The feel of the car changed drastically. I hit the brake fast, but it was hardly necessary; we were only starting to move from a dead stop. A moment ago we'd been doing seventy.
I heard the sea before I saw it: breakers crunching ahead of us, flashing white in the headlights. If I'd kept the throttle down we'd have driven right into them. The freeway lighting had become a pale pink glow far across the sea; dawn or dusk, I couldn't tell. We were in soft dry sand. It might have been a California beach, and our car sitting mired in sand might have been a television commercial or a practical joke, except that it wasn't.
"S-s-sonofabitch took me at my word," said Hal Grant. Then, "This can't be real. Can it?"
Joy was furious. "He was listening to us! That-eavesdropper!"
I got out.
It felt like sand. It crunched beneath my feet, like sand. How could it be part of another world? But the sinking feeling in my belly felt like an elevator starting down. Terror? Or low gravity?
I threw back my head and screamed, "Findlay!"
And he was there, grinning out of a metal cagework affair. "Figured it out, did you?"
"Christ no, Findlay! What's going on here? We're terribly confused! One minute we were driving along the freeway, and the next we're here at Hermosa Beach!"
First he was flabbergasted. Then he burst out laughing. Well, it had been worth a try.
So was my next move. His head was thrown back and his beard was raised, and I stepped forward fast and hit him in the throat, putting all my weight behind it.
Not murder. Justice. And we needed that cage affair to get home.
It was like hitting a padded pillar. My head snapped forward, my teeth came together with a sharp click, and something gave agonizingly in my shoulder. Tom Findlay must have weighed over a ton.
He stopped laughing, gradually. "Very good. Nobody's ever adjusted quite that fast. Let's say you pass with honors," he said. "And here's your diploma."
It appeared beside him in the cage: a black disc on edge, two feet high. He caught it before it could topple, and he sent it rolling out. I let it go past me.
Grant had come up behind me. In resignation he said, "Where are we?"
"A lot of use you'll get out of that! I'll tell you anyway. It's the second planet out from Alpha Centauri A. If you were hoping for double suns and wild new constellations, you can forget it. We used the closest available water world."
"Gonna be dull," said Hal. He'd given up.
So had I. I inhaled; the air smelled incredibly clean. A door slammed behind me. The women. God, don't let them beg. I said, "So they came and sampled us and found us wanting. So they're doing it over with another five hundred Edens. So where do you come in, Findlay? They aren't human, are they?"
"Not by a long way," said Findlay, with reverence. "Neither am I. I'm a robot. I'm also the ideal they're aiming for, in case you were wondering."
"I wasn't."
"Now, now."
"If you're just what they want, why do they need us?"
"I'm expensive. Robots don't breed. You can forget about genetic engineering, too. It's immoral. I don't know why. It's enough that they think so. Anything else?"
"We were doing seventy on the freeway," said Hal. "What happened to the momentum?"
"You were also doing about twenty miles per second with respect to this beach. We just took it all in one vector sum. What else? Oh, you won't be separated. This Eden will hold all four of you. We did it that way last time, too. The Eden story is only a myth."
"Are there any others?" Carol cried. "What direction are they."
But he was gone, and the metal frame around him. We were alone on a beach, four of us and a car, in the growing light of dawn.
"This thing is sticky," Hal said suddenly. He was holding the black disc that Findlay had rolled past me. He looked at his hand, then licked a finger. "Right. It's a memento, his signature, as it were. What can you say about chocolate covered manhole covers?"
"Don't get it sandy," my wife said briskly. "We can eat the chocolate. It's the only thing on this world that we know we can eat."
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.
"Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish."
Eric sighed noisily. "Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this..this.." Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."
I shivered. "What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth- to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric. "Look, are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh fabulous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We'd spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long. "What's the trouble, Eric?"
"You'd rather not know."
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn't making the extra effort to get human expression out of his "prosthetic" vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.
"I can take it," I said.
"Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I've just had a spinal anaesthetic."
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. "See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can't feel them."