Becalmed In Hell.txt

Back to Venus, with a difference. This is the astronomical
Venus, not the romantic vision of "The Doors of His Face, the
Lamps of His Mouth." (But notice the sea images, even in this
rationalist's view of the Planet of Love.)
Like all Larry Niven's stories, this one is solidly based on
present-day science and technology, and it contains a neat,
nasty problem: if something goes wrong with a spacecraft
whose control system is a Cyborgpart human, part wires and
transistorsis the trouble mechanical or psychological? And
how do you find out before it kills you?

BECALMED IN HELL

Larry Niven

I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright
and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modem office building
in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it
was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough
to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet
beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs.
Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish."
Eric sighed noisily. "Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in
thisthis" Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just
after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black
calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep
any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching th8 surface."
I shivered. "What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much
imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction
writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth-
to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but
motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made
an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal
pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate
the tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the
hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile
drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature
readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small
probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely
confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world
in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric. "Look,
are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh frabjous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing
over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it
myself. We'd spent four months getting to Venus in order to
spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper
atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long. "What's the trouble, Eric?"
"You'd rather not know."
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman
monotone; he wasn't making the extra effort to get human
expression out of his "prosthetic" vocal apparatus. Only a
severe shock would affect him that way.
"I can take it," I said.
"Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like
I've just had a spinal anaesthetic."
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. "See if you
can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams
by guess-and-hope even if you can't feel them."
"Okay." One split second later, "They don't. Nothing
happens. Good thinking though."
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself
from the couch. What came out was, "It's been a pleasure
knowing you, Eric. I've liked being half of this team, and I still
do."
"Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attach-
ments. Carefully."
I swallowed my comments and went to open the access door
in the cabin's forward wall. The floor swayed ever so gently
beneath my feet.
Beyond the four-foot-square access door was Eric. Eric's
central nervous system, with the brain perched at the top and
the spinal cord coiled in a loose spiral to fit more compactly into
the transparent glass-and-sponge-plastic housing. Hundreds of
wires from all over the ship led to the glass walls, where they
were joined to selected nerves which spread like an electrical
network from the central coil of nervous tissue and fatty
protective membrane.
Space leaves no cripples; and don't call Eric a cripple,
because he doesn't like it. In a way he's the ideal spaceman. His
life support system weighs only half of what mine does, and
takes up a twelfth as much room. But his other prosthetic aids
take up most of the ship. The ramjets were hooked into the last
pair of nerve trunks, the nerves which once moved his legs, and
dozens of finer nerves in those trunks sensed and regulated fuel
feed, ram temperature, differential acceleration, intake aper-
ture dilation, and spark pulse.
These connections were intact. I checked them four diferent
ways without finding the slightest reason why they shouldn't be
working.
"Test the others," said Eric.
It took a good two hours to check every trunk nerve con-
nection. They were all solid. The blood pump was chugging
along, and the fluid was rich enough, which killed the idea that
the ram nerves might have "gone to sleep" from lack of
nutrients or oxygen. Since the lab is one of his prosthetic aids, I
let Eric analyse his own blood sugar, hoping that the "liver"
had goofed and was producing some other form of sugar. The
conclusions were appalling. There was nothing wrong with
Ericinside the cabin.
"Eric, you're healthier than I am."
"I could tell. You looked worried, son, and I don*t blame you.
Now you'll have to go outside."
"I know. Let's dig out the suit."
It was in the emergency tools locker, the Venus suit that was
never supposed to be used. NASA had designed it for use at
Venusian ground level. Then they had refused to okay the ship
below twenty miles until they knew more about the planet. The
suit was a segmented armor job. I had watched it being tested
in the heat-and-pressure box at Cal Tech, and I knew that the
joints stopped moving after five hours, and wouldn't start again
until they had been cooled. Now I opened the locker and pulled
the suit out by the shoulders and held it in front of me. It
seemed to be staring back.
"You still can't feel anything in the ramjets?"
"Not a twinge."
I started to put on the suit, piece by piece like medieval
armor. Then I thought of something else. "We're twenty miles
up. Are you going to ask me to do a balancing act on the hull?"
"No! Wouldn't think of it. We'll just have to go down."
The lift from the blimp tank was supposed to be constant
until takeoff. When the time came Eric could get extra lift by
heating the hydrogen to 'higher pressure, then cracking a valve
to let the excess out. Of course he'd have to be very careful that
the pressure was higher in the tank, or we'd get Venusian air
coming in, and the ship would fall instead of rising. Naturally
that would be disastrous.
So Eric lowered the tank temperature and cracked the valve,
and down we went.
"Of course there's a catch," said Eric.
"I know."
"The ship stood the pressure twenty miles up. At ground
level it'll be six times that."
"I know."
We fell fast, with the cabin tilted forward by the drag on
our tailfins. The temperature rose gradually. The pressure went
up fast. I sat at the window and saw nothing, nothing but black,
but I sat there anyway and waited for the window to crack-
NASA had refused to okay the ship below twenty miles : . .
Eric said, "The blimp tank's okay, and so's the ship, I think.
But will the cabin stand up to it?"
"I wouldn't know."
"Ten miles."
Five hundred miles above us, unreachable, was the atomic
ion engine that was to take us home. We couldn't get to it on
the chemical rocket alone. The rocket was for use after the air
became too thin for the ramjets.
"Four miles. Have to crack the valve again."
The ship dropped.
"I can see ground," said Eric.
I couldn't. Eric caught me straining my eyes and said,
"Forget it. I'm using deep infrared, and getting no detail."
"No vast, misty swamps with weird, terrifying monsters and
man-eating plants?"
"All I see is hot, bare dirt."
But we were almost down, and there were no cracks in the
cabin wall. My neck and shoulder muscles loosened. I turned
away from the window. Hours had passed while we dropped
through the poisoned, thickening air. I already had most of my
suit on. Now I screwed on my helmet and three-finger gantlets.
"Strap down," said Eric. I did.
We bumped gently. The ship tilted a little, swayed back,
bumped again. And again, with my teeth rattling and my
armor-plated body rolling against the crash webbing. "Damn,"
Eric muttered. I heard the hiss from above. Eric said, "I don't
know how we'll get back up."
Neither did 1. The ship bumped hard and stayed down, and
I got up and went to the airlock.
"Good luck," said Eric. "Don't stay out too long." I waved at
his cabin camera. The outside temperature was seven hundred
and thirty.
The outer door opened. My suit refrigerating unit set up a
complaining whine. With an empty bucket in each hand, and
with my headlamp blazing a way through the black murk, I
stepped out onto the right wing.
My suit creaked and settled under the pressure, and I stood
on the wing and waited for it to stop. It was almost like being
under water. My headlamp beam went out thick enough to be
solid, penetrating no more than a hundred feet. The air couldn't
have been that opaque, no matter how dense. It must have
been full of dust, or tinydroplets of some fluid.
The wing ran back like a knife-edged running boar...