Venus Read Online Free PDF

and if I return safely.”

    Abdullah closed his eyes for a moment, as if thinking over what I’d just said. Then he corrected himself. “No matter what the ultimate source of the funding may be, we are appealing to you to allow this private venture to include a scientific component.”
    “For the good of the human race,” Greenbaum said, his raspy voice actually quavering with emotion.
    “Think of what we might discover beneath the clouds!” Mickey enthused.
    I sympathized with them, but the thought of battling with those designers and engineers made me shake my head.
    Greenbaum misunderstood my gesture. “Let me explain something to you, young man.”
    My brows must have gone up. Mickey tried to hold him back; she literally tugged at the sleeve of his pullover shirt, but he shrugged her off. Surprising vigor for a rickety old man, I thought.
    “Do you know anything about plate tectonics?” he asked, almost belligerently.
    “Certainly,” I said. “Mickey’s taught me quite a bit about it, actually. The Earth’s crust is composed of big plates, the size of continents, and they slide around on top of the hotter, denser rock below the crust.”
    Greenbaum nodded, apparently satisfied with the state of my education.
    “Venus has plate tectonics, too,” I added.
    “It did,” Greenbaum said. “Half a billion years ago.”
    “Not now?”
    “Venus’s plates are locked,” Mickey said.
    “Like the San Andreas fault?”
    “Much worse.”
    “Venus is on the verge of an upheaval,” Greenbaum said, his eyes fixed on mine. “For something like five hundred million years the planet’s plates have been locked together. All across the planet. She’s been building up internal heat all that while. Sometime soon that heat is going to burst out and totally blow away the planet’s surface.”
    “Sometime soon?” I heard myself squeak.

    “Geologically speaking,” Mickey said.
    “Oh.”
    “For the past five hundred million years Venus’s surface has been virtually unchanged,” Greenbaum went on. “We know that from counting meteor impacts. Below the surface, the planet’s internal heat is blocked. It can’t get through the crust, can’t escape.”
    Mickey explained, “On Earth, the planet’s internal heat is vented out of volcanoes, hot springs, that sort of thing.”
    “Water acts as a lubricant on Earth,” Greenbaum said, peering intently at me, as if to determine if I was understanding him. “On Venus there’s no liquid water; it’s too hot.”
    “No liquid water,” Mickey took up, “means no lubrication for the plates. They lock in place and stay locked.”
    Nodding, I mumbled, “I see.”
    “For five hundred million years,” Greenbaum said, “the heat’s been building up below Venus’s surface. It’s got to go somewhere!”
    “Sooner or later,” Mickey took over, “Venus is going to erupt cataclysmically. Volcanoes everywhere. The crust will melt and sink. New crustal material will well up from below.”
    “It’s going to be wonderful!” Greenbaum actually cackled with glee.
    “And this might happen while I’m down on the surface?” I asked, suddenly fearful that they might be right.
    “No, no, no,” Mickey said, trying to soothe me. “We’re talking geological time frames here, not human.”
    “But you said—”
    Greenbaum went from cackling to gloom. “We’d never be lucky enough to have it happen while we’re actually on the scene. The gods aren’t that generous.”
    “I wouldn’t call it luck,” I said. “The whole surface suddenly melting and blasting out volcanoes and all that.”
    Mickey said, “Don’t worry about it, Van. It won’t happen during the few days you’re below the clouds.”
    “Then what are you so worked up about?” I asked.

    Abdullah piped up, in his bass register. “Not every scientist agrees with Professor Greenbaum.”
    “Most planetary scientists disagree with us,” Mickey admitted.
    “Damn fools,” Greenbaum grumbled.
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