Battle On Venus
by
William F. Temple
3S XHTML edition 1.0
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contents
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THE ASTRONAUTS WERE EVERYONE’S TARGETS
Earth’s first spaceship to Venus landed amidst a war where strange weapons like the archaic ones used in the old wars on Earth in the Twentieth Century hurled shells at each other. Rut this war had lasted over a thousand years—and by remote control!
George Starkey had to find a way to stop the war before the little group of astronauts became early casualties. But how? Where were the headquarters of the contending sides and how do you tell a robot tank that you’re neutral?
But George had an ally, a Venusian girl who thought stealing was virtuous—and, unknowingly, he had something else that turned out to be the most valuable substance on Venus—a box of chocolate bars!
Turn this book over for second complete novel (proofers note: The Suns Of Amara available as a separate ebook) WILLIAM F. TEMPLE is a London-born Englishman, who was publishing science-fiction long before it became a respectable word. His youthful friends and fellow-authors were Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, and John Christopher. Before World War II the Temple-Clarke flat was the headquarters of the British Interplanetary Society (Temple edited its Journal). Then, space travel was regarded as beyond the lunatic fringe. Now, the B.I.S is as respectable as science-fiction. Temple still lives in hopes of becoming respectable also.
He has had numerous science-fiction stories published on both sides of the Atlantic, and many have been anthologized. Besides four science-fiction novels, he has published a straight book on space travel, and a crime thriller.
He has written a good deal of (intentionally) juvenile general fiction, and has two children of his own.
For a brief dark space he was an editor but prefers to pretend it never happened.
ACE BOOKS
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
BATTLE ON VENUS
Copyright © 1963, by Ace Books, Inc. All Rights Reserved First Ace printing: April, 1963 Second Ace printing: June, 1973
printed as ACE DOUBLE #76380 with THE SUNS OF AMARA Copyright ©, 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.
Printed in U.S.A.
I
ON EVERY roll his name was entered as “Captain J. Freiburg.” He signed his checks “J. Freiburg.” Friends called him “Cap” or simply “J.”
He never let on, unless he had to, what “J” stood for. He’d always been sensitive about it and now he was downright superstitious about it. His given name was Jonah; he’d wrecked a ship once, and right now he had a hunch he was on the point of wrecking another. And there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. It wasn’t a question of skilclass="underline" he was skillful enough. It was a question of luck. He’d used up a lot of luck on this trip, and he felt the last drops of it oozing away through his boot soles.
Inside the spaceship, the light was becoming unbearably bright. Freiburg felt he was standing at the focus point of a score of naked arc lamps. Meter dials shone like mirrors and defied reading. Handrails blazed like rods of white fire—a man hesitated to grasp them.
But it was all just light, nothing more. The temperature hadn’t risen a single degree, even though the ship was twenty-six million miles nearer the sun than their native Earth: the air-conditioning was that good. Freiburg cupped his hand around the chronometer, shielding it from the glare. He calculated that, at the present rate of deceleration, the ship would reach, tail first, the outer wisps of the clouds of Venus in about fourteen minutes. He said into the mike: “Fasten glare shields.”
From a loud-speaker the mate’s voice acknowledged.
Slowly, with a hand made heavy by two g’s, Freiburg reached out to his cabin’s solitary porthole. He swung an amber disk to cover the quartz, fastened it with a snap. The joint glare from the Venusian albedo and the sun itself was softened into a cool lemon light.
He recalled a time when as a boy he was on an Atlantic liner which ran into heavy sea mist. There was other shipping around. The liner crawled, hooting. Answering warnings sounded from the blank white curtain on all sides. The boy pictured the anxious skipper on the bridge and didn’t envy him. But he trusted him. The skipper, he thought, wouldn’t hold such a position if he weren’t equal to the job. They’d come through, all right. And they did. Now he was the skipper, with his ship about to enter impenetrable cloud. His TV screen showed only that same blank white curtain. But he was in a trickier position than that sea captain. He could neither stop his ship nor reverse it, not now. He’d handed it over to the computer. It was dealing with the mass and speed of the ship, the mass of Venus, and the readings of the radar altimeter. He trusted the computer but not the altimeter. At this distance its measurements were relatively coarse.
The needle flickered indecisively over whole divisions marking a hundred metres. It would fine up as they neared the ground. But if it were just one division out, that could be equivalent to dropping the ship from a height of better than ninety metres—say 300 feet—on Earth.
It would do the ship no good at all, to say nothing of its crew. If only he could see the ground, he would feel happier bringing the ship down by manual control. But the current theory was that the clouds of Venus extended clear to the ground. Hence the handover to instruments. But he didn’t feel he’d handed over his responsibility as part of a package deal. The crew believed that he, personally, was responsible for their safety. That was okay so long as he had complete control and knew what was happening. It was the unexpected or inexplicable events which tended to throw him. He had a deep-rooted hate of the unknown quantity. It seldom turned out to be in his favor. He trusted himself, but not his luck. Gambling lost him that earlier ship. The gale had passed, he risked the take-off, and the gale promptly rushed back like a fury and smacked the ship into a side-slip. There were other near-disasters through unlucky timing and freak happenings.
Yes, his name was Jonah.
And he was losing his nerve and getting too old for pioneering. If he came through this last and most dangerous adventure, he’d retire. George Starkoy came in, working his way slowly along the handrail and sagging a bit at the knees—from two g’s, not from age. Starkey had yet to experience the fading optimism and the growing anxiety of middle age.
“Well, Skip, here goes—third and last strike.”
There was no disciplining Starkey. He wasn’t one of the crew. He was a professional explorer: tenacious, resourceful—and lucky. He’d done enough good work on Mars to qualify for inclusion in this first attempt to make Venus. He had an unquenchable thirst to learn what was on the other side of the hill. Sheer curiosity gave him unflagging energy.
The Captain made no answer to the obvious remark. George looked at the infra-red visi-plate. It showed only a few vague and spotty shadows. He said: “A lot of help that is. If that’s the best it can do, I guess it must be true the clouds reach all the way down.”
“Maybe, Starkey. Or maybe it means the clouds themselves are thick with floating particles.”
“Atmospheric dust?”
The Captain shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe chemical powder on the loose. There’s plenty of carbon dioxide there—but what else?”
“We’ll soon know when Firkin gets his specimen.”
George sank into a sprung chair. The braking drive was steadily increasing. Talking became difficult and they both fell silent. The Captain thought back to his home in Vermont, the porch and the rocking chair, the view of distant woods. George thought forward to Venus. These minutes of excited anticipation; these formed the crown of life. He was one hundred per cent energized.