Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Meaning, I suppose, that we would not have lost the Doradus? That half of its crew would not now be dead and the other half fugitives?”

  Damn Martita. I refuse to reply.

  “It’s clear enough that she remembers what she was taught,” Jack observes. “The Knowledge has not been erased in her.”

  “No matter. We are impervious now,” I say, as firmly as I can. “The New Man is indestructible.”

  Jurgen snorts at me; he sounds like some bulky ungulate. “You’ve said that before. And been as wrong as Kingman.” When he is in a very good mood his giggle uncannily resembles the whinny of a jackass. “Really, Bill, if Kingman must die for such a trivial mistake, why should we let you live?”

  “Let me live?” I turn away from the fields and the forest to face them. “I think you can answer that for yourselves.”

  Until now they hadn’t known how I was planning to deal with Kingman, or whom I’d chosen to do the work. But I’ve just seen the man coming out of the woods—which is why I choose this moment to turn toward them. Against the colorful autumn leaves the man’s curly red hair, his camel’s hair coat, his pigskin gloves, make an unmistakable orange splotch on the landscape.

  I’ve turned because I want to see the looks on their faces. They cringe quite satisfactorily—all of them except Jack Noble, who is my man now, now that he’s been forced to go underground like me. The orange man is my man too, and they all know it.

  Holly is the first to recover her aplomb. “So, Bill, on to Jupiter.” She has the audacity to smirk at me. “But how do we know Linda won’t be there ahead of us, as she was on Phobos?”

  I can think of several answers to that. The least obscene finds voice before the others.

  “Actually, my dear, I’m depending on it.”

  HIDE AND SEEK

  AN AFTERWORD BY

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  The wise science fiction writer prefers to operate in galaxies far, far away and long, long ago, where he is safe from nagging critics—like the small boy who once told Ray Bradbury he had a satellite moving in the wrong direction. (“So I hit him.”)

  However, by exquisitely bad timing, the setting of this novel occurs practically next door and tomorrow afternoon. Desperate attempts to persuade publisher Byron Preiss to stop the countdown for a year or so have been of no avail. By the time these words appear in print, Paul and I may have to eat some of them.

  How could I have dreamed when I wrote “Hide and Seek” back in 1948 that forty-one years later a Russian robot would be hopping across the face of Phobos, just like the character in my story? (As in the case of every space mission forecast, this sentence must be qualified by the incantation, “If all goes well.”) For early in 1989—probably about the time I’m proofreading this book, dammit—two space probes will have made a rendezvous with Phobos, and one of them will have dropped a small “rover” which will explore the little world by jumping across it in twenty-meter hops, making a whole series of scientific measurements at each landing. (I will be quite embarrassed if, in the course of its wanderings, it encounters a large black monolith.)

  When Phobos was discovered in 1877, it not only made obsolete Tennyson’s “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” but it presented astronomers with a phenomenon they had never encountered before. Most satellites orbit their primaries at substantial distance, in a fairly leisurely manner; our own Moon takes almost thirty times longer to go around the Earth than the Earth takes to revolve on its own axis. But here was a world where the “month” was shorter than the “day”! Mars rotates in twenty-four and a half hours (to the great convenience of future colonists, who need make only minor adjustments to their watches and circadian rhythms), yet Phobos circles it in only seven and a half!

  Today, we are accustomed to artificial satellites which perform such feats, thus rising in the west and setting in the east (see Bradbury, supra), but the behavior of Phobos was quite a surprise to late-19th-century astronomers. It was also a bonus to such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs; who can forget the hurtling inner moon illuminating the ancient sea beds of Barsoom?

  Alas, Phobos doesn’t hurtle very fast, and you’d have to watch for some time to see that it’s moving at all. And it’s a miserable source of illumination; not only is its apparent size a fraction of our Moon’s, but it is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System, reflecting about as much light as a lump of coal. Indeed, it may be largely made of carbon, and altogether bears a close resemblance to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet, as revealed by a whole flotilla of space probes in 1987. It’s not much use, therefore, during the cold Martian nights, to warn travelers of approaching thoats, seeking whom they might devour.*

  Tiny though it is—a battered ellipsoid whose longest dimension is less than thirty kilometers—Phobos may be destined to play a major role in the future of space exploration. After the Moon, it may be the next celestial body to know human visitors, since it is an ideal base for the reconnaissance of Mars.

  Perhaps the first writer to suggest this was Laurence Manning, an early member of the American Rocket Society. In “The Wreck of the Asteroid” (Wonder Stories, 1932) his explorers first landed on Phobos and had a lot of fun bouncing around in its approximately one-thousandth-of-an-Earth gravity. Until one of them overdid it, achieved escape velocity—and started to fall helpless toward the looming face of Mars…

  It’s a nice, dramatic situation, which author Lawrence Manning milked for all it was worth. The crew had to make an emergency take off and race after their careless colleague, hoping to catch up with him before he made yet another crater on Mars.

  I hate to spoil the fun, but that just couldn’t happen. Small though it is (about 20 meters a second, compared with Earth’s 11,200) not even an Olympic high-jumper could attain the escape velocity of Phobos—especially when encumbered with a spacesuit. And even if he did, he would be in no danger of falling onto Mars—because he would still have the whole of Phobos’s eight thousand meters per second orbital velocity. His trifling muscular contribution would make virtually no difference to that, so he would continue to move in just the same orbit as Phobos, but displaced by a few kilometers. And after one revolution, he’d be back where he started…

  If you want further details, I refer you to “Jupiter V” (in Reach for Tomorrow) which takes place on what was, in pre-Voyager days, the innermost satellite of Jupiter, now renamed Amalthea. To fall onto Jupiter would be a much more spectacular fate than falling onto Mars; but it’s even more difficult to do. (“If all goes well,” the much-delayed Galileo Mission will demonstrate this feat in 1995).

  “Hide and Seek” is not the only story of mine to deal with Phobos; in The Sands of Mars (1954), I brutally turned Phobos into a minisun (by carefully unspecified technology) in order to improve the climate of Mars. It now occurs to me that this was a trial run for blowing up Jupiter in 2010: Odyssey Two.

  Soon after the appearance of “Hide and Seek,” another British science fiction writer asked me rather suspiciously: “Have you ever read C. S. Forester’s short story ‘Brown on Resolution’?”

  “No,” I answered, truthfully enough. “I’m afraid I’ve never even read the Hornblower books. What’s it about?”

  Well, it seems Brown was a British seaman in the First World War, armed with only a rifle, who managed to keep at bay a German cruiser from his various hideouts on a small, rocky island. (A rather similar story, one war later, was made into an excellent movie starring Peter O’Toole. In Murphy’s War, the hero was still coping, more or less single-handed, with Germans; but being Irish he would have been just as happy fighting the Brits.)

  I’m sorry to say that I still haven’t gotten around to Forester’s story and missed the chance of discussing “Brown” with him when we once dined together in the magnificent Painted Hall of the Royal Navy College at Greenwich. Which was a pity, as it would have given me a chance of trotting out one of my favorite quotations: “Talent borrows—but Genius steals.”

&nbs
p; Decades before the Viking spacecraft gave us our first close-up views of Phobos, it was obvious that a hunk of rock only a few times larger than Manhattan could possess no trace of atmosphere, still less harbor any life. Yet unless my memory has betrayed me completely, I seem to recall that Burroughs once had Mars invaded by marauding Phobians. The economics—not to mention the ecology—of such a microcivilization boggles the imagination. Once again, I fear, ERB hadn’t done his homework.* Nevertheless, Phobos once featured rather spectacularly on the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) agenda. Back in the sixties, the Russian astrophysicist Iosef Shkovskii—best known to the general public for his collaboration with Carl Sagan on SETI’s sacred book Intelligence in the Universe (1966)—made an extraordinary suggestion about the little world, based on the long-established observation that it is slowly falling toward Mars.

  I have never decided how seriously Iosef took his theory; he had a considerable sense of humor—which he needed to survive as a Jewish scientist in Stalin’s time (and a lot later)—but this is how his argument went:

  The slow descent of Phobos is due to the same effect that finally brings down close artificial satellites to Earth—the braking effect of the atmosphere. A satellite made of dense material will survive a long time; one with low mass per volume will be brought down more quickly, as was demonstrated by the ECHO balloon, and later by SKYLAB, which was essentially an empty fuel tank.

  Working backward from the drag figures, Iosef calculated that the density of Phobos must be much less than that of water. This could only mean that it was hollow…

  Well, it seemed unlikely that Nature could make a hollow world some tens of kilometers across. Phobos must be a space station, presumably constructed by the Martians. Which, added another scientist, is why they’re no longer around. They went broke building it.

  Alas, the Viking photos showed that Phobos is undoubtedly a natural object, but its surface does show some puzzling peculiarities. Much of it is covered with parallel grooves several hundred meters wide, so that it looks like a ploughed field on a gigantic scale.

  I cannot help recalling that when the Italian astronomer Schiaparelli reported “grooves” on Mars in 1877, he chose the unfortunate word “channels” to describe them. What a lot of trouble the mistranslation caused—and how chagrined Percival Lowell would have been to learn that his beloved canals have now turned up not on Mars, but on tiny Phobos.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Colombo, June 1988

  P.S.: Alas, Phobos 1 has just been lost, halfway through its mission; it was sent an incorrect instruction which caused it to close down completely, beyond hope of revival. I feel very sorry for the programmer concerned, who has to face the wrath of colleagues who’ve lost years of their lives’ work.

  Incidentally, something similar happened with Mariner 1, the first of the series of U.S. probes which eventually explored Venus, Mercury, and Mars. It was lost soon after takeoff because a single comma had been omitted from a line of programming.

  I’m keeping my fingers crossed for Phobos 2. How glad I am that i only have to write about these machines, not make them actually work…

  Colombo,

  10 October 1988

  * The erudite Sprague de Camp once pointed out a very peculiar feature of Barsoomian ecology: the fauna apparently consisted almost entirely of carnivores. The poor beasts must have suffered from acute malnutrition.

  * I am still prepared to repeat a statement that I made many years ago: ERB is a much underrated writer. To have created the best-known character in Western—and perhaps world—fiction is no small achievement. The Mars novels, however, should be read before the age of sixteen: I hope to revisit Barsoom in my rapidly approaching second childhood.

  INFOPAK

  TECHNICAL

  BLUEPRINTS

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

  Pages 2-5

  Marstruck Open terrain heavy transport tractor—overview; cut-away perspective; cab/tractor overview; wireframe overview cutaway; undercarriage components; turbines.

  Pages 6-8

  Town Hall, Labyrinth City Architecture—glass weld integrity scan; wireframe overview; plan view; components—cast glass, carbon filament, ceramics.

  Pages 9-12

  Marsplane Climate-driven geo-flex controlled long-range sailplane—canopy false color atmospheric display; cockpit module; perspective of cockpit; rato schematic, ratomount, geo-flex control; rocket assisted take-off; canopy display, cockpit overview, tail section.

  Page 16

  Mars Topographical section—surface approximation.

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4: THE MEDUSA ENCOUNTER 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, Russell Galen, Alan Lynch, Mary Higgins.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  105 Madison Avenue

  New York, New York 10016

  Text and artwork copyright © 1990 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: 89-91865

  ISBN: 0-380-75348-0

  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: March 1990

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

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Stephana McClaran kindly shared journals and photographs of her travels in Nepal and India, for which I thank her.

  PROLOGUE

  She lay exposed on the operating table. Men and women sheathed in sterile plastic film leaned over her, wielding black instruments. The rank smell of onions threatened to suffocate her. Her mind’s eye involuntarily displayed complex sulfur compounds as the circle of lights above her began to swirl in a golden spiral.

  William, she’s a child

  As the darkness closed in, she clutched harder at the hand she held, trying to keep from falling.

  To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

  She was sliding away. She was tilting up into the spiral. The hand to which she clung slid from her grasp. Around her, shapes swarmed in the maelstrom. The shapes were signs. The signs had meaning.

  The meaning engulfed her. She tried to call out, to shout a warning. But when the blackness closed over her, only one image remained, an image of swirling clouds, red and yellow and white, boiling in an immense whirlpool, big enough to swallow a planet. She left herself then, and fell endlessly into them…

  Blake couldn’t see what was going on; they’d put up a curtain of opaque fabric to screen his view of Ellen’s body. He was frightened. When she’d let go of his hand, her own hand falling limp on the sheets, he’d thought for a moment that she was dead.

  But the blue vein in her throat still pulsed; her chest still rose and fell beneath the rough gown; the surgeon and his assistants went on with their work as if nothing unusual had happened. “She’s under,” one of them said.

  Blake fought back dizziness when he saw the clamps and tongs, saw the scalpel and scissors go down gleaming and reappear above the curtain streaked with blood. The surgeon moved with swift precision, doing whatever he was doing to the middle of Ellen. Suddenly he stopped.

  �
��What the hell is this stuff?” he said angrily, his voice muffled inside his clear film mask. Blake saw an assistant’s nervous glance in his direction. The young surgeon turned to stare at Blake—they hadn’t wanted him here, but Ellen had refused to let them begin without him at her side. With his tongs the surgeon lifted a bit of something slippery and fishlike and slapped it on a tray. “Biopsy. I want to know what it is before we close.”

  The technician hurried away. Meanwhile the surgeon bent and pulled up more of the stuff and threw it on a larger tray held by his assistant. Blake peered at it in fascination, the silvery tissue lying in sheets like a beached jellyfish, trembling and iridescent.

  The surgeon was still working to clean the last of it out of Ellen when the technician handed him the analysis. On the pages Blake glimpsed graphs, lists of ratios and molecular weights, false-color stereo images.

  “All right, we’d better close,” the surgeon said. “I want this woman under intensive surveillance until we hear what the research committee makes of this.”

  Blake stood looking out upon the glowing glass city and the Noctis Labyrinthus beyond, a maze of rock pinnacles and deep-cut ravines, midnight blue under the unblinking stars.

  Ellen lay deeply sleeping under a coarse sheet, her short blond hair framing her unlined face. Her full lips were slightly parted, as if she were tasting the air. No tubes or wires intruded upon her slim flesh; the monitoring probes hovered without touching her delicate skull and slight breasts and slender abdomen. The silent graphics above the bed displayed reassuringly normal functions. The room was quiet and warm, almost peaceful.

  The silhouette of a tall man appeared in the doorway, blocking the light from the hall. Blake saw the reflection in the glass wall and turned, expecting to see one of the doctors.