Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Some twenty years after the publication of “Electromagnetic Launching” by the BIS, the concept was taken much further by Gerald O’Neill, who made it a key element of his “space colonization” projects (see The High Frontier, 1977; Gerry O’Neill is justifiably annoyed by the Star Warriors’ preemption of his title.) He showed that the large space habitats he envisaged could be most economically constructed from materials mined and prefabricated on the Moon, and then shot into orbit by electromagnetic catapults to which he gave the name “mass drivers.” (I’ve challenged him to produce any propulsion device that doesn’t fit this description.)

  The other scientific element in “Maelstrom II” has a much longer history; it’s the branch of celestial mechanics known as “perturbation theory.” I’ve been able to get considerable mileage out of it since my applied maths instructor, the cosmologist Dr. George C. McVittie, introduced me to the subject at Kings College, London, in the late ’40s. However, I’d come across it—without realizing—in dear old Wonder Stories almost two decades earlier. Here’s a challenge to you: spot the flaw in the following scenario…

  The first expedition has landed on Phobos, the inner moon of Mars. Gravity there is only about a thousandth of Earth’s, so the astronauts have a great time seeing how high they can jump. One of them overdoes it, and exceeds the tiny satellite’s escape velocity of about thirty kilometers an hour. He dwindles away into the sky, toward the mottled red Marscape; his companions realize that they’ll have to take off and catch him before he crashes into the planet only six thousand kilometers below.

  A dramatic situation, which opens Lawrence Manning’s 1932 serial “The Wreck of the Asteroid.” Manning, one of the most thoughtful science fiction writers of the ’30s, was an early member of the American Rocket Society, and was very careful with his science. But this time, I’m afraid, he was talking nonsense: his high jumper would have been perfectly safe.

  Look at his situation from the point of view of Mars. If he’s simply standing on Phobos, he’s orbiting the planet at almost eight thousand kilometers an hour (a Moon that close to its primary has to move pretty fast). As spacesuits are massive affairs, and not designed for athletic events, I doubt if the careless astronaut could achieve that critical thirty kilometers an hour. Even if he did, it would be less than a half-percent of the velocity he already has, relative to Mars. Whichever way he jumped, therefore, it will make virtually no difference to his existing situation; he’ll still be traveling in almost the same orbit as before. He’d recede a few kilometers away from Phobos—and be right back where he started, just one revolution later! (Of course, he could run out of oxygen in the meantime—the trip round Mars will take seven-and-a-half hours. So maybe his friends should go after him—at their leisure.)

  This is perhaps the simplest example of “perturbation theory,” and I developed it a good deal further in “Jupiter V” (reprinted in Reach for Tomorrow, 1956). This story, incidentally, was based on what seemed a cute idea in the early ’50s. A decade earlier, LIFE Magazine had published space-artist Chesley Bonestell’s famous paintings of the outer planets. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if sometime in the 21st century LIFE sent one of its photographers out there to bring back the real thing, and compare it with Chesley’s hundred-year-old visions?

  Well, little did I imagine that, in 1976, the Voyager space-probe would do just this—and that, happily, Chesley would still be around to see the result. Many of his carefully researched paintings were right on target—though he couldn’t have anticipated such stunning surprises as the volcanoes of Io, or the multiplex rings of Saturn.

  Much more recently, Perturbation Theory plays a key role in 2061: Odyssey Three; and I won’t promise not to use it again one of these days. It gives all sorts of opportunities for springing surprises on the unsuspecting reader—

  —Over to you, Paul Preuss!

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  INFOPAK

  TECHNICAL

  BLUEPRINTS

  On the following pages are computer-generated diagrams representing some of the structures and engineering found in Venus Prime:

  Pages 2-7

  Venus Rover Hostile terrain, manned exploration and research vehicle—overview perspective; partial exploded view; wireframe perspective; cockpit bell; sensory control and communication components.

  Pages 8-9

  Port Hesperus Venus-orbiting space station—wireframe cut-away perspective view; axial components.

  Pages 10-13

  Artificial Reality System Computer-generated sensory analysis suit—systems overview; sensory components; I/O orthotactic fabric sensor matrix.

  Page 14

  Mare Moscoviense Lunar plateau—Farside Base, radio telescope research facility; aerial overview map; typical elevation section.

  Page 15-16

  Linear Induction Launch System Interstationary, lunar transportation mechanism—wireframe view of capsule; track schematic.

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 3: HIDE AND SEEK is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book ten. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.

  Special thanks to John Douglas, Michael Kazan, Russell Galen, Alan Lynch and Mary Higgins.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  105 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Text and artwork copyright © 1989 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime is a trademark of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Published by arrangement with Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.

  Cover design, book design, and logo by Alex Jay/Studio J

  Front cover painting by Jim Burns

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 88-91380

  ISBN: 0-380-75346-4

  All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., 24 West 25th Street, New York, New York 10010.

  First Avon Books Printing: June 1989

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  K-R 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  PROLOGUE

  Dare Chin was not a nervous man, but he was edgy tonight. Mainly it was that damned plaque, the infamous Martian plaque. It had been discovered ten years ago, somewhere near the edge of the north polar ice-cap, no one knew where exactly, because the guy who found it wanted to keep it a secret. And he had, long enough to blow himself up in a drilling accident.

  The plaque was a mirror-finish scrap of alloy the size of a broken dinner plate, inscribed with line after line of undecipherable symbols. Its discovery and authentication had proved that beings who could write—everybody assumed the inscriptions were writing, though nobody had proved it—had been hanging around Mars a billion years before humans evolved on Earth.

  The plaque was sitting downstairs in the middle of Town Hall right this minute, as I had been for most of the last ten years. Not a copy, which would have been sensible, but the real thing, unique in the universe so far as anybody knew, and therefore truly without price. The rationale for exposing the real thing instead of a copy was that it was one of the attractions that drew tourists to Mars, and who would steal it anyway?

  Tonight Chin was staying late to guard it. He had better things to do, or at least other things to do. Chin was the assistant mayor of Labyrinth City, the biggest settlement on assistant mayor of Labyrinth City, the biggest settlement on Mars—a town that needed water on a planet where what little water there was went straight from ice to vapor in the dry, thin atmosphere, a town whose people needed to breathe oxygen on a planet where atmospheric pressure was less than one percent of Earth’s, and ne
eded to stay warm on a planet where during heat waves the temperature rose to a toasty minus five degrees centigrade, a town which needed to dispose of its sewage on a planet where there were no native microorganisms to digest it.

  Besides dealing with these everyday challenges to the town’s infrastructure, its administrators somehow had to manage an unmanageable, unmeltable pot of residents—a third of them permanent citizens, the working-class roughnecks, with another third transient, mostly rich tourists, and a final third which floated, consisting of ivory-tower types, scientists, and Council of Worlds mouse pushers.

  The pile of yellow hard copy on Dare Chin’s desk would have reduced any administrator who believed in the perfectibility of humanity—as he was supposed to, being a card-carrying member of the Interplanetary Socialist Workers Party—to anger, tears, suicidal depression, or all three. The local roughnecks, with a two-to-one ratio of men to women, got drunk and cut each other up just about every weekend. The tourists daily got themselves cheated, robbed or mortally insulted. The scientists and bureaucrats, supposedly possessed of the best educations, had the morals of feral cats and spent their off hours playing spouse-, companion-, and child-swapping games.

  Take the case in his wait file right now, a three-way marriage between a geologist and two hydrologists: they were breaking up because the geologist’s hitch with the Terraforming Project was over, her contract hadn’t been renewed, and she wanted to ship for Earth taking their daughter with her… She’d borne the child, who was the product of gamete fusion between her and the other woman; the husband and legal “father” had contributed nothing genetically, but he was siding with his hydrologist colleague in the custody fight—they both had two years to run on their work contracts. Chin wished they could all go back to Strasbourg where they came from and fight it out there.

  But contracts were involved, so he had to make an administrative ruling before the case could go up to the civil court on Mars Station. Meanwhile four unhappy people were spending another night together in the green-glass maze of Labyrinth City. He hoped they’d all get out of it alive. Right now there were more pressing things on his mind.

  The tall blonde who was glaring at him across his desk wasn’t making any of it easier. She had the thin, tough build of a Martian long timer and a net of fine lines around her eyes that indicated she spent a lot of time squinting into the distance. She was wearing the standard brown polycanvas pressure suit, its helmet slung casually from her belt. “You can’t put me off tonight, Dare,” she was saying, at a volume just short of a yell.

  “Any night but tonight.” He and Lydia Zeromski had been lovers for most of the last three years; that, in his experience, was about as long as a woman’s patience lasted.

  “Tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow I’m starting a run. Do I head for your place when I get back? Or do I write you off before I leave?”

  He stood up and moved toward her, his hands opening in supplication. “Lydia, nothing has changed between us. But don’t try to pressure me right now. I’ve got a ton of work. Plus the guy downstairs to worry about.”

  “That fat jerk?”

  “He’s got our most revered piece of scrap metal out of its case…”

  “And you’re afraid he’s going to drop it and make a dent.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Chin breathed an exasperated sigh. The Martian plaque was harder than diamond, harder than any material humans knew how to make, as everybody well knew; denting it was a nonproblem. “Get out of here. I’ll talk to you before you leave.”

  “Forget it.” She pulled her helmet over her head, a movement so practiced it was like putting on sunglasses. She paused in the doorway and gave him one last incendiary glare, but said nothing. As she turned and walked rapidly away she sealed her faceplate.

  Chin could hear her footsteps rapping lightly down the hall and then going down the stairs to the ground floor. He stared into the dim, greenly lit hallway outside his office, trying to collect his thoughts.

  Chin’s narrow face was handsome; he had straight black hair and black eyes and a wide firm mouth, now down-turned. He was a tall man, with a naturally slender build kept slim—like Lydia’s—by twenty years of life at a third of a gee. It was a typical build for Martians because, while it was easy to carry extra mass at low gees, it was unnecessary and could even be dangerous to sling around a lot of extra fat and muscle.

  Through the glass outer wall he noticed a lantern outside in the windswept street; the yellow glow of a patroller’s hand torch wavered through the green glass like the phosphorescent organs of some benthic fish. As he watched, the light resumed its slow movement. He glanced at his watch: 20:08. Old Nutting was as regular as a cesium clock.

  He went back to his desk and sat down. He leaned back in his chair, staring up through the glass ceiling at the vast shadow of the sandstone vault that arched overhead. Beyond the edge of the natural stone roof shone ten thousand stars, unblinking—hard bright points in the Martian night.

  What was to be done about Lydia? The question had plagued him for most of the three years they’d been intimate. She was younger than he was, a passionate, demanding woman. He was a man who felt older than he looked—people age slowly on Mars, because of the low gravity, provided they stay out of the ultraviolet—but for all his apparent maturity, a man still uncertain of his wants and needs…

  He mentally pinched himself. He had to put the personal stuff out of his mind tonight. He had to decide what to do with the information he’d recently acquired.

  He pulled the yellow fax sheets from beneath the pile of other papers, where he’d hidden them when he’d heard Lydia’s unexpected footsteps on the stairs. The data stared up at him. The facts were bald enough, but crucial connections were missing; Chin knew enough about evidence to know what was needed in court and what was needed to make an administrative ruling, and in the communications before him he didn’t have enough of either. But there were other routes to justice.

  Shortly after he’d come to Mars, years back, Chin, like a lot of other tenderfeet, had managed to get himself cheated on a work contract. Lab City had been a smaller and rougher place then, hardly more than a construction camp—not that the same kind of thing didn’t still happen today—and a cheap shuttleport lawyer had given him some advice.

  “Don’t bother to convince me you’re in the right. I’ll grant you that without argument,” said the lawyer, “but getting a settlement, and especially collecting on it, is something else again. So how far are you willing to go?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “To make them think you’re crazy?”

  “Crazy!”

  “Crazy enough to beat somebody up. Burn something down. Zero some expensive equipment. Catch my drift?”

  To Dare Chin’s eventual amusement and edification, it had proved unnecessary either to sue or to carry through on his threats—so apparently he’d been willing to go far enough. As an administrator he had learned to think of this sort of paralegal strategy as the “personal approach.”

  The time had come to use the personal approach on Dewdney Morland. Chin left his office and descended the stairs to the ground floor.

  Morland was standing in the middle of the floor under the dome, hunched over his instruments. His back was to Chin; work lights on tripods joined with the overhead spots to pinpoint the Martian plaque and Morland himself in a circle of brilliant white light. Dewdney Morland, Ph.D., had arrived on Mars a week ago, preceded by clearances from the Council of Worlds Cultural Commission. The past two evenings, starting when Town Hall closed for the night, Morland had set up his kit and worked until dawn. He had to work at night because his optical instruments were sensitive to minor vibrations, like footsteps—

  “What the hell?”

  —the tremor of which now caused Morland to look up and whirl around angrily.

  “You! Look what you’ve done, Chin! Twenty minutes’ recording ruined.”

  Chin’s only reply was a look of distaste borderi
ng on contempt.

  Morland was a disheveled fellow with a pasty complexion, a patchy beard, and sticky blond hair that hadn’t been cut in recent months; split ends curled over the collar of his expensive tweed jacket, which had long ago sagged into shapelessness. Those bulging pockets, Chin knew, contained a pipe and a bag of shredded tobacco, the paraphernalia of a habit that people who live in controlled environments regarded as not only offensive but extraordinarily quaint.

  “First that cow tromping through here and now you,” Morland screeched. “What does it take to get it through your provincial skulls? I need absolute stillness.”

  On the floor beside Morland’s chair, Chin noted an open briefcase; from what Chin could see, it contained a few fax copies and the remains of a portable dinner. “Would you step aside, Dr. Morland?”

  “What did you say?”

  “Please move to one side.”

  “Listen, do you want me to get an order barring you from these premises while I’m working? It can be swiftly arranged, I assure you. The Council of Worlds executive building is only a few steps away.”

  Chin leaned forward and his features darkened. “Move, fat man,” he bellowed, “before I break your stupid face!”

  It was a convincing display of homicidal rage; Morland recoiled. “That’s… This… I’m reporting this to the commission tomorrow,” he choked, meanwhile dancing rapidly away from the display case. “You’ll rue this, Chin…”

  Chin ignored him as he stepped forward to examine the plaque. It rested on a cushion of red velvet, glittering in the converging beams of light. The silvery fragment had been broken from some larger piece by a blow of unimaginable force, but nothing that had happened to it in the billion years since had left so much as a hair’s-width scratch upon it. The perfect surface in which Chin now observed his own features proved that this was not a copy of metal or plastic, and when he breathed upon it and saw his cloudy breath obscure his reflection, he knew without touching it that this was no hologram. It was the real thing.