Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  For a long moment the radiolink between Mission Control and Kon-Tiki was silent. Even Buranaphorn was quiet.

  Falcon spoke first, with leaden effort. “Please state your reasons.”

  “Until I came here,” Brenner began, with cheer that rang false to his listeners, “I too would have sworn that any creature who could have made a shortwave radio antenna must be intelligent. Now I’m not so sure. This could have evolved naturally. Really, I suppose it’s no more fantastic than the human eye.”

  “Fine and good, Dr. Brenner,” Buranaphorn said. “Why are you invoking the Prime Directive?”

  “We have to play safe,” said Brenner, dropping the false cheer. “We have to assume intelligence, even if none of us here believes it.”

  We, Falcon thought, as he sought to control the roiling emotions that welled up within him…

  “Therefore I am placing this expedition under all the clauses of the Prime Directive,” Brenner said, with a terminal flourish.

  A responsibility which he had never consciously imagined had descended upon Howard Falcon. In the few hours that remained to him, he might become another inhabited planet’s first ambassador from the human race.

  Odd that it came as no surprise—but rather with an irony so delicious that he almost wished the surgeons had restored to him the power of laughter.

  Aboard Garuda, Buranaphorn gave Brenner a searching look: the gray-haired little man had sagged in three dimensions and was floating in his harness like a ball of dough. Buranaphorn said curtly, “I wish I’d let you stay asleep.”

  When it came to research, the Prime Directive could develop into a prime pain in the neck. Nobody seriously doubted that it was well intentioned. After a century of argument, humans had finally learned to profit from their mistakes on their home planet, or so it was hoped—and not only moral considerations but self-interest demanded that these stupidities should not be repeated elsewhere in the solar system. That’s one of the reasons the guy from Voxpop was here, right? To make sure they stuck to it.

  Nobody in this crew needed reminding. To treat a possibly superior intelligence as the settlers of Australia and North America had treated their aborigines, as the English had treated the Indians, as practically everybody had treated the tribes of Africa … well, that way lay disaster.

  Buranaphorn persisted. “Doctor, I’m serious. Don’t you think you ought to get some real rest?” After all, the Prime Directive’s first clause was keep your distance. Make no approach. Make no attempt to communicate. Give them plenty of time to study you—although exactly what was meant by “plenty of time” had never been spelled out. That much alone was left to the discretion of the human on the spot. “Whatever that thing is, we’re not going to get any better visuals while it’s night down there.”

  Brenner looked at him oddly. “I couldn’t possibly sleep. Do you know how long we’ve been waiting for this moment?”

  “As you say, Doctor.” One of those, thought Buranaphorn—and up until an hour ago he’d had me fooled. Brenner had seemed so sane, so level headed. He was the guy who kept saying they might find some germs down there … but nothing more.

  This mission seemed to have attracted a lot of types who’d invested their life hopes (to coin a phrase) in the clouds of Jupiter—certified engineers, but closet religionists just the same. The type that had called themselves Creation “scientists” back in the 20th century. For his part, Meechai Buranaphorn was an ex-rocket jock and an aeronautical engineer who wore his Buddhism lightly. Not that he went out of his way to squash bugs—and he never ate meat unless, you know, it had been raised to be eaten. But some of these guys … you’d think they were expecting instant reincarnation or something. Buranaphorn forced his thoughts back to the status of the mission.

  At least the two Space Board heavies had cleared out of the place; the way they’d been behaving, you’d think they were trying to start trouble. But maybe they’d had a reason to be here after all. Who would have thought…? He keyed the bridge. “What’s the word on the stowaway?”

  Rajagopal came back at him. “There is no word,” she said.

  “Come on, give me something, Raj.” The first mate had that infuriating haughtiness that, in Buranaphorn’s opinion, came naturally to Indian women. Especially those in positions of authority.

  But Rajagopal relented. “She and Redfield are locked in the clinic with our Space Board visitors.”

  “How’s the captain taking it?”

  Chowdhury himself came on the comm. “Please do your job, Mr. Buranaphorn, and let us do ours. Don’t distract yourself with inessentials. Your mission is the reason we are all here.”

  Thanks for the reminder, jerk, Buranaphorn thought. But he kept the thought to himself.

  Inside the ship’s tiny clinic, Sparta was unconscious again.

  “I didn’t hit her that hard,” Blake said, for what must have been the hundredth time.

  This time the blond doctor—he was from an old Singapore family, Dutch by ancestry—didn’t bother to reply. He’d already explained at length that the woman’s intercranial blood vessels had been rendered dangerously permeable by her use of the drug Striaphan, found in huge quantity on her person—use which had evidently been massive and prolonged. Even a moderate blow to the head was enough to have caused rapid subdural hematoma.

  Blood on the brain was not all that uncommon aboard spacecraft; flying around weightless, people tended to collide with things head first. The clinic’s nanosurgical kit could have handled the routine noninvasively, perhaps within a couple of hours, had the patient been in good health, as most space workers were. Unfortunately, this woman was severely malnourished and her lungs were teeming with pneumonia—not overwhelming medical problems, but ones rarely encountered in space and, in combination with the concussion and blood clot, definitely life-threatening.

  Things would be a lot easier, thought the doctor, if he could get rid of the kibitzers. The clinic, a wedge of a room off the recreation area, was small enough already without having to share it with this distraught character Redfield and this gray hulk of a Space Board officer—and where the hell had he come from, flashing his badge and pulling Council of Worlds rank?

  “Stay here, Doctor Ullrich,” said the officer. “Mr. Redfield and I will be back shortly.”

  “There is nothing more I can do for the patient until…”

  “Stay here.”

  “But I haven’t eaten in…” The hatch closed on the young doctor’s pained objection.

  Outside, in the corridor, the commander turned to his lieutenant. “Anything, Vik?”

  “Nothing.” The big blond lieutenant had his stun-gun out of its holster.

  The commander peered at Blake. “She’s been on board at least since Ganymede. You’re sure it’s not a bomb?”

  “Not on Kon-Tiki. It would have showed up as extra mass.”

  “She hid her own mass easily enough.”

  “On Garuda she had a couple of orders of magnitude more mass to slop around in. Kon-Tiki was weighed repeatedly before they launched it. Right down to the gram. I watched.”

  “Yeah, I get the impression you made yourself a perfect pest,” the commander grunted. “A pulse bomb, then—something tiny, not explosive, bad enough to fry the circuitry—what they did to her on Mars.”

  “She’s been an outlaw for almost two years, outside anybody’s system. How would she get access to anything that sophisticated and expensive?”

  “I could ask how she stowed away…”

  “However she did it, it didn’t take that kind of money.”

  “Yeah.” The commander sighed. “Structural damage?”

  “Kon-Tiki has worked without a hitch, all the major systems—heatshields, drogue chutes, balloon, fusion pack, ramjets, life support, instrumentation, communication… They crawled all over that thing before they let it separate.”

  “Then it’s software.”

  “Every diagnostic has run perfectly.”

 
“Still … software.”

  Blake nodded, reluctantly. “I think you’re right. But we aren’t going to find out what she did unless she tells us.”

  “Look, Redfield, I’m not trying to get rid of you. But the doctor in there says he’s hungry. How about rounding up some slop from the mess?”

  Blake started to object—why can’t Vik do it? he wanted to ask. But the answer was obvious: the lieutenant had the firepower, and they might need it. Blake headed for the mess.

  The commander went back into the clinic.

  “Food’s on the way,” he said to Ullrich. “Say again what you know about this stuff she was on.”

  “Computer says a guanine nucleotide binding protein…”

  “So a cop can understand it.”

  Ullrich flushed. “A neuropeptide—a brain chemical—associated with the visual cortex. Limited use in the treatment of some forms of reading disorder. The typical dosage is about a millionth what this woman has been taking.”

  “What would that do to her?”

  “In rats it apparently produces hallucinations. Auditory and visual. And bizarre behaviors.”

  “Like schizophrenia?”

  “We don’t diagnose rats as schizophrenic.”

  “One for you, Doctor,” said the commander. “Keep talking.”

  “The woman’s left visual cortex is fragile. Redfield’s blow to her jaw thrust the brain against the back of the skull. Preexisting cell-membrane permeability may account for her complaint that she can’t see … although obviously she sees well enough in the ordinary sense of the word.”

  At that moment Sparta’s eyes opened. Ullrich glanced at her. He felt less compassion for this patient than he should have. “In any event, her life’s out of danger. Her pneumonia is under control.”

  “Can you talk, Linda?” the commander asked. His rough voice conveyed a curious mix of concern and command.

  The doctor objected, almost by reflex. “That is not…”

  “Can talk,” she whispered. She looked away from the commander’s face and frowned at the doctor. “Dangerous.”

  “Never mind him, he’s clean,” said the commander, ignoring Ullrich’s puzzled, offended look. “Do you want to say what you did to Kon-Tiki?”

  “No.” Her eyes locked with the commander’s. “You understand.”

  “You think that Howard Falcon took your place as envoy?”

  “As it was intended by the prophetae.”

  “You want to deny him that? Out of jealousy?”

  “Jealousy?” She tried to smile, with ghastly effect. “Don’t want Free Spirit to make first contact. You neither.” Her gaze drifted to the shadowed metal ceiling. “Been busy, sir. Two years now.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know who you are. Really are.”

  “Howard Falcon is an innocent man,” said the commander.

  “‘Man’ not the word,” she said.

  “As human as you.”

  “I am not a human being,” she said, with force that cost her.

  “You are nothing but,” said the commander. He turned to the doctor. “Show her the scans.”

  Beyond protest, Ullrich did as he was told and brought the woman’s brain scans up on the flat-screen. “The area of the hematoma,” he said, pointing, “almost entirely relieved by targeted nano-organisms…”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the commander said, silencing him. “You could see closer or farther than an ordinary human, Linda—not because of anything they did to the eye-ball, but because of what they did to the visual cortex.”

  “Getting to like that,” she said. “Gone now. Fried my brain.”

  “This other knot of matter is still intact,” said the commander, pointing to a dense shadow in the forebrain. “And this. And this.”

  “Can still compute trajectory,” she said.

  “What did you do to Kon-Tiki’s computer?” he repeated.

  “Can still listen.” She closed her eyes. For a single second—it seemed to last forever—she was perfectly still. When she opened them again she said, “Maybe persuade me—if we had longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t waste time on me. Mission Control.”

  He understood. “So it’s already happening.”

  25

  It had been growing darker, but Falcon had scarcely noticed as he strained his eyes toward the living cloud. The wind that was steadily sweeping Kon-Tiki around the funnel of the great whirlpool had now brought him within twenty kilometers of the creature.

  “If you get much closer, Howard, I want you to take evasive action,” Buranaphorn said. “That thing’s electric weapons are probably short-range, but we don’t want you putting it to a test.”

  “Future explorers,” Falcon said hoarsely.

  “Say again please?”

  “Leave that to future explorers,” Falcon repeated. One part of his brain watched the unfolding events with brilliant clarity, but another seemed to have trouble forming words. “Wish them luck.”

  “That’s a roger,” came the voice of Mission Control.

  It was quite dark in the capsule—strange, because sunset was still hours away. Automatically he glanced at the scanning radar as he had done every few minutes. That and his own senses confirmed that there was no other object within a hundred kilometers of him, aside from the medusa he was studying.

  Suddenly, with startling power, he heard the sound that had come booming out of the Jovian night—the throbbing beat that grew more and more rapid, then stopped in mid-crescendo. The whole capsule vibrated like a pea on a kettledrum.

  Falcon realized two things simultaneously during the sudden, aching silence: this time the sound was not coming from thousands of kilometers away over a radio circuit. It was in the very atmosphere around him.

  The second thought was more disturbing. He had quite forgotten—inexcusable, but there had been other things on his mind—that most of the sky above him was completely blanked out by Kon-Tiki’s gas bag. Lightly silvered to conserve heat, the great balloon also made an effective shield against both radar and vision.

  Not that this hadn’t been considered at length and finally tolerated, as a minor design trade-off of little importance. But suddenly it seemed very important.

  Falcon saw a fence of gigantic tentacles descending all around his capsule.

  “Remember the Prime Directive! The Prime Directive!”

  Brenner’s scream filled his head with an extraordinary bright confusion—as if words alone had the power to bend his attention, subvert his very will. For a moment Falcon thought the words had welled up from his subconscious mind, so vividly did they seem to tangle with his own thoughts.

  But no, it was Brenner’s voice all right, again yelling over the commlink: “Don’t alarm it!”

  Don’t alarm it? Before Falcon could think of an appropriate answer, that overwhelming drumbeat started again and drowned all other sounds.

  The sign of a really skilled test pilot is how he reacts not to foreseeable emergencies but to ones that nobody could have anticipated—a reaction that is not conscious, not conditionable, but a capacity for decision built in at the cellular level. Before Falcon could even form a notion of what he was about to do, he had done it. He’d pulled the ripcord.

  Ripcord—an archaic phrase from the earliest days of ballooning, when there was a cord rigged to literally rip open the bag. Kon-Tiki’s ripcord wasn’t a cord but a switch, which operated a set of louvers around the upper curve of the envelope. At once the hot gas rushed out. Kon-Tiki, deprived of her lift, began to fall swiftly in a gravity field two and a half times as strong as Earth’s.

  Falcon had a momentary glimpse of great tentacles whipping upward and away. He had just time to note that they were studded with large bladders or sacs, presumably to give them buoyancy, and that they ended in multitudes of thin feelers like the roots of a plant.

  He half expected a bolt of lightning. Nothing happened.

  Brenner w
as still yelling at him. “What have you done, Falcon? You may have frightened it badly!”

  “Busy here,” Falcon said, squelching the transmission. His precipitous rate of descent was slackening as the atmosphere thickened and the balloon’s deflated envelope acted as a parachute. When Kon-Tiki had dropped about three kilometers, he thought it must surely be safe to close the louvers again. By the time he had restored buoyancy and was in equilibrium once more, he had lost another two kilometers of altitude and was getting dangerously near the red line.

  He peered anxiously through the overhead windows. He did not expect to see anything but the obscuring bulk of the balloon, but he had side-slipped during his descent, and part of the medusa was barely visible a couple of kilometers above—much closer than he’d expected, and still coming down, faster than he would have believed possible.

  Buranaphorn was on the link from Mission Control, calling anxiously: “Howard, we show your rate of descent…”

  “I’m all right,” Falcon broke in, “but it’s still coming after me. I can’t go any deeper.” Which was not quite true; he could go a lot deeper, at least a couple of hundred kilometers, but it would be a one-way trip, and he would miss most of the journey.

  To his great relief he saw that the medusa was leveling out, a bit more than a kilometer above him. Perhaps it had decided to approach the intruder with caution, or perhaps it too had found this deeper layer uncomfortably hot. For the temperature was over fifty degrees Centigrade, and Falcon wondered how much longer Kon-Tiki’s life-support system could handle matters.

  Brenner was back on the circuit, still worried. “Try not to frighten it! It’s only being inquisitive!”

  Falcon felt a stiffness about his neck and jaws as if his gorge were rising. Brenner’s voice did not lack conviction, exactly—what it lacked was the sound of integrity. Falcon recalled a videocast discussion he’d caught between a lawyer and an astronaut in which, after the full implications of the Prime had been spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed, “You mean if there was no alternative I’d have to sit still and let myself be eaten?” and the lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered, “That’s an excellent summation.” As Falcon recalled, his masters—his physicians, that is—had been quite upset to find him watching that show; they thought they’d censored it. It had seemed funny at the time.