Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  It was the kind of specialized and hideously expensive device that required the capacities of a rich institution: a powerful corporation, a big union, a whole nation, or a group—such as the Free Spirit—more resourceful, if less visible, than any of these.

  Khalid must have taken the gadget with him.

  The plane’s ruined circuits couldn’t be fixed, only replaced, and the marsplane didn’t carry that kind of spare part. Sparta closed the access panel.

  She leaned against the fragile fuselage and watched the languidly sinking sun. Maybe Khalid was telling the truth. His advice to stay with the plane may have been well meant. Nothing necessarily ruled against him; he may have removed the pulse bomb to give it to the patrollers.

  Still, with the best intentions, he could die in the desert.

  And if he did not have the best intentions, he might save himself and see to it that no one found her for weeks.

  Common sense said she had to leave this place immediately.

  Methodically she rooted the pitons out of the sand ash and recoiled and repacked the lanyards, leaving only the wingtips anchored. She reassembled the huge plane, piece by piece.

  A few minutes later the whole immense and fragile assembly was trembling in the wind, pinned to the ground by its wingtips.

  There were hydraulic linkages from the pilot’s seat to the wingtip lanyards, the designers having anticipated that in some situations sophisticated electronic systems would be wholly inappropriate. With the right wind, Sparta could pull the pins and let the plane rise, even without rocket assist.

  She’d never flown one of these craft; until a couple of days ago, she’d never set foot on Mars. Right now there was a twenty-kilometer crosswind, not the ideal circumstance for an unpowered launch. But she had a knack for this sort of thing.

  The sun had just set when she released the right wingtip. Simultaneously she leaned on the stick. The right wing lifted and the whole marsplane immediately pivoted backward on its tethered left wingtip, skimming centimeters above the slope. Half a second later, a little before the plane was head-on to the wind, Sparta released the left lanyard and leaned right on the stick. The plane quivered, tried to stay aloft—the left wingtip sank again and bounced—then rose confidently and glided slowly downslope, its line of flight falling and curving over the saddle of the dark cinder cones.

  Sailplanes rarely sail at night, when the cool, dense atmosphere is falling groundward, but Sparta knew that there would be bright patches of sand in the desert that would give up their heat in rising columns some hours beyond the setting of the sun. She would have no trouble finding them. Her infrared vision, swamped in broad daylight, was at its best in darkness; she needed no holographic projection to see the atmosphere at night.

  The barely visible landscape of the Tharsis Plateau was rendered in shades of midnight blue and starlight silver. Overhead, shining Phobos moved against the stars, casting deep shadows from the slopes of the desert buttes and dunes. To Sparta’s eyes there was more to the scene: the desert glowed with shades of red as the rocks and sand gave back the day’s heat at different rates. Revealed by their relative warmth, spirals of rich maroon slowly twisted in the dark blue atmosphere over the night landscape—escalating funnels on which the marsplane could hitch a ride.

  She skimmed the plane over the dunes and caught the nearest of the updrafts. Soon the plane was wheeling high above the desert and Sparta was searching her eidetic memory, trying to match the remembered map to the remembered territory, seeking the airy thread that would lead her to Labyrinth City.

  13

  A warning light glowed yellow inside Khalid’s helmet, telling him his batteries were low, but he did not see it. Half the night he had slept in dreamless exhaustion while the cold wind sent trickles of sand to cover him like a comforter.

  Weariness had overtaken Khalid, and he had curled himself into the shelter of a steep dune face. He knew even as he’d succumbed to sleep that he was risking the last of his precious reserves, but in the long run a human can no more do without rest than without air.

  The last thing he’d done was to make sure he was lying with his face toward the east. For it would surely take the full light of the rising sun to wake him.

  When it rose the sun was small, low in the east, and climbing fast. The undulating surface of the sand in front of the speeding marstruck was as smooth and sensuous as a discarded kimono of yellow silk, with folds as high as the hills. Since before dawn Lydia’s marstruck had been racing across this dune field, the largest expanse of dunes Blake had ever seen or imagined.

  There were tread tracks across the sand, rising and falling over the waves, and they were a remarkable palimpsest, for as faint as they were they were still visible in the slanting light. Only the persistently reapplied imprimatur of passing vehicles could have frustrated the erasing wind.

  Sixteen hours away, across the endless dunes, was the pipeline camp. They would drive all day and well into the night, reaching it when the stars were bright and the moons danced in the sky.

  Lydia squinted at the road. With the sun low, every little ripple was a line of brightness and shadow. She had long since resumed her taciturn silence.

  Blake’s eyes were fastened on the horizon instead of the road, and he saw the apparition first.

  “Good God, do you see that?” he whispered.

  She slowed the truck and looked where he pointed.

  It was a human figure, a man by his size and build, trudging the faint track far ahead of them, oblivious to their approach. He was frail and bent, a dark stick-puppet moving with painful speed toward God-knew-where.

  Blake and Lydia sealed their suits and Lydia pumped the cab to vacuum. She sent the truck careening over the sand. Even before she drew alongside the walking figure she knew who he was. She knew his stance and gait.

  She skidded the truck to a halt beside him. Gaunt and parched, the man stared up at Blake.

  Blake stared back. “Khalid!”

  Khalid must have heard him through his commlink, but he was too dazed or dry throated to reply. He only stared.

  Lydia had her door open and was already out of the cab and running. Blake jumped down to join her.

  “Battery light says he’s got maybe two hours’ charge,” Lydia said to Blake.

  “By God, he was lucky.”

  They lifted the frail and dehydrated man over the treads and into the cab. A minute later, Lydia had the cab resealed and repressurized. While Blake supported Khalid, she lifted the helmet from his head.

  Khalid had fixed his dark gaze on Blake.

  “Khalid, do you recognize me?”

  “Blake,” Khalid said, in a whisper so faint it was little more than an exhalation. Then his long-lashed eyes closed and his head lolled.

  “He needs water,” Lydia said. She reached for the emergency tube on the dash. She put it to Khalid’s lips.

  Khalid sputtered and choked, and then began to suck greedily. Water dribbled down his stubbled chin.

  When he finally released the tube, Blake asked, “What happened?”

  “Blake”—his fingers feebly grasped at Blake’s chest—“Linda is out there.”

  “Linda? You mean…?”

  “Yes. The plane was sabotaged. This.” His fingers scrabbled at his thigh pocket, and Blake helped him open the flap. Khalid pulled out a steel sphere that appeared to have been burned to discoloration.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t know. Fried the electronics. She’s still out there.”

  “How far?”

  Khalid paused before he answered. “Two days’ walk. Maybe one hundred kilometers, a hundred and twenty at most. Southeast. I’ll lead you.”

  “What about the emergency beacon?” Lydia demanded.

  “No good,” Khalid whispered.

  “Lydia…”

  “Out there, a miss is as good as eternity,” Lydia said.

  “You can’t refuse to help!”

  “I’m not refusing h
elp,” she said angrily. “I’ll radio satellite search. Meanwhile the camp can send out search parties.”

  “Tell them to track us,” Blake said. “We’ve got plenty of fuel. We can unhitch the trailers and make good time. Even if we don’t get to her first, we can narrow the search.”

  Lydia studied Blake across the body of Khalid, who had leaned back against the seat between them and closed his eyes. “This man’s not out of danger, you know,” she said. “Who is this Linda? Is she more important than him? Who is she to you?”

  “That’s not her name,” Blake said uncomfortably. “Her name is Ellen Troy. She’s an inspector with the Space Board. She’s in charge of investigating the murders.”

  “Yes… Ellen,” Khalid whispered. “Something happened to her…”

  “Why was she with you?” Lydia asked him.

  He gazed at her. “Because she thought I did it.”

  Lydia’s mouth tightened, but then some knot of inner resistance unraveled. She looked up at Blake. “How are we going to find her?”

  Khalid fumbled in the patch pocket again and brought out his miniature astrolabe. “God will guide us.”

  “What’s that thing?”

  He attempted a feeble smile. “Its inertial guidance doesn’t work anymore, but with … suitable coordinate transformations … it’s still an astrolabe.”

  All night Sparta had followed the wind. Phobos was sliding toward the east as the sun climbed to meet it. The low, fast Martian moon crossed the sun more often than Earth’s bigger and more distant companion, but there was rarely anyone in the narrow shadow path of Phobos across the planet’s surface to observe the transit.

  As Sparta guided the marsplane higher into the morning’s warming atmosphere she saw the shadow of Phobos passing to the north, a slanted column of darkness in the dust-glistening sky. On the rippled plane of the dune field below, the twenty-seven-kilometer-long blob of shadow crawled eastward like a giant black amoeba.

  Soon Sparta was well to the south and west of the moving moon shadow. She never saw the microscopic speck in the dunes that was the speeding marstruck, and the riders in the truck never saw the lazily circling plane that carried the woman they were hoping to rescue.

  All day long Lydia drove fast and easily across the trackless dunes, aiming the tractor on the heading Khalid had specified along a snaking path that avoided the sharpest ridge crests but, where there was no alternative, plunging without hesitation down the shadowed slipfaces. Freed of its loaded trailers, the big tractor was an agile dune buggy.

  Khalid, restored by water and food and clean air, was in the sleeping box—sleeping through it all. Lydia heard nothing from him until almost nightfall. Then suddenly he poked his head through her lace curtains and demanded that she stop the truck.

  “It is time to pray,” he told them.

  Lydia, remarkably fresh and alert, or perhaps just running on caffeine—already she was brewing a fresh reservoir in the maker under the console—watched from the bubble as Khalid walked fifty meters into the barren dunes, spread a square of light polyfiber cloth on the sand, and kneeled to prostrate himself in the approximate direction of an invisible Mecca. The wind whipped the cloth around his knees and blew streamers of dust over his bowed back.

  “How can you keep going like this?” Blake asked huskily. Bleary and cramped, he shook himself awake from where he had dozed off in his harness, sitting on the other side of the cab. He peered through the plastic bubble at Khalid, out there bowing to the sand.

  “If either of you guys could drive I wouldn’t have to keep going. Meanwhile the change of routine keeps me awake.” She nodded toward Khalid. “He seems serious about his religion.”

  “Has been ever since I first knew him.”

  “When was that?”

  “We were nine.”

  “He seems to like you,” she said.

  “I like him,” he said.

  “So how come this mutual woman friend of yours thinks he’s a murderer?”

  “She hopes it isn’t true. So do I.”

  “Maybe I don’t know Khalid as well as you two, but I’ve seen him around for a few years now, and I can’t imagine the very serious Doctor Sayeed killing anybody. Not in cold blood, anyway.”

  “I can’t either. But like you say, he’s religious. Religion can take weird forms. And make people do weird things.”

  “If he did it, why is he trying to save her life?”

  He brooded on that before he said, “Let’s see if she’s alive.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Thanks.” He took the steaming cup she handed him. “Who do you think killed them, Lydia?”

  “The way you ask sounds like you don’t think I’d give a lot to know. Well, I would.”

  “You’ve been a cool customer.”

  “Yeah?” She looked at him over the rim of her coffee mug. “With you, maybe.” Khalid had vouched for Blake, and Lydia had had time to think about what that meant. She sipped at her coffee for a few moments before she began to talk.

  “Dare and I were here with the first bunch of regulars, the first people to really settle here. None of the explorers and scientists before us had ever stayed more than a few months. We were roughnecks, like most of the others—we worked on wildcat wells all over the permafrost regions, helped map the hydrology of Mars. And we helped build Lab City.

  “We cursed and fought and got drunk a lot, the first years. Everybody did. So it took Dare and me a while to realize we were in love. There aren’t that many couples among the old-timers, you know. There used to be a lot more men than women, and a lot of the women hooked up with guys they didn’t like much just to get away from a bunch of others they didn’t like at all. When more people came in later, most of the early matches broke up. Some of the women discovered they liked freedom best.”

  “Doesn’t Mars have some natives?”

  “Twenty-three kids born on Mars, at last count,” Lydia said. “Not exactly a population explosion, and what’s it been, ten years now? I’m not saying there aren’t good marriages, good companionships, just that they’re pretty rare. But so is jealousy.”

  “Jealousy is rare? That’s not the impression I got—the guys in the ’Pine looked ready to take my head off if I looked cross-eyed at a woman.”

  “You’re not one of us,” Lydia said simply. “A stranger has to watch his step. Or her step—same goes for a strange woman. Besides, we all thought you were a fink.”

  “All of you?”

  “Just about everybody in the Porkypine had you pegged for trouble, even if they weren’t sure what kind. We weren’t wrong, either.”

  “I’m not admitting anything.” He nodded toward Khalid, who had gotten to his feet and was making his way back to the cab. “Not in front of a witness, anyway.”

  Lydia smiled. “Neither would I. They don’t pay you enough to cover the damage you did.”

  Khalid’s voice sounded over the suitcomms. “You two seem to be having a lively conversation for this late hour.” He waited outside the truck while Lydia pumped the air down.

  “We were talking about an explosion in the motor pool fueling depot a couple of days ago,” said Lydia. “Destroyed some vehicles.”

  “Oh?”

  Blake could see Khalid outside the cab, eyeing him knowingly through his faceplate. Blake cleared his throat. “There seems to be an odd notion that I had something to do with it.”

  The cab door popped on Blake’s side and Khalid climbed in, maneuvering past Blake’s legs.

  As he settled himself into his harness Khalid smiled, his perfect teeth gleaming in his dark face. “Remember what fun we had, Blake, that summer in Arizona? Smearing our faces with black shoe polish and blowing things up?”

  “Let’s not bore Lydia with tales of our school days, buddy,” said Blake.

  “I’m far from bored,” she said.

  “We’ll give you the gruesome details later.” Inside his helmet, Blake had turned pink with embarrassm
ent.

  All three ran out of words. Lydia revved the big turbines and threw the tread motors into gear. The truck rolled.

  Khalid coughed and said, “I didn’t intend to interrupt…”

  “Yes, please finish what you were saying, Lydia,” Blake said. “About what happened…” When he ran out of words again, Khalid gave him an inquiring glance. “…the night the plaque was stolen.”

  Lydia looked at Khalid. “I was saying that Dare and I were in love. That was pretty obvious to everybody, wasn’t it, Khalid?”

  He nodded judiciously.

  But she caught his reticence, his hesitation. “Okay. Maybe not so obvious. The truth was that I always loved him more than he loved me,” she said. “He was an independent guy, a lonely guy, and I knew him well enough to know that I couldn’t do more than put a patch on what ailed him.” She fell silent, choosing her words. “But as long as he needed me at all, I put up with it. But in the last week or so before … he was murdered … it was different. He started avoiding everybody. He was edgy all the time. I took it personally. Because I was insecure, I guess. Anyway, I knew he was working late—he’d been working late every night since that creep Morland showed up—so I went to see him at work. I suppose I had some stupid idea that I was going to give him an ultimatum. As if either of us had a choice…”

  She was quiet even longer this time. Meanwhile the air pressure in the cab was back to Earth normal. She opened her faceplate, and the men did the same. When she didn’t resume her story, Blake finally broke the silence. “What happened?”