There was nothing out of place under any of the panels. By making and breaking contacts and getting Eric's reactions, I found that his sensation ended somewhere between the second and third inspection panels. It was the same story on the left wing. No external damage, nothing wrong at the junctions. I climbed back to ground and walked slowly beneath the length of each wing, my headlamp tilted up. No damage underneath.
I collected my buckets and went back inside.
"A bone to pick?" Eric was puzzled. "Isn't this a strange time to start an argument? Save it for space. We'll have four months with nothing else to do."
"This can't wait. First of all, did you notice anything I didn't?" He'd been watching everything I saw and did through the peeper in my helmet.
"No. I'd have yelled."
"Okay. Now get this.
"The break in your circuits isn't inside, because you get sensation up to the second wing inspection panels. It isn't outside because there's no evidence of damage, not even corrosion spots. "That leaves only one place for the flaw."
"Go on."
"We also have the puzzle of why you're paralyzed in both rams. Why should they both go wrong at the same time?
There's only one place in the ship where the circuits join."
"What? Oh, yes, I see. They join through me."
"Now let's assume for the moment that you're the piece with the flaw in it. You're not a piece of machinery, Eric. If something's wrong with you it isn't medical. That was the first thing we covered. But it could be psychological."
"It's nice to know you think I'm human. So I've slipped a cam, have I?"
"Slightly. I think you've got a case of what used to be called trigger anaesthesia. A soldier who kills too often sometimes finds that his right index finger or even his whole hand has gone numb, as if it were no longer a part of him. Your comment about not being a machine is important, Eric. I think that's the whole problem. You've never really believed that any part of the ship is a part of you. That's intelligent, because it's true. Every time the ship is redesigned you get a new set of parts, and it's right to avoid thinking of a change of model as a series of amputations."
I'd been rehearsing this speech, trying to put it so that Eric would have no choice but to believe me. Now I know that it must have sounded phony. "But now you've gone too far.
Subconsciously you've stopped believing that the rams can feel like a part of you, which they were designed to do. So you've persuaded yourself that you don't feel anything."
With my prepared speech done, and nothing left to say, I stopped talking and waited for the explosion.
"You make good sense," said Eric.
I was staggered. "You agree?"
"I didn't say that. You spin an elegant theory, but I want time to think about it. What do we do if it's true?"
"Why... I don't know. You'll just have to cure yourself."
"Okay. Now here's my idea. I propose that you thought up this theory to relieve yourself of a responsibility for getting us home alive. It puts the whole problem in my lap, metaphorically speaking."
"Oh, for-"
"Shut up. I haven't said you're wrong. That would be an ad hominem argument. We need time to think about this."
It was lights-out, four hours later, before Eric would return to the subject.
"Howie, do me a favor. Assume for awhile that something mechanical is causing all our trouble. I'll assume it's psychosomatic."
"Seems reasonable."
"It is reasonable. What can you do if I've gone psychosomatic? What can I do if it's mechanical? I can't go around inspecting myself. We'd each better stick to what we know."
"It's a deal." I turned him off for the night and went to bed.
But not to sleep.
With the lights off it was just like outside. I turned them back on. It wouldn't wake Eric. Eric never sleeps normally, since his blood doesn't accumulate fatigue poisons, and he'd go mad from being awake all the time if he didn't have a Russian sleep inducer plate near his cortex. The ship could implode without waking Eric when his sleep inducer's on. But I felt foolish being afraid of the dark.
While the dark stayed outside it was all right.
But it wouldn't stay there. It had invaded my partner's mind.
Because his chemical checks guard him against chemical insanities like schizophrenia, we'd assumed he was permanently sane. But how could any prosthetic device protect him from his own imagination, his own misplaced common sense?
I couldn't keep my bargain. I knew I was right. But what could I do about it?
Hindsight is wonderful. I could see exactly what our mistake had been, Eric's and mine and the hundreds of men who had built his life support after the crash. "There was nothing left of Eric then except the intact central nervous system, and no glands except the pituitary. "We'll regulate his blood composition," they said, "and he'll always be cool, calm, and collected. No panic reactions from Eric!"
I know a girl whose father had an accident when he was forty-five or so. He was out with his brother, the girl's uncle, on a fishing trip. They were blind drunk when they started home, and the guy was riding on the hood while the brother drove.
Then the brother made a sudden stop. Our hero left two important glands on the hood ornament.
The only change in his sex life was that his wife stopped worrying about late pregnancy. His habits were developed.
Eric doesn't need adrenal glands to be afraid of death. His emotional patterns were fixed long before the day he tried to land a moonship without radar. He'd grab any excuse to believe that I'd fixed whatever was wrong with the ram connections.
But he was counting on me to do it.
The atmosphere leaned on the windows. Not wanting to, I reached out to touch the quartz with my fingertips. I couldn't feel the pressure. But it was there, inexorable as the tide smashing a rock into sand grains. How long would the cabin hold it back?
If some broken part were holding us here, how could I have missed finding it? Perhaps it had left no break in the surface of either wing. But how?
That was the angle.
Two cigarettes later I got up to get the sample buckets. They were empty, the alien dirt safely stored away. I filled them with water and put them in the cooler, set the cooler for 40 Abso- lute, then turned off the lights and went to bed.
The morning was blacker than the inside of a smoker's lungs.
What Venus really needs, I decided, philosophizing on my back, is to lose ninety-nine percent of her air. That would give her a bit more than half as much air as Earth, which would lower the greenhouse effect enough to make the temperature livable. Drop Venus' gravity to near zero for a few weeks and the work would do itself.
The whole damn universe is waiting for us to discover antigravity.
"Morning," said Eric. "Thought of anything?"
"Yes." I rolled out of bed. "Now don't bug me with questions.
I'll explain everything as I go."
"No breakfast?"
"Not yet."
Piece by piece I put my suit on, just like one of King Arthur's gentlemen, and went for the buckets only after the gauntlets were on. The ice, in the cold section, was in the chilly neighborhood of absolute zero. "This is two buckets of ordinary ice," I said, holding them up. "Now let me out."