lacquered forehead. “Where shall I start? Do I have to tell you about the atmosphere? There’s free formaldehyde, you know-embalming fluid. Or the heat? It averages above the boiling point of water- if there were any water on Venus, which there isn’t. Not accessible, anyhow. Or the winds? I clocked five hundred miles an hour.” “No, not exactly that,” I said. “I know about that. And honestly, Jack, there are answers for all those things. I want to get the feel of the place, what you thought when you were there, how you reacted. Just start talking. I’ll tell you when I’ve had what I wanted.” He dented his rose-marble lip with his lower teeth. “Well,” he said, “let’s start at the beginning. Get us another drink, won’t you?” The waiter came, took our order, and came back with the liquor. Jack drummed on the table, sipped his rhinewine and seltzer, and began to talk. He started way back, which was good. I wanted to know the soul of the fact, the elusive, subjective mood that underlay his technical reports on the planet Venus, the basic feeling that would put compulsion and conviction into the project. He told me about his father, the six-foot chemical engineer, and * his mother, the plump, billowy housewife. He made me feel their dismay and their ungrudging love for their thirty-five-inch son. He had been eleven years old when the subject of his adult life and work first came up. He remembered the unhappiness on their faces at his first, inevitable, offhand suggestion about the circus. It was no minor tribute to them that the subject never came up again. It was a major tribute that Jack’s settled desire to learn enough engineering and rocketry to be a test pilot had been granted, paid for, and carried out in the face of every obstacle of ridicule and refusal from the schools. Of course Venus had made it all pay off. The Venus rocket designers had run into one major complication. It had been easy enough to get a rocket to the moon a quarter-million miles away; theoretically it was not much harder to blast one across space to the nearest other world, Venus. The question was one of orbits and time, of controlling the ship and bringing it back again. A dilemma. They could blast the ship to Venus in a few days- at so squandersome a fuel expenditure that ten ships couldn’t carry it. Or they could ease it to Venus along its natural orbits as you might float a barge down a gentle river-which saved the fuel but lengthened the trip to months. A man in eighty days eats twice his
own weight in food, breathes nine times his weight of air, and drinks water enough to float a yawl. Did somebody say: distill water from the waste products and recirculate it; do the same with food; do the same with air? Sorry. The necessary equipment for such cycling weighs more than the food, air, and water. So the human pilot was out, obviously. A team of designers went to work on an automatic pilot. When it was done it worked pretty well. And weighed four and one half tons in spite of printed circuits and relays constructed under a microscope. The project stopped right there until somebody thought of that most perfect servo-mechanism: a sixty-pound midget. A third of a man in weight, Jack O’Shea ate a third of the food, breathed a third of the oxygen. With minimum-weight, low-efficiency water- and air-purifiers, Jack came in just under the limit and thereby won himself undying fame. He said broodingly, a little drunk from the impact of two weak drinks on his small frame: “They put me into the rocket like a finger into a glove. I guess you know what the ship looked like. But did you know they zipped me into the pilot’s seat? It wasn’t a chair, you know. It was more like a diver’s suit; the only air on the ship was in that suit; the only water came in through a tube to my lips. Saved weight i) And the next eighty days were in that suit. It fed him, gave him water, sopped his perspiration out of its air, removed his body wastes. If necessary it would have shot novocaine into a broken arm, tourniqueted a cut femoral artery, or pumped air for a torn lung. It was a placenta, and a hideously uncomfortable one. In the suit thirty-three days going, forty-one coming back. The six days in between were the justification for the trip. Jack had fought his ship down through absolute blindness: clouds of gas that closed his own eyes and confused the radar, down to the skin of an unknown world. He had been within a thousand feet of the ground before he could see anything but swirling yellow. And then he landed and cut the rockets. “Well, I couldn’t get out, of course,” he said. “For forty or fifty reasons, somebody else will have to be the first man to set foot on Venus. Somebody who doesn’t care much about breathing, I guess. Anyway, there I was, looking at it.” He shrugged his shoulders, looked baffled, and said a dirty word softly. “I’ve told it a dozen