Reporters on Venus

by Donald Angus MacDonald

During his famous tour of Venus and Mars, which resulted in his best selling book, “An Innocent on 3 Worlds”, Samuel Clemens made an allusion to an event that took place at the Federal Armory at the American legation on Victoria Island on Venus.

Being a celebrity, and some one new at that, everyone was eager to make Mr. Clemens acquaintance, so for his entire stay at the capitol of the American Territories on Venus, it was one formal dinner after another, preceded all day by dozens of people trying to talk to him, all wide eyed with the prospect of a new face. In any event, at what was his last dinner on Venus, he provoked a situation that was so energetic that the Provost Marshal’s riot squad was called to the dinner to make sure things did not get out of hand. All he said was “Well, reporters have a job to do too, you know.”

Now reporters are not highly regarded socially, but defending their existence does not usually provoke a near riot, but in this as in so many other things, Venus is a special case.

There is some dispute about the originator of the legend; but most people credit, or blame, the Chicago Tribune and a writer by the name of Walter Purvis in 1878. Under orders to produce a story on Venus “with some color in it”, Purvis sat down, and not for the first time wrote out a piece of fiction. His story was about the famous lost city of Azar-Schram, its licentious devil worshipping population and its destruction in an earthquake (yes, actually a Venusquake, but his is an example of his writing. And his target audience.), and its eventual burial in the drifting sands of the great sand sea of northern Venus. A large chunk of which happened to be claimed by the USA.

The fact that there are no quakes, Earth or Venus on Venus, and there have been none in recorded history, none of the natives have ever heard of the place, Azar-Schram is not a name in any of the local languages, and finally there are no sand sea on Venus, in the north or anywhere else made no impression on anyone on earth who read the story.

A copy of the paper eventually reached the Americans on Venus via the regular mail packet, and provoked some laughter and head shaking, and was quickly forgotten about.

However on Earth, the story had struck a chord. It was as if there were thousands of people who not only wanted to believe in a mystery; and god and the constitution were not enough but wanted to not believe the authorities. It took a few years, but everyone had heard of it, and eventually, in a delicious twist of irony, the Chicago Tribune announced that it was going to sponsor an expedition to go to Venus and find the fictional city they had themselves created.  Things being the way they were in the newspaper business, the New York Post announced that they too were sponsoring an expedition to Venus to find the place and the head of their expedition was going to be Henry Stanley the famous African explorer. This became general, with several other newspapers and rich people announcing that they too were sponsoring expeditions to find Azar-Schram. The plaintive voices of everyone who knew better were ignored, and the race was on.

The customs people and the administrators on Venus had no idea what was heading their way.

It was a madhouse. Between the quarantine and the officials trying to inject some common sense into the circus, another story came into being, that the government did not want people to find Azar-Schram, for what ever reason that occurred who ever was writing the story.

The government had found the place and was mining all the gold and jewels and keeping it a secret. The government had found the place and was secretly extracting all the advanced technological devices found there, because they did not want people to panic at what could be done with them. The government was in league with the devil worshipper who still lurked among the ruins of the city. The Martians were making the government keep it a secret. These were the reputable reasons. The others ranged from bizarre to libelous.

The circuses eventually made there way north and disappeared into the murk that was Venus.

The New York Post expedition only lost one man in five, mainly due to Stanley’s refusal to march more than 3 days away from any known water supply.

When one thinks of a sheet of basalt, the initial impression is of a smooth sheet of rock. Unfortunately smooth does not necessarily mean like a billiard table. There are all sorts of furrows, dips, bumps and ridges on the basalt deserts of Venus, all apparently design to trip the unwary pedestrian and twist or break ankles, legs, wrists, and what ever else hits the ground.

On his first days march into the basalt, Stanley’s expedition had 4 casualties of various severity. The next couple of days saw the rate reduced to 1 or 2 a day but the uncertain light in the morning and at sunset made moving an adventure in fear. The number of injured had the side effect of slowing down the movement rate to a crawl.

Figuring, correctly as it turned out, that there no water to be found in a solid sheet of rock god only knew how thick, and hundreds or thousands miles long and wide, he elected to march along the mountains climbing up every so often to get water from the cloud forest, and searching the desert with his telescope from the slopes of the mountains. Finding nothing, and no natives who would admit to knowing what he was talking about, after 6 months he came back with nothing to show for it except for some useful maps.

Most of the others, including the Chicago Tribune’s disappeared and were never heard from again.

Over the next couple of years a few dribs and drabs of survivors made their way back to the American legation, half mad with stories of thirst, mirages, cannibals, devil worshippers, and nightmarish creatures in the various cloud forests. They were not believed, which was unfortunate because some of their ravings were in fact true.

Back on earth, the disappearances of the various expeditions lead to more headlines, and the conviction that the government was hiding something. There were Senate inquiries, Congressional inquiries, and newspaper inquiries.  None of them found anything, which just lead a certain stratum of the population to nod their heads knowingly and say, “Well what did you expect?”

As a result at east once a year another expedition set out to find the unsinkable and usually disappeared, never to be heard from again. The various attempts to keep these idiots from committing suicide were just seen as confirmation that Azar-Schram was really out there and the government did not want it found.

It was unfortunate for Mr. Clemens that his visit to Venus coincided with the last expedition to no-where, with the explorers treating everyone with an arrogant condescension that set everyone’s teeth on edge. You can only take the knowing smiles and the looks that say, “Yes, we know that you are under orders to say things like this, but we know better” before the stress becomes too much. Mr. Clemens tripped the pressure valve. Everyone blamed reporters for what they had to put up with.

In the mean time, one of the London papers had come up with their own lost city, Pleo-cr. A floating city lost in the South Seas just off the coast of one of the large islands. Reality had as little to do with a sunken city in the seas of Venus, as it did with the city lost in the non-existent sands of Venus.

The seas of Venus being what they are, there were even fewer survivors of the various expeditions. The British loonies were every bit as certain and self centered as their American cousins. The British bureaucrats were every bit as taken back as their American cousins, leading more than one Brit to mutter over his gin and tonic “we should take a leaf out of the French book and only let the papers print what we think they should know.”

Being much more arrogant than most Americans the British upper classes were much better at inducing a teeth-gritting rage in less time than the republican Yankees. Every so often an Naval aerolyth patrol or a trading vessel would come across a survivor of one of these farces waving a shirt or something on the coast of some island trying to get attention, take him back to Victoria Island, take note of his horror story, usually consisting of some mix of: cannibals, human sacrifice, monsters, tentacles, magic, eyes in the water and plagues, put it in a filing cabinet and send him back to London, under the principle that they sent him here, they can have him back.