twenty-six million miles nearer the sun than their native Earth: the air-conditioning was that good. Freiburg cupped his hand around the chronometer, shielding it from the glare. He calculated that, at the present rate of deceleration, the ship would reach, tail first, the outer wisps of the clouds of Venus in about fourteen minutes. He said into the mike: “Fasten glare shields.”
From a loud-speaker the mate’s voice acknowledged.
Slowly, with a hand made heavy by two
He recalled a time when as a boy he was on an Atlantic liner which ran into heavy sea mist. There was other shipping around. The liner crawled, hooting. Answering warnings sounded from the blank white curtain on all sides. The boy pictured the anxious skipper on the bridge and didn’t envy him. But he trusted him. The skipper, he thought, wouldn’t hold such a position if he weren’t equal to the job. They’d come through, all right. And they did. Now he was the skipper, with his ship about to enter impenetrable cloud. His TV screen showed only that same blank white curtain. But he was in a trickier position than that sea captain. He could neither stop his ship nor reverse it, not now. He’d handed it over to the computer. It was dealing with the mass and speed of the ship, the mass of Venus, and the readings of the radar altimeter. He trusted the computer but not the altimeter. At this distance its measurements were relatively coarse.
The needle flickered indecisively over whole divisions marking a hundred metres. It would fine up as they neared the ground. But if it were just one division out, that could be equivalent to dropping the ship from a height of better than ninety metres—say 300 feet—on Earth.
It would do the ship no good at all, to say nothing of its crew. If only he could see the ground, he would feel happier bringing the ship down by manual control. But the current theory was that the clouds of Venus extended clear to the ground. Hence the handover to instruments. But he didn’t feel he’d handed over his responsibility as part of a package deal. The crew believed that he, personally, was responsible for their safety. That was okay so long as he had complete control and knew what was happening. It was the unexpected or inexplicable events which tended to throw him. He had a deep-rooted hate of the unknown quantity. It seldom turned out to be in his favor. He trusted himself, but not his luck. Gambling lost him that earlier ship. The gale had passed, he risked the take-off, and the gale promptly rushed back like a fury and smacked the ship into a side-slip. There were other near-disasters through unlucky timing and freak happenings.
Yes, his name was Jonah.
And he was losing his nerve and getting too old for pioneering. If he came through this last and most dangerous adventure, he’d retire. George Starkoy came in, working his way slowly along the handrail and sagging a bit at the knees—from two
“Well, Skip, here goes—third and last strike.”
There was no disciplining Starkey. He wasn’t one of the crew. He was a professional explorer: tenacious, resourceful—and lucky. He’d done enough good work on Mars to qualify for inclusion in this first attempt to make Venus. He had an unquenchable thirst to learn what was on the other side of the hill. Sheer curiosity gave him unflagging energy.
The Captain made no answer to the obvious remark. George looked at the infra-red visi-plate. It showed only a few vague and spotty shadows. He said: “A lot of help that is. If that’s the best it can do, I guess it must be true the clouds reach all the way down.”
“Maybe, Starkey. Or maybe it means the clouds themselves are thick with floating particles.”
“Atmospheric dust?”
The Captain shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe chemical powder on the loose. There’s plenty of carbon dioxide there —but what else?”
“We’ll soon know when Firkin gets his specimen.”
George sank into a sprung chair. The braking drive was steadily increasing. Talking became difficult and they both fell silent. The Captain thought back to his home in Vermont, the porch and the rocking chair, the view of distant woods. George thought forward to Venus. These minutes of excited anticipation; these formed the crown of life. He was one hundred per cent energized.
Venus was the real surprise parcel of the solar system, and yet, excepting the moon, it was Earth’s nearest neighbor. Mars had been interesting, but you knew too much about it before you got there. You knew the so-called canals were only natural fissures. You knew there were no cities, no traces of human life. Still, it was something to confirm the insect life. But the landscape was pretty flat—in all senses—and there wasn’t a great deal to add to the astronomers’
maps.
Venus was something again: the masked sister to Earth. No one had ever seen her face. She might be an ugly sister—or even more beautiful than Earth. He longed to see behind the mask.
Captain J. Freiburg stared at the dull infra-red screen and at the glowing green radar screen, trying to match the hints of contours. He was scared at the thought of mountain peaks. A level area was practically essential. He
