NEXT STOP, VENUS!
When he first got the idea of the sky-car, the doctor never stopped to consider whether he was the right man for such an excursion. Personally, he hated travel. He was merely a general practitioner, with a great fondness for astronomy; and the sole reason why he wanted to visit the planets was that he couldn't see them well enough with his telescope. So he dabbled a little in magnetism and so forth, and stumbled upon the principle of the cube.
But he had no mechanical ability, and was on the point of giving up the scheme when he met Smith. He was instantly impressed by the engineer's highly commonplace face; he had had considerable experience with human contrariness, and felt sure that Smith must be an absolute wonder, since he looked so very ordinary.
Kinney's diagnosis proved correct. Smith knew his business; the machinery was finished in a hurry and done right. However, when it came to fitting the outfit into a suitable sky-car, Kinney was obliged to call in an architect. That accounts for E. Williams Jackson. At the same time, it occurred to the doctor that they would need a cook. Mrs. Kinney had refused to have anything whatever to do with the trip, and so Kinney put an ad in the paper. As luck would have it, Van Emmon, the geologist, who had learned how to cook when he first became a mountaineer, saw the ad and answered it in hope of adventure.
The doctor himself, besides his training in the mental and bodily frailities of human beings, had also an unusual command of the related sciences, such as biology. Smith's specialties have already been named; he could drive an airplane or a nail with equal ease. Van Emmon, as a part of his profession, was a skilled "fossilologist," and was well up in natural history.
As for E. Williams Jackson—the architect was also the sociologist of the four. Moreover, he had quite a reputation as an amateur antiquarian. Nevertheless, the most important thing about E. Williams Jackson was not learned until after the visit to Mercury, after the terrible end of that exploration, after the architect, falling in a faint, had been revived under the doctor's care.
"Gentlemen," said Kinney, coming from the secluded nook among the dynamos which had been the architect's bunk; "gentlemen, I must inform you that Jackson is not what we thought.
"He—I mean, she—is a woman!"
Which put an entirely new face upon matters. The three men, discussing it, marveled that the architect had been able to keep her sex a secret all the time they were exploring at Mercury. They did not know that none of E. Williams Jackson's fellow architects had ever guessed the truth. Ambitious and ingenious, with a natural liking for house-planning, she had resolved that her sex should not stand in the way of success.
And when she finally came to herself, there in her bunk, and suspected that her secret was out—instead of shame or embarrassment she felt only chagrin. She walked, rather unsteadily, across the floor of the great cube-shaped car to the window where the three were standing; and as they quietly made a place for her, she took it entirely as a matter of course, and without a word.
The doctor had been speaking of the peculiar fitness of the four for what they were doing. "And if I'm not mistaken," he went on, "we're going to need all the brains we can pool, when we get to Venus.
"I never would have claimed, when we started out, that Mercury had ever been inhabited. But now that we've seen what we've seen, I feel dead sure that Venus once was peopled."
The four looked out the triple-glazed vacuum-insulated window at the steadily growing globe of "Earth's twin sister." Half in sunlight and half in shadow, this planet, for ages the synonym for beauty, was now but a million miles away. She looked as large as the moon; but instead of a silvery gleam, she showed a creamy radiance fully three times as bright.
"Let's see," reflected the geologist aloud. "As I recall it, the brightness of a planet depends upon the amount of its air. That would indicate, then, that Venus has about as much as the earth, wouldn't it?" remembering how the home planet had looked when they left it.
The doctor nodded. "There are other factors; but undoubtedly we are approaching a world which is a great deal like our own. Venus is nearly as large as the earth, has about nine-tenths the surface, and a gravity almost as strong. The main difference is that she's only two-thirds as far from the sun as we are."
"How long is her day?" Smith wanted to know.
"Can't say. Some observers claim to have seen her clearly enough to announce a day of the same length as ours. Others calculate that she's like Mercury; always the same face toward the sun. If so, her day is also her year—two hundred and twenty-five of our days."
Van Emmon looked disappointed. "In that case she would be blistering hot on one side and freezing cold on the other; except," remembering Mercury, "except for the 'twilight zone,' where the climate would be neither one nor the other, but temperate." He pointed to the line down the middle of the disk before them, the line which divided the lighted from the unlighted, the day from the night.
The four looked more intently. It should be remembered that the very brilliance of Venus has always hindered the astronomers; the planet as a whole is always very conspicuous but its very glare makes it impossible to see any details. The surface has always seemed to be covered by a veil of hazy, faintly streaked vapor.
Smith gave a queer exclamation. For a moment or two he stared hard at the planet; then looked up with an apologetic grin.
"I had a foolish idea. I thought—" He checked himself. "Say, doesn't Venus remind you of something?"
The doctor slowly shook his head. "Can't say that it does, Smith. I have always considered Venus as having an appearance peculiarly her own. Why?"
The engineer started to answer, stopped, thought better of it, and instead pointed out the half that was in shadow. "Why is it that we can make out the black portion so easily?"
Kinney could answer this. "The fact is, it isn't really black at all, but faintly lighted. Presumably it is star-shine."
"Star-shine!" echoed the architect, interested.
"Just that. You see," finished the doctor, "if that side is never turned toward the sun, then it must be covered with ice, which would reflect the star—"
"Ah!" exclaimed Smith with satisfaction. "I wasn't so crazy after all! My notion was that the whole blamed thing is covered with ice!"
It looked reasonable. Certainly the entire sphere had a somewhat watery appearance. It prompted the geologist to say:
"Kinney—if that reflection is really due to ice, then there must be plenty of water vapor in the air. And if that's the case—"
"Not only is life entirely possible," stated the doctor quietly, "but I'll bet you this sky-car against an abandoned soap-stone mine that we find humans, or near-human beings there when we land tomorrow!"