Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Scores of probes had survived this flaming ordeal, but they’d been tough, solidly packed masses of instrumentation, able to withstand several hundred gravities of drag. Kon-Tiki would hit peaks of thirty Gs, and would average more than ten, before she came to rest in the upper reaches of the Jovian atmosphere.

  Very carefully and thoroughly Falcon began to attach the elaborate system of restraints that would anchor him to the walls of the cabin. No simple webbed harness here—when he’d finished making the last connections among the struts and tubes and electrical conduits and strain sensors and shock absorbers, he was virtually a part of the ship’s structure.

  The clock on the console was counting backward. One hundred seconds to entry. For better or worse, Falcon was committed. In a minute and a half he would hit palpable atmosphere and would be caught irrevocably in the grip of the giant.

  The countdown proceeded: minus three, minus two, minus one, on down to zero.

  Nothing happened. At first.

  The clock began counting up—plus one, plus two, plus three—and then, from beyond the walls of the capsule, there came a ghostly sighing that rose steadily to a high-pitched, screaming roar. The countdown had been three seconds late, not at all bad, considering the unknowns.

  The noise was quite different from that of a plunging shuttle on Earth or Mars, or even Venus. In this thin atmosphere of hydrogen and helium, all sounds were transformed a couple of octaves upward. On Jupiter, even thunder would have falsetto overtones.

  Squeaky thunder. Falcon would have grinned if he could.

  With the rising scream came mounting weight. Within seconds he was completely immobilized. His field of vision contracted until it embraced only the clock and the accelerometer. Fifteen Gs and four hundred and eighty seconds to go. He never lost consciousness; but then, he had not expected to.

  Kon-Tiki’s flaming trail through the atmosphere was surely spectacular, viewed by the photogram cameras feeding Mission Control, or by any other watcher—many thousands of kilometers long by now. Five hundred seconds after entry, the drag began to taper off: ten Gs, five Gs, two… Then the sensation of weight vanished almost completely. Falcon was falling free, all his enormous orbital velocity dissipated.

  There was a sudden jolt as the incandescent remnants of the capsule’s heat shield jettisoned. The aerodynamic cowlings blew away in that same instant. Jupiter could have them now; they had done their work. Falcon released some of his physical restraints, giving himself a bit more freedom to move within the capsule—without diminishing his intimacy with the machinery—and waited for the automatic sequencer to start the next and most critical series of events.

  He could not see the first drogue parachute pop out, but he could feel the slight jerk. The rate of fall diminished immediately. Soon Kon-Tiki had lost all its horizontal speed and was going straight down at almost fifteen hundred kilometers an hour.

  Everything depended on what happened in the next sixty seconds.

  And there went the second drogue. He looked up through the overhead window and saw, to his immense relief, that clouds upon clouds of glittering foil were billowing out behind the falling ship. Like a great flower unfurling, thousands of cubic meters of the balloon’s fabric spread out across the sky, a vast parachute scooping up the thin gas until finally it was fully inflated.

  Kon-Tiki’s rate of fall dropped to a few kilometers an hour and remained constant. Now there was plenty of time. At this rate it would take Falcon days to fall all the way down to the surface of Jupiter.

  But he would get there eventually, if he did nothing about it. Until he did, the balloon overhead acted merely as an efficient parachute, providing no lift—nor could it do so while the density of the gas inside and out was the same.

  Then, with its characteristic and rather disconcerting crack, the little fusion reactor started up, pouring torrents of heat into the envelope overhead. Within five minutes the rate of fall had become zero; within six, the ship had started to rise. According to the altimeter, it leveled out a little over four hundred kilometers above the surface—or whatever passed for a surface on Jupiter.

  Only one kind of balloon will work in an atmosphere of hydrogen, the lightest of all gases, and that is a hot-hydrogen balloon. As long as the fuser kept ticking over, Falcon could remain aloft, drifting across a world that could hold a hundred Pacifics. After traveling in stages some five million kilometers from Earth, the last of the watery planets, Kon-Tiki had begun to justify her name. She was an aerial raft, adrift upon the fluid currents of the Jovian atmosphere.

  Falling toward Jupiter, Falcon had emerged from his painful dreams into triumphant sunlight. In her stinking hiding hole aboard Garuda, in the shadow of Amalthea, Sparta still lived inside hers…

  “Dilys” has no means of reading a datasliver without an interface. Five minutes after discovering the crypt she is back upstairs in Kingman’s kitchen, at the household computer. The terminal has been placed too near the gas range, its flatscreen hazy and its keypad slick with grease. Nevertheless, she enters the terminal with her fingerprobes and feels the tingling flow of electrons. She inserts the stolen chip. Its contents spill directly into her forebrain.

  She rolls the spiky ball of information in multidimensional mental space, seeking a key to entry. The mass of data is gibberish, although not without formal regularities. But the key is nothing so simple as a large prime; its complex geometric quality eludes her for long seconds. Then an image comes unbidden into her mind. It is familiar indeed, the swirling vortex of clouds into which her dreams have so often led her—

  —but seen from higher up, so that the peculiarly curdled patterns of Jupiter’s clouds are as plain and sharply defined as a slowly stirred paint can, drops of orange and yellow paint spiraling into the white.

  Vistas of information split open before her.

  She is falling into and through those bottomless clouds—no, she is soaring through them like a winged creature. Intense waves of radio emission seep through her, fill her with thrilling warmth, a sensation so familiar it causes her sweet pain—for the memory that she once could experience such sensations in her own body.

  She is dazzled, disoriented, made a little drunk. She struggles to retain an objective outlook, to make sense of what she is seeing.

  This is data from a Jupiter probe. A tag on the file, accessed by her objective mind, gives its designation and date. She is experiencing what the probe “experienced” through all its sensors, its lenses and antennas and radiation detectors.

  The file terminates. With a jump, like a cut in a viddie, she is inside another experience.

  An operating theater. A swirl of lights overhead. A tingle of dulled pain throughout her body, radiating from her belly to the tips of her toes and fingers. Is this herself on the table? Is she reliving her agony on Mars through some monitor’s data record? No, this is another place, another … patient. The physicians take their time.

  They are invisible behind their masks, but she can smell them. Not much left of the flesh and blood human under the lights, and what there is is supported by an intricate fretwork of plastic and metal … instruments where organs should be. Temporary support systems? Permanent prostheses?

  Jump. New file.

  Falcon. She is Falcon. She/he is testing her/his restored limbs, her/his restored sense organs. Grisly business … the most primitive sort of physical therapy. Her/his progress monitored by internal implants…

  Again she struggles to separate her consciousness from the experience in which she is immersed. These are Falcon’s feelings, but Falcon himself does not seem to know that he has been tapped, is being recorded. They’ve put a bug in him, inside his head.

  Fascinated, she immerses herself in his therapy, the painful stretching and flexing of his patched limbs and organs—his restored and enhanced powers. Of his eyes—capable of microscopic and telescopic vision, of sensitivity to ultraviolet and infrared. Of his sense of smell—capable of bringing instant chemical analys
is to consciousness. Of his sensitivity to radio and particle radiation. Of his ability to listen…

  He was her. But better. New and improved. Better sensors. Better processors. She felt a surge of anger, of stark jealousy.

  Jump. New file.

  Flight simulation, down into the swirling clouds of the gas giant, a planet which could only be Jupiter. Visuals and other data, lifted from probes. Supersonic winds. Hydrocarbon slurry. Temperature shifts, pressure shifts—all seen from inside Falcon’s head. And she is there, swimming in it with him.

  A hot beam of radio—

  —and then a sound, a song, a booming choir, coming right into his/her breast, bursting from it with a swelling joy and a shocking, necessary urge. For the Song is the Knowledge, and the Knowledge is that, in the end, All Will Be Well… Despite and because of the sacrifice. The necessary and joyfully-to-be-contemplated Sacrifice. A voice as of that of the God of Heaven sounds all around: “Remember the Prime.”

  She gives herself up to the luxury and ecstasy of the simulation. Falcon loves it. Falcon seeks it as she does, the giving, the final surrender… “Remember the Prime.”

  Then she understands. Her rage and jealousy soar as she identifies with Falcon, the one who has taken her place, the one who is made better than she.

  She breaks the link and pulls the chip from the terminal, pulls her spines from its ports, cuts all contact. She is consumed with a rage that could kill her.

  20

  Though a whole new world was lying around Falcon, it was more than an hour before he could examine the view. First he had to check all the capsule’s systems and test its response to the controls. He had to learn how much extra heat was necessary to produce a desired rate of ascent, and how much gas he must vent in order to descend. Above all, there was the question of stability. He must adjust the length of the cables attaching his capsule to the huge, pear-shaped balloon, to damp out vibrations and get the smoothest possible ride.

  Thus far he was lucky. At this level the wind was steady, and the Doppler reading on the invisible surface gave him a “ground” speed of 348 kilometers per hour. For Jupiter, that was modest; winds of up to 2,000 klicks had been observed. But mere speed was of course unimportant; the danger was turbulence. If he ran into that, only skill and experience and swift reaction could save him. And these were not matters that could yet be programmed into Kon-Tiki’s computer.

  Not until he was satisfied that he had got the feel of his strange craft did Falcon pay any attention to Mission Control’s pleadings to hurry the checklist. Then he deployed the booms carrying the instrumentation and the atmosphere samplers. The capsule now resembled a rather untidy Christmas tree, but it still rode smoothly down the Jovian winds while it radioed torrents of information to the recorders on the ship so far above. And now, at last, he could look around.

  His first impression was unexpected and even a little disappointing, based as it was on naive personal memories of Earth. As far as the scale of things was concerned, he might have been ballooning over an ordinary cloudscape in India. The horizon seemed at a normal distance; there was no feeling at all that he was on a world eleven times the diameter of his own. He smiled and made the mental shift—for a mere glance at the infrared radar, which sounded the layers of atmosphere beneath him, confirmed how badly human eyes could be deceived.

  Now his memories were of a different sort. He saw Jupiter as it had been seen by hundreds of unmanned probes that had preceded him this far. That layer of clouds apparently about five kilometers away was really sixty kilometers below. And the horizon, whose distance he might have guessed at about two hundred, was actually almost 3,000 kilometers from the ship.

  The crystalline clarity of the hydrohelium atmosphere and the enormous curvature of the planet would have fooled the untrained observer completely, who would have found it more challenging to judge distances here than on the moon. To the earthbound mind, everything seen must be multiplied by at least ten. It was a simple business for which he was well prepared. Nevertheless, he realized there was a level of his consciousness that was profoundly disturbed—which, rather than acknowledge that Jupiter was huge, felt that he had shrunk to a tenth his normal size.

  No matter. This world was his destiny. He knew in his heart that he would grow used to its inhuman scale.

  Yet as he stared toward that unbelievably distant horizon, he felt as if a wind colder than the atmosphere around him was blowing through his soul. All his arguments for a manned exploration of Jupiter had been disingenuous, and he realized now that his inner conviction was indeed the truth. This would never be a place for humans. He would be the first and last man to descend through the clouds of Jupiter.

  The sky above was almost black, except for a few wisps of ammonia cirrus perhaps twenty kilometers overhead. It was cold up there on the fringes of space, but both temperature and pressure increased rapidly with depth. At the level where Kon-Tiki was drifting now it was fifty below zero Centrigrade, and the pressure was five Earth atmospheres. A hundred kilometers farther down it would be as warm as equatorial Earth, and the pressure about the same as at the bottom of one of the shallower seas. Ideal conditions for life.

  A quarter of the brief Jovian day had already gone. The sun was up halfway in the sky, but the light on the unbroken cloudscape below had a curious mellow quality. That extra six hundred million kilometers had robbed the sun of all its power. Though the sky was clear, it had the feel of an overcast day. When night fell, the onset of darkness would be swift indeed; though it was still morning, there was a sense of autumnal twilight in the air.

  Autumn was something that never came to Jupiter. There were no seasons here.

  Kon-Tiki had come down in the center of the equatorial zone—the least colorful part of the planet. The sea of clouds that stretched out to the horizon was tinted a pale salmon; there were none of the yellows and pinks and even reds that banded Jupiter at high altitudes. The Great Red Spot itself—most spectacular of all of the planet’s features—lay thousands of kilometers to the south. It had been a temptation to descend there, where the probes had hinted at such spectacular vistas, but the mission planners had judged that the south tropical disturbance had been “unusually active” these past months, with currents reaching over a thousand million kilometers an hour. It would have been asking for trouble to head into that maelstrom of unknown forces. The Great Red Spot and its mysteries would have to wait for future expeditions.

  The sun, moving across the sky twice as swiftly as it did on Earth, was now nearing the zenith; it had become eclipsed by the great silver canopy of the balloon. Kon-Tiki was still drifting swiftly and smoothly westward at a steady 348 klicks, but only the radar (and Falcon’s private, instantaneous calculation) gave any indication of this.

  Was it always this calm here? Falcon wondered. The scientists who had analyzed the data from the probes spoke persuasively of the Jovian doldrums; they had predicted that the equator would be the quietest place, and it seemed they’d known what they were talking about after all. At the time, Falcon had been profoundly skeptical of such forecasts. He’d agreed with one unusually modest researcher who had told him bluntly, “There are no experts on Jupiter.”

  Well, there would be at least one by the end of the day. If he survived until then.

  Aboard Garuda, flight director Buranaphorn released his harness catch and floated smoothly away from his console. Moments later his relief, Budhvorn Im, slipped gracefully into the harness. She was a petite Cambodian woman wearing the uniform of the Indo-Asian Space Service, with a colonel’s firebirds on her shoulders.

  “So far it’s less exciting than a simulation,” said Buranaphorn.

  “That is very nice,” said Im. “Let us hope it stays that way.” She checked in her colleagues one by one as, throughout the circular room, the first-shift controllers handed off to the second shift.

  Garuda’s internal commlink crackled with Captain Chowdhury’s tired voice. “Bridge to Kon-Tiki Mission Control.�
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  “Go ahead, Captain,” Im replied.

  “I’ve got a permission-to-come-aboard request from a Space Board cutter now leaving Ganymede Base. Two people to board. Their ETA is at our MET nineteen hours, twenty-three minutes.”

  “What is the reason for this visit?” Im asked, puzzled.

  “No reason given.” He paused, and she heard the crackle of a commlink in the background. “Cutter repeats this is a request.”

  “No reflection on either crew, but I would prefer not to risk misalignment during docking procedures.”

  “Shall I say you ask me to refuse permission, then?”

  “I suppose if they really want to come they will make it an order,” said Im. When Chowdhury didn’t reply, she said, “No point in antagonizing them.” Or putting Chowdhury on the line. “Please stress to the cutter’s captain the delicate nature of our mission. Also please keep me informed.”

  “As you wish.” Chowdhury keyed off.

  Im had no idea why a cutter would choose to descend upon Kon-Tiki Mission Control in the middle of the mission, but they certainly had the right to do so. And she had no real fear of a mishap. Only a docking accident—highly unlikely—would interrupt communications with the Kon-Tiki capsule.

  It was only when she glanced at the controllers—their consoles arrayed in a neat circle before her—that Im noticed one or two faces wearing apprehensive expressions—worried looks that couldn’t be explained by the nominal status of the mission.

  Sparta’s consciousness of the dark world around her returned in a red haze of pain. She listened, long enough to determine the status of the mission. She heard Im and Chowdhury discuss the approach of a Space Board cutter. That did not concern her. It was none of her affair. Soon it would all be over.