It was a tense two months, going from Earth to Venus. At last the day arrived when we were to transfer from Truax to Hesperos, leaving the old freighter in orbit with a skeleton crew aboard her.
* * *
I took one last look at my stateroom. When we had boarded Truax the single room had seemed rather cramped and decidedly shabby to me. Over the nine weeks of our flight to Venus, though, I’d grown accustomed to having my office and living quarters all contained within the same four walls–or bulkheads, as they’re called aboard ship. At least the smart wall screens had made the compartment seem larger than it actually was.
Now we were ready to transfer to the much smaller Hesperos. At least, the crew was. I dreaded the move. If Truax was like a tatty old freighter, Hesperos would be more like a cramped, claustrophobic submarine.
To make matters worse, in order to get to the dirigible-like Hesperos we were going to have to perform a spacewalk. I was actually going to have to seal myself into a spacesuit and go outside into that yawning vacuum and trolley down the cable that linked the two vessels, with nothing between me and instant death but the monomolecular layers of my suit. I could already feel my insides fluttering with near panic.
For about the twelve-thousandth time I told myself I should have insisted on a tugboat. Rodriguez had talked me out of it when we’d first started planning the mission. “A pressurized tug, just so we can make the transfer without getting into our suits?” he had jeered at me. “That’s an expense we can do without. It’s a waste of money.”
“It would be much safer, wouldn’t it?” I had persisted.
Tomas Rodriguez had been an astronaut; he’d gone to Mars four times before retiring upward to become a consultant to aerospace companies and universities doing planetary explorations. Yet what he really wanted was to fly again.
He was a solidly built man with an olive complexion and thickly curled hair that he kept clipped very short, almost a military crew cut. He looked morose most of the time, pensive, almost unapproachable. But that was just a mask. He smiled easily, and when he did it lit up his whole face to show the truly gentle man beneath the surface.
But he was not smiling; he looked disgusted. “You want safety? Use the mass and volume we’d need for the tug to carry extra water. That’ll give us an edge in case the recycler breaks down.”
“We have a backup recycler.”
“Water’s more important than a tug that we’ll only use for five minutes during the whole mission. That’s one piece of equipment that we definitely don’t need to carry along.”
So I had let Rodriguez talk me out of the tug. Now I was going to have perform an EVA, a space walk, something that definitely gave me the shakes.
My jitters got even worse whenever I thought about Lars Fuchs.
Once my father told me that Fuchs actually was racing for the prize money, I spent long hours digging every byte of information I could glean about him. What I found was hardly encouraging. Fuchs had a reputation for ruthlessness and achievement. According to the media biographies, he was a merciless taskmaster, a driven and hard-driving tyrant who ran roughshod over anyone who stood in his way. Except my father.
The media had barely covered Fuchs’ launch into a high-velocity transit to Venus. He had built his ship in secrecy out in the Belt–adapted an existing vessel, apparently, to his needs. Unlike all the hoopla surrounding my own launch from Tarawa, there was only one brief interview with Fuchs on the nets, grainy and stiff because of the hour-long delay between the team of questioners on Earth and Fuchs, out there among the asteroids.
I pored over that single interview, studying the face of my adversary on my stateroom wall screen, in part to get my mind off the impending space walk. Fuchs was a thickset man, probably not much taller than me, but with a barrel chest and powerful-looking shoulders beneath his deep blue jacket. His face was broad, jowly, his mouth a downcast slash that seemed always to be sneering. His eyes were small and set so deep in his sockets that I couldn’t make out what color they might be.