Avogadro's Revenge

"Atom of Death."

By Ross Rocklynne (1913-88; Wikipedia HERE; ISFDb HERE; the SFE HERE; and Project Gutenberg HERE).

Illustration by Don Lynch (ISFDb HERE).

First appearance: Planet Stories, Winter 1940.

Short story (7 pages).

Online at Archive.org (HERE).

(Parental caution: Mild profanity.)

   "But if you’re going anyway, you better take two tanks of ozone. You might find yourself breathing CO2, before you get back."

YOU MIGHT BE familiar with those TV cop shows (Columbo, for instance) where the perpetrator of an attempted perfect crime somehow slips up by overlooking an ordinary thing that most people wouldn't give a second thought to, such as a car's odometer registering a few more miles than it should. In today's story, we have a variation on that idea, one that just might be unique . . .

Comment: With just a few alterations this story could have been set in the Alaskan wilderness.

Main characters:

~ Fowler Berry ("curled his lips into a thin smile of satisfaction as he pushed aside the oily, dripping vines and branches of the Venusian jungle and swamp"), Pete Slater ("The long hours wore away. Slater had a case of nerves"), Luke Browne ("A tight grim smile suddenly etched itself on Browne’s bearded face"), and Anson Harkness ("leaped back, pinning himself against the wall, his sensitive face going whiter than it normally was under Venus’ cloud blanket").

References and resources:

- "the oily, dripping vines and branches of the Venusian jungle and swamp":

  As our space probes have informed us, the mean temperature of the real Venus is 867°F, making a jungle seem downright balmy:

  "Early treatments of a Venus covered in swamps and jungles are found in Gustavus W. Pope's Journey to Venus (1895), Fred T. Jane's To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Maurice Baring's 'Venus' (1909). Following its popularization by Arrhenius, the portrayal of the Venusian landscape as dominated by jungles and swamps recurred frequently in other works of fiction; in particular, Brian Stableford says in Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia that it became 'a staple of pulp science fiction imagery'." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Venus rotated slowly":

  Much slower in reality than our author could know at the time, with Venus taking 117 Earth days to rotate once. (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "we was just setting down to grub"; "I been up that way, and there ain’t any emeralds"; "they was wuthless":

  Evidently, on the space frontier standard English suffers a similar decline to that in early America.

- "Ozone tanks were used instead of oxygen because, under equal conditions of pressure and temperature, more ozone, made of a heavier molecule, could be crowded into a tank than could oxygen":

  "For the last few decades, scientists studied the effects of acute and chronic ozone exposure on human health. Hundreds of studies suggest that ozone is harmful to people at levels currently found in urban areas. Ozone has been shown to affect the respiratory, cardiovascular and central nervous system. Early death and problems in reproductive health and development are also shown to be associated with ozone exposure." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "for turning state's evidence":

  "A criminal turns state's evidence by admitting guilt and testifying as a witness for the state against their associate(s) or accomplice(s), often in exchange for leniency in sentencing or immunity from prosecution." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- "Avogadro's Hypothesis":

  "Avogadro's law (sometimes referred to as Avogadro's hypothesis or Avogadro's principle) or Avogadro-Ampère's hypothesis is an experimental gas law relating the volume of a gas to the amount of substance of gas present." (Wikipedia HERE.)

- This is our first head-on encounter with Ross Rocklynne.

Unless otherwise noted, all bibliographical data are derived from The FictionMags Index created by William G. Contento & edited by Phil Stephensen-Payne.

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