"For what?"
"Contaminants. My body is hydrogen oxide with contaminants. If the contaminants in the helium are complex enough it might be alive."
"There are plenty of other substances," said Eric, "but I can't analyze them well enough. We'll have to rush this stuff back to Earth while our freezers can keep it cool."
I got up.
"Take, off right now?"
"Yes, I guess so. We could use another sample, but we're just as likely to wait here while this one deteriorates."
"Okay, I'm strapping down now. Eric?"
"Yeah? Takeoff in fifteen minutes, we have to wait for the ion-drive section. You can get up."
"No, I'll wait. Eric, I hope it isn't alive. I'd rather it was just helium II acting like it's supposed to act."
"Why? Don't you want to be famous, like me?"
"Oh, sure, but I hate to think of life out there. It's just too alien. Too cold. Even on Pluto you could not make life out of helium II."
"It could be migrant, moving to stay on the night side of the pre-dawn crescent. Pluto's day is long enough for that. You're right, though; it doesn't get colder than this even between the stars. Luckily I don't have much imagination."
Twenty minutes later we took off. Beneath us all was darkness and only Eric, hooked into the radar, could see the ice dome contracting until all of it was visible: the vast layered ice cap that covers the coldest spot in the solar system, where midnight crosses the equator on the black back of Mercury.
---------------------------------------------------
This, my first story, became obsolete before it was printed. Mercury does have an atmosphere, and rotates once for every two of its years.
The sequel which follows fared somewhat better.
LN ---------------------------------------------------
BECALMED IN HELL
I could feel the heat hovering outside. In the cabin it was bright and dry and cool, almost too cool, like a modern office building in the dead of the summer. Beyond the two small windows it was as black as it ever gets in the solar system, and hot enough to melt lead, at a pressure equivalent to three hundred feet beneath the ocean.
"There goes a fish," I said, just to break the monotony.
"So how's it cooked?"
"Can't tell. It seems to be leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Fried? Imagine that, Eric! A fried jellyfish." Eric sighed noisily.
"Do I have to?"
"You have to. Only way you'll see anything worthwhile in this--this--" Soup? Fog? Boiling maple syrup?
"Searing black calm."
"Right."
"Someone dreamed up that phrase when I was a kid, just after the news of the Mariner II probe. An eternal searing black calm, hot as a kiln, under an atmosphere thick enough to keep any light or any breath of wind from ever reaching the surface."
I shivered.
"What's the outside temperature now?"
"You'd rather not know. You've always had too much imagination, Howie."
"I can take it, Doc."
"Six hundred and twelve degrees."
"I can't take it, Doc!"
This was Venus, Planet of Love, favorite of the science-fiction writers of three decades ago. Our ship hung below the Earth to-Venus hydrogen fuel tank, twenty miles up and all but motionless in the syrupy air. The tank, nearly empty now, made an excellent blimp. It would keep us aloft as long as the internal pressure matched the external. That was Eric's job, to regulate the tank's pressure by regulating the temperature of the hydrogen gas. We had collected air samples after each ten mile drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had gotten from the surface merely confirmed in detail our previous knowledge of the hottest world in the solar system.
"Temperature just went up to six-thirteen," said Eric.
"Look, are you through hitching?"
"For the moment."
"Good. Strap down. We're taking off."
"Oh frabjous day!" I started untangling the crash webbing over my couch.
"We've done everything we came to do. Haven't we?"
"Am I arguing? Look, I'm strapped down."
"Yeah."
I knew why he was reluctant to leave. I felt a touch of it myself. We'd spent four months getting to Venus in order to spend a week circling her and less than two days in her upper atmosphere, and it seemed a terrible waste of time.
But he was taking too long.
"What's the trouble, Eric?"
