"How very different Venus looks now to what it does from the earth,"
said Zaidie, a couple of mornings later, by earth-time, as she took her
eye away from the telescope through which she had been examining an
enormous golden crescent which spanned the dark vault of Space ahead of
and slightly below the _Astronef_.
"Yes," replied Redgrave, "she looks----"
"How do you know that she is a she?" said Zaidie, getting up and laying
a hand on his shoulder as he sat at his own telescope. "Of course I know
what you mean, that according to our own ideas on earth, it is the
planet or the world which has been supposed for ages to, as it were,
shine upon the lovers of earth with the light reflected from
the--the--well, I suppose you know what I mean."
"Seeing that you are the most perfect terrestrial incarnation of the
said goddess that I have seen yet," he replied, slipping his arm round
her waist and pulling her down on to his knees, "I don't think that that
is quite the view you ought to take. Surely if Venus ever had a
daughter----"
"Oh, nonsense! After we've travelled all these millions of miles
together do you really expect me to believe stuff like that?"
"My dear girl-graduate," he said, tightening his grip round her waist a
little, "you know perfectly well that if we had travelled beyond the
limits of the Solar System, if we had outsailed old Halley's Comet
itself, and dived into the uttermost depths of Space outside the Milky
Way, you and I would still be a man and a woman, and, being, as may be
presumed, more or less in love with each other----"
"Less indeed!" said Zaidie; "you're speaking for yourself, I hope."
And then when she had partially disengaged herself and sat up straight,
she said between her laughs----
"Really, Lenox, you're quite absurd for a person who has been married as
long as you have, I don't mean in time, but in Space. Was it a thousand
years or a couple of hundred million miles ago that we were married?
Really I am getting my ideas of time and space quite mixed up.
"But never mind that! What I was going to say is that, according to all
the authorities which your girl-graduate has been reading since we left
Mars, Venus--oh, doesn't she look just gorgeous, and our old friend the
Sun behind there blazing out of darkness like one of the furnaces at
Pittsburg--I beg your pardon, Lenox, I'm afraid I'm getting quite
provincial. I suppose we're considerably more than a hundred million
miles away?"
"Yes, dear; we're about a hundred and fifty millions, and at that
distance, if you'll excuse me saying so, even the United States would
seem almost like a province, wouldn't they?"
"Well, yes; that's just where distance doesn't lend enchantment to the
view, I suppose."
"But what was it you were going to say before that----"
"The interlude, eh? Well, before the interlude you were accusing me of
being a graduate as well as a girl. Of course I can't help that, but
what I was going to say was----"
"If you are going to talk science, dear, perhaps we'd better sit on
different chairs. I may have been married for a hundred and fifty
million miles, but the honeymoon isn't half way through yet, you know."
Then there was another interlude of a few seconds' duration. When Zaidie
was seated beside her own telescope again, she said, after another
glance at the splendid crescent which, as the _Astronef_ approached at a
speed of over forty miles a second, increased in size and distinctness
every moment:
"What I mean is this. All the authorities are agreed that on Venus, her
axis of revolution being so very much inclined to the plane of her
orbit, the seasons are so severe that half the year its temperate zone
and its tropics have a summer about twice as hot as ours and the other
half they have a winter twice as cold as our coldest. I'm afraid, after
all, we shall find the Love-Star a world of salamanders and seals;
things that can live in a furnace and bask on an iceberg; and when we
get back home it will be our painful duty, as the first explorers of the
fields of Space, to dispel another dearly-cherished popular delusion."
"I'm not so very sure about that," said Lenox, glancing from the rapidly
growing crescent, to the sweet, smiling face beside him. "Don't you see
something very different there to what we saw either on the Moon or
Mars? Now just go back to your telescope and let us take an
observation."
"Well," said Zaidie, rising, "as our trip is, partly at least, in the
interests of science, I will;" and then when she had got her own
telescope into focus again--for the distance between the _Astronef_ and
the new world they were about to visit was rapidly lessening--she took a
long look through it, and said:
"Yes, I think I see what you mean. The outer edge of the crescent is
bright, but it gets greyer and dimmer towards the inside of the curve.
Of course Venus has an atmosphere. So had Mars; but this must be very
dense. There's a sort of halo all round it. Just fancy that splendid
thing being the little black spot we saw going across the face of the
Sun a few days ago! It makes one feel rather small, doesn't it?"
"That is one of the things which a woman says when she doesn't want to
be answered; but, apart from that, you were saying----"
"What a very unpleasant person you can be when you like! I was going to
say that on the Moon we saw nothing but black and white, light and
darkness. There was no atmosphere, except in those awful places I don't
want to think about. Then, as we got near Mars, we saw a pinky
atmosphere, but not very dense; but this, you see, is a sort of
pearl-grey white shading from silver to black. You notice how much paler
it grows as we get nearer. But look--what are those tiny bright spots?
There are hundreds of them."
"Do you remember as we were leaving the Earth, how bright the mountain
ranges looked; how plainly we could see the Rockies and the Andes?"
"Oh, yes, I see; they're mountains; thirty-seven miles high, some of
them, they say; and the rest of the silver-grey will be clouds, I
suppose. Fancy living under clouds like those."
"Only another case of the adaptation of life to natural conditions, I
expect. When we get there I daresay we shall find that these clouds are
just what make it possible for the inhabitants of Venus to stand the
extremes of heat and cold. Given elevations three or four times as high
as the Himalayas, it would be quite possible for them to choose their
temperature by shifting their altitude.
"But I think it's about time to drop theory and see to the practice," he
continued, getting up from his chair and going to the signal board in
the conning-tower. "Whatever the planet Venus may be like, we don't want
to charge it at the rate of sixty miles a second. That's about the speed
now, considering how fast she's travelling towards us."
"And considering that, whether it is a nice world or not it's nearly as
big as the Earth, I guess we should get rather the worst of the charge,"
laughed Zaidie as she went back to her telescope.
Redgrave sent a signal down to Murgatroyd to reverse engines, as it
were, or, in other words, to direct the "R. Force" against the planet,
from which they were now only a couple of hundred thousand miles
distant. The next moment the sun and stars seemed to halt in their
courses. The great golden-grey crescent, which had been increasing in
size every moment, appeared to remain stationary, and then, when he was
satisfied that the engines were developing the Force properly, he sent
another signal down, and the _Astronef_ began to descend.
The half-disc of Venus seemed to fall below them, and in a few minutes
they could see it from the upper deck spreading out like a huge
semi-circular plain of light ahead and on both sides of them. The
_Astronef_ was falling at the rate of about a thousand miles a minute
towards the centre of the half-crescent, and every moment the brilliant
spots above the cloud-surface grew in size and brightness.
"I believe the theory about the enormous height of the mountains of
Venus must be correct after all," said Redgrave, tearing himself with an
evident wrench away from his telescope. "Those white patches can't be
anything else but the summits of snow-capped mountains. You know how
brilliantly white a snow-peak looks on earth against the whitest of
clouds."
"Oh, yes," said Zaidie, "I've often seen that in the Rockies. But it's
lunch-time, and I must go down and see how my things in the kitchen are
getting on. I suppose you'll try and land somewhere where it's morning,
so that we can have a good day before us. Really, it's very convenient
to be able to make your own morning or night as you like, isn't it? I
hope it won't make us too conceited when we get back, being able to
choose our mornings and our evenings; in fact, our sunrises and sunsets
on any world we like to visit in a casual way like this."
"Well," laughed Redgrave, as she moved away towards the companion
stairs, "after all, if you find the United States, or even the Planet
Terra, too small for you, we've always got the fields of Space open to
us. We might take a trip across the Zodiac or down the Milky Way."
"And meanwhile," she replied, stopping at the top of the stairs and
looking round, "I'll go down and get lunch. You and I may be king and
queen of the realms of Space, and all that sort of thing, but we've got
to eat and drink, after all."
"And that reminds me," said Redgrave, getting up and following her, "we
must celebrate our arrival on a new world as usual. I'll go down and get
out the wine. I shouldn't be surprised if we found the people of the
Love-World living on nectar and ambrosia, and as fizz is our nearest
approach to nectar----"
"I suppose," said Zaidie, as she gathered up her skirts and stepped
daintily down the companion stairs, "if you find anything human, or at
least human enough to eat and drink, you'll have a party and give them
champagne. I wonder what those wretches on Mars would have thought of it
if we'd only made friends with them?"
Lunch on board the _Astronef_ was about the pleasantest meal of the day.
Of course, there was neither day nor night, in the ordinary sense of the
word, except as the hours were measured off by the chronometers.
Whichever side or end of the vessel received the direct rays of the sun,
was bathed in blazing heat and dazzling light. Elsewhere there was black
darkness and the more than icy cold of Space; but lunch was a convenient
division of the waking hours, which began with a stroll on the upper
deck and a view of the ever-varying splendours about them, and ended
after dinner in the same place with coffee and cigarettes and
speculations as to the next day's happenings.
This lunch-hour passed even more pleasantly and rapidly than others had
done, for the discussion as to the possibilities of Venus was continued
in a quite delightful mixture of scientific disquisition and that
converse which is common to most human beings on their honeymoon.
As there was nothing more to be done or seen for an hour or two, the
afternoon was spent in a pleasant siesta in the luxurious deck-saloon;
because evening to them would be morning on that portion of Venus to
which they were directing their course, and, as Zaidie said, when she
subsided into her hammock:
It would be breakfast-time before they could get dinner.
As the _Astronef_ fell with ever-increasing velocity towards the
cloud-covered surface of Venus, the remainder of her disc, lit up by the
radiance of her sister-worlds, Mercury, Mars, and the Earth, and also by
the pale radiance of an enormous comet, which had suddenly shot into
view from behind its southern limb, became more or less visible.
Towards six o'clock it became necessary to exert nearly the whole
strength of her engines to check the velocity of her fall. By eight she
had entered the atmosphere of Venus, and was dropping slowly towards a
vast sea of sunlit cloud, out of which, on all sides, towered thousands
of snow-clad peaks, rounded summits, and widespread stretches of upland
about which the clouds swept and surged like the silent billows of some
vast ocean in Ghostland.
"I thought so!" said Redgrave, when the propellers had begun to revolve
and Murgatroyd had taken his place in the conning-tower. "A very dense
atmosphere loaded with clouds. There's the Sun just rising, so your
ladyship's wishes are duly obeyed."
"And doesn't it seem nice and homelike to see him rising through an
atmosphere above the clouds again? It doesn't look a bit like the same
sort of dear old Sun just blazing like a red-hot Moon among a lot of
white-hot stars and planets. Look, aren't those peaks lovely, and that
cloud-sea?--why, for all the world we might be in a balloon above the
Rockies or the Alps. And see," she continued, pointing to one of the
thermometers fixed outside the glass dome which covered the upper deck,
"it's only sixty-five even here. I wonder if we can breathe this air,
and--oh--I do wonder what we shall see on the other side of those
clouds."
"You shall have both questions answered in a few minutes," replied
Redgrave, going towards the conning-tower. "To begin with, I think we'll
land on that big snow-dome yonder, and do a little exploring. Where
there are snow and clouds there is moisture, and where there is moisture
a man ought to be able to breathe."
[Illustration: _Snow peaks and cloud seas._]
The _Astronef_, still falling, but now easily under the command of the
helmsman, shot forwards and downwards towards a vast dome of snow which,
rising some two thousand feet above the cloud-sea, shone with dazzling
brilliance in the light of the rising Sun. She landed just above the
edge of the clouds. Meanwhile they had put on their breathing-suits, and
Redgrave had seen that the air chamber through which they had to pass
from their own little world into the new ones that they visited was in
working order. When the outer door was opened and the ladder lowered he
stood aside, as he had done on the Moon, and Zaidie's was the first
human foot which made an imprint on the virgin snows of Venus.
The first thing Redgrave did was to raise the visor of his helmet and
taste the air of the new world. It was cool, and fresh, and sweet, and
the first draught of it sent the blood tingling and dancing through his
veins. Perfect as the arrangements of the _Astronef_ were in this
respect, the air of Venus tasted like clear running spring water would
have done to a man who had been drinking filtered water for several
days. He threw the visor right up and motioned to Zaidie to do the same.
She obeyed, and, after drawing a long breath, she said:
"That's glorious! It's like wine after water, and rather stagnant water
too. But what a world, snow-peaks and cloud-seas, islands of ice and
snow in an ocean of mist! Just look at them! Did you ever see anything
so lovely and unearthly in your life? I wonder how high this mountain
is, and what there is on the other side of the clouds. Isn't the air
delicious! Not a bit too cold after all--but, still, I think we may as
well go back and put on something more becoming. I shouldn't quite like
the ladies of Venus to see me dressed like a diver."
"Come along, then," laughed Lenox, as he turned back towards the vessel.
"That's just like a woman. You're about a hundred and fifty million
miles away from Broadway or Regent Street. You are standing on the top
of a snow mountain above the clouds of Venus, and the moment that you
find the air is fit to breathe you begin thinking about dress. How do
you know that the inhabitants of Venus, if there are any, dress at all?"
"What nonsense! Of course they do--at least, if they are anything like
us."
As soon as they got back on board the _Astronef_ and had taken their
breathing-dresses off, Redgrave and the old engineer, who appeared to
take no visible interest in their new surroundings, threw open all the
sliding doors on the upper and lower decks so that the vessel might be
thoroughly ventilated by the fresh sweet air. Then a gentle repulsion
was applied to the huge snow mass on which the _Astronef_ rested. She
rose a couple of hundred feet, her propellers began to whirl round, and
Redgrave steered her out towards the centre of the vast cloud-sea which
was almost surrounded by a thousand glittering peaks of ice and domes of
snow.
"I think we may as well put off dinner, or breakfast as it will be now,
until we see what the world below is like," he said to Zaidie, who was
standing beside him on the conning-tower.
"Oh, never mind about eating just now, this is altogether too wonderful
to be missed for the sake of ordinary meat and drink. Let's go down and
see what there is on the other side."
He sent a message down the speaking tube to Murgatroyd, who was below
among his beloved engines, and the next moment sun and clouds and
ice-peaks had disappeared and nothing was visible save the
all-enveloping silver-grey mist.
For several minutes they remained silent, watching and wondering what
they would find beneath the veil which hid the surface of Venus from
their view. Then the mist thinned out and broke up into patches which
drifted past them as they descended on their downward slanting course.
Below them they saw vast, ghostly shapes of mountains and valleys, lakes
and rivers, continents, islands, and seas. Every moment these became
more and more distinct, and soon they were in full view of the most
marvellous landscape that human eyes had ever beheld. The distances were
tremendous. Mountains, compared with which the Alps or even the Andes
would have seemed mere hillocks, towered up out of the vast depths
beneath them.
Up to the lower edge of the all-covering cloud-sea they were clad with a
golden-yellow vegetation, fields and forests, open, smiling valleys, and
deep, dark ravines through which a thousand torrents thundered down from
the eternal snows beyond, to spread themselves out in rivers and lakes
in the valleys and plains which lay many thousands of feet below.
"What a lovely world!" said Zaidie, as she at last found her voice after
what was almost a stupor of speechless wonder and admiration. "And the
light! Did you ever see anything like it? It's neither moonlight nor
sunlight. See, there are no shadows down there, it's just all lovely
silvery twilight. Lenox, if Venus is as nice as she looks from here I
don't think I shall want to go back. It reminds me of Tennyson's Lotus
Eaters, 'the Land where it is always afternoon.'
"I think you are right after all. We are thirty million miles nearer to
the Sun than we were on the Earth, and the light and heat have to filter
through those clouds. They are not at all like Earth clouds from this
side. It's the other way about. The silver lining is on this side. Look,
there isn't a black or a brown one, or even a grey one, within sight.
They are just like a thin mist, lighted by a million of electric lamps.
It's a delicious world, and if it isn't inhabited by angels it ought to
be."