Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The moon was a gigantic crescent, the dividing line between its night and day a jagged arch sweeping across a quarter of the sky. Down there the sun was setting and the long lunar night was beginning, but the summits of isolated peaks were still blazing with the last light of day, defying the darkness that had already encircled them.

  That darkness was not complete. Though the sun had gone from the land below, the almost-full Earth flooded it with glory. Cliff could see, faint but clear in the glimmering earthlight, the outlines of “seas” and highlands, the dim stars of mountain peaks, the dark circles of craters. Directly below, its lights pricking cheerily through the gloom, was the tiny outline of Cayley Base. Except for that single sign of humanity, he was flying above a ghostly, sleeping land—a land that was trying to drag him to his death.

  And far above his head was the life-ring he could not reach, the spidery L-1 space station, its sunlit struts and cables too far away to be visible against the stars.

  Now Cliff was poised at the highest point of his orbit, exactly on the line between moon and Earth. It was time to go.

  He bent his legs, crouching against the hull. Then, with every bit of strength he could muster, he launched himself toward the stars and the invisible space station far overhead. His safety line uncoiled swiftly behind him; until the length of polyfiber was completely payed out, he could still change his mind.

  The capsule dwindled with surprising speed, until it was a mere shadowy speck against the earthlit moon below. As it receded, Cliff felt a most unexpected sensation. He had anticipated terror, or at least vertigo, but not this unmistakable, haunting sense of déjà vu. All this had happened before. Not to him, of course, but to someone else. He could not pinpoint the memory, and there was no time to hunt for it now.

  He flashed a quick glance at Earth, moon, and what he could see of the receding shuttle, and he arrived at a decision without conscious thought. He snapped the quick-release. His safety line whipped away and vanished.

  He was alone, more than 3,000 kilometers above the moon, 400 thousand kilometers from the Earth. He could do nothing but wait; it would be two-and-a-half hours before he would know if he could live. If his own muscles had performed the task that rockets had failed to do.

  And as the stars slowly revolved around him, he suddenly recalled the origin of that haunting memory. It was many years since he’d encountered the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, but who could ever forget them?

  He too was trapped in a maelstrom, being whirled down to his doom; he too hoped to escape by abandoning his vessel. Though the forces involved were totally different, the parallel was striking. Poe’s fisherman had lashed himself to a barrel because stubby, cylindrical objects were sucked down into the great whirlpool more slowly than his ship. It was a brilliant application of the laws of hydrodynamics. Cliff could only hope that his use of celestial mechanics would be equally inspired.

  How fast had he jumped away from the capsule? His total delta-vees were a good two meters per second—five miles an hour at most—trivial by astronomical standards, but enough to inject him into a new orbit, one that, Van Kessel had promised him, would clear the Moon by several kilometers. Not much of a margin, but it would be enough on this airless world, where there was no atmosphere to claw him down.

  With a sudden spasm of guilt, Cliff remembered that he’d never made that second call to Myra. It was Van Kessel’s fault; the engineer had kept him on the move, made sure he had no time to brood on his own affairs. Van Kessel was right, of course: in a situation like this, a man could think only of himself. All his resources, mental and physical, must be concentrated on survival. This was no time or place for the distracting and weakening ties of love.

  He was racing now toward the night side of the moon, and the daylit crescent was shrinking as he watched. The intolerable disk of the sun, at which he dare not look directly, was falling swiftly toward the curved horizon. The crescent moonscape dwindled to a burning line of light, a bow of fire set against the stars. Then the bow fragmented into a dozen shining beads, which one by one winked out as he shot into the shadow of the moon.

  With the going of the sun, the earthlight seemed more brilliant than ever, frosting his suit with silver as he slowly rotated front to back along his orbit. It took about ten seconds for him to make each revolution; there was nothing he could do to check his spin, and indeed he welcomed the constantly changing view. Now that his eyes were no longer distracted by occasional glimpses of the sun he could see the stars in thousands, where there had been only hundreds before. The familiar constellations were drowned, and even the brightest of planets was hard to find in the blaze of stellar light.

  The dark disk of the lunar-night landscape lay across the star field like an eclipsing shadow, and it was slowly growing as he fell toward it. At every instant some star, bright or faint, would pass behind its edge and wink out of existence. It was almost as if a hole were growing in space, eating up the heavens.

  There was no other indication of his movement, or of the passage of time, except for his regular ten-second spin. When he looked at the chronometer display on the forearm of his suit he was astonished to see that a half an hour had already passed since he’d left the capsule. He searched for it among the stars, without success. By now it would be several kilometers behind him. But according to Van Kessel it would presently draw ahead as it moved on its lower orbit, and would be the first to reach the moon.

  Cliff was still puzzling over this seeming paradox—the equations of celestial mechanics which physicists found so simple were opaque to him, who was at home with the complexity of diploidy and triploidy and selection principles that the same physicists invariably got inside out—when the strain of the past hours, combined with the euphoria of unending weightlessness, produced a result he would hardly have believed possible. Lulled by the gentle susurration of the air inlet, floating lighter than any feather as he turned beneath the stars, Cliff fell into a dreamless sleep…

  12

  The underground control room of the electromagnetic launcher was a cramped room with two banks of flatscreen consoles facing a wall of larger screens. Half a dozen human controllers could monitor power supply, power control systems, track alignment, cargo loading, space vehicle maintenance—all the other complex subsystems of the launcher.

  Topside, work was normally done by radiation-hardened robots and teleoperators; the launcher operated continuously, and radiation from space precluded humans from holding steady jobs on the surface. But for now the launcher had been shut down. The auxiliary reactors that had provided power during the long lunar night were cooling as rapidly as safety permitted. Power from the solar panels, once more flowing in the lunar morning, was shunted to capacitors and banks of monstrous flywheels. The launcher would remain out of commission until its failure was understood and resolved.

  On the big wall screens, huge videoplates showed the surface of Farside Base in crisp detail: the launcher track stretched in an uncannily straight line to the east, vanishing at an infinity defined only by the distant peaks of the Mare Moscoviense ringwall. To one side the radio-telescopes were rimmed in the backlight of the low sun, a hundred round ears forming one big ear.

  The alarm had gone out by suitlink to everyone working on the surface in the vicinity of Farside Base. Spacesuited men and women dropped what they were doing and trudged away. Tractors and moon buggies turned in their tracks and rolled in stately slow-motion toward the base’s central domes and hangars.

  Inside the domes and in the labyrinth of underground facilities, yellow warning lights flashed and low sirens moaned in every bay and corridor. Damage-control crews gathered their equipment and reported to standby positions. Everyone whose work was not essential to life support, communications, and emergency services was ordered to head for the deep shelters that had been established in the ice mines.

  The inhabited areas of the base were buried under enough regolith to provide plenty of protection against meteorites, from cosmi
c dust specks on up to massive, thousand-kilogram giants—the sort of monster that might hit somewhere inside the base perimeter once every ten million years, but would likely miss any important structure even then.

  The errant launch capsule was far more massive than even a giant meteorite. A bit more acceleration and the derelict would have sailed safely overhead; a bit less and it would have impacted with the moon well before reaching the Mare Moscoviense. But through a chance so unlikely it had been dismissed as negligible when the linear accelerator was designed and built, it was aimed right for the base. The only shred of optimism in this bleak scenario was that, with very minor uncertainties, the moment of impact was predictable.

  Van Kessel and a knot of worried controllers clustered around the duty officer’s desk at the top of the room. Van Kessel’s shiny pate was ringed with unruly gray fuzz, giving him a faintly comic appearance that was flatly contradicted by his hard gray eyes and the firm set of his mouth. He and the others were paying no attention to the base’s emergency drill. They were staring at a computer flat-screen that fed out continuously updated data on the capsule’s trajectory. Wherever radars on the moon could get a fix on the falling object they monitored its progress, comparing projections of its path against its actual track.

  “Still doesn’t look very good,” muttered Frank Penney. He was a handsome, athletic young man with a deep artificial tan, incongruous among the pale faces of the other controllers.

  “No significant deviation,” Van Kessel agreed. “It’s going to be messy.”

  “Does Leyland have any idea what’s actually going to happen to him?” Penny asked.

  “Absolutely not,” Van Kessel replied. “I didn’t dare tell him. He almost fainted on us as it was.”

  “Let’s hope it wasn’t all for nothing.”

  “At least we kept the poor devil busy for a few minutes. Whatever else, it’s going to be a hell of a sightseeing tour.”

  At some prompting from his subconscious, the “poor devil” woke up. Where was he? Where were the walls of his home? No, of his room on the moon. Of the space capsule. He could see nothing but stars and…

  Then Cliff remembered. That was the moon down there. He was flying naked, but for a few layers of canvas, through hard vacuum.

  The blue-white Earth was sinking toward the moon’s horizon. The sight almost brought on another wave of self-pity; for a moment Cliff had to fight for control of his emotions. This was the very last he might ever see of Earth, as his orbit took him back over Farside into the land where earthlight never shone. The brilliant antarctic ice caps, the equatorial cloud belts, the scintillation of the sun upon the Pacific—all were sinking swiftly behind the lunar mountains. Then they were gone; he had neither sun nor Earth to light him now, and the invisible land below was so black that his eyes ached when he peered into it.

  A cluster of stars had appeared inside the darkened disk where no stars could be. In his still drowsy state, Cliff stared at them puzzled until he realized he was passing above one of the outlying Farside research posts. Down there beneath their portable pressure domes, men and women were waiting out the lunar night—sleeping, working, resting, perhaps quarreling or making love. Did they know that he was speeding like an invisible meteor through their sky, racing above their heads at more than 6,000 kilometers an hour? Almost certainly; for by now the whole moon and the whole Earth must know of his predicament. Already those below must be tracking him on radar, and some might even be searching with telescopes, but they would have little time to find him. Within seconds, the unknown research station had dropped out of sight, and he was once more alone above the dark side of the moon.

  It was impossible to judge his altitude above the blank emptiness speeding below, for there was no sense of scale or perspective. Sometimes it seemed that he could reach out and touch the darkness across which he was racing; yet he knew that in reality it must still be many kilometers beneath him.

  But he also knew that he was still descending, and that at any moment one of the crater walls or mountain peaks that strained invisibly toward him might claw him from the sky.

  In the darkness somewhere ahead was the final obstacle—the hazard he feared most of all. Around the Mare Moscoviense loomed a ringwall of mountains two kilometers high. Those familiar peaks, over which he had passed so often in recent months as automated capsules shuttled him back and forth, were deceptively smooth of surface; like all the hills and valleys of the moon, they had been sanded by countless micrometeorite impacts over billions of years, their defiles filled with the debris. But they were as steep as mountains on Earth, and high enough to snag him at the last instant before he sailed over the base.

  The first eruption of dawn took him completely by surprise. Light exploded ahead of him, leaping from peak to peak until the whole arc of the horizon was lined with flame. He was hurtling out of the lunar night, directly into the face of the sun. He would not die in darkness.

  The greatest danger was fast approaching. He glanced at his suit chronometer and saw that five full hours had passed: he was almost back where he had started, nearing the lowest point of his orbit. Within moments he would hit the moon—or skim it and pass safely out into space.

  As far as he could judge, he was some thirty kilometers above the surface and still descending, though very slowly now. Beneath him the long shadows of the lunar dawn were daggers of blackness, stabbing into the night land. The steeply slanting sunlight exaggerated every rise in the ground, making mountains of the smallest hills.

  And now, unmistakably, the ground ahead was wrinkling into the pattern it had taken him so many trips to learn to recognize. Rolling into view, ahead and off to his right, was the deep crater Shatalov, an outlier of the bigger crater Belyaev in the foothills of the mountains. The great western ringwall of the Mare was rising ahead, still more than 150 kilometers away but approaching at well over a kilometer per second. It was a wave of rock, climbing from the face of the moon.

  There was nothing he could do to avoid it; his path was fixed, unalterable. All that could be done had already been done, two-and-a-half hours ago.

  It became apparent that what had been done was not enough. He was not going to rise above these mountains; they were rising above him. Straight ahead he could make out the distinctive shape of Mount Tereshkova, the highest peak on the crater’s western rim.

  Cliff regretted his failure to make that second call to the woman who still waited so many thousands of kilometers away. Yet perhaps it was just as well; perhaps there had been nothing more to say.

  Other voices filled the aether as his suit receiver came within range of the base, calling to each other, not to him. They waxed, then waned again as he entered the radio shadow of the ringwall, and some of them were talking about him, although the fact hardly registered. He listened with an impersonal interest, as if to messages from some remote point of space or time, of no concern to him.

  He heard Van Kessel’s voice say, quite distinctly: “…confirming you will receive intercept orbit immediately after Leyland passes perigee. Your rendezvous time now estimated at minus one hour, five minutes.”

  I hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that’s one appointment I’ll never keep.

  Now the wall of rock was only eighty kilometers away, and each time he spun helplessly around in space to face it, it was fifteen kilometers closer. There was no more room for optimism. He sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier, and it suddenly became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned like a coward.

  No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him. He was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had traveled, the path that should have led to Earth, when to his astonishment�
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  —the moonscape beneath him exploded in silent flame. Somewhere behind his back a light as fierce as that of the sun instantly banished the long shadows, struck fire from the crests of the surrounding peaks, rimmed the craters which were spread below him in searing brightness. The light lasted only a fraction of a second, and by the time he had turned toward its source it had faded completely.

  Directly ahead of him, only thirty kilometers away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted on the flank of Mount Tereshkova—but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought: that by some fantastic feat of organization and logistics the Farside engineering division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.

  For it was gone. A huge, crescent-shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five minutes ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.

  The bizarre vision slid from his sight as he twisted away into another revolution. He had come all the way around and was almost upon the mountains when he remembered that all this while there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule—many tonnes, traveling at almost a kilometer-and-a-half every second—was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he now flashed. Appalled at the scope of the destruction, Cliff wondered what havoc the impact of the manmade meteor had wrought on Farside Base.

  Cliff’s luck held. There was a brief patter of dust particles against his suit, but none punctured it—most of the debris had been propelled outward and forward—and he caught a brief glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke falling away beneath him. How strange to see a cloud upon the moon!