But there are tricks to that, too. Navigation over Venus takes 3-D skills. It's easy enough to proceed from Point A to Point B on the surface. Your transponders will link you to the radio range and map your position continuously on the charts. What's hard is to find the right altitude. That takes experience and maybe intuition, and that's why my airbody and I were worth a million dollars to people like Boyce Cochenour.
By then we were at the airbody, and the telescoping snout from the crawler was poking out to its lock. Cochenour was staring out the bull's-eye. "It doesn't have any wings!" he shouted, as though I was cheating him.
"It doesn't have sails or snow chains either," I shouted back. "Get aboard if you want to talk! It'll be easier in the airbody."
We climbed through the little snout, I unlocked the entrance, and we got aboard without much trouble.
We didn't even have the kind of trouble that I might have made for myself. You see, an airbody is a big thing on Venus. I was damn lucky to have been able to acquire it, and, well, I won't beat around the bush, you could say I loved it. Mine could have held ten people, without equipment. With what Sub Vastra's outfitting shop had sold us and Local 88 had certified as essential to have on board, it was crowded with just the three of us.
I was prepared for at least sarcasm. But Cochenour merely looked around long enough to find the best bunk, strode over to it, and claimed it as his. The girl was acting like a good sport about all the inconveniences. And there I was, left with my glands charged up for hostile criticism, and nobody criticizing.
It was a lot quieter inside the airbody. You could hear the noise of the winds right enough, but it was only annoying. I passed Out high-filter earplugs, and with them in place the noise was hardly even annoying.
"Sit down and strap in," I ordered, and when they were stowed away I took off.
At ninety thousand millibars, wings aren't just useless, they're poison. My airbody had all the lift it needed, built right into its seashell-shaped hull. I fed the double fuel mixture into the thermojets, we bounced across the reasonably flat ground at the edge of the spacepad (it was bulldozed once a week, which is how it stayed reasonably flat), and we were zooming off into the wild yellow-green yonder-a moment later, into the wild brown-gray yonder-after a run of no more than fifty meters.
Cochenour had fastened his harness loosely to be comfortable.
I enjoyed hearing him yell as he was thrown about in the savage,
short-period turbulence. It wouldn't kill him, and it only lasted for
a few moments. At a thousand meters I found our part of Venus's
semipermanent atmospheric inversion, and the turbulence dropped
to where I could take off my belt and stand.
I took the plugs out of my ears and motioned to Cochenour and the girl to do the same.
He was rubbing his head where he'd bounced into an overhead chart rack, but he was grinning a little. "Pretty exciting," he admitted, fumbling in his pocket. "All right if I smoke?"
"They're your lungs."
He grinned more widely. "They are now," he agreed. "Say, why didn't you give us those earplugs while we were in the tractor?"
There is, as you might say, a tide in the affairs of guides, where you either let them flood you with questions and then spend the whole time explaining what that funny little dial means when it
turns red... or you keep your mouth shut and go on to do your work and make your fortune. What it came down to was a choice:
Was I going to come out of this liking Cochenour and his girlfriend, or not?
If I was, I should try to be civil to them. More than civil. Living, the three of us, for three weeks in a space about as big as an apartment kitchenette meant that everybody would have to work real hard at being nice to everybody else, if we were going to come back without total hatred. And as I was the one who was being paid to be nice, I should be the one to set an example.
On the other hand, the Cochenours of the world are sometimes just not likable. If that was going to be the case, the less talk the better, and I should slide questions like that off with something like, "I forgot."
But he hadn't actually gone out of his way to be unpleasant. The girl had even actually attempted friendliness. So I opted for courtesy. "Well, that's an interesting thing. You see, you hear by differences in pressure. While the airbody was taking off, the plugs filtered out part of the sound-the pressure waves-but when I yelled at you to belt up, the plugs passed the overpressure of my voice and you could hear easily enough. However, there's a limit. Past about a hundred and twenty decibels-that's a unit of sound-"
"I know what a decibel is," Cochenour growled.
