His spacesuited form floated into view again, like a pale white ghost hovering before me. Then I saw the others, a scattering of bodies floating in the void, each connected to the trolley by thin tethers that seemed to be stretched to their limit.
“It’s really fun,” Marguerite’s voice called.
We were not in zero gravity. The two spacecraft were still swinging around their common center of gravity, still connected by the Buckyball cable. But there was nothing out there! Nothing but an emptiness that stretched to the ends of the universe.
Shaking inside, my heart thundering so loudly that I knew they could all hear it over my suit radio, I grasped the edge of the outer hatchway in my gloved hands and, closing my eyes, stepped off into infinity.
My stomach dropped away. I felt bile burning up into my throat. My mind raced. He missed me! Rodriguez missed me and I’m falling away from the ship. I’ll fall into the Sun or go drifting out and away forever and ever.
Then something tugged at me. Hard. My eyes popped open and I saw that my tether was as taut as a steel rod, holding me securely. But the trolley seemed to be miles away. And I couldn’t see any of the others even when I twisted my head to look for them.
“He’s secured,” Rodriguez’s voice said in my earphones.
“Very well,” Duchamp replied. “I’m coming out.”
I was twisting around, literally at the end of my tether, trying to find the rest of us.
Then the massive bulk of Venus slid into my view. The planet was huge! Its tremendous mass curved gracefully, so bright that it was hard to look at it even through the heavy tinting of my helmet. For a dizzying moment I felt as if its enormous expanse was above me, over my head, and it was going to come down and crush me like a ponderous boulder squashing some insignificant bug.
But only for a moment. The fear passed quickly and I gasped as I stared at the overpowering awesome immensity of the planet. Tears sprang to my eyes, not from its brightness, from its beauty.
I felt someone tugging at my shoulder. “Hey, you okay, boss?” Rodriguez asked.
“Wha . . . yes. Yes, I’m all right.”
“Don’t freeze up on us now,” the astronaut said. “We’ll be ready to move soon’s Duchamp gets herself connected to the trolley.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off Venus. She was a brilliant saffron-yellow expanse, glowing like a thing alive. Goddess of beauty, sure enough. At first I thought the cloud deck was as firm and unvarying as a sphere of solid gold. Then I saw that I could make out streamers among the clouds, slightly darker stretches, patches where the amber yellowish clouds billowed up slightly.
I was falling in love with a world.
“I’m secured. Let’s get moving.” Duchamp’s terse order broke my hypnotic staring.
Turning my entire body slightly I saw the seven other figures bobbing slightly around the trolley, which was nothing more than a motorized framework of metal struts that could crawl along the Buckyball cable.
I looked down the length of the cable toward Hesperos, which seemed to be kilometers away. Which it was: three kilometers, to be exact. At that distance the fat dirigible that was our spacecraft looked like a toy model or a holographic image of the real thing. At its nose the broad cone of the heat shield stood in place like a giant parasol, looking faintly ludicrous and totally inadequate to protect the vessel from the burning heat of entry into those thick yellow clouds.
“All right, by the numbers, check in,” Duchamp commanded.
As the crew members called in I thought again of what a farce Marguerite’s “official” title of mission scientist was. But I was glad she was with us. I could talk to her. She didn’t lord it over me as her mother did; even Rodriguez made it clear, without realizing he was doing it, that he regarded me as little more than a rich kid playing at being a scientist.
“All right, then,” Duchamp said. “Captain to Truax. We are ready for transfer.”