Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Grant acknowledged the “go ahead” and began to talk steadily and, he hoped, quite dispassionately. He gave a careful analysis of the situation, appending pertinent data in telemetry, ending his speech with a request for advice. His fears concerning McNeil he left unspoken; the engineer was doubtless monitoring the transmission.

  And on Port Hesperus—the Venus orbital station—the bombshell was about to burst, triggering trains of sympathetic ripples on all the inhabited worlds, as video and faxsheets took up the refrain: STAR QUEEN IN PERIL. An accident in space has a dramatic quality that tends to crowd all other items from the newsheads. At least until the corpses have been counted.

  The actual reply from Port Hesperus, less dramatic, was as swift as the speed of light allowed: “Port Hesperus control to Star Queen, acknowledging your emergency status. We will shortly forward a detailed questionnaire. Please stand by.”

  They stood by. Or rather they floated by.

  When the questions arrived Grant put them on printout. The message took nearly an hour to run through the printer and the questionnaire was so detailed, so extremely detailed—so extraordinarily detailed, in fact—that Grant wondered morosely if he and McNeil would live long enough to answer it. Two weeks, more or less.

  Most of the queries were technical, concerning the status of the ship. Grant had no doubt the experts on Earth and Venus station were wracking their brains in an attempt to save Star Queen and her cargo. Perhaps especially her cargo.

  “What do you think?” Grant asked McNeil, when the engineer had finished running through the message. He was studying McNeil carefully now, watching him for any signs of strain.

  After a long, rigid silence, McNeil shrugged. His first words echoed Grant’s thoughts. “It will certainly keep us busy. I doubt we’ll get through this in a day. And I’ve got to admit I think half of these questions are crazy.”

  Grant nodded but said nothing. He let McNeil continue.

  “‘Rate of leakage from the crew areas’—sensible enough, but we’ve already told them that. And what do they want with the efficiency of the radiation shields?”

  “Could have something to do with seal erosion, I suppose,” Grant murmured.

  McNeil eyed him. “If you were to ask me, I’d say they were tryin’ to keep our spirits up, pretendin’ they have a bright idea or two. And meanwhile we’re to keep ourselves too busy to worry about it.”

  Grant peered at McNeil with a queer mixture of relief and annoyance—relief because the Scot hadn’t thrown another tantrum and, conversely, annoyance because he was now so damned calm, refusing to fit neatly into the mental category Grant had prepared for him. Had that momentary lapse after the meteoroid struck been typical of the man? Or might it have happened to anyone? Grant, to whom the world was very much a place of blacks and whites, felt angry at being unable to decide whether McNeil was cowardly or courageous. That he might be both never occurred to him.

  In space, in flight, time is timeless. On Earth there is the great clock of the spinning globe itself, marking the hours with whole continents for hands. Even on the moon the shadows creep sluggishly from crag to crag as the sun makes its slow march across the sky. But in space the stars are fixed, or might as well be; the sun moves only if the pilot chooses to move the ship, and the chronometers tick off numbers that say days and hours but as far as sensation goes are meaningless.

  Grant and McNeil had long since learned to regulate their lives accordingly; while in deep space they moved and thought with a kind of leisure—which vanished quickly enough when a voyage was nearing its end and the time for braking maneuvers arrived—and though they were now under sentence of death, they continued along the well-worn grooves of habit. Every day Grant carefully dictated the log, confirmed the ship’s position, carried out his routine maintenance duties. McNeil was also behaving normally, as far as Grant could tell, although he suspected that some of the technical maintenance was being carried out with a very light hand, and he’d had a few sharp words with the engineer about the accumulation of dirty food trays following McNeil’s turns in the galley.

  It was now three days since the meteoroid had struck. Grant kept getting “buck up” messages from traffic control on Port Hesperus along the lines of “Sorry for the delay, fellows, we’ll have something for you just as soon as we can”—and he waited for the results of the high-level review panel convened by the Board of Space Control, with its raft of specialists on two planets, which was running simulations of wild schemes to rescue Star Queen. He had waited impatiently at first, but his eagerness had slowly ebbed. He doubted that the finest technical brains in the solar system could save them now—though it was hard to abandon hope when everything still seemed so normal and the air was still clean and fresh.

  On the fourth day Venus spoke. “Okay, fellows, here’s what we’ve got for you. We’re going to take this one system at a time, and some of this gets involved, so you be sure and ask for clarification if you need it. Okay, first we’ll go into the cabin atmosphere system file, locus two-three-nine point four. Now I’ll just give you a moment to find that locus…”

  Shorn of jargon, the long message was a funeral oration; the thrust of the instructions was to insure that Star Queen could arrive at Port Hesperus under remote control with its cargo intact, even if there were two dead bodies in the command module. Grant and McNeil had been written off.

  One comfort: Grant already knew from his training in high-altitude chambers that death from hypoxia, near the end, anyway, would be a positively giddy affair.

  McNeil vanished below soon after the message concluded, without a word of comment. Grant did not see him again for hours. He was frankly relieved, at first. He didn’t feel like talking, either, and if McNeil wanted to look after himself that was his affair. Besides, there were various letters to write, loose ends to see to—though the last-will-and-testament business could come later. There were a couple of weeks left.

  At supper time Grant went down to the common area, expecting to find McNeil at work at the galley. McNeil was a good cook, within the limitations of spacecraft cuisine, and he usually enjoyed his turn in the kitchen. He certainly took good enough care of his own stomach.

  But there was no one in the common area. The curtain in front of McNeil’s cabin was pulled shut.

  Grant yanked the curtain aside and found McNeil lying in midair near his bunk, very much at peace with the universe. Hanging there beside him was a large plastic crate whose magnetic lock had somehow been jimmied. Grant had no need to examine it to know its contents; a glance at McNeil was enough.

  “Ay, and it’s a dirty shame,” said the engineer without a trace of embarrassment, “to suck this stuff up through a tube.” He cocked an eye at Grant. “Tell you what, cap’n—whyn’t you put a little spin on the vessel so’s we can drink ’er properly?” Grant glared at him contemptuously, but McNeil returned his gaze unabashed. “Oh, don’t be a sourpuss, man—have some yourself! For what does it matter?”

  He batted a bottle at Grant, who fielded it deftly. It was a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Napa Valley of California—fabulously valuable, Grant knew the consignment—and the contents of that plastic case were worth thousands.

  “I don’t think there’s any need,” Grant said severely, “to behave like a pig—even under these circumstances.”

  McNeil wasn’t drunk yet. He had only reached the brightly lit anteroom of intoxication and had not lost all contact with the drab outer world. “I am prepared,” he announced with great solemnity, “to listen to any good argument against my present course of action. A course which seems eminently sensible to me.” He blessed Grant with a cherubic smile. “But you’d better convince me quickly, while I’m still amenable to reason.”

  With that he squeezed the plastic bulb into which he’d off-loaded a third of the bottle’s contents, and shot a ruddy purple jet into his open mouth.

  “You’re stealing company property—scheduled for salvage,” Grant announced, unaware of th
e absurdity but conscious as he said it that his voice had taken on the nasality, the constriction, of a young schoolmaster, “and … and besides, you can hardly stay drunk for two weeks.”

  “That,” said McNeil thoughtfully, “remains to be seen.”

  “I don’t think so,” retorted Grant. With his right hand he secured himself to the bulkhead, with his left he swiped at the crate and gave it a vicious shove that sent it soaring through the open curtain.

  As he wheeled and dived after it he heard McNeil’s pained yelp: “Why you constipated bastard! Of all the dirty tricks!”

  It would take McNeil some time in his present condition to organize a pursuit. Grant steered the crate down to the hold airlock and into the pressurized, temperature-controlled compartment it had come from. He sealed the case and replaced it on its rack, strapping it securely into place. No point in trying to lock the case; McNeil had made a mess of the lock.

  But Grant could make sure McNeil wouldn’t get in here again—he would reset the combination on the hold airlock and keep the new combination to himself. As it happened, he had plenty of time to do it. McNeil hadn’t bothered to follow him.

  As Grant swam back toward the flight deck he passed the open curtain to McNeil’s cabin. McNeil was still in there, singing.

  “We don’t care where the oxygen goes

  If it doesn’t get into the wine…”

  Evidently he’d already removed a couple of bottles before Grant had arrived to grab the case. Let them last him two weeks then, Grant thought, if they last the night.

  “We don’t care where the oxygen goes

  If it doesn’t get into the wine…”

  Where the hell had he heard that refrain? Grant, whose education was severely technical, was sure McNeil was deliberately misquoting some bawdy Elizabethan madrigal or the like, just to taunt him. He was suddenly shaken by an emotion which, to do him justice, he did not for a moment recognize, and which passed as swiftly as it had come.

  But when he reached the flight deck he was trembling, and he felt a little sick. He realized that his dislike of McNeil was slowly turning to hatred.

  11

  Certainly Grant and McNeil got on well enough in ordinary circumstances. It was nobody’s fault that circumstances were now very far from ordinary.

  Only because the two men had shown wonderfully smooth personality curves on the standard psychological tests; only because their flight records were virtually flawless; only because thousands of millions of pounds and dollars and yen and drachmas and dinars were involved in the flight of Star Queen had the Board of Space Control granted the ship a waiver of the crew-of-three rule.

  The crew-of-three rule had evolved during a century and a half of space flight and ostensibly provided for a minimally sound social configuration during long periods of isolation—a problem that had not been pressing in the 20th century, before occupied spacecraft had ventured farther than the moon and the time delay for communication with Earth was still measured in seconds. True, in any group of three, two will eventually gang up on the third—as the ancient Romans learned after several hard political lessons, in human affairs the least stable structure is the tripod. Which is not necessarily bad. Certainly three is better than two, and two is much better than one. And any group larger than three will soon enough degenerate into sub-groups of diads and triads.

  A man or woman alone will almost certainly go mad within a relatively short time. It may be a benign madness, even an exemplary madness—taking the form of an obsessive writing of romantic poetry, for example—but no form of madness is encouraging to spacecraft insurors.

  Experience shows that a crew of one man and one woman will experience a crisis within days. Their relative ages do not matter. If the text of their conversation is power, the subtext will be sex. And vice versa.

  On the other hand, two men alone together or two women alone together, provided their sexual vectors are not convergent, will dispense with the sexual subtext and will get down to the nitty-gritty of power every time: who’s in charge here?… Although in the case of two women the resolution of that question is, for cultural reasons, somewhat less likely to lead to fatal violence.

  With three people of whatever sex, everybody will try to get along for a while and eventually two will gang up on the third. Thus the power question resolves itself, and depending on the make-up of the crew, sex will take care of itself also, i.e. two or more may be doing it together and one or more will be doing it alone.

  Two men, not close friends, both of them heterosexual and of comparable age and status but fundamentally different in temperament, are the worst possible combination.

  Three days without food, it has been said, is long enough to remove the subtle differences between a so-called civilized man and a so-called savage. Grant and McNeil were in no physical discomfort, nor would they be in extreme pain even at the end. But their imaginations had been active; they had more in common with a couple of hungry cannibals lost in a log canoe than they would have cared to admit.

  One aspect of their situation, the most important of all, had never been mentioned; the computer’s analysis had been checked and rechecked, but its bottom line was not quite final, for the computer refrained from making suggestions it had not been asked to make. The two men on the crew could easily take that final step of calculation in their heads—

  —and each arrived at the same result. It was simple, really, a macabre parody of those problems in first-grade arithmetic which began, “If two men had six days to assemble five helicopters, how long…?

  At the moment the meteoroid destroyed the stored liquid oxygen, there were approximately forty-eight hundred cubic feet of air inside the crew module and twelve hundred cubic feet of air in the pressurized compartment of Hold A. At one atmosphere a cubic foot of air weighs one and two-tenths ounces, but less than a fourth of that is oxygen. Adding in the space-suit and emergency supplies, there were less than seventy pounds of oxygen in the ship. A man consumes almost two pounds of oxygen a day.

  Thirty-five man-days of oxygen…

  The oxygen supply was enough for two men for two and a half weeks. Venus was three weeks away. One did not have to be a calculating prodigy to see that one man, one man only, might live to walk the curving garden paths of Port Hesperus.

  Four days had passed. The acknowledged deadline was thirteen days away, but the unspoken deadline was ten. For ten more days two men could breathe the air without endangering the chances of the one who might survive alone. Beyond ten days one man only would have any hope of reaching Venus. To a sufficiently detached observer the situation might have seemed highly engaging. Grant and McNeil were not detached, however. It is not easy at the best of times for two people to decide amicably which of them shall commit suicide; it is even more difficult when they are not on speaking terms.

  Grant wished to be perfectly fair. Therefore, as he conceived matters, the only thing to do was to wait until McNeil sobered up and emerged from his cabin; then Grant would put it to him directly.

  As these thoughts swirled over the surface of his mind Peter Grant was staring through the windows of the flight deck at the starry universe, seeing the thousands upon thousands of individual stars and even the misty nebulas as he had never seen them before. He was moved by a certain conviction of transcendence—

  —which mere speech would surely betray.

  Well, he would write McNeil a letter. And best do it now, while they were still on diplomatic terms. He clipped a sheet of notepaper to his writing pad and began: “Dear McNeil.” He paused, his ballpoint poised above the paper. Then he tore that sheet out and began again: “McNeil.”

  It took him the best part of three hours to get down what he wanted to say, and even then he wasn’t wholly satisfied. Some things were damned difficult to put on paper. At last he finished; he folded the letter and sealed it with a strip of tape. He left the flight deck, taking the letter with him, and closed himself into his cabin. The business of actually
handing the letter to McNeil could wait a day or two.

  Few of the billions of videoplate addicts on Earth—or the additional thousands on Port Hesperus and Mars and in the Mainbelt and on the colonized moons—could have had any true notion of what was going on within the minds of the two men aboard Star Queen. The public media was full of rescue schemes. All sorts of retired spaceship pilots and writers of fantasy fiction had been dredged up to give their opinions over the airwaves as to how Grant and McNeil should comport themselves. The men who were the cause of all this fuss wisely declined to listen to any of it.

  Traffic control on Port Hesperus was a bit more discreet. One could not with any decency give words of advice or encouragement to men on death row, even if there was some uncertainty about the date of execution. Therefore traffic control contented itself with few emotionally neutral messages each day—relaying the newsheads about the war in southern Asia, the growing sector dispute in the Mainbelt, new mineral strikes on the surface of Venus, the fuss over the censorship of “While Rome Burns,” which had just been banned in Moscow…

  Life on Star Queen continued much as before, not withstanding the stiffness between the two men that had attended McNeil’s emergence—classically hung-over—from his cabin. Grant, for his part, spent much of his time on the flight deck writing letters to his wife. Long letters. The longer the better… He could have spoken to her if he’d wished, but the thought of all those news addicts listening in prevented him from doing so. Unhappily, there were no truly private lines in space.

  And that letter to McNeil. Why not deliver it, get it over with? Well, he would do that, within a couple of days … and then they would decide. Besides, such a delay would give McNeil a chance to raise the subject himself.

  That McNeil might have reasons for his hesitation other than simple cowardice did not occur to Grant.