She’s sent Yeats and Sakamoto out to repair the shell.”

  “That’s necessary. There’s no getting around it.”

  “Perhaps,” I admitted reluctantly. “But she shouldn’t let them stay out too long.”

  “How long is too long?”

  “How long were Rodriguez and I outside? Both our suits were damaged.”

  Marguerite nodded. “I’m sure she’s watching their readouts.”

  The timer on the cooler chimed, ending our conversation. Marguerite drew out a sample of the Venusian air, rich with sulfuric acid droplets and the organisms that lived in them. Quickly she prepared a microscope slide and put the display onto the screen of the laptop computer she had plugged into the electron microscope.

  “They’re recovering!” she said happily. “Look at how vigorously they’re swimming around!”

  “But where’s the suit material?” I asked.

  She turned from the laptop to stare at me. “It’s gone. They’ve digested the cermet. It’s food for them.”

  I raced along the passageway to the bridge. Duchamp was in her command chair, as usual. I could hear Yeats’s voice, puffing with exertion: “. . . going a lot slower than I expected. This is tough work, let me tell you.”

  “You’ve got to bring them back inside!” I said to Duchamp. “Now! Before the bugs kill them.”

  Rodriguez was not on the bridge. Riza Kolodny, at the comm console, looked at me and then the captain and finally turned her face resolutely to her screens, not wishing to get involved.

  Before Duchamp could reply, I said, “The bugs eat cermet. It’s like caviar to them, for god’s sake!”