myself.
I said after a minute, “You may be right. But I’m sure going to give it a good try.”
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said, lying, “but maybe a little tired. And we’ve got a long trip tomorrow, so I’d better take you home, Miss Keefer.”
5
My airbody lay by the spacepad and was reached the same way the spacepad was reached. Elevator to the surface lock, a tractor-cab to carry us across the dry, tortured surface of Venus, peeling under the three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind. Normally I kept it under a foam housing, of course. You don’t leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to keep it intact, not even if it’s made of chrome steel. I’d had the foam stripped free when I checked it out and loaded supplies that morning. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull’s-eye ports of the crawler, through the green-yellow murk outside. Cochenour and the girl could have seen it too, if they’d known where to look, but they might not have recognized it.
Cochenour screamed in my ear, “You and Dorrie have a fight?”
“No fight,” I screamed back.
“Don’t care if you did. You don’t have to like each other, just do what I want you to do.” He was silent a moment, resting his throat. “Jesus. What a wind.”
“Zephyr,” I told him. I didn’t say any more, he would find out for himself. The area around the spacepad is a sort of natural calm area, by Venusian standards. Orographic lift throws the meanest winds up over the pad and all we get is a sort of confused back eddy. The good part is that taking off and landing are relatively easy. The bad part is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the atmosphere settle out on the pad. What passes for air on Venus has layers of red mercuric sulfide and mercurous chloride in the lower reaches, and when you get above them to those pretty fluffy clouds you find some of them are hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus is 3-D. It’s easy enough to
proceed from point to point; your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on to the charts. What’s hard is to find the right altitude, and that’s why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to Cochenour.
We were at the airbody, and the telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring out the bull’s eye. “No wings!” he shouted, as though I was cheating him.
“No sails or snow chains, either,” I shouted back. “Get aboard if you want to talk! It’s easier in the airbody.”
We climbed through the little snout, I unlocked the entrance, and we got aboard without much trouble.
We didn’t even have the kind of trouble that I might have made myself. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire it and, well, I won’t beat around the bush, you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra’s purchasing department had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential aboard, it was crowded with just the three of us. I was prepared for sarcasm, at least. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it and declared it his. The girl was a good sport, and there I was, left with my glands all charged up for an argument and no argument.
It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the wind right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed out earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.
“Sit down and strap up,” I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off.
At twenty thousand millibars wings aren’t just useless, they’re poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed built into the seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuels into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground around the spacepad (it was bulldozed
I said after a minute, “You may be right. But I’m sure going to give it a good try.”
“You’re angry, aren’t you?”
“No,” I said, lying, “but maybe a little tired. And we’ve got a long trip tomorrow, so I’d better take you home, Miss Keefer.”
5
My airbody lay by the spacepad and was reached the same way the spacepad was reached. Elevator to the surface lock, a tractor-cab to carry us across the dry, tortured surface of Venus, peeling under the three-hundred-kilometer-an-hour wind. Normally I kept it under a foam housing, of course. You don’t leave anything free and exposed on the surface of Venus if you want to keep it intact, not even if it’s made of chrome steel. I’d had the foam stripped free when I checked it out and loaded supplies that morning. Now it was ready. I could see it from the bull’s-eye ports of the crawler, through the green-yellow murk outside. Cochenour and the girl could have seen it too, if they’d known where to look, but they might not have recognized it.
Cochenour screamed in my ear, “You and Dorrie have a fight?”
“No fight,” I screamed back.
“Don’t care if you did. You don’t have to like each other, just do what I want you to do.” He was silent a moment, resting his throat. “Jesus. What a wind.”
“Zephyr,” I told him. I didn’t say any more, he would find out for himself. The area around the spacepad is a sort of natural calm area, by Venusian standards. Orographic lift throws the meanest winds up over the pad and all we get is a sort of confused back eddy. The good part is that taking off and landing are relatively easy. The bad part is that some of the heavy metal compounds in the atmosphere settle out on the pad. What passes for air on Venus has layers of red mercuric sulfide and mercurous chloride in the lower reaches, and when you get above them to those pretty fluffy clouds you find some of them are hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid.
But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus is 3-D. It’s easy enough to
proceed from point to point; your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on to the charts. What’s hard is to find the right altitude, and that’s why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to Cochenour.
We were at the airbody, and the telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring out the bull’s eye. “No wings!” he shouted, as though I was cheating him.
“No sails or snow chains, either,” I shouted back. “Get aboard if you want to talk! It’s easier in the airbody.”
We climbed through the little snout, I unlocked the entrance, and we got aboard without much trouble.
We didn’t even have the kind of trouble that I might have made myself. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire it and, well, I won’t beat around the bush, you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra’s purchasing department had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential aboard, it was crowded with just the three of us. I was prepared for sarcasm, at least. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it and declared it his. The girl was a good sport, and there I was, left with my glands all charged up for an argument and no argument.
It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the wind right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed out earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.
“Sit down and strap up,” I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off.
At twenty thousand millibars wings aren’t just useless, they’re poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed built into the seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuels into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground around the spacepad (it was bulldozed
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