Analog -- Death on Venus


                             July 11 @ 9:00 p.m. EST
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     Death on VenusBen Bova  




     Illustration by Vincent Di Fate 
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."
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.
He made a grisly imitation of a smile to the interviewers’ opening question and 
replied, "Yes, I am going to Venus. It seems only fair that I should take this 
very generous prize money from Martin Humphries--the man who destroyed my 
business and took my wife from me more than thirty years ago."
That brought a barrage of questions from the reporters. I froze the image and 
delved into the hypertext records. 
Fuchs had an impressive background. He had been born poor, but built a sizable 
fortune for himself out in the Asteroid Belt, as a prospector. Then he started 
his own asteroidal mining company and became one of the major operators in the 
Belt, until Humphries Space Systems undercut his prices so severely that Fuchs 
was forced into bankruptcy. HSS then bought out the company for a fraction of 
its true worth. My father had personally taken control and fired Fuchs from the 
firm that the man had founded and developed over two decades.
While Fuchs stayed out in the Asteroid Belt, penniless and furious with helpless 
rage, his wife left him and married Martin Humphries. She became my father’s 
fourth and last wife. 
I gasped with sudden understanding. She was my mother! The mother I had never 
known. The mother who had died giving birth to me six years afterward. The 
mother whose drug addiction had saddled me with chronic anemia from birth. I 
stared at her image on the screen: young, with the flaxen hair and pale blue 
eyes of the icy northlands. She was very beautiful, yet she looked fragile, 
delicate, like a flower that blooms on a glacier for only a day and then 
withers.
It took an effort to erase her image and go back to the news file. Fuchs had 
taken off for Venus in a specially modified ship he had named Lucifer. The Latin 
name for Venus as the morning star was Lucifer. It was also the name used by the 
Hebrew prophet Isaiah as a synonym for Satan.
Lucifer. And Fuchs. After a high-g flight, he was already in orbit around Venus, 
more than a week ahead of me. Sitting there in my stateroom, staring at Fuchs’ 
sardonic, sneering face on the wall screen, I remembered that the time had come 
to transfer to Hesperos. There was no way to get out of it. I still wished I was 
home and safe, but now I knew that I had to go through with this mission no 
matter what the dangers.
But my thoughts went back to my mother. I had never known that she was once 
Fuchs’ wife. My father hardly ever spoke of her, except to blame me for her 
death. Alex had told me that it wasn’t my fault, that women didn’t die in 
childbirth unless there was something terribly wrong. It was Alex who told me 
about her drug dependency; as far as my father was concerned she was faultless.
"She was the only woman I ever really loved," he said, many a time. I almost 
believed him. Then he would add, cold as liquid helium, "And you killed her, 
Runt."
A single rap on my door startled me. Before I could respond, Desiree Duchamp 
slid the door open and gave me a hard stare.
She wore the same dun-colored flight coveralls as everyone else aboard ship, but 
on her they looked crisper, sharper, almost like a military uniform. Her eyes 
were large and luminous. She might have been beautiful if she would smile, but 
the expression on her face was severe, bitter, almost angry.
"Are you coming or not?" she demanded.
I drew myself up to my full height--not quite eye to eye with my captain--and 
forced my voice to be steady and calm as I answered, "Yes. I’m ready."
When she turned and headed down the passageway I squeezed my eyes shut and tried 
to conjure up a picture of my brother. I’m doing this for you, Alex, I said to 
myself. I’m going to find out why you died--and who’s responsible for your 
death.
But as I headed down the passageway after Duchamp, the image in my mind was of 
my mother, so young and lovely and vulnerable.
We had done simulations of the EVA procedure a dozen times, and I had suited up 
each time. I thought it was silly, like children playing dress-up, but Duchamp 
had insisted that we pull on the cumbersome suits and boots and helmets and 
backpacks even though we were only going to play-act in Truax’s virtual reality 
chamber.
Now the crew was gathered at the main airlock, busily getting into their 
spacesuits. It looked to me like the changing room in some athletic team’s 
locker, or a beachside cabana. I paid intense attention to every detail of the 
procedure, though. This time it would be for real. A mistake here could be 
fatal. Leggings first, then the thickly lined boots. Slide into the torso and 
wiggle your arms through the sleeves. Pull the bubble helmet over your head, 
seal it to the neck ring. Then work the gloves over your fingers. The gloves had 
a bony exoskeleton on their backs, powered by tiny servomotors that amplified 
one’s muscle power tenfold. There were also servos built into the suit’s joints: 
shoulders, elbows, knees.
Duchamp herself hung the life-support rig on my back and connected the air hose 
and power lines. The backpack felt like a ton weighing on my shoulders.
I heard the suit’s air fans whine into life, like distant gnats, and felt cool 
air flowing softly across my face. The suit was actually roomy inside, although 
the leggings chafed a little against my thighs.
Marguerite, Rodriguez and the four other crew members were all fully suited. 
Even Dr. Waller, our rotund, dark-skinned Jamaican physician with the sunny 
disposition, was frowning slightly with impatience as they waited for me to 
finish up. 
"Sorry I’m so slow," I muttered.
They nodded from inside their fishbowl helmets. Marguerite even managed a little 
smile.
"All right," Duchamp said at last, once she was convinced my suit was properly 
sealed. "Radio check." Her voice was muffled slightly by the helmet.
One by one the crew members called to the EVA controller up on the bridge. I 
heard each of them in my helmet earphones.
"Mr. Humphries?" the controller called.
"I hear you," I said.
"Radio check complete. Captain Duchamp, you and your crew are go for transfer."
With Duchamp directing us, we went through the airlock hatch, starting with 
Rodriguez. Then the doctor and, one by one, the three technicians. I followed 
Marguerite. Captain Duchamp grasped my arm as I stepped carefully over the sill 
of the hatch into the blank metal womb of the airlock.
Once she swung the inner hatch shut I felt as if I were in a bare metal coffin. 
I started to breathe faster, felt my heart pumping harder. Stop it! I commanded 
myself. Calm down before you hyperventilate.
But when the outer hatch started to slide open I almost panicked.
There was nothing out there! They expected me to step out into total emptiness. 
I tried to find some stars in that black infinity, something, anything to 
reassure me, but through the deep tinting of my helmet I could not see any.
"Hold on." Rodriguez’s familiar voice calmed me a little. But only a little. 
Then I saw the former astronaut--now an astronaut once again--slide into view, 
framed by the outline of the open hatch.
"Gimme your tether," Rodriguez said, extending a gloved hand toward me. It 
looked like a robot reaching for me. I couldn’t see his face at all. Even though 
the bubble helmets gave us fine visibility from inside them, their protective 
sunshield tinting made them look like mirrors from the outside. All I could see 
in Rodriguez’s helmet was the blank fishbowl reflection of my own helmet.
"C’mon, Mr. Humphries. Gimme your tether. I’ll attach it to the trolley. 
Otherwise you’ll swing away."
I remembered the drill from the simulations we had gone through. I unclipped one 
end of my safety tether from its hook at the waist of my suit and handed it 
mutely to Rodriguez. He disappeared from my view. There was nothing beyond the 
airlock hatch that I could see, nothing but a gaping, all-encompassing 
emptiness.
"Step out now, come on," Rodriguez’s voice coaxed in my earphones. "You’re okay 
now. Your tether’s connected to the trolley and I’m right here."
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."
"Copy you ready for transfer, Captain. Hesperos main airlock is cycled, outer 
hatch open and waiting for your arrival."
"Activate trolley," she commanded.
"Activating."
I felt a very slight tug on my tether, and then all of us were moving toward the 
distant Hesperos, accelerating now, sliding down the long Buckyball cable like a 
small school of minnows flashing across a pond. Hesperos seemed to be coming up 
at us awfully fast; I thought we’d crash into her, but I kept silent. Sometimes 
you’d rather die than make an ass of yourself.
Sure enough, the trolley smoothly decelerated, slowly coming to a stop as the 
seven of us swung on our tethers like a trained team of acrobats in a silent 
ballet until we were facing down toward Hesperos. I marvelled that we went 
through the maneuver without bumping one another, but Rodriguez later told me it 
was simple Newtonian mechanics at work. My respects to Sir Isaac. 
The trolley stopped about ten meters from the open airlock hatch, with us 
hanging by our tethers with our boots a mere meter or so from Hesperos’ hull. As 
we had done in the virtual reality simulations, Duchamp unhooked her tether and 
dropped to the hatch, her knees bending as her boots hit the hull soundlessly. 
She stepped into the airlock, disappearing into its shadowed depth for a moment. 
Then her bubble helmet and shoulders emerged from the hatch and she beckoned to 
me.
"Welcome aboard, Mr. Humphries," she said. "As owner, you should be the first to 
board Hesperos. After me, of course."



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