I can’t tell you how much better I felt with a solid link back to the orbiter. It didn’t really change things. I was just as tired and hot and far from safety as before. But I wasn’t alone anymore.
«According to the signals from your beacon and the return vehicle’s,» the director said, as calmly professional as ever, «you are less than five klicks from the ship.»
«Five klicks, copy.»
«That distance holds good if there’s no atmospheric distortions warping the signals,» he added.
«Thanks a lot,» I groused.
Hal came on again and talked to me nonstop, trying to buck me up, keep me going. At first I wondered why he was doing the pep-talk routine, then I realized that I must be dragging along pretty damned slowly. I put my life-support graph on the helmet screen. Yeah, air was low, water lower, and I was almost out of the heat-absorbing alloy.
I turned around three-sixty degrees and saw the ragged trail of molten alloy I was leaving behind me, like a robot with diarrhea. The alloy was shiny, new-looking against the cracked, worn, old rocks. And there were lines curving along the ground, converging on the trail every few meters.
Snakes! I realized. They like metals. I turned back toward the distant rescue vehicle and made tracks as fast as I could.
Which wasn’t all that fast. Inside the cumbersome suit I felt like Frankenstein’s monster trying to play basketball, lumbering along, painfully slow.
I must have been describing all this into my helmet mike, talking nonstop. Hal kept talking, too.
And then the servo on my right knee seized up. The knee just froze, half bent, and I toppled over on my face with a thump that whacked my nose against the helmet’s faceplate. Good thing, in a way. The pain kept me from blacking out. Blood spattered over my readout screens and the lower half of the faceplate. I must’ve screamed every obscenity I’d ever heard.
Hal and the controller were both yelling at me at once. «What happened? What’s wrong?»
Through the pain of my broken nose I told them while I tried to get back on my feet. No go. My right leg was frozen in the half-bent position; there was no way I could walk. Blood was gushing down my throat.
So I crawled. Coughing, choking on my own blood, I crawled on my hands and knees, scraping along the blazing hot rocks with those damned snakes slithering behind me, feasting on the metal alloy trail I was leaving.
The radio crapped out again. Nothing but mumbles and hisses, with an occasional crackle so loud that I figured it must be from lightning. I couldn’t look up to see if the clouds were flickering with light, but I saw a strange, sullen glow off on the horizon to my left.
«… volcano …» came through the earphones.
Just what I needed. A volcanic eruption. It was too far away to be a direct threat, but in that undersea-thick atmosphere down on Venus’s surface, volcanic eruptions can cause something like tidal waves, huge pressure waves that can push giant boulders for hundreds of kilometers.
Or knock over a flimsy rocket vehicle that’s sitting on the plain waiting for me to reach it.
I’m not going to make it, I told myself.
«The hell you’re not!» Hal snapped. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words out loud.
«I can’t go much farther,» I said, glad that at least the radio link was back. «Running out of air, water, everything …»
«Hang tight, pal,» he insisted. «Don’t give up.»
I muttered something about snake food. I rolled over on my side, completely exhausted, and saw that the snakes were gobbling up my alloy trail, getting closer to the source of the metal—me—all the time.
And then suddenly they all disappeared, reeled back into their holes so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it.
Why? What would make them—
I heard a roar. A high-pitched banshee wail, really. Looking up as far as I could through the bloodied faceplate, I saw the sweetest sight of my life. A squat, bullet-shaped chunk of metal with a cluster of jet pods hanging off its ass end and three spindly, awkward legs unfolding out of its sides.
The return vehicle settled gently on the rocks half a dozen meters in front of me and released its jet pods with an ungainly thump. I crawled over to it with the last bit of my strength. The airlock hatch popped open and I hauled myself up into it.
The airlock was about as big as a shoe box but I tucked myself inside and leaned on the stud that closed the hatch and sealed it. I just sat there in that tight little metal cubbyhole and gasped into my helmet mike, «Take me up.»
The acceleration from the booster rockets knocked me unconscious.
When I came to, I was on an air-cushion mattress in the orbiter’s tiny infirmary. My face was completely bandaged except for holes for my eyes and mouth. They must have pumped enough painkillers in me to pacify the whole subcontinent of India. I felt somewhere between numb and floating.
Hal was there at my beside. And Angel.
They had flown the return vehicle to me, of course, once they got a good fix on my position. The little ship’s cameras even got a good shot of the erupting volcano as it lifted up through the atmosphere—ahead of the pressure wave, thank goodness—and carried me safely to orbit.
«You did a great job, pal,» Hunky Hal said, smiling his megawatt smile at me.
«We were so frightened,» Angel said. «When the radio link went dead we thought …»
«Me, too,» I whispered. My voice wasn’t up to anything more.
«We’ll get an Oscar for this one,» Hal said. «For sure.»
For sure.
«Get some rest now,» he went on. «I’ve gotta get over to the processing guys and see how they’re morphing your video imagery.»
I nodded. Angel looked down at me, sweet as her namesake, then turned to Hal. He slid an arm around her waist and together they left me lying there in the infirmary.
Lovers. I felt my heart break. Everything I’d done, all that I’d gone through, and it didn’t help at all. He wanted her now.
And I still loved him so.
THE QUESTION
As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise, human science is at a loss.
One of the new frontiers that we will face—sooner or later—is the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence.
Radio astronomers have been searching for intelligent signals from the stars for more than half a century. Despite a few false alarms, no such signals have been found. Why?
One possibility is the sheer size of the starry universe. Our Milky Way galaxy alone contains more than a hundred billion stars, and there are billions of galaxies out there. How many of them harbor intelligence and civilizations?
Another possibility is that we’re using the wrong equipment. To expect alien creatures to be beaming radio signals across the parsecs is probably naïve. If such civilizations exist, they are most likely using very different technologies.
My own opinion is that alien civilizations are alien. They don’t think the way we do. They have different priorities, different desires, different needs.
«The Question» is my humble attempt to depict what might happen if and when we do make contact. I was guided by the famous maxim of the twentieth-century English geneticist J. B. S. Haldane: «The universe is not only queerer than we imagine—it is queerer that we can imagine.»
See what you think.
THE DISCOVERER
Not many men choose their honeymoon site for its clear night skies, nor do they leave their beds in the predawn hours to climb up to the roof of their rented cottage. At least Hal Jacobs’s bride understood his strange passion.
Linda Krauss-Jacobs, like her husband, was an amateur astronomer. In fact, the couple had met at a summer outing of the South Connecticut Astronomical Society. Now, however, she shivered in the moonless dark of the chill New Mexico night as Jacobs wrestled with the small but powerful electronically boosted telescope he was trying to set up on the sloping roof, muttering to himself as he worked in the dark.