Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  The lock clicked open. The door to Prott’s inner office slowly swung back. She stepped through. The pressure from the inner office to the outer office was positive, and she felt the cool outward flow of air. The fine hairs rose on her scalp.

  She stepped inside. The pressure-sealed door slowly closed itself behind her.

  Sparta did not need enhanced analytical faculties to detect the difference in the atmosphere; anyone who had ever been near a slaughterhouse would have known it. Anyone who had been in a shooting gallery would have recognized the smell of burned powder.

  Prott’s body was on the floor behind his desk. He’d been dead for perhaps half an hour. The heat had long retreated from his limbs, leaving them blue in the darkness, but in Sparta’s eerie eyesight the core of his head and his torso still glowed like banked fires.

  She knelt carefully beside the body, not touching it—but breathing deeply, looking, listening…

  When he was killed he had been sitting in his enameled desk chair, which had fallen backward and to the side. There was a neat round hole centered above his eyes and a much larger hole in the back of his skull.

  Prott’s head lay twisted to one side in a pool of blood, which was congealing on the gray industrial carpet. The expression on his face could not be read, for the bullet had triggered a reflex that had left the unfortunate Prott, so careful of his looks, cross-eyed.

  Sparta glanced up. There was a crater in the sandstone wall behind Prott’s desk. The polished stone was marred with a splash of drying blood, at the level of a seated man’s head.

  She stood and leaned close to the hole chipped in the wall. Zeroing in, she could see microscopic flecks of soft metal gleaming in the rock matrix. The spent bullet had not embedded itself but had fallen to the floor, where the murderer had retrieved it, for otherwise Sparta would have had no trouble locating it. The faint odor of oxidized lead and copper wrote their simple formulas across the screen of her consciousness.

  Sparta crossed to the door and touched the light switch. Soft yellow room light came from scallopshell glass sconces near the ceiling.

  Prott’s office was large and lavish, furnished with dark leather furniture—a couch as big as a bed, deep armchairs—with low side tables of polished basalt slabs. On the floor in one corner a full-bellied alabaster jar held an arrangement of imported dried plants. There was only one picture, an inane oil in desaturated colors, contrived so as to not look too much like anything. Maybe it was a landscape. Whatever. It was visual Muzak.

  The room gave no hint of a real personality; the decor was high-priced, soulless industrial design by the same firm which had done the interior of the entire stone-and-glass hotel. The books and chips in evidence were restricted to business journals, biographies of successful entrepreneurs, inspirational tracts on management…

  Inset into the sandstone wall near the couch was a liquor shelf, glinting glassily of brown and red and green. None of the bottles seemed to have been opened recently. The adjacent crystal glasses showed a fine haze of room dust; when Sparta looked closely, she saw no recent fingerprints. Prott was prepared to entertain business guests, but apparently he had not lately had the opportunity.

  Sparta looked around the room, felt for it.

  It was too featureless. Too much the dressed set.

  She had yet to begin a serious search for clues to the identity of the killer. What already bothered her was that she did not know the real identity of the victim.

  She had the records which had been beamed to her while she’d been en route to Mars, of course, but like Prott’s office they were too sterile, the sanitized resume of a middle manager’s rise through the ranks of an interplanetary hotel chain.

  How convenient. And how frustrating. The man who lay dead on the carpeted floor was surely a competent hotel manager, but also, according to the testimony of the local police, he was a lecher and an expert pistol shot. Sparta’s own sense of him suggested that he was a man on the edge of a psychotic break.

  Yet his resume showed the smooth curve of an undistinguished and unmarred career.

  There was no such person as Wolfgang Prott. Not the Wolfgang Prott of record.

  Sparta went to the tiny flatscreen on Prott’s desk. From beneath her fingernails, polymer-insert spines unsheathed themselves like cat’s claws; she inserted them directly into the computer’s I/O ports as if she were inserting skeleton keys into an old-fashioned door lock.

  But like the unit on his secretary’s desk, Prott’s machine was no more than a terminal of the hotel’s master computer. Seconds later, she had learned everything it had to offer, which was nothing new.

  There were drawers in Prott’s desk, locked with standard I.D. sliverports. Her PIN spines slid into them and the drawers sprang open. Inside, beside the usual paraphernalia—stationery, tacks, rubber bands, pens, clear tape—were neatly indexed racks of RAM slivers.

  After building a block against outside eavesdroppers, she used his own terminal to play the slivers, one at a time; it took more time to load and unload them than to suck their contents dry. Once again she was impressed by the sheer banality of Prott’s milieu. The slivers in these locked drawers were records relating solely to business: phonelink directories, personnel records, credit checks on hotel guests, his personal financial records. From the evidence, his employees and guests were ordinary, fallible human beings. His only visible personal income was from his salary, and he had invested what he could afford of that, with only mixed success.

  For a borderline psychotic, Prott had been a remarkably discreet and well-organized man. Even a good man. He hadn’t wanted the details of his employees’ private lives stored on the master computer, where any talkative clerk could soon spread rumors about who used what chemicals, who slept with whom, who owed money to whom, so he’d kept these and other sensitive matters on separate chips, locked in his desk.

  Sparta rather respected him for that, even as it further roused her suspicions. Nothing in these files was truly revealing of Prott or of anyone associated with him.

  There had to be more. Hidden not in his office but in his private suite, perhaps. But Prott’s suite was visited daily by maids and accessible to any determined guest in the hotel—it would be a much less secure locus than this, his inner sanctum, where even the unused glasses on the bar testified that no one ever came except his assistant and the janitor.

  No, this was the place. Prott’s murderer had not used stealth or force to enter it; the lock had not been wiped clean, and only Prott’s touch was upon it. The murderer had walked through an open door, done the work without touching anything, then left and let the door quietly close itself.

  Sparta moved more quickly now, searching the room with all her heightened senses. There was nothing hidden in the decorative jars, no safe behind the bland oil painting, nothing lurking in the recesses of the leather couch, no hollow places under the carpet. But a section of the picture-sandstone wall beside Prott’s desk was thick with the oils and acids of his touch.

  A laser beam had carefully sawn an irregular curve around the radiating iron crystals that formed one of the “pictures” in the stone. The resulting thin plate of rock covered a shallow cavity in the wall’s cladding. Sparta had to play with the oddly shaped plate a moment before she was able to dislodge it: the trick was to press a lower corner and let the featherweight slab fall into her hand.

  Inside the cavity were two objects, a microchip recording and a gun.

  The gun was .22 caliber, a long-barreled target pistol uncleaned since its last use. It smelled of stale propellant and uranium oxide.

  Sparta bent close to it, peered at it microscopically, sniffed it. Prott had handled it, but not recently. Less recent were other chemical signatures, two of them pronounced. One she did not know. The other she could not believe, did not want to believe…

  She bent to the chip. Prott’s signature was as fresh here as his fingerprints on the door lock. He had recorded the chip shortly before he was killed.


  She placed it in Prott’s desktop terminal. She let her PIN spines emerge and inserted them into the ports, and then she went into trance and absorbed the contents of Prott’s last chip.

  15

  Here begins the recording, synthesized in the voice of Wolfgang Prott:

  If you are what I think you are, Inspector, you will have found these: the gun that murdered Morland and Chin, and an eyewitness account of the scene a few seconds after they were murdered.

  I hope you don’t find these things. You’ll have no cause to look for them unless I haven’t given them to you in person. In which case I’m probably dead. That is not a remote possibility, so I’m taking the precaution of recording this.

  We have the same enemy, you and I. I speak of the prophetae of the Free Spirit. They did those things to you I don’t fully understand, those things that make you so “lucky” and will have allowed you to find my hiding hole and this document. Because of those same people—through no direct means, but by necessity—I have become what I have become. No, I won’t apologize for my sickly personality; after all, I’ve worked decades to perfect it.

  Oh yes, I really am the odious hotelier I seem to be; the resume of my undistinguished career is quite accurate, as far as it goes. But after hours I pursue a … let’s call it a hobby. I don’t mean only the pursuit of women, although I try hard to give that impression. And apparently I succeed.

  My primary … interest … has been to interdict the illegal trade in fossils and artifacts on Mars. This hotel I manage was a nexus for smuggling when I arrived here a year ago. No longer.

  Smuggling still occurs on Mars, of course. How could it not? Otherwise-respectable people, museum directors and the like, will use the most extraordinary egocentric and ethnocentric excuses to justify their theft of cultural objects—usually claiming that they can better protect them or better appreciate them or show them off to better advantage than their rightful owners. But these sanctimonious deals are no longer made on the premises of the Mars Interplanetary Hotel. A smuggler on Mars needs to be much cleverer today than before I arrived.

  Because of my interest in these matters, I had been following Dewdney Morland’s career for some years before I arrived here—for some years before he showed any interest in Mars, in fact.

  Morland had legitimate-seeming credentials, and his vita, quite unremarkable, looked no odder than that of many academics. He studied topics that seemed, to uninitiates, obscure and unrelated, but there was a plausible and respectable theme to his researches, being the relationship of artifacts to the tools used to shape them. It was only shortly before he came to Mars that he became interested in Culture X, however.

  There are … were … only a dozen or so people throughout the solar system who claimed expertise in Culture X. It may have been Morland’s misfortune to boast that he had joined them, for he and all but one of the others, Professor Forster, are dead now. And Morland was no expert.

  The thing about Morland, not apparent to many people, was that valuable objects tended to disappear from the places where he did his research. He did his research on Cro-Magnon calendar bones at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. A week after he’d wrapped up his work, a collection of valuable 20th-century ethnographic films was discovered missing. Fortunately no information was lost, for the films had long ago been transferred to more permanent media, but the acetate originals would have been extremely valuable to specialist collectors. No one suspected Morland at the time, and indeed no connection has ever been proved.

  A year later, Morland was working on Anasazi artifacts at the University of Arizona. This time an extraordinary assemblage of pottery disappeared from the vaults. Here priceless information was lost with them, but although there was a thorough investigation, again nothing could be proved. Two years later, about the time Morland was visiting New Beirut, the Lebanese lost several unique items of Hellenistic gold jewelry from the Museum of Surviving Antiquities. In this instance the objects’ aesthetic value exceeded their scholarly value, but the loss was nevertheless significant, and a blow to that struggling institution.

  You will have no difficulty understanding that once objects of this kind are taken there is little likelihood they will ever be seen again. For a thief to dispose of a previously unknown artifact is relatively easy, but to try to fence one—sell one, I mean—which has already been catalogued, if it is well known, invites instant arrest.

  Consequently, thefts of famous objects are almost always commissioned; the stolen goods go straight into the vaults of the wealthy but discreet pirates who finance the jobs, there to be gloated over in private.

  In the case of Dewdney Morland we had a scholar of middle rank and modest income, with access to first-rate museums. Even on the face of it he was not, shall we say, unapproachable.

  Strict liability laws forbid the spreading of unprovable allegations, but word manages to get to those who need to know. Museum people talk to each other, and some of them talk to me. The news that Morland had obtained permission to investigate the Martian plaque made my flesh creep. He’d never been stupid enough to steal the things he was ostensibly studying, but perhaps his successes had emboldened him.

  The Martian plaque was not housed in a museum with other valuables; if it were to be stolen, it would have to be through a direct assault. I had nothing to go on but my suspicions, and I could not even share these with the local authorities without giving myself away. Nevertheless, I passed hints to Darius Chin—anonymously—and he followed up on them on his own.

  Morland stayed here at the hotel. There was a regrettable mix-up while his luggage was being fetched from the shuttleport—a mix-up that allowed me to ascertain that he was carrying nothing suspicious and that his instruments were exactly what they seemed—interferometers and the like. But to make up to Morland for the hotel’s error, I saw to it that he got a better room than he had paid for, plus very close personal attention.

  He was not a pleasant man. He was rude to me, rude to the staff, loud and contentious with everyone. I find it difficult to understand how he could have done any work at all at night, for he spent most of his afternoons drinking. Indeed, on the night he was murdered he accosted Dr. Sayeed in the lobby and became so abusive that other guests complained, and the clerk threatened to remove him.

  Putting up with him was doubly frustrating, for it appeared that if Morland was not innocent, he was maddeningly clever. The illegal devices I had left in his room and sometimes managed to get onto his person reported his whereabouts and his conversations faithfully. There was nothing suspicious in any of his actions.

  I reluctantly determined to befriend the man. He had let drop that he was an excellent shot, that he considered himself something of a marksman. He bragged about it. I take it he was a hunter of deer and other controlled species on Earth.

  Now, shooting has long been a pursuit of mine, a sort of hobby. Of course there is nothing to hunt on Mars, but target shooting is a popular sport here, and I offered to escort Morland to the hotel’s range and teach him to use a pistol. He condescended to accept.

  I took a mean pleasure in the fact that he was predictably inept at first; he wasn’t used to a pistol and he wasn’t used to the gravity of Mars. His first few dozen rounds came nowhere near the target. Shortly, however, I was struck by his rapid progress. Even during our first session, he showed noticeable improvement.

  And from the start he was obsessed with beating me at my own game. When he asked if he could borrow one of my pistols—as you see, they are rather nicer pieces than those kept at the range for the use of guests—I didn’t know how to refuse. He intended to spend the daylight hours at practice, he said, hours when I was working, and he could not.

  After a couple of days we met again, and Morland gave me quite a demonstration, cutting out the bull’s-eyes with astonishing precision. To observe his skill was a useful reminder for me; we habitually assume that people who look athletic are skillful athletes in all ways and that people
who don’t look athletic have no physical skill whatever. But nothing prevents a fat, short-breathed, pasty-faced fellow with high blood pressure from having the gift of deadly aim.

  He wasn’t quite good enough to beat my score that day, but he came close. We agreed to a rematch and wagered a bottle of Dom Pérignon on the outcome. He must have been confident; for him the champagne was a costly prize, whereas I could appropriate a bottle from dining room stores.

  That night he and Darius Chin were murdered.

  I was there, Inspector.

  Alas, not soon enough to prevent the deaths of those two men—but I arrived soon enough to recover the murder weapon, the one you have in your hand now. Yes, it is my gun, the gun I loaned to Morland.

  It happened this way: late that night I had intended to stop at the Phoenix Lounge to have a word with the bartender when I saw what I thought was a ghost, a man I had thought long dead. But this man is hard to mistake. He is a small man, fastidious in his manners, always expensively dressed, with curly bright orange hair that he keeps trimmed close to his skull.

  He is one of the few prophetae I can recognize on sight, and the deadliest of their assassins.

  I had just come in from inspecting the hotel’s heat exchangers and was still in my pressure suit. The orange man was leaving the Phoenix Lounge. He put on his pressure suit in the cloak room and mingled with the group of guests who were going out on the town. I followed.

  He didn’t stay with the others. I am not without skill in stalking, and I know the pressure tubes of Labyrinth City well. It was quickly apparent that he was making his way by a roundabout route to the Town Hall.

  I paused to let him get a few steps ahead. As you know, the only approach to the hall through the tubes is from the Council of Worlds executive building—that stretch is exposed and fairly well lit. After a minute or so I moved as close as I dared.