Trapped on Venus (2 page)

 
The astronauts were
allotted only six hours of rest in their closely-crowded schedule before they
were to begin preparations to leave the module. It was John Stimson who was responsible
for awakening them.

 
“V-12... Venus twelve?
This is Stimson. Your rest period is over. Repeat, your rest period is over. Do
you read me?”

 
Stimson flipped a
switch, leaving the channel open for a moment, but received no reply. He nudged
it back in place and repeated the message.

 
“Venus twelve?... This
is Stimson. Your rest period is over. Jennings? Fisk? Do you read me?”

 
The second broadcast
awakened Scott. His eyes fluttered a moment, then the voice registered in his
memory, bringing him from his dreams to the reality of the space craft. It was
a disappointment to be awakened from his wife’s warm and tender embrace, but
then it was a dream that had recurred to him time and again during the long
flight. Scott leaned forward to note the time on the digital clock, then
answered Stimson’s call.

 
“Roger, Earth One,” he
said, still somewhat groggy. “We’re up.”

 
He turned to Fisk to
make certain that he, too, was awake and jostled his arm. Fisk tilted forward
in the near-weightless cabin, then stretched and yawned. He was awake.

 
“V-12,” Stimson went
on, “our readings indicate that the surface temperature is even hotter than we
originally thought. It’s over 900 degrees Fahrenheit outside. You’ll have to
wear the thermal liners.” He paused. “I know they’re awkward, but you wouldn’t
last more than ten or fifteen minutes out there without them. Your first walk
is scheduled for two hours.”

 
“Roger, John,” Scott
acknowledged, feeling the excitement begin to build within him. He looked over
at the temperature gauge inside the craft. “I guess I forgot about the heat.
It’s leveling out at about seventy-two degrees in here – just about right for a
warm, summer day.”

 
“It’s warm, all right.
That Sun’ll burn you to a cinder if you give it a chance.”

 
“Thanks for the
warning, John.”

 
Scott let his eyes
drift to the tinted heat shield drawn over the pod window, and looked out over
the Venusian landscape. The atmosphere was murky with a heavy, wavy sulphuric
acid vapor trapping the sunlight as it pierced the clouds in a kind of
greenhouse effect that pushed the temperature to well over 900º Fahrenheit
while the pressure was a crushing 90 times that of Earth. In fact, if it
weren’t for the ingeniously-designed Exo-Caustic Anti-Implosion Suits (ECAIS,
or “EKs” as they were called) that balanced the outside pressure against the
inside pressure of their suits and were impervious to the poisonously caustic
vapor in the air, they wouldn’t last more than a few seconds in the harsh environment
as they stepped onto the planet.

 
The Sun was painfully
bright, radiating from the barren but uneven dry and powdery surface with an
overwhelming brilliance. Venus, being so much closer to the Sun than the Earth
and rotating on its axis only once every 243 Earth days, has a day that is
longer than its year. Revolving ever so slowly in the opposite direction from
its orbit around the Sun, with a dense cover of sulphuric acid clouds, make
Venus a mysterious planet. The unmanned probes preceding Scott and Marty gave
the scientists an idea of what to expect, but the Sun’s intensity seemed even
more powerful than they had anticipated. The sun shields constructed over the
windows filtered out the otherwise damaging rays of light, but still permitted
Scott to observe the intense heat outside. As he looked out, shapes were
dissolved into soft shadows with vivid heat waves rising from their crests.

 
It was like looking
through a welder’s mask or a pair of very dark sunglasses as Scott gazed
through the pod window, yet he noticed a nearly unblemished surface with no
ridges or crags where they had landed. The Venusian winds and the tremendous
intensity of the Sun seemed to have eroded the landscape into gentle knolls and
mounds, making it appear more like a vast desert wasteland than a planet that
had fascinated scientists for hundreds of years. But the surface didn’t appear
to be composed of sand, as would be a desert; it was more like a shattered
window with pieces of a clay-like substance, cracked and segmented,
crisscrossing the surface, making it appear much like a mud hole after it had
dried out.

 
“Doesn’t look like
much, does it,” Scott remarked to his co-pilot as the winds of sulphuric acid
swirled around their ship, looking stormy and overcast.

 
Fisk, too, had been
staring out the small porthole on his side of the craft. He turned in response
to Scott’s comment.

 
“No, I guess if you’re
looking for trees and blue skies, it doesn’t. But, from a geological
standpoint, it’s fantastic! Look! Do you see the way those cracks are formed?”
He pointed out the window, looking almost at the base of the module. “They’re
all octagonal, evenly-shaped, almost perfectly symmetrical. That could indicate
it’s some new mineral, something we’ve never seen or studied before. You see,
everything on Earth breaks apart under this kind of heat – no bonding strength.
But, for some reason, this stuff – whatever it is – doesn’t. I can hardly wait
to get started on my tests. It could be the biggest thing since carbon-14!”

“You geologists never get enough of this stuff, do you,
Marty? You and your rocks,” he chuckled.

“Not when I get an opportunity like this. I’ve never seen
anything like it, Scott! It’s incredible!”

“We’d better get started, then. It’ll take us long enough
just to suit up. Did you hear Stimson? He says we’ve got to wear the liners.”

Fisk was already tugging his silver-skinned liner from the
place where it was stored under his chair. “Yeah, I know,” he said without
enthusiasm.

It was rather cumbersome working in such a small area, but
they persisted, trying to pull their liners from the cylinders mounted near the
floor of the craft.

“They sure scrimped on space,” Fisk grunted. “If this thing
was in here any tighter, I’d never get it out!”

 
Scott strained and
pulled his liner free, having to tilt his chair forward to get a good grip on
it. The men donned their liners, heat compressing the seams to prevent even a
single ray of the Sun’s beastly brilliance from reaching them, then
depressurized the capsule to equalize the inside and outside pressures as they
activated the ladder that would lead them to the surface.

“We’re ready, Stimson,” Scott informed the scientist.

“Roger, Probe. And, good luck.” Stimson crossed his fingers
and waited.

“Pressure equalized, Marty?”

“Affirmative.”

“Ladder down?”

“Check.”

“Let’s go, then. John?” he said, placing his hands on the
exit hatch. “We’re going out.”

“Roger, Probe,” an anxious John Stimson answered.

Scott, nearest the exit hatch, twisted the circular locking device
with both hands. The wheel turned once around before the heavy door cracked
from its seal. A brilliant curtain of light flooded into the cabin, instantly
sizzling several food containers hovering inside the craft and a water vile
secured to Scott’s control panel. The scorching light was thick, almost
knife-like as it pierced the crack of the door, rushing into the cabin with
light-speed swiftness. Scott continued to push open the hatch, though, until a
small tear in his console chair burst into flame. The fibers of the chair
burned instantly, catching Fisk’s attention.

“Close the hatch, Scott!” Marty yelled.

But even before he yelled, Scott had jerked the door closed.
He twisted the wheel quickly while Fisk covered the flames with his
thickly-gloved hand.

“There must be an oxygen leak somewhere,” Marty added
quickly. “Check the spare tanks, Scott.”

 
Scott twisted inside
the small capsule, looking behind him to check the readings on the converter
tanks.

 
“Nothing here, Marty.
All tanks show full. Did you check the cabin readings?”

 
“Negative, Scott.
According to our equipment, there’s no oxygen present – inside or out.” He
paused a moment, thinking about what had happened.
No leaks, no oxygen, yet
there was a fire....
“Could it be,” he mused, “that there’s some other gas
present – outside, maybe – that will support combustion?”

 
Scott listened
curiously. He was the chemist/engineer on this flight. Was it possible? “I
don’t know, Marty. I really don’t know....”

 
He sank back in the
arms of his chair, burdened by the confusion already upon them. They weren’t
even on the surface yet, and already they had complications.

 
“I can’t say what to
expect. There’s so much we don’t know about it outside, so much we have to
learn, that almost anything is possible. We know the atmosphere is mostly
carbon dioxide with small amounts of nitrogen, a little argon and neon, but the
rest is a complete mystery. That’s why my tests are so important. And, we won’t
know any more until I can run an analysis... Stimson, are you listening?” Scott
asked the scientist at Earth Control One.

 
“Affirmative, Scott.
We heard the entire sequence. There’s nothing we can add from here. Our
readings all show negative. If there’s oxygen present, we don’t know where it’s
coming from. But, you have to get moving, Scott. If you wait much longer, it
may cut the mission short.”

 
“I know,” Scott
replied – but he was left without an answer. “We expected the reaction from the
containers, we knew the heat would be too much for them, but the fire’s got me
beat. How could we anticipate a combustion factor in an atmosphere without
oxygen?”

 
Grayson, still
orbiting overhead, broke into the communication.

 
“Jennings? This is
Grayson. What color was the flame? Could you tell?”

 
“Negative, Tom. It’d
be impossible to make out the true color with these visors on. It just looked
like a flame. But, if I had to make a guess, I’d say it was maroon, kind of a
dark red. Why? Does that help any?”

 
“Negative. I thought
maybe the color of the flame might give us a clue. But, if you can’t be certain
of the color, it won’t tell us much.”

 
Scott wasn’t giving up
yet, though. He leaned forward, reaching inside the compartment beneath his
chair for the spare liner each astronaut had and pulled it out.

 
“Marty,” he said, unfolding
the liner, “the only thing we can do is try to block out as much sunlight as
possible with our liners. That way, when we open the hatch, the whole ship
won’t go up in flames! Here, give me a hand. If we can stretch it out enough,
maybe we can make a screen of it. It won’t have to cover up everything, just
the stuff that might give us trouble.”

 
Marty helped Scott
stretch the liner across the cabin, then reached beneath the chair for his own.
The two, when used together, covered nearly everything in the cabin, jutting
awkwardly here and there, but offering enough protection to shield the consoles
and chairs from the Sun.

 
“There.... That should
do it,” Scott said with a note of finality. He slid around the liner and tugged
it back in place as Marty squeezed in behind him. The stiff, but lightweight
material looked almost like a wall of heavy tinfoil pinioned as it was from
cushion to console, the shiny outer surface wrinkled and sagging across the
area, conforming to the contours of the objects it covered, yet reassured the
astronauts that another fire would not break out and possibly damage the
wiring. They looked back at the completed sunscreen with moderate approval.

 
“Ready to try again?”
Scott asked.

 
“Roger. Ready when you
are,” Marty answered. “But, take it easy when you open the hatch. I want to
have time to react in case this doesn’t work.”

 
“It will, Marty. It
will. Have confidence.... Stimson? We’re ready. We’re going to give it another
try.”

 
“Roger.... We read
you, Scott. Be careful. There’s no telling what else might happen. It’s more
important to get you back alive than to lose you in some foolhardy stunt. Don’t
take any chances. If it’s not going to work, don’t push it. Maybe we can come
up with another idea back here.”

 
“Thanks for the warning,
John, but you can be sure we....”

 
“Scott?” The voice was
a woman’s. Barbara Jennings, Scott’s wife, had crossed the room to Stimson’s
control panel and stood bravely at the desk, trying to conceal her fear. Her
eyes were tear-stained, reddened, as she understood the risk of the venture
they were about to embark upon. Their very lives were at stake.