Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  He walked down the axis of the ship until he came to the forward elevator, between gas cells one and two. Riding up to the observation deck, he noticed it was uncomfortably hot.

  The Queen obtained almost a quarter of its buoyancy from the unlimited amounts of waste heat produced by its miniature “cold” fusion power plant. Indeed, on this lightly loaded test flight, only six of the ten gas cells contained helium, an increasingly rare and expensive gas; the remaining cells were full of plain hot air. Yet the ship still carried 200 tonnes of water as ballast.

  Running the gas cells in hot-air mode created technical problems in refrigerating the access ways; obviously a little more work would have to be done there. Falcon dictated a brief memo to himself on his microcorder.

  A refreshing rush of cooler air hit him in the face when he stepped out onto the big observation deck, into the dazzling sunlight that streamed through the clear acrylic roof. He was confronted with a scene of controlled chaos. Half a dozen workers and an equal number of superchimp assistants were busily laying the partly completed dance floor, while others were installing electrical wiring, arranging furniture, and fiddling with the elaborate louvers of the transparent roof. Falcon found it hard to believe that everything would be ready for the maiden voyage, only four weeks ahead.

  Well, that was not his problem, thank goodness. He was merely the captain, not the cruise director.

  The human workers waved to him, and the “simps” flashed toothy smiles. They all looked quite spiffy in the blue and white coveralls of the Queen’s corporate sponsors. He walked among them, through the orderly confusion, and mounted the short spiral stairs to the already finished Skylounge. This was his favorite place in the whole ship, but he knew that once the Queen was in service he would never again have the lounge all to himself. He would allow himself just five minutes of private enjoyment.

  He keyed his commlink and spoke to the bridge, confirming that everything was still in order. Then he relaxed into one of the comfortable swivel chairs.

  Below, in a curve that delighted the eye, was the unbroken silver sweep of the ship’s envelope. He was perched at the highest point forward, surveying the immensity of the largest vehicle ever built to contend with gravity near a planet’s surface. The only larger craft in the solar system were the space freighters that plied the trajectories among the space stations of Venus, Earth, Mars, the moons, and the Mainbelt; in the absence of weight, size was a secondary concern.

  And when Falcon had tired of admiring the Queen, he could turn and look almost all the way to the horizon of that fantastic wilderness carved by the Colorado River in half a billion years time.

  Apart from the remotely operated camera platform, which had now fallen back and was recording the spectacle from amidships, Falcon had the sky to himself. It was blue and empty up here, although the horizon was opaque with the purple brown stain that had become the permanent color of Earth’s lower atmosphere. Far to the south and north he could see the icy trails of ascending and descending intercontinental space planes, specifically prohibited from the corridor across the desert skies that today had been reserved for the Queen.

  Someday, cheap fusion plants would supplant the fossil fuels upon which so much of the Earth still depended for economic sustenance, and ships like the Queen would ply the atmosphere gently and cleanly, carrying cargo and passengers. Then the sky would belong only to the birds and the clouds and the great dirigibles. But that day was still decades in the future.

  It was true, as the old pioneers had said at the beginning of the 20th century: this was the only way to travel—in silence and luxury, breathing the air around you and not cut off from it, near enough to the surface to watch the everchanging beauty of land and sea. The subsonic jets of the past century’s final quarter had been hardly better than cattle cars, packed with hundreds of passengers seated up to ten abreast. Now, a hundred years later, a great many more passengers would soon be able to travel in greater comfort, at comparable speed, and with less real expense.

  Not that any of them would be traveling on the Queen; the Queen and her projected sister ships were not a mass-transit proposition. Only a few of the world’s billions would ever enjoy gliding silently through the sky in highest luxury, champagne in hand, the symphonic strains of a live orchestra drifting from the stage of the observation deck below… But a secure and prosperous global society could afford such follies and indeed needed them for their novelty and entertainment, as a useful distraction from the kind of aggressive interplanetary business affairs that too often threatened to erupt into brushfire wars. And there were at least a million people on Earth whose discretionary income exceeded a thousand “new dollars” a year—that is, a million of the ordinary dollars everybody else was used to having deducted from their credit chips at every transaction. So the Queen would not lack for passengers.

  Falcon’s commlink beeped, interrupting his reverie. The copilot was calling from the bridge.

  “Okay for rendezvous, Captain? We’ve got all the data we need from this run, and the viddie people are getting impatient.”

  Falcon glanced at the camera platform, now matching his speed and altitude a quarter of a kilometer away. “Okay, proceed as arranged. I’ll watch from here.”

  He went down the spiral stairs from the Skylounge and walked back through the busy chaos of the observation deck, intending to get a better view amidships. As he walked he could feel a change of vibration underfoot; the silent turbines were powering down, and the Queen was coming to rest. By the time he reached the rear of the deck, the ship was hanging motionless in the sky.

  Using his master key, Falcon let himself out onto the small external platform flaring from the end of the deck; half a dozen people could stand here, with only low guardrails separating them from the vast sweep of the envelope—and from the ground, thousands of meters below the envelope’s sharply sloping artificial horizon. It was an exciting place to be, and perfectly safe even when the ship was traveling at speed, for it was sheltered in the dead air behind the huge dorsal blister of the observation deck. Nevertheless, it was not intended that the passengers would have access to it; the view was a little too vertiginous.

  The covers of the forward cargo hatch had already opened like giant trap doors, and the camera platform was hovering above them, preparing to descend. Along this route in years to come would travel thousands of passengers and tonnes of supplies. Only on rare occasions would the Queen have to drop down to sea level to dock with her floating base.

  A sudden gust of cross wind slapped Falcon’s cheek, and he tightened his grip on the guardrail. The Grand Canyon could be a bad place for turbulence, although he did not expect much at this altitude. Without anxiety he focused his attention on the descending platform, now some fifty meters above the ship; the crewman who was piloting the robot platform from the Queen’s bridge was a highly skilled operator who had performed this simple maneuver a dozen times on this flight already. It was inconceivable that he would have any difficulties.

  Yet he seemed to be reacting rather sluggishly. That last gust had drifted the camera platform almost to the edge of the open hatchway.

  Surely the pilot could have corrected before this…

  Did he have a control problem? Unlikely. These remotes had multiple-redundancy, fail-safe takeovers—any number of backup systems. Accidents were unheard of.

  But there he went again, off to the left. Could the pilot be drunk? Improbable though that seemed…

  Falcon keyed his commlink. “Bridge, put me in…”

  Without warning he was slapped violently in the face by a gust of freezing wind. That was not what had interrupted his orders to the bridge. He hardly felt the wind, for he had been checked by the horror of what was happening to the camera platform. The operator was fighting for control, trying to balance the craft on its jets, but he was only making matters worse. The oscillations had increased—twenty degrees, forty degrees, sixty degrees.

  Falcon found his voice.
“Switch to automatic, you fool!” he shouted at the commlink. “Your manual control’s not working!”

  The platform flipped over on its back. The jets no longer supported it, but drove it swiftly downward, sudden allies with the gravity they had fought until this moment.

  Falcon never heard the crash. He felt it, though, as he raced across the observation deck toward the elevator that would take him down to the bridge. Workers shouted at him anxiously, wanting to know what happened.

  It would be many months before he knew the answer to that question.

  Just as he was about to step into the elevator shaft, he changed his mind. What if there was a power failure? Better be on the safe side, even if it took a few seconds longer. Even if time was the essence.

  He ran down the spiral stairway that enclosed the elevator shaft. Halfway down he paused to check the ship for damage. He had a perfect view, and what he saw froze his heart. That damned platform had gone straight through the ship, top to bottom, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were collapsing slowly even now, in great falling veils of plastic.

  Falcon wasn’t worried about lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, with eight cells still intact. Far more serious was the structural damage. Already he could hear the latticework of carbon-carbon and titanium all around him, groaning in protest under sudden abnormal, excessive loads. Strong and flexible as the metal and carbon-fiber members were, they were no stronger than their sundered joints.

  Lift alone wasn’t enough. Unless it was properly distributed, the ship’s back would break.

  Falcon ran again. He’d gotten a few steps down the stairs when a superchimp, one of the workers’ assistants from the observation deck, came racing down the elevator shaft, shrieking with fright—moving with incredible speed, hand over hand, along the outside of the elevator’s latticework. In its terror the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its recent ancestors.

  Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched the creature’s approach with some alarm. A distraught simp was a powerful and possibly dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning against striking out at humans.

  As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance. He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a human disaster beyond its comprehension, for which it bore no responsibility.

  It stopped exactly opposite him, on the other side of the lattice. There was nothing to prevent it from coming through the opening framework if it wished. And then it moved toward him, its wide thin lips hovering over yellow fangs, bared in terror.

  Now its face was only inches from his, and he was looking straight into its terrified eyes. Never before had Falcon been so close to a simp, able to study its features in such detail. He felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all humans experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.

  Falcon’s presence seemed to have calmed the animal; its lips closed over its fangs. Falcon pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation deck. He said, very clearly and precisely, “Boss. Boss. Go.”

  To his relief, the simp understood. It gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once raced back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could. If any safety remained aboard the Queen, it lay in that direction, upward.

  His duty lay in the other direction.

  He had almost reached the bottom of the spiral stairs when the lights went out. With a sound of rending polymer, the vessel pitched nose down. He could still see quite well, for a shaft of sunlight streamed through the open hatch and the huge tear in the envelope. Many years ago Falcon had stood in a great cathedral nave watching the light pour through the stained-glass windows, forming pools of multicolored radiance on the ancient flagstones. The dazzling shaft of sunlight through the ruined fabric high above compulsively reminded him of that moment.

  He was in a cathedral of metal and polymer, falling down the sky.

  When he reached the bridge and was able for the first time to look outside, he was horrified to see how close the ship was to the ground. Only a thousand meters below were the beautiful and deadly pinnacles of rock and the red river of mud, carving its way down into the past. There was no level area anywhere in sight where a ship as large as the Queen could come to rest on an even keel.

  A glance at the display board told him all the ballast had gone. However, rate of descent had been reduced to a few meters a second; they still had a fighting chance.

  Without a word, Falcon eased himself into the pilot’s seat and took over such control as remained. The instrument board showed him everything he wished to know; speech was superfluous.

  In the background, he could hear the communications officer giving a running report over the radiolink. By this time all the news channels of Earth and the inhabited worlds would have been preempted—and he could imagine the frustration of the program managers: one of the most spectacular wrecks in history was occurring without a single live camera to transmit it! Someday the last moments of the Queen might fill millions with awe and terror, as had those of the Hindenburg a century and a half before, but not in real time.

  Now the ground was only about four hundred meters away, still coming up slowly. Though he had full thrust, he had not dared use it lest the weakened structure collapse. Now he realized he had no choice. The wind was taking them toward a fork in the canyon where the river was split by a wedge of rock like the prow of some gigantic, fossilized ship of stone. If the Queen continued on its present course it would straddle that triangular plateau and come to rest with at least a third of its length jutting out over nothingness; it would snap like a rotten stick.

  Far away, above the groans of the straining structure and the hiss of escaping gas, came the familiar whistle of the turbines as Falcon opened up the lateral thrusters. The ship staggered, and began to slew to port.

  The shriek of tearing metal was now almost continuous—and the rate of descent had increased ominously. A glance at the damage-control board showed that cell number five had just gone.

  The ground was only meters away. Even now Falcon could not tell whether his maneuver would succeed or fail. He switched the thrust vectors to vertical, giving maximum lift to reduce the force of impact.

  The crash seemed to last forever. It was not violent, merely prolonged and irresistible. It seemed that the whole universe was falling about them.

  The sound of crunching laminate and metal came rapidly nearer, as if some great beast were eating its way through the dying ship.

  Then the floor and ceiling closed upon Falcon like a vise.

  The holographic image vanished from the briefing room. Sparta and Blake and the commander sat quietly in the dark for a moment.

  Finally Sparta said, “A very convincing reconstruction.”

  “Yeah.” Blake stirred in his armchair. “I remember seeing the videos when I was a kid. They weren’t like this, though. It’s like being inside the guy’s head.”

  “We had good coverage from the flight recorders, a lot of it classified information,” the commander said. “And you’re right, we also had access to Falcon’s experience.”

  “From deep-probe debriefing of the survivors?” Sparta asked.

  “That’s right,” the commander replied. In the gloom, his pale eyes were reflected points of light.

  Sparta locked gazes with him in the dark. His face enlarged itself a dozen times under her telescopic inspection; the little jumps of his cold eyes betrayed him. Even the sudden sharp smell of him betrayed him. She knew the commander and his colleagues were using the same deep molecular-probe techniques on her, tapping her nightly dreams, recording her nightmares for later reconstruction—reconstructions that might easily be as terrifying as this “documentary.
”

  His eyes shifted ever so slightly in the direction of Blake, before coming back to her almost instantly. He was acknowledging her suspicions, and at the same time silently telling her this was information they could not afford to share with Blake.

  Sparta said, “Run the incident with the simp again, please.”

  The commander complied, keying the holo controls. Almost instantly they were back inside the Queen, that slowly collapsing cathedral of plastic and metal…

  Falcon, descending the stairs beside the elevator as swiftly as he could, watched the simp’s approach with some alarm. A distraught simp was a powerful and possibly dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning.

  As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “boss”…

  “Stop there,” Sparta commanded.

  The hologram froze.

  “You’ve analyzed the animal’s speech?” she demanded.

  “The crash investigators tried. Falcon’s recollection wasn’t that precise. Not good enough to recover the words.”

  “All right, go on.”

  Even now, Falcon realized, the simp looked toward humans for guidance. He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a human disaster beyond its comprehension, for which it bore no responsibility…

  It moved toward him, its wide thin lips hovering over yellow fangs, bared in terror.

  Now its face was only inches from his. Falcon felt a strange mingling of kinship and discomfort…

  Falcon pointed up the elevator shaft. “Boss. Boss. Go.”

  The simp gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and raced back the way it had come.

  “That’s enough,” Sparta said. “You can cut it off.”