And Venus is rain.
There are dry periods up by the poles, but we don’t go there—no plants. And the equator is wind-driven steam that would flay the flesh from your skeleton. Only girls went there, heavily armored. And robots, and telepresence.
They could employ robots up here in the so-called temperate zone, too, but people are supposedly cheaper in the long run. Made with unskilled labor, as the saying goes, but more or less teachable.
Plus the advantage of unquantifiable factors like imagination and initiative, and the supposition that a team is more than the sum of its parts. Versatility and initiative. You can program a machine to solve a thousand different problems, and you hope it becomes a machine for finding the thousand-and-first.
This team found more than it bargained for.
Humans as individuals are fallible in their own ways, with errors less predictable than those of machines, but the other side of that is being able to see problems that didn’t appear to be problems and, once in a great while, solutions that don’t appear to be solutions.
We were almost killed by that virtue, back when humans were new here. People call it the Second Wave now, which is a little grandiose and hopeful, since if there was a First Wave, it consisted of only eight people, five of them eventually buried under the planet’s muddy soil.
“Buried” is kind of a euphemism, since anything edible is dug up immediately and integrated into the lively Venusian ecology. But cremation’s not a real option, not with everything wringing wet, surrounded by hardly enough oxygen to keep a match lit. Did I mention that it’s not a garden spot? Though it is full of plants.
I wrote into my will that if I die here, they should just put my body outside with a nice ribbon tied around some appendage. Use the ribbon from my Ph.D. diploma, finally giving it a useful purpose.
(On the way to and from Mars I accumulated thirty credit hours and wrote a dissertation on anomalies in heat-transfer models in extreme environments. Like the one I was going to enjoy on the planet of steam ’n’ stink.)
The girls who work down toward the equator have to stalk around in heavy plastic armor, but the air in their suits is cool and sweet. I applied for that assignment, but I think was automatically disqualified, not really for being male but for not weighing less than a hundred pounds. They’re all tiny and cute, and when you talk to them on the cube, they’re not wearing too much.
My friend Gloria, who works down there, lamented that it smells like a women’s locker room with no perfume. I imagined that I could handle that, compared to eau de rotting greenhouse, but was smart enough not to say anything.
I wouldn’t have any reason to go down there, anyhow. You might ask why someone with a physical-science doctorate finds himself with a job collecting biota on an alien planet, but that would prove that you didn’t know a lot about the intersection of science and bureaucracy. Half a lifetime ago, I got a bachelor’s in environmental engineering because that’s where the jobs were, but then went on to aero/astro. So of course when the wheels of the gods ground out this assignment for me, they saw the “EnvEng” and ignored the fact that I did go on to the physics doctorate, and have forgotten more biology than I ever learned.
The transfer orbit we took from Mars to Venus lasted six months, and I did take two biology courses en route. But I also wanted to finish my dissertation before I forgot all my thermophysics. So I absorbed just enough xenobiology to avoid touching plants that would kill me. You don’t need any course work to avoid the animals that would.
While I was up in orbit, we got a message from a movie guy asking about doing a Venus-based remake of the classic Jurassic Park. Much hilarity ensued. Someone remembered a joke about the difference between a producer in science and one in Hollywood: a producer in science needs decades of education, not to mention intelligence and dedication—so he or she can produce something. A producer in Hollywood just needs a phone.
Oh, and no one was ever eaten by a special-effects monster.
In fact, when we studied the macrofauna of Venus, it was with the understanding that for every animal that had a name, there were two or three that hadn’t yet made their presence known. Some very “macro,” and either good at hiding or so macro they wouldn’t even notice killing you.
My favorite is the flying carpet, both big and almost invisible underfoot. It looks like a large rug that’s contracted a skin disease—which means that it doesn’t look that different from most of the ground. You can stroll right over it, and it doesn’t move until you’re in the middle of its several square meters. Then it tries to roll itself up with you inside. Your warning is an enzyme that smells like rotten apple juice: if you smell that, you have about half a second to jump back the way you came. Because that enzyme ain’t apple juice.
The microfauna have had less success in incorporating us into the food chain; except for whatever the crotch-eaters like, our body chemistry isn’t compatible. The creatures who eat us get very sick, which seems only fair.
I supposed that they would eventually develop an aversion to us, but Hania, our only actual xenobiologist, says that’s not likely. Too many monsters and too few of us for them to eat and throw up. Thus not enough learning opportunities.
She would remind me that humans are the monsters here. I’ll persist in species chauvinism and call a monster a monster.
I remembered a point that my high-school biology teacher made: a prey animal that’s taken by a predator obviously can never communicate the knowledge of having been killed that way to the next generation. But a prey animal that does survive the encounter may communicate the thrill of the chase. Presumably the abstraction “that was close; better not do that again” is too complex for their ungulate brains.
But they do observe and learn. A complex example on Earth was a “tribe” of burrowing creatures, meercats, who would dive into their holes if humans approached carrying guns, but would ignore humans carrying shovels. (That was language behavior as well as perception and discrimination: the meercat who was the lookout had different sounds for armed and unarmed humans.)
There’s nothing as innocent as ungulates or meercats here. If there were cute fuzzy little burrowing animals, they would drink blood or give off a poison gas, or both.
The little disaster that led to the current trouble was the local space elevator’s falling down. Earth’s space elevator is as safe as the one at Macy’s, but Earth doesn’t have Venusian weather. One cable unraveled, then another, and it’s a good thing they’d put the equatorial station to the east of the damned thing, or it might have flattened all the human females on the planet. One of them did die in the storm of whipping cables and metal shreds. Two storage modules were destroyed, one with most of their food, and their shuttle was sliced in two.
They couldn’t survive for long on the planet, and they had no way off. So the wisdom of redundancy was made clear: each base had the wherewithal to keep both crews alive for longer than it would take for help to arrive from Earth. Most of those resources were duplicated again up at Midway, the unmanned synchronous satellite that was the nexus for the space elevator.
Midway probably wasn’t hurt when the elevator took its little trip. But it was suddenly a very expensive destination in terms of fuel.
My shuttle craft is “bimodal,” as an economy measure. It can fly around in the atmosphere of Venus or in the vacuum of outer space. In the miserly atmosphere, it concentrates oxygen from the planet’s thin “air” soup as it sputters along, but it’s nothing like a terrestrial turbojet. A lot of the energy from the engine goes right back into extracting oxygen. And if I fly too high, the oxygen concentrator seizes up.