Read Online Venus by Ben Bova - Free Book Online Page A

cool surface she was burning with rage. And I understood why. My father had dumped her because he’d become more interested in her daughter. And she was furious about it.
    They say that hell has no fury like a woman scorned. But what about a woman scorned because the man wants her daughter?
    Then I wondered how the daughter felt about it. Was Duchamp protecting her daughter against my father’s unwanted lechery? Or was she dragging her away, kicking and screaming?
    Either way, it looked to me like a nest of snakes.
     
    We left Earth orbit the following day and started on the two-month-long trajectory to Venus. We had to burn more propellant than the minimum-energy trajectory would use, but I figured that cutting the transit time in half was worth the expenditure.
    I hardly felt the thrust when we broke orbit. I was standing off in one corner of the bridge doing a media interview while the working crew attended to their jobs. Off to Venus! It was a good news subject. Fine human interest: Van Humphries setting out to recover his dead brother’s remains from the hellhole of the solar system. Later that evening,
when I saw the network’s broadcast, though, they showed more computer simulations of what Venus’s surface might look like than they showed of me.
    But my father kept worrying about Fuchs, bombarding me with tension-riddled messages Where was he? What was he up to? It made me worry, too.
    No matter. We were on our way to Venus. That was the important thing.

DREAM
    I knew I was dreaming but somehow it didn’t matter. I was a mere child again, a toddler just learning to walk. There was a grown man looming in front of me, holding his arms out and calling to me.
    “Come on, Van. You can do it. Walk to me.”
    In my dream, I couldn’t make out his face. His voice sounded kind, friendly, but his face was somehow hidden from me.
    “Come on, Van. Take a step. Come on.”
    It was enormously difficult. Much easier to hang on to whatever piece of furniture my chubby little fingers were clutching. Or just plop down and crawl on all fours. But his voice beckoned to me, half encouraging, half pleading, and I eventually let go.
    I took a teetering step, then another.
    “Good boy! Good boy, Van.”
    I saw his face. It was my brother Alex. He was only a child himself, nine or ten years old. But he was helping me,
encouraging me. I tried to reach him. Step by labored, dangerous step I tried to get to his welcoming arms.
    Instead, my legs buckled and I plopped onto the floor.
    “You’re hopeless, Runt. Absolutely hopeless.” Suddenly it was my father towering over me, a disgusted look on his face.
    “The ancient Greeks would have left you on a mountaintop to feed the wolves and crows.”
    Alex was no longer there. He was dead, I remembered. I sat there on the floor and blubbered like a baby.

IN TRANSIT
    I had met the crew several times before we left Earth, of course. The crew of my ship Hesperos , I mean. Truax had its own crew—an even dozen of grizzled, experienced men and women—but I had practically nothing to do with them. Captain Duchamp handled that part of the mission. It was my crew, the crew of Hesperos , that I cared about.
    In addition to Duchamp and Rodriguez there were only four others: three technicians, for communications, life support, and sensor systems, and the physician. The comm and sensor techs were women about my own age, rather nondescript techies who talked in jargon and kept pretty much to themselves. Same for the life support guy, except he was chubby and rather surly—the kind who always gave the impression that the least little technical problem was the end of the world.
    They had to be good, though. They had been okayed by both Rodriguez and Duchamp. Naturally, all our systems were actually run by the ship’s mainframe; the human techs were needed for repairs and maintenance work, mostly. For
a while I had thought about using robots instead, but Rodriguez convinced me that the humans were