“Are you sure?” Frank demanded, unconvinced.
“Arid wastes. No water. Dry dust blowing around. Deserts.”
“You donkey,” Frank said, disgusted. “That’s Mars.”
“What’s the difference? Mars, Jupiter, Venus, Pluto… they’re all the same.”
“Are we going to live in a dome with the scout teams?” Syd wondered. “We can’t; we’ll have to have our own dome. A Refuge inside a Refuge.”
“They should have told us.” Garry complained.
“There wasn’t time,” Syd complained.
“Time, hell,” Frank retorted. “They’ve had thirty years to tell us. All my life, year after year, and not one word.”
“I’m sorry,” Irma said, “but I can’t see that it makes any difference. What’s there to tell? We know where we’re going. There’s nothing we can do about it; we can’t alter the course of the ships.”
“The trouble with us,” Syd said thoughtfully, “is that we’re used to having things decided for us. We’ve never really done anything on our own. We’re like children; we’ve never grown up.”
“Our womb,” Frank agreed. He indicated the ship. “And it’s still around us.”
“We let them think for us, make our plans. We just drift along, like now. We have no conception of responsibility.”
“What else can we do?” Garry demanded.
“Nothing.” Syd considered. “I wonder if it’ll ever end. I wonder if a time will come when we’re on our own, making our own plans,”
Nobody said anything; nobody could imagine what it would be like.
The passage between Earth and Venus took two hundred eighty hours and forty-five minutes. Toward the last stages, when the misty greenish orb had risen and filled up the sky, Frank sat alone in the communications room, hands clenched together, waiting.
The ship was no longer silent. All around him the floor and walls boomed with the din of braking jets. Automatic relays were responding to the planet; a spiraling course was being set that gradually lowered the ship toward the surface. In front of Frank, rows of lights lit up in shifting patterns: robot equipment was engaging itself in answer to the situation.
The audspeaker clicked, sizzled with static, and then spoke. “This is the service dome on Venus.” A human voice, loud and very close, not more than a few thousand miles away. “Who are you? Why are you landing? We don’t have any reports.” The voice sounded hopeful, but skeptical. “Please describe yourselves. Supply ship? Replacements? Troop of dancers?”
Another voice asked: “You bringing us more equipment? We’re short as hell on food-processing machinery.”
“Books,” the first man said emphatically. “Christ, we’re dying. What’s all this stuff about Jones? Who the hell is Jones? Is all this on the level?”
“You have news?” the other man demanded eagerly. “Is it true they’re sending ships out past Sirius? Whole flocks of them?”
Frank sat helpless; there was nothing he could do to answer. The transmitter, like everything else, was robot-controlled. It was terrible to hear the pleading voices, very close by, and not be able to respond.
And then the response came. At first he couldn’t imagine where it originated. It boomed out deafeningly; the sound washed over his ears in shattering waves.
“This ship,” the voice thundered, “is robot-directed. Its passengers have no control over it. The ship and its companion are under the protection of Fedgov.”
It was Doctor Rafferty’s voice. The voice, taped and incorporated into the automatic equipment of the ship, was issuing from the bank of lights directly above his head. An old tape, prepared when there was still a Fedgov, when the term still meant something.
“This ship,” Rafferty explained, “will guide itself to the restricted installations in the N-area of the planet. The companion ship, also robot-controlled, will follow after an interval of one hour. It is requested that you give the passengers as much cooperation as possible, especially in the event that unforeseen difficulties occur.” He added: “This is a taped explanation by a legal representative of Fedgov. It will be repeated until the landing takes place.”
The weaker voices returned, full of astonishment. “It’s them!” one hollered thinly. “Get the ambulances over to N! They’re coming down on automatic!”
Scrambling sounds, and the Venus transmitter clicked off. Now there was only static until, five minutes later, Rafferty’s statement thunderously repeated itself.
It continued, spaced by five-minute breaks, until the emergency jets screamed it aside, and the ship plunged into the thick lower bands of atmosphere that enclosed the planet.
Stumbling in his haste, Frank made his way out of the communications room, down the corridor to the lounge. The lounge was empty; the others had left it. Terrified, he raced around in a half-circle, yelling into the uproar. The ship was animate with sound, a screeching organic racket, as if every molecule had grown a mouth and was shrieking out its pain.
Garry appeared and grabbed hold of his arm; he was shouting, but nothing came out: only gestures and mouth-motions. Frank followed along; Garry led him to an interior chamber, a reinforced cell at the heart of the ship. Irma and Syd stood mutely together, eyes wide, skins pale with shock. The chamber was the miniature medical ward of the ship. They had retreated here instinctively, pulling as far into safety as possible.
Now the brake jets had cut off. Either the ship was out of fuel, or it was deliberately coasting. Frank wondered about the other ship; he thought about Louis and Vivian and Dieter and the baby. He wished they could be together, all eight of them. He wished—
The impact wiped out his thoughts. And for a long time, how long he never knew, there was simple nothingness; no world and no self, only empty nonexistence. Not even the awareness of pain.
The first sensation that returned was that of weight. He was lying in the corner, and his head was ringing. Clanging like a great church bell, and slowly wheeling around, his head drifted sickeningly. The chamber was a shambles, crumpled in as if some Behemoth had trod on it. At one point, the ceiling and the floor met. Pools of liquid, probably insulating fluid, poured from broken wall-pipes. Somewhere in the half-darkness a mechanical repair car was ludicrously fussing with a rent in the hull as large as a two-story house.
Well, that was it. The ship had been ripped open like an over-inflated bladder. A dense, fragrant, steaming fog was already billowing in from outside. The ambulances would arrive to find them dead.
“Frank,” Garry whispered.
Frank struggled up. Syd lay crumpled; probably she was dead. He felt her pulse. No, she was alive. He and Garry stumbled through the ruins of the chamber, toward what had been the passage. The passage was sealed off by a collapsed wall; the only exit was the rip in the hull. They could go only one way: out. Around them, the ship was flattened junk.
“Where’s Irma?” Frank demanded hoarsely.
Garry was shoving through heaps of debris, toward the rip. “Out. She crawled out.” Grunting, struggling, he disappeared into the swirls of moist fog, and dropped through the rip. Frank followed.
The scene was unbelievable. For a time neither of them could grasp it. “We’re back home,” the boy murmured, dazed and confused. “Something went wrong. We went around in a circle.”
But it wasn’t the Refuge. And yet it was. Familiar hazy hills spread out, lost in billowing moisture. Green lichens grew everywhere; the soil was a tangled floor of lush growing plants. The air smelled of intricate organic life, a rich, complex odor, similar to the odor they remembered but, at the same time, far more alive. They gaped foolishly: there was no delineating wall. There was no finite hull confining it. The world lay stretched out as far as the eye could see. And above. The world was everywhere.
“My God,” Frank said. “It’s not a fake.” Bending down, he snatched up a crawling snail-like insect. “Not a robot—this is alive. It’s genuine!”
From the mist, Irma appeared. Blood oozed over one eye; her hair was matted and tangled, her clothing was torn. “We’re home,” she gasped, gripping a bulging armload of plant life she had gathered. “Look at it—remember it? And we can breathe. We can live.”
Off in the distance, great columns of steam rose up, geysers of boiling water forced through the rocks to the surface. An immense ocean pounded somewhere, invisible in the drifting curtain of moisture.
“Listen,” Frank said. “You hear that? You hear the water?” They listened. They heard. They reached down and felt; they threw themselves on the ground, clutching frantically, faces pressed to the damp, warm soil.
“We’re home,” Irma wept. All of them were crying and moaning, wailing in bewildered joy. And above them, the other ship was already thundering down.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
UNDER ITS cloud layer the surface temperature of Venus varied from 99 degrees Fahrenheit to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower atmosphere was a mixture of ammonia and oxygen, heavily laden with water vapor. Among the oceans and rolling hills toiled a variety of life forms, building and evolving, planning and creating.