The Captain peered over George’s shoulder.
“Hardly the place to spend a sunny holiday,” said George.
“Gloomy.” Freiburg nearly added that it was almost as gloomy as he felt, but restrained himself. He must try to avoid spreading despondency. The loudspeaker clicked and came alive. The mate’s voice was shakier yet.
“Sir, Firkin appears to be dead.”
Freiburg felt another load laid on his shoulders. Was he to be labeled
“killer” now? It was unfair. A flame of resentment flickered.
“Why ‘appears’? Can’t you tell? What happened?”
“I don’t know, sir. I think you’d better come along to his cabin right away.”
“Coming.”
The Captain hadn’t liked Firkin as a person, and as a person he was small loss. An opinionated, egocentric bore and whiner, alternately boasting or beefing. But a competent and conscientious analytic chemist and valuable to this expedition.
George followed the skipper along the passages, down the ladder. The mate stood guard at Firkin’s door, and he looked worried.
“Don’t go in, sir. Just look through the spy-hole.”
Firkin’s cabin, which was also his laboratory, was airtight. In there he was to carry out analyses of Venusian atmosphere. There was a small glass panel in the door and the drill was that you were to tap and get his indicated okay before you entered. He’d likely be wearing a pressure helmet, while you were unprotected. And you couldn’t know what might have seeped in through the air-lock or out of the specimen bottles.
The Captain looked. Firkin wasn’t wearing his helmet, so he hadn’t started analyzing. He lay on his back, very still, face and body contorted. His mouth was half open. So were his eyes. His face was congested, blue-black. There was wet blood over his chin and there seemed to be spots of it on the floor. It wasn’t easy to be sure, because a thin white mist was swirling around inside the cabin like cigaret smoke, and visibility wasn’t too good. However, two things were plain enough. The broken quartz specimen bottle at his side. The jagged slit in the outer wall of the cabin.
“What do you make of it, George?” asked the Captain. George peered in his turn. “H’m. Looks like he took a specimen of the cloud stratum, as per plan, but a shell splinter came through the wall and broke the bottle under his nose. That cloud-stuff must be poisonous: he’s been coughing up blood.”
“I agree,” said the Captain. “And there’s still some gas in there: you can see it. You did the right thing, mister, stopping us at the door. We’re still in a spot, though. Now our expert is dead, how are we going to tell if the atmosphere outside is breathable or not?”
“I don’t think it’s harmful, sir—at least, not poisonous,” said the mate. “Take a look along here.”
He led them down the passage to a place where there was another rent in the outer wall. It was maybe five centimetres wide and you could see Venus through it.
“I guess that hit us after we’d got below the clouds,” said the mate. “But it don’t seem to have made any difference to us.”
George put his fingers over the hole. He could feel a steady inflow. He put his nose near the aperture and sniffed.
“Careful,” Freiburg warned.
“I think it’s all right; as near enough to our kind of air to be acceptable. There’s a bit of a tang to it, and it’s certainly denser than Earth’s atmosphere: it’s pouring through to even up the pressure in here.”
“Well, that’s something on the credit side at last. Looks like we may not need spacesuits… How’s the radio, mister? Has Sparks got through again, yet?”
“No, sir. That… um… crash-landing loused the set up quite a bit. He’s working on it.”
“Aw, hell.” The closer they’d got to the sun and the wavering streams of electrons it emitted, the worse radio communication with Earth had become. Finally, static had drowned it altogether. Freiburg was barred from the qualified triumph of announcing the landing on Venus. Still, on the other hand, he hadn’t to announce what a mess he’d made of the landing. He said, between relief and irritability: “Let’s go outside and assess the damage.”
The air out there was breathable, all right, but the tang made you cough. And the density was somewhat oppressive. You could feel the air pressing against your eardrums and everyone seemed to be speaking annoyingly loud. These things, and the gray light and the scowling clouds, did much to offset the slight lift which the lesser gravitation gave you.
Freiburg regarded the crumpled tail-fins glumly.
“More than a week’s work to put that back in shape,” he said. George had brought his collapsible telescope and was staring around the horizon through it. “High mountains in that direction,” he reported. “Around sixty kilos away, I’d say. So far as I can see, all of the rest of this area looks pretty much the same as where we’re standing—one darn great plain.”
“A plain,” grunted the Captain. “Yes, and a battlefield too, I guess. These depressions in the ground look pretty much like shell craters to me. And fairly new ones, too. Well, I was hopeful of finding intelligent life on Venus, but now it looks doubtful if we shall. Oh, yes, there must be Venusians, all right—who else could have fired at us—but they must be around the level of the nuts who were running things back on Earth going on a century ago. We may be lucky if we got off this damn planet alive.”
George snapped his telescope shut, frowning. He didn’t like this kind of defeatism. They’d only just arrived on Venus and already the skipper was talking about getting away from it.
Three more of the crew came climbing down the ship’s ladder, curious to sample Venus. That left the radio operator alone in the ship, still struggling with his set. Everyone started wandering around inspecting the terrain. The Captain searched in one of the bigger craters and found metal fragments of shell or bomb casing. There had been a war on around here, sure enough. From way off, George suddenly shouted and beckoned him. The Captain went over. George, pointing, said: “And what d’you make of that?”
There was a perfectly straight slit along the ground, only three or four centimetres wide. It seemed to be endless; it led off unbroken in either direction as far as the eye could see, straight as a ruled line.
“I’ve followed it way out. It just goes on,” said George.
“Queer,” he commented. “Looks as though someone’s drawn a giant knife across the landscape. Are there any parallel marks of any kind?”
“I can’t see any.”
“Then how the devil does the knife hold up? I mean, if it were some kind of plow, there should be the marks of wheels or—or something around here.”
“I still can’t see any, Skip.”
“What’s it supposed to be? A boundary line? A frontier?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I guess the only way to find out is to follow the line until we bump into whatever made it.”
“Yes, George, and we might bump into whoever’s behind those guns. Don’t be too hasty about dashing off to explore. We’d better stick together here for a while, and wait and see if the natives approach us. They don’t seem over-friendly. We may need all hands to beat off an attack. We’ll set up a command post in one of these craters; I’ve a notion we may be safer below ground level, and if—”
The Captain broke off. From somewhere far off came a thin, keening wail, getting louder. The crew started to shout and point. There was something moving out there on the plain.
“Your telescope!” snapped the Captain, and George passed it to him. Even through the telescope the thing racing towards them was not easy to see in the poor light, especially as it was almost edge on. Captain Freiburg had once seen the wheel of a racing car come off and go bowling on by itself at a hundred miles an hour. Something like that was coming along the ground in their direction at about the same speed, but it was all of seven metres in diameter. An unattached wheel of solid, gleaming metal tapering down from the hub to an edge of extreme thinness. It was like the wheel off an enormous bacon-slicer, run amok.