The Raft

by Sean Huxter

The cry screeched to distortion levels in my helmet, making it hard to tell who had yelled. I was thrown across the cabin and landed with an ungracious thud against a porthole. Davis careened towards me, missing me by inches, but Rousseau was held fast in his harness at the wheel. I thought Davis had hit the wall rather hard, but he said he was alright. Whatever it was that had struck us had done so just when Davis and I were switching co-pilot positions, so we were both unharnessed. We were lucky not to have been killed.
"Ok, we have major problems!" I reached up to turn my phones down to reduce the hissing overmodulation of Rousseau's voice which was filling my head. I did a rough check of my environment suit and found it intact. No leaks. Davis did the same, and his was also unbroken. Then we put our minds to finding out what the hell had just happened.
"It didn't show on the scope," Rousseau yelled.
"What didn't?" I asked.
"Space debris. Meteor. I don't know. It's still not on scope, but it struck the main vane."
Shit. "How much damage is there?" I was already looking through the aft porthole at the vane. It was twisted entirely away and tumbling off into space. The stars were spinning wildly. "It's gone!" I screamed.
"Christ!" That was Davis. He had himself strapped back into the co-pilot seat while I grabbed for the navigation console. I strapped myself in as he tried to help Rousseau steady the ship. I looked at the scanner to find our position. The impact had thrown us significantly off course toward the nearest body -- Venus.
"Communications are OK." I said, after scanning the frequencies. "I'm sending out a mayday."
"Roger," Rousseau said. "Alert the nearest vessel to see if they can pick us up."
"Roger." I contacted the Hera, contracted out to Tridentia, the largest mining consortium in the business. Their ships made trips from Mercury to Earth twice a month and were our best hope of rescue. Captain Burton answered and told me that his ship would be passing Venus in three days and if we could obtain an orbit they would pick us up.
"Attempt an orbit, Rousseau," Davis said. After the initial panic, our voices took more normal tones.
"Roger. Mitchell, hand off the orbital data as soon as you get it."
I rogered that and went to work. Venus was still only a bright star on visual, but on scanners it loomed large under high magnification. I calculated the orbital dynamics and transferred the data to the pilot computer. After ten minutes of struggling with the controls, Rousseau announced that he could not stop our spinning and that orbit was impossible. The attitude thrusters were damaged. Most of the fuel had evaporated into space. I volunteered an EVA repair, but both he and Davis agreed that the damage was irreparable. Then Davis suggested I find a place to put down.
My heart leapt to my throat. I found it hard to breathe. The spinning made me nauseous.
"Take it easy, Mitchell. We've got the lifecraft and supplies to survive for almost a week."
Oh god. My mind grew numb with the reality of it all. It tried to take me out of reality, back to a safe place and time. For a moment I succumbed to the temptation and remembered:

We were celebrating at my ranch. The champagne was flowing freely and our friends and families were there. They thought we were crazy but drank the expensive champagne anyway and wished us luck. The ultra-light had taken us three years to build. It was a hobby kit we had purchased from Astronaut Magazine. My sister, Janie, never did take us seriously. She thought we were an odd team, and she was right. Rousseau was a shuttle pilot for the Uranus mining project, so that made him a natural. But Davis was an architect and I was a biology professor. We had met at a conference on amateur space flight. It seemed we each had an intense interest in the subject and we became close friends.
Rousseau's experience and knowledge of space travel gave him a natural curiosity about what it would be like to build his own ultra-light and fly it. Davis' architectural business simply fed him money so he could spend his spare time designing space craft as a hobby. And my scientific background, even though it was richest in biology, fuelled my interest in visiting another planet. My dream was to visit Venus and experience the plant life found there in recent decades.
The ultra-light was never intended for a landing, however. Planetfall kits were extremely expensive and there were only a few in existence. I would have to be satisfied with a fly-by. Or so I thought.
The day after the party our ultra-light was loaded aboard a cargo shuttle and we were off. My sister still didn't think we would go through with it. I guess she changed her mind when the shuttle launched with us and our contraption in it.

I felt Davis' arm around my throat, pulling me toward the lifecraft. He closed the door behind him and I fumbled with my crash webbing. When I was secured, Davis checked on me again to make sure. Then he checked Rousseau's rigging.
We did an emergency systems check and found it all in order. A fail-safe radio, feeder packs, spare oxygen, an electrical generator, and a small but versatile tool kit we jokingly referred to as the Swiss Army Knife. Not funny at the moment. It was there and Davis closed the case. He strapped himself in. We faced each other in the small cylindrical lifecraft. For a while no one spoke.
Rousseau was first. "Ok, is everyone in and secure?"
We all nodded. We ran through the checklist and drill as we had so frequently practised. When we were sure we were ready, Rousseau reached out for the release lever. He looked at us each for a long moment. We each nodded, and Rousseau pulled.
The spinning stopped as the lifecraft cleared the launch tube. Computerized thrusters stabilized our attitude and set our course for Venus. I got back to work. I found a flat area of Venus that we could set down near and hoped it would not be too harsh a climate.
Venus' violent surface was a misleading disguise. Underneath the swirling blanket of clouds was a calm atmosphere made up mostly of carbon dioxide, with droplets of sulphuric acid in the upper clouds. But the surface temperatures were high. Even higher than Mercury's at times. If our suits failed, we would meet our ends very quickly. The die was cast now, and we waited for what was bound to be a turbulent atmospheric entry. I didn't want to be around to experience it, so I hit the "sleep" switch on my wrist. I saw both Davis and Rousseau do the same. The oxygen/nitrogen mixture in my suit altered subtlely and I was soon asleep. I think I wondered if I would ever awaken.

I did. Thank whoever it was that designed the lifecraft kit, we had survived the landing. Davis shook me. I looked at him and Rousseau. They were already out of their crash webbing and had the pieces of the survival kit on their shoulders. They were handing me a case. I unlocked my webbing and stood. There was not much room in the pod, so we were eager to get out. We checked each others' environment suits for tears and found none. Rousseau twisted the door valve open. We let the air leak in slowly, since the pod was pressurized with an atmosphere of its own. As soon as the hissing began, we heard Rousseau scream!
The spray of atmosphere poured into the lifecraft and within seconds Rousseau was in convulsions. Davis sealed the door valve instantly. I rolled Rousseau over and tried to find a tear. It took me at least a minute, but I finally found a centimetre-long rip in his suit under one arm. Although the atmosphere was no longer leaking into our pod, it was too late to save Rousseau. He was already dead when I rolled him back over. His face was an unpleasant sight. The heat and toxicity of the atmosphere had killed him almost instantly.
We sat for a few minutes, stunned. Then Davis stood and twisted the pressure valve again. The cabin's atmosphere soon matched the outside, so he opened the door and stepped out. I think I could have sat there for an eternity, but Davis' strong arms lifted me out of my seat and pulled me out through the door.
I saw a dim, overcast landscape. Davis was pointing upward. I followed his finger and saw a network of thick cables surrounding us, stretching upwards into the clouds until it looked like some of the fine sea-ferns I used to retrieve as samples while scuba diving in college. The structure was definitely a plant. And to survive the hot surface temperatures, it had to have been a sturdy material. I recognized it of course. It was one of the things the first scientific landing party had brought back from Venus. It was missed entirely during the robot orbital exploration missions. It was a lightwood tree. I had studied it only briefly during a class in Venusian plant life, but it fascinated me. Not much was known about it, but I was consumed with the prospect of any life in the solar system so I wished to know more.
Right now, Davis had other plans. "We have to bury Rousseau. Then get on the horn and tell the Hera that we had to crash land."
We used the small spade in the Swiss Army Knife to dig a shallow grave. With the stony surface, that's all we could manage between us. The rocks were so hot some of them glowed with their own heat. We placed Rousseau down in the hole and covered him. I had to look at his face at one point, and even with the tremendous heat of the planet, I couldn't imagine anything doing that to human flesh. I had to walk away for a while and collect my thoughts. Davis didn't see Rousseau's face and I told him he was lucky.
When I returned, I pulled the fail-safe radio out of its case and turned it on. I had no trouble contacting the Hera. I told Captain Burton that we had not been able to obtain orbit, and that we had had to use a lifecraft. I told him about Rousseau.
"That's bad news," he said. "We're not equipped for a landing. We're simply a cargo transport. Shuttles fill us up and unload. We have the capacity for low orbit, but not enough fuel to effect a landing and lift-off."
"What can we do?" My voice registered my panic.
"Well, I can send for a lander, but it would take fourteen days to get here from Mercury. What's your emergency supply like?"
"We can survive for a week at most. Even with Rousseau's share of the food and oxygen, a week and a half is stretching it."
"I'd like to help, boys, but I don't know what I can do!"
"Ok, send for that lander! We can hold out!"
"Roger. I'll send for it right away. Meantime, we're passing your way in three days. Is there no way to get that lifecraft into orbit?"
"No way, Captain. It's a simple landing craft with only enough fuel to manoeuvre us down safely. Besides, it was bashed up pretty good on landing."
"Ok, boys. I'll tell base to send that lander. Perhaps they can pare it down a bit to get some more speed."
"Thanks, Captain. Thanks." I signed off and turned to Davis, who had heard the conversation.
"I guess that means we're here for a while."
"Guess so."
"And we had better conserve our strength if we want to stretch our supplies."
"Guess so."

The second day passed without incident. I had called Earth to let them know our situation. While they do have sympathy for ultra-light astronauts, they didn't have any solution to our problem. Solar Guard had no ships in the area so we were stuck relying on the lander from Mercury. While Davis was busy converting the lifecraft into a shelter, I was studying the lightwood. Davis wondered what was keeping me occupied, so he wandered my way.
"What is that thing?"
"That's a lightwood tree. I studied it in college."
"What's it made of?"
"Well, not wood. That's just a name. I don't really know. It's a very lightweight material, and very tensile. Notice that it grows upward as far as you can see."
"Yeah. I feel like Jack, and that is one enormous beanstalk!"
"Well, it only goes half-way up through the atmosphere, but that still makes it the tallest living structure in our solar system."
"Living?"
"Sure. It's a plant. Or what we have to think of as a plant. Nothing like the plants on earth, but it isn't an animal, and it is alive. Or at least, self replicating."
"What keeps it up so high? Its strength?"
"Not just that. The amazing thing about this tree is that it is so lightweight. A sample was brought back to earth, and they found that it is made up of cells, like a real tree, but that those cells are flexible and contain a vacuum."
"You're kidding."
"Nope. Somehow the cells stretch, creating a vacuum. The larger the cells stretch, the lighter the tree gets. It becomes less dense in its atmosphere. This way, it can grow up to hundreds of kilometres from its roots, and it doesn't break from the weight. Imagine an oak spread out several hundred kilometres. It would break under the weight of its own branches. This tree has solved that problem. It stretches out, and in fact, the branches are floating in the atmosphere. Like a hot-air balloon, its limbs just float there, taking as much sunlight for food as possible. It needs to spread out in order to get enough light for nourishment. In that way at least, it is similar to earth plants. Photosynthesis. Of a sort. The scientists studying it haven't been able to figure it all out yet."
"I don't guess we can eat it?" Davis grinned.
"Nope."

With the third day came bad news. We were inside the lifecraft when Captain Burton hailed us on the radio.
"Boys, I don't quite know how to tell you this. I've received a message from Mercury base and the lander is out of commission for forty-eight hours. That means it won't reach you for sixteen days."
I didn't know what to say. I looked to Davis. He shook his head, and I gulped.
"Isn't there... can't you get it going sooner?"
"Sorry, boys. Major leak in the hydraulics. It's going to take the two days to fix it, working round the clock. They know the urgency of your situation."
I thought about that for a while and looked around me. "Davis, do you think we can stretch it for sixteen days?"
Davis thought about it for a while, stood and walked away.
"Uh... Captain, I want to thank you for all you've done and..." I looked toward Davis, not knowing what else to say. We weren't going to get rescued. Lightning flashed toward the horizon, illuminating Davis' silhouette. His head was shaking slowly from side to side. The tree gave a lurch which shuddered throughout its length and slowly settled again. The reverberations would probably take an hour to fade. A thought occurred to me. Not Jack and the Beanstalk -- Robinson Crusoe!
"Captain!" My voice could not hide my elation. "Captain! What's your ETA to Venus?"
"Tomorrow, noontime."
"You said you can manage a low orbit! Does that mean you can enter the atmosphere?"
"Well, the ship is not aerodynamic, so we can't actually fly, but we could make it through the cloud cover for a pass, but we'd have to get out fast. Why?"
"I'll let you know. Stand by!"
I ran towards Davis, yelling! "I've got it! I've got it!" I realized I didn't have to yell, but I couldn't help myself!
Davis turned and looked at me as if I had more than the usual number of heads. "What's up?"
"Didn't you see what happened to the tree?"
"No."
"Lightning struck over in those hills! The tree jerked with a reflex-like action!"
"Yeah?"
"Yeah! The upper atmosphere contains sulphuric acid, right?"
"Right."
"And the land is acidic. I think I know why the tree floats!"
I ran to the tree and studied its base. In fact there were many bases, or perhaps there were several different trees. I found a young one, whose branches had not reached more than twenty meters into the air. I ran to get the Swiss Army Knife. Davis told me to slow down, we had to conserve energy if we were to last sixteen days. I laughed.
"Help me and you won't have to worry about conserving energy!"
We carried the cases to the base of the tree and I experimented with cutting the trunk. A heat torch didn't work. After much experimenting, it turned out a regular high-tolerance hacksaw worked well. As I cut through the six inch trunk, I felt a popping sensation. I couldn't hear it, because of the soundproofing in the environment suit, but I guessed it would have sounded like rice crispies after adding the milk. The cells were popping as I cut through them. Air was bursting into the vacuumed cells.
Within ten minutes, I had sawn through the trunk, and watched as the tree majestically lowered itself down to the ground. "Timber!" I cried with glee. I cut a section a foot long and carried it over to Davis who was setting up the electrical generator.
I hooked a test lead up to one end of the log with an alligator clip.
"Give it the juice, Man Friday," I cried, almost in hysterics.
"Whatever you say, Mitchell."
"Just call me Robinson!"
I hooked up the other lead to the base of the log section. Nothing happened. It sat on the ground. I looked rather nervously at Davis.
"Jack up the current," I yelled.
As Davis turned the knob, the honeycomb latticework of cells began to expand and the log began to float. Davis kept increasing the current and the log floated to the end of the test leads. When the alligator clip came loose, the log sank slowly to rest into the dust of the ground.
"Electrical potential," I cried. "The acidic atmosphere! The lightning! The tree uses that voltage difference to expand its cells and float!"
"Well, I'll be!" Davis was beginning to understand. But he hadn't quite grasped the big picture.
"Man Friday, you and I are going to build us a raft!"

We went to work right away. It took the rest of the day, but we managed to get two dozen three-meter-long logs sawn and latched together with rope from the emergency kit, and the crash webbing inside the lifecraft. We were using up oxygen faster than normal, but if this failed, we were dead anyway. We cut several more logs to build a railing around the platform, and found that with some extra effort, a tongue-in-groove structure worked best. We were running out of fastening methods. We lashed the Swiss Army Knife and the electrical generator to the deck and tied our spare oxygen tanks to the railings. We were exhausted when we had the job completed. I guess all that practice putting together an ultra-light from a kit made Davis and I experts at improvisation.

The next morning I was sitting on the deck of our raft, using the radio. "Castaways to Captain Burton, come in, Captain Burton." Davis was checking the lifecraft for anything else we might need.
"Burton here. What can I do for you boys?"
"Well, sir. It may sound a little crazy, but how low into the atmosphere can you go before you have to get out again?"
"Not too far. Less than five kilometres, I would estimate."
"What kind of manouvering ability do you have in that density of atmosphere?"
"We have manouvering thrusters, but we just can't land and lift-off again."
"Well, sir, I may have something very unusual up my sleeve. Exactly when do you arrive?"
"I can begin a low-orbit pass at exactly... twelve fifteen."
"Another question, sir. Can your sensors pinpoint our exact location from the radio transponder?"
"One second... Yes, Ops has you in their sights right now. Do you need to know the coordinates?"
"No, I just need to know you can see us."
We visited Rousseau's gravesite and bade our final farewells. Either this would work or we would be joining him on his journey, wherever it was he was headed. We did a disaster check of the pod to see if there was anything else we needed. That was only the fourth or fifth time we did that. It would have been so easy if we could have fitted the lifecraft to the raft, but I didn't think we'd have enough lift if we did. We had to keep the weight down to a minimum. Survival gear only, the generator and the radio.
I didn't know how long it would take us to climb the atmosphere with all that weight, so I thought it best to start out early. Our suits would protect us from the sulphuric acid, but not so the torrential winds at high altitudes. For that we had to hope our fastenings would do the trick. Davis strapped in, and I did the same across from him. We were lying flat on deck, with the generator between us, secured in webbing. This way, either of us could control the generator if the other couldn't.
Davis took the first shift, and turned the generator up to one tenth power. The raft bucked and expanded slightly. The tyings held, and with another tenth power we lifted off the ground.
We had no control over our attitude, just our altitude. The raft swayed this way and that, finally deciding to right itself. We had been clever and placed the heavy gear low on the raft. Cross beams on the railings were being fed more current, keeping our centre of gravity low.
It took almost a half an hour to reach the topmost canopy of the lightwood tree we had crashed under, and we were still on the rise. I had estimated the amount of electrical current that the tree was getting and knew that we had much more power in the generator. I knew that we would be able to achieve a much higher altitude, but I didn't know just how high we could go. Once the atmosphere had rarefied to a point where the trees' vacuum cells plus our weight were equal to the atmospheric density, we could go no higher. I just hoped that would be high enough.
It was another ten minutes before the wind began to reach hurricane proportions. We lost the Swiss Army Knife overboard. Thanks god it wasn't the radio. We had changed oxygen tanks once, and there were several others in case we needed them. The wind was tossing us around like a leaf in a tempest, but our security webbing held us in place.
"Captain Burton to Castaways. Mitchell, we are entering the atmosphere now. We have you in our sights and are on our way towards your position. I don't know how you did it, but you're within ten kilometres of the outer atmosphere. If you can get closer, we can pick you up easily. Our thrusters can hold us in position for a while, and as long as we don't go too low, we'll be able to reach escape velocity on our remaining fuel."
"Thanks, Captain. I'm attempting to gain altitude now, but the storm is making it very difficult."
Now I could see the long slender shape of the Hera through the cloud cover. It was at least another kilometre away, and the captain said they couldn't get much lower.
"Crank it, Davis," I said.
"It's almost to full power now."
"I don't care, go to full!"
Before he could do that, we felt, rather than heard, popping noises. I was horrified. I knew what that meant. We had reached the tree's cellular tolerance level. The fibres connecting the vacuum cells were stretched to such extremes the cells were bursting. We started to lose height slowly.
"That's probably just a few weaker cells, Davis. Pay no attention to it. Jam it up to full!"
Davis rotated the knob to its maximum and we rose higher. But at the same time, more cells popped. As we reached our ultimate apogee, the freighter Hera descended through a thick cloud no more than one hundred meters above us!
A cargo door opened up and I could see suited astronauts at the edges, waiting to grab us as we entered the bay. They looked amazed at what they saw. We were a pair of castaways riding a raft.
The popping increased, and we began to sink. Slowly at first, then more rapidly as cell after cell of valuable vacuum popped, weighing us down. I called for Davis to decrease current, then jack it up again, hoping to bounce back towards the Hera. The noise of the winds and the downward thrusters of the cargo ship were deafening even through the protection of the helmets of our environmental suits.
It was no use. We managed to gain some altitude, but lost more.
Then with a deft move the likes of which I had never seen before, nor probably will ever see again, the Hera dipped downward and in the blink of an eye, we were inside the cargo bay. The doors closed so fast we couldn't see the movement. We crashed heavily down on deck as the Hera rose and left the atmosphere.
We could see the men cheering, but we weren't in radio contact, so we didn't hear them. My arm broke on impact, and Davis broke a couple of ribs, but I still heard him laugh when he knew he was safe. "Robinson Crusoe!" he cried. I laughed so hard I cried too.

We held another ceremony at my ranch on earth. More champagne was flowing and our families and friends had gathered, but this time it was not a celebration, it was a mourning. Charles Rousseau had become my friend, and it was time to honour him in a way that was not possible on that planet so many million kilometres away. Davis and I held our glasses high and toasted our friend. His family wept and mine joined them. I said a few words about him to the crowd, but nothing I could say would bring him back. I did say, however, that if it weren't for his quick thinking during the accident, none of us would have returned.
Later, Janie walked with Davis and myself to the barn where we had built our ultra-light. I looked around at the scrap material, the plans, the tools. Then I left the barn and had the doors closed. Davis and I padlocked the door, and we each kept a key. We would dispose of them individually, later.

All content of these pages © Sean Huxter.