It continued, spaced by five-minute breaks, until the emergency jets screamed it aside, and the ship plunged into the thick lower bands of atmosphere that enclosed the planet.
Stumbling in his haste, Frank made his way out of the communications room, down the corridor to the lounge. The lounge was empty; the others had left it. Terrified, he raced around in a half-circle, yelling into the uproar. The ship was animate with sound, a screeching organic racket, as if every molecule had grown a mouth and was shrieking out its pain.
Garry appeared and grabbed hold of his arm; he was shouting, but nothing came out: only gestures and mouth-motions. Frank followed along; Garry led him to an interior chamber, a reinforced cell at the heart of the ship. Irma and Syd stood mutely together, eyes wide, skins pale with shock. The chamber was the miniature medical ward of the ship. They had retreated here instinctively, pulling as far into safety as possible.
Now the brake jets had cut off. Either the ship was out of fuel, or it was deliberately coasting. Frank wondered about the other ship; he thought about Louis and Vivian and Dieter and the baby. He wished they could be together, all eight of them. He wished—
The impact wiped out his thoughts. And for a long time, how long he never knew, there was simple nothingness; no world and no self, only empty nonexistence. Not even the awareness of pain.
The first sensation that returned was that of weight. He was lying in the corner, and his head was ringing. Clanging like a great church bell, and slowly wheeling around, his head drifted sickeningly. The chamber was a shambles, crumpled in as if some Behemoth had trod on it. At one point, the ceiling and the floor met. Pools of liquid, probably insulating fluid, poured from broken wall-pipes. Somewhere in the half-darkness a mechanical repair car was ludicrously fussing with a rent in the hull as large as a two-story house.
Well, that was it. The ship had been ripped open like an over-inflated bladder. A dense, fragrant, steaming fog was already billowing in from outside. The ambulances would arrive to find them dead.
"Frank," Garry whispered.
Frank struggled up. Syd lay crumpled; probably she was dead. He felt her pulse. No, she was alive. He and Garry stumbled through the ruins of the chamber, toward what had been the passage. The passage was sealed off by a collapsed wall; the only exit was the rip in the hull. They could go only one way: out. Around them, the ship was flattened junk.
"Where's Irma?" Frank demanded hoarsely.
Garry was shoving through heaps of debris, toward the rip. "Out. She crawled out." Grunting, struggling, he disappeared into the swirls of moist fog, and dropped through the rip. Frank followed.
The scene was unbelievable. For a time neither of them could grasp it. "We're back home," the boy murmured, dazed and confused. "Something went wrong. We went around in a circle."
But it wasn't the Refuge. And yet it was. Familiar hazy hills spread out, lost in billowing moisture. Green lichens grew everywhere; the soil was a tangled floor of lush growing plants. The air smelled of intricate organic life, a rich, complex odor, similar to the odor they remembered but, at the same time, far more alive. They gaped foolishly: there was no delineating wall. There was no finite hull confining it. The world lay stretched out as far as the eye could see. And above. The world was everywhere.
"My God," Frank said. "It's not a fake." Bending down, he snatched up a crawling snail-like insect. "Not a robot—this is alive. It's genuine!"
From the mist, Irma appeared. Blood oozed over one eye; her hair was matted and tangled, her clothing was torn. "We're home," she gasped, gripping a bulging armload of plant life she had gathered. "Look at it—remember it? And we can breathe. We can live."
Off in the distance, great columns of steam rose up, geysers of boiling water forced through the rocks to the surface. An immense ocean pounded somewhere, invisible in the drifting curtain of moisture.
"Listen," Frank said. "You hear that? You hear the water?" They listened. They heard. They reached down and felt; they threw themselves on the ground, clutching frantically, faces pressed to the damp, warm soil.
"We're home," Irma wept. All of them were crying and moaning, wailing in bewildered joy. And above them, the other ship was already thundering down.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
UNDER ITS cloud layer the surface temperature of Venus varied from 99 degrees Fahrenheit to 101 degrees Fahrenheit. The lower atmosphere was a mixture of ammonia and oxygen, heavily laden with water vapor. Among the oceans and rolling hills toiled a variety of life forms, building and evolving, planning and creating.
Louis and Irma were repairing a turbine-driven tractor, when Dieter excitedly put in his appearance. "It's ready!" he shouted, standing in the entrance of the shed. "We're going to start!"
From under the tractor, Louis stuck out his head. "What's ready?" he demanded sourly.
"The corn. We're going to harvest it. We've got all the equipment down there; Vivian's hooking it up." Dieter danced up and down with frenzy. "You all have to pitch in—this stuff can wait. I rounded up Frank and Syd; they're on their way. They'll meet us along the route. And Garry's tagging along."
Grumbling, Louis dragged himself out from under the tractor. "It isn't corn. Stop calling it corn."
"It's corn in the spiritual sense. It's the essence of corn."
"Even if it's dark green?" Irma asked, amused.
"Even if it's purple-striped and silver polka-dotted. Even if it stands ninety feet high and has lace-embroidered pods. Even if it spurts ambrosia and coffee-grounds. It's still corn."
Louis stood wiping his forehead. "We can't come until the tractor's working." It was fifty miles to Dieter's place, across rolling country. "I think we need a new ignition coil; that means back to the ship."
"The heck with it," Dieter said impatiently, "I've got my dobbin cart—we can all fit in that."
The dobbin cart and the dobbin itself waited quietly. Louis approached cautiously, his eyes narrow with suspicion. "What do you call it?" He had seen the animals a long way off, but never this close. The dobbin was mostly legs, with immense flat feet like leather suction cups. A matted pelt, ragged and uneven, hung over it. The dobbin's head was tiny; its eyes were half-shut and indolent. "How'd you trap it?" he asked.
"They're tame enough, if you have the patience." Dieter climbed up into the cart and grabbed hold of the reins. "I've taught the hell out of this thing. They're sort of quasi-telepathic; all I have to do is think what I want, and off it goes." He wrinkled his nose contemptuously. "Forget that tractor; you can't keep it running anyhow. This is the vehicle of the future—the dobbin cart is the coming thing."
Irma got gingerly into the cart beside Dieter, and after a moment Louis followed. The cart was crude but solid; Dieter had laboriously constructed it during the last four months. The material was a now-familiar, heavy bread-like plant fiber that rapidly hardened on exposure. After it had been aged and dried, it could be cut, sawed, polished, and stained. Occasionally, migratory animals gnawed the material away, but that was the only known hazard.
The dobbin's vast flat feet began rhythmically to pound; the cart moved forward. Behind them, Louis' cabin dwindled. He and Irma had single-handedly built it; a year had passed in which much had been accomplished. The cabin, made of the same bread-like substance, was surrounded by acres of cultivated land. The so-called corn grew in dense clumps; it wasn't really corn, but it functioned as corn. Bulging pods ripened in the moist atmosphere. Around the base of the crop, insects crept; predators devouring plant-pests.
The fields were irrigated by shallow trenches bringing water out of an underground spring that spilled up to the surface in a hot, bubbling torrent. In the warm, humid atmosphere, almost unchanging, virtually hothouse in its stability, four crops a year were possible.