Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  “So everything’s gotta be nautical, Al?” I ask as I rejoin the others.

  “I put ‘em up two days ago. You’re just noticing now?”

  I give him a look.

  “Gotta keep everything ship-shape,” he says. “Ready with the timer?”

  Joe Kerwin is attached to the mass measurement device, crouched forward holding the handlebars, and Shepard’s standing by to get him going. I reset my stopwatch. “Ready.”

  Shepard pushes Kerwin what looks like down, making sure the measurement pedestal is all the way against the stops.

  “Go.”

  Shepard releases him. Kerwin’s body moves up and down through the air, suddenly reduced to…well, a body in motion, an object having mass, immobile and impersonal.

  I count three cycles and then click the watch. “Mark. 12.3 seconds.”

  Shepard writes it down so we can do our calculations later.

  “It doesn’t feel like a ship,” I point out. “It doesn’t even feel like we’re moving.”

  “I’m pretty sure we’re moving, Buzz,” Shepard says, somewhat more condescendingly than I care for.

  “Well, obviously,” I say. “It just doesn’t feel like it.”

  Again we get Kerwin ready. Again, release, and the smooth oscillation.

  “12.3 seconds,” I say. “How’s that for consistency?”

  “We’ll see after number three,” Shepard replies.

  “Do you need to feel like you’re moving?” Kerwin asks.

  “I don’t know if I like moving or I just dislike standing still,” I respond. “The last weekend at home, I was trying to get some errands done. A trip to the hardware store for a new toilet seat, and Joan had dry cleaning to pick up. But she got upset. ‘You’re not here even when you’re here,’ she said. And I was…well, I was confused. I told her I just wanted to take care of the stuff she has to do on her own when I’m gone. But she said ‘Be here when you’re here.’ And I must’ve given her a look like I didn’t even know what she was talking about, because she had to explain herself. ‘Sit in the living room. Talk with the kids. Pet the dogs. Just…be still.’ And I did. But it was…” I trail off. I don’t even know how to articulate what it was. I’m not good with feelings.

  Again we get Kerwin going, but after two oscillations, he says, “Wait, stop. I lost my grip, I don’t think that’ll be accurate.”

  “All right.” I reset the watch.

  “Pilots do make horrible passengers, by the way,” Kerwin observes as he repositions himself.

  “We do, don’t we?” I exclaim brightly.

  “That’s the most excited I’ve heard you all mission, Buzz,” Shepard says.

  “Well it’s true!” I don’t know that I’ve put it into words, but that must be what it is, what I’ve been feeling these past few days. It’s nice to have someone else recognize it. “I had a hard time on the tour. And that must’ve been it.”

  “I can see that,” Kerwin says. “That’s how I felt the last time I flew as a civilian. You get used to looking at the world through the canopy. All those…expansive panoramas. Then all of the sudden you’re in a seat with a…sad little window next to you. No way to see what’s in front of you, even…”

  We repeat the process. It occurs to me that I could fudge the results and tell Shepard it came out the same. But I’ve never been that type of man. “12.2 seconds,” I pronounce.

  “I am starting to miss the views a bit,” Shepard says. “Flying over the mountains in California…”

  “I like that,” I chime in. “The way it all looks rumpled. Like a…like a brown blanket on a woman’s body in the morning sunlight.”

  “That’s…very poetic, Buzz.”

  “Or over the Midwest, even,” Kerwin adds. “It’s funny, it’s some boring driving, but from the air, I really like it. There’s that…patchwork, but it’s not like a quilt, because there are so many shapes.”

  “Yes,” I chime in. “Trapezoids, rectangles, triangles, squares. Maybe a raggedy quilt. Or some…abstract modern art collage. Personally, I really like getting above a good layer of cumulus clouds, though. You get up there, and sometimes they’re so…thick that they seem real.”

  Shepard smirks.

  “Well, you know what I mean. Not just real, but solid. Like you could just get out and explore. And it’s like some alien landscape. And there’s nobody else anywhere.”

  I turn back to the workbook and do the calculations. We’ve all lost mass: Shepard less than the rest of us, but he’s down a pound, at last.

  They’d done these measurements on the three-month test mission as well. The data seems to suggest that we’ll lose weight (or mass, rather) for a couple weeks, then level off as we reach a lower plateau. I have no reason to believe we’ll be any different than the test crew, although it does occur to me that the size of the sample is statistically insignificant.

  Before long, we’re floating lazily around the dinner table.

  “I was reading one of those articles about how we’ll be able to float huge structures in Venus someday, in the upper atmosphere,” Kerwin says.

  “Yeah, I saw that, too,” Shepard chimes in. “All that CO2, you could keep something up there with plain old oxygen.”

  “Obviously we’ll have to gather the data to find out, but like they said in training, it might be the closest thing to an earthlike environment in the whole rest of the Solar System.”

  “Do you think that could ever work?” I ask.

  “Sure, why not? I mean, it would take a while to get started, but it’s bound to happen eventually. Also, one of the planetary scientists, that guy Sagan, was talking to me about terraforming, and that might be a way to do it. I mean, I’m hopeful we’ll find something already there, floating aerosolized life forms, or whatever. But if there aren’t any, why not introduce our own? You could set up floating labs, introduce various forms of plant life, start monitoring to see what grows. Algae, even. Reverse the greenhouse effect from the CO2 and transform the planet. These probes we’re launching could start laying the groundwork for that. Obviously it’ll take some time, but who knows…maybe we will be remembered like Columbus.”

  “Personally, I’m excited for the EVA,” I tell him. “The probes are interesting, but I’m most excited to just…do something out there. That’s what I’m missing about flying. Not just the views. Being in control.”

  “Yes,” Shepard says, his voice suddenly warm. “Grabbing the stick, zooming down over some beach to flat-hat the civilians…when you get so low that you can see faces and tans, you can spot the women in bikinis…”

  “They let you do that in the Navy?” I half-smile. “I got an official reprimand for that once. That’s gotta be against regs even there.”

  “Well, officially, I’ve never done it,” Shepard grins. “And if I have, it must’ve just been a momentary error in judgment, a grave mistake I’ll never repeat. But…you know. Sure beats being a passenger.”

  “Amen to that,” I add. “I remember when we were flying back from Tokyo at the end of our tour. Late in the year, short days. And I knew, with the route we were flying, that we were somewhere over the Aleutians. But damned if I could see anything. Like Joe said, just a sad little window. A…useless black rounded rectangle. And feeling like whatever was out there, dark ice, angry ocean, whatever, we were just stuck in a tin can hurtling over it for the next few hours.”

  “I hate that. No control over the situation,” Shepard says.

  “Well, some,” I tell him. “I figured I could at least get drunk and speed up the trip.”

  “Time travel!” Shepard says. “I like it.”

  “Yes!” I chuckle. “Time travel. But I just got dried out. Slept for a bit, then woke up with that awful…dislocated feeling.”

  “No fun,” Shepard says.

  “No fun,” I echo. “Kinda wouldn’t mind a little now, though.”

  Shepard gives a strange look that I cannot quite interpret. “Yeah, it might be nice.”r />
  After we eat, he gets on the radio.

  “Houston, Explorer, we’re ready to provide a status, over.”

  The uncomfortable pause.

  “Explorer, this is Houston, go ahead.”

  “Houston, we’ve all eaten, and we’re ready to start our evening rest period. Frame count for the 35 millimeter mag is 9787. Dosimeters are as follows: Commander, 16874, Pilot, 14382, Science Pilot, 12838.” (The dosimeters measure cumulative radiation exposure; they started each one at different levels so as to make it easier to keep them separate for the course of the flight.) “We’ve taken no medication. Everyone is in good spirits and good health.”

  Now that things have settled down, we have time to read a little at night and wind down. I get out a book: Kon Tiki. Sometimes I think Shepard isn’t so bad after all. But these things he says, these little snide remarks…I realize I need to make two signs: LATRINE and MESS HALL. But when to put them up? Probably during a nighttime bathroom break, when the others are in bed. Or during my next communications window…

  I look back at the book. It occurs to me that my eyes have been skimming over the words, absorbing nothing. Sometimes it seems like that’s all a book is: something you can hold in your hands so you don’t look stupid daydreaming. I force myself to read for half an hour, and make myself pay attention to the story.

  Shepard is sometimes a decent guy, and he can be genuinely entertaining. But he’s also far too seat-of-the-pants for a mission like this. The flying isn’t even flying, per se. We’ve calculated the direction we needed to travel and flung ourselves into space. Course corrections aside, we’re just along for the ride.

  Before heading to the sleeping chamber, I press my head against the large window, as if I’ll be able to see something. I remember doing this over the Pacific, peering out into the blackness in forlorn hope, with something else in my chest, some tight restlessness.

  And this is how I feel now. In a can with two other men, headed to Venus. Very few windows, and little to see out them anyway. (Jim Lovell complained about two weeks on Gemini VII, but he and Frank at least had a planet to look at!) I should be glad for the time off every night. Instead, I’m eager for the morning. Our days are filled with work. At night, there is nothing to do now but wait.

  8 APR 1972

  The excitement of launch is fading, and we are settling in to our routines. We are no longer in control, no longer pilots. We are passengers of physics.

  •••

  Our mission continues.

  The days drift by, one by one, seemingly endless, numbered but otherwise indistinguishable. We fill them with groundbreaking science, unprecedented in human history, but it soon feels routine. Granted, routine can be comforting: when you float over to the pantry and pull out three trays, you want to look through the little metal slot and see more trays springing up into place, with no end in sight. But it doesn’t make for a good story, because the whole point is repetition, and knowledge of what will happen next: what makes a mission successful also turns a story stale.

  Through it all, our spacecraft home flies smoothly onwards, alone in the great emptiness.

  INTERLUDE:

  COCOA BEACH

  It’s late 1977, a couple weeks before launch, and we’re at the Cape, at the Holiday Inn: me, Shepard, and Owen Garriott.

  It’s all orange and aqua outside, all bright and presentable, but the inside’s dark. It’s another one of those places where everyone looks good, and everything sounds like a good idea, like there’s a dimmer switch for your conscience. Shepard’s been going here for a decade and a half, back since the Mercury days.

  We order drinks at the bar. I don’t know if we’re here to celebrate the mission, or because we want to cram in as many nights at the bar as possible before we have to go into quarantine. And our wives are back in Houston, for a few more days. And I’m not sure how much that matters to some of us, because nothing outside the bar feels real.

  There’s a table of young women close by, two brunettes and a blonde. They’re making eyes at us and talking in whispers. Women: the giant conspiracy.

  “Come on, let’s go,” Shepard says to me.

  “Me?”

  “Yeah, I need a wingman. You Air Force pukes don’t believe in wingmen?”

  I snort. “You Navy pukes don’t believe in matrimony?”

  He laughs. “How many of us are saints here? None of us. Not a one.”

  I have to admit, he has a point.

  “Speak for yourself,” Owen laughs.

  Shepard gives him a look. “I’m talking to Buzz here.” And to me: “And I’m not talking matrimony, I’m talking air support. It’s not always about racking up kills, sometimes it’s about flying cover.”

  “I didn’t know you needed that.”

  “Everybody needs protection from something.”

  “Be it hostile bar girls or angry wives.” I polish off my whiskey.

  “I don’t know that they’re hostile,” Owen says. “Why else would they be here? And you never know, they might be obliterated soon anyway.”

  “Right. Easy mission,” Shepard says. “Should be a milk run. Let’s go.”

  “Well…” I think for a minute. “There is always a certain allure, for a certain kind of female…”

  Shepard snaps. “I’m talking to Owen here!”

  I lower my tone. “You’re about to say goodbye to Louise for over a year, and you’re gonna go try and get laid?”

  “Who said anything about getting laid?” Shepard grins. “Maybe I just want to hang out and enjoy their company. Maybe I want to tell them some stories. I don’t know.”

  “Some leader. You want me to be your wingman and you won’t even tell me what the mission is,” I smirk. “I’ll stay here. This sounds like a disaster.”

  “Well, nothing’s wrong with a little conversation,” Owen says.

  They summon the bar girl, order up a preparatory bombardment of beer to soften up the defenses a little more, and take off soon afterwards.

  I linger a while. I do not want to think about Joan, but I think about Joan. I polish off my drink and try to sit still for a minute. After a while, curiosity gets the better of me and I wander over.

  Shepard’s mid-story, showing off, as usual: “…were trying to decide what to feed us before the mission. I mean, all these unknowns, going into space. They tried to launch a few chimps up there, but it wasn’t like they could explain how they felt during the thing.”

  “Ohh! Ohh! Eeeeh! Eeeeh!” Owen says, in a passable imitation of our primate cousins, and some of the girls laugh.

  “Kinda hard to decipher,” Shepard says. “And of course, you don’t want anyone vomiting in the craft, which wasn’t so much an issue with us, being highly experienced aviators and all. But of course…and, well, you can try and discuss it delicately, but there’s no getting around it, everything’s gotta come out the other end eventually.”

  The blonde (who’s, truthfully, pretty fantastic looking) turns to one of her companions and mumbles something. As I lean close to listen, Shepard looks over his shoulder at me, annoyed.

  “Look at this guy, buzzing around…” Everyone laughs.

  “Real original, Al,” I observe. “Never heard that before.”

  “Nothing wrong with catching a little buzz.” The blonde smiles and hands me a Schlitz; I realize it’s untouched, from the round Al had ordered.

  “Nothing wrong at all,” I reply, and take a long pull.

  “ANYWAY,” Shepard continues. “This was a problem, because it was a small spacecraft, and they hadn’t made provisions for that, especially on the short flights. So they were trying to decide what to feed us, and it was hard, because they didn’t want to overfeed us, but also they didn’t want to leave us with nothing in our stomachs, all hungry and anxious, and so at last, one of these Germans was all ‘Vee have decided to feed you ze steak und eggs. It ees a very high protein diet, so zere vill be very little residue.’ And…” (Here Shepard chuckle
s…he’s always had a hard time keeping a straight face at punchline time.) “…and I said ‘No shit.’ And he said ‘Exactly.’”

  Shepard laughs. One of the brunettes says: “Eww.”

  “Great story, Al,” I observe.

  “Stop buzzing around. You’re killing my buzz, Buzz!”

  Again the ladies laugh.

  “You know, rather than telling old war stories, you could actually…engage these ladies in conversation. See who they are and what they’re all about,” I point out. “That might liven things up a bit.”

  “Yeah, there’s a thought,” the blonde smiles.

  “Ehhh, I think we just need to get our buzz back. Our other buzz,” Shepard says, and summons the waitress. “Let’s do some shots. Shots? Shots?” He makes a show of asking the girls, but doesn’t actually wait for a response. “Cutty, all around.”

  The waitress disappears.

  “So you’re launching soon, then?” the friendliest of the brunettes asks.

  “Yes. Venus, Mars, Venus,” Owen says.

  “Shouldn’t you be…working late, or training, or something?” the blonde asks. “Centrifuges and simulators and such?”

  “Oh, we’ve done all that,” Shepard replies. “It is dangerous and demanding work, don’t get me wrong. Requiring nerves of steel. But rocketry and gravity, that’s all taken care of.” The waitress comes back with shots. “My biggest concern is, we’ve got some long and lonely nights ahead of us…” He passes out the shotglasses. “So I would like to offer a toast: To no more lonely nights.”

  We slam our drinks, but a couple of girls leave theirs on the table.