The Lost Tribes of Venus

Everyone knew what that meant. The slightest trace of magnetic material would distort the delicately balanced cylinder of force that contained and directed the Hoskins blast, making it suicidal to operate.

Calmly Captain Reno voiced the thought in every mind.

"It must be cleared. From the outside."

Several of the men swore under their breaths. Interplanetary space was constantly bombarded, with an intensity inverse to the prevailing gravitation, by something called Sigma radiation. Man had never encountered it until leaving Earth, and little was known of it except that short exposure killed test animals and left their bodies unpredictably altered.

Inside the ship it was safe enough, for the sleek hull was charged with a Kendall power-shield, impervious to nearly any Sigma concentration. But the shielding devices in the emergency spacesuits were small and had never been space-tested in a region of nearly equalized gravitations.

The man who emerged from the airlock would be flipping a coin with a particularly unpleasant form of death.

Many pairs of eyes turned toward Robson Hind. He was jet chief.

"I'm assigned, not expendable," he protested hastily. "If there were more trouble later...." His face was pasty.

Assigned. That was the key word. Barry Barr felt a lump tightening in his stomach as the eyes shifted to him. He had some training in Hoskins drivers. He knew alloys and power tools. And he was riding Four unassigned after that broken ankle had made him miss Three. He was the logical man.

"For the safety of the ship." That phrase, taken from the ancient Earthbound code of the sea, had occurred repeatedly in the indoctrination manual at Training Base. He remembered it, and remembered further the contingent plans regarding assigned and unassigned personnel.

For a moment he stood indecisively, the nervous, unhumorous smile quirking across his angular face making him look more like an untried boy than a structural engineer who had fought his way up through some of the toughest tropical construction camps of Earth. His lean body, built more for quick, neatly coordinated action than brute power, balanced handily in the zero gravity as he ran one hand through his sandy hair in a gesture of uncertainty.

He knew that not even the captain would order him through the airlock.

But the members of the Five Ship Plan had been selected in part for a sense of responsibility.

"Nick, will you help me button up?" he asked with forced calmness.

For an instant he thought he detected a sly gleam in Hind's eyes. But then the jet chief was pressing forward with the others to shake his hand.

Rebellious reluctance flared briefly in Barry's mind. Dorothy Voorhees had refused to make a definite promise before blasting off in Three--in fact he hadn't even seen her during her last few days on Earth. But still he felt he had the inside track despite Hind's money and the brash assurance that went with it. But if Hind only were to reach Venus alive--

The blazing disc of Sol, the minor globes of the planets, the unwinking pinpoints of the stars, all stared with cosmic disinterest at the tiny figure crawling along the hull. His spacesuit trapped and amplified breathing and heartbeats into a roaring chaos that was an invitation to blind panic, and all the while there was consciousness of the insidiously deadly Sigma radiations.

Barry found the debris of the meteorite, an ugly shining splotch against the dull superceramic tube, readied his power chisel, started cutting. Soon it became a tedious, torturingly strenuous manual task requiring little conscious thought, and Barry's mind touched briefly on the events that had brought him here.

First Luna, and that had been murderous. Man had encountered Sigma for the first time, and many had died before the Kendall-shield was perfected. And the chemical-fueled rockets of those days had been inherently poor.

Hoskins semi-atomics had made possible the next step--to Mars. But men had found Mars barren, swept clear of all life in the cataclysm that had shattered the trans-Martian planet to form the Asteroid Belt.

Venus, its true surface forever hidden by enshrouding mists, had been well within one-way range. But Hoskins fuel requirements for a round trip added up to something beyond critical mass. Impossible.

But the Five Ship Plan had evolved, a joint enterprise of government and various private groups. Five vessels were to go out, each fueled to within a whiskered neutron of spontaneous detonation, manned by specialists who, it was hoped, could maintain themselves under alien conditions.

On Venus the leftover fuel from all five would be transferred to whichever ship had survived the outbound voyage in best condition. That one would return to Earth. Permanent base or homeward voyage with colonists crowded aboard like defeated sardines? Only time would tell.

Barry Barr had volunteered, and because the enlightened guesses of the experts called for men and women familiar with tropical conditions, he had survived the rigorous weeding-out process. His duties in Venus Colony would be to refabricate the discarded ships into whatever form was most needed--most particularly a launching ramp--and to study native Venusian materials.