The Germans on Venus

by Brian Stableford

  After a further three quarters of an hour. Hauchet activated the Silber brakes. Within a minute, the rotation, already very slow, was conclusively arrested, and the three men emerged into the Sirius.

  Rosenwald activated the inferior porthole, and sunlight suddenly invaded the projectile. Groping blindly, he closed it again and opened a second, which revealed the Earth amid the stars. They were already 20,000 kilometers away; with the aid of large telescopes they could examine at their leisure the green seas, the vast rivers and the stains of cities. The white pole shrank slowly beneath their eyes.

  They began to make themselves comfortable. As their emotions were still working away inside them, Rosenwald got out his planner and they dined magnificently. When they had immolated a few bottles, they went to the waste disposal unit, but it was not working. The tube did not refuse its service, but the door to the void was obstinate.

  “The fusible metal has not completely melted directly outside it!” said Hauchet.

  The other two looked at him, without laughing—for the idea of conserving three months’ detritus and excretions was far from pleasant.

  “I anticipated this,” said the Doctor, smiling.

  He went to his bed, lifted the sheets and triumphantly brought out a sort of black suit of armor. He set it upright.

  “What the Devil…?” Reinhardt began.

  “To go outside, if the weather’s good,” replied the joyful Rosenwald. “Great idea, Hauchet.”

  And the Doctor set about getting into the suit of armor. Jointed to perfection, the hands very well articulated, it comprised a double layer of ebonite rubber with a reservoir of liquid air sufficient for an hour. Evidently, a man enclosed within it could defy the most intense cold, even that of absolute zero.

  “I’ve tried it out ten or a dozen times in the course of my studies on the physiology of extreme cold but I didn’t want to mention it to you until the occasion arose,” said the smiling Doctor. “The occasion arrived very quickly.”

  The other two sealed him in perfectly, and he went slowly down to the laboratory, one of whose doors communicated with the void. His companions waited. A few moments later, they were surprised to see feet through the porthole, the wrong way up. They ran to it, looked out and whistled. The doctor was floating upside-down, suspended between the nadir and the zenith, motionless and unsupported. A short while later, he returned to the projectile, guiding himself along a rope unrolled from his waist, and set to work.

  Ten minutes later, he reappeared.

  “A word of advice for you, Rosenwald, if you want to frolic in space. It’s charming; you’re as light as a feather—but beware of the escape velocity. Remember that you’re on a very singular planet, and that the least effort will send you beyond the gravitational attraction of the projectile into space. You’ll become a planet yourself and your own sole inhabitant—which is a glorious prospect, but beware of asphyxiation!”

  Rosenwald looked out of the porthole, and no longer had any inclination to try it. Beyond the vicinity of the flamboyant Sun, from which furious protuberances sprang forth, the stars—points of light set against the ebon sky—seemed disquietingly bright.

  Von Reinhardt and his friend were not professional astronomers, and they limited themselves at first to operating the recording apparatus that had to replace human observers for the occasion: photography; measurements of light intensity; the composition of exterior space; views of the Earth; monitoring the conditions of life in the projectile itself—the absorption of oxygen in conditions of minima weight and 1000 other problems posed by the new conditions. Then they went up to the observatory, searched for white Venus and began to study it with their narrow-focus telescope. That kept them occupied until it was time for bed, after a dinner worthy of the circumstances.

  But they could not sleep. Weight diminished slowly with every inch they advanced—and it is the sole force that we and nature have been unable to modify in the history of the Earth. The human organism continued to function regularly, but the conditions were modified to a considerable degree. The first symptom was an increasing overexcitement, a feverish activity of speech and gesture. The blood, less heavy, flooded the brain under the constant pressure of the heart, which did not change itself. Read clouds were passing before their eyes and it seemed to them that a vice was gripping their heads.

  From the very outset of the voyage, they would have succumbed to an intellectual delirium, like excessively wise gods, if Hauchet had not anticipated the circumstance. They immediately took drugs to diminish the activity of the heart and relax their blood pressure considerably, their muscular activity being minimal.

  That is a point that the explorers of other worlds have never envisaged. Man’s resistance to all possible forces, serums and radiations has been tested, but no one has ever been able to ascertain how his body will stand up to an increase or diminution of weight.

  The three men waited, immobile in their camp-beds, each one next to a porthole. It was necessary, in large measure, to trust their own resistance and take the chance. Whatever they did, their brains were working at high tension and they soon resembled hashish-eaters, laughing without any reason, their speech disordered, gesturing madly, and yet understanding everything perfectly.

  Then fatigue overwhelmed them, crushingly. For hours, the liquid air apparatus released the vivifying gas; the gas-recycler rotated in its corner; the ventilator hummed, forcing the air charged with human exhalations through the tubes irrigated with calcium chloride. The mechanical life of the all the complex and precise recording devices continued without human intervention.

  Finally, Rosenwald woke up. He made a gesture and suddenly found himself carried into the air, outside is bunk. Then he looked at the ship’s clock. It marked hours, days and moths and he saw that he had slept for two full days after the cerebral excess and enormous expense of their first hours.

  He shook his comrades. Although they felt very weak, their primitive torpor was succeeded by a joyful animation. Simply lifting a finger, in that extraordinary weightlessness, now set the entire body in motion. Without losing any time, they made four cups of excellent coffee in the solar oven; then effervescent beer washed down the excellent meal that Hauchet prepared for them. Afterwards, they went to the laboratory.

  Rapidly, regularly, imperceptibly, minute by minute and hour by hour, they were advancing towards Venus. From the tenth day onwards, they could see the snowy peaks of its high mountains through its telescope, and the new world’s disk became appreciable to the naked eye.

  The days went by, measurable only by the chronometers, monotonous but rich in sensations and discoveries. They watched their planet increase in size slowly; they calculated the moment of greatest proximity before Sirius would close its arc towards the Earth. The dazzling glory of the Sun increased. At his calculating machine, Hauchet probed the enigma: a tiny, pensive creature before the high stars, who was nevertheless measuring some of them in a few in a few grams of grey matter.

  Humankind was waiting for them in the little spark lost in the Heavens that was our world.

  VI. The Unexpected

  It was time for the trajectory of the Sirius to curve back towards Earth. The space explorers had gathered more information regarding the sublime Heavens and the Morning Star than previous centuries had accumulated. There were about to bring this booty back to us. Their long voyage through the gulf of the void had certainly not been futile; they also had pictures of the far side of the Moon.

  Their velocity needed to decrease as they drew nearer to Venus, then increase gradually as they returned towards the Earth. But had it actually decreased? They had no point of reference among the cold stars. The titanic distances rendered the movement of the Sirius infinitesimal. The observations they made with a micrometer of the gradually diminishing increase in the diameter of Venus’ disk were their only means of obtaining an approximation of the distance they had traversed.

  The truth became manifest. The arc was not closing.
The simultaneous attraction of Venus and the Sun had countered the antigravitational effect of their velocity, and the Sirius was following a new route through space, dependent on three causes, and probably others still. Hauchet attempted to calculate them, and a council of war was held in the observatory.

  “We have to induce some reaction against the course of the Sirius,” Rosenwald opined.

  “In which case the projectile would evaporate in flames,” said Hauchet, “its movement converted into heat. No, either we go on too quickly, missing Venus, and then must beware of the Sun—we’d be drawn to it like moths—or we try to reach Venus, or we attempt to return to the Earth. There are chances of success; there are more of failure. In the last case, the Sirius would describe a new ellipse in space, which would be very interesting but might be far too prolonged, for we can’t possibly cross 20 million kilometers with nothing but the reaction motor. We’d remain on our course. Providing the impulse is easy—but then we’d become an independent celestial body and the movements are so complex they’d become unpredictable. Besides, as a scientist, I vote for the voyage to Venus. If both of you opt for the return to Earth, I’ll obey—but don’t forget that the Wheel is still in place and that wireless telegraphy is possible, from world to world, with the energies we’ll create.”

  Imagine those men, in that narrow room, beneath the indifferent gaze of the stars, between two infinities, those champions of our race, deliberating upon the great adventure. When Hauchet fell silent, the others looked at him, palely.

  “Do you think we’d be able to carve out a niche for ourselves up there?” asked Rosenwald.

  The Frenchman’s eyes slowly filled with an unsustainable gleam. He simply replied: “There’s a song that goes: We are a race of gods.”

  “Well said!” cried von Reinhardt. “It’s a dream worthy of our race. Set a course for Venus!” He laughed loudly. He drew his large body up to its full height, and bounded like a lion in the overly narrow space.

  “Now,” said Hauchet, “let’s send some postcards. You Germans…”

  “What?” said Rosenwald.

  But the Doctor brought out a packet of cards from his desk, marked a position on each one, signed it, and then held them out. “You’re forgetting our messengers,” he said.

  His journal was briefly printed, in ten copies, on the ship’s writing-machine. The “messengers” consisted of aluminum sheets with little pieces of steel lowering their centers of gravity. After being launched into the void towards a world, so as to fall upon it, the aluminum sheet acted as a parachute, while a whistle attracted attention, and the whole was designed to float on water.

  “It’s a great pity,” Rosenwald joked, “that Ariel, or Urania, or a Venusian can’t sign with us.”

  With heroic precision, they filled out their postcards. Inserted in ten messengers, sealed at the bottom, Hauchet took possession of them, and, clad in an ebonite suit, he left the Sirius. He looked back momentarily. The distant Earth was shining, peaceful and foreign. A rapid shiver ran down Hauchet’s spine. Then he took the first of the messengers, flexed his robust arm, and hurled it into the void. The device disappeared in a trice, more rapidly than a bullet. The man, confronting the void, repeated his action. He seemed to be sowing the field of stars for a strange harvest—and a thought, perhaps a farewell, flew away, free, into space.

  A few days later, they saw Venus invade their nadir, its attraction making itself felt. It was a world, another world—and the three men, the first from our Earth to visit another planet, were playing the great game of Life and Death in all its beauty.

  Venus the white extended itself. The peaks of its mountains, set against the flaming Sun, were like lace. The destiny of a conquering humankind and of a future humankind was about to be decided on the chessboard of the worlds.

  END OF PART ONE

  Part Two: Venus, German Colony

  (Otto Rosenwald’s Journal)

  I. The Arrival

  Our velocity began to increase so quickly that we were afraid that we might pass Venus by and meet an incandescent death in the Sun a month later, in an unprecedented impact. For Hauchet, it was a period of hectic activity; for us, of anxious idleness. There was no sound, no flame, nothing but abrupt tremors to testify to the activation of the reaction-motor. There were two long days of maneuvers. We passed behind the planet, using its gravitational attraction as a brake, then began to describe a complex arc to which Hauchet alone could put a name. For hours, we flew parallel to the planet. Then we began our descent. The greatest danger was past. We belonged to this world, and our Sirius was flying at a distance of 50,000 leagues, drawing closer to its rapid rotation by the minute.

  Our hearts leapt at the sight of the horizon that seemed to be revealing itself to us. “A little lower than the angels,” we had traced out route through space, but the thought of the Empire was within us.

  At the end, the stars darkened. We entered the atmosphere. A tube and a system of balloons permitted the analysis of the external environment. First, we went through a layer of rare gases. The noise of the reaction-motor became perceptible, while we rocked from one side to the other, for the velocity of our fall was reduced to about 2000 meters per second by virtue of tacking, and the double work of the motors attempted to make us advance horizontally through the thick atmosphere. For a terribly long minute, we were swallowed up by enormous clouds, without knowing whether we were going to crash into one of those mountains with which Venus bristles, especially in the southern hemisphere. Then, a grey daylight reappeared. We were now flying almost level, progressing by leaps and bounds, and our motors were exhaling without respite—but the air, almost twice as dense as ours—saved us, opposing a slid resistance to the extreme rapidity of the gas flooding from our apparatus.

  For a second, I glimpsed a snowy layer of clouds through the porthole before disappearing into it. We were bouncing off the padding and the detonations of the motors were rolling like a cannonade. Then, there was a heart-rending stop and the sensation of a steep fall. Weight reasserted its rights upon us, brutally.

  We struck a mass of water diagonally. Suddenly, turbulent foam rose up around us. There was sudden darkness, one bounce, then two, and a regular swaying began. We were at rest, after that immense voyage across space.

  I ran to the observatory, but I could see nothing through the porthole by the living fluidity of waves. Distant horizons revealed themselves; then, in the far distance, formidable mountain summits. They glowed in the Sun like silver cupolas, partly disappearing into the second layer of the white clouds that protected this world from the extreme proximity of the Sun.

  “It’s the sea,” said von Reinhardt.

  Hauchet began an analysis with the aid of the aforementioned tubes. First he established the nature and composition of the air, then its chemical and biological innocuousness, attempting to identify microbes. Afterwards, he took a sample of the water; a drop flamed in front of his spectroscope.

  “Yes, we’ve come down in the southern hemisphere.”

  That was the better of our options. Now, it was a matter of reaching land.

  We had made provisions for the eventuality that, on returning to Earth, we would come down in the ocean or a desert, and we possessed two aircraft propellers. We opened a porthole; the first draught of new air, the air of another world, filled my mouth with a fresh and sweet taste. We burst into joyful laughter, while Hauchet deployed the propeller outside and connected it to the motor.

  The Sirius, two-thirds submerged, obeyed; it began slowly to displace itself as we desired. A 100 kilos on Earth only weighs 80 on Venus, while the denser air suited our propellers very well.

  Eventually, the shore appeared before our eyes. We focused our attention. Strange and multitudinous plants were entangled on the emerald rocks. The Sirius scraped on the sandy seabed, stopping 100 meters away, and we navigated by guesswork, approaching as close as possible. Finally, we found an inlet, at the mouth of a fast-flowing river hollowed ou
t in the rock. We moved slowly against the current.

  That swift water welcomed us. Its depth was adequate for us to advance without encumbrance. The width attained 200 meters, and when we had come through a sort of gully, we then found ourselves in a plain, behind the cliffs. Our first concern was to anchor the projectile to the bank, then to inspect the surroundings of the Sirius, marvelously calm beneath the ardent Sun.

  II. On the Ground

  Usually, in all the literature that I have read, immediately after arriving on a new world, people set off adventuring, with their hands in their pockets, nothing being safer than an unknown planet—but we were too wise for that. We examined the plain, bristling with sumptuous vegetation and extending as far as the black mass of the distant cliffs. Other, higher, cliffs barred the river for ten or 12 miles, and there was nothing within 100 paces but a seemingly-inoffensive grayish block.

  The result was that, taking my stout rifle, I took the chance of getting down. The heat outside the Sirius was truly Saharan. I yearned for fresh air and shady forests. My companions joined me.

  “A veritable monastery,” said von Reinhardt. “Venusian game must not come here.”

  As he was speaking, the block I mentioned suddenly got up: a massive, solid, weighty form. There was an immediate dull roar; then the creature’s panting respiration revealed a formidable organism, which as coming towards us. With one accord, we stepped back, lowering our heavy rifles.

  “To the Sirius!” cried Hauchet. “We need to take a look at this. Run!”

  We leapt forward; he covered our retreat. The porthole and the ladder were still there, fortunately, and there was no oscillation to fear, given our firm anchorage. We were inside in a second, and the Doctor climbed up unhurriedly. The creature arrived at top speed.