Excerpt: 'Venus'

'Venus' (Tor Books)
By Ben Bova
$24.95 hardcover

April 6, 2000
Web posted at: 2:54 p.m. EST (1854 GMT)

(CNN) -- Van Humphries, the main character in Ben Bova's "Venus," is racing to be the first human to set foot on Venus, a planet with a red-hot surface and a carbon-dioxide atmosphere.

Van's brother Alex was killed on an earlier mission to Venus, and now his father is offering a $10 billion reward for the recovery of Alex's body.

Van isn't the only one going for the money, Lars Fuchs, Van's father's greatest enemy, has also accepted the challenge.

In this excerpt, Van's ship Hesperos has just entered Venus' sulfuric acid clouds.

Desiree Duchamp is the captain of the ship and Tomas Rodriguez is second-in-command. Duchamp's daughter Marguerite, who is also her clone, is along on the mission.

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Entry

Orbiting Venus's hot, thick atmosphere at slightly more than seven kilometers per second, Hesperos fired its retrorockets at precisely the millisecond called for in the entry program.

Strapped into the chair in the observation blister, I felt the ship flinch, like a speeding car when the driver taps the brake slightly.

I leaned forward as far as the safety harness would allow. Through the forward-angled port I could see the rim of the big heat shield and, beyond it, the smooth saffron clouds that completely shrouded the planet.

Except the clouds were no longer smooth.

There were rifts here and there, long streamers floating above the main cloud deck, patterns of billows like waves rolling across a deep, deep sea.

Marguerite was turned toward the port also, so I could not see her full face, only a three-quarter profile. She seemed intent, her hands gripping the arms of her chair. Not white-knuckled, not frightened, but certainly not relaxed, either. Me, I was clutching the arms of my chair so hard my nails were going to leave permanent indentations in the plastic. Was I frightened? I don't know.

I was excited, taut as the Buckyball cable that had connected us to the old Truax. I was breathing hard, I remember, but I don't recall any snakes twisting in my gut.

Something bright flared across the rim of the heat shield and I suddenly wished I were up on the bridge, where I could see the instruments and understand what was happening. There was an empty chair up there; I should have demanded that I sit in it through the entry flight.

The ship shuddered. Not violently, but enough to notice. More than enough. The entire rim of the heat shield was glowing now and streamers of hot gas flashed past. The ride started to get bumpy.

"Approaching maximum gee forces," Duchamp's voice called out over the intercom speaker in the overhead.

"Max gee, check," Rodriguez replied, from his position up in the nose.

It was really bumpy now. I was being rattled back and forth in my chair, happy to have the harness holding me firmly.

"Maximum aerodynamic pressure," Duchamp said.

"Temperature in the forward section exceeding max calculated."

Rodriguez's voice was calm, but his words sent a current of electricity through me.

The calculations have an enormous safety factor in them, I tried to reassure myself.

It would have been easier if the ship didn't feel as if it were trying to shake itself apart.

I couldn't see a thing through the port now. Just a solid sheet of blazing hot gases, like looking into a furnace. I squeezed my eyes down to slits while the battering, rattling ride went on. My vision blurred. I closed my eyes entirely for a moment. When I opened them cautiously, I could see fairly well again, although the ship was still shuddering violently.

Marguerite hadn't moved since the entry began. She was still staring fixedly ahead.

I wondered if her camera was getting anything or if the incandescent heat of our entry into the atmosphere had fried its lens.

The ride began to smooth out a bit. It was still bumpier than anything I had ever experienced before, but at least now I could lean my head back against the padded headrest and not have it bounce so hard it felt like I was being pummeled by a karate champion.

Marguerite turned slightly and smiled at me. A pale smile, I thought, but it made me smile back at her.

"Nothing to it," I said, trying to sound brave. It came out more like a whimper.

"I think the worst is over," she said.

Just then there was an enormous jolt and an explosion that would have made me leap out of my chair if I weren't strapped in. It took just a flash of a second to realize that it was the explosive bolts jettisoning the heat shield, but in that flash of a second I must have pumped my entire lifetime's supply of adrenaline into my blood. I came very close to wetting myself; my bladder felt painfully full.

"We're going into the clouds!" Marguerite said happily.

"Deceleration on the tick," Duchamp's voice rang out.

"Heat shield jettison complete," Rodriguez replied. "Now we're a blimp." I threw a smile to Marguerite and popped the latch on my safety harness.

The instant I stood up, though, Hesperos shuddered, lurched, swung around crazily and accelerated so hard I was slammed right back into my chair.

The superrotation.

The solid body of the planet may turn very slowly, but Venus' upper atmosphere, blast-heated by the Sun, develops winds of two hundred kilometers per hour and more that rush around the entire planet in a few days. In a way, they're like the jet streams on Earth, only bigger and more powerful.

Our lighter-than-air vessel was in the grip of those winds, zooming along like a leaf caught in a hurricane. We used the engines hanging outside the gondola only to keep us from swinging too violently, otherwise we would have depleted our fuel in a matter of hours. We couldn't fight those winds, we could only surf along on them and try to keep the ride reasonably smooth.

Truax, up in a safe, stable orbit, was supposed to keep track of our position by monitoring our telemeter beacon.

This was for two reasons: to stay in constant communications contact with us and to plot the direction and speed of the superrotation wind, with Hesperos playing the same role as a smoke particle in a wind tunnel.

But Truax hadn't deployed the full set of communications satellites around the planet by the time we got caught in the superrotation. Without the commsats to relay our beacon, they lost almost half our first day's data.

If anything had gone wrong, they wouldn't know it for ten-twelve hours.

Fortunately, the only trouble we had was a few bruised shins as Hesperos lurched and swirled in the turbulent winds. It was like being in a racing yacht during a storm: you had to hold on to something whenever you moved from one place to another.

It was scary at first, I admit. No amount of lectures, videos or even VR simulations can really prepare you for the genuine experience. But in a few hours I got accustomed to it.

More or less.

I spent most of those hours right there in the observation blister, staring out as we darted along the cloud tops. Marguerite got up and went back to her lab; crew members passed by now and then, stumbling and staggering along the passageway, muttering curses every time the ship pitched and they banged against a bulkhead.

At one point Marguerite came back to the blister, a heavy-looking gray box of equipment in her hands.

"Shouldn't you be checking the sensors up forward?" she asked, a little testily, I thought.

"They're running fine," I said. "If there were any problems I'd get a screech on my phone." I tapped the communicator in the chest pocket of my coveralls.

"Don't you want to see the data they're taking in?"

"Later on, when the ride settles down a little," I said. It had always nonplussed me that many scientists get so torqued up about their work that they have to watch their instruments while the observation is in progress. As if their being there can make any difference in what the instruments are recording.

Marguerite left and I was alone again, watching the upper layer of the cloud deck reaching for us. Long, lazy tendrils of yellowish fog seemed to stretch out toward us, then evaporate before my eyes. The cloud tops were dynamic, bubbling like a boiling pot, heaving and breathing like a thing alive.

Don't be an anthropomorphic ass, I warned myself sternly. Leave the metaphors to the poets and romantics like Marguerite. You're supposed to be a scientist.

Of sorts, a sardonic inner voice scoffed. You're only playing at being a scientist. A real scientist would be watching his sensors and data readouts like a tiger stalking a deer.

And miss this view? I answered myself.

We were dipping into the clouds now, sinking down into them like a submarine sliding beneath the surface of the sea. Yellow-gray clouds slid past my view, then we were in the clear again, then more mountains of haze covered the port. Deeper and deeper we sank, into the sulfuric-acid perpetual global clouds of Venus.

The ride did indeed smooth out, but only a little. Or maybe we all became accustomed to the pitching and rolling. We got our sea legs. Our Venus legs.

It was eerie, sailing in that all-enveloping fog. For days on end I stared out of the ports and saw nothing but a gray sameness. I wanted to push ahead, to go deeper, get beneath the clouds so we could begin searching the surface with telescopes for the wreckage of my brother's vessel.

But the mission plan called for caution, and despite my eagerness I understood that the plan should be followed. We were in uncharted territory now, and we had to make certain that all of Hesperos' systems were performing as designed....

...So we coasted along in the uppermost cloud deck, patiently filling the big shell above us and testing our equipment. Once in a while it seemed to me that we weren't moving at all, that we were stuck in place like a ship run aground on a reef. All we could see out the ports was that perpetual yellowish-gray sameness. But then some strong current in the atmosphere would grab us and the gondola would tilt and groan like a creaking old sailing ship and my insides would flutter just a little bit.

I was constantly worried about Fuchs, of course, but the IAA reports on his activity showed that he was also moving cautiously. He had entered the atmosphere several hours before we did, but so far had not gone much deeper than we had.

Like us, he was floating in the upper reaches of the top cloud deck, pushed around the planet by the superrotation winds.

"He's no fool," Duchamp told me as we sat together in the spartan little galley. It was the only place aboard Hesperos where two or three people could sit together, other than the bridge.

"Lars takes risks," Duchamp said, "but only when he's certain the odds are in his favor."

"You know him?" I asked.

She made a thin smile. "Oh, yes. Lars and I are old friends."

"Friends?" I felt my brows hike up.

Her smile faded. "I first met him just after he had lost his business and his wife. He was a pretty desperate man then. Hurt and angry. Bewildered. Everything he had built up in his life had been snatched away from him." She exhaled a puff of air through her nostrils, something between a grunt and a sigh.

The expression on her face told me she knew perfectly well that the man who had destroyed his company and taken his wife was my father.

She didn't have to say it; we both knew.

"But he pulled himself up again, didn't he?" I snapped. "He's done fairly well in asteroid mining, hasn't he?"

Duchamp looked at me for a long silent moment, the kind of look a university professor gives to an especially dense and hopeless student.

"Yes," she said. "Hasn't he."

Ben Bova's latest prediction: 'Moonwar'
April 24, 1998
Review: 'The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction'
November 9, 1999
Salon: In defense of science fiction
May 26, 1999

Ben Bova Web site
Tor Science Fiction and Fantasy

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