Death on Venus
Ben Bova
My name is Van Humphries. I will be the first human being to reach the hell-hot surface of the planet Venus, or I will die in the attempt.
My father gave me no other choice.
All my life my father had looked down on me; despised me and my illness, sneeringly called me “Runt.” Sick from birth, I’d been born with a form of pernicious anemia because of my mother’s drug addiction. She had died giving birth to me, and my father blamed me for her death. He claimed she was the only woman he had ever truly loved, and I had killed her.
Father–Martin Humphries–lived in Selene City on the Moon where he played his chosen roles of interplanetary tycoon; megabillionaire; hell-raising, womanizing, ruthless corrupt giant of industry; founder and head of Humphries Space Systems, Inc.
My older brother, Alex, was the apple of Father’s eye. But three years ago Alex was killed on the first human mission to Venus. His ship entered the clouds that totally cover our sister planet, but never came out again.
“It should’ve been you, Runt!” Father howled when we got the news. “It should’ve been you who died, not Alex.”
Father stewed in helpless fury for months, then suddenly announced that he would give a ten-billion-dollar prize to whoever returned Alex’s remains to him.
Ten billion dollars! I would have thought that half the world would leap at the chance to claim the prize. But then I realized that no one in his right mind would dare to try.
As beautiful as Venus appears in our skies, the planet itself is the most hellish place in the solar system. The ground is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is so high it has crushed spacecraft landers as if they were flimsy cardboard cartons. The sky is perpetually covered from pole to pole with clouds of sulfuric acid. The atmosphere is a choking mixture of carbon dioxide and sulfurous gases.
But Martin Humphries wanted his son’s remains returned to him. So he offered his ten-billion-dollar prize.
And he did one other thing. He cut off my stipend, as of my twenty-fifth birthday. On that date I became penniless.
I had loved Alex, the big brother who’d protected me as best as he could from Father’s cruel disdain. I decided that I would go to Venus and find his remains.
If I was successful, I would be financially secure and independent of Father for the rest of my life.
If I failed, I would join Alex on the red-hot surface of Venus.
I was not the only desperate one aiming for the prize money, I discovered. Lars Fuchs, a “rock rat” from the Asteroid Belt, was also on his way to Venus. From what Father told me, Fuchs was a monster. I had never seen my father look so disturbed about anyone. My father hated Lars Fuchs, that was apparent. He was also quite clearly afraid of him.
* * *
We travelled from Earth orbit to Venus orbit in a converted freighter named Truax. Tethered to the shabby old bucket was Hesperos, the craft that we would ride into the clouds of Venus and down to the planet’s surface. Hesperos was small but efficient, a cross between a dirigible and submarine that would glide through Venus’ thick clouds and carry us all the way down to the ground, where the atmospheric pressure was about the same as the pressure of ocean water more than a kilometer below the surface.
I had wanted Tomas Rodriguez to captain Hesperos, but Father had insisted on putting one of his former mistresses in charge, Desiree Duchamp. Tomas reluctantly accepted being bumped to second-in-command. Captain Duchamp, in turn, brought her daughter along. Marguerite was a biologist, of all things. Who needed a biologist on a planet as dead and devastated as Venus?
I soon found out two things: Captain Duchamp wanted her daughter with her because my lecherous father had his eye on her. And Marguerite Duchamp was a clone of her mother.
As Marguerite explained to me, “Mother’s always said she’s never met a man she’d trust to father a child with her. So she cloned herself and had the embryo implanted in herself. Eight and a half months later I was born.”