Chapter 9: The Ocean Primeval

The Magellan hung in the air while the men studied the surface of this world that had so long been a mystery. The air was not the clear air of Earth; rather, it was the kind that precedes the coming of a fog, thick, heavy with moisture, the horizons fading into gray. Below them lay a mottled expanse of water, reflecting the gray sky, and verging almost to a deep brown. The water was still, occasionally stirred by a slight wave. “No tides have ever moved these waters,” commented Russ quietly to Burl. “There is no moon to pull and sway them. The motion of this world, so slow in the passage of its day, hardly disturbs the water.”

“It looks shallow to me,” said Burl. “The darker sections look as if the bottom must be close.”

“I imagine it is. We’ll take soundings,” Russ answered. “I have a feeling the whole world may be like this ... one vast, shallow, swampy sea. See the scum floating on it?”

“See it? Now that you mention it, there’s hardly a part that hasn’t something on it,” was Burl’s reply. “There’re patches of muck all over it, like floating oil, or even drifting masses of weeds.”

It was true. The water showed on its surface a strange filth unlike anything one would expect on the surface of a Terrestrial sea. There were wide areas of brownish-gray slime and little floating blobs of green. Shining flecks of yellow, like bright oil drops, seemed to flow through and between the masses of scum.

At the radar, Haines began to call out figures. As Russ had guessed, it was a shallow sea. In places, the bottom was only a dozen feet beneath. For a while, all the men of the crew were quiet, watching the silent waters beneath them.

“Unclean, the whole place looks unclean,” Lockhart said finally. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s find the Sun-tap station.”

The rest of the crew came to action. The spaceship began to move slowly, while Oberfield and Caton probed for the lines of force which would lead to the station.

Now a long, low bank appeared, a ridge of mud protruding above the water. Here and there stretched other low mud bars, and once a ridge of rock.

“I’ve seen no animals or birds,” said Burl. “Do you suppose there are any?”

Russ pursed his lips. “I don’t think so. From the look of this world, life probably isn’t developed that far. You won’t find animals until there is dry land--and I’d guess now that there’s no place on all Venus where there is much dry land. There may be fish or fish life, but even that’s questionable. Consider--the long, long day, the absence of violent, unshielded Sun rays, the steady damp warmth, the quiet, barely moving waters, the heavy amounts of carbon dioxide in the air...”

He paused and went over to Lockhart’s chart table to pick up a paper. “Oberfield worked out the atmosphere. It is very heavy in carbon dioxide, very low in free oxygen. There’s water vapor down here, but the clouds have kept it below; it didn’t show up in the outer atmosphere at all.”

“There’s the Sun-tap base,” said Burl, and added as an afterthought, “I think.”

This one did not look at all like the other stations he had seen. There was indeed a ringed wall station, but the wall was low and slanted outward. It stood on the end of a wide mudbank, and near it veins of rock glistened as if wet.

The interior machinery was a neat, compact mass of crystalline globes and levers. But the masts and shining discs which had characterized the stations on Mercury and Earth were missing. Instead, there floated upon the surface of the water, for a mile around, great shining bowls, like huge saucers gently rocking in the faint wavelets. Thin, flexible, shining lines of metal connected this surface layout with the station.

“With no direct Sun to aim at, this station seems to be directed toward a nonfocused system of light diversion,” Lockhart announced. “The wrecking crew please get under way!”

“I’m going down with you,” Russ joined in. “I’ve gotten permission to take some observations from the surface.”

“Good,” said Burl, and hurried with him down to the central floor.

They disembarked in two parties. Haines and Ferrati used the two-man rocket plane and would make a wide encirclement of the vicinity, mapping and finally blowing up the accumulator discs floating on the surface. Burl, Russ, and Boulton took a helicopter.

The helicopter, under the control of the Marine captain, dropped out of the cargo port of the Magellan. Steadied by the regular whirl of its great blades and driven by tiny rocket jets in the tip of each wing, the whirlybird swung down like a huge mosquito hovering over a swamp patch.

It moved over the water and finally hung directly over the mudbank. Maneuvering so that the helicopter was directly in the protected circle of the walls, Burl and Russ dropped a rope ladder and swung down hand over hand to be the first human beings to set foot on Venus.

They were lightly dressed, for the temperature was hot, around 110°, and it was humid. No breezes blew here. They wore shorts and shirts and high-laced leather boots. Each carried two small tanks of oxygen on his back. A leather mouth nozzle strapped across the shoulders guaranteed a steady flow of breathable air. In their belts were strapped knives and army pistols. Russ carried recording equipment, and Burl a hatchet.

They dropped off the swaying ladder inside the station. The ground was hard-packed as if the builders had beaten it down and smoothed it off. The globes were familiar to Burl--he had studied the pictures of the two he had already visited and he realized that they followed the same general system. Where the mast towers would have been, there were leads running through the plastic walls out across the sea. He wondered briefly why the walls were curved outward.