Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Until emergency batteries cut in, it was going to be very dark.

  But not to Sparta, who tuned her visual cortex to infrared and made her way swiftly through a strange world of glowing shapes, an environment eerily resembling some giant plastic model of a complex organism lit only in red neon. Otherwise-dark light fixtures still glowed from the warmth in their diodes. Wires in the wall panels still glowed from resistance to the electricity that had recently flowed through them, and the panels themselves glowed faintly with borrowed heat.

  Although most of the microminiaturized devices in the station consumed only trickles of electricity, their extreme density made for glowing hotspots in every phonelink and datalink. Every flatscreen and video-plate glowed with the alphanumerics or graphics or images of human faces they had displayed when the power was cut. Every place that human hands and feet had touched within the last hour glowed with the warmth of their passage. If there were rats in the walls, Sparta would see them.

  Out in the halls and corridors the emergency lights flashed on quickly, drawing from their own self-contained batteries, throwing hard beams and stark strobing shadows down crowded passages. People swam swiftly through this flashing world like schools of squid, moving with single purpose toward the central part of the core—moving, for the most part, soundlessly, except for a few frightened cries, quickly answered by quiet commands, as emergency personnel took frightened newcomers in tow and firmly steered them to safety.

  Pressure loss was the primal fear in space, but the regular inhabitants of Port Hesperus had run drills for just this sort of thing so often that when the reality occurred, it was almost routine. Old-timers were comfortable in the knowledge that so huge was the volume of air in even one quarter of Port Hesperus’s core that it would be eight hours before the pressure dropped from its current luxurious sea-level value to the thinness of a mountaintop in the Andes. Long before then the repair crews would have done their job.

  Sparta stayed in the dark, avoiding the corridors and the crowds, swimming through the dull infrared glow of access passages, along freight shafts, past pipes and cable racks in the ventilation tunnels, toward the site of the blown hatch. She was moving against the crowds but with the air; she’d needed only a moment of listening to pinpoint the wind’s destination, for it wailed through the blown pressure plate, playing the core like a vast organ pipe.

  As she flew she felt the breeze, stirring gently at first, steadily freshening. Twenty or thirty meters from the hole the airflow reached hurricane velocity, and if she were to slip over that imaginary boundary she would be sucked into a supersonic funnel and shot into space like a rifle bullet. She would have to get close, but not that close.

  The open hatch was in the Q3 security lock, and the purpose of this second act of sabotage was clear to her—someone had needed to create a diversion that would draw people away from Star Queen, that would make the neighborhood unsafe. Someone much cleverer than Sparta had suspected. So Sparta took the shortcut through the alleys and backyards of the space station, dashing to get to Star Queen, while the culprit was still aboard.

  It occurred to her, as she approached the lock through a final stretch of ventilator duct, that the diversion had been not just clever but shrewd, provoking maximum terror with minimum risk of injury—the only people in the immediate vicinity of the blown hatch were the spacesuited guards, and even if they had been sucked into the vacuum of the docking bay they would have been protected. A softhearted villain, then?

  Not the one who blew up Star Queen’s oxygen supply. Perhaps safety in this case was more apparent than real, the accidental byproduct of a fundamentally pragmatic scheme.

  Sparta knocked the panel from the end of the ventilator and saw it skitter away, dragged by the wind; she peered from her hole into dark, howling desolation. The approach to the security lock was deserted. The guards, if not in the wrong place at the wrong time and thus instantly sucked out, would by now have been ordered to clear out. That would have been what the perpetrator planned, needed.

  And if Sparta was right, the individual was still aboard the ship, having left the hatch wide open—with no time to waste putting on a spacesuit—and would be coming out again any second.

  Sparta would forestall the escape. She pulled herself out of the ventilator. Clinging to the walls against the sucking vacuum, she pulled herself hand over hand into Star Queen’s docking tube. She pulled herself along by inches while the excruciating wind tore at her ears. Finally she reached Star Queen’s main hatch.

  Inside the ship she punched the switches and watched as the hatch slowly sealed itself shut behind her; inside the airlock there was silence. She saw the red glow of handprints on the switches and on the ladder rungs, one person’s handprints.

  The two of them were in here together. Sparta leaned close to a glowing print and inhaled its chemical essence. Not anyone she had met on Port Hesperus, not anyone she had touched in weeks. The spicy amino acid pattern, called to full visualization, teased at her memory but was nowhere within its access…

  In one scenario, Sondra Sylvester was to have been in the hold, attempting to steal The Seven Pillars of Wisdom; two minutes ago, Sylvester was two kilometers away. In another scenario—Sparta’s favorite—Nikos Pavlakis was to have been in the ship, on the flight deck, setting its automatic systems to undock and blast its way out of the station, into the sun, forever burying the evidence of his and his partners’ treachery. But without accomplices, Pavlakis had had no time to rig the diversion.

  Sparta pulled herself cautiously into the ship, past the stores deck—paused—then floated down through the flight deck. The glow of the console lights, running on batteries, made a soft circular kaleidoscope in the darkness. She paused again, listening—

  A distant careful movement, the brush of a glove, perhaps, or the scrape of a shoe against metal. She pinpointed it: her quarry was in Hold A. It was no one she had expected to find.

  If whoever was in the hold was not Sylvester, it was one of her agents. Not Nancybeth, who was as somatically focused as an infant, incapable of concentrating on anything but her own needs and pleasures for more than a minute at a time. All communications to and from Helios had been tightly monitored; someone who had been aboard Helios, then. Sparta knew she’d been a fool…

  She crept weightless through the life-support-deck corridor with every augmented sense atingle, through the hatch of the hold airlock—which was ajar—until her face was inches from the outer hatch of Hold A. It too stood open. She moved as silently as she could, pulling herself along by the friction of the merest pressure of her fingertips, into the lock.

  “Don’t be afraid of me,” he said. His voice was as warm as before, but this time it rose from a deeper, firmer base. He was quite near. “I needed to learn something.”

  His control was extraordinary, she thought. If she’d made a voiceprint of his words, they would have betrayed no insincerity.

  She stopped where she was, breathless, pausing for thought. She could hear him and smell him, she knew approximately where he was, but she had no weapon and he was not in the line of sight.

  “You don’t have to show yourself,” he said. “I’m not sure where you are, in fact, although I think you can hear me easily. Let me explain.”

  Seconds passed while she inched closer to the inner hatch. The empty interior darkness of the hold was cold and black, what she could see of it, except for the dull red glow of the places he had touched.

  Their pattern made plain what he was after—the space where the book’s Styrene case had rested was a cold, empty pit.

  “I’m going to make the assumption that you’re willing to listen,” he said.

  She had him located now, but still not as precisely as she wanted. He was lurking just inside the airlock. That sound—that was probably his hand, maybe his hip, rubbing lightly against the shell of the hold, no more than a foot or two from her head. Keep him talking, talking and moving in the way that talking entrains unconsciou
sly, keep him talking a half a minute more and she would know where to grab…

  “I needed to look at this book before you let it off the ship,” he said. “You said it was here, but I needed to know if the book you saw was the real book. You’re not an expert. I am.”

  She inched closer, breathing in and breathing out in long, slow, controlled inhalations and exhalations that no ear but her own could hear. His breath, because she was so close to him, was a visible cloud of warmth, pulsing slowly in the dark air beyond the lock.

  A foot away in the darkness he was explaining himself to her. “Someone with time and a lot of money to spend could, just conceivably, have counterfeited a book from the early 20th century. They would have had to find craftsmen who could set metal type, to begin with—printers who were willing to print a book in the old way, line by line, from a text a third of a million words long. They would have had to cast the type—it would take months, if the person had the skills—unless the original type was still in existence and they could get hold of it. They would have had to find old paper of the right sort—or reproduce it, watermarks and all, and make it look old. Then the bindings, the marbled slipcase, the leather covers … think of the craftsmanship, the incredible skill!”

  In his passion for the thing he was describing, that peculiar old book, he seemed momentarily to have forgotten about Sparta.

  She hesitated, then spoke in a whisper that would carry only to him. “I’m listening.” No answer. Perhaps he was startled by her closeness. “Why so important to look at it now? Why not wait?” she whispered.

  “Because the real book may still be aboard.”

  Had he hoped to find the real book first? Or was all this an elaborate alibi because she’d already caught him with the real book in his hands?

  “Sondra Sylvester flew to Washington, then back to London three weeks before she boarded Helios,” she said. “She made other trips from France to England. What was she doing there?”

  “She was in Oxford. She had a book made.” His voice was bolder now, darker, like old hardwood. “I have it in my hand.”

  A shutter clicked in her mind, a wall descended, a decision was made. She slipped her hands over the rim of the hatch and pulled hard, darting into the hold. She brought herself up against the steel racks opposite the hatch and turned to face him. He was a glowing blob of red in the darkness, beside the open hatch. The thing in his hand was … a book—

  —only a book.

  “Can we have some light now?” he asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  He reached up and hit the switch beside the hatch. Green worklights illuminated the hold and her vision shifted into the visible spectrum. For a moment Blake’s eyes held hers. He looked a bit sheepish, as if regretting all the fuss.

  She had an odd thought, then—she thought he looked rather charming with his reddish hair awry and his thoroughly rumpled suit.

  He held up the book. “A beautiful counterfeit. The typeface is perfect. The paper is perfect—the kind they still print Bibles on. The binding is extraordinarily good. Chemical analysis will prove the book is new, but if you’d never seen the original, you would have to read a lot of it even to become suspicious.”

  She was watching him, listening to him. He was different indeed. “What gives it away?” she asked.

  “There must have been a gang of them at different print shops, whacking the linotype keyboards. Three hundred thousand words. Some of the typesetters weren’t as careful as others.”

  “Errors?”

  “A few typos. Only a few, remarkably.” He smiled. “There really wasn’t time for a thorough proofreading.”

  She saw what he was driving at. “But Darlington probably wouldn’t have read it anyway.”

  “From what I know of the man he would never have opened it.” He smiled. “Well, maybe to the title page.”

  “What makes you think the original is still on board?”

  “Because I personally brought the book up by shuttle and saw it secured in that rack only a few hours before Star Queen left Earth. Unless it went back off the ship immediately, it’s got to be here.”

  “Is that the case it came in?” The gray Styrene case floated beside him.

  “I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t that worried about the lock. A determined thief with plenty of time and access to the ship’s computer… I thought I knew what Sylvester was up to, you see, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she would move so quickly. News of the meteoroid strike started me thinking about how anxious she’d been for Star Queen to leave on schedule. Then I learned Inspector Ellen Troy had been assigned…”

  How had he learned that? She’d worry about it later—she was going to have plenty of time to interview Blake Redfield. “All right, Mr. Redfield. Let me have this exquisite counterfeit. Exhibit A.” Ruefully she added, “Thanks for your help—I’ll put in a good word at your trial. If you’re lucky you can get a change of venue.”

  “Sorry I had to blow a hole in the station. But the fuss I made wasn’t just for the book’s sake—not that it isn’t worth it.” He made no move to hand it to her. “A wise salesman once told me that anything for sale is worth exactly what the buyer and seller agree it’s worth. By that standard the real Seven Pillars is worth a million and a half pounds. This fake could have cost Sondra Sylvester a half a million pounds. Labor and materials. Bribes and payoffs.”

  She liked his voice, but he was talking too much. “The book, please.”

  His eyes never left hers. “You see, I knew if anyone came before I left Star Queen, it would be you. In fact, I counted on it.”

  Again something had escaped her. Again her heart was suddenly racing. Once she’d known Blade Redfield well, as well as one child could know another. Why was he a mystery to her now?

  “SPARTA,” he said, quietly. “I never believed what they told us about what happened to you, what happened to your folks, why they closed the program. I recognized you the second I saw you on that street in Manhattan. But you didn’t want me to know you even existed. So I…”

  A great rending and tearing of metal cut him off in midsentence, its obscene screech crushing the warmth of his voice.

  Creeping up on him, before she knew who he was, she’d seen that other hold open, but she’d ignored it. “Follow me,” she shouted, diving past him into the airlock.

  In the corridor a blast of heat seared her face. The open Hold C airlock was the mouth of a furnace. She slammed the hatch shut and spun its wheel. “Blake, move!”

  He scrambled out of the hold, still clutching the counterfeit book. “Get up there,” she urged him. “We’ve got to get off the ship, fast!”

  Blake pulled himself out of the access lock—just as the hatchcover bulged from a massive impact, slamming him sideways off the ladder. Sparta boosted him and leaped after him, an instant before the diamond-edged proboscis ripped through the hatch’s steel plate like a chainsaw through plywood, spraying weightless shrapnel. The Rolls-Royce robot was rapidly carving a hole for itself through the sealed lock.

  The mining robot, which had been loaded through an outer pressure hatch, was not only too big for the airlock but too big for the corridor; that it had to tear the ship to pieces to make progress did not deter it.

  Blake sailed up past the cabins, through the flight deck, through the stores deck, toward the main airlock, pulling and steering himself with one hand in the darkness, holding his book in the other. Sparta followed closely, pausing only to slam the lower corridor hatch after herself.

  Blake reached the top of the crew module. He careened to a halt against the outer hatch of the main airlock, reached to punch the switches—

  —and yanked his hand back as if he’d been scalded.

  Sparta pulled herself to a stop below him. “Go, Blake, go!” she barked, before she saw what he saw, the red sign blazing: WARNING. VACUUM. “They must’ve sealed off the security area,” she said, “let it go to vacuum.”

  “Spacesuits—on the wall beside you
.”

  The robot’s progress was a demolition derby; an endless mashing and tearing of metal and plastic. Any moment it would rip through the hull, and then they would perish in vacuum.

  “No time,” she said. “Our only chance is to disable it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Not here. We’re trapped.”

  She dived back down to the flight deck. He fumbled after her. To him the place was pitch dark but for the glow of the console lights, but she saw everything. She could see through the steel deck to what looked like the glow of an oncoming white dwarf star.

  “Forget that damned book!” she yelled at Blake—but he held onto the exquisite counterfeit as if it were worth as much as his life. The robot arrived on the flight deck at the same time he did, a creature of nightmare preceded by the flare of its radiators. Having widened the corridor opening with its saw-toothed proboscis, its bristling sensors appeared first above the edge of the hole, followed in milliseconds by its great samurai-helmet head thrusting into the room. Its head swiveled in rapid jerks, diamond-paned compound eyes reflecting the multi-colored glow from the instrument panel.

  The wave of heat from its radiators was enough to send Blake and Sparta thrashing away in retreat.

  The robot’s glittering eyes fixed on Sparta. Its leg motors accelerated with a whine, and it jumped—five and a half weightless tonnes, its ore-scoops out-stretched—toward the corner of ceiling where she cringed. She possessed a small fraction of the machine’s mass and could accelerate much faster; by the time it had smashed into the flight deck ceiling she was bouncing off the floor.

  “Fire extinguisher,” Blake cried, and for a half second she thought he’d panicked, lost his wits—what good’s a fire extinguisher against a nuclear reactor?—but in the next half second she realized that the heat had inspired him.

  That the mining robot was not built to work in freefall gave them a slim advantage in the battle. One other advantage, hardly more robust, had occurred to her when she’d leaped to evade its grasp. The brute machine acted as if it had a personal grudge—against her. It didn’t want to just punch a hole in the ship and let her die, drunk on hypoxia. It wanted to tear her to pieces. It wanted to watch.