
A desperate call erupts in a government lab: a trainee astronaut has crashed through an airlock on Venus, and the planet’s toxic cyanogen clouds have already begun to paralyze her. With only a handful of minutes before permanent brain damage sets in, the only hope lies in an experimental quantum link that could pull her back through the same tunnel that delivered her there. The narrator, a modest computer programmer, is thrust into the center of the crisis, tasked with translating a bizarre alien logic—explaining something as simple as left and right to a creature that doesn’t share human perception.
Project Tunnel, a half‑joking venture turned serious, hinges on a tunnel‑diode effect that can blur the line between Earth and Venus. Scientists scramble to power the device, while a teenage “psi‑girl” with uncanny mental abilities watches the chaos with unnerving calm. The story balances tense, high‑tech problem‑solving with a wry look at bureaucracy, ambition, and the odd camaraderie that forms when an impossible rescue hangs in the balance.
Language
en
Duration
~28 minutes (27K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2016-04-07
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1911–1981
A Golden Age science fiction writer with an engineer’s eye for detail, he built stories around communications systems, problem-solving, and life in space. He is especially remembered for the Venus Equilateral tales, which helped give mid-century magazine SF some of its brisk, technical charm.
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