‘I see - but it doesn’t really explain how your cousin Jayme comes to be involved in this business. I’d have thought he’d be much too busy reclaiming deserts.’
‘Not while his old man is still in the chair. They’re too much of a kind. After he had had a year or so of the desert- blossoming business Jayme could see a lot of will-clashing ahead, so he started putting his main interest into other things. Well, I suppose that, what with the Gonveia strain and the Troon strain together, it was more or less a natural that he should get to thinking about space. He hasn’t the Troon urge to get out into space; the Gonveia strain is stronger - he only wants to operate it - and the more he looked at space, lying out here with nobody doing anything about it, the more it irked him. After a bit, he got his old man interested, too, and then other people - which is why we’re here today.’
‘Until the Brazzies arrive to throw us, and his interests, out,’ Arthur put in.
Troon shook his head.
‘Don’t you believe it. Jayme isn’t the kind that gets thrown out - nor’s the old man. I’d put the old man down as the richest, as well as the most valuable, immigrant Australia ever had; and there must be a goodish part of the Gonveia family fortune sunk in this. No, take it from me, they both know what they’re doing.’
‘I hope you’re right. The Brazzy in the street must be tearing mad now he’s heard about it - he’s pretty proud of that “Space is a Province of Brazil” stuff.’
‘True enough - even though he’d have more to be proud of if he’d done more about it. All the same, when you look at the difference the Gonveia family has made to the face of the earth with the hundreds of thousands of square miles of deserts they’ve salvaged, I think they’re a good bet.’
‘Well, I hope you’re right. Things’ll be a lot less sticky for us if you are,’ Arthur Dogget replied.
Presently, when Arthur had gone off, leaving him alone, Troon looked at the message again, and wondered how his cousin was handling things back on Earth.
His thoughts returned to a day three years ago when a small private aircraft, dead on its appointed time, had hovered over his house, and then put down on his landing-lawn.
Out of it had emerged Jayme Gonveia, a large, active young man in a white suit, white hat, and blue silk shirt, looking rather too big to have fitted into the craft that had brought him. For a moment he had stood beside the machine, looking round George Troon’s estate, noting the carefully spaced, thick-limbed Martian-derived trees that were something like spineless cacti, and the no less carefully arranged bushes of complementary kinds, examining the mesh of wiry grass beneath his feet, and the blades of wider-leafed grass coming up, sparsely as yet, through it. George, as he approached, could see that, somewhat cheerlessly institutional as the calculated precision of the prospect appeared at present, Jay me was approving of it.
‘Not doing badly,’ he had greeted George. ‘Five years?’
‘Yes,’ said George. ‘Five years and three months now, from the bare sand.’
‘Water good?’
‘Adequate.’
Jayme nodded. ‘In another three years you’ll be starting real trees. In twenty you’ll have a landscape, and a climate. Should do nicely. We’ve just developed a better grass than this. Grows faster, binds better. I’ll tell them to send you some seed.’
They walked towards the house, across a patio, and into a large, cool room.
‘I’m sorry Dorothea’s away,’ said George. ‘She’s gone to Rio for a couple of weeks. Dull for her here, I’m afraid.’ Jayme nodded again.
‘I know. They get impatient. The first stages of reclamation aren’t exciting. Is she a Brazilophile?’
‘No - not really,’ George told him. ‘But you know how it is. Rio is lights, music, dresses, centre of the world and all that. It recharges her batteries. We usually go a couple of times a year. Occasionally she goes on her own. She’s plenty of friends there.’
‘Sorry to miss her,’ said his cousin.
‘She’ll be sorry not to have seen you. Quite a time since you met,’ George responded.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Jayme, ‘it does make it a little easier to talk confidential business.’
George, in the act of approaching the drink-cupboard, turned round and looked at his cousin with a lifted eyebrow.
‘Business?’ he remarked. ‘Since when am I supposed to have known anything about business? And what sort of business?’
‘Oh, just the usual Troon sort - space,’ said Jayme.
George returned with bottles, glasses, and syphon, and * set them down carefully.
‘ “Space”, he reminded his cousin, ‘ “Space is a Province of Brazil.” ‘
‘But it is also a kind of madness in the blood of the Troons,’ Jayme replied.
‘Now put under restraint for all of us - except, I suppose, for Jorge Trunho.’
‘Suppose there were an escape-route?’
‘I should be interested. Say on.’
Jayme Gonveia leant back in his chair.
‘I have by now,’ he said, ‘grown more than a little tired of this “Province of Brazil” bluff. It is time it was called.’
‘Bluff?’ exclaimed George.
‘Bluff,’ Jayme repeated. ‘Brazil has had it easy. She’s been sitting on the top of the world so long that she thinks she’s there for good, as a provision of nature. She’s going soft. In the chaos that followed the Northern War she worked, and worked hard, to put herself on top; and since then, there have been no challengers to keep her on her toes. She’s just sat back over the matter of space, too. When she first proclaimed it a Province she reclaimed the damaged Satellites, and made three of them spaceworthy again, and she took over and improved the old British Moon Station. But since then...!
‘Well, look at the record....Nothing at all until Grandpa Trunho’s unlucky Mars expedition in 2094. There wouldn’t have been a second expedition there unless Grandpa Gonveia and his pals had pressed for it in 2101. The third, in 2105, was financed entirely by public subscription, and since then no one has set foot on the place.
‘They abandoned the smallest Satellite back in 2080. In 2115 they abandoned another, keeping only Primeira in commission. In 2111 a newspaper and radio campaign on the neglect of space forced them into sending the first Venus expedition - and a shabby affair that was, scandalously ill-equipped; never heard from once it had entered the Venus atmosphere, and no wonder. Ten years later they allowed a learned society to send another ship there - by subscription again. When that, too, disappeared, they just gave up. In the twenty years since then nothing further has been done, nothing at all. They’ve spent just enough to keep Primeira and the Moon Station habitable, so that they can hog their monopoly of space and, if necessary, threaten the rest of us from there, and that’s all. What a record! ‘
‘Far from admirable,’ agreed George Troon. ‘And so - ?’
‘And so they are going to pay the usual penalty of neglect. Someone else is going to step in.’
‘Meaning Jayme Gonveia?’
‘With a kind of syndicate I’ve got together. It’s unofficial, of course. The Australian government just can’t afford to know anything about it. Support for any idea of the kind would definitely be an unfriendly act towards the Brazilian people. However, we naturally had need of designers, and of the use of yards to build the ships, so that there is - well - a little more than a liaison between us and certain government departments. Nominally, however, it has to be an adventure with a rather old-world title - privateering.’ George kept the excitement that was speeding up his pulses carefully imperceptible.
‘Well, well,’ he said, in a tone that matched his cousin’s. ‘Would I be astray in suspecting that there is a part for me in these plans?’
‘So perceptive of you, George. Yes, I remember you as a boy on the subject of space; the veritable Troon obsession. As they never outgrow it, I am assuming that you still hear the “thin gnat-voices calling”?’
‘I’ve had to muffle them, Jayme, but they are still there.’ ‘I thought so, George. So now let me tell you about the job,’ Jayme had said.
A year later, the
Aphrodite
, with a complement of ten, including George Troon in command, had set out. She was a new kind of ship, for she had a new kind of task - Venus in one leap, with no help from Satellite or Moon Station. As such, she was devoid of all unnecessary weight: victualled and found only for one voyage and a few weeks more; everything beyond bare necessities was to follow her in supply-rockets.
A supply-rocket (or ‘shuttle’, or ‘crate’) could be built for a fraction of the cost of a manned rocket. With living-quarters, insulation, air supply, water-purifying system, and all the rest of the human needs eliminated, the payload could be over fifty per cent higher. Launching, too, was more economical; a shuttle could be given a ground-boost and a quick step-boost producing an acceleration several times greater than a human cargo could survive. Once launched and locked on to its target, it would continue to travel by inertia until it should pick up the coded radio signals that would check and take charge of it. There was no more difficulty in directing a supply-rocket to Venus than in aiming it for a Satellite or for the moon, and no more power was needed to get it there - though it would require extra fuel for a safe landing against the planetary pull.
The question of supplies, therefore, raised few difficulties. The problems arose over the key-ship, the manned
Aphrodite
, for she must take off under full load, sustain her crew for the voyage, and, above all, be manoeuvrable enough in atmosphere to choose her landing when she should arrive. It was the last proviso that called for modified design. Both the previous expeditions were known to have entered the Venus atmosphere. It was after that that something fatal had befallen them, and the general opinion among spacemen was that neither had proved sufficiently manoeuvrable to pick, and, if necessary, to change its choice of, landing-place with accuracy. On a vapour-bound planet where inspection could not be visual until the last moments, that was essential.
Many years ago it had been supposed that Venus was entirely, or almost entirely, water-covered. That had later given way to the theory that the perpetual clouds were not vaporous, but were formed of dust swept up from an arid surface by constant fierce winds. Several times since then opinions had swung this way and that between the two extremes until there was general acceptance of the view that the planet was probably waterlogged, but scarcely likely to lack land masses entirely. Radar, however, would not be able to distinguish accurately between marshland and solid ground - or even, with certainty, between either and floating weed-beds, should such exist. Infra-red would tell more, but from a comparatively low altitude. It might well be that the true nature of the ground would be indiscernible above a few hundred feet, and it was imperative, therefore, that a ship which discovered itself to be descending upon a mudbank, or a morass, should have the ability to draw off and search for better ground. It was a problem that had not occurred with Earth landings where a ship was brought in by an alliance of radio and electronic control, nor had it arisen on Mars, with its dry surface and normally perfect visibility.
In the event, the last stage of the
Aphrodite
’s journey had proved the worth of the designers’ trouble. Had she not been able to cruise at moderate altitude in search of a landing-place, there would have been an end of her. The cruise gave her the opportunity to discover that the proportion of land to sea over the area she covered was extremely small, and none of it was the high, firm ground she sought.
At last, Troon decided to return to the largest island so far observed - a low-lying mass about one hundred and fifty miles long and a hundred miles across at its widest, misted over, and sodden under continuous rain. Even then it had been difficult to find a suitable landing area; hard to tell whether the monotonous grey-white vegetation they saw below was low-growing bushes, or densely packed tree-tops; impossible to know what sort of ground lay beneath it. One could do no more than make a guess from the apparent configuration of the ground.
Troon had made six unsuccessful attempts to land the ship. On two of them she got as far as touching the mud, and starting to sink into it, before blasting free again. At the seventh try, however, the tripod supports had squelched through only two or three inches of mud before they found a firm bottom. Then, at last, Troon had been able to switch off, and stagger over to his bunk, past caring or wanting to know anything more about the planet he had reached.
The
Aphrodite
’s landing took place two weeks ahead of conjunction. A week later they had picked up the signal of the first supply-rocket, switched on contact, and put it into a spiral. They lost it for an hour or two when it was on the other side of the planet on its first circuit, but picked it up again as it came round, and held it thereafter. It was brought in and landed successfully in a roughly surveyed area a mile or so to the south of the ship.
Of the seven that followed it in the course of the next two weeks, only Number 5 gave trouble. In the final stages of descent she developed a fault which cut out the main drive, and dropped her like a stone for two hundred feet. She split open as she hit, but luckily it had been possible to salvage most of her contents. The unloading priority had been the Dome from Number 2 rocket; it was badly needed to get them out of the cramped cabin of the
Aphrodite
, and give them shelter from the eternal rain and drizzle into a place where there would be room to live and work and protect the stores. Even before it was fully ready, however, there had come a message from Jayme, saying laconically: ‘They’re on to you, George. You have 584 days, or a little less, to get ready for them.’
‘They’, it quickly became clear, meant only certain official circles in Brazil, and their knowledge was severely restricted. A public admission that an expedition had not only made an unauthorized incursion into the Brazilian ‘Province of Space’, but had stolen a march on its nominal administrators by achieving the first successful landing on Venus, would involve not only the Space Department, but the whole government in a serious loss of face. The evident intention was to avoid publicity, while counter measures were prepared, possibly in the hope that if the secret could be kept until a Brazilian expedition had been dispatched at the next conjunction there might be no need of the admission at all.