Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Don’t worry, Doctor. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back. No matter how long you’re gone.”

  He leaned toward her, his dark eyes filled with serious purpose. “In the interests of both of us, then: if you want to continue our discussion, come with me. I promise you will learn more than you imagine.”

  Here it was, the crux of the meeting, the real goal of his stage-managing.

  “I’ll consider it,” she said.

  “Call the MTP office when you’ve decided. If the answer is yes, I’ll meet you in the lobby at five-thirty tomorrow morning,” he said. “Wear your pressure suit.” Abruptly he stood. “If you will excuse me … the account is already settled. I have to leave.” He turned and walked away.

  She watched him go. His long, deliberate stride seemed more suited to the desert than to a hotel restaurant.

  With the pistol on full automatic she fired a full clip into the paper target twenty meters away. The roar of the gun was continuous in the long stone room, its muzzle flash a single strobing flare. Spurts of sand leaped from the bullet trap against the back wall; shreds of paper fluttered lazily down from the target.

  She lowered the gun and cleared the chamber, then stepped away from the line and pushed the headset back from her ears.

  The range director lifted his own ear protectors from his head and set them on the bench. “Well, let’s see the bad news.” He was a burly man in whites, with the hotel’s insignia on his close-fitting tee-shirt. He punched a button and the target traveled slowly along its guide wire until it came to the line.

  He unclipped the paper target and studied it in silence, then looked up at Sparta with sour suspicion knitting his thick black brows. “Fair shooting.”

  He handed her the target. A hole the size of a dime had been punched out of the center.

  “Beginner’s luck,” she said.

  “You’re trying to hustle me, Inspector. You’ve shot on Mars before.” He nodded at the target. “‘Course you did miss once”—there was one other hole in the paper, a hole the diameter of a single bullet, outside the outer ring in the lower right-hand corner; Sparta’s first shot had missed the bull’s-eye—“Still, I wouldn’t mind taping this on my office wall. Inspire the other amateurs.”

  “That’s a nice compliment, but I’d better decline.” She handed him the target pistol, handle first. “Thanks for letting me try out.”

  “Go ahead, use another clip. The hotel can afford it.”

  “No, I don’t want to get a sore wrist—these uranium slugs pack a wallop.”

  “Don’t do anything for you except make the pistol harder to control.” He took the gun and set it aside for cleaning. “Goes against the natural advantage you’ve got here, a lighter weapon with the same punch.”

  “Why does Mr. Prott use them? He’s an excellent shot, I’m told.”

  “He’s not as hopeless as some.” He hesitated. “Never knew him to use uranium slugs, though. Doesn’t mean he didn’t.”

  “Who does?”

  “Not many who use this range; this is for guests of the hotel, and maybe a few of the local business types. That guy that got killed tried them once.”

  “Morland?”

  “Yes. A real S.O.B., but after he practiced awhile he got so he could hit the back wall.”

  “He’d never shot before?”

  “Not with a pistol. Not on Mars. I think Prott sicced him on me to give the guy something to do. Keep him out of the bar. Tell you, with his mouth I was tempted to shoot him myself.”

  Sparta looked at him straight-faced. “And you don’t care who knows it, do you?”

  He shrugged. “So arrest me.”

  “Too bad. A whole roomful of witnesses puts you elsewhere on the night of the crime.”

  The man’s round, sour face widened in a grin. “Yeah, those guys out at the ‘Pine are great, aren’t they? They’d say anything to keep a friend out of trouble.”

  7

  Phobos was sliding across the stars and Deimos was a bright distant spark when Blake left his cubicle at the hive.

  The Noble Water Works motor pool was half a kilometer away through dark windblown alleys. Blake moved swiftly through the shadows until he reached the edge of the shuttleport complex. His target for tonight faced open desert.

  Fifty meters away, a clutch of liquid-hydrogen tanks bulged from the sand like half-buried ostrich eggs. He dashed across the exposed sand to their shadow. Crouched in the darkness, he peered at the fenced and floodlit marshaling yard. He’d cased the motor pool earlier in the day, but had decided not to show his face to anyone in the yard until he was supposed to report for work.

  Outdoors on Mars one did not have to worry about sniffers, either chemical or biological—a guard or two perhaps, but there weren’t going to be any dogs around. Chain-link fences, floodlights, remote cameras, maybe pressure sensors and movement detectors … at best, the security would be primitive. And if freight depots were raided as often as the scuttlebutt at the ’Pine had it, even the guards weren’t going to be too alert. Someone on the inside was inviting the thefts.

  The vehicles in the yard were ranked behind a double line of fences. A row of huge marstrucks squatted like beetles. Rovers and utility tractors huddled around the trucks as if seeking shelter from the wind. The vehicles Blake was looking for, the personnel carriers that Yevgeny had called crummies, were parked together in the shadow of a building that looked like a fueling shed; the crummies resembled military APCs, armored personnel carriers—steel boxes on treads—although there was no war on this planet. None declared, anyway.

  Blake hunkered down in the lee of the liquid hydrogen tank and cogitated. APCs. Three of them. He could disable them one by one, but it would take most of the night, and if all three were found to have crippling mechanical defects at the same time, that might rouse a bit of suspicion.

  Better an accident that took them all out at once. Plus a few other vehicles along with them, and maybe some miscellaneous machinery thrown in. Blake tried to suppress the incipient thrill: he loved to blow things up, even though he knew he shouldn’t. So he only did it when he had a good excuse.

  He peered up at the shell of the liquid hydrogen tank. A big Noble Water Works corporate symbol was painted on its side. Some distance away was a stack of slimmer tanks, requiring less pressurization: liquid oxygen. Liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, derived by electrically dissociating water-ice mined by the company, fueled the big gas turbines that powered the marstrucks. Hydrogen plus oxygen. Highly efficient. Highly energetic.

  The pipes from the bulging tanks ran on pylons above the sand, left exposed for easy maintenance, and high enough to bridge the traffic in the yard. A couple of meters up, the pylons were braceleted with razor-sharp accordion wire to discourage climbers. With some effort Blake could have gotten around the wire, but his expert eye had earlier located an easier entrance to the yard.

  Blake slipped across twenty meters of open sand to a salient of the chain-link fence. He paused in a cone of shadow, hidden from two angled floodlights by the bulk of a clumsily placed transformer. Clumsily placed or expertly placed? Blake almost laughed to see the often-cut, often-spliced square of wire fencing in front of him. Others had been here before him. Great thieves—not to mention everyday thieves, even company thieves—think alike.

  Blake reached into the patch pocket of his pressure suit and withdrew his “tool kit.” Improvisation was his way of life, and on his travels around the shuttleport he had accumulated a handy set of tools just by keeping his eyes open and his fingers nimble.

  He used an induction sensor he had rescued from orphanhood to make sure no current was running through the patched wire: then he swiftly reopened the fence with a pair of lever-wrench pliers, out to him on long-term loan. He was through the outer fence in no time and almost as swiftly through the inner fence.

  In the yard, yellow windblown dust glistened in the haphazard floodlighting, which could hardly have provided better cover for
intruders if it had been designed for that purpose; lanes of black shadow connected one squatting vehicular hulk to another.

  As he had predicted, there were pressure sensors scattered across the yard, but their placement was obvious and their sensitivity was necessarily low; a few thrown handfuls of dust and rock offset the tremors of his footsteps. It was like slow-motion dancing through a minefield, with all the mines lying on the surface.

  The movement detectors depended on lasers and would be set off if the brightness of the reflected beam varied from the reference setting. For Blake’s purposes many of the beams were conveniently obstructed by carelessly parked trucks or by empty fuel dewars and other equipment. Blake moved cautiously among the metal giants in the yard, hugging the big treads of the marstrucks.

  He was about to cross between two rovers when he saw a red thread of beam set to trip him; it was betrayed by a sparkle of drifting dust a half meter away.

  The unobstructed beam was looking straight into the night beyond the fence. Blake peered at its focus point; a small red dot came and went as the fence links blew back and forth in the wind. Blake took a shiny, nickel-plated socket wrench from his pocket and gingerly inserted it into the beam path; he was poised to run. There was no alarm; he cautiously twisted the wrench, reflecting the beam to another part of the fence. Careful of the movement detectors, he walked around the beam, rotating the beam as he went. When he was past, he pulled his makeshift reflector out of the way.

  Still no alarm. He let his breath out slowly.

  Nothing to it.

  The videoplates in the guard station were ranked in a semicircle around the security chief’s desk. The picture on each screen slowly panned back and forth across a different sector of the deserted marshaling yard.

  “Nothing yet?” Yevgeny Rostov was standing behind the security chief, his massive arms folded over his chest, a scowl on his saturnine face.

  “You can see as good as me, Yev. The board’s all green and the viddie on the ’plates ain’t switched channels.”

  “So many holes you’ve left in security, he could walk in and out again and you would never know.”

  The security chief leaned back easily in his ergonomic chair. The size of his rear end suggested how much time he spent in it. “No call to be slingin’ around lost insults.”

  “Not lost, unfounded,” Rostov grumbled. “Baseless. Without foundation. We are speaking English, yes?”

  “Unfound, yeah, and besides, if I was that bad at my job, the company woulda fired me by now.”

  Yevgeny made a noise in his throat, rather like a hard-starting engine.

  “Anyway, what makes you so sure this guy’s gonna show up tonight? He didn’t last night.”

  “He never lifted wrench in his life—so I do not think he wants to go to pipeline, where he would have to work. Tonight is his last chance or he will have no excuse.”

  “Why couldn’t he just call in sick or somethin’?”

  “And bring note from mother? Don’t be stupid. I tell you, this man is professional.” Yevgeny turned away and looked through the glass windows of the guard tower into the empty yard.

  Blake was under the main pipe bridge now, precariously shielded from surveillance by a steel stanchion. The pipes from the big storage tanks were directed into the fueling shed, where the portable dewars were loaded. A videocam mounted on the corner of the fueling shed panned slowly toward him. He eased back into the shadow of a marstruck’s giant tread until the camera had scanned his position. Blake noted that the coaxial feed that ran from the camera down the side of the shed was rhythmically swinging in the steady breeze, inaudibly slapping against the wall’s crude glass bricks.

  That loose cable, now … it certainly looked overdue to wear through… And if it were to wear through high enough, the wind might carry the length of it across a big shunt valve inside that wire cage beside the fueling shed. And if that shunt valve had an internal leak and unfortunately happened to contain an explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen…

  When the camera was looking the other way, Blake did his step and shuffle across a few meters of exposed dust, reaching the shelter of the fueling shed. There he discovered a bonus; the exterior communications terminal through which the camera lines led also contained the connecting circuitry for the pressure sensors. Three snips of his pliers and a bit of hasty splicing disarmed the detectors all at once. Again he poised himself to run—

  —but he didn’t have to; he’d wired it right the first time.

  He left the video cameras functioning.

  The door to the unpressurized shed swung easily on its hinges. He went inside, into a pea-green semidarkness illuminated by the reflected glow of floodlights above. They were aimed outward, into the yard.

  The routing shunts and valves were arranged in banks against the wall, big steel manifolds of pipe, a tangle of tubes as extravagant as an octopus orgy.

  On Mars, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen remain liquid only in containment, so for Blake’s purposes the fluids would have to be mixed inside the pipes. His recently acquired book knowledge of space-station municipal plumbing had not addressed fueling manifolds, but extrapolation was easy enough by visual inspection. And some of the handles were painted red.

  It took most of his strength to turn the red-painted wheels; these particular valves weren’t reset often. Then he turned them back.

  Outside again, waiting in the shadow of the doorway for the camera to look the other way … he wriggled on his belly to the cage around the shunt valve. More wire work, for none of the thieves who had passed this way before him—and passed frequently, at that—had had reason to cut through this fence. Once inside it, he twisted a wheel this way, another wheel that way … these wheels turned a lot easier. He got quick results. Leaning his helmet against the pipe, he could hear the hiss of mixing gases.

  He climbed back through the hole in the fence and studied the videocam’s loose coaxial cable. In the low gravity it was a simple matter to mount the rough wall to the roof line, keeping himself close enough beneath the camera’s angle of depression to be effectively invisible.

  He meant not to have the falling cable trigger his bomb while he was clinging to the building next to it. Which meant he must cut to within a few strands of wire, which would wear through in the time it took him to escape but in less time than it took anyone responding to the malfunction to appear on the scene.

  This cut had to be precise. He used his black knife. Three strands of bare wire glistened in the night.

  Then he half slid, half fell down the wall of the shed. It wasn’t an elegant dismount, but he knew the ground now, knew where to duck and jump. Any half-decent starlight security camera would have witnessed his odd solo ballet, out there among the shadows of the trucks and crummies.

  A single red light lit up on the board.

  “He is here!” Yevgeny shouted. “Where is that sector? Send guards there now.”

  “Calm down, Yev, they’re already scramblin’. He’s not inside yet, not by a long shot. We’ll get the guy while he’s still climbin’ through the fence.”

  On the monitoring videoplates, the figures of two armed guards ran in the improbably long strides of one-third gravity toward the salient of the perimeter fence.

  “Coulda told you he’d try to get in through there,” the security director said.

  “Yes? How could you have told me that?” Yevgeny roared.

  “Oh, instinct, I guess you’d call it.” The fat man lolled back in his chair and grinned. “Yeah, instinct. Plus my years of exper…”

  One of the video monitors went dark at that moment, and simultaneously the night sky outside the windows turned a brilliant white orange. The security chief was so relaxed that when he tried to straighten up, his sudden movement caused him to fall backward out of his chair. Yevgeny dived for his pressure-suit bag as the double-plate windows bulged inward.

  The shock wave and tremor almost shattered the building’s pressure lock, but it
held. So did the windows, luckily for the security chief and Yevgeny Rostov.

  A brilliant ball of orange rose like a Japanese lantern into the night sky over the motor pool. A fountain of white flame spewed after it, a steady torch burning brighter than the gas burn-off that once lit the Texas oilfields.

  Blake sat in the shelter of one of the big hydrogen tanks that was emptying its contents to fuel the spectacle.

  Good show. Jolly good. He just couldn’t keep himself from grinning.

  Sirens are useless in the atmosphere of Mars; the call went out through the commlinks and alarm circuits.

  None of the guests in the Mars Interplanetary Hotel could hear the alarms or see the display, invisible from the hotel, so none were disturbed by the incident—none but one.

  Sparta woke, listening…

  She heard the frantic song in the wires, the tremor of footsteps and the rumble of vehicle treads. She heard voices through the walls: An accident at the shuttleport, a big fire, something blew up…

  She groaned. That Blake.

  Dammit, if he was tearing up the neighborhood again, he was on his own. This time she wasn’t lifting a finger to protect him from the law.

  PART

  3

  ACROSS THE

  FREEZING SANDS

  8

  Half buried in drifting dust, the Terraforming Project’s hangar at the shuttleport was almost invisible against the sea of dunes beyond. The wind slithered over it as if over a huge airfoil, tugging the groundbound building gently skyward.

  Inside, the hangar was an immense vault of steel covering an expanse of glass tile. So gentle was the curve of the arch that the roof seemed low, yet in the center its slender, unsupported steel beams stretched thirty meters above the floor. Through panels of green glass in the roof the morning sun penetrated the interior gloom with diffuse shafts of light.