I’d seen the films. I knew better. There was life.
Something alive, that hated light. Something out there in the dark. Something huge…“Eric, you there?”
“Where would I go?” he mocked me.
“Well,” said I, “if I watched every word I spoke I’d never get anything said.” All the same, I had been tactless. Eric had had a bad accident once, very bad. He wouldn’t be going anywhere unless the ship went along.
“Touché,” said Eric. “Are you getting much heat leakage from your suit?”
“Very little.” In fact, the frozen air didn’t even melt under the pressure of my boots.
“They might be avoiding even that little. Or they might be afraid of your light.” He knew I hadn’t seen anything; he was looking through a peeper in the top of my helmet.
“Okay, I’ll climb that mountain and turn it off for a while.”
I swung my head so he could see the mound I meant, then started up it. It was good exercise, and no strain in the low gravity. I could jump almost as high as on the moon, without fear of a rock’s edge tearing my suit. It was all packed snow, with vacuum between the flakes.
My imagination started working again when I reached the top. There was black all around; the world was black with cold. I turned off the light and the world disappeared.
I pushed a trigger on the side of my helmet and my helmet put the stem of a pipe in my mouth. The air renewer sucked air and smoke down past my chin. They make wonderful suits nowadays. I sat and smoked, waiting, shivering with the knowledge of the cold. Finally I realized I was sweating. The suit was almost too well insulated.
Our ion-drive section came over the horizon, a brilliant star moving very fast, and disappeared as it hit the planet’s shadow. Time was passing. The charge in my pipe burned out and I dumped it.
“Try the light,” said Eric.
I got up and turned the headlamp on high. The light spread for a mile around; a white fairy landscape sprang to life, a winter wonderland doubled in spades. I did a slow pirouette, looking, looking…and saw it.
Even this close it looked like a shadow. It also looked like a very flat, monstrously large amoeba, or like a pool of oil running across the ice. Uphill it ran, flowing slowly and painfully up the side of a nitrogen mountain, trying desperately to escape the searing light of my lamp. “The collector!” Eric demanded. I lifted the collector above my head and aimed it like a telescope at the fleeing enigma, so that Eric could find it in the collector’s peeper. The collector spat fire at both ends and jumped up and away. Eric was controlling it now.
After a moment I asked, “Should I come back?”
“Certainly not. Stay there. I can’t bring the collector back to the ship! You’ll have to wait and carry it back with you.”
The pool-shadow slid over the edge of the hill. The flame of the collector’s rocket went after it, flying high, growing smaller. It dipped below the ridge. A moment later I heard Eric mutter, “Got it.” The bright flame reappeared, rising fast, then curved toward me.
When the thing was hovering near me on two lateral rockets I picked it up by the tail and carried it home.
“No, no trouble,” said Eric. “I just used the scoop to nip a piece out of his flank, if so I may speak. I got about ten cubic centimeters of strange flesh.”
“Good,” said I. Carrying the collector carefully in one hand, I went up the landing leg to the airlock. Eric let me in.
I peeled off my frosting suit in the blessed artificial light of ship’s day.
“Okay,” said Eric. “Take it up to the lab. And don’t touch it.”
Eric can be a hell of an annoying character. “I’ve got a brain,” I snarled, “even if you can’t see it.” So can I.
There was a ringing silence while we each tried to dream up an apology. Eric got there first. “Sorry,” he said.
“Me too.” I hauled the collector off to the lab on a cart.
He guided me when I got there. “Put the whole package in that opening. Jaws first. No, don’t close it yet. Turn the thing until these lines match the lines on the collector. Okay. Push it in a little. Now close the door. Okay, Howie, I’ll take it from there…” There were chugging sounds from behind the little door. “Have to wait till the lab’s cool enough. Go get some coffee,” said Eric.
“I’d better check your maintenance.”
“Okay, good. Go oil my prosthetic aids.”
“Prosthetic aids”—that was a hot one. I’d thought it up myself. I pushed the coffee button so it would be ready when I was through, then opened the big door in the forward wall of the cabin. Eric looked much like an electrical network, except for the gray mass at the top which was his brain. In all directions from his spinal cord and brain, connected at the walls of the intricately shaped glass-and-soft-plastic vessel which housed him, Eric’s nerves reached out to master the ship. The instruments which mastered Eric—but he was sensitive about having it put that way—were banked along both sides of the closet. The blood pump pumped rhythmically, seventy beats a minute.
“How do I look?” Eric asked.
“Beautiful. Are you looking for flattery?”
“Jackass! Am I still alive?”
“The instruments think so. But I’d better lower your fluid temperature a fraction.” I did. Ever since we’d landed I’d had a tendency to keep temperatures too high. “Everything else looks okay. Except your food tank is getting low.”
“Well, it’ll last the trip.”
“Yeah. ’Scuse me. Eric, coffee’s ready.” I went and got it. The only thing I really worry about is his “liver.” It’s too complicated. It could break down too easily. If it stopped making blood sugar Eric would be dead.
If Eric dies I die, because Eric is the ship. If I die Eric dies, insane, because he can’t sleep unless I set his prosthetic aids.
I was finishing my coffee when Eric yelled. “Hey!”
“What’s wrong?” I was ready to run in any direction.
“It’s only helium!”
He was astonished and indignant. I relaxed.
“I get it now, Howie. Helium II. That’s all our monsters are. Nuts.”
Helium II, the superfluid that flows uphill. “Nuts doubled. Hold everything, Eric. Don’t throw away your samples. Check them for contaminants.”
“For what?”
“Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive.”
“There are plenty of other substances,” said Eric, “but I can’t analyze them well enough. We’ll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool.”
I got up. “Take off right now?”
“Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we’re just as likely to wait here while this one deteriorates.”
“Okay, I’m strapping down now. Eric?”
“Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive section. You can get up.”
“No, I’ll wait. Eric, I hope it isn’t alive. I’d rather it was just helium II acting like it’s supposed to act.”
“Why? Don’t you want to be famous, like me?”
“Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It’s just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium II.”
“It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the predawn crescent. Pluto’s day is long enough for that. You’re right, though; it doesn’t get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don’t have much imagination.”
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of Mercury.
This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere, and rotates once for every two of its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.
LN
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
“There goes a fish,” I said, just to break the monotony.
“So how’s it cooked?”
“Can’t tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish.”
Eric sighed noisily. “Do I have to?”
“You have to. Only way you’ll see anything worthwhile in this—this—” Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
“Searing black calm.”
“Right.”
“Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface.”
I shivered. “What’s the outside temperature now?”
“You’d rather not know. You’ve always had too much imagination, Howie.”
“I can take it, Doc.”
“Six hundred and twelve degrees.”
“I can’t take it, Doc!”
This was Venus, planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth-to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric’s job, to regulate the tank’s pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten-mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
“Temperature just went up to six-thirteen,” said Eric. “Look, are you through bitching?”
“For the moment.”
“Good. Strap down. We’re taking off.”
“Oh, frabjous day!” I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
“We’ve done everything we came to do. Haven’t we?”
“Am I arguing? Look, I’m strapped down.”
“Yeah.”
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We’d spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long. “What’s the trouble, Eric?”
“You’d rather not know.”
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn’t making the extra effort to get human expression out of his “prosthetic” vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.
“I can take it,” I said.
“Okay. I can’t feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I’ve just had a spinal anesthetic.”
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. “See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can’t feel them.”
“Okay.” One split second later, “They don’t. Nothing happens. Good thinking though.”
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was, “It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I’ve liked being half of this team, and I still do.”
“Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully.”
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door in the cabin’s forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric’s central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don’t call Eric a cripple, because he doesn’t like it. In a way he’s the ideal spaceman. His life support system weighs only half what mine does, and takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aperture dilation, and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four different ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn’t be working.
“Test the others,” said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve connection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that the ram nerves might have “gone to sleep” from lack of nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I let Eric analyze his own blood sugar, hoping that the “liver” had goofed and was producing some other sugar compound. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric—inside the cabin.
“Eric, you’re healthier than I am.”
“I could tell. You look worried, and I don’t blame you. Now you’ll have to go outside.”
“I know. Let’s dig out the suit.”
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The suit was a segmented armor job. I had watched it being tested in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn’t start again until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It seemed to be staring back.
“You still can’t feel anything in the ramjets?”
“Not a twinge.”
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval armor. Then I thought of something else. “We’re twenty miles up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?”
“No! Wouldn’t think of it. We’ll just have to go down.”
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant until takeoff. When the time came Eric could get extra lift by heating the hydrogen to higher pressure, then cracking a valve to let the excess out. Of course he’d have to be very careful that the pressure was higher in the tank, or we’d get Venusian air coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally that would be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve, and down we went.
“Of course there’s a catch,” said Eric.
“I know.”
“The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground level it’ll be six times that.”
“I know.”
We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on our tailfins. The temperature rose gradually. The pressure went up fast. I sat at the window and saw nothing, nothing but black, but I sat there anyway and waited for the window to crack. NASA had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles…
Eric said, “The blimp tank’s okay, and so’s the ship, I think. But will the cabin stand up to it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Ten miles.”
Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic ion engine that was to take us home. We couldn’t get to it on the chemical rocket alone. The rocket was for use after the air became too thin for the ramjets.
“Four m
iles. Have to crack the valve again.”
The ship dropped.
“I can see ground,” said Eric.
I couldn’t. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said, “Forget it. I’m using deep infrared, and getting no detail.”
“No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and man-eating plants?”
“All I see is hot, bare dirt.”
But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the cabin wall. My neck and shoulder muscles loosened. I turned away from the window. Hours had passed while we dropped through the poisoned, thickening air. I already had most of my suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-finger gauntlets.
“Strap down,” said Eric. I did.
We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back, bumped again. And again, with my teeth rattling and my armor-plated body rolling against the crash webbing. “Damn,” Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above. Eric said, “I don’t know how we’ll get back up.”
Neither did I. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and I got up and went to the airlock.
“Good luck,” said Eric. “Don’t stay out too long.” I waved at his cabin camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred and thirty.
The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a complaining whine. With an empty bucket in each hand, and with my headlamp blazing a way through the black murk, I stepped out onto the right wing.
My suit creaked and settled under the pressure, and I stood on the wing and waited for it to stop. It was almost like being under water. My headlamp beam went out thick enough to be solid, penetrating no more than a hundred feet. The air couldn’t have been that opaque, no matter how dense. It must have been full of dust, or tiny droplets of some fluid.
The wing ran back like a knife-edged running board, widening toward the tail to where it spread into a tailfin. The two tailfins met back of the fuselage. At each tailfin tip was the ram, a big sculptured cylinder with an atomic engine inside. It wouldn’t be hot because it hadn’t been used yet, but I had my counter anyway.