The Merchant's War Read Online Free PDF Page B

poison, and too much of it, so the pressure was appalling. The heat boiled everything boilable away. There was nothing growing that was worth talking about when the first Earth ship landed, and fifty years of human colonization hadn’t made it good: just microscopically less awful. The Veenies’ attempts to turn the atmosphere into something a human being could stand weren’t finished, but they’d gone far enough that in some places you could get around without a pressure suit nowadays … though you needed to carry a breathing tank on your back, because there was precious little oxygen.
    This part they called the “Venera-Russian Hills Planetary Park”—so the sign at the tram stop said—wasn’t really much worse than the rest of it, no matter how much the Veenie Conservationists patted themselves on the back for retaining its “unspoiled wilderness quality.” I gazed at it through the window, and felt no impulse to get closer.
    “Let’s go, Tenn,” Mitzi urged.
    “Are you sure you want to do this?” It was nasty enough in the tram station, with the noise of the cars and the Veenies with their giggling brats. Going out of doors meant a whole higher order of nastiness. We’d have to put on the air tanks and sip air from tubes in our mouths, and it would mean even more heat than the interior ovens the Veenies seemed to thrive on. “Maybe we should eat first,” I offered, eyeing the refreshment stand. Under the painted legend “Chefs Recommendation for Today” someone had chalked, “Stay away from the scrambled eggs.”
    “Oh, come on, Tenn! You’re always telling me how much you hate Veenie food. I’ll go get us a couple of breathers.”
    When you don’t have any choice, go along— that’s the motto of the Tarbs. It has served our family well, for we’ve been members of the advertising profession since the old days of Madison Avenue and the Pepsi-Cola jingle. So I strapped the damn tank on my back and put the damn tube in my mouth and, whispering around the mouthpiece, said, “Into the valley of death, march on!”
    Mitzi didn’t laugh. She was in a sort of down mood that whole day, I know—I assumed because I was leaving. So I clapped her on the back and we stumbled down the path to the Venera.
    The Venera space probe is a hunk of dead metal, about the size of a pedicab, with spiky rods and dishes sticking out of it. It is not in good shape. Time was when it perched on top of a rocket in snowy Tyuratam and blasted its way across a hundred million miles of space to come blazing down through Venus’s blistering air. It must have made quite a sight, but of course there wasn’t anybody there to see it. After all that trouble and expense it had a working life of a couple of hours. It was long enough for it to radio back some pressure and temperature readings, and transmit a few out-of-focus distorted pictures of the rocks it was sitting on. That was its whole career. Then the poison gases seeped in, and all the circuits and gadgets and gizmos died. I suppose, really, that you’d have to say that the Venera was quite an accomplishment for those old pre-technological days. Those foggy gray camera eyes produced the first look at the surface of Venus that any human being ever had, and when the Veenies stumbled across it, in their first months of colonizing the planet, you would have expected them to want to celebrate it as a triumph, right? Oh, hell, no. The reason the Veenies made such a fuss about this hunk of junk was just more of their weirdness. See, back in those days the Russians were what they called Soviets. I’m not real sure what Soviets were—I always get them mixed up with the Scientologists and the Ghibellines—but I do know that they didn’t believe in—wait for it!—in profit! That’s right. Profit. They didn’t believe in people making money out of things. And as for profit’s major handmaiden, advertising, well, they just didn’t have any! I know that sounds strange, and