"It should. It's been tested enough."
"Holly Carter drew the short straw."
"Er--" I started and then stopped short as the implication became
clear. "She's--she's--not--?"
"Holly made it to Venus all right," he said. "Trouble is we can't get
her back."
"Can't get her back?"
He nodded again. "You know, we've never really known very much about
the atmosphere of Venus."
"Yes."
"Well, from what little came through just before Holly blacked out, it
seems that there must be one of the cyanogens in the atmosphere in a
concentration high enough to effect nervous paralysis."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," said Paul Wallach in a flat tone, "that Holly Carter stopped
breathing shortly after she cracked the airlock. And her heart stopped
beating a minute or so later."
"Holly--dead?"
"Not yet, Tom," he said. "If we can get her back in the next fifteen or
twenty minutes, modern medicine can bring her back."
"But there'll be brain damage!"
"Oh, there may be some temporary impairment. Nothing that retraining
can't restore. The big problem is to bring her back."
"We should have built two tunnel cars."
"We should have done all sorts of things. But when the terminal rocket
landed on Venus, everybody in the place was too anxious to try it out.
Lord knows, I tried to proceed at a less headlong pace. But issuing
orders to you people is a waste of time and paper."
I looked at him. "Doc," I asked, giving him the honorary title out of
habit, "Venus is umpty-million miles from here. We haven't another
tunnel car, and no rocket could make it in time to do any good. So how
can we hope to rescue Holly?"
"That's the point," said Wallach. "Venus, it appears, is inhabited."
"Oh?"
"That's what got Holly caught in the first place. She landed, then saw
this creature approaching. Believing that no life could exist in an
atmosphere dangerous to life, she opened the airlock and discovered
otherwise."
"So?"
"So now all we have to do is to devise some way of explaining to a
Venusian the difference between left and right. I thought you might
help."
"But I'm just a computer programmer."
"That's the point. We all figured that you have developed a form of
communication to that machine of yours. The rest of the crew, as you
know, have a bit of difficulty in communicating among themselves in
their own jargon, let alone getting through to normal civilians. When
it comes to a Venusian, they're licked."