This was Venus, planet of Love, favourite 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 miles drop from three hundred miles on down, and temperature readings for shorter intervals, and we had dropped the small probe. The data we had got 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 bitching?'
'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?'
'You'd rather not know.'
He meant it. His voice was a mechanical, inhuman monotone; he wasn't making the extra effort to get human expression out of his 'prosthetic' vocal apparatus. Only a severe shock would affect him that way.
'I can take it,' I said.
'Okay. I can't feel anything in the ramjet controls. Feels like I've just had a spinal anaesthetic.'
The cold in the cabin drained into me, all of it. 'See if you can send motor impulses the other way. You could run the rams by guess-and-hope even if you can't feel them.'
'Okay.' One split second later, 'They don't. Nothing happens. Good thinking though.'
I tried to think of something to say while I untied myself from the couch. What came out was, 'It's been a pleasure knowing you, Eric. I've liked being half of this team, and I still do.'
'Get maudlin later. Right now, start checking my attachments. Carefully.'
)
Written three years before "2001: A Space Odyssey," this story similarly explores the psychological confrontation of a man and his spaceship's controlling intelligence system. Instead of an intelligent computer, Howie's ship is controlled by a man's brain and nervous system--a fellow spaceman named Eric who was critically injured in an accident. They are in orbit above Venus on a fact-finding mission when Eric reports the alarming news that he is unable to 'feel' the ramjets they need to get home. Upon investigation, Howie finds nothing wrong with the jets and begins to suspect that Eric is suffering from a paralyzing psychosis.
