Voyage

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Coming on in,’ Gershon said. ‘Approach speed twenty-one feet per. Thirty seconds.’

  Around fifteen miles per hour. Like a slow car crash: hard, but survivable.

  ‘Nine. Eight …’

  The ground rocked upwards, spinning toward the camera; York, trying to pick out features, felt oddly dizzy.

  ‘Two. One.’

  The picture fuzzed over briefly, then cleared.

  She saw a steady image, a rocky plain, no longer rotating. The plain tipped a little, as the probe settled on its side.

  Gershon whooped. ‘Touchdown!’ He pumped his arms, football-style. ‘Welcome to a pleasant spring day on Venus. Air pressure is a soothing ninety-one atmospheres. Temperatures today will peak at a frisky eight hundred and eighty degrees Fahrenheit …’

  Hot enough to melt lead.

  York bent to stare into the screen. The image was distorted into a kind of bow by the fish-eye lens. She couldn’t see the horizon; the visibility couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. The sun was invisible, but the sky was bright. Like a smoggy day in LA.

  Live, from the surface of Venus. York felt a surge of affection for the tough little superprobe.

  The land was flattened, shattered into plates, littered with scattered rocks. The plates were reddish-brown, and looked vaguely shiny. The light was strong enough for some of the rocks to cast a sharp shadow. The surface looked like clay that had been baked, carelessly, in an oven that was set too high: cracked, fractured.

  Could be basaltic. Volcanic. Probably highly alkaline. And those plates look almost sedimentary. But there’s no water here! Laid down by deposition from the air, then? No. Maybe a volcanic origin is more likely. And where the hell did that surface rubble come from? What erosion mechanisms are available? The wind, the acidic atmosphere?

  Without plate tectonics or vulcanism, how the hell did the interior heat escape?

  Maybe it doesn’t escape, she speculated wildly. Maybe the heat gets trapped, under a stable surface, rather than leaking out steadily, like on Earth … building up until it reaches a point where the lithosphere can’t contain it.

  She thought it through. Periodically the surface would melt, suddenly, dramatically, all over the planet, as all that trapped heat escaped. The whole damn planet would resurface itself at once. Catastrophic vulcanism, maybe once every half-billion years: hundreds of millions of years’ worth of geology, crammed into a few millennia.

  She felt breathless. The scenario seemed outrageous. A hell of a hypothesis to spin out of one goddamn impact crater, Natalie.

  But what other explanation could there be, for that pristine wound on the Maxwell Montes?

  She wondered if she should publish this. Maybe even radio home a paper, before they got to Mars.

  Without corroborative proof, though? Peer reviews, to which she’d have to submit any formal write-up of the notion, weren’t often kind. I’d be laughed out of court. The dippy Space Lady from California …

  The distribution of impact craters would be significant, she thought quickly. Corroborative, in fact. On Mars and the Moon there was a clustering of craters, in certain regions. On Mars, you had one young hemisphere, smooth and unblemished, the other heavily cratered, ancient. The same on the Moon, with its separation into the younger seas and the ancient highlands.

  Here – if I’m right – it would be different. The craters must be uniformly distributed, right across the planet’s surface.

  All we’d need is a reasonably detailed global map of the surface, and to do a simple crater count. Then we’d know.

  But that map wasn’t available, and it wasn’t going to be. Not in her lifetime.

  The radar mapping from this flyby would be the most detailed ever performed, but would be confined to a strip, wrapped around one side of the planet. Any crater counts based on that were going to be tentative, at best.

  She slammed her fist into a working surface. Stone glanced at her, surprised; she kept her eyes averted from his face.

  Damn. We shouldn’t be here! A fifty-million-buck radar mapper in polar orbit would settle this. And they spent more than that on the backup john for this tin can of ours.

  For fifteen years, most of NASA’s budget had been sucked into manned spaceflight. Unmanned projects had been subordinated to the needs of the Mars mission or cut altogether. They had lost a gravity-assist flight to Venus and Mercury, asteroid and comet encounters, Grand Tour probes to the outer planets. The Large Space Telescope, a big Earth-orbital eye, had also been axed.

  Sure, humans were on the way to Mars. But humanity knew nothing of the rest of the Solar System it hadn’t known in 1957: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn remained points of light in the sky, the disks and rings of the giant worlds a telescopic blur.

  And I’m cooperating with it, she thought sourly. After all my great moral pronouncements, I’ve finished up as guilty as the rest. Maybe, because I know better, more so.

  The screen filled up with static.

  The probe had imploded, crushed by the pressure.

  York checked the time. It was just fifty-five seconds after landing.

  Gershon pushed himself away from his console. ‘Well, there you have it. Venus is, officially, a shit-hole.’

  And now, suddenly, the cabin grew perceptibly darker. She glanced up. As Ares sailed into the shadow of Venus, the last crescent sliver thinned out into a hoop of light – it was suddenly multicolored (I hope the cameras are getting this) – and then it faded and died away.

  Now there was a hole in space, above Ares: it was the blackness of the cloud decks of Venus, empty, scorching, lifeless.

  York returned to her station. ‘The TV mosaics have started,’ she reported. ‘And the planetary strip photography. Everything’s nominal on the pallet.’

  ‘Pericenter,’ Stone said abruptly. ‘How about: that. Mission elapsed time one seventy-one days, fourteen hours, twenty-four minutes.’ He checked his displays. ‘It’s September eighth, 1985, and here we are at Venus, guys. Distance to the surface three thousand, one hundred, fifty-five miles and change. We’ve come a hundred and seven million miles from Earth, and we’re within fifty miles of the nominal trajectory. Damn fine shooting.’

  York looked up, through the little science viewport above her. Her eyes seemed to have grown dark-adapted, and she thought she could see something of the cloud tops, presumably illuminated by starlight. The cloud-world looked like a huge, milky, pregnant belly, protruding toward her.

  There was a flash, somewhere beneath the clouds, like a light bulb exploding under cotton wool.

  She pushed up to the viewport and stared out. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  ‘What?’ Stone asked.

  I recognize that, from Earth orbit. ‘I just saw lightning, under the clouds.’

  Gershon looked at her. ‘That’s ridiculous. You get thunder and lightning on Earth from large particles, like ice crystals, being shipped around by updraughts. Venus has got a layer of stew for air. There’s no evidence for updraughts or large particles. So how the hell can there be lightning?’

  It happened again: a flash, roughly elliptical, that must have covered tens of square miles. For an instant she could see detailed structure in the gray clouds, layers and banks streaked out in the direction of rotation, illuminated from below.

  ‘Don’t argue about it now,’ Stone said calmly. ‘If it’s there, the TV cameras will pick it up. Hell, Ralph, your fat little probe might even have goddamn heard it.’

  Gershon was right, of course, York thought. There was no direct evidence on Venus of any of the mechanisms which generated thunder and lightning storms on Earth. Then what? Vulcanism?

  She returned to her station, troubled. A goddamn glimpse like this isn’t enough. It’s a whole planet out there. You need a year in orbit, a wider range of sensors, a hundred probes. With this swingby, we’re going to come away with more questions than answers.

  ‘Makes you think,’ Gershon said. ‘We got a delta-vee of over thir
teen thousand feet per second out of that. For free. That’s more than our two tanks of propellant gave us when we left Earth orbit! And now we’re traveling at more than twenty-five miles per second, our greatest velocity …’

  ‘How about that,’ Stone said. ‘Natalie, as of now you’re riding the fastest man-made object in history. Quite a ride, for someone who didn’t want to be a pilot anyhow.’

  York wasn’t listening.

  We’re only here to steal from you, she thought. Ares had no intrinsic interest in Venus itself. We only want your energy.

  Light flooded the science station. She glanced up. A new crescent was forming, as Ares swept toward the day side of the planet.

  She couldn’t get that astonishing image out of her head: the single, pristine crater, punched in the top of a mountain range.

  Wednesday, June 3, 1981 Headquarters, Columbia Aviation, Newport Beach

  JK Lee thought the new Mars Excursion Module RFP was the roughest piece of crap he’d seen in many a long day.

  An RFP, a Request For Proposals, was part of the standard procedure the federal government followed to award large contracts. This particular RFP had gone out to fourteen companies, including McDonnell, Boeing, Rockwell, Lockheed and Martin. Response was requested in ten weeks. NASA would then evaluate the proposals, using a scoring system based on a prearranged formula, to weight the technical approach, the personnel to be used by the bidder, the bidder’s corporate expertise in areas relevant to the bid, and so on. For a large contract an RFP was a major piece of work in its own right.

  The document JK Lee held in his hand – short, badly photocopied, some of it even completed by hand – was horse shit.

  He called Jack Morgan into his office.

  Lee threw the MEM RFP at Morgan. ‘Look at this thing.’

  Jack Morgan was compact, grizzled, with broad, strong hands. He sat down on the other side of Lee’s big metal desk.

  After skimming the RFP, Morgan dumped the paper back on Lee’s desk.

  Lee asked, ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘I wouldn’t wipe my ass with it. I’ve never seen such a hasty, amateurish piece of work.’

  ‘I know.’ Morgan was right, of course. The weight limits on the new MEM were fantastically tight, and the cost ceilings and timescales, to make a 1985 launch, were forbidding. The RFP had obviously been issued in a hell of a panic, as NASA, in the midst of its recovery from the Apollo-N thing, scrambled to put together a viable program for getting back on course to Mars.

  Lee said, ‘I agree. This RFP is a piece of shit. I’m surprised they put it out. But still …’

  ‘But still, what? JK – you’re not thinking of bidding.’

  Lee sat back and put his feet up on his desk. ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because we wouldn’t win. Because it would be a waste of money. I don’t even know why we were sent this thing.’

  Lee thought he knew.

  He happened to know that Ralph Gershon was on NASA’s evaluation panel for this bid. Since they’d met at that lousy Technical Liaison Group meeting over in Rockwell’s Brickyard, and gone for that drive in the Mojave, and Lee had bullshitted a rookie astronaut about a MEM shaped like Apollo – making it up as he went along, really – he and Gershon had stayed in touch.

  He had Gershon to thank for this RFP invitation, he figured.

  ‘Anyhow,’ Morgan said, ‘Rockwell are going to get the MEM; everyone knows that.’

  ‘Yeah, but suppose.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just suppose.’

  ‘One small detail,’ said Morgan. ‘We couldn’t build the thing, even if we won.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because our specialty is airframes and avionics. That’s what makes us a good subcontractor. If you’re bidding for a complete spacecraft, for Christ’s sake, you’re looking at everything: the tanks, the engines, the navigation and flight and guidance stuff, the heat-shields, the life support –’

  Lee had been waiting for that. ‘We’re okay on life support. We’ve got you.’

  ‘Bullshit, JK,’ Morgan said. ‘If you think I’m going to hang my hide out for you in front of Art Cane over a goddamn hare-brained stunt like this, you’ve got another think coming.’ He stood, picked up the RFP, and threw it at Lee’s waste basket. ‘If you’ve got any sense, you’ll leave it there.’

  ‘Yeah. I will. Thanks, Jack.’

  When Morgan had gone, Lee settled back in his big swivel chair, propped up his heels more comfortably on his desk, and lit up a cigarette. The big gun-metal desk was a JK trademark; it was a gift from the crew he’d worked with on the old B-70 project, and it had followed him ever since.

  He thought about Jack Morgan.

  Morgan had been an Air Force flight physician during the Korean War, and he’d got into aerospace medicine by accident. After the war, working for Rockwell – North American as it was then – he’d been on hand when a pilot had been forced to bail out of an experimental F-100, a supersonic jet. The air at that speed was like a wall. Morgan had been on the team of surgeons who had helped to pull the pilot through. It was only the third time in history a pilot had left an airplane traveling faster than sound. So Morgan became, de facto, a leader in the new field of aerospace medicine.

  Since then Morgan had become one of Lee’s most trusted confidants – translate that as drinking partner – and he’d come along for the ride when Lee had busted out of Rockwell, back in 1967, disillusioned by the firing of Stormy Storms.

  Lee valued Morgan’s advice. That didn’t mean he often took it, though.

  After a quarter of an hour he leaned forward and pressed his intercom. ‘Bella, I want you to set me up some meetings.’

  ‘Yes, sir, JK.’

  He got out of his chair and dug the RFP out of the trash.

  Three days later JK Lee bustled into the office of his boss, Arthur Cane, with four of his top people. Including Jack Morgan. They had armfuls of charts and graphs, all making up a hastily assembled presentation called: ‘Why We Should Bid For The MEM.’

  Cane sat behind his big walnut desk, with his heavy English stone-cased fountain pen resting on top of the pile of paperwork before him.

  Arthur Cane was now over seventy, and a huge Bakelite hearing aid clung to one fleshy ear, and he didn’t have a hair on his head. But, after all these years, Lee could still see the look that came into the old man’s eye when he walked around the company lot, past the big, gleaming walls of the wind tunnel. Look at this. My very own wind tunnel.

  Cane was an old-timer who’d worked in the Hughes Corporation before the war, and had then spent a number of years with the boffins at Langley. Cane loved working on advanced aircraft concepts – the push of knowledge into new areas, the thrill of making materials and systems perform beyond the limits of what seemed possible – but he’d got frustrated at Langley, with its budget compromises and in-house politics.

  So, when Langley was subsumed into NASA, Cane had got out, and formed his own company – Columbia Avionics – so that he could fund his own research and follow his nose, and sell the results back to NASA and the big players.

  Which he’d done with success. But Cane had fiercely resisted growing Columbia too fast or too big, and he’d also defended his company astutely from the takeover bids that came along regularly from the big boys.

  Well, today Lee was going to ask Cane for a couple of million bucks of company money, to bid for a contract so big it was bound to transform Columbia out of all recognition. So I damn well need to understand how Art ticks.

  Lee opened the pitch. He kept his introduction flat, neutral and brief. Time enough for tub-thumping later.

  First up after Lee was Julie Lye, a smart young MIT graduate. Lee had pulled her out of her regular research to give the proposal some academic weight. Lye gave a brief, concise talk on what was known, from the various spaceprobes, of Mars: the structure of the atmosphere, the properties of the surface. It was an introduction to the probl
ems anyone would face in landing humans safely on Mars, keeping them alive, and bringing them home. Lye was trim, precise, reassuring.

  Cane watched her with his face blank and his fingers steepled before him.

  Next came Chaushui Xu, another smart kid, a Chinese American who was taking a doctorate in aerodynamics based on his work at Columbia. Xu’s presentation was about the options for getting through the Martian atmosphere, and how Columbia’s expertise could be leveraged to solve the problems.

  Cane’s eyes narrowed to slits, as if he was falling asleep.

  Xu started to get nervous, and he fumbled a little. But Lee wasn’t perturbed; he knew that Cane valued brains above everything else, and these were some of the brightest kids in the company. Cane was listening.

  Xu got to the end of his presentation. He sat down, fumbling again.

  Now Bob Rowen took the floor. A good bit older than the others, Rowen had worked with Lee on the old B-70 project, and with Lee and Storms on the later X-15 development. Rowen outlined how Columbia could handle the challenges of the spacecraft’s avionics. Soon, it was pretty clear that a Columbia MEM would be the smartest spacecraft that ever flew.

  Half-way through Rowen’s pitch, Cane very visibly turned off his hearing aid and started going through his paperwork.

  Jack Morgan leaned over to Lee. ‘Christ,’ he whispered. ‘What the hell do we do now?’

  Lee grinned. ‘We keep briefing. He’s hooked, believe me. If he didn’t like us we’d be out of here by now.’

  The last pitch was Jack Morgan’s, and he described how a Columbia MEM would keep four humans alive on Mars for a month. Clearly irritated by Cane’s manner, Morgan rattled through his spiel as quickly as he could, and sat down with a clatter of showcards.

  Lee got to his feet again. He summed up everything that had been said, and made a little speech about the future, and then just waited.

  He was aware of his team getting restless behind him, but Lee had been here many times before. He stood before Cane’s desk, unperturbed.