Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  What Blake was doing in here was the sort of thing that got people killed. He was hunting a wounded animal.

  Linda, or Ellen, or whatever secret name she called herself, was much smarter and quicker than he, and he knew it. He’d seen enough of her uncanny “luck” to guess at what she had in her brain and nerves but never talked about. Probably she could see in the dark and smell him coming, just like a wounded mountain lion.

  Nevertheless she must be stopped. She was too dangerous to allow to go free and way too dangerous to underestimate. If she said she had ensured that Howard Falcon’s mission would fail, she had reason. Yet he couldn’t simply hand her over to the commander, tell him that at last she was back—and wash his hands of the results. Too many things were happening too fast. He had to handle this on his own.

  A couple of factors were on his side. With his perverse addiction to sabotage, Blake was a more experienced sneak even than she. With any luck, she wouldn’t be expecting him, for she’d gone out of her way to warn him off, when she must have known he didn’t suspect she was within three planets of here.

  And she was sick. But whether her haunted eyes and wasted body meant she was any less formidable, he didn’t know.

  He moved slowly through the almost impassable passage until he was next to the AP service bay. He’d already searched the more accessible of the places on his list where she might hide. They’d proved a little too accessible for her to risk.

  Through a mere crevice between electrical bus bridges he got a glimpse into the AP service area, dimly illuminated by a couple of glowing green diodes. Nothing was moving in there, nothing visible. Blake listened as hard as he could, but he could hear only the whine and hum and creak of the ship above his own breath and heartbeat. Quiet as they were, they sounded like hurricane wind and surf in his ears.

  He inched himself forward, until he was hanging half into the space where he expected to find her.

  The madwoman’s ill-timed screech was his only warning. She flew out of the deep shadows into the sickly green light, talons outstretched, screaming like a harpy. She could have torn his throat out—but because of her scream he had a fractional moment in which to register her fiery eyes, her gleaming fangs, as he convulsed, twisted—

  —and seized her wrist. Her PIN spines, extended beneath her nails, sliced open his arm like razors, but he didn’t notice. His calves were still wedged fast in the narrow passage; they gave him the leverage he needed, and…

  With a single jerk of its neck a leopard seal peels the skin off its prey in a spray of blood…

  The effect on Sparta was not so grisly. Whipped upside down by Blake, she did a rag doll’s somersault and slammed butt first into the bulkhead, legs splayed. Her foul breath came out in an explosive grunt and she feebly waved her free arm, but Blake’s left fist slammed into the point of her chin. Her head snapped back and her eyes rolled up in her head.

  His own blood was floating in the little room, little black bubbles in the green light, more of them all the time. He folded his arms around her wasted, filthy body and burst into tears. Sobbing bitterly, he groped with his good hand for the dogged hatch that opened into the maintenance corridor.

  He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to turn her in. He’d wanted to get the truth out of her and, if he could think of any way to do it, help her get free.

  Too late. He was losing blood fast; he needed to get to the clinic. And she was dying in his arms.

  24

  When true dawn finally arrived, it brought a sudden change of weather. Kon-Tiki was moving through a blizzard; waxen snowflakes were falling so thickly that visibility was reduced to zero. Falcon worried about the weight that might accumulate on the balloon’s envelope. Then he noticed that any flakes settling outside the window quickly disappeared; Kon-Tiki’s continual outpouring of heat was evaporating them as swiftly as they arrived.

  If he had been ballooning on Earth, he would also have had to worry about the possibility of hitting something solid. No danger of that here. Mountains on Jupiter, in the unlikely event that there were any, would still be hundreds of kilometers below him. As for the floating islands of foam, hitting them would probably be like plowing into slightly hardened soap bubbles.

  Nevertheless he took a cautious peek with the horizontal radar. What he saw on the screen surprised him. Scattered across a huge sector of the sky ahead were dozens of large and brilliant echoes, completely isolated from one another, apparently hanging unsupported in space. Falcon remembered the phrase early aviators had used to described one of the hazards of their profession, “clouds stuffed with rocks,” a good description of what seemed to lie in the path of Kon-Tiki. The radar screen made for a disconcerting sight, although Falcon reminded himself that nothing really solid could hover in this atmosphere.

  Falcon’s conscious mind tried to pigeon-hole the apparition—some strange meteorological phenomenon, then, and still at least 200 kilometers off—but an inchoate emotion welled in his breast. “Mission Control, what am I looking at?” His own tight voice surprised him.

  “No help, Howard. All we have to go on is your radar signal.”

  At least they could see the weather, and Buranaphorn conveyed the welcome news that he would be clear of the blizzard in half an hour.

  Yet there was no warning of the violent cross wind that abruptly grabbed Kon-Tiki and swept it almost at right angles to his course. Suddenly the envelope was dragging the capsule through the air like a sea anchor, almost horizontally. Falcon needed all his skill and his rattlesnake-quick reflexes to prevent his ungainly vehicle from tangling itself in the guys, even capsizing.

  Within minutes he was racing northward at over 600 kilometers per hour.

  As suddenly as it had started, the turbulence ceased. He was still moving at high speed, but in still atmosphere, as if he’d been caught in a jet stream. The snowstorm vanished, and he saw with his own eyes what Jupiter had prepared for him.

  Kon-Tiki had entered the funnel of a gigantic whirlpool, at least a thousand kilometers across. The balloon was being swept along a curving wall of cloud. Overhead the sun was shining in a clear sky, but far beneath, this great hole in the atmosphere drilled down to unknown depths until it reached a misty floor where lightning flickered almost continuously.

  Though the vessel was being dragged downward so slowly that it was in no immediate danger, Falcon increased the flow of the heat into the envelope until Kon-Tiki hovered at a constant altitude. Not until then did he abandon the fantastic spectacle and return to considering the problem of the radar signals. They were still out there.

  The nearest echo was now only about forty kilometers away. All of the echoes, he quickly realized, were distributed along the wall of the vortex, moving with it, apparently caught in the vortex like Kon-Tiki itself. He peered through the windows with his telescopic eye and found himself looking at a curiously mottled cloud that almost filled the field of view.

  It was not easy to see, being only a little darker than the whirling wall of mist that formed its back-ground. Not until he had been staring for over a minute did he realize that he had met it before. Quickly he trained Kon-Tiki’s optics on the object, so that Mission Control could share the view.

  The first time he’d seen the thing it had been crawling across the drifting mountains of foam, and he had mistaken it for a giant, many-trunked tree. Now at last he could appreciate its real size and complexity, could even give it a name to fix its image in his mind. For it did not resemble a tree at all, but a jellyfish, such as might be met trailing its tentacles as it drifted along the warm eddies of Earth’s ocean currents. To some early naturalist those trailing tentacles had been reminiscent of the twisting snakes of a Gorgon’s head, thus the creature’s name: Medusa.

  This medusa was almost two kilometers across, with scores of tentacles hundreds of meters long; they swayed back and forth in perfect unison, taking more than a minute for each complete undulation—almost as if the creature were rowing itself through t
he sky.

  The other radar blips were other, more distant medusas. Falcon focused his sight, and the balloon’s telescope, on half a dozen of them. He could detect no obvious variations in size or shape; they all seemed to be of the same species. He wondered just why they were drifting lazily around in this thousand-kilometer orbit. Were they feeding upon the aerial “plankton” sucked in by the whirlpool—sucked in as Kon-Tiki itself had been?

  “Mission Control, I haven’t heard anything from Dr. Brenner. Did he go back to bed?”

  “Not to bed, Howard,” came Buranaphorn’s delayed reply. “Just to sleep. He’s right beside me, snoring like a baby.”

  “Wake him up.”

  “By the…” Brenner’s squawk came through the link a second later. “Howard, that creature is a hundred thousand times as large as the biggest whale! Even if it’s only a gas bag, it must weigh a million tonnes! I can’t even guess at its metabolism. It must generate megawatts of heat to maintain its buoyancy.”

  “It couldn’t be just a gas bag. It’s too good a radar reflector.”

  “You’ve got to get closer.” Brenner’s voice had an edge of contained hysteria.

  “I could do that,” Falcon replied—he could approach the medusa as closely as he wanted, by changing altitude to take advantage of differing wind velocities—but he made no move. Something in him had seized up, in a twinge of paralysis like that he’d experienced in the radio storm.

  “Falcon, you must immediately…”

  Buranaphorn firmly interrupted Brenner. “Let’s stay where we are for the present, Howard.”

  “Yes, Flight, let’s do that.” Falcon’s words conveyed relief—and a certain wry amusement at that “we.” An extra thousand kilometers or so of vertical distance made a considerable difference in Mission Control’s point of view.

  But Olaf Brenner offered no apology for his attempt to usurp the flight director’s prerogatives.

  Sparta’s eyes opened. In her sleep she had been listening to the exchange between Mission Control and the fragile balloon whirling through the clouds of Jupiter so far below. Yet there was no comprehension on her ravaged face.

  “Aiingg Zzhhhee…” Her throat was full of sand.

  “What?”

  Three men were peering down at her, two young, one older. She didn’t recognize them. Again she tried to focus in, to study them at close range, but her head was about to explode. If she could see into their eyes, read their retinal patterns, she would surely be able to recognize them… But why was her right eye dead? She could form an image only at a fixed, normal angle. She could see no better than any ordinary person.

  “I can’t see,” she said in a whisper, barely more distinctly.

  One of the young men waved his hand in front of her face. She tracked it with her eyes. He held up three fingers. “Can you see my hand? How many fingers?”

  “Three,” she whispered.

  “Keep both eyes open,” said the man, who must be a doctor. He laid the palm of his hand over her right eye. “How many fingers now?”

  “Four. But I can’t see.”

  He moved his palm to cover her left eye. “How many now?”

  “Still four.”

  “Why do you say you can’t see?” The doctor took his hand away from her face. “Are you experiencing distorted vision? Shadows? Any abnormality?”

  She turned her head aside, not bothering to reply. The fool did not understand what she was talking about, and it occurred to her that it was better not to explain things to him.

  “Ellen, we must talk to you,” said one of the others, the old one. Why did he call her that name? It wasn’t hers.

  She tested her bonds, trying not to be obvious about it, and found them strong. She had been strapped to a cushioned surface, a bed, with wide woven bands around her ankles and wrists and middle. Tubes were running into her arms, and she could vaguely sense more tubes and wires sprouting from her head. Those tubes must be doing something to her head. She couldn’t see.

  But she could still listen…

  For over an hour now, while Kon-Tiki had been drifting in the gyre of the great whirlpool, Falcon had been experimenting with the videolink’s contrast and gain, trying to record a clearer view of the nearest of the medusas. He wondered if its elusive coloration was some kind of camouflage; perhaps, like many of Earth’s animals, it was trying to lose itself against its background. That was a trick used by both hunters and hunted.

  In which category was the medusa? He didn’t really expect to answer that question in the short time left to him, yet, just before local noon, and without the slightest warning, the answer came.

  Like a squadron of antique jet fighters, five mantas came sweeping through the wall of mist that formed the funnel of the vortex, flying in a V formation directly toward the gray mass of the medusa. There was no doubt in Falcon’s mind that they were on the attack; evidently it had been quite wrong to assume that they were harmless vegetarians.

  Everything happened at such a leisurely pace that it was like watching slo-mo. The mantas undulated along at perhaps fifty klicks; it seemed ages before they reached the medusa, which continued to paddle imperturbably along at an even slower speed. Huge though they were, the mantas looked tiny beside the monster they were approaching. And when they flapped down upon its back, they looked about as big as birds landing on a whale.

  Could the medusa defend itself? Falcon didn’t see how the attacking mantas could be in danger as long as they avoided those huge, clumsy tentacles. And perhaps their host was not even aware of them. They could be insignificant parasites, tolerated as a dog tolerates fleas.

  No, it was obvious the medusa was in distress.

  With agonizing slowness, it began to tip over like a capsizing ship. Ten minutes passed; it had tilted forty-five degrees, and it was rapidly losing altitude.

  Falcon could not help but feel pity for the beleaguered monster. The sight even brought bitter memories, for in a grotesque way the fall of the medusa was almost a parody of the dying Queen’s last moments.

  “Save your sympathies,” said Brenner’s oddly flat voice over the commlink, as if the exobiologist had been reading his mind. “High intelligence can develop only among predators, not among these drifting browsers—whether they’re in the sea or in the air. Those things you call mantas are closer to us than that monstrous bag of gas.”

  Falcon heard out the scientist’s assessment and was moved to dissent. But he said nothing. After all, who could really sympathize with a creature a hundred thousand times larger than a whale? Nor did Falcon want to prod Brenner, who must be near utter exhaustion. His remarks were increasingly infected with inappropriate emotion.

  Falcon was saved from further brooding upon the state of Brenner’s soul—or his own—by the sight of the medusa, whose tactics seemed to be having an effect. The mantas had been disturbed by its slow roll and were flapping heavily away from its back, like gorging vultures interrupted during mealtime. Did they somehow prefer an upright orientation, or was something else, invisible to Falcon, spurring them into action?

  They had not moved very far at that, continuing to hover a few yards from the still-capsizing monster, when there was a sudden, blinding flash of light—

  —synchronized with a crash of static on the radio. Falcon felt the jolt as a sour spasm where his stomach used to be. He watched in close-up as one of the mantas slowly twisted end over end, plummeting straight downward, trailing a plume of black smoke behind it as it fell! The resemblance to a fighter going down in flames was quite uncanny.

  In unison the remaining mantas dived steeply away from the medusa, gaining speed by losing altitude. Within minutes they had vanished in the wall of cloud from which they had emerged.

  The medusa, no longer falling, began to roll back toward the horizontal. Soon it was sailing along once more on an even keel, as if nothing had happened.

  “Beautiful!” Brenner’s ardent voice breathed into the commlink, after the first moment o
f stunned silence. “Electric defenses, like eels and rays. And at least a million volts!” He paused, and resumed with an edge on his voice. “Talk to us, Falcon. Do you see any organs that might have produced the discharge? Anything that looks like an electrode?”

  “No,” said Falcon. He tweaked the resolution. “Something odd here, though. See this pattern? Run a replay—it wasn’t there before.”

  A broad, mottled band had appeared along the side of the medusa, forming a regular checker-board, startling in its geometric precision. Each square was itself speckled in a complex subpattern of short horizontal lines, spaced at equal distances in a geometrically perfect array of rows and columns.

  “You’re right,” said Brenner, with something very like awe in his voice. “That’s new. What do you think?”

  Buranaphorn didn’t give Falcon time to answer the question. “Meter-band radio array, wouldn’t you say, Howard?” He laughed. “Any engineer who didn’t have a biologist’s reputation to protect would know it at a glance.”

  “‘S why it returns such a massive echo,” said Falcon.

  “Why, maybe, but why now,” Brenner demanded. “Why has it just appeared?”

  “Could be an aftereffect of the discharge,” Buranaphorn said.

  “Could be,” said Falcon. He paused before he said, “Or maybe it’s listening to us.”

  “On this frequency?” Buranaphorn almost laughed. “Those would have to be meter-, even decameter-length antennas. Judging by their size.”

  Brenner broke in excitedly. “What if they’re tuned to the planet’s radio outbursts? Nature never got around to that on Earth, even though we do have animals with sonar and electric senses—but Jupiter’s almost as drenched in radio as Earth is in sunlight!”

  “Could be a good idea,” said Buranaphorn. “The thing could be tapping into the radio energy. Could be it’s even a floating power plant.”

  “All of which is very interesting,” said Brenner, his voice trembling with that authoritarian edge again, “but there’s a much more important matter to settle. I’m invoking the Prime Directive.”