by Paul Preuss
“No, stay.” Merck said sharply and slowly got to his feet. In his right hand he was carrying something black and shiny, barely bigger than his palm. “Really, Forster, Gress’s fate is of no interest to me. He had his assignment. He failed. I pray that I have not already failed mine.”
“Your assignment. What’s that mean?”
Merck walked to the far end of the gallery, past rows of display cases. Some of the cases housed real fossils, scraps of natural sculpture collected by Venus-roving mining robots over the years. Others contained duplicates, recently completed, of the creatures Merck and Forster had seen preserved in the cave, painstakingly reconstructed from their recordings.
Merck bent over a case holding a replica of the tablets. He stared at the rows upon rows of signs, incised in a polished metallic surface that looked uncannily like the real thing, although it was only metallized plastic. The real thing was buried beneath the Venusian rock. It would wait there as long as it had waited already; its metal was as hard as diamond.
Merck murmured words that Forster could not hear. He seemed to be talking directly to the tablets.
“Speak up, man,” Forster said, moving closer. “I can’t understand you.”
“I said, our tradition did not prepare us for these events. The Pancreator was to speak to those of us who had accepted and preserved the Knowledge. Only to us. But these”—he stared at the tablets—“are accessible to any philologist.”
“What are you talking about, Merck? Who or what is the Pancreator?”
Merck placed the thing in his hand on top of the display case. It was a flat plastic disk. He turned toward Forster then, raising himself to his full imposing height in the shadows. “I grew to like you, Forster, despite our differences. Despite how often you have frustrated my efforts.”
“You need a rest, Merck,” said Forster. “It’s obvious you’ve taken all this very hard. I regret it was I who proved you wrong about the translations, but that was inevitable.”
Merck went on, ignoring him. “Sometimes I have even been tempted to help you with the truth, even though it has been my lifelong mission to steer you—and everyone else—away from it.”
“You’re speaking nonsense,” Forster said bluntly.
“Unhappily for you, you’ve come to the truth on your own. So I have had to destroy your work…”
“What?” Forster turned to the blank flatscreen on Merck’s worktable. He lunged at the mounded keyboard and stroked the keys, but the flatscreen showed him empty files. “I can’t… What does this mean? What have you done, Merck?”
“What I’ve done here is being done everywhere such records have been recorded and stored, Forster,” Merck whispered. “On Earth, on Mars, in every library and museum and university. Everywhere. It only remains to destroy the two minds that could reveal the truth. You would do so willingly. I can’t blame you for that. And of course I could be forced.”
Forster looked at the thing on the case beside Merck. “What the devil is…”
He lunged for Merck. A flash of intense light and a wall of seared air blew him back. His last image of Merck was of a tall blond man sheathed in flame.
EPILOGUE
The commander was waiting for Sparta and Blake as they stepped off the shuttle at Newark. He was crisp in his blue uniform. They were dressed for a vacation.
Sparta’s greeting lacked warmth. “Our appointment is at your office tomorrow.”
“Something’s come up,” the commander said hoarsely. He turned his blue stare on Blake. “Hello, Redfield.”
“Blake, it’s time you knew who this man really is. This is my boss. Commander…”
“Sorry, still no time to get acquainted,” he said to Blake, interrupting her, but he gave Blake’s hand a quick, very hard squeeze. “We’ll have to talk as we go,” he said to Sparta.
Blake looked at Sparta. “Am I included in this?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Don’t let me out of your sight.” They hurried to join the commander, pushing past other passengers on the high-speed people-mover to reach his side.
“Somebody bombed the Hesperian Museum,” the commander said, his throat full of gravel. “Proboda pulled Forster from the wreckage. Bad burns over about seventy percent of his body—nothing the medics can’t fix in a few days. Merck’s dead—not enough left to reconstruct.”
“What happened?”
“We’re not sure. Forster’s having a little trouble remembering the last minute or two before the bomb went off.”
“Proboda saved him?”
“Got there in three minutes, waded in, got burned himself. Vik’s no intellectual, but he’s just earned himself another commendation.” The commander touched Sparta’s arm to indicate that she should take a right where the corridor branched toward the helipad.
“We rate a helicopter to headquarters?”
“We’re not going to headquarters,” said the commander. “They’re holding a loaded shuttle for us. It’s going back up as soon as you’re on it.”
She was silent a moment. “There goes the R & R you keep promising me,” she said at last.
“We’ll owe you,” said the commander.
Sparta looked at Blake, and for a moment her eyes were moist. Blake had never seen her cry, and she didn’t oblige him now. Instead, awkwardly, she took his hand. They looked at each other as the people-mover trundled along, but she would not move to him and he would not force himself on her.
The commander looked sternly away and kept quiet, until at last he cleared his throat loudly and said, “Watch your step. Change to the right coming up.”
Blake and Sparta broke away from each other. Sparta said nothing; her throat was swollen with the effort to control her emotions.
“The bombing of the Hesperian looks like part of a pattern,” the commander said. “Archaeological stuff. All over the place. Some stolen, some destroyed.” His tone indicated he couldn’t imagine why anyone would be interested in “archaeological stuff.” “How about you, Redfield? Any ideas?”
“Well, sir…”
“What you told Troy you were doing in Paris, for example?” He glanced at her. “You leave anything out of that report, Troy?”
“Nothing of importance, sir.” Her whisper was defiant.
“Now that you’ve blown your cover with these weirdos, Redfield, we probably ought to recruit you, but it will have to wait.”
“Where are you sending me, sir?” Sparta asked huskily.
“Thing causing the most stir is this Martian plaque.”
“The Martian plaque?”
“Disappeared yesterday from Labyrinth City. You’re going to get it back.”
“Mars.” She swallowed. “Commander, I wonder if you would allow me a few minutes to talk to Blake before boarding.”
“Sorry, no time.”
“But sir,” she said angrily, “if you send me to Mars we won’t see each other for months.”
“That’s up to him,” said the commander. “We’re holding two seats, but he’s a civilian. He doesn’t have to go with you if he doesn’t want to.”
It took a moment for it to sink in. Then Blake shouted and Sparta grinned. They clutched each other. The commander never cracked a smile.
APPENDIX:
THE PLAYFAIR
CIPHER
The Playfair cipher was devised by the scientist Charles Wheatstone in 1854. His friend the Baron Playfair lobbied so effectively to have the cipher adopted by the British government that it became known by Playfair’s name instead of Wheatstone’s. Playfair turns plaintext into ciphertext by first preparing the plaintext in a specific way, then transforming the plaintext according to certain rules, using an alphabet square. The layout of the alphabet square varies according to a keyword.
This was Blake’s plaintext:
TO HELEN FROM PARIS IF YOU FIND THIS FIND ME IN THE FORTRESS SEEKING THE FIRST OF FIVE REVELATIONS YOU WILL NEED A GUYDE
The rules for preparing plaintext are:
<
br /> The plaintext letters are divided into pairs; for example, TO HELEN becomes TO HE LE, etc.
Double letters, if they occur in a pair, must be divided by an X or a Z. For example, the double L’s in WILL NEED become LX LN, etc. (But the three S’s in FORTRESS SEEKING become SX SZ SE, etc.; using X once and Z the next time avoids calling attention to a letter that has been enciphered twice in the same way. Such a hint could betray part of the layout of the alphabet square.)
J in the plaintext is treated as if it were I. (Blake’s plaintext contained no J’s.)
So Blake’s first step was to write out the plaintext thus: TO HE LE NF RO MP AR IS IF YO UF IN DT HI SF IN DM EI NT HE FO RT RE SX SZ SE EK IN GT HE FI RS TO FX FI VE RE VE LA TI ON SY OU WI LX LN EX ED AG UY DE
The Playfair alphabet square is five letters wide by five letters high. First the keyword is written (but no letters are repeated), and then the remaining letters of the alphabet are written, with I and J treated as the same letter. Blake’s keyword was SPARTA, thus his Playfair square was:
S P A R T
B C D E F
G H IJ K L
M N O Q U
V W X Y Z
The Playfair transformation is based on the fact that the letters of each pair in the plaintext can occur in only one of three states. The pair can be together in the same row, together in the same column, or—most commonly—together in neither.
Each letter in a pair of letters that falls in the same row is replaced by the letter to its right; for example, ED becomes fe. The letter to the “right” of the last letter in a row is the first letter in the same row.
Each letter in a pair of letters that falls in the same column is replaced by the letter below it; for example, RQ becomes ey. The letter “below” the last letter in the column is the top letter in the same column.
Each letter in a pair of letters that appears in neither the same row nor the same column is replaced by the letter occurring at the intersection of its own row and its partner’s column. Pair order must be preserved: first determine the intersection of the first letter’s row with the second letter’s column, then the intersection of the second letter’s row with the first letter’s column. It helps to imagine that the two plaintext letters determine two corners of a square inside the alphabetical square; then the ciphertext letters lie at the opposite corners of this smaller square. For example TO becomes au.
. . A R T
. . D E F
. . IJ K L
. . O Q U
. . . . .
Since I and J are identical, a transformation to IJ may be written as either I or J, at the encipherer’s whim.
Blake transformed the plaintext thus:
TO
au
HE
kc
LE
fk
NF
uc
RO
aq
MP
ns
AR
rt
IS
ga
IF
ld
YO
xq
UF
zl
IN
ho
DT
fa
HI
ik
SF
tb
IN
ho
DM
bo
EI
dk
NT
up
HE
kc
FO
du
RT
ts
RE
ek
SX
av
SZ
tv
SE
rb
EK
kq
IN
ho
GT
ls
HE
kc
FI
dl
RS
tp
TO
au
FX
dz
FI
dl
VE
yb
RE
ek
VE
yb
LA
jt
TI
al
ON
qo
SY
rv
OU
qm
WI
xh
LX
jz
LN
hu
EX
dy
ED
fe
AG
si
UY
qz
DE
ef
Sparta found the cipher in this form:
aukcfkucaqnsrtgaldxqzlhofaiktbhobodkupkcdutsekavtvrbkqholskcdltpaudzdlybekybjtalqorvqmxhjzhudyfesiqzef.
Knowing that the system was Playfair, and surmising that the key was SPARTA, Sparta had only to divide the ciphertext into pairs, reconstruct the alphabet square, and, using the same rules, transform each cipher pair back into its plain equivalent:
au
TO
kc
HE
fk
LE
uc
NF
aq
RO
ns
MP
rt
AR
ga
IS
…
MAELSTROM
AN AFTERWORD BY
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
There cannot be many science fiction novels that end with a 40-page appendix full of mathematical equations and electric-circuit diagrams. Don’t worry—this isn’t one of them; but just such a book inspired it, half a century ago. And with any luck, during the next half-century it will cease to be fiction.
It must have been in 1937 or ’38, when I was Treasurer of the five-year-old British Interplanetary Society (annual budget to start the conquest of space, about $200), that the BIS was sent a book with a rather odd title, by an author with an even odder name. “Akkad Pseudoman’s” Zero to Eighty (Princeton: Scientific Publishing Company, 1937) must now be quite a rarity: I am indebted to my old friend Frederick I. Ordway III (responsible for the technical designs in 2001: A Space Odyssey) for the fine copy I possess.
The snappy subtitle says it all:
Being my lifetime doings,
reflections, and inventions
also
my journey round the Moon
Quite an “also”; I can hear the author’s modest cough.
He was not, of course, really Mr. Pseudoman, as the preface made clear. This was signed “E. F. Northrup,” and explained that the book had been written to show that the Moon may be reached by means of known technologies, without “invoking any imaginary physical features or laws of nature.”
Dr. E. F. Northrup was a distinguished electrical engineer, and the inventor of the induction furnace which bears his name. His novel, which is obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy, describes a journey to the Moon (and around it) in a vehicle fired from the earth by a giant gun, as in Jules Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon. Northrup, however, tried to avoid the obvious flaws in Verne’s naive proposal, which would have quickly converted Ardan et al. into small blobs of protoplasm inside a sphere of molten metal.
Northrup used an electric gun, two hundred kilometers long, most of it horizontal but with the final section curving up Mount Popocatepetl, so that the projectile would be at an altitude of more than five kilometers when it reached the required escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers per second. In this way, air-resistance losses would be minimized, but a small amount of rocket power would be available for any necessary corrections.
/> Well—it makes more sense than Verne’s Moongun, but not by much. Even with 200 kilometers of launch track, the unfortunate passengers would have to withstand 30 gees for more than half a minute. And the cost of the magnets, power stations, transmission lines, etc. would run into billions; rockets would be cheaper, as well as far more practical.
I am sure that “Akkad Pseudoman” would have been surprised—and delighted—to know that men first circled the Moon aboard Apollo 8 at Christmas 1969; the date he gave in his novel was June 28, 1961. Incidentally, he was not the first to propose this scheme: the Winter, 1930 Science Wonder Quarterly has a beautiful Frank R. Paul illustration of a line of giant electromagnets, shooting a spaceship up a mountainside. It could very well have served as the frontispiece of Zero to Eighty.
A few years after reading Dr. Northrup’s book (which is still full of interesting ideas, including a remarkably sympathetic—especially for the time—treatment of Russian technology) it occurred to me that he had made one slight mistake. He had put his electric launcher on the wrong world; it made no sense on Earth—but was ideal for the Moon.
First: there’s no atmosphere to heat up the vehicle or destroy its momentum, so the whole launching track can be laid out horizontally. Once it’s given escape velocity, the payload will slowly rise up from the surface of the Moon and head out into space.
Second: lunar escape velocity is only one-fifth of Earth’s, and can therefore be attained with a correspondingly shorter launch track—and a twenty-fifth of the energy. When the time comes to export goods from the Moon, this will be the way to do it. Although I was thinking of inanimate payloads, and launchers only a few kilometers long, suitably protected human passengers could be handled by larger systems, if there were ever enough traffic to justify them.
I wrote up this idea, with the necessary calculations, in a paper titled “Electromagnetic Launching as a Major Contribution to Space-Flight,” which was duly published in the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (November, 1950); it may be more conveniently located in my Ascent to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography (Wiley, 1984). And because a good idea should be exploited in every possible way, I used it in fiction on two occasions: in the chapter “The Shot from the Moon” (Islands in the Sky, 1952) and in the short story “Maelstrom II” (Playboy, April 1965, reprinted in The Wind from the Sun, 1972). This is the tale which Paul Preuss has ingeniously worked into Venus Prime, Volume 2.
