Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

“No. I was thinking I might feel like saying things I wouldn’t want him to hear. We’re really away from him for the first time, just the two of us. Isn’t it great?”

Bony had mixed feelings about that. Sure, it was great not to have Friday ordering him around or using Liddy as a personal sex toy. But out of the frying pan …

As another wave lifted them he stared all around, seeking any sign of the winged mystery that had cast the tri-lobed underwater shadow on his first trip outside. He saw nothing like it, but far off to his left he caught a glimpse of a long horizontal line across the face of the sea. Land? Or clouds? Before he could confirm anything they were dropping back into the trough.

“Liddy, look that way when we hit the crest of another wave.” He pointed. “I thought I saw something on the skyline. Could be clouds — if this planet has clouds.”

While they waited he opened the circuit to the Mood Indigo . “We’re at the surface, and in a little while I’m going to try the suit thrustors. They ought to move us about up here even if they have problems lower down. If I have to release our connecting line to give us more mobility, I will. We won’t lose the line. The buoy stays on the surface and the beacon will let us find it easily enough from any distance.”

A grunt from Friday Indigo, and that was all.

One more device that Bony had made from nothing and his boss took for granted. Apparently that’s what it was like when you had enough money to buy anything, including people’s brains and bodies. Bony broke the circuit to the ship before the captain could veto his proposal, and made sure that he could unhook the line and beacon easily from his suit. He was still busy with that when he heard Liddy’s excited voice.

“It’s not just clouds, Bony. It’s clouds and land .”

He stared, but too late. They were again dropping into a trough. “Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be without going over and standing on it. See for yourself. Wait for the next crest and you can watch waves breaking on the shore.”

If there was land, it was their best hope of escape. The planet’s gravity field was weak, and the ship’s drive should certainly function in an atmosphere.

But which atmosphere? The water samples he had analyzed back on the ship showed a high level of dissolved oxygen. That was encouraging — the only place it could come from was the air at the surface.

Bony glanced at his suit monitors. They were designed to warn if anything in the ambient environment was dangerous to humans. No red lights blinked. That didn’t mean you could breathe whatever was outside. An excess of carbon dioxide would not show as dangerous, but try to breathe that for long and you would be in trouble.

“See?” It was Liddy’s cry. “It is land.”

He had missed it again. He paddled over until he was again right next to her. “Liddy, I’m going to do two things. I want you to watch, but I don’t want you too close. If anything goes wrong, follow the line and go back down.”

He unhooked the buoy and beacon from his suit, as she said nervously, “Bony, you mustn’t do anything silly. I won’t allow it.”

“I’ll try not to. The first thing I want to do is pretty straightforward. If we’re to get anywhere at all on the surface in a reasonable time, we won’t manage it by paddling. We must try our drives. So I’m going to use my suit thrustors to make sure they work and don’t fizzle or blow up or do something else weird. I want you to stay right where you are. Don’t follow me.”

He swam slowly away until there were thirty or forty meters between them. He used his arms to turn in the water so that he was facing Liddy, and tried to sound more confident than he felt. “All right. Here I come.”

He turned on the rear suit thrustors, keeping the setting to a medium level. That was just as well. Even on medium impulse he went racing through the water at a slight downward angle. The level rose on either side of his helmet and suddenly he was submerged and could see nothing but blue-green bubbles. He cut the thrust at once. When he bobbed up to the surface he was face-to-face with Liddy and only inches away from her. The expression of surprise and relief showing through her visor should have been comical. It wasn’t. It was merely reasonable, because Bony felt the same way himself.

He said, he hoped calmly, “I guess that’s a success. Be careful when you use yours, and keep it to a low or medium thrust level. Now for a trickier one. I’m going to let some outside air into my suit.”

“Bony, that’s dangerous. Suppose it’s a poisonous gas?”

“I don’t see how it can be. We know that the gas dissolved in the sea is mostly oxygen, and there must be a balance between what’s in the water and what’s in the air above it. The big question is, how much oxygen? It won’t kill me, but too little or too much and I’ll pant and pass out. Keep an eye on me and be ready to seal my suit.”

“Bony, please don’t.”

“We must. I don’t know how long we may have to stay on Limbo, and we don’t want to have to live in space-suits indefinitely.”

Bony made sure that the neck seal was tight, so that the rest of the suit would remain inflated even when the helmet was cracked open. The air pressure inside most of the suit had to remain higher than outside. Otherwise he would sink like a stone when the helmet pressure equalized.

He found himself holding his breath as air hissed from the suit. That was ridiculous, about as sensible as a man being hanged trying to delay execution by jumping up into the air a moment before the trapdoor opened. The whole point was to get this over as fast as possible.

His ears were popping. As the air escaped he sank a few inches deeper into the water. Now air was entering his helmet. The smell of an alien sea was in his nostrils. Bony opened his mouth wide and gulped in the air of Limbo.

He felt a moment of dizziness and panic. He was panting, his vision blurred, and something was catching in his throat and burning at his lungs. He thought of Liddy’s worries about poisonous gases. Then he realized that the strange sensation was almost surely the effects of a high ozone level. That made logical sense. The blue giant sun delivered a sleet of ultraviolet light to Limbo, and UV had the effect of ionizing oxygen to form the triatomic molecule of ozone.

The act of rational thought had its own steadying effect. His breathing slowed. His vision cleared and he saw Liddy reaching up to seal his helmet.

“No.” He took her hands in his. “It’s all right. I can breathe. The air pressure is a bit lower but the oxygen content is higher. I’m not sure what the long-term effects might be, but provided we always go back and sleep in the ship I think we’ll be all right.”

Liddy said suddenly, “Fine. It’s my turn. I’m going to open my helmet and breathe it, too.”

“Wait a minute.” Another big wave was arriving. Lifted high, Bony for the first time was looking in the right direction at the right time. He saw a black mass bulging up from the sea, with a narrow band of sparkling white in front of it.

Land, and a line of breakers, no more than a few kilometers away.

“Hold off for the moment, Liddy. If we’re going ashore we won’t want open helmets while we’re doing it. I’m going to close mine, then I’ll show you how to use the thrustors.”

It took a couple of false starts. The first time, Liddy set the wrong thrust angle. She was driven under water and popped up forty meters away like the bloated corpse of some sea-monster. The second time Bony used too high a thrust setting. He skated helplessly across the surface at speed and was buffeted hard by waves. Over the suit radio he could hear Liddy laughing at him.