Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “I thought not. If you had…”

  But at that moment Blake turned his shoulder into Pierre’s crotch. He twisted off his chair and shoved Pierre as hard as he could against the sink. Pierre bent over in pain, but he was quick enough to bring up his forearm to defend himself against Blake’s thrusting arms. But Blake was not going for Pierre’s face; he reached around and past him and grabbed a bottle of drain opener from the shelf over the steel sink. He brought the fragile plastic bottle down against the edge of the sink with all the strength he could muster, even as Pierre shoved him back. Blake’s eyes and mouth were pursed tight and he was holding his breath; he yanked his shirt up over his face. Pierre swung as Blake ducked and dived. Pierre suddenly screamed.

  Lequeu shrieked in pain and clutched at his throat. The bleach and the caustic, reacting in the drain, had expelled a heavy cloud of chlorine gas into the room, burning their eyes, their skin, their mucous membranes, their lungs.

  Blake blundered toward the door with his eyes closed. He almost made it—but Lequeu threw out an arm and the injector brushed Blake’s shoulder as he stumbled past, running blind. He left two disabled bodies gasping and writhing on the floor behind him.

  The neurostimulant was real. Before he got out on the street Blake was babbling uncontrollably. He ran down the rue Jacob, tears streaming from his eyes, while he blurted an extemporaneous monologue: “…Pierre Pussycat, they ought to call you, all fake muscles from the exercise machine, never saw a day of real work in your life, you type…”

  Blake had meant to head straight for police headquarters, but he knew it would be hours before he sounded sane. Until then, he had to go somewhere where no one would pay attention to his sudden attack of logorrhea.

  He headed for the quays and riverbanks he had gotten to know well, where on sunny afternoons like this, under the chestnut trees, one or more of his former colleagues among the homeless could be found haranguing passers-by who did their best to pretend they heard nothing at all.

  Meanwhile he kept talking nonsense: “…and as for you, Lequeu, who’s your tailor? You ought to tell him to get into some other line of work…”

  “Frankly, Mademoiselle—”

  “I’m an inspector, Lieutenant.”

  “Ah, yes,” said the police officer, hooking a forefinger in his high stiff collar. “Inspector… Troy. At any rate, about this ‘precious papyrus’—the director has admitted that the scroll would never have been missed had not the unfortunate incident with the guard forced the museum staff to do a thorough search and inventory of the area where this man Guy was working.”

  They were sitting in the lieutenant’s cramped and crowded office at police headquarters on the Île de la Cité. Through the grimy window behind the lieutenant’s head, Sparta could see leafy chestnuts and the mansard roofs of Right Bank apartments on the far side of the Seine.

  “How was the guard attacked?” Sparta asked.

  “With a minimal dose of tranquilizer, quite expertly applied via hypodermic dart to the neck.”

  “A dangerous area.”

  “Here is the dart.” He held up a plastic package that contained a tiny glittering filament of metal. “Almost microscopic. It could have punctured the carotid artery without severe damage, although in fact it struck nowhere near the artery. In my estimation, Monsieur ‘Guy’ knew precisely what he was doing. What we don’t know is why he was doing it. Can you help us, Inspector?”

  “I can only tell you that ‘Guy’ is an agent engaged in research on a group known as the prophetae of the Free Spirit—at least, that is the name they were known by several centuries ago. We don’t know what they call themselves these days. We’ve heard nothing from Guy in over four months.”

  “But here you are,” the lieutenant remarked dryly.

  “I received a coded message requesting me to meet… Guy … at the Louvre.”

  “He was engaged in research, you say?” The crisp, gray-haired Frenchman regarded her with professional suspicion and what she had learned to recognize as the endemic jaundice of the Paris flic. “What was the nature of this research? Who are these so-called Free Spirits?”

  “I deeply regret that as a representative of the Board of Space Control, I am not at liberty to say more,” Sparta remarked cooly. “I came to you because our man obviously intended to draw attention to himself. Otherwise the guard would not have been given an opportunity to recognize him.”

  “Possibly,” said the lieutenant. He did not mention that the position of the guard’s sleeping body indicated he had been shot after the thief had already escaped.

  “And because I had hoped you would be able to provide some clue as to the importance of this papyrus.”

  “As to that, I can only repeat: the papyrus has little intrinsic value.”

  “Would you object to my visiting the Louvre personally?”

  “Official Space Board business naturally takes precedence over our merely local concerns,” the lieutenant replied, calling her bluff.

  “Very well, if you would be so kind as to arrange a link with Earth Central,” she said, calling his.

  They watched each other from opposite sides of his cluttered desk. Then, with an almost imperceptible sigh, the lieutenant reached for his old-fashioned phonelink console.

  Before his fingers reached the pad, however, the console chimed. He hesitated, then keyed the link. “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  “Pour l’Inspecteur, Monsieur. De la Terre Centrale.”

  He looked up at Sparta. “They are saving us the trouble, it seems.” He handed her the link’s hand unit.

  “Troy here,” said Sparta.

  “Troy,” said a gravelly voice.

  “Commander,” she said, surprised. “How did…?”

  “Never mind that. I’m calling from an infobooth on the Quai d’Orsay.”

  “Out of the office again,” she said dryly. “Anyway, I have important information concerning our friend that…”

  “It will have to wait, Troy. Sorry to cut your fun and games short—whatever line you’ve been feeding that French cop—but I just got a commwhistle from Central. Something’s come up.”

  “Yes? Where?”

  “On the moon.”

  PART

  4

  MAELSTROM

  11

  He was not the first man, Cliff Leyland told himself bitterly, to know the exact second and the precise manner of his death. Times beyond number, condemned criminals had waited for their last dawn. Yet until the very end they could hope for a reprieve; human judges can show mercy. But against the laws of nature, there is no appeal.

  Only six hours ago he had been whistling happily while he packed his ten kilos of personal baggage for the long fall home. Blessed surprise! He’d been released early from his tour of duty on the Moon: he was needed back on the Sahara project, as quickly as possible. He reserved his place on the first available manned capsule from Farside and sincerely hoped he would never be coming back.

  He could still remember (even now, after all that had happened) how he had dreamed that Myra was already in his arms, that he was taking Brian and Sue on that promised cruise down the Nile. In a few minutes, as Earth rose above the horizon, he might see the Nile again; but memory alone could bring back the faces of his wife and children.

  He’d had the usual moment of nervousness as he climbed aboard, of course; he’d never really gotten used to living on the moon, or to traveling in space. He was one of those people who would have been delighted to stay on Earth his whole life. Nevertheless, in the course of his frequent business trips between Farside and L-5, he’d gotten used to the automatic capsules that shuttled him back and forth from the transfer station at L-1. He still didn’t trust the heavy modular tugs that worked the traffic trajectories between the libration points and low-Earth orbit. And he’d long been inwardly terrified at the prospect of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere on one of the fiery winged shuttles.

  Cliff had ridden the catapult often
enough, in fact, that people like Katrina considered him something of an expert. The first time, having heard many tall tales of electromagnetic “bumpiness,” he’d expected the launch to be rough. But so rigidly was the capsule suspended by the magnetic fields surrounding its own on-board superconducting magnets that in fact he felt no lateral movement at all as he was whipped along thirty kilometers of so-called “rough acceleration” track.

  Nor had he been looking forward to the ten gees of acceleration he would have to endure for twenty-four long seconds before the capsule reached the Moon’s escape velocity of some 2,400 meters per second. Yet when the acceleration had gripped the capsule, he had hardly been aware of the immense forces acting upon him. At its worst it was like lying under a pile of mattresses on the floor of a swiftly ascending elevator.

  The only sound had been a faint creaking from the metal walls: to anyone who had endured the thunder of a rocket launch from Earth, the silence was uncanny. And when the weary voice of the launch director came over his helmet radio to announce, “T plus five seconds; velocity 500 meters per second,” he could scarcely believe it. In the traditional English units still natural to Cliff, he was going over a thousand miles an hour!

  A thousand miles an hour in five seconds from a standing start—with nineteen seconds still to go as the generators smashed their thunderbolts of power into the launcher. He was riding the lightning across the face of the moon. And when the acceleration finally ceased and Cliff was suddenly weightless, it was as if a giant hand had opened and released him gently into space.

  He’d ridden the lightning five times in six months, and although he was far from blasé upon this sixth and final occasion, he was resting almost comfortably in the accelerating capsule. But this time, at T plus twenty-two seconds, the lightning failed.

  Even in the womblike shelter of his acceleration couch, Cliff knew instantly that something was wrong. The capsule had not ceased hurtling along the track, but in this final kilometer before acceleration was to cease there came a moment of stomach-lifting drag.

  He had no time to feel fear or even to wonder what had happened. Free-fall lasted less than half a second, before acceleration resumed with a jolt. A corner of the cargo net tore loose and one of his bags walloped onto the floor beside him. The final burst of acceleration lasted only one more second, and then he was weightless again. Through the little triangular windows forward, which were no longer “overhead,” Cliff saw the peaks of the ring-wall of Mare Moscoviense flicker past in a wink. Was it his imagination? They had never seemed so close.

  “Launch control,” he said urgently into his radiolink, “what the devil happened?”

  The launch director’s midwestern American voice held no hint of boredom. “Still checking. Call you back in half a minute.” Then he added belatedly, “Glad you’re okay.”

  Cliff yanked at the buckles of the webbing that held him to his seat and stood up, weightless, peering through the windows. Was the moonscape really significantly closer, or did it just seem that way? Through the window the surface of the moon was falling smoothly away, and the field of view was filling with stars. At least he had taken off with most of his planned speed, and there was no danger he would crash back to the surface immediately.

  But he would crash back sooner or later. He could not possibly have reached escape velocity. He was rising into space along a great ellipse—and in a few hours he would be back at his starting point. Or would be except that he’d never get through that last little bit of solid rock.

  “Hello Cliff, Frank Penney talking to you.” The launch controller sounded almost cheerful. “We’ve got a first fix on it—we got a transient phase reversal in the fine acceleration sector, God knows why. It put enough drag on you to lop about a thousand klicks off your final velocity. That orbit would bring you right back down on top of us in a little under five hours if you couldn’t change it, but no sweat. Your onboard retro’s got enough delta-vees stored to kick you into a stable orbit—heck, you could even make it on verniers alone. Your consumables are fat, you’ve got air enough in there for three people plus safety margins. All you’ll have to do is sit tight until we can get a tug from L-1 into your neighborhood.”

  “Yes of course … that doesn’t sound too complicated.”

  Slowly Cliff allowed himself to relax. In his panic he’d forgotten all about the retrorocket, although he didn’t intend to admit that to launch control. Low-powered as they were, even the maneuvering rockets could easily put him into a rounder orbit that would clear the moon by a comfortable margin. Though he might fall back closer to the surface than he’d ever flown—except when landing—the view as he skimmed over the mountains and plains would be breathtaking. He’d be perfectly safe. He just had to keep telling himself that.

  “So if you’ve got nothing better to do, why don’t you let us talk you through the procedure,” said Penney cheerily. “You see a panel marked B-2 on the left of the main instrument board?”

  “Yes.”

  “Find the big T-bar toggle in the middle of it, which is in the down position, ENG, engaged that is, and push it to the up position, which is DISENG, disengaged. A red light should come on.”

  Cliff found the chrome handle and pushed it up. It went smoothly but with a reassuring firmness of action. “All right, I have a red light in the disengage position.”

  “Good, that means whatever we do here is off-line. Nothing’s gonna go boom before we’re ready. Now I want you to find the toggle marked MAN/AUTO, at the top right of the panel, and confirm that it’s on AUTO. The toggle’s got a light in it, and that light should be yellow.”

  “Yes, I’ve got it. It’s on AUTO and the light is yellow.”

  “Right next to it is a similar toggle labeled LOC/REM, which should be yellow and in the REM position, the remote position.”

  “That’s confirmed.”

  “Good. What we’re going to do here is insert a new program so that when we engage again, the maneuver-control system will initiate a burn at our command. We’re looking at sort of a minimax situation here, Cliff. The later we burn, the better we can fine-tune your orbit. But at the same time we prefer to do this by line-of-sight transmission rather than routing through the transfer stations—I won’t bore you with the technicalities. So anyway, let’s first confirm that the MCS is receiving our transmissions as it should. Is the BC narrowband flat-screen showing a green light? That’s a little square liquid crystal window down at the lower left of the panel, and it’s labeled BC NARROW.”

  “Yes, the light’s green.”

  “Okay, we’re going to squirt up a little harmless information here, and that should show up on the flat-screen as a bunch of squiggles followed by a message, just the word RECEIVED. You got that?”

  Cliff said, “Yes, I understand. I’m standing by.”

  There was a pause. “What do you have on the LC, Cliff?”

  “Nothing. Go ahead when you’re ready.”

  This time the pause was longer. “How about now?”

  “There’s no change,” said Cliff.

  “Okay, Cliff…” The air was dead a moment. “Looks like we’ll be going to manual on this. The narrowband does not seem to be fully up to snuff.”

  “Please say again,” Cliff requested.

  “Well, we sent our test message three times and apparently you did not get it. We’ve queried your narrowband with telemetry and we are not getting anything but noise—sounds like the sizzling rice dish in the dining hall last night. So tell you what, just shove that REM/LOC toggle over to LOC, would you, buddy?”

  Cliff did so. “It’s on LOC. Now the light is red.”

  “Great, don’t worry about it, we’re still disengaged. Now just find that PROG button on row three, second from the left, and tell me if you get a little blue light.”

  “It’s blue.”

  “Good, that means the computer is ready for instructions. So I’m going to read you a list of numbers, not too long, and you will key them in
by hand, okay?”

  “Okay. Yes.” Let’s get on with it, Cliff thought, beginning to get a bit irritated. The launch controller was acting so calm he almost seemed condescending.

  “Okay, Cliff, here they come.”

  Penney read off a list of coordinates in three axes, plus specifications for the intensity and duration of the burn. Cliff read them back as he punched them in.

  “Right, Cliff, now just press ENTER and you’re all set. That blue light will flicker and turn green.”

  “I just pressed ENTER. The light flickered, but it’s still blue.”

  “That rascal… So, just confirming that we have the T-bar in DISENGAGE, the pilot on AUTO, and the control LOCAL…”

  “That’s all confirmed.”

  “Give us a sec.”

  For a long time Cliff stared out the window as the horizon rolled away beneath him.

  “I’ll tell you what, Cliff”—Penney’s voice was, if anything, cheerier yet—“why don’t we stick this thing in MAN and ENGAGE and see if we can’t just go around the barn. I mean, cut the computer out of the command loop.”

  “Right now?”

  “Sure, buddy. Let’s blow you into a higher orbit right now—what the hell, we’ll figure the trajectory later. Won’t take but a few seconds once we get a couple of Dopplers on you.”

  “If I’m off will the tug be able to reach me?” Cliff hoped his voice didn’t betray the depth of his fear.

  “Hell, you’re not going anywhere near that far out. Trajectory might not be ideal, but you can afford to wait a little longer to rendezvous.”

  Better than not being able to wait any longer at all, Cliff thought. “What do I do?”

  “Just flip her into manual…”

  He pushed the toggle to red. “Done.”

  “Now engage the controls.”

  He pulled the T-bar down and the light went green. “Done.”

  “Okay, Cliff, now grab something and hold on. The acceleration’s going to be the usual retrofire, about half a gee, but we don’t want you barking a shin or something.” By now Frank Penney was positively jovial.