The first-person pronoun there is unfortunately accurate. When the storm hit, there was nobody else pilot-certified at the “temperate” base. There wouldn’t really be room for a copilot, anyhow, once I picked up the women.
So my trip south was solo, slow, and tense. Most of the time I was flying low over ferocious electrical storms, so the ride was bumpy until I got high enough, and the radio was useless with static.
I did sporadically get through enough to know that the surviving women were safe for now, inside the living module of their shuttle, but of course it wasn’t flyable.
We didn’t discuss the other dangers. There were thunder lizards big and strong enough to tear through the light metal skin of the ship—it was great for keeping vacuum out and protecting against micrometeoroids, but even I, with merely human strength, could tear a hole into it with a crowbar and tin snips. The biggest lizards were half the size of the ship. If they thought there was something good to eat inside, they wouldn’t need to look around for a can opener.
The women had guns, as we did. But they wouldn’t have much value, even as noisemakers; the environment was full of dangerous-sounding noises. You can shoot at the native life all day, and it’s just target practice. Dumb as rocks. They don’t know somebody’s shooting at them. If you hit them, they don’t even know they’re dead.
They did shoot three or four of the beasts when they first landed. All that meat lying around rotting kept the other creatures occupied for a while, and most of them grew cautious enough to stay away from the ship, at least during the day. At night, there would be a lot of feeding and fighting, but during the day the larger meat-eaters mostly slept.
The women were doing fine in their way, and the men in theirs, for about a Venusian year, nine Earth months. And then the Sun decided to misbehave.
It’s not as if we hadn’t had solar flares before. They screw up everything for a couple of days, but you basically power down and play cards until the storm is over.
This was a superflare, though, the largest one recorded this century. It even shut down communications on Mars, let alone Earth and Venus.
Mercury Station had time to broadcast three words, or two and a half: “LOOK OUT—FLA …” It was not a warning for Florida.
Ten hours later, the coronal mass ejection from the flare hit us. Quantum electronics went south. Solid-state circuits became really solid, as in fused. Switches welded shut. Radios became paperweights.
The shuttle had been designed with a fallback manual mode that required no electronics. Of course, I’d never used it except in a training simulator.
The ship even had a paper-print manual, which gave off a whiff of mildew when I opened it. I’d studied it well enough to be certified, twenty years ago. And I could read the parts that were English. Most of the math was gibberish to a normal person.
Could I navigate well enough to find the women? Yes and no.
Venus does have a pole star, but you might have to wait a few years for a break in the clouds to align with it.
Or go above the clouds.
There was a manual fuel feed by a forward-facing port, along with an airspeed indicator and a visual fuel gauge. Of course, the gauge only told you how many liters of fuel you had left, not how far you could get on them.
The manual had appendices in the back that told you how much fuel the tub burned per second at full throttle, half throttle, and stall. The calculator bucky-printed on the page was useless without power, but luckily someone had had a sense of humor—there was an old-fashioned slide rule in a wall module like a fire alarm: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS. Ha, ha. I used the butt of my pistol to gain access to lower mathematics.
There were several blank pages in the back of the manual, and in a MISC drawer, I found an old pencil with an eraser.
I couldn’t make the eraser work; I guess the battery was dead. But with the tables in the back of the manual, and the slide rule, I figured we had twenty-seven minutes of full acceleration, more than enough to get to Midway and refuel for Earth transfer.
Of course, the electronics on Midway would be useless. I could fly to it and dock by the seat of my pants. But could I get inside? Take care of that when we get there, I guess.
The most economical Hohmann transfer would get us to Earth orbit in as little as six months. I packed four and a half crates of freeze-dry in the shuttle, all I had at the one-man base. Buckled up and took off.
I took a suborbital trajectory up high enough to be in space, kind of, and found the south celestial pole in between Ursa Minor and Draco. Oriented the ship to be pointing nose south, and dove back down.
The equatorial station was fortunately at the intersection of an Amazon-sized river and a big brown sea, so I could just follow the sea’s coastline down to the river and look around. That would be simple if it were a nice clear day.
Venus never has one.
Buffeted by storm winds, I had my hands full keeping visual contact with the coastline while the ship pitched and yawed through driving rain. Too-frequent lightning glared every few seconds.
I didn’t expect to see the space elevator cable, less than a meter thick, until it’s close to the base. But you could easily see where it had fallen, a straight brown line of dead vegetation. When the map showed I was near the base, I dropped to treetop level and crawled along dead slow.
They damned near shot me down! A signal flare exploded just off my port wing, and by reflex I slapped the smart-descend. In the absence of electronics, that was not smart. It killed the engine, and I was a very heavy glider for about eight seconds.
I tried for the beach and almost made it. Branches slapped and scraped and did break my fall. I gouged up about thirty meters of sand and came to a stop just before finding out whether the thing would work as a submarine.
Or an anchor.
In fact, I wasn’t too badly situated, pointed seaward with the shuttle’s nose slightly elevated. I eased the throttle forward a fraction of a millimeter and it did fire up and move me a little nudge. So if I had to, I could get away fast.
In a bin marked SURVIVAL GEAR, I found a web belt with two canteens and a holstered pistol. Filled the canteens and put a full magazine in the pistol. There were ten more full magazines in a cardboard box; I dumped them into a camo knapsack along with some food bars.
There was also a heavy machine gun, too big to lift comfortably with one hand. Overkill, unless I was attacked by an infantry platoon.
The pistol was an old-fashioned powder type, flash and smoke and big boom. Maybe it would startle some monster enough to give it indigestion after it ate my arm.
Actually, as a usually observant vegetarian, I didn’t feel good about the prospect of blasting away at innocent animals. But I didn’t want to become part of the food chain myself, either.
I hoped I was within a few miles of where the girls had called from. The radio was all white noise and crackle, but I shouted a description of my situation into it anyhow.
They had probably heard the shuttle come screaming in and crash. Would they come toward the sound? I supposed I would, in their situation. Or maybe split into two groups, one staying put and the other going off to search for my smoldering remains. In any case, my most obvious course was to stay put myself, for at least as long as it would take for them to get here.
So of course I went outside. Or, to be fair, I did sit in the semidarkness of the emergency lighting for as long as I could stand it, maybe five minutes.
I drew the heavy pistol and opened the door just wide enough to see outside. Nothing slithered into the ship, so I opened it wide enough to exit and studied the jungle for several minutes. The ripe and rotten smell conquered the shuttle’s air-conditioning pretty thoroughly, but there was no sign of life bigger than an insect—though that might mean the size of your foot, on Venus.