Insistence of Vision (19 page)

Grinning, he turned back to the window, gazed upward – then shouted –

“Grab something! Brace yourselves!”

That was all he had time or breath to cry, while yanking on the tiller cables and shoving his knee hard against the elevator control plane.
Bird
heeled over to starboard, both rolling and struggling to yaw-turn. Harsh cries of surprise and alarm erupted from the back compartments, as crates and luggage toppled.

He heard Petri shout – “stay where you are!” – at the panicky Xerish, who whimpered in terror. Jonah caught a glimpse of them, reflected in the view-patch, as they clutched one of the air-storage bottles to keep from tumbling across the deck, onto the right-side bulkhead.

Come on, old boy,
he urged the little sub and wished he had six strong men cranking at the stern end, driving the propeller to accelerate
Bird of Tairee
forward. If there had been, Jonah might – just barely – have guided the sub clear of peril tumbling from above. Debris from a catastrophe, only a small fraction of it glittering in the darkness.

Hard chunks of something rattled against the hull. He glimpsed an object, thin and metallic – perhaps a torn piece of pipe – carom off the view-patch with a bang, plowing several nasty scars before it fell away. Jonah half expected the transparent zone to start spalling and cracking, at any second.

That didn’t happen, but now debris was coming down in a positive rain, clattering along the whole length of his vessel, testing the sturdy old shells with every strike. Desperate, he hauled even harder, steering
Bird
away from what seemed the worst of it, toward a zone that glittered a bit less. More cries erupted from the back two chambers.

I should have sealed the hatches,
he thought. But then, what good would that do for anyone, honestly? Having drifted laterally from Cleo Canyon, any surviving chambers would be helpless, unable to maneuver, never to be found or rescued before the stored air turned to poison.
Better that we all go together.

He recognized the sound that most of the rubble made upon the hull – bubble-stone striking more bubble-stone. Could it all have come from the
Pride of Laussane?
Impossible! There was far too much.

Leininger.

The doomed dome must have imploded, or exploded, or simply come apart without the stabilizing pressure of the depths. Then, with all its air lost and rushing skyward, the rest would plummet. Shards of bubble wall, dirt, pinyons glowing feebly as they drifted ever-lower… and people. That was the detritus Jonah most hoped to avoid.

There. It looks jet black over there.
The faithful old sub had almost finished its turn. Soon he might slack off, setting the boat upright. Once clear of the debris field, he could check on the passengers, then go back to seeking the home canyon…

He never saw whatever struck next, but it had to be big, perhaps a major chunk of Leininger’s wall. The blow hammered all three compartments in succession, ringing them like great gongs, making Jonah cry out in pain. There were other sounds, like ripping, tearing. The impact – somewhere below and toward portside, lifted him off his feet. tearing one of the rudder straps out of Jonah’s hand, leaving him to swing wildly by the other.
Bird
sawed hard to the left as Jonah clawed desperately to reclaim the controls.

At any moment, he expected to greet the harsh, cold sea and have his vessel join the skyfall of lost hopes.

6.

Only gradually did it dawn on him – it wasn’t over. The peril and problems, he wasn’t about to escape them that easily. Yes, damage was evident, but the hulls – three ancient, volcanic globes, still held.

In fact, some while after that horrible collision, it did seem that
Bird of Tairee
had drifted clear of the heavy stuff. Material still rained upon the sub, but evidently softer items. Like still-glowing chunks of pinyon vine.

Petri took charge of the rear compartments, crisply commanding passengers to help each other dig out and assessing their hurts, in order of priority. She shouted reports to Jonah, whose hands were full. In truth, he had trouble hearing what she said, over the ringing in his ears, and had to ask for repetition several times. The crux: one teenager had a fractured wrist, while others bore bruises and contusions – a luckier toll than he expected. Bema – the Sadoulite mother – kept busy delivering first aid.

More worrisome was a
leak
. Very narrow, but powerful, a needle jet spewed water into the rear compartment. Not through a crack in the shell – fortunately – but via the packing material that surrounded the propeller bearing. Jonah would have to go back and have a look, but first he assessed other troubles. For example, the sub wouldn’t right herself completely. There was a constant tilt to starboard around the roll axis…

…then he checked the pressure gauge, and muttered a low invocation to ancient gods and demons of Old Earth.

ᚖ

“We’ve stopped falling,” he confided to Petri in the stern compartment, once the leak seemed under control. It had taken some time, showing the others how to jam rubbery cloths into the bearing and then bracing it all with planks of wood torn from the floor. The arrangement was holding, for now.

“How can that be?” she asked. “We were
heavy
when the
Pride
let us go. I thought our problem was how to slow our descent.”

“It was. Till our collision with whatever-hit-us. Based on where it struck, along the portside keel, I’d guess that it knocked off some of our static ballast – the stones lashed to our bottom. The same thing that happened to
Pride
during that awful thump quake
.
Other stones may have been dislodged or had just one of their lashings cut, leaving them to dangle below the starboard side, making us tilt like this. I’d say we’ve just learned a lesson today, about a really bad flaw in the whole way we’ve done sub design.”

“So which is it? Are we rising?”

Jonah nodded.

“Slowly. It’s not too bad yet. And I suppose it’s possible we might resume our descent, if we fill all the ballast tanks completely. Only there’s a problem.”

“Isn’t there always?” Petri rolled her eyes, clearly exasperated.

“Yeah.” He gestured toward where Xerish – by luck a carpenter – was hammering more bracing into place. Jonah lowered his voice. “If we drop back to the sea floor, that bearing may not hold against full-bottom pressure. It’s likely to start spewing again, probably faster.”

“If it does, how long will we have?”

Jonah frowned. “Hard to say. Air pressure would fight back, of course. Still, I’d say less than an hour. Maybe not that much. We would have to spot one of the canyon domes right away, steer right for it and plop ourselves into dock as fast as possible, with everyone cranking like mad –”

“— only using the propeller will put even more stress on the bearing,” Petri concluded with a thoughtful frown. “It might blow completely.”

Jonah couldn’t prevent a brief smile.
Brave enough to face facts… and a mechanical aptitude, as well? I could find this woman attractive.

“Well, I’m sure we can work something out,” she added. “You haven’t let us down, yet.”

Not yet,
he thought and returned to work, feeling trapped by her confidence in him. And cornered by the laws of chemistry and physics – as well as he understood them with his meager education, taken from ancient books that were rudimentary and obsolete when the Founders first came to Venus, cowering away from alien invaders under a newborn ocean, while comets poured in with perfect regularity.

Perfect for many lifetimes, but not forever. Not anymore.
Even if we make it home, then go ahead with the Melvil Plan, and manage to find another bubble-filled canyon less affected by the rogue thumps, how long will that last?

Wasn’t this whole project, colonizing the bottom of an alien sea with crude technology, always doomed from the start?

In the middle compartment, Jonah opened his personal chest and took out some treasures – books and charts that he had personally copied under supervision by Scholar Wu, onto bundles of hand-scraped pinyon leaves. In one, he verified his recollection of Boyle’s Law and the dangers of changing air pressure on the human body. From another he got a formula that – he hoped – might predict how the leaky propeller shaft bearing would behave, if they descended the rest of the way.

Meanwhile, Petri put a couple of the larger teen girls to work on a bilge pump, transferring water from the floor of the third compartment into some almost-full ballast tanks. Over the next hour, Jonah kept glancing at the pressure gauge. The truck appeared to be leveling off again.
Up and down. Up and down. This can’t be good for my old
Bird.

Leveled. Stable… for now. That meant the onus fell on him, with no excuse.

To descend and risk the leak becoming a torrent, blasting those who worked the propeller crank… or else…

Two hands laid pressure on his shoulders and squeezed inward, surrounding his neck, forcefully. Slim hands, kneading tense muscles and tendons. Jonah closed his eyes, not wanting to divulge what he had decided.

“Some wedding day, huh?”

Jonah nodded. No verbal response seemed needed. He felt married for years – and glad of the illusion. Evidently, Petri knew him now, as well.

“I bet you’ve figured out what to do.”

He nodded again.

“And it won’t be fun, or offer good odds of success.”

A head shake. Left, then right.

Her hands dug in, wreaking a mixture of pleasure and pain, like life.

“Then tell me, husband,” she commanded, coming around to bring their faces close. “Tell me what you’ll have us do. Which way do we go?”

He exhaled a sigh. Then inhaled. And finally spoke one word.

“Up.”

7.

Toward the deadly sky. Toward Venusian hell. It had to be. No other choice was possible.

“If we rise to the surface, I can try to repair the bearing from inside, without water gushing through. And if it requires outside work, then I can do that by putting on a helmet and coveralls. Perhaps they’ll keep out the poisons long enough.”

Petri shuddered at the thought. “Let us hope that won’t be necessary.”

“Yeah. Though while I’m there I could also fix the ballast straps holding some of the weight stones to our keel. I… just don’t see any other way.”

Petri sat on a crate opposite Jonah, mulling it over.

“Wasn’t upward motion what destroyed Leininger Colony and the
Pride?
”

“Yes… but their ascent was uncontrolled. Rapid and chaotic. We’ll rise slowly, reducing cabin air pressure in pace with the decreased push of water outside. We have to go slow, anyway, or the gas that’s dissolved in our blood will boil and kill us. Slow and gentle. That’s the way.”

She smiled. “You know all the right things to say to a virgin.”

Jonah felt his face go red and was relieved when Petri got serious again.

“If we rise slowly, won’t there be another problem? Won’t we run out of breathable air?”

He nodded. “Activity must be kept to a minimum. Recycle and shift stale air into bottles, exchanging with the good air they now contain. Also, I have a spark separator.”

“You do? How did… aren’t they rare and expensive?”

“I made this one myself. Well, Panalina showed me how to use pinyon crystals and electric current to split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. We’ll put some passengers to work, taking turns at the spin generator.” And he warned her. “It’s a small unit. It may not produce enough.”

“Well, no sense putting things off, then.” Petri said with a grandmother’s tone of decisiveness. “Give your orders, man.”

ᚖ

The ascent became grueling. Adults and larger teens took turns at the pumps, expelling enough ballast water for the sub to start rising at a good pace… then correcting when it seemed too quick. Jonah kept close track of gauges revealing pressure, both inside and beyond the shells. He also watched for symptoms of decompression sickness – another factor keeping things slow. All passengers not on-shift were encouraged to sleep – difficult enough when the youngest children kept crying over the pain in their ears. Jonah taught them all how to yawn or pinch their noses to equalize pressure, though his explanations kept being punctuated by fits of sneezing.

Above all, even while resting, they had to breathe deep, as their lungs gradually purged and expelled excess gas from their bloodstreams.

Meanwhile, the fore-chamber resonated with a constant background whine as older kids took turns at the spark separator, turning its crank so that small amounts of seawater divided into component elements – one of them breathable. The device had to be working – a layer of salt gathered in the brine-collector. Still, Jonah worried.
Did I attach the poles right? Might I be filling the storage bottle with oxygen and letting hydrogen into the cabin? Polluting the sub with an explosive mix that could put us out of our misery, at any second?

He wasn’t sure how to tell – none of his books said – though he recalled vaguely that hydrogen had no odor.

After following him on his rounds, inspecting everything and repeating his explanations several times, Petri felt confident enough to insist. “You must rest now, Jonah. I will continue to monitor our rate of ascent and make minor adjustments. Right now, I want you to close your eyes.”

When he tried to protest, she insisted, with a little more of the accented tone used by Laussane mothers. “We will need you far more, in a while. You’ll require all your powers near the end. So lie down and recharge yourself. I promise to call, if anything much changes.”

Accepting her reasoning, he obeyed by curling up on a couple of grain sacks that Xerish brought forward to the control cabin. Jonah’s eyelids shut, gratefully. The brain, however, was another matter.

How deep are we now?

It prompted an even bigger question:
how deep is the bottom of Cleopatra Canyon, nowadays?