Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Grant flushed angrily, but McNeil met him sharply. “Oh yes, let’s not forget the business of the wines. No doubt that’s still on your mind. Your first good grudge against me. But that’s one thing I don’t regret. A civilized man should always know when to get drunk. And when to sober up. Perhaps you wouldn’t understand.”

  Oddly, that’s just what Grant was beginning to do, at last. He had caught his first real glimpse of McNeil’s intricate and tortured personality and realized how utterly he had misjudged him. No—misjudged was not the right word. In some ways his judgment had been correct. But it had only touched the surface; he had never suspected the depths that lay beneath.

  And in his moment of insight Grant understood why McNeil was giving him a second chance. This was nothing so simple as a coward trying to reinstate himself in the eyes of the world: no one need ever know what happened aboard Star Queen. And in any case, McNeil probably cared nothing for the world’s opinion, thanks to the sleek self-sufficiency that had so often annoyed Grant. But that very self-sufficiency meant that at all costs he must preserve his own good opinion of himself. Without it life would not be worth living; McNeil had never accepted life save on his own terms.

  McNeil was watching Grant intently and must have guessed that Grant was coming near the truth. He suddenly changed his tone, as if sorry he had revealed so much of his own character. “Don’t think I get some quixotic pleasure from turning the other cheek,” he said sharply, “it’s just that you’ve over-looked some rather basic logical difficulties. Really, Grant—didn’t it once occur to you that if only one of us survives without a covering message from the other, he’ll have a very uncomfortable time explaining what happened?”

  Grant was dumbstruck. In the depths of his seething emotions, in the blindness of his fury, he had simply failed to consider how he was going to exculpate himself. His righteousness had seemed so … so self evident.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right,” he murmured. Still, he privately wondered if a covering message was really all that important in McNeil’s thoughts. Perhaps McNeil was simply trying to convince him that his sincerity was based on cold reason.

  Nevertheless, Grant felt better now. All the hate had drained out of him and he felt—almost—at peace. The truth was known and he accepted it. That it was rather different from what he had imagined hardly seemed to matter. “Well, let’s get it over,” he said, unemotionally. “Don’t we still have that new pack of cards?”

  “Yes, a couple of them in the drawer there.” McNeil had taken off his jacket and was rolling up his shirtsleeves. “Find the one you want—but before you open it, Grant,” he said with peculiar emphasis, “I think we’d better speak to Port Hesperus. Both of us. And get our complete agreement on the record.”

  Grant nodded absently; he did not mind very much now, one way or the other. He grabbed a sealed pack of the metallized cards from the game drawer and followed McNeil up the corridor to the flight deck. They left the glinting poison bottles floating where they were.

  Grant even managed a ghost of a smile when, ten minutes later, he drew his card from the pack and laid it face upward beside McNeil’s. It fastened itself to the metal console with a faintly perceptible snap.

  McNeil fell silent. For a minute he busied himself lighting a fresh cigarette. He inhaled the fragrant, poisonous smoke deeply. Then he said, “And the rest you already know, Inspector.”

  “Except for a few minor details,” Sparta said coolly. “What became of the two bottles, the real poison and the other?”

  “Out the airlock with Grant,” he replied shortly. “I thought it would be better to keep things simple, not run the risk of a chemical analysis—revealing traces of salt, that kind of thing.”

  Sparta brought a package of metallized playing cards from her jacket pocket. “Do you recognize these?” She handed them to him.

  He took them in his large, curiously neat hands, hardly bothering to look at them. “They could be the ones we used. Or others like them.”

  “Would you mind shuffling the pack, Mr. McNeil?”

  The engineer glanced at her sharply, then did as he was told, expertly shuffling the thin, flexible cards in midair between his curved palms and nimble fingers. Finished, he looked at her inquisitively.

  “Cut, if you don’t mind,” she said.

  “That would be your privilege, wouldn’t it?”

  “You do it.”

  He laid the deck on the nearby lamp table and swiftly moved the top section of the deck to one side, then placed the bottom section on top of it. He leaned away. “What now?”

  “Now I’d like you to shuffle them again.”

  The look on his face, as blank as he could make it, nevertheless barely concealed his contempt. He had shared one of the more significant episodes of his life with her, and her response was to ask him to play games—no doubt in some feeble attempt to trick him into something. But he shuffled the cards quickly, making no comment, letting the hiss and snarl of their separation and swift recombination make the comment for him. “And now?”

  “Now I’ll choose a card.”

  He fanned the deck and held it toward her. She reached for it but let her fingers hover over the cards, moving back and forth as if she were trying to make up her mind. Still concentrating, she said, “You’re quite expert at handling these, Mr. McNeil.”

  “Nor have I made a secret of it, Inspector.”

  “It was no secret to begin with, Mr. McNeil.” She tugged a card from the edge of the deck and held it up, toward him, without bothering to look at it herself.

  He stared at it, shocked.

  “That would be the jack of spades, wouldn’t it, Mr. McNeil? The card you drew against Commander Grant?”

  He barely whispered yes before she plucked another card from the deck he still rigidly held out to her. Again she showed it to him without looking at it. “And that would be the three of clubs. The card Grant drew, which sent him to his death.” She flipped the two cards onto the bed. “You can put the deck down now, Mr. McNeil.”

  His cigarette burned unnoticed in the ashtray. He had already anticipated the point of her little demonstration, and he waited for her to make it.

  “Metallized cards aren’t allowed in professional play for a simple reason,” she said, “with which I’m sure you’re quite familiar. They aren’t as easy to mark with knicks and pinholes as the cardboard kind, but it’s a simple matter to impose a weak electric or magnetic pattern on them that can be picked up by an appropriate detector. Such a detector can be quite small—small enough, say, to fit into a ring like the one you’re wearing on your right hand. That’s a handsome piece—Venusian gold, isn’t it?”

  It was handsome and intricate, portraying a man and woman embracing; if examined closely, in fact, it was more than a little curious. Without hesitating, McNeil twisted the heavy sculpted ring over his knuckle. It came off easily, for his finger was thinner than it had been a week ago. He held it out to her, but to his surprise, she shook her head—

  —and smiled. “I don’t need to look at it, Mr. McNeil. The only coherent patterns on these cards were imposed by me, a few minutes ago.” She leaned away from him, relaxing in her chair, inviting him to relax as well. “I used other methods to determine which cards had been drawn by you and Grant. They were the only two cards in the deck which seemed to have been handled beyond a light shuffle. Frankly, I was partly guessing.”

  “You made a lucky guess, then,” he said hoarsely, having found his voice. “But if you aren’t accusing me of cheating on Grant, why this demonstration? Some people might call it unusual, maybe even cruel.”

  “Oh, but you,” she said fiercely. “You wouldn’t have needed electromagnetic patterns to cheat, would you, Mr. McNeil?” She glanced at his forearms, which rested on his thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. “Even with your sleeves rolled up.”

  He shook his head no. “I could have cheated him easily enough, Inspector Troy. But I swear I didn’t.”r />
  “Thank you for saying so. Although I was confident that you would admit the truth.” Sparta got to her feet. “ ‘Life and honour seemed in different categories … the more that was lost the more precious the little left.’”

  “What’s that mean?” McNeil growled.

  “From an old book I glanced at recently—a passage that made me want to read the whole thing someday. It gave me considerable insight into your situation. You’re quite good at concealing truths, Mr. McNeil, but your particular sense of honor makes it very difficult for you to lie outright.” She smiled. “No wonder you almost choked on that coffee.”

  McNeil’s expression was puzzled now, almost humble. How could this pale, slim child have peered so deeply into his soul? “I still don’t understand what you mean to do.”

  Sparta reached into her jacket again and brought out a small plastic book. “Star Queen will be inspected by other people after me, and they will be at least as thorough as I’ve been. Since you and I know you didn’t cheat Grant out of his life, it’s probably a good thing you thought to bring this book out with you, and that I never found it, and that I never had any suspicion of what a gifted amateur magician you are.”

  She tossed the book on the bed, beside the cards. It landed face up: Harry Blackstone on Magic.

  “Keep the cards, too. Little gift to help you get well soon. I bought them ten minutes ago at a kiosk in the station.”

  McNeil said, “I’m having the feelin’ that nothing I said came as much of a surprise to you, Inspector.”

  Sparta had her hand on the door panel, poised to leave. “Don’t think I admire you, Mr. McNeil. Your life and the way you choose to live it is your business. But it so happens I agree that there’s no justification for destroying the late, unfortunate Peter Grant’s reputation.” She wasn’t smiling now. “That’s me speaking privately, not the law. If you’ve kept anything else from me, I’ll find it out—and if it’s criminal, I’ll have you for it.”

  PART

  5

  BLOWOUT

  17

  Sparta reached Viktor Proboda on the commlink: he could stop playing games now. The passengers from Helios could come aboard.

  Spaceports in space—unlike planetside shuttleports, which resemble ordinary airports—have a flavor all their own, part harbor, part trainyard, part truckstop. Small craft abound, tugs and tenders and taxis and cutters and self-propelled satellites, perpetually sliding and gliding around the big stations. There are very few pleasure craft in space (the eccentric billionaire’s hobby of solar yachting provides a rare exception) and unlike a busy harbor, there is no swashing about, no bounding over wakes or insolent cutting across bows. The daily routine is orbit-matching—exquisitely precise, with attendant constant recalculation of velocity differentials and mass/fuel ratios—so that in space even the small craft are as rigidly constrained to preset paths as freight cars in a switching yard. Except that in space, gangs of computers are continually rearranging the tracks.

  And aside from local traffic, spaceports are not very busy. Shuttles from the planet’s surface may call a few times a mouth, interplanetary liners and freighters a few times a year. Favorable planetary alignments tend to concentrate the busy times; then local chambers of commerce turn out costumed volunteers in force, greeting arriving liners the way Honolulu once greeted the Lurline and the Matsonia. Lacking indigenous grass skirts or flower leis, space station boosters have invented novel “traditions” to reflect a station’s ethnic and political mix, its economic base, its borrowed mythologies: thus, arriving at Mars Station, a passenger might encounter men and women wearing Roman breastplates, showing their bare knees, and carrying red flags emblazoned with hammers and sickles.

  At Port Hesperus the passengers from Helios, disembarking after a long delay, traversed a winding stainless steel corridor rippling with colored lights, garish signs boasting of the station’s mineral products in English and Arabic and Russian; kanji-splashed paper banners, fluttering in the breeze from the exhaust fans, added an additional touch of festivity.

  When the passengers reached a glass-roofed section of the corridor they were distracted by a silent commotion overhead; looking up, they were startled to see a chitoned Aphrodite riding a plastic seashell, smiling and waving at them, and near her a Shinto sun goddess wafting prettily in her silk kimono. Both women floated freely in zero-gee, at odd angles to each other and everyone else. These apparitions of the station’s goddess (the Japanese were stretching the identity some) were haloed by a dozen grinning men, women, and children gesturing with fruit-and-flower baskets, products of the station’s hydroponic farms and gardens.

  The passengers, before being allowed to ascend to the level of these heavenly creatures, faced one last obstacle. At the terminus of the corridor Inspector Viktor Proboda, flanked by respectful guards with stunguns at their sides, ushered them into a small cubical room upholstered on all six sides with dark blue carpet. Some were admitted individually, some in groups. On one wall of the carpeted cube a videoplate displayed the stern visage of Inspector Ellen Troy, bigger than life-size. She was ostentatiously studying a filescreen in front of her, its surface invisible to the videoplate watcher.

  Sparta was actually in a hidden room not far from the disembarkation tube, and in fact she was paying no attention to the filescreen, which was a prop. She had arranged with Proboda to bring the passengers into the room in a specific order, and she had already disposed of most of them, including the Japanese professor and the Arabs with their families, and various engineers and travelling salesmen.

  At the moment she was trying to hustle the Dutch schoolgirls on their way. “We won’t have to detain you any longer,” she said with a friendly smile. “Hope the rest of your trip is more fun.”

  “This has been the best part,” one of them said, and another added, with much batting of lashes at Proboda, “We really are liking your comrade.” The third girl, however, looked as prim as Proboda himself.

  “Through here, please,” he said, “all of you. To your right. Let’s move it along.”

  “Bye, Vikee…”

  “Vikee” felt Sparta’s amused gaze from the videoplate, but he managed to hurry the girls out and get Percy Farnsworth into the room without having to look her image in the eye. “Mr. Percy Farnsworth, London, representing Lloyd’s.” Farnsworth came into the interrogation cube with mustache twitching. “Mr. Farnsworth, Inspector Troy,” Proboda said, indicating the videoplate.

  Farnsworth managed to be brisk and breathless at the same time. “Eager to be of assistance in your investigation, Inspector. Say the word. This sort of thing my specialty, you know.”

  Sparta watched him, expressionless, for two seconds: a veteran confidence man who’d done his time, now working for the other side. That was the story, at any rate. “You’ve already been helpful, sir. Given us a great many leads.” She pretended to peruse his file on her dummy filescreen. “Mm. Your Lloyd’s syndicate seems to have been quite enthusiastic about Star Queen. Insured the ship, most of the cargo, the lives of the crew.”

  “Quite. And naturally I’d like to contact Lloyd’s as soon as possible, file a preliminary…”

  She interrupted. “Well, off the record, I’d say the underwriters have gotten off lightly.”

  Farnsworth mulled this bit of information—what exactly did she mean?—and apparently decided the inspector was willing to play cozy with him. “Encouraging, that,” he said, and dropped his voice to a confidential murmur. “But would you mind terribly … this business with Grant…”

  “I suppose you’d like to know if it was legally an accident or a suicide. That’s the big question here. Unfortunately the solicitors will just have to fight it out, Mr. Farnsworth. I have nothing to add to the public record.” Her tone conveyed no coziness. “I’ll accept your kind offer of further assistance. Please move through that door on the left and wait for me inside.”

  “There?” A door into a grim steel tube had suddenly opened in t
he carpetry. He peered through it hesitantly, as if expecting to meet a wild animal.

  Sparta prodded him. “I won’t keep you more than ten minutes, sir. Carry on. Eh?”

  With a mumbled “Quite,” Farnsworth moved through the door. The moment he was clear it popped shut behind him. Proboda quickly opened the door to the disembarkation tube. “Mr. Nikos Pavlakis, Athens, representing Pavlakis Lines,” Proboda said. “This is Inspector Troy.”

  Pavlakis bobbed his big head and said, “Good day, Inspector.” Sparta did not acknowledge him until she had finished reading something from her filescreen. Meanwhile he tugged nervously at the cuffs of his tight jacket.

  “I see this is your first visit to Venus, Mr. Pavlakis,” she said, looking up. “Regrettable circumstances.”

  “How is Mr. McNeil, Inspector?” Pavlakis asked. “Is he well? May I talk to him?”

  “The clinic has already released him. You’ll be able to talk to him soon.” His concern struck her as sincere, but it did not deflect her from her line. “Mr. Pavlakis, I note that Star Queen is a new registry, yet the ship is actually thirty years old. What was her former registry?”

  The heavyset man flinched. “She has been completely refurbished, Inspector. Everything but the basic frame is new, or reconditioned, with a few minor…”

  Viktor Proboda cut into Pavlakis’s nervous improvisation. “She asked for the former registry.”

  “I… I believe the registry was NSS 69376, Inspector.”

  “Kronos,” Sparta said. The word was an accusation. “Ceres in ’67, two members of the crew dead, a third woman injured, all cargo lost. Mars Station ’73, docking collision killed four workers on the station, cargo in one hold destroyed. Numerous accidents since involving loss of cargo. Several people have been injured and at least one other death has been attributed to below-standard maintenance. You had good reason to rechristen the ship, Mr. Pavlakis.”