01-Human Space Read online

  “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 pre-dawn 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 the 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 of 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 form of sugar. The conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with Eric—inside the cabin.

  “Eric, you’re healthier than I am.”

  “I could tell. You looked worried, son, 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 miles. 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 until it spread into a tailfin. The two tailfins met back of the fuselage. At the 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.

  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 back 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 join through me.”

  “Now let’s assume for the moment that you’re the piece 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 phony. “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, an
d 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 awhile 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?