Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Olaf Brenner came through the hatch in the center of the control room’s “floor,” emerging from the corridor that led down to Garuda’s living quarters. The pudgy, gray-haired exobiologist was still sleepy, bouncing off the bulk-heads in uncoordinated haste, flying almost out of control. He tried to strap himself to his console next to the flight director’s, pulling on his sweater at the same time. Im had to help him keep from drifting away.

  Brenner didn’t bother to say thanks for the save. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “Listen,” Im told him.

  Over the speakers the boomings were repeating themselves. Falcon’s second probe had swiftly dropped through the reflective layers beneath and the bright screens in Mission Control made it clear that the strange sounds were coming from a cluster of sources about 2,000 kilometers away from Kon-Tiki. A great distance, but it gave no indication of their intrinsic power—in Earth’s oceans quite feeble sounds could travel equally far.

  “What does that sound like?” Im asked.

  “What does it sound like to you?” Brenner said gruffly.

  “You’re the expert. But it could be a deliberate signal, maybe?”

  “Nonsense. There may be life down there. In fact I’ll be very disappointed if we find no microorganisms—perhaps even simple plants. But there couldn’t possibly be anything like animals as we know them—individual creatures that move about under their own volition.”

  “No?”

  “Every scrap of evidence we have from Mars and Venus and Earth’s prehistory tells us there’s no way an animal can generate enough power to function without free oxygen. There’s no free oxygen on Jupiter. So any biochemical reactions have to be low-energy.”

  “You picking up this conversation, Howard?” Im inquired.

  Falcon’s carefully neutral voice came over the speakers. “Yes, Flight. Dr. Brenner’s made this argument before.”

  “In any case”—Brenner turned his attention to the data on his flatscreen and spoke directly to Falcon through the commlink—“some of these sound-waves look to be a hundred meters long! Even an animal as big as a whale couldn’t get that out of its pipes! They must have a natural origin, Howard.”

  “Probably the physicists will come up with an explanation,” Falcon replied. His tone was cool.

  “Well, think about it,” Brenner demanded. “After all, what would a blind alien make of the sounds it heard on a beach during a storm, or beside a geyser, or a volcano, or a waterfall? The alien might easily attribute them to some huge beast.”

  An extra second or two passed before Falcon said, “That certainly is something to think about.”

  “Quite,” Brenner harrumphed.

  There, for the time being, their conversation ended.

  From Jupiter, the mysterious signals continued at intervals, recorded and analyzed by batteries of instruments in Mission Control. Brenner studied the accumulating data displayed on his flatscreen; a quick Fourier transform revealed no apparent meaning lurking in the rhythmic booming.

  Brenner yawned elaborately and looked around. “Where’s the professional busybody?” he asked Im, seeing the empty harness where Blake Redfield often perched.

  “Even professional snoops have to sleep sometime,” replied the flight director.

  Blake was in his tiny cabin, sleeping fitfully. He’d been sleeping about five hours in every twenty-four, and not all at once. He’d spaced his naps, making a point of monitoring the operations of each of Mission Control’s three daily shifts. What it had gained him was a pretty good idea who the ringers were, the controllers who controlled themselves too well under his constant needling and prodding.

  No matter which side of this multi-sided game they were on, they and he shared knowledge denied the rest of the people on Garuda, namely that Falcon had a purpose in the clouds that went well beyond the mission’s stated objectives.

  Even Falcon himself appeared not to know. Was he pretending? It was a question—one of many—that could only be answered in the event.

  In her hiding hole, Sparta stirred from dreams of revenge. Her red eyes opened and she ran a furry tongue over yellow teeth. Reality reemerged only gradually.

  She listened long enough to confirm mission elapsed time. Soon now… She knew it was time to move, if she were to reach Blake. But did she still want to? She pondered…

  Her red eyes had watched from hiding as he went about his officious business, tapping into data without permission, asking rude questions of the off-duty controllers, making a pest of himself. To her, his behavior was transparent. He knew, as she did, that something was rotten in the Kon-Tiki mission. But unlike her, he didn’t know what. He was scratching and prying at scabs, hoping to irritate the beast into striking back—thus revealing itself.

  Some ember of compassion for him still burned in her brain. He had no idea that they were simply biding their time, that he was already marked for death. Blake’s efforts were dangerous and useless.

  She owed him nothing. Still, she could warn him of the cataclysm to come. She had done her best to behead the Free Spirit. Like the Hydra, it grew other heads.

  22

  About an hour before sunrise the voices of the deep died away, and Falcon began to busy himself with preparation for the dawn of his second day. Kon-Tiki was now only five kilometers above the nearest cloud layer; the external pressure had risen to ten atmospheres, and the temperature was a tropical thirty degrees Centigrade. A fellow could be comfortable here with no more equipment than a breathing mask and the right grade of heliox mixture.

  Mission Control had been silent for several minutes, but shortly after dawn bloomed in the Jovian clouds, Im’s voice came over the link. “We’ve got some good news for you, Howard. The cloud layer below you is breaking up. You’ll have partial clearing in an hour. You’ll have to watch out for turbulence.”

  “I’m already noticing some,” Falcon answered. “How far down will I be able to see?”

  “At least twenty kilometers, down to the second thermocline. That cloud deck is solid—it’s the one that never breaks.”

  As Falcon well knew. He also knew it was out of his reach. The temperature down there must be over a hundred degrees. This must be the first time a balloonist had ever had to worry not about his ceiling but about his basement.

  Ten minutes later he could see what Mission Control had already observed from its orbiting sensors with their superior vantage points: there was a change in color near the horizon, and the cloud layer had become ragged and humpy, as if something had torn it open. Falcon cranked his nuclear furnace up a couple of notches and gave Kon-Tiki another five kilometers of altitude so that he could get a better view.

  The sky below was clearing rapidly and completely, as if something was dissolving the solid overcast. An abyss was opening before his eyes. A moment later he sailed out over the edge of a cloud canyon twenty kilometers deep and a thousand kilometers wide.

  A new world lay spread beneath him; Jupiter had stripped away one of its many veils. The second layer of clouds, unattainably far below, was much darker in color than the first—almost salmon pink, and curiously mottled with little islands of brick red. These were all oval-shaped, with their long axes pointing east-west, in the direction of the prevailing wind. There were hundreds of them, all about the same size, and they reminded Falcon of puffy little cumulus clouds in the terrestrial sky.

  He reduced buoyancy, and Kon-Tiki began to drop down the face of the dissolving cliff.

  It was then that he noticed the snow.

  White flakes were forming in the atmosphere and drifting slowly downward. Yet it was much too warm for snow, and in any event there was scarcely a trace of water at this altitude. Moreover, there was no glitter or sparkle about these flakes as they went cascading down into the depths. When, presently, a few of them landed on an instrument boom outside the main viewing port, he saw that they were a dull, opaque white, not crystalline at all, and quite large, several inches across. They l
ooked like wax.

  He realized that this was precisely what they were. A chemical reaction taking place in the atmosphere around him was condensing the hydrocarbons floating in the Jovian sky.

  About a hundred kilometers ahead there was a disturbance in the cloud layer; the little red ovals were jostling around and were beginning to form a spiral, the familiar cyclonic pattern so common in the meteorology of Earth. This vortex was emerging at astonishing speed; if that was a storm ahead, Falcon said to himself, he was in big trouble.

  And then his concern changed to wonder—and fear.

  What was developing in his line of sight was not a storm at all. Something enormous—something scores of kilometers across—was rising through the clouds.

  The reassuring thought that it, too, might be a cloud, a thunderhead boiling up from the lower levels of the atmosphere, lasted only a few seconds. No, this was solid; it shouldered its way through the pink and salmon overcast like an iceberg rising from the deep.

  An iceberg floating in hydrogen? That was impossible, of course, but perhaps it was not too remote an analogy. He focused his telescopic eye upon the enigma—and moments later adjusted Kon-Tiki’s optics to convey the same image to Mission Control—and he saw that the vast shape was a whitish, crystalline mass threaded with streaks of red and brown. It must be, he decided, the same stuff as the “snowflakes” falling around him—a mountain range of wax.

  It was not, he realized, as solid as he had thought. Around the edges it was continually crumbling and reforming…

  Mission Control had been pestering him with questions for well over a minute now.

  “I know what it is,” he said firmly, answering at last. “A mass of bubbles, some kind of foam, hydrocarbon froth. The chemists are going to have a field day… Just a minute!”

  “What’s happening?” Im’s calm but unmistakably urgent voice came in on top of the radio delay. “What do you see, Howard?”

  Falcon heard Brenner babbling excitedly in the background, but he ignored the pleas from Garuda and concentrated his attention on the telescopic image in his own eye. Belatedly he refocused the mechanical optics. He had an idea … but he had to be sure. If he made a mistake, he would be a laughingstock to everyone who was watching the feed from this mission, throughout the entire solar system.

  Then he relaxed, glanced at the clock, and cut in on the nagging voice from Mission Control. “Hello, Mission Control,” he said, very formally. “This is Howard Falcon aboard Kon-Tiki. Emphemeris time nineteen hours, twenty-one minutes, fifteen seconds. Latitude zero degrees five minutes north. Longitude one hundred five degrees, forty-two minutes, system one… If Dr. Brenner is still standing by, please tell him there is life on Jupiter. And it’s big.”

  “I’m very happy to be proved wrong,” came back Brenner’s reply, as quickly as the distance allowed. For all his earlier vehemence, Brenner seemed downright cheerful. “Guess Mother Nature always has something up her sleeve, eh? Just keep the long lens on and give us the best pictures you can.”

  If Falcon had been given to irony he would have asked himself what the hell the exobiologist expected he would be doing besides getting the best pictures he could. But Falcon’s sense of irony had never been well developed.

  He tweaked the vibrationless telescope and peered at the videoplate image. That should keep Brenner happy. Then he looked as closely as he could with his own eye. The things moving up and down those distant waxen slopes were still too far away for Falcon to make out many details, although they must have been very large indeed to be visible at all at such a distance. Almost black, shaped like arrowheads, they maneuvered by slow undulations of their entire bodies, so that they looked rather like giant manta rays swimming above some tropical reef.

  Perhaps they were sky-borne grazers, no more carnivorous than cattle browsing upon the cloud pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up riverbeds down the flanks of the floating cliffs. Occasionally one of them would dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely from sight.

  Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer below. It would be at least three hours before it was above those ephemeral hills. It was in a race with the sun. Falcon hoped that darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape over which they flapped their way.

  The commlink crackled. “Howard, I hate to leave at a time like this, but it’s time to change shifts,” said Im. “Dr. Brenner has just ordered another liter of black coffee. I think he plans to be with you awhile.”

  “Indeed I do,” Brenner said jovially.

  “Thanks for your help, Flight,” Howard said. “And hello, Flight.”

  “Hello, Howard.” The voice that came back was that of David Lum, an ethnic Chinese from Ganymede with long service in the Indo-Asian space program. “We had to pry Budhvorn out of here,” said Lum. “She would have hogged all the fun.”

  The fun was some time coming—a long three hours. During the whole period Falcon kept the external microphones on full gain, wondering if this was the source of the booming in the night. The mantas certainly seemed large enough to have produced it. Once he got an accurate measurement, he discovered they were almost 300 meters across the wings! That was three times the length of Earth’s largest whale, although Falcon knew the mantas couldn’t weigh more than a few tonnes.

  Finally, half an hour before sunset, Kon-Tiki was almost above the waxy mountains.

  “No,” said Falcon, again answering repetitive queries from Brenner, “they’re still showing no reaction to my presence. I don’t think they’re very bright. They look like harmless vegetarians. If they were to try to chase me, I doubt they could reach my altitude.”

  Still, he was a little disappointed that the mantas showed not the slightest interest in him as he sailed high above their feeding ground. Perhaps they had no way of detecting his presence. He could see little detail in their structure, and even computer-enhanced photograms through the telescope had detected no sign of anything that resembled a sense organ. The creatures were simply huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that in reality were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth. Though they looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of tissue paper.

  At close quarters he could see the myriad cellules or bubbles from which they were formed. Some of these were quite large, a meter or so in diameter, and Falcon wondered in what witches’ cauldron of hydrocarbons they had been brewed. There must be enough petrochemicals deep down in the atmosphere of Jupiter to supply all humanity’s needs for a million years.

  The short day had almost gone when he passed over the crest of the waxen hills, and the light was fading rapidly along their lower slopes. There were no mantas on this western side, and for some reason the topography was very different. The foam was sculptured into long, level terraces, like the interior of a lunar crater. Falcon could almost imagine that they were gigantic steps leading down to the hidden surface of the planet.

  And on the lowest of these steps, just clear of the swirling clouds that the mountain had displaced when it came surging skyward, was a roughly oval mass, five or six kilometers across. It was difficult to see, since it was only a little darker than the gray white foam on which it rested. Falcon’s first thought was that he was looking at a forest of pallid trees, like giant mushrooms that had never seen the sun.

  Yes, it must be a forest—he could see hundreds of thin trunks springing from the white waxy froth in which they were rooted. But the trees were packed astonishingly close together; there was scarcely any space between them. Perhaps it was not a forest after all, but a single enormous tree like one of the giant multi-trunked banyans of the East. Once he had seen a banyan tree in Java that was over 650 meters across. This monster was at least ten times that size.

  Th
e light had almost gone. The cloudscape had turned purple with refracted sunlight, and in a few seconds that too would vanish. In the last light of his second day on Jupiter, Howard Falcon saw—or thought he saw—something that cast the gravest doubts on his interpretation of the white oval. But it also thrilled him in a way he could not have consciously explained.

  Unless the dim light had totally deceived him, those hundreds of thin trunks were beating back and forth in perfect synchronism, like fronds of kelp rocking in the surge.

  And the tree was no longer in the place where he had first seen it.

  PART

  5

  A MEETING

  WITH

  MEDUSA

  23

  A gleaming white cutter sidled cautiously up to Garuda’s main airlock. The diagonal blue band and gold star on the cutter’s bow declared its authority: the Board of Space Control was the Council of Worlds’ largest agency, many-armed like Shiva, both nurturing and disciplinary, coordinating space development and sponsoring scientific missions such as Kon-Tiki, but at the same time acting as police, coast guard, and marines. The white cutter had a strangely aerodynamic appearance for a spacecraft, for the Space Board had designed its fusion-powered ships to pursue their objectives even into the depths of planetary atmospheres.

  The cutter was a long way from an atmosphere now. As it hung motionless in space, a docking tube snaked out from its lock and sealed itself to the equally motionless Garuda. A few minutes later, a Space Board commander and a big blond lieutenant with a stun-gun on his hip flew expertly onto Garuda’s bridge.

  They were met by Rajagopal, the first mate. “How can we assist you, Commander?” Somehow, from the woman’s glossy red lips, even the simple courtesy sounded arrogant.

  “We’re here to observe.” He was tall, sunblackened man with a rasping, Canadian-accented voice.