Dishwasher On Venus

By Jeff Bagato

Continuing his quest to wash dishes on every inhabited colony in the solar system, Javelin Praecox heads for Venus. There, a small scientific expedition to study weather and extremophile bacteria has encountered the unexpected—a new alien species! The mushroom-shaped Venusians come in a variety of colors and sexes, speak a strange pidgin English, love blueberry pancakes and pickled eggs, and make a magic elixir called lime wine. These new creatures also present several mysteries. Where did they come from? How did they evolve? Why are some crew members collecting their mucous-like secretions? And what can Javy—or the tiny, innocent Venusians—do against the gangsters invading the outpost? Once again, a simple dishing gig turns out to be more dangerous, more exciting, and more strange than Javy bargained for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781329946996

Book preview

Dishwasher On Venus

Dishwasher On Venus

by Jeff Bagato

Copyright page

Dishwasher On Venus

Copyright 2015 by Jeff Bagato

ISBN: 978-1-329-94699-6 eBook

Rights

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Publisher

Published by

Panic Research Press

PO Box 2482

Merrifield, VA 22116

www.panicresearch.com

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Chapter 1

The air pressure alarm blared in the small cabin of the spherical spacecraft heading through the atmosphere of the planet of love. I had been asleep, but fear scrubbed it away. The briefing sheet on Venus noted that the atmospheric pressure was 92 times that of Earth, like going down one kilometer, or just over half a mile, under the ocean. You’d need a bathysphere to go down that far, and supposedly the capsule was built like one, but if there’s one constant in space, it’s that malfunctions happen. Sometimes that rule is phrased far more colorfully, but I wasn’t in the mood for it.

The capsule’s engineer, technician and pilot, a guy named Ogleford, clumped across the room directly toward me, raising a ball peen hammer. I ducked just as he smacked the flat head of the tool against the side instrument panel above my head. The alarm cut off immediately.

Damn pressure gauges always ding out in this thing. Gotta be a fault in a ship somewhere, might as well be a refried reading.

So the pressure’s fine? I stammered.

On this tub? You betcha. Damn thing’s built to take far worse. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t hear the freepin’ alarm. We’d be squished to a meat jelly sandwich between two slices of three-inch tungsten carbide.

I shuddered. I’m a dishwasher, not Buck Rogers. My professional ambition is to wash dishes everywhere there’s a human settlement. I last worked on Mars, and things had gotten a little too serious, living with my girlfriend on her huggie commune and serving as advisor to the Bureau of Indigenous Martian Life and Culture, in addition to holding down a dishing gig at the Maradise Found resort. A dishwasher likes to keep it simple. Besides, I wasn’t getting any further along in my goal.

I was going a little stir crazy on Mars, feeling like I was stagnating professionally. Then I saw a small notice in the employment section of the Martian Web News internet site:

Hell needs a dishwasher and kitchen aide. Ishtar Base, Venus, serving exobiological survey team. If you can’t handle the pressure, stay out of the kitchen. Immed. avail. Televox Kino-6399.

As soon as I sent them a message with my resume attached, Ogleford had responded with a job offer. Maybe it’s hard to get good people to work in Hell.

I caught a passenger cruiser to Earth orbit and from there picked up the supply shuttle for the Venus expedition. The shuttle docked at a space station orbiting Venus and dropped me off there to wait for a bathysphere to come up from the surface. I was left alone for three days, during which I wondered if the orbiting station counted as inhabited if no one was actually living there but me, and if dumping empty food tubes in the recycler counted as doing dishes.

I also read up on the planet and the expedition. The scientific team’s main purpose was to study the swarms of extremophile bacteria living in the middle cloud area below the sulfuric acid zone and above the hot, barren planet’s surface. Basically, the microbes had found the most hospitable niche in Hell, where the pressure, heat and acidity were lowest. Which wasn’t saying much. It was a place only a super-tough microbe could call home.

Because the little bugs lived in the clouds, subject to the high Venusian winds and deadly atmospheric conditions, the expedition’s secondary purpose was to study the meteorology of the planet of love.

It might have made sense to float the team in a dirigible, where they could examine their subjects eye-to-eye, so to speak, except what the pressure didn’t crumple, the wind would have blown away. So the base was comprised of a series of bathyspheres linked by heavy tubing, all set into the Venusian bedrock. Essentially, they had landlocked ten ships like the one carrying me down to the surface of Hell. Two more ships served as relays to retrieve supplies and personnel from the space station.

It’s ironic that the planet named for the goddess of love more resembles mythical depictions of the underworld of punishment and damnation. Surface temperatures of 800 degrees Fahrenheit, 500 mile per hour winds, intense pressure 90 times that of Earth’s surface, carbon dioxide atmosphere, active volcanoes. The place presented half a dozen ways to kill a man. I just hoped the danger would stay outside the dishing area.

The closer we got to the surface, the more the capsule groaned and creaked. Suddenly, a terrible shrieking noise erupted—not the pressure alarm, but something new. I yelled across the wide circular room to Ogleford.

What’s that?

Don’t worry, kid. It’s just the asbestos door seal burning away. Always gets a little sulfuric acid in it.

That door sounds like it’s a little worried.

Naw. It’s got six inches of seal to melt away. Once it gets through the first five, the stuff crystallizes into a tougher barrier than before.

So it was designed to disintegrate as a way of making it more effective?

Genius, eh?

Yeah, sure. I was beginning to think taking this assignment wasn’t such a good idea, goal be damned.

Chapter 2

The survey team consisted of eight persons: six scientists and two technicians. Dr. Fleegue MacFenster, a pioneer of Venusian meteorology extremely well respected in his field, headed the expedition. Dr. Horich Ulrumpen and Dr. Khanathan Pribattal specialized in terrestrial extremophile microbes, while Dr. Capstone Flith and his graduate student Janalee Mossicon focused on exobiology in general. Dr. Heidi Klopperton studied extraterrestrial winds and related weather systems; it was an especially big deal for her to be on the ground, considering the intensity of the Venusian winds, and that comparable systems on Saturn and Jupiter defied current limits for habitation. I had already met Ogleford, who doubled as technician and chef. The other systems engineer was Jim Dwark.

Most of these folks I knew by name only for the first week or so. Typical of other scientists I’d met, the ones here were locked in their respective labs, pouring over their instruments, charts, and statistics. It turns out they had very little need for a dishwasher at all. For the most part, only Ogleford and Dwark added dishes to my sink on a daily basis, while most of the others simply heated up tins of soup, stew, or lo mein in their labs and rinsed their dishes with a little water mixed with isopropyl alcohol.

The women proved the exception to this rule. Dr. Klopperton insisted on truly clean dishes, although she prepared her own meals and brought out dishes once a week, while Janalee occasionally ferried out the dishes she and Flith used and took in some of Ogleford’s admittedly mediocre cooking. Canned soup would probably have been tastier. But people don’t come to Hell for the chow.

When I arrived, everyone was holed up in their quarters. So my first acquaintances were the biggest surprise. Nobody had prepared me for the gremlins, the other native Venusians.

Roughly two and a half years after the expedition was manned, the gremlins showed up, Ogleford told me as we toured the kitchen. The scientists had expected to study distant clouds of bacteria. Instead, they got full-fledged creatures running around on their little pseudopods, chattering away, and getting underfoot. The kitchen was crowded with them. In some way, they looked a bit like two-foot high mushrooms, with a large round cap attached to a conical base that flared out to a snail-like foot. Five eyes were set along the front edge of the flattened dome, and