Tales of the Grand Tour by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2004-10-23T04:00:00+00:00

When the human race begins to expand its habitat through the solar system, it won’t be only scientists and engineers who go to other worlds. There will be entrepreneurs like Sam Gunn and Dan Randolph, visionaries like Chet Kinsman and Jamie Waterman, saints, sinners, pilgrims, adventurers . . .

Adventurers. Some people make adventure their business. And what a business opportunity the hellishly hot surface of the planet Venus will be!

HIGH JUMP

The things a man will do for love.

I had been Hal Prince’s stunt double for more than five years. To the general public he was the greatest daredevil that ever lived, the handsome star of the most exciting adventure videos ever recorded, the tall sandy-haired guy with the flashing smile and twinkling eyes who always did his own stunts.

Well, I had known him when he was Aloysius Prizanski, back before he got his nose fixed, when he’d been a wannabe actor hungry enough to jump into a pool of blazing petrol from the bridge of an ocean liner.

Back then he did his own stunts, sure enough, but once he got so popular that he could command half a bill just for signing a contract, the insurance people insisted that he was just too goddamned valuable to risk.

So I did his stunts. His old pal. His asshole buddy. Ugly old me. It was no big secret in the industry, but as far as the general public was concerned, it was Handsome Hal himself who’d risked his own neck riding the hundred-gee catapult at Moonbase into lunar orbit and sledding down the dry-ice-coated flank of Olympus Mons in nothing more than a Buckyball suit.

To say nothing of skydiving into Vesuvius while it was boiling out steam and the occasional blurp of hot lava. That one cost me three months in a burn recovery center, although I never let Hal know it. He thought I’d just gotten miffed at him and taken off to sulk.

Now I was going to do the high jump for him. On Venus, yet. Pop myself out of an orbiting spacecraft and drop all the way down to the planet’s red-hot surface.

And I mean red-hot. The ground temperature down there is hot enough to melt aluminum. The air pressure is almost a hundred times what it is at sea level on Earth; like the pressure in the ocean, more than a kilometer down.

And by the way, Venus’s air is almost all choking carbon dioxide. The clouds that cover the planet from pole to pole are made of sulfuric acid. And they’re filled with bugs that eat metal, too.

The stunt was to jump from orbit and go all the way down to the ground. I had just come back from the patch-up job after the Vesuvius barbecue. Truth to tell, I was scared into constipation over this stunt.

But I didn’t tell Hal. Or anybody else.

We all have our little secrets. My doubling for him was Hotshot Hal’s secret. But I had a few of my own, too.

Angel Santos doubled for

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