I fastened a line to the wing and slid to the ground. As long as we were here…The ground turned out to be a dry, reddish dirt, crumbly, and so porous that it was almost spongy. Lava etched by chemicals? Almost anything would be corrosive at this pressure and temperature. I scooped one pailful from the surface and another from underneath the first, then climbed up the line and left the buckets on the wing.
The wing was terribly slippery. I had to wear magnetic sandals to stay on. I walked up and hack along the two-hundred-foot length of the ship, making a casual inspection. Neither wing nor fuselage showed damage. Why not? If a meteor or something had cut Eric’s contact with his sensors in the rams, there should have been evidence of a break in the surface.
Then, almost suddenly, I realized that there was an alternative.
It was too vague a suspicion to put into words yet, and I still had to finish the inspection. Telling Eric would be very difficult if I was right.
Four inspection panels were set into the wing, well protected from the reentry heat. One was halfway back on the fuselage, below the lower edge of the blimp tank, which was molded to the fuselage in such a way that from the front the ship looked like a dolphin. Two more were in the trailing edge of the tailfin and the fourth was in the ram itself. All opened, with powered screwdriver on recessed screws, on junctions of the ship’s electrical system.
There was nothing out of place under any of the panels. By making and breaking contacts and getting Eric’s reactions, I found that his sensation ended somewhere between the second and third inspection panels. It was the same story on the left wing. No external damage, nothing wrong at the junctions. I climbed back to ground and walked slowly beneath the length of each wing, my headlamp tilted up. No damage underneath.
I collected my buckets and went back inside.
“A bone to pick?” Eric was puzzled. “Isn’t this a strange time to start an argument? Save it for space. We’ll have four months with nothing else to do.”
“This can’t wait. First of all, did you notice anything I didn’t?” He’d been watching everything I saw and did through the peeper in my helmet.
“No. I’d have yelled.”
“Okay. Now get this.
“The break in your circuits isn’t inside, because you get sensation up to the second wing inspection panels. It isn’t outside because there’s no evidence of damage, not even corrosion spots. That leaves only one place for the flaw.”
“Go on.”
“We also have the puzzle of why you’re paralyzed in both rams. Why should they both go wrong at the same time? There’s only one place in the ship where the circuits join.”
“What? Oh, yes, I see. They’re joined through me.”
“Now let’s assume for the moment that you’re the piece of equipment with the flaw in it. You’re not a piece of machinery, Eric. If something’s wrong with you it isn’t medical. That was the first thing we covered. But it could be psychological.”
“It’s nice to know you think I’m human. So I’ve slipped a cam, have I?”
“Slightly. I think you’ve got a case of what used to be called trigger anesthesia. A soldier who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index finger or even his whole hand has gone numb, as if it were no longer a part of him. Your comment about not being a machine is important, Eric. I think that’s the whole problem. You’ve never really believed that any part of the ship is a part of you. That’s intelligent, because it’s true. Every time the ship is redesigned you get a new set of parts, and it’s right to avoid thinking of a change of model as a series of amputations.” I’d been rehearsing this speech, trying to put it so that Eric would have no choice but to believe me. Now I know that it must have sounded phoney. “But now you’ve gone too far. Subconsciously you’ve stopped believing that the rams can feel like a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you’ve persuaded yourself that you don’t feel anything.”
With my prepared speech done, and nothing left to say, I stopped talking and waited for the explosion.
“You make good sense,” said Eric.
I was staggered. “You agree?”
“I didn’t say that. You spin an elegant theory, but I want time to think about it. What do we do if it’s true?”
“Why…I don’t know. You’ll just have to cure yourself.”
“Okay. Now here’s my idea. I propose that you thought up this theory to relieve yourself of a responsibility for getting us home alive. It puts the whole problem in my lap, metaphorically speaking.”
“Oh, for—”
“Shut up. I haven’t said you’re wrong. That would be an ad hominem argument. We need time to think about this.”
It was lights-out, four hours later, before Eric would return to the subject.
“Howie, do me a favor. Assume for a while that something mechanical is causing all our trouble. I’ll assume it’s psychosomatic.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“It is reasonable. What can you do if I’ve gone psychosomatic? What can I do if it’s mechanical? I can’t go around inspecting myself. We’d each better stick to what we know.”
“It’s a deal.” I turned him off for the night and went to bed.
But not to sleep.
With the lights off it was just like outside. I turned them back on. It wouldn’t wake Eric. Eric never sleeps normally, since his blood doesn’t accumulate fatigue poisons, and he’d go mad from being awake all the time if he didn’t have a Russian sleep inducer plate near his cortex. The ship could implode without waking Eric when his sleep inducer’s on. But I felt foolish being afraid of the dark.
While the dark stayed outside it was all right.
But it wouldn’t stay there. It had invaded my partner’s mind. Because his chemical checks guard him against chemical insanities like schizophrenia, we’d assumed he was permanently sane. But how could any prosthetic device protect him from his own imagination, his own misplaced common sense?
I couldn’t keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do about it?
Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been, Eric’s and mine and the hundreds of men who had built his life support after the crash. There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact central nervous system, and no glands except the pituitary. “We’ll regulate his blood composition,” they said, “and he’ll always be cool, calm and collected. No panic reactions from Eric!”
I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so. He was out with his brother, the girl’s uncle, on a fishing trip. They were blind drunk when they started home, and the guy was riding on the hood while the brother drove. Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our hero left two important glands on the hood ornament.
The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about late pregnancy. His habits were developed.
Eric doesn’t need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional patterns were fixed long before the day he tried to land a moonship without radar. He’d grab any excuse to believe that I’d fixed whatever was wrong with the ram connections.
But he was counting on me to do it.
The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out to touch the quartz with my fingertips. I couldn’t feel the pressure. But it was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a rock into sand grains. How long would the cabin hold it back?
If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed finding it? Perhaps it had left no break in the surface of either wing. But how?
That was an angle.
Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were empty, the alien dirt safely stored away. I filled them with water and put them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40° absolute, then turned off the lights and went to bed.
The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker’s lungs. What Venus really needs, I decided, philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-nine percent of her air. That w
ould give her a bit more than half as much air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the temperature livable. Drop Venus’s gravity to near zero for a few weeks and the work would do itself.
The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.
“Morning,” said Eric. “Thought of anything?”
“Yes.” I rolled out of bed. “Now don’t bug me with questions. I’ll explain everything as I go.”
“No breakfast?”
“Not yet.”
Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur’s gentlemen, and went for the buckets only after the gauntlets were on. The ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly neighborhood of absolute zero. “This is two buckets of ordinary ice,” I said, holding them up. “Now let me out.”
“I should keep you here till you talk,” Eric groused. But the doors opened and I went out onto the wing. I started talking while I unscrewed the number two right panel.
“Eric, think a moment about the tests they run on a manned ship before they’ll let a man walk into the life-system. They test every part separately and in conjunction with other parts. Yet if something isn’t working, either it’s damaged or it wasn’t tested right. Right?”
“Reasonable.” He wasn’t giving away anything.
“Well, nothing caused any damage. Not only is there no break in the ship’s skin, but no coincidence could have made both rams go haywire at the same time. So something wasn’t tested right.”
I had the panel off. In the buckets the ice boiled gently where it touched the surfaces of the glass buckets. The blue ice cakes had cracked under their own internal pressure. I dumped one bucket into the maze of wiring and contacts and relays, and the ice shattered, giving me room to close the panel.
“So I thought of something last night, something that wasn’t tested. Every part of the ship must have been in the heat-and-pressure box, exposed to artificial Venus conditions, but the ship as a whole, a unit, couldn’t have been. It’s too big.” I’d circled around to the left wing and was opening the number three panel in the trailing edge. My remaining ice was half water and half small chips; I sloshed these in and fastened the panel. “What cut your circuits must have been the heat or the pressure or both. I can’t help the pressure, but I’m cooling these relays with ice. Let me know which ram gets its sensation back first, and we’ll know which inspection panel is the right one.”
“Howie. Has it occurred to you what the cold water might do to those hot metals?”
“It could crack them. Then you’d lose all control over the ramjets, which is what’s wrong right now.”
“Uh. Your point, partner. But I still can’t feel anything.”
I went back to the airlock with my empty buckets swinging, wondering if they’d get hot enough to melt. They might have, but I wasn’t out that long. I had my suit off and was refilling the buckets when Eric said, “I can feel the right ram.”
“How extensive? Full control?”
“No, I can’t feel the temperature. Oh, here it comes. We’re all set, Howie.”
My sigh of relief was sincere.
I put the buckets in the freezer again. We’d certainly want to take off with the relays cold. The water had been chilling for perhaps twenty minutes when Eric reported, “Sensation’s going.”
“What?”
“Sensation’s going. No temperature, and I’m losing fuel feed control. It doesn’t stay cold long enough.”
“Ouch! Now what?”
“I hate to tell you. I’d almost rather let you figure it out for yourself.”
I had. “We go as high as we can on the blimp tank, then I go out on the wing with a bucket of ice in each hand—”
We had to raise the blimp tank temperature to almost eight hundred degrees to get pressure, but from then on we went up in good shape. To sixteen miles. It took three hours.
“That’s as high as we go,” said Eric. “You ready?”
I went to get the ice. Eric could see me, he didn’t need an answer. He opened the airlock for me.
Fear I might have felt, or panic, or determination or self-sacrifice—but there was nothing. I went out feeling like a used zombie.
My magnets were on full. It felt like I was walking through shallow tar. The air was thick, though not as heavy as it had been down there. I followed my headlamp to the number two panel, opened it, poured ice in and threw the bucket high and far. The ice was in one cake. I couldn’t close the panel. I left it open and hurried around to the other wing. The second bucket was filled with exploded chips; I sloshed them in and locked the number two left panel and came back with both hands free. It still looked like limbo in all directions, except where the headlamp cut a tunnel through the darkness, and—my feet were getting hot. I closed the right panel on boiling water and sidled back along the hull into the airlock.
“Come in and strap down,” said Eric. “Hurry!”
“Gotta get my suit off.” My hands had started to shake from reaction. I couldn’t work the clamps.
“No you don’t. If you start right now we may get home. Leave the suit on and come in.”
I did. As I pulled my webbing shut, the rams roared. The ship shuddered a little, then pushed forward as we dropped from under the blimp tank. Pressure mounted as the rams reached operating speed. Eric was giving it all he had. It would have been uncomfortable even without the metal suit around me. With the suit on it was torture. My couch was afire from the suit, but I couldn’t get breath to say so. We were going almost straight up.
We had gone twenty minutes when the ship jerked like a galvanized frog. “Ram’s out,” Eric said calmly. “I’ll use the other.” Another lurch as we dropped the dead one. The ship flew on like a wounded penguin, but still accelerating.
One minute…two…
The other ram quit. It was as if we’d run into molasses. Eric blew off the ram and the pressure eased. I could talk.
“Eric.”
“What?”
“Got any marshmallows?”
“What? Oh, I see. Is your suit tight?”
“Sure.”
“Live with it. We’ll flush the smoke out later. I’m going to coast above some of this stuff, but when I use the rocket it’ll be savage. No mercy.”
“Will we make it?”
“I think so. It’ll be close.”
The relief came first, icy cold. Then the anger. “No more inexplicable numbnesses?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“If any come up you’ll be sure and tell me, won’t you?”
“Are you getting at something?”
“Skip it” I wasn’t angry any more.
“I’ll be damned if I do. You know perfectly well it was mechanical trouble. You fixed it yourself!”
“No. I convinced you I must have fixed it. You needed to believe the rams should be working again. I gave you a miracle cure, Eric. I just hope I don’t have to keep dreaming up new placebos for you all the way home.”
“You thought that, but you went out on the wing sixteen miles up?” Eric’s machinery snorted. “You’ve got guts where you need brains, Shorty.”
I didn’t answer.
“Five thousand says the trouble was mechanical. We let the mechanics decide after we land.”
“You’re on.”
“Here comes the rocket. Two, one—”
It came, pushing me down into my metal suit. Sooty flames licked past my ears, writing black on the green metal ceiling, but the rosy mist before my eyes was not fire.
The man with the thick glasses spread a diagram of the Venus ship and jabbed a stubby finger at the trailing edge of the wing. “Right around here,” he said. “The pressure from the outside compressed the wiring channel a little, just enough so there was no room for the wire to bend. It had to act as if it were rigid, see? Then when the heat expanded the metal these contacts pushed past each other.”
“I suppose it’s the same design on both wings?”
He gave me a queer look. “Well, naturally.”
I left my check for $5000 in a pile of Eric’s mail and hopped a plane for Brasilia. How he found me I’ll never know, but the telegram arrived this morning.
HOWIE COME HOME ALL IS FORGIVEN
DONOVAN’S BRAIN
I guess I’ll have to.
WAIT IT OUT
Night on Pluto. Sharp and distinct, the horizon line cuts across my field of vision. Below that broken line is the dim gray-white of snow seen by starlight. Above, space-blackness and space-bright stars. From behind a jagged row of frozen mountains the stars pour up in singletons and clusters and streamers of cold white dots. Slowly they move, but visibly, just fast enough for a steady eye to capture their motion.
Something wrong there. Pluto’s rotation period is long: 6.39 days. Time must have slowed for me.
It should have stopped.
I wonder if I may have made a mistake.
The planet’s small size brings the horizon close. It seems even closer without a haze of atmosphere to fog the distances. Two sharp peaks protrude into the star swarm like the filed front teeth of a cannibal warrior. In the cleft between those peaks shines a sudden bright point.
I recognize the Sun, though it shows no more disk than any other, dimmer star. The Sun shines as a cold point between the frozen peaks; it pulls free of the rocks and shines in my eyes…
The Sun is gone, the starfield has shifted. I must have passed out.
It figures.
Have I made a mistake? It won’t kill me if I have. It could drive me mad, though…
I don’t feel mad. I don’t feel anything, not pain, not loss, not regret, not fear. Not even pity. Just: what a situation.
Gray-white against gray-white: the landing craft, short and wide and conical, stands half-submerged in an icy plain below the level of my eyes. Here I stand, looking east, waiting.
Take a lesson: this is what comes of not wanting to die.
Pluto was not the most distant planet. It had stopped being that in 1979, ten years ago. Now Pluto was at perihelion, as close to the Sun—and to Earth—as it would ever get. To ignore such an opportunity would have been sheer waste.