That’s impossible. Her mind raced. If that’s characteristic of the whole surface, everything is turned on its head. No plate tectonics, and no vulcanism either?

The enigmatic crater passed out of view as the probe descended.

“Ten minutes from pericenter,” Stone said. The mission commander was watching his instruments, York saw, not the images from the probe, the first pictures of the surface of Venus.

The probe was heading for a rough plain, broken up with large, jagged rocks. She saw some evidence of winds: dust streaks, scouring, a couple of flattened dunes. The air isn’t always so sluggish, then.

“Coming on in,” Gershon said. “Approach speed twenty-one feet per. Thirty seconds.”

Around fifteen miles per hour. Like a slow car crash: hard, but survivable.

“Nine. Eight…”

The ground rocked upward, spinning toward the camera; York, trying to pick out features, felt oddly dizzy.

“Two. One.”

The picture fuzzed over briefly, then cleared.

She saw a steady image, a rocky plain, no longer rotating. The plain tipped a little, as the probe settled on its side.

Gershon whooped. “Touchdown!” He pumped his arms, football-style. “Welcome to a pleasant spring day on Venus. Air pressure is a soothing ninety-one atmospheres. Temperatures today will peak at a frisky 880 degrees Fahrenheit…”

Hot enough to melt lead.

York bent to stare into the screen. The image was distorted into a kind of bow by the fish-eye lens. She couldn’t see the horizon; the visibility couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards. The sun was invisible, but the sky was bright. Like a smoggy day in L.A.

Live, from the surface of Venus. York felt a surge of affection for the tough little superprobe.

The land was flattened, shattered into plates, littered with scattered rocks. The plates were reddish brown, and looked vaguely shiny. The light was strong enough for some of the rocks to cast a sharp shadow. The surface looked like clay that had been baked, carelessly, in an oven that was set too high: cracked, fractured.

Could be basaltic. Volcanic. Probably highly alkaline. And those plates look almost sedimentary. But there’s no water here! Laid down by deposition from the air, then? No. Maybe a volcanic origin is more likely. And where the hell did that surface rubble come from? What erosion mechanisms are available? The wind, the acidic atmosphere?

Without plate tectonics or vulcanism, how the hell does the interior heat escape?

Maybe it doesn’t escape, she speculated wildly. Maybe the heat gets trapped, under a stable surface, rather than leaking out steadily, as on Earth… building up until it reaches a point where the lithosphere can’t contain it.

She thought it through. Periodically the surface would melt, suddenly, dramatically, all over the planet, as all that trapped heat escaped. The whole damn planet would resurface itself at once. Catastrophic vulcanism, maybe once every half billion years: hundreds of millions of years worth of geology, crammed into a few millennia.

She felt breathless. The scenario seemed outrageous. A hell of a hypothesis to spin out of one goddamn impact crater, Natalie.

But what other explanation could there be for that pristine wound on the Maxwell Montes?

She wondered if she should publish this. Maybe even radio home a paper, before they got to Mars.

Without corroborative proof, though? Peer reviews, to which she’d have to submit any formal write-up of the notion, weren’t often kind. I’d be laughed out of court. The dippy Space Lady from California…

The distribution of impact craters would be significant, she thought quickly. Corroborative, in fact. On Mars and the Moon there was a clustering of craters, in certain regions. On Mars, you had one young hemisphere, smooth and unblemished, the other heavily cratered, ancient. The same on the Moon, with its separation into the younger seas and the ancient highlands.

Here — if I’m right — it would be different. The craters must be uniformly distributed, right across the planet’s surface.

All we’d need is a reasonably detailed global map of the surface, and to do a simple crater count. Then we’d know.

But that map wasn’t available, and it wasn’t going to be. Not in her lifetime.

The radar mapping from this flyby would be the most detailed ever performed, but would be confined to a strip wrapped around one side of the planet. Any crater counts based on that were going to be tentative, at best.

She slammed her fist into a working surface. Stone glanced at her, surprised; she kept her eyes averted from his face.

Damn. We shouldn’t be here! A fifty-million-buck radar mapper in polar orbit would settle this. And they spent more than that on the backup john for this tin can of ours.

For fifteen years, most of NASA’s budget had been sucked into manned spaceflight. Unmanned projects had been subordinated to the needs of the Mars mission or cut altogether. They had lost a gravity-assist flight to Venus and Mercury, asteroid and comet encounters, Grand Tour probes to the outer planets. The Large Space Telescope, a big Earth-orbital eye, had also been axed.

Sure, humans were on the way to Mars. But humanity knew nothing of the rest of the Solar System it hadn’t known in 1957: the moons of Jupiter and Saturn remained points of light in the sky, the disks and rings of the giant worlds a telescopic blur.

And I’m cooperating with it, she thought sourly. After all my great moral pronouncements, I’ve finished up as guilty as the rest. Maybe, because I know better, more so.

The screen filled up with static.

The probe had imploded, crushed by the pressure.

York checked the time. It was just fifty-five seconds after landing.

Gershon pushed himself away from his console. “Well, there you have it. Venus is, officially, a shit-hole.”

And then, suddenly, the cabin grew perceptibly darker. She glanced up. As Ares sailed into the shadow of Venus, the last crescent sliver thinned out into a hoop of light — it was suddenly multicolored (I hope the cameras are getting this) — and then it faded and died away.

There was a hole in space, above Ares: it was the blackness of the cloud decks of Venus, empty, scorching, lifeless.

York returned to her station. “The TV mosaics have started,” she reported. “And the planetary strip photography. Everything’s nominal on the pallet.”

“Pericenter,” Stone said abruptly. “How about that. Mission elapsed time one seventy-one days, fourteen hours, twenty-four minutes.” He checked his displays. “It’s the eighth of September 1985, and here we are at Venus, guys. Distance to the surface three thousand, one hundred, fifty-five miles and change. We’ve come a hundred and seven million miles from Earth, and we’re within fifty miles of the nominal trajectory. Damn fine shooting.”

York looked up, through the little science viewport above her. Her eyes seemed to have grown dark-adapted, and she thought she could see something of the cloud tops, presumably illuminated by starlight. The cloud-world looked like a huge, milky, pregnant belly, protruding toward her.

There was a flash, somewhere beneath the clouds, like a lightbulb exploding under cotton wool.

She pushed up to the viewport and stared out, “Jesus Christ.”

“What?” Stone asked.

I recognize that, from Earth orbit. “I just saw lightning, under the clouds.”

Gershon looked at her. “That’s ridiculous. You get thunder and lightning on Earth from large particles, like ice crystals, being shipped around by updrafts. Venus has a layer of stew for air. There’s no evidence for updrafts or large particles. So how the hell can there be lightning?”

It happened again: a flash, roughly elliptical, that must have covered tens of square miles. For an instant she could see detailed structure in the gray clouds, layers and banks streaked out in the direction of rotation, illuminated from below.