In addition to being a story teller, I am a librarian, and librarians love to keep their facts straight. The fact about Venus is that nobody knows just what it is like on the surface of the planet. Since nobody knows, I could make it all up.
Many facts are known about Venus, however. Venus is the Sun's second planet. It is about twenty-five million miles closer to the Sun than our Earth. Astronomers have measured and "weighed" it. It is almost exactly the same size as Earth, but its weight (mass) is twenty per cent less. It turns very slowly on its axis, so that its day is much longer than an Earth day. Because of a layer of clouds that surrounds it, the surface cannot be seen even with the most powerful of telescopes. Thus, astronomers cannot tell just how fast or slow it turns. A Venus day may be as short as fourteen Earth days or as long as two hundred and twenty-five Earth days.
If you noticed, you can see I have kept my picture of life on Venus true to these facts. I had the Venus day be fourteen Earth days long. Some of the animals and plants were a great deal larger than Earth animals and plants, a fact that would be expected on a planet with less gravity than that of Earth.
Of course you might think that because of the clouds that surround Venus, the planet would be a terribly rainy place. That is not very probable. By using an instrument called a spectrograph, astronomers have learned that those heavy clouds are not clouds of water vapor. Indeed, they can find evidence for little or no water vapor on Venus. They can detect a great deal of carbon dioxide—but no oxygen.
"But without oxygen, animals couldn't breathe!" I can hear a child who knows some science say. "Life would be impossible!"
That could be true. Some scientists, in fact most of them, believe that life is impossible on the surface of Venus. But remember, nobody knows what is under that heavy layer of clouds, and nobody knows just what those clouds are.
One astronomer, Rupert Wildt, has advanced a theory about the Venusian clouds that, I think, would allow for the possibility of life on Venus. He theorized, on the evidence available to him, that, when Venus was young, carbon-dioxide and water, in the presence of ultra-violet light, may have combined to make clouds of one form of plastic! I think it possible that such clouds would be thick, spongy and permanent, and that they would join together, so that the inner atmosphere of Venus could not escape through them. According to his theory Venus could be like a Christmas present—all wrapped in shining plastic. This could account for the fact, too, that more than half the light falling on it from the sun is reflected, making it the brightest of all the planets or stars, a jewel of a planet.
Under a loose layer of plastic, life could be possible on Venus. If plant life began under those clouds, then an oxygen atmosphere could develop. Plants take in carbon dioxide through their leaves and give out oxygen. Many scientists believe the Earth's atmosphere became rich with oxygen in this manner. Of course, none of that oxygen in Venus' atmosphere could get through the thick layer of spongy plastic clouds. The carbon dioxide that was trapped on the outside would not get through either.
Scientists believe, too, that Venus may be too hot for life, or too cold. I think that the clouds and the carbon dioxide trapped outside of them would serve, on the one hand, to insulate Venus from the hot light of the nearby sun; and, on the other hand, to hold in its warmth during the long nights.
As you can see, I have spun my story out of Mr. Wildt's idea of the plastic clouds of Venus. The rhinosaurs heavy armor, the arrow-bird's bills, the marva's plastic-strengthening jewel claws, all had their beginnings in the idea of a plastic planet. It allowed for the creation of some fairly interesting animals, I think.