Chapter 8. _The Veil of Venus_

In an artificially constructed chamber somewhere in the solar system, an

intelligent being sat before a bank of instruments that was designed to

bring to his attention various factors concerning the things that

mattered to his species. This being had been on duty for the average

length of time such a duty entailed and had been paying little conscious

attention to the routine--for there had been nothing to report for some

time.

The drop in channeling from Planet III that had occurred some time ago

had thus far not caused too much concern. It was assumed by the other

intelligent beings involved that the matter was possibly a weather

condition, a volcanic discharge or quite simply that the planet was in

unfavorable orbit. Not all the stations ever worked simultaneously.

There were always some behind the Sun, or blocked in some other manner.

But the main channels were at work, and the different lines and shifts

continued to build up satisfactorily.

But now something occurred that focused the attention of the watcher

more closely on his instruments. A facet of his panel had flashed a

color at the lowest end of his visible spectrum. How the being

registered that color cannot be said; the inhabitants of Planet III

would have termed it red.

With trained reaction, the watcher activated the full signal. Instantly

there appeared before his eyes a vision of a scene. There was the

interior of the major station on Planet I. It was non-functioning, and

there were two strange creatures turning now to look directly at him.

They were bipeds with two armlike extensions, lumpy objects, clad in

bulky white folds. They wore cumbersome helmets and he could see two

eyes shielded beneath thick transparencies over the face.

One of these creatures raised his arm and there was a puff of steam.

Then the vision flashed off, but not before the trained watcher had

activated the crash mechanism.

If the watcher had been closer in space to the station, the destruction

would have come quicker. Unfortunately for him, the speed of light and

radio impulses is limited, so that it was several minutes before the

destruction impulse reached Planet I.

A short while later, after the guiding beings had digested the news,

preparations were made for a vessel to go sunward to investigate--and

remove--the interference.

* * * * *

Burl twisted on his heel sharply as he whirled around to look at the

flash of red. Boulton drew his hand weapon, aimed and fired.

There was a jet of steam as the compressed air blasted the dart from the

gun. The glowing globe was pierced, there was a small explosion, and

then the globe and its pedestal vanished.

"What was that?" cried Burl.

Boulton holstered his gun. "A signal of some kind--a warning probably.

My guess is that it was an alarm tipping off the remote control masters

of this place that it was out of commission. Help me with the photo

stuff; I think we'd better get out of here quick!"

Without wasting more time, the two men snapped the scene as fast as the

shutters would click. Then they picked up the cameras, grabbed their

umbrellas and ran for the break in the wall.

Just as they made their first flying leaps toward the shielded rocket

plane, the globes within the Sun-tap station started to go off. One

after another, like a chain reaction, they blew up, and within seconds

the interior of the walled station was a turmoil of falling metals,

beams, wires, and sharp transparent shards.

Haines and Ferrati were ready for take-off and puffs of smoke were

coming from the exhaust. Without bothering to take down the plastic

Sun-shield, Burl and Boulton tumbled into the cabin. Before the door

was even closed, Haines lifted the ship and headed for the dark depths

of the canyon.

The inside of the plane was perilously hot. The shield had been a

temporary protection, but even the ground radiated heat like an oven.

They had to seek the cold of the sunless canyon to allow some of the

heat to escape. To have flown directly to the _Magellan_ without cooling

the plane would have been disastrous.

The _Magellan_ emerged from the cold side to meet them. From the heights

of space, they saw that they would not need to bomb the mountain relayer

masts--for the same alarm that had triggered the station had shattered

them.

After the _Magellan_ had scuttled back to the cold side, there was a

council of war in the control room. Burl and Boulton described very

carefully what had happened.

"This must have been their primary station," said Russ thoughtfully. "No

matter what they seek to channel from the Sun on other planets, it is

from here that the first and strongest diversion of solar energy must

have been coming. This station may have been the last constructed--the

final link put into place. And for that reason, they installed an

alarm."

"Ah," said Lockhart, "even if they did, would it necessarily have

destroyed the station? After all, they would normally have figured on

repairing whatever went wrong."

"It seems to me," said Burl, "that the red flash itself didn't start the

destruction. There was a delay--must have been several minutes--before

it started. Could it be, that what was alerted was a watcher?"

"Where?" said Boulton. "There was no place for a watcher to be in that

station. We saw no sign of it."

"Maybe deep underground?" suggested the engineer, Caton. "They might

have living quarters a few miles underneath."

"Highly unlikely," said Russ Clyde. "It would still be too hot, and,

remember, these people plan to incinerate Mercury and the inner planets.

They must be from the edge of the system. The delay may be a valuable

clue to that. It would take time for a remote control station on another

planet to see what was happening and take steps. If you can figure out

exactly how many minutes and seconds elapsed between the flashing of the

red bulb and the blowup, we could work out the approximate distance."

But, unfortunately, the time could not be judged that accurately.

Neither Burl nor Boulton had had time to look at his watch.

They hung over the cold side of Mercury for several hours more while the

two astronomers figured their next move. When the orbits had been

determined, the _Magellan_ turned its massive wide nose away from the

Sun toward a gleaming white disc that dominated the dark skies of outer

space. With full power on, they pushed away from the littlest planet

and began the long fall toward the Sun's second planet, that which some

had considered to be Earth's veiled twin, Venus.

There was a matter of thirty million miles to cross, and the crossing

would be made fighting the pull of the Sun all the way.

Caton and his men had spent the wait on Mercury working on the great

generators in the powerhouse nose. They recalibrated the output and

corrected it from the records kept during the flight inward. Now they

were confident of its ability to drive the ship away from the Sun.

Coming in, they had not been sure what their A-G drive would do and

could do. Going outward they knew just what to expect.

They did not travel blindly outward, for that would have been both a

crude waste of power and inaccurate. Instead, the ship drove at a long

slant from the Sun, moving in a gently curving orbit that would bring it

onto Venus at the same time that Venus itself was moving along in its

orbit. This is what they had tried to do before, but without success.

Venus travels around the Sun at a speed of about 32 miles per second,

and takes about 224.5 days to complete the circuit. From where the

_Magellan_ took off, it would approach and overtake Venus at a speed a

little greater than the 32 miles per second.

The days passed swiftly enough. They had developed the pictures taken in

the Mercury station, and the engineers and astronomers spent long hours

debating their features, matching up what they had seen with what was

known about the Andes station.

The shining face of Venus grew larger. It was a mysterious planet, the

most mysterious in the system, even though it was the closest of the

planets to Earth. Venus was a world whose atmosphere--of Earthly

depth--was a solid mass of clouds. Never had the clouds lifted to reveal

the surface. The clouds reflected the sunlight brilliantly, yet as Burl

could now see with the naked eye, parts of it were hazy, as if mighty

storms were raising dark particles from below.

"We've had a couple of prober rockets shot into its surface," said Russ,

as they watched the oncoming planet. "They didn't prove much--faded out

fast, but we think they established its length of day. Nobody knew how

many hours it took Venus to rotate on its axis. Some even thought it

always presented one face to the Sun as does Mercury. Others thought it

had a quick day, shorter than Earth's. Others gave it a day almost a

month long.

"Our prober rockets, carrying unmanned instruments, rather definitely

indicate that the planet has a day about twenty Earth-days long. Even

though it's shielded by the clouds, it must be miserably hot near the

surface."

"We'll soon find out." Burl grinned. "After Mercury, it couldn't be so

bad. Maybe it rains all the time."

Russ shrugged. "Who knows?" he said.

Venus was a vast sea of swirling white and gray clouds beneath them when

the _Magellan_ reached it. They hung above the cloud level, while

stretching below them lay the circular bowl of veiled mystery that was

the fabled evening star of poem and song.

Oberfield was probing the surface with the radiation counters for the

Sun-tap distortion. None had been detected from Earth, but observation

of the sunny face of Venus had always been difficult from the third

planetary orbit. But quickly the dour astronomer proved the fact. A

calculation of the planet's albedo--its rate of reflected

sunlight--showed that in one large central section there was a dimming

out. Somewhere in that spot, the light was being diverted.

Lockhart brought the _Magellan_ down gradually, closer, closer, and

finally sank it into the soupy atmosphere of Venus. Now, from every

viewplate, nothing reflected but a glare of white mist. But the ship was

not operating blind. Radar pierced the clouds, and from the wide screens

the crew could see that they had not yet touched the surface.

"Watch out for mountains," whispered Russ, hanging over Lockhart's

shoulder.

Their progress was slow but steady. The cloud bank around them did not

clear, but still glowed gray. After a descent of nearly two hours, there

was a flicker on the radar. It registered no features, no mountains,

nothing but a seemingly flat plain.

Above and around them the white clouds still blanketed everything. But

now Burl thought he saw a pale glow. Gradually the white faded away into

wisps and shreds, and in a flash the ship broke out of the clouds.

They hung beneath a grayish-white sky. Below them, scarcely a half mile

of visibility in misty, thin air, they saw the surface of Venus. They

were over water. An ocean stretched below them as far as the eye could

see, with neither a rock nor an island. Venus was a water world!