But then I decided I’d do the stunt, after all. I wanted to be noticed; I wanted to break the lock the two of them had on each other, and the only way I knew to do that was to go through with the toughest, most daring and dangerous stunt that’d ever been tried. Admiration, that’s what I was after. I wanted to make their eyes shine—for me.
The High Jump: from Venus orbit all the way to the ground. And back, of course. None of the publicity flaks even mentioned the return trip, but I thought about that part of it a lot.
Okay, so we’re in orbit around Venus—Hal, Angel, me, our crew of technicians and our tech directors, plus the ship’s crew. We had decided to keep the ship’s crew in the dark about me doubling for Hal. As far as they were concerned I was just another techie. The fewer people outside the industry who knew about my doubling for him, the better.
So Hal’s doing the mandatory media interview, all dolled up in a space suit, no less, with the helmet tucked under one arm. Standing there by the airlock hatch, he looks like a freaking Adonis, so help me, a Galahad, literally a knight in shining armor. And Angel’s right there beside him, hanging on his arm, gazing up into his sparkling green eyes as if she’s about to have an orgasm just looking at him.
The media people were all back on Earth, of course. We didn’t want them on the ship with us, too much of a chance of them finding out about Hal’s little secret. Since it took messages more than eight minutes to travel from them to us (and vice-versa) they had prerecorded their questions and squirted them to us a couple of hours earlier.
Now Homeric Hal stood there like a young Lancelot and spoke foursquare into the camera, replying to each of their questions after only an hour or so to study the lines his publicity flaks had written for him.
«Yes,» he said, with his patented careless grin, «I suppose we could use computer graphics for these stunts instead of doing them live. But I don’t think the public would be so interested in a computer simulation. My fans want to see the real thing! It’s the unexpected, the element of danger and risk, that excites the viewers.»
The next questioner asked why Hal was so eager to risk his beautiful butt on these stunts.
He did his bashful routine, shrugging and scratching his head. «I don’t really know. I guess I got hooked on the excitement of it all, and … and …»
He hesitated, as the script required. I thought sourly that what he’s really hooked on is the money. Mucho bucks in this game. He let me take over the dangerous part of it easily enough.
«…and … well I guess it’s the thrill of taking enormous risks and coming out alive. It makes your heart beat faster, that’s for sure. Gets the old adrenaline pumping!»
His adrenaline was pumping, all right. But it wasn’t about the risks of the Venus jump. It was Angel, draped over him and drinking in every syllable he uttered.
The media interview ended at last. Hal’s smile winked off. «Okay,» he said, starting to peel off his suit. «Let’s get to work.»
To his credit, Hal gave me a farewell hug just before I stepped into the airlock. It was an awkward hug, with me in the bulky thermally insulated space suit that we’d had specially built for this stunt.
«Take care of yourself, pal,» he said, his voice gone husky.
«Don’t I always?» I said back to him.
I stepped into the airlock and turned around to face him again. And there was Angel, right beside him. I blew a kiss as the hatch closed and sealed me in—not an easy thing to do from inside my heat-proofed helmet.
There were two technicians already outside, in space suits of course, to help click me into the aeroshell. It wasn’t a spacecraft, just a heat shield that carried the bare minimum of equipment I’d need to make it down to the surface. I mean, that Humphries kid had reached Venus’s surface a couple of years earlier, but he’d never walked on the planet’s rocky ground, as I was going to do. He’d been inside a specially designed submersible; it touched down on the surface, not him on his own two feet. And he was supported by an even bigger ship that cruised a few kilometers above him, at that.
Plus, he’d landed in the highland mountains of Aphrodite. It’s only four hundred degrees Celsius up there. Big deal. I was going down to the lowlands, where it’s four-fifty, minimum, and doing it without a ship. Just me in a thermal suit and a handful of equipment.
Plus the heat shield, yeah, but that was just to get me through the entry phase. I mean, we were orbiting Venus at just about seven kilometers per second. You can’t dip into the atmosphere in nothing but your high-tech long johns at that speed—not unless you want to make yourself into a shooting star.
I had no intention of becoming a cinder. The heat shield was flimsy enough, nothing more than a shallow bathtub coated on one side with a heat-absorbing plastic that boils off when it reaches fifteen hundred degrees. The boiled-off goop carries the heat away with it, leaving me safe on the other side of the shield. At least, that’s the way it’s supposed to work.
Believe me, the heat shield looked damned flimsy as I climbed into it. The techs checked out all my suit’s systems and the connections, then clamped me into the shield’s shallow protection. None of us said much while they got me properly clicked in.
Finally, they each patted my thick helmet and wished me luck. I thanked them, and they clambered through the airlock and shut the hatch. I was alone now, with nothing to keep me company but the automated voice of the computer ticking off the last three minutes of the countdown.
Three minutes can be a long time, when you’re alone hanging outside an orbiting spacecraft, a hundred million kilometers from blue skies and sunny beaches. I was locked into the heat shield, arms and legs stretched out like a guy in a B&D video, with nothing to do but worry about what was coming next.
To keep my nerves from twitching, I looked out through one corner of my faceplate at what little I could see of Venus.
She was gorgeous! The massive, curving bulk of the planet gleamed like a gigantic golden lamp, a brilliant saffron-yellow expanse against the cold blackness of space. She glowed like a thing alive. Goddess of beauty, sure enough. At first I thought the cloud deck was as solid and unvarying as a sphere of solid gold. Then I saw that I could make out streamers among the clouds, slightly darker stretches, patches where the amber yellowish clouds billowed up slightly. I stared fascinated at those fantastically incredible clouds. They shifted and changed as I watched. It was almost like staring into a fire, endlessly fascinating, hypnotic.
A human voice broke into my enchantment. «You okay out there?»
«Sure,» I snapped. «I’m fine.»
«Separation in thirty seconds.» It was the voice of our tech controller in my helmet earphones. «Speak now or forever hold your jockstrap.»
«Let ’er rip,» I said, in time-honored, devil-may-care fashion. Just in case some wiseass was eavesdropping with a recorder.
«Five … four …» Well, you know the rest. I felt a quiver and then a not-too-gentle push against the small of my back: the latches releasing and then the spring-loaded actuator that pushed my aeroshell away from the orbiting spacecraft.
And there I was, as the flyguys say, watching our orbiter dwindle away from me. Before I had time to grit my teeth the retrorockets kicked in, and I mean kicked. I couldn’t hear anything in the vacuum of space, naturally, but I sure felt it. The whole goddamned aeroshell rattled like a studio set in an earthquake. I heard a kind of a roar inside my head; not sound, really, so much as my bones picking up the vibrations as the rockets tried to shake me to death.
I hung on—nothing else I could do—for the forty-five seconds of retro burn, knowing the cameras from the ship were getting every picosecond of it in glorious full color. Every bone in my body was quivering like a struck gong. I wondered if I’d get out of this with any teeth unchipped.