Living Hell
JOE HALDEMAN
MAYBE I SHOULD HAVE STAYED ON MARS.
That’s a sentiment repeated so often here on Venus it’s right up there with “I should have read the fine print.” About a third of the people here first did a stint on Mars, and I guess we thought that Venus had to be better. Wrong as rain.
And Venus is rain.
There are dry periods up by the poles, but we don’t go there—no plants. And the equator is wind-driven steam that would flay the flesh from your skeleton. Only girls went there, heavily armored. And robots, and telepresence.
They could employ robots up here in the so-called temperate zone, too, but people are supposedly cheaper in the long run. Made with unskilled labor, as the saying goes, but more or less teachable.
Plus the advantage of unquantifiable factors like imagination and initiative, and the supposition that a team is more than the sum of its parts. Versatility and initiative. You can program a machine to solve a thousand different problems, and you hope it becomes a machine for finding the thousand-and-first.
This team found more than it bargained for.
Humans as individuals are fallible in their own ways, with errors less predictable than those of machines, but the other side of that is being able to see problems that didn’t appear to be problems and, once in a great while, solutions that don’t appear to be solutions.
We were almost killed by that virtue, back when humans were new here. People call it the Second Wave now, which is a little grandiose and hopeful, since if there was a First Wave, it consisted of only eight people, five of them eventually buried under the planet’s muddy soil.
“Buried” is kind of a euphemism, since anything edible is dug up immediately and integrated into the lively Venusian ecology. But cremation’s not a real option, not with everything wringing wet, surrounded by hardly enough oxygen to keep a match lit. Did I mention that it’s not a garden spot? Though it is full of plants.
I wrote into my will that if I die here, they should just put my body outside with a nice ribbon tied around some appendage. Use the ribbon from my Ph.D. diploma, finally giving it a useful purpose.
(On the way to and from Mars I accumulated thirty credit hours and wrote a dissertation on anomalies in heat-transfer models in extreme environments. Like the one I was going to enjoy on the planet of steam ’n’ stink.)
The girls who work down toward the equator have to stalk around in heavy plastic armor, but the air in their suits is cool and sweet. I applied for that assignment, but I think was automatically disqualified, not really for being male but for not weighing less than a hundred pounds. They’re all tiny and cute, and when you talk to them on the cube, they’re not wearing too much.
My friend Gloria, who works down there, lamented that it smells like a women’s locker room with no perfume. I imagined that I could handle that, compared to eau de rotting greenhouse, but was smart enough not to say anything.
I wouldn’t have any reason to go down there, anyhow. You might ask why someone with a physical-science doctorate finds himself with a job collecting biota on an alien planet, but that would prove that you didn’t know a lot about the intersection of science and bureaucracy. Half a lifetime ago, I got a bachelor’s in environmental engineering because that’s where the jobs were, but then went on to aero/astro. So of course when the wheels of the gods ground out this assignment for me, they saw the “EnvEng” and ignored the fact that I did go on to the physics doctorate, and have forgotten more biology than I ever learned.
The transfer orbit we took from Mars to Venus lasted six months, and I did take two biology courses en route. But I also wanted to finish my dissertation before I forgot all my thermophysics. So I absorbed just enough xenobiology to avoid touching plants that would kill me. You don’t need any course work to avoid the animals that would.
While I was up in orbit, we got a message from a movie guy asking about doing a Venus-based remake of the classic Jurassic Park. Much hilarity ensued. Someone remembered a joke about the difference between a producer in science and one in Hollywood: a producer in science needs decades of education, not to mention intelligence and dedication—so he or she can produce something. A producer in Hollywood just needs a phone.
Oh, and no one was ever eaten by a special-effects monster.
In fact, when we studied the macrofauna of Venus, it was with the understanding that for every animal that had a name, there were two or three that hadn’t yet made their presence known. Some very “macro,” and either good at hiding or so macro they wouldn’t even notice killing you.
My favorite is the flying carpet, both big and almost invisible underfoot. It looks like a large rug that’s contracted a skin disease—which means that it doesn’t look that different from most of the ground. You can stroll right over it, and it doesn’t move until you’re in the middle of its several square meters. Then it tries to roll itself up with you inside. Your warning is an enzyme that smells like rotten apple juice: if you smell that, you have about half a second to jump back the way you came. Because that enzyme ain’t apple juice.
The microfauna have had less success in incorporating us into the food chain; except for whatever the crotch-eaters like, our body chemistry isn’t compatible. The creatures who eat us get very sick, which seems only fair.
I supposed that they would eventually develop an aversion to us, but Hania, our only actual xenobiologist, says that’s not likely. Too many monsters and too few of us for them to eat and throw up. Thus not enough learning opportunities.
She would remind me that humans are the monsters here. I’ll persist in species chauvinism and call a monster a monster.
I remembered a point that my high-school biology teacher made: a prey animal that’s taken by a predator obviously can never communicate the knowledge of having been killed that way to the next generation. But a prey animal that does survive the encounter may communicate the thrill of the chase. Presumably the abstraction “that was close; better not do that again” is too complex for their ungulate brains.
But they do observe and learn. A complex example on Earth was a “tribe” of burrowing creatures, meercats, who would dive into their holes if humans approached carrying guns, but would ignore humans carrying shovels. (That was language behavior as well as perception and discrimination: the meercat who was the lookout had different sounds for armed and unarmed humans.)
There’s nothing as innocent as ungulates or meercats here. If there were cute fuzzy little burrowing animals, they would drink blood or give off a poison gas, or both.
The little disaster that led to the current trouble was the local space elevator’s falling down. Earth’s space elevator is as safe as the one at Macy’s, but Earth doesn’t have Venusian weather. One cable unraveled, then another, and it’s a good thing they’d put the equatorial station to the east of the damned thing, or it might have flattened all the human females on the planet. One of them did die in the storm of whipping cables and metal shreds. Two storage modules were destroyed, one with most of their food, and their shuttle was sliced in two.
They couldn’t survive for long on the planet, and they had no way off. So the wisdom of redundancy was made clear: each base had the wherewithal to keep both crews alive for longer than it would take for help to arrive from Earth. Most of those resources were duplicated again up at Midway, the unmanned synchronous satellite that was the nexus for the space elevator.
Midway probably wasn’t hurt when the elevator took its little trip. But it was suddenly a very expensive destination in terms of fuel.
My shuttle craft is “bimodal,” as an economy measure. It can fly around in the atmosphere of Venus or in the vacuum of outer space. In the miserly atmosphere, it concentrates oxygen from the planet’s thin “air” soup as it sputters along, but it’s nothing like a terrestrial turbojet. A lot of the energy from the engine goes right back into extracting oxygen. And if I fly too high, the oxygen concentrator seizes up.
So my trip south was solo, slow, and tense. Most of the time I was flying low over ferocious electrical storms, so the ride was bumpy until I got high enough, and the radio was useless with static.
I did sporadically get through enough to know that the surviving women were safe for now, inside the living module of their shuttle, but of course it wasn’t flyable.
We didn’t discuss the other dangers. There were thunder lizards big and strong enough to tear through the light metal skin of the ship—it was great for keeping vacuum out and protecting against micrometeoroids, but even I, with merely human strength, could tear a hole into it with a crowbar and tin snips. The biggest lizards were half the size of the ship. If they thought there was something good to eat inside, they wouldn’t need to look around for a can opener.
The women had guns, as we did. But they wouldn’t have much value, even as noisemakers; the environment was full of dangerous-sounding noises. You can shoot at the native life all day, and it’s just target practice. Dumb as rocks. They don’t know somebody’s shooting at them. If you hit them, they don’t even know they’re dead.
They did shoot three or four of the beasts when they first landed. All that meat lying around rotting kept the other creatures occupied for a while, and most of them grew cautious enough to stay away from the ship, at least during the day. At night, there would be a lot of feeding and fighting, but during the day the larger meat-eaters mostly slept.
The women were doing fine in their way, and the men in theirs, for about a Venusian year, nine Earth months. And then the Sun decided to misbehave.
It’s not as if we hadn’t had solar flares before. They screw up everything for a couple of days, but you basically power down and play cards until the storm is over.
This was a superflare, though, the largest one recorded this century. It even shut down communications on Mars, let alone Earth and Venus.
Mercury Station had time to broadcast three words, or two and a half: “LOOK OUT—FLA …” It was not a warning for Florida.
Ten hours later, the coronal mass ejection from the flare hit us. Quantum electronics went south. Solid-state circuits became really solid, as in fused. Switches welded shut. Radios became paperweights.
The shuttle had been designed with a fallback manual mode that required no electronics. Of course, I’d never used it except in a training simulator.
The ship even had a paper-print manual, which gave off a whiff of mildew when I opened it. I’d studied it well enough to be certified, twenty years ago. And I could read the parts that were English. Most of the math was gibberish to a normal person.
Could I navigate well enough to find the women? Yes and no.
Venus does have a pole star, but you might have to wait a few years for a break in the clouds to align with it.
Or go above the clouds.
There was a manual fuel feed by a forward-facing port, along with an airspeed indicator and a visual fuel gauge. Of course, the gauge only told you how many liters of fuel you had left, not how far you could get on them.
The manual had appendices in the back that told you how much fuel the tub burned per second at full throttle, half throttle, and stall. The calculator bucky-printed on the page was useless without power, but luckily someone had had a sense of humor—there was an old-fashioned slide rule in a wall module like a fire alarm: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Ha, ha. I used the butt of my pistol to gain access to lower mathematics.
There were several blank pages in the back of the manual, and in a MISC drawer, I found an old pencil with an eraser.
I couldn’t make the eraser work; I guess the battery was dead. But with the tables in the back of the manual, and the slide rule, I figured we had twenty-seven minutes of full acceleration, more than enough to get to Midway and refuel for Earth transfer.
Of course, the electronics on Midway would be useless. I could fly to it and dock by the seat of my pants. But could I get inside? Take care of that when we get there, I guess.
The most economical Hohmann transfer would get us to Earth orbit in as little as six months. I packed four and a half crates of freeze-dry in the shuttle, all I had at the one-man base. Buckled up and took off.
I took a suborbital trajectory up high enough to be in space, kind of, and found the south celestial pole in between Ursa Minor and Draco. Oriented the ship to be pointing nose south, and dove back down.
The equatorial station was fortunately at the intersection of an Amazon-sized river and a big brown sea, so I could just follow the sea’s coastline down to the river and look around. That would be simple if it were a nice clear day.
Venus never has one.
Buffeted by storm winds, I had my hands full keeping visual contact with the coastline while the ship pitched and yawed through driving rain. Too-frequent lightning glared every few seconds.
I didn’t expect to see the space elevator cable, less than a meter thick, until it’s close to the base. But you could easily see where it had fallen, a straight brown line of dead vegetation. When the map showed I was near the base, I dropped to treetop level and crawled along dead slow.
They damned near shot me down! A signal flare exploded just off my port wing, and by reflex I slapped the smart-descend. In the absence of electronics, that was not smart. It killed the engine, and I was a very heavy glider for about eight seconds.
I tried for the beach and almost made it. Branches slapped and scraped and did break my fall. I gouged up about thirty meters of sand and came to a stop just before finding out whether the thing would work as a submarine.
Or an anchor.
In fact, I wasn’t too badly situated, pointed seaward with the shuttle’s nose slightly elevated. I eased the throttle forward a fraction of a millimeter and it did fire up and move me a little nudge. So if I had to, I could get away fast.
In a bin marked SURVIVAL GEAR, I found a web belt with two canteens and a holstered pistol. Filled the canteens and put a full magazine in the pistol. There were ten more full magazines in a cardboard box; I dumped them into a camo knapsack along with some food bars.
There was also a heavy machine gun, too big to lift comfortably with one hand. Overkill, unless I was attacked by an infantry platoon.
The pistol was an old-fashioned powder type, flash and smoke and big boom. Maybe it would startle some monster enough to give it indigestion after it ate my arm.
Actually, as a usually observant vegetarian, I didn’t feel good about the prospect of blasting away at innocent animals. But I didn’t want to become part of the food chain myself, either.
I hoped I was within a few miles of where the girls had called from. The radio was all white noise and crackle, but I shouted a description of my situation into it anyhow.
They had probably heard the shuttle come screaming in and crash. Would they come toward the sound? I supposed I would, in their situation. Or maybe split into two groups, one staying put and the other going off to search for my smoldering remains. In any case, my most obvious course was to stay put myself, for at least as long as it would take for them to get here.
So of course I went outside. Or, to be fair, I did sit in the semidarkness of the emergency lighting for as long as I could stand it, maybe five minutes.
I drew the heavy pistol and opened the door just wide enough to see outside. Nothing slithered into the ship, so I opened it wide enough to exit and studied the jungle for several minutes. The ripe and rotten smell conquered the shuttle’s air-conditioning pretty thoroughly, but there was no sign of life bigger than an insect—though that might mean the size of your foot, on Venus.
It was a short jump to the ground. My boots sank two inches into the mud. I aimed around for targets of opportunity, a cheerful and optimistic phrase. None appeared, so I pull
ed the rain hat down tight and made a careful circle around the ship.
It didn’t appear to be greatly damaged. The leading edge of its wings had a couple of dents, which would limit reentry speed for atmospheric braking, but once I got off this blasted planet, I didn’t really plan on returning. When I got back to Earth, I’d just take the elevator down. Leave this tub in orbit for Solar System Enterprises to sell for salvage.
A snake I hadn’t seen reared up to about belt level. I fired reflexively and it flew away. A flying snake? Maybe it was just gliding, technically. Bad enough.
The snake had a face, sort of smiling, and bright yellow antennae, or horns. What a charming planet.
I hadn’t hit it, but the noise made my ears ring and the pistol’s recoil had smacked my palm like a baseball bat. I wasn’t going to be blasting away like some hero in a cowboy movie.
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