Beneath the bandages, my new eyes stared blindly into the darkness the bandages forced on them. They itched.
Cory and I were boosted into orbit by the Saturn 16, the one all the commentators called the Empire State Building booster. It was a big beast, all right. It made the old Saturn 1-B look like a Redstone, and it took off from a bunker two hundred feet deep - it had to, to keep from taking half of Cape Kennedy with it.
We swung around the earth, verifying all our systems, and then did our inject. Headed out for Venus. We left a Senate fighting over an appropriations bill for further deep-space exploration, and a bunch of NASA people praying that we would find something, anything.
'It don't matter what,' Don Lovinger, Project Zeus's private whiz kid, was very fond of saying when he'd had a few. 'You got all the gadgets, plus five souped-up TV cameras and a nifty little telescope with a zillion lenses and filters. Find some gold or platinum. Better yet, find some nice, dumb little blue men for us to study and exploit and feel superior to. Anything. Even the ghost of Howdy Doody would be a start.'
Cory and I were anxious enough to oblige, if we could. Nothing had worked for the deep-space programme. From Borman, Anders, and Lovell, who orbited the moon in '6~ and found an empty, forbidding world that looked like dirty beach sand, to Markhan and Jacks, who touched down on Mars eleven years later to find an arid wasteland of frozen sand and a few struggling lichens, the deep-space programme had been an expensive bust. And there had been casualties - Pederson and Lederer, eternally circling the sun when all at once nothing worked on the second-to4ast Apollo flight. John Davis, whose little orbiting observatory was holed by a meteoroid in a one-in-a-thousand fluke. No, the space programme was hardly swinging along. The way things looked, the Venus orbit might be our last chance to say we told you so.
It was sixteen days out - we ate a lot of concentrates, played a lot of gin, and swapped a cold back and forth - and from the tech side it was a milk run. We lost an air-moisture converter on the third day out, went to backup, and that was all, except for flits and nats, until re-entry. We watched Venus grow from a star to a quarter to a milky crystal ball, swapped jokes with Huntsville Control, listened to tapes of Wagner and the Beatles, tended to automated experiments which had to do with everything from measurements of the solar wind to deep-space navigation. We did two midcourse corrections, both of them infinitesimal, and nine days into the flight Cory went outside and banged on the retractable DESA until it decided to operate. There was nothing else out of the ordinary until.
'DESA,' Richard said. 'What's that?'
'An experiment that didn't pan out. NASA-ese for Deep Space Antenna - we were broadcasting pi in high-frequency pulses for anyone who cared to listen.' I rubbed my fingers against my pants, but it was no good; if anything, it made it worse. 'Same idea as that radio telescope in West Virginia - you know, the one that listens to the stars. Only instead of listening, we were transmitting, primarily to the deeper space planets - Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. If there's any intelligent life out there, it was taking a nap.'
'Only Cory went out?'
'Yes. And if he brought in any interstellar plague, the telemetry didn't show it.'
'Still -'
'It doesn't matter,' I said crossly. 'Only the here and now matters. They killed the boy last night, Richard. It wasn't a nice thing to watch - or feel. His head. . . it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.'
'Finish the story,' he said.
I laughed hollowly. 'What's to tell?'
We went into an eccentric orbit around the planet. It was radical and deteriorating, three twenty by seventy-six miles. That was on the first swing. The second swing our apogee was even higher, the perigree lower. We had a max of four orbits. We made all four. We got a good look at the planet. Also over six hundred stills and God knows how many feet of film.