by Ben Bova
“Come on,” I said as I stumbled past Waller. He seemed frozen, mouth gaping, eyes goggling, unwilling or unable to let go of the hatch frame and start downhill toward the airlock.
I grabbed his shoulder and shook him, hard. “Come on!” I shouted at him. “You heard the captain. That means everybody!”
“But I’ve never been in my space suit!” he said, almost in tears. “Never. I was told I wouldn’t have to.”
“That doesn’t matter now,” I said, yanking him free. “Come with me, I’ll show you how to do it.”
The ship seemed to straighten out somewhat as we staggered and weaved down the passageway. We had to manually open hatches every few meters. They automatically slammed shut behind us. At least the alarms had been silenced; their wailing was enough to scare you into cardiac fibrillation.
Rodriguez was already at the airlock, helping Riza Kolodny into her suit. The other two technicians crowded behind him, getting their own suits on.
“Where’s Marguerite?” I asked him.
“I don’t know. Maybe up at the bridge with her mother,” he said, without looking up from his work.
“These suits are all damaged,” I said, holding out the sleeve of my own. The elbow joint was obviously blackened, as if singed by a flame.
“You want to go with no suit at all?” Rodriguez snapped.
Waller moaned. I thought he was going to faint, but then I saw a growing stain across the crotch of his coveralls. The doctor had wet himself.
“What’s happened?” I demanded. “What are we going to do?”
Still checking Riza’s backpack, Rodriguez said, “Damned shell cracked open. We’re losing buoyancy. Can’t keep the ship in trim.”
“So what—”
“We’re going to the descent module, use it in the escape pod mode. Ride it up to orbit and hope Truax can find us.”
“Then why do we need the suits?”
“Whole front section of the gondola’s leaking like a frickin’ sieve,” Rodriguez said, his voice edged with fear-driven tension. “If the leaks reach the bridge before we can get everybody into the pod . . .”
He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I got the picture.
I helped Dr. Waller into his suit before starting to put mine on. The ship kept dipping and then rising, making my insides feel as if I were on an elevator that couldn’t make up its mind. Waller seemed almost in shock, hardly able to move his arms and legs, his eyes staring blankly, his mouth sagging open and gasping like a fish. It flashed through my mind that he had the only undamaged suit on board; all the others had developed leaks, even the spares.
By the time I got my own suit on, Marguerite and her mother were still nowhere in sight. I clomped down the slanting passageway toward the bridge.
“Where’re you going?” Rodriguez yelled after me. “I gotta check you out!”
“I’ll be back in a few minutes,” I called back, shouting so they could hear me through the helmet. “Get everybody to the escape pod. I’ll catch up with you there.”
Checking out the suit was nothing more than busywork at this stage of the game. They all leaked to some degree, we all knew that. But we only needed them for the few minutes it would take to clamber into the escape pod and dog its hatch shut.
I wasn’t going without Marguerite, though. What was she doing? Where was she?
Her lab was empty. The ship seemed to straighten out again; the passageway even angled upward a little, for a moment.
I pushed on to the bridge. There they were, both of them.
“. . . can’t stay here,” Marguerite was saying, pleading really.
“Someone’s got to keep the ship on as even a keel as possible,” Duchamp said, her eyes fixed on the main display screen. Sitting in her command chair, she had a laptop across her knees, her fingers working the keys like a concert pianist playing a cadenza.
“But you’ll—”
I broke into their argument. “Everyone’s suited up and headed for the escape pod.”
Duchamp looked sharply at me. Then, with a single curt nod, she turned her gaze to her daughter. “Get into your suit. Now.”
“Not until you come with me,” Marguerite said.
The picture is etched in my mind. The two of them, as identical as copies from a blueprint except for their ages, glaring at each other with identical stubborn intensity.
“Both of you, get your suits on,” I said, trying to sound commanding. “The others are waiting for you.”
The ship lurched and heaved wildly. My stomach tried to jump into my throat. I grabbed the hatch frame for support. Marguerite, standing beside her mother, staggered and fell into Rodriguez’s chair with an ungainly thump.
Duchamp turned back to the main screen, banging on the laptop’s keyboard again.
“We’re losing the last bit of buoyancy we have,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen. I saw that it displayed a schematic of the ship’s maneuvering engines.
“Then we’ve got to get out!” I snapped.
“Someone’s got to keep the ship from diving deeper,” Duchamp said. “If I don’t work the engines, we’ll sink like a stone.”
“What about the regular trim program?” I demanded.
She barked out a single harsh, “Hah!”
I said, “The computer should be able—”
“There’s no way the computer can keep this bucket on a halfway even keel without manual input,” Duchamp said. “No way.”
“But—”
“I’m only barely managing to hold her at altitude now.”
As if to prove her words, the ship dipped down again, then popped sharply upward. I thought I could hear moaning from up forward, where the rest of the crew was waiting for us.
“It’s the captain’s duty,” Duchamp said, glancing at me. Then she smiled thinly. “I know you didn’t want me for the job, but I take the position seriously.”
“You’ll kill yourself!” Marguerite shrieked.
“Get her off the bridge,” Duchamp said to me.
Still clinging to the rim of the hatch, I thought swiftly. “I’ll make you a deal.”
She arched one brow at me.
“I’ll get Marguerite suited up and bring your suit here to the bridge. Then you suit up and come forward to the escape pod.”
She nodded.
“Come on,” I said to Marguerite.
“No,” she snapped. Turning to her mother, she said, “Not without you.”
Duchamp gave her a look I’d never seen on her face before. Instead of her usual stern, flint-hard stare, the captain’s features softened, her eyes glistened.
“Marguerite, go with him. I’ll be all right. I’m really not suicidal.”
Before Marguerite could reply I grasped her wrist and literally hauled her out of the chair, off the bridge, and down the slanting passageway to the airlock where the suits were stored.
“She’ll kill herself,” Marguerite said in a throaty whisper, as if talking to herself. Over and over, as I helped her into her space suit, she repeated it. “She’ll kill herself.”
“I won’t let her,” I said, with a bravado I didn’t really feel. “I’ll get her into her suit and up to the escape pod if I have to carry her.”
I only said it to make Marguerite feel better, and I’m certain that she knew it. But she let me help her put the suit on and check out the backpack.
I took the least-used-looking of the remaining suits and we staggered back up the passageway toward the bridge again. The ship’s pitching and reeling seemed to calm down somewhat. Maybe we had hit a region of calm, stable air, or we were finally in equilibrium with the air pressure outside.
We got to the bridge and I offered to run the auxiliary engines while the captain got into her suit.
She gave me a pitying smile. “If I had a few days to teach you . . .”
“Then let’s get Rodriguez up here,” I suggested.
“I’ll go get him,” Marguerite said.
; Raising her hand to stop her daughter, Duchamp said, “The intercom still works, dear.”
“Then call him,” I commanded.
She seemed to think it over for half a second, then tapped the intercom stud on her chair arm. Before she could say anything, however, the message light on the comm console flashed on.
Duchamp called out to the computer, “Answer incoming call.”
Lars Fuchs’s heavy, jowly face filled the screen, glowering angrily.
“I picked up your distress call,” he said flatly, with no preamble.
Hesperos’s command computer was programmed to beam out a distress call when safety limits were exceeded. The instant the alarms began going off and the compartment hatches were automatically shut, the computer must have started calling for help. In ten minutes or so, I realized, we would be getting inquiries from the IAA on Earth: standard safety procedure for all space flights.
“We’re preparing to abandon ship,” Duchamp said. “Buoyancy’s gone.”
“Stand by,” Fuchs said, the expression on his face somewhere between annoyed and exasperated. “I’m approaching you at maximum speed. You can transfer to Lucifer.”
Strangely, Duchamp’s expression softened. “You don’t have to do that, Lars.”
He remained irritated. “The hell I don’t. IAA regulations require any craft receiving a distress signal to render all possible assistance, remember?”
“But you can’t—”
“If I don’t come to your aid,” he snapped, “the IAA will hang me out to dry. They’d love to make an example of me. And they won’t hang me by my neck, either.”
I studied his face there on the bridge’s main display screen, at least two times bigger than life. There was anger there, plenty of it. Bitterness deeper than I’d ever seen before. Lars Fuchs looked like a man who’d been forced to make hard decisions all his life, iron-hard decisions that had cost him all hope for ease and joy. Joyless. That was it. That was what made his face so different from anyone I had ever seen before. There was no trace of joy in him. Not even a glimmer that a moment of happiness would ever touch him. He had abandoned all hope of joy, long years ago.
It took all of two or three seconds for me to come to that conclusion. In that time Duchamp made her decision.
“We only have a few minutes before the gondola starts breaking up, Lars.”
“Get into your suits. Lucifer will be within transfer range in . . .” his eyes shifted to some data screen out of camera range “. . . twelve minutes.”
Duchamp drew in a deep breath, then nodded once. “All right. We’ll be ready.”
“I’ll be there,” Fuchs said grimly. Strangely, I thought I heard just a hint of softening in his voice.
Rodriguez came back to the bridge and took over the conn while Duchamp struggled into her suit. She had to step out into the passageway, there was no room on the bridge to do it. Marguerite and I both checked her out. The suit had several slow leaks in it, but should have been good for at least an hour.
“We’ll be aboard Lucifer by then,” Duchamp said from inside her helmet. We were close enough so I could see her face through the tinted bubble. She wore the same hard-edged expression she usually showed. No trace of fear or even apprehension. If any of this frightened or worried her, it certainly did not show in her face.
“We’d better be,” Marguerite said, barely loud enough for me to hear her. All our suits leaked a little, thanks to the bugs. I was grateful that we didn’t have to pressurize them; Venus’s atmospheric pressure at this altitude was slightly higher than Earth’s.
It seemed to me that the ship’s pitching and bobbing smoothed out somewhat under Rodriguez’s hand, but that may have simply been my imagination—or the fact that I liked him a lot better than our hard-bitten captain.
Even so, the metal structure of the gondola began to groan and screech like a beast in pain. I stood out in the passageway and fought down the urge to scream out my own terror.
Marguerite didn’t seem to be at all afraid. In fact, she knotted her brows in puzzlement. “Why are the bugs attacking just the one area of the gondola and not the entire structure?”
“What makes you think they’re not?” I managed to gulp out.
“The only part being damaged so far is the section between airlock and the nose area,” she said.
“How can you be sure of that?”
She jabbed a gloved thumb back toward the bridge. “Look at the life-support display. That’s the only section that’s lost air pressure.”
She was right, I saw as I peered at the life-support screen. Now I furrowed my own brows. Was there any difference between that section and the rest of the gondola? I tried to remember the schematics and blueprints I had studied long months ago, when we were building Hesperos.
That entire section was designed around the airlock. Maybe the bugs were chewing on the plastics that we used as sealant for the outer airlock hatch?
“Is the inner airlock hatch sealed shut?” I called in to Rodriguez, who was still in the command chair.
Without stopping to think why I asked it, he flicked his eyes to the “Christmas tree” display of lights that indicated the status of the ship’s various systems. Most of the lights were bright, dangerous red now.
“No,” he said, shaking his head inside his helmet.
“Seal it,” I said.
“It won’t do any good,” Marguerite said. “If the bugs have eroded the outer hatch’s sealant, they’ll do the same for the inner hatch.”
“It might buy us a few minutes’ time,” I countered.
Duchamp, fully suited up now, agreed with me. “Every second counts.”
She went into the bridge and repossessed her command chair. Rodriguez came out into the passageway with us. He had to squeeze a little to get through the hatch with his suit on.
“All right,” Rodriguez said. “Helmets sealed. Let’s go up forward with the others.”
“What about her?” Marguerite asked.
Duchamp replied, “I’m needed here. I’ll leave the bridge when Lucifer starts taking us aboard.”
“I’ll stay here with you, then,” Marguerite said.
“No,” I said. “You’re coming with us.”
She had to turn her entire body toward me for me to see the flat refusal in her eyes. The same rigidly adamant expression I had seen so often on her mother’s face; the same stubborn set of the jaw.
“Captain,” I called out, “give the order.”
“He’s right, ma petite,” Duchamp said, in a voice softer and lower than I had ever heard from her. “You’ve got—”
The message light began blinking again and Duchamp stopped in mid-sentence. “Answer incoming call.”
Fuchs’s bleakly somber face filled the comm screen. “I’ll be maneuvering beneath your ship in four minutes. I won’t be able to hold station for more than a minute or so. You’ll have to be prepared to jump.”
“Not below us!” Duchamp cried, startled. “We’re breaking up. Debris could damage you.”
Fuchs glowered. “Do your suits have maneuvering propulsion units?”
“No.”
“Then if you can’t fly, the only way to get from Hesperos to Lucifer is to drop.” His wide slash of a mouth twitched briefly in what might have been the ghost of a smile. “Like Lucifer himself, you’ll have to fall.”
Jump from Hesperos onto Lucifer? The idea turned my innards to water. How could we do that? How close could Fuchs bring his ship to ours? I should have added maneuvering units to the space suits, I never thought of it back on Earth. We weren’t planning any EVA work except for the transfer from Truax, and we had the cable trolley for that. Rodriguez should’ve known that we’d need maneuvering jets in an emergency. Somebody should’ve thought that far ahead.
“Three minutes, ten seconds,” Fuchs said. “Be prepared to jump.”
The comm screen went blank.
“Come on,” Rodriguez said, nudging my shoulder to point me up
the passageway.
Marguerite still hesitated.
“Go with them,” Duchamp commanded. “I’ll hold this bucket on course for another two minutes and then come along.”
“You won’t do anything foolish?” Marguerite asked, in a tiny voice.
Duchamp gave her a disgusted look. “The idea that the captain goes down with his ship was a piece of male machismo. I’m not afflicted with the curse of testosterone, believe me.”
Before either of them could say anything more, I put my gloved hand on Marguerite’s backpack and shoved her—gently—along the passageway.
I never found out if shutting the inner airlock hatch slowed down the bugs’ destruction or not. As it turned out, it didn’t matter, one way or the other.
The rest of the crew, Dr. Waller, and the three technicians were up in the nose section, already inside the descent module. As far as they knew we were still planning to use the ’sphere in its escape pod mode and rocket up into orbit, to be picked up by Truax.
As we hurried up the passageway toward the hatch that opened onto the airlock area, Rodriguez again ordered us to seal our helmets. “Air pressure’s okay on the other side of the hatch,” he said, “but there’s probably a lot of Venusian air mixed in with our own. You wouldn’t enjoy breathing sulfuric acid fumes.”
I checked my helmet seal six times in the few steps it took us to reach the closed hatch.
Meanwhile, Rodriguez used his suit radio to tell Waller and the techs to get out of the pod and into the airlock section. They asked why, of course.
“We’re going to transfer to Fuchs’s ship, Lucifer,” he said.
“How?” I heard Riza Kolodny’s adenoidal voice in my helmet earphones.
“You’ll see,” Rodriguez said, like a father who doesn’t have the time to explain.
We got the hatch open and looked into the airlock section. It seemed safe enough. I couldn’t see holes in the structure. But the metal seemed to be groaning again, and I could hear thin, high-pitched whistling noises, like air blowing through a lot of pinholes.
Rodriguez stepped through the hatch first, then Marguerite. I followed. The ship lurched again and I put out my hand to rest it on the sturdy metal frame of the airlock hatch, to steady myself.