“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…