Chapter XII

“How very different Venus looks now to what it does from the earth,” said Zaidie, a couple of mornings later, by earth-time, as she took her eye away from the telescope through which she had been examining an enormous golden crescent which spanned the dark vault of Space ahead of and slightly below the Astronef.

“Yes,” replied Redgrave, “she looks----”

“How do you know that she is a she?” said Zaidie, getting up and laying a hand on his shoulder as he sat at his own telescope. “Of course I know what you mean, that according to our own ideas on earth, it is the planet or the world which has been supposed for ages to, as it were, shine upon the lovers of earth with the light reflected from the--the--well, I suppose you know what I mean.”

“Seeing that you are the most perfect terrestrial incarnation of the said goddess that I have seen yet,” he replied, slipping his arm round her waist and pulling her down on to his knees, “I don’t think that that is quite the view you ought to take. Surely if Venus ever had a daughter----”

“Oh, nonsense! After we’ve travelled all these millions of miles together do you really expect me to believe stuff like that?”

“My dear girl-graduate,” he said, tightening his grip round her waist a little, “you know perfectly well that if we had travelled beyond the limits of the Solar System, if we had outsailed old Halley’s Comet itself, and dived into the uttermost depths of Space outside the Milky Way, you and I would still be a man and a woman, and, being, as may be presumed, more or less in love with each other----”

“Less indeed!” said Zaidie; “you’re speaking for yourself, I hope.”

And then when she had partially disengaged herself and sat up straight, she said between her laughs----

“Really, Lenox, you’re quite absurd for a person who has been married as long as you have, I don’t mean in time, but in Space. Was it a thousand years or a couple of hundred million miles ago that we were married? Really I am getting my ideas of time and space quite mixed up.

“But never mind that! What I was going to say is that, according to all the authorities which your girl-graduate has been reading since we left Mars, Venus--oh, doesn’t she look just gorgeous, and our old friend the Sun behind there blazing out of darkness like one of the furnaces at Pittsburg--I beg your pardon, Lenox, I’m afraid I’m getting quite provincial. I suppose we’re considerably more than a hundred million miles away?”

“Yes, dear; we’re about a hundred and fifty millions, and at that distance, if you’ll excuse me saying so, even the United States would seem almost like a province, wouldn’t they?”

“Well, yes; that’s just where distance doesn’t lend enchantment to the view, I suppose.”

“But what was it you were going to say before that----”

“The interlude, eh? Well, before the interlude you were accusing me of being a graduate as well as a girl. Of course I can’t help that, but what I was going to say was----”

“If you are going to talk science, dear, perhaps we’d better sit on different chairs. I may have been married for a hundred and fifty million miles, but the honeymoon isn’t half way through yet, you know.”

Then there was another interlude of a few seconds’ duration. When Zaidie was seated beside her own telescope again, she said, after another glance at the splendid crescent which, as the Astronef approached at a speed of over forty miles a second, increased in size and distinctness every moment:

“What I mean is this. All the authorities are agreed that on Venus, her axis of revolution being so very much inclined to the plane of her orbit, the seasons are so severe that half the year its temperate zone and its tropics have a summer about twice as hot as ours and the other half they have a winter twice as cold as our coldest. I’m afraid, after all, we shall find the Love-Star a world of salamanders and seals; things that can live in a furnace and bask on an iceberg; and when we get back home it will be our painful duty, as the first explorers of the fields of Space, to dispel another dearly-cherished popular delusion.”

“I’m not so very sure about that,” said Lenox, glancing from the rapidly growing crescent, to the sweet, smiling face beside him. “Don’t you see something very different there to what we saw either on the Moon or Mars? Now just go back to your telescope and let us take an observation.”

“Well,” said Zaidie, rising, “as our trip is, partly at least, in the interests of science, I will;” and then when she had got her own telescope into focus again--for the distance between the Astronef and the new world they were about to visit was rapidly lessening--she took a long look through it, and said:

“Yes, I think I see what you mean. The outer edge of the crescent is bright, but it gets greyer and dimmer towards the inside of the curve. Of course Venus has an atmosphere. So had Mars; but this must be very dense. There’s a sort of halo all round it. Just fancy that splendid thing being the little black spot we saw going across the face of the Sun a few days ago! It makes one feel rather small, doesn’t it?”

“That is one of the things which a woman says when she doesn’t want to be answered; but, apart from that, you were saying----”

“What a very unpleasant person you can be when you like! I was going to say that on the Moon we saw nothing but black and white, light and darkness. There was no atmosphere, except in those awful places I don’t want to think about. Then, as we got near Mars, we saw a pinky atmosphere, but not very dense; but this, you see, is a sort of pearl-grey white shading from silver to black. You notice how much paler it grows as we get nearer. But look--what are those tiny bright spots? There are hundreds of them.”

“Do you remember as we were leaving the Earth, how bright the mountain ranges looked; how plainly we could see the Rockies and the Andes?”

“Oh, yes, I see; they’re mountains; thirty-seven miles high, some of them, they say; and the rest of the silver-grey will be clouds, I suppose. Fancy living under clouds like those.”

“Only another case of the adaptation of life to natural conditions, I expect. When we get there I daresay we shall find that these clouds are just what make it possible for the inhabitants of Venus to stand the extremes of heat and cold. Given elevations three or four times as high as the Himalayas, it would be quite possible for them to choose their temperature by shifting their altitude.

“But I think it’s about time to drop theory and see to the practice,” he continued, getting up from his chair and going to the signal board in the conning-tower. “Whatever the planet Venus may be like, we don’t want to charge it at the rate of sixty miles a second. That’s about the speed now, considering how fast she’s travelling towards us.”

“And considering that, whether it is a nice world or not it’s nearly as big as the Earth, I guess we should get rather the worst of the charge,” laughed Zaidie as she went back to her telescope.

Redgrave sent a signal down to Murgatroyd to reverse engines, as it were, or, in other words, to direct the “R. Force” against the planet, from which they were now only a couple of hundred thousand miles distant. The next moment the sun and stars seemed to halt in their courses. The great golden-grey crescent, which had been increasing in size every moment, appeared to remain stationary, and then, when he was satisfied that the engines were developing the Force properly, he sent another signal down, and the Astronef began to descend.

The half-disc of Venus seemed to fall below them, and in a few minutes they could see it from the upper deck spreading out like a huge semi-circular plain of light ahead and on both sides of them. The Astronef was falling at the rate of about a thousand miles a minute towards the centre of the half-crescent, and every moment the brilliant spots above the cloud-surface grew in size and brightness.

“I believe the theory about the enormous height of the mountains of Venus must be correct after all,” said Redgrave, tearing himself with an evident wrench away from his telescope. “Those white patches can’t be anything else but the summits of snow-capped mountains. You know how brilliantly white a snow-peak looks on earth against the whitest of clouds.”

“Oh, yes,” said Zaidie, “I’ve often seen that in the Rockies. But it’s lunch-time, and I must go down and see how my things in the kitchen are getting on. I suppose you’ll try and land somewhere where it’s morning, so that we can have a good day before us. Really, it’s very convenient to be able to make your own morning or night as you like, isn’t it? I hope it won’t make us too conceited when we get back, being able to choose our mornings and our evenings; in fact, our sunrises and sunsets on any world we like to visit in a casual way like this.”

“Well,” laughed Redgrave, as she moved away towards the companion stairs, “after all, if you find the United States, or even the Planet Terra, too small for you, we’ve always got the fields of Space open to us. We might take a trip across the Zodiac or down the Milky Way.”

“And meanwhile,” she replied, stopping at the top of the stairs and looking round, “I’ll go down and get lunch. You and I may be king and queen of the realms of Space, and all that sort of thing, but we’ve got to eat and drink, after all.”

“And that reminds me,” said Redgrave, getting up and following her, “we must celebrate our arrival on a new world as usual. I’ll go down and get out the wine. I shouldn’t be surprised if we found the people of the Love-World living on nectar and ambrosia, and as fizz is our nearest approach to nectar----”