‘Well, look at the record....Nothing at all until Grandpa Trunho’s unlucky Mars expedition in 2094. There wouldn’t have been a second expedition there unless Grandpa Gonveia and his pals had pressed for it in 2101. The third, in 2105, was financed entirely by public subscription, and since then no one has set foot on the place.
‘They abandoned the smallest Satellite back in 2080. In 2115 they abandoned another, keeping only Primeira in commission. In 2111 a newspaper and radio campaign on the neglect of space forced them into sending the first Venus expedition - and a shabby affair that was, scandalously ill-equipped; never heard from once it had entered the Venus atmosphere, and no wonder. Ten years later they allowed a learned society to send another ship there - by subscription again. When that, too, disappeared, they just gave up. In the twenty years since then nothing further has been done, nothing at all. They’ve spent just enough to keep Primeira and the Moon Station habitable, so that they can hog their monopoly of space and, if necessary, threaten the rest of us from there, and that’s all. What a record! ‘
‘Far from admirable,’ agreed George Troon. ‘And so - ?’
‘And so they are going to pay the usual penalty of neglect. Someone else is going to step in.’
‘Meaning Jayme Gonveia?’
‘With a kind of syndicate I’ve got together. It’s unofficial, of course. The Australian government just can’t afford to know anything about it. Support for any idea of the kind would definitely be an unfriendly act towards the Brazilian people. However, we naturally had need of designers, and of the use of yards to build the ships, so that there is - well - a little more than a liaison between us and certain government departments. Nominally, however, it has to be an adventure with a rather old-world title - privateering.’ George kept the excitement that was speeding up his pulses carefully imperceptible.
‘Well, well,’ he said, in a tone that matched his cousin’s. ‘Would I be astray in suspecting that there is a part for me in these plans?’
‘So perceptive of you, George. Yes, I remember you as a boy on the subject of space; the veritable Troon obsession. As they never outgrow it, I am assuming that you still hear the “thin gnat-voices calling”?’
‘I’ve had to muffle them, Jayme, but they are still there.’ ‘I thought so, George. So now let me tell you about the job,’ Jayme had said.
A year later, the Aphrodite, with a complement of ten, including George Troon in command, had set out. She was a new kind of ship, for she had a new kind of task - Venus in one leap, with no help from Satellite or Moon Station. As such, she was devoid of all unnecessary weight: victualled and found only for one voyage and a few weeks more; everything beyond bare necessities was to follow her in supply-rockets.
A supply-rocket (or ‘shuttle’, or ‘crate’) could be built for a fraction of the cost of a manned rocket. With living-quarters, insulation, air supply, water-purifying system, and all the rest of the human needs eliminated, the payload could be over fifty per cent higher. Launching, too, was more economical; a shuttle could be given a ground-boost and a quick step-boost producing an acceleration several times greater than a human cargo could survive. Once launched and locked on to its target, it would continue to travel by inertia until it should pick up the coded radio signals that would check and take charge of it. There was no more difficulty in directing a supply-rocket to Venus than in aiming it for a Satellite or for the moon, and no more power was needed to get it there - though it would require extra fuel for a safe landing against the planetary pull.
The question of supplies, therefore, raised few difficulties. The problems arose over the key-ship, the manned Aphrodite, for she must take off under full load, sustain her crew for the voyage, and, above all, be manoeuvrable enough in atmosphere to choose her landing when she should arrive. It was the last proviso that called for modified design. Both the previous expeditions were known to have entered the Venus atmosphere. It was after that that something fatal had befallen them, and the general opinion among spacemen was that neither had proved sufficiently manoeuvrable to pick, and, if necessary, to change its choice of, landing-place with accuracy. On a vapour-bound planet where inspection could not be visual until the last moments, that was essential.
Many years ago it had been supposed that Venus was entirely, or almost entirely, water-covered. That had later given way to the theory that the perpetual clouds were not vaporous, but were formed of dust swept up from an arid surface by constant fierce winds. Several times since then opinions had swung this way and that between the two extremes until there was general acceptance of the view that the planet was probably waterlogged, but scarcely likely to lack land masses entirely. Radar, however, would not be able to distinguish accurately between marshland and solid ground - or even, with certainty, between either and floating weed-beds, should such exist. Infra-red would tell more, but from a comparatively low altitude. It might well be that the true nature of the ground would be indiscernible above a few hundred feet, and it was imperative, therefore, that a ship which discovered itself to be descending upon a mudbank, or a morass, should have the ability to draw off and search for better ground. It was a problem that had not occurred with Earth landings where a ship was brought in by an alliance of radio and electronic control, nor had it arisen on Mars, with its dry surface and normally perfect visibility.
In the event, the last stage of the Aphrodite’s journey had proved the worth of the designers’ trouble. Had she not been able to cruise at moderate altitude in search of a landing-place, there would have been an end of her. The cruise gave her the opportunity to discover that the proportion of land to sea over the area she covered was extremely small, and none of it was the high, firm ground she sought.
At last, Troon decided to return to the largest island so far observed - a low-lying mass about one hundred and fifty miles long and a hundred miles across at its widest, misted over, and sodden under continuous rain. Even then it had been difficult to find a suitable landing area; hard to tell whether the monotonous grey-white vegetation they saw below was low-growing bushes, or densely packed tree-tops; impossible to know what sort of ground lay beneath it. One could do no more than make a guess from the apparent configuration of the ground.
Troon had made six unsuccessful attempts to land the ship. On two of them she got as far as touching the mud, and starting to sink into it, before blasting free again. At the seventh try, however, the tripod supports had squelched through only two or three inches of mud before they found a firm bottom. Then, at last, Troon had been able to switch off, and stagger over to his bunk, past caring or wanting to know anything more about the planet he had reached.
The Aphrodite’s landing took place two weeks ahead of conjunction. A week later they had picked up the signal of the first supply-rocket, switched on contact, and put it into a spiral. They lost it for an hour or two when it was on the other side of the planet on its first circuit, but picked it up again as it came round, and held it thereafter. It was brought in and landed successfully in a roughly surveyed area a mile or so to the south of the ship.
Of the seven that followed it in the course of the next two weeks, only Number 5 gave trouble. In the final stages of descent she developed a fault which cut out the main drive, and dropped her like a stone for two hundred feet. She split open as she hit, but luckily it had been possible to salvage most of her contents. The unloading priority had been the Dome from Number 2 rocket; it was badly needed to get them out of the cramped cabin of the Aphrodite, and give them shelter from the eternal rain and drizzle into a place where there would be room to live and work and protect the stores. Even before it was fully ready, however, there had come a message from Jayme, saying laconically: ‘They’re on to you, George. You have 584 days, or a little less, to get ready for them.’
‘They’, it quickly became clear, meant only certain official circles in Brazil, and their knowledge was severely restricted. A public admission that an expedition had not only made an unauthorized
incursion into the Brazilian ‘Province of Space’, but had stolen a march on its nominal administrators by achieving the first successful landing on Venus, would involve not only the Space Department, but the whole government in a serious loss of face. The evident intention was to avoid publicity, while counter measures were prepared, possibly in the hope that if the secret could be kept until a Brazilian expedition had been dispatched at the next conjunction there might be no need of the admission at all.
Absence of publicity suited both parties for the present. So long as it lasted, no awkward representations could be made to the Australian government, and no overt, or even covert, reprisals taken. Meanwhile both of them employed the interlude which the laws of planetary motion imposed.
On Venus, once the essentials of the Dome were erected, the entire party busied itself with collecting, photographing, preserving, and crating specimens of Venusian air, water, soil, rock, plants, seeds, and insect-type life, working against time to get at least these preliminary, and as yet unclassified, specimens loaded aboard the emptied Number 2 supply-rocket, and dispatched as soon as possible towards the now receding Earth. Only when that had been accomplished did they relax, and, turning their attention to the other shuttles, set about making the Dome into as comfortable a habitation as possible.
Back in Rio, the higher levels of the Space Force pulled schemes for Venusian expeditions out of their pigeon-holes, called in technicians, and started to get down to the task of creating a commando which must be ready, not only to reach Venus by the time of the next conjunction, but to take police action when it should arrive.
When the matter of assigning personnel arose, it was almost inevitable that Space-Commander Jorge Manoel Trunho should be among those chosen. His qualifications and record were first-class, and his family’s history and tradition would have made failure to include him invidious.
In Sydney, Jayme Gonveia, through his own peculiar channels, received the news of the appointment with satisfaction. There was a place in his plans for Commander J. M. Trunho.
The Satellite, Primeira, now alerted, detected Number 2 supply-rocket in the course of its return journey to Earth, and inquired whether it should intercept with a guided missile. A hurried council called in Rio was divided in its opinions. The members could not know that the object detected was simply a freighter. It might be the expedition returning. It was true that messages originating upon Venus were still being picked up, in an as yet unbroken code, but they might be dummy messages, originating from an automatic transmitter left there as a bluff. If the returning rocket were to be summarily blown to bits, and then turned out to have contained the expedition, or even a part of it, somebody would certainly give the matter publicity, and the public reaction would be bad. The government would be reviled for an act scarcely to be distinguished from murder,, and the victims would very likely become heroes overnight. In the end, therefore, Primeira was instructed to make no attack, but to continue observation, and home stations were ordered to be ready to track the object as it approached the Earth. This they did, but had the misfortune to lose it somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, and no more was heard of it.
Thereafter, for more than a year, all parties had worked secretly, and without alarms.
Now that the cat was, at last, publicly out of the bag it caused political ructions in Rio, but made little practical difference. Not even to appease the wrath of the Brazilian people could the conjunction of planets be hastened. Time had been short enough anyway, and, whatever ministers might say in speeches, preparations could only go ahead as planned.
In Sydney, Jayme Gonveia boarded a Brazil-bound aircraft in order to study reactions at their centre. It was a stage that called for careful observation and assessment, with perhaps a little influence thrown in at critical moments. His only surprise was that the breakdown of security had not come sooner. A leakage he had expected, but he had not foreseen the source of it, and hoped that by the time George Troon returned the details would have been forgotten.
For Dorothea, Mrs George Troon, after a year of a preoccupied husband, followed by more than a year of grass-widowhood tediously spent in the slowly regenerating wilderness that was her home, was in the habit of making periodical visits to Rio to break up the depression induced by these things. Taken by friends one night to a party which she found unamusing, she had attempted to improve it by several glasses of iced aguadente and passion-fruit, dashed with quinine and bitters. Her intention of raising her spirits had somehow gone wrong, and she had lifted, instead, the sluices of self-pity. She became woefully the neglected wife. And though in the course of lamenting this, she did not actually mention her husband’s whereabouts, it became clear that she had not seen him for some little time - clear enough to catch the attention of one Agostinho Tarope, a fellow-guest who happened also to be a columnist on the Diario do Sao Paulo. It occurred to Agostinho that a prolonged absence of a member of the Troon family could have interesting implications, and if his subsequent inquiries did not produce many hard facts, he collected enough indications to convince himself that it was worth taking a risk with some pointed comment. Other papers pounced upon, and inflated, his speculations. Nobody was able to produce George Troon to refute the rumours, and the row was on....
The Brazzy in the street was, as Arthur Dogget had suggested, tearing mad. He turned out in large numbers, carrying banners which proclaimed Space to be a Province of Brazil, and demanded action against Australian aggression. Replying to an official approach, the Australian government denied any knowledge of the matter, but undertook to look into the rumours, while pointing out that Australia was a free country of free citizens.
Political and official circles in Brazil were far from unanimous. Factions started to form. Some held the forthright chauvinist view of holding on to space at any cost; others saw it as a regrettable expense, but a strategic necessity; one group considered it a waste of money to maintain stations and a force which could bring no return. Strong complaints about the lack of enterprise in the development of space began to be heard again.
The Space Force itself was split several ways. Those at the top, and previously in the know, were already resentful at being shaken out of a comfortable routine, and reacted with bluster to the newspaper comments on the inefficiency of the Service. The youngest stratum of officers and men began to look forward to action and excitement in the defence of space. Among the men with longer service, however, there was variety of opinion. Many of those who had joined for the great adventure of exploring space, only to find themselves stagnating for years in sentry duty, showed a cynicism little short of subversive. Plenty of disillusioned voices could be heard asking: ‘Why stop ‘em? All we’ve done out there for a hundred years is play dog-in-the-manger - and it’ll be no better if we do chuck ‘em out. If there are others ready to have a shot at really doing a job out there, then let ‘em, I say. And good luck to ‘em.’
It was to this stratum of opinion that Jayme Gonveia was giving his most careful attention at the moment....
Meanwhile, the party on Venus had found its forbearance severely tested.
Once the Dome had been made comfortable, the three jet-platforms assembled, and the island mapped by infra-red photography, exploration, in its wider sense, had virtually come to an end. The land was found to be monotonously low-lying, with a backbone of raised ground which at its highest points barely exceeded one hundred feet. Much of the coast was hard to determine, for it shelved gradually into a tideless sea in great stretches of swamps and marsh, and the weeds growing out of the muddy water had little to distinguish them from those that covered the saturated land. Animate life on the island was restricted to insects, a few wandering crustaceans not unsimilar to spider-crabs which seldom came far from the shore, and a few lunged fish, apparently in the process of becoming amphibians. In the sea there was plenty of life, large and small, but the coastal marshes cut off all surface approach, and the disturbance caused by the jets made it all but impossible to net s
pecimens from hovering platforms.
Cautious descents were made in various parts of the island to take samples. Landing on the lower ground was usually out of the question, and even on the higher slopes it was risky. The platform had to hang cautiously just above the growths while one member of its crew probed with a long rod. With luck, there might be rock a few inches below the surface, and it could put down. Far more often there was a bed of dangerous mud where the probe would go feet deep into a mush made by generations of rotting plants, discovering no bottom at all. So there, too, most of the specimen-taking had to be conducted with scoops wielded from the platforms.
‘A fiery hell,’ Dogget had proclaimed, ‘seems a nice clean conception when you compare it with the stinking, rotting slime under the goddamned, never-ending rain in this place.’
Any exploration beyond the bounds of the island was out of the question, for observation had already shown how rare land was, and the platforms were not equal to long-range travel. There was, therefore, no disposition whatever to risk taking them out over the uncharted seas.
The biologists of the party had far the best of it. Poring over sections through microscopes gave them endless interest.
Once the shuttles had been unloaded there was little temptation to go outside the Dome for anything other than a specimen collecting expedition; inside, kept dry and comfortable by a desiccating plant, there was increasing boredom for all but the four biologists. They remained happily busy and, by degrees, the rest drifted into lending them a hand, and into becoming biologists, or at least biologists’ assistants, themselves. Troon observed the development with approval.