Fred Hoyle - Element 79

He told the guide he was going down to retrieve it, but the guide said no, the slope was far too steep. They had argued, both determined men. To him, there was no question of leaving the ax. If it had gone down to the glacier, all very well. He would have written it off. But it hadn’t. It had stopped. It was holding itself up, waiting to be fetched.

To the Swiss, this was a case of insanity. The route ahead to the summit of the Obergabelhorn was a rock climb, as also was the descent by the Arbengrat. An ax was almost superfluous from here on. Certainly there was no danger in going on. Equally certain, there was danger in attempting to retrieve the ax which his client had been fool enough to drop.

So they had argued, one in English, one in German, not able to understand each other very well. At last the Englishman had told the guide to fix his own price for the retrieval of the ax, but retrieved it was going to be, even if he had to go alone for it. This changed the situation, for a guide is paid to risk his life in his client’s interest.

The guide had lowered the Englishman on a two-hundred-foot rope. Then the guide had climbed down to him in his steps, and they had again run out the rope. This brought him off the horribly steep part of the slope, to the ledges where the ax had fastened itself. With the ax, now, getting back to the ridge had not been impossibly difficult. Details of the rest of the traverse were almost lost from memory.

The guide had more than doubled his tariff for the day. The old man still remembered the two hundred francs he had paid over. A lot for an ax, but then it had been impossible to leave it, with its hand outstretched to him like that.

With a sigh, the brown-faced man got to his feet, slipped the ax through the special loop in his rucksack, and started down the track from the lochan to the lower valley.

An agent’s job is a lonely one. Agent Number 38 Zone 11 reflected so as he worked over his report for perhaps the twentieth time. He hadn’t even a decent name to be known by. Just Number 38 of Zone 11, nothing more. It was irritating, degrading almost.

Reports of U.F.O.s (Unidentified Flying Objects) were of course commonplace, had been for twenty years. To allay public anxiety, an official inquiry had been necessary—that would be about ten years ago. The findings weren’t too well received in some quarters. A lot of witnesses had been judged to be irresponsible publicity-seekers. Liars, in fact. And the more honest ones had been put down as victims of anxiety complexes. This had been Agent 38’s own opinion at the time. A bunch of psychotic characters. How could objects whiz through the atmosphere, or whiz along outside the atmosphere, at the fantastic speeds that had been claimed? The accelerations would kill you in a moment.

According to the big boys, the way an anxiety complex works is this. You’re all hotted up inside about something or other. You can’t find any outlet for your bottled emotions in the real world. So you invent a phantom world. You force yourself to see things and hear things—U.F.O.s, in fact. In short, you go crazy.

Agent 38 could well believe he was suffering from an anxiety complex. Who wouldn’t be after the troubles of the last few years? But how, in his case, could spotting a U.F.O. be of the slightest help to a bottled-up psychosis? So far from helping, it would be a disastrous end to his career. Perhaps he should suppress his report? Oh, to hell with it! He’d been over that possibility a hundred times before, and a hundred times he’d rejected it. His whole training was against it—suppressing a report was one of the things one just did not do.

Of course, his report would have one unusual feature to distinguish it. He hadn’t merely spotted the U.F.O., he’d detected an electromagnetic transmission from it—in an unusual part of the wave band, too. Agent 38 couldn’t understand why anyone should want to transmit at such a short wavelength. But after all, that wasn’t his business. His business was to send out his report.

The transmission had obviously been coded. Although he himself hadn’t been able to decipher it, perhaps the big bugs might be able to do so. Then perhaps they wouldn’t think he was crazy. But the chances were they’d fail, just as he himself had failed. Which would put him in a tough spot. They’d think he’d invented the whole thing. They’d say that his psychosis was very very bad. He’d be moved immediately to some quiet place for recuperation.

Well, perhaps that wouldn’t be so unpleasant after all. Perhaps deep down in himself that was what he really wanted. Perhaps that was the reason for his psychosis.

Dave Johnson looked out of the starboard porthole. There were four of them in the spaceship: Bill Harrison, Chris Yolantis, Stu Fieldman, and himself. This was the end of the line, the end of hard, unremitting training. But there were some things you could train for, and there were others you couldn’t. Take the silence, for instance, the strange, gliding silence. It made you aware of all the little noises you could hear on Earth, even in places that were supposed to be dead quiet. For the first two weeks they’d played records and they’d talked incessantly. But then they’d come to realize they were talking simply to shut out the silence. After that it had seemed somehow better to accept the silence. So there were no long speeches anymore. Most of what they said now was in terse Anglo-Saxon.

Dave doubted that any of them had really recovered from the beginning. Once the shattering effect of the starting blast had worn off, they’d watched the bright ball of the Earth recede away from them. At first it had filled almost half the sky. But day after day it had become smaller and smaller. Now it was a mere point, like Mars or Jupiter. This was the terrible morale destroyer—watching your home receding implacably to huge, pitiless distances. You knew that out there, nearly forty million miles away, people were going about their daily lives—kids to school, commuters to work, housewives busying themselves, cars on the highways, hamburger stands. You knew it, but you couldn’t believe it.

Soon another planet would be filling their sky. On paper everything was easy. They were to enter the atmosphere of Venus, brake down, descend below the white clouds, and then fly several times around. There wasn’t to be a landing, because the scientists were quite certain Venus was covered entirely by ocean. Then they’d simply blast off again and return to Earth.

It was difficult to see where anything could go wrong. The reentry problem into the Earth’s atmosphere had been solved years ago—they themselves had made four flights out from Earth during training. And entry into the Venusian atmosphere should be no different in principle from the case of Earth. The host of space vehicles encircling Venus over the past two decades had shown quite conclusively that the atmosphere contained nothing but harmless gases—nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water.

Dave wondered just how far the ideas of the scientists would hold up. The clouds through which the spaceship must soon penetrate were thought to be merely frozen crystals of carbon dioxide—cirrus clouds of dry ice, in fact. But suppose the scientists were wrong. Suppose the clouds continued unbroken right down to the ocean surface. Suppose the oceans were boiling.

The blast-off from Venus would be controlled by radio transmitters on Earth. This was one comfort, at least. It would insure that the ship accelerated into the right orbit for the home trip. They themselves would be down under the Venusian clouds, unable to see out into space, certainly unable to choose the proper homeward trajectory. In fact, at any moment the people back home could take over control of the ship—a precaution just in case they all went crazy.