by Paul Preuss
“Where are they?” Forster demanded. “I was so looking forward to seeing them again this evening.”
The commander walked to the tall windows that overlooked the dark lawn. He watched the shadowy group on the lawn. “Give them a little time. They’ll make it yet.”
THE MEDUSA
ENCOUNTER
AN AFTERWORD BY
ARTHUR C. CLARKE
One of the advantages of living on the Equator (well, only 800 kilometers from it) is that the Moon and planets pass vertically overhead, allowing one to see them with a clarity never possible in higher latitudes. This has prompted me to acquire a succession of ever-larger telescopes during the past forty years, beginning with the classic 3 1/2-inch Questar, then an 8-inch, and finally a 14-inch, Celestron. (Sorry about the obsolete units, but we seem stuck with them for small telescopes-even though centimeters make them sound much more impressive.)
The Moon, with its incomparable and ever-changing scenery, is my favorite subject, and I never tire of showing it to unsuspecting visitors. As the 14-inch is fitted with a binocular eyepiece, they feel they are looking through the window of a spaceship, and not peering through the restricted field of a single lens. The difference has to be experienced to be appreciated, and invariably invokes a gasp of amazement.
After the Moon, Saturn and Jupiter compete for second place as celestial attractions. Thanks to its glorious rings, Saturn is breathtaking and unique—but there’s little else to be seen, as the planet itself is virtually featureless.
The considerably larger disc of Jupiter is much more interesting; it usually displays prominent cloud belts lying parallel to the equator, and so many fugitive details that one could spend a lifetime trying to elucidate them. Indeed, men have done just this: for more than a century, Jupiter has been a happy hunting ground for armies of devoted amateur astronomers.*
Yet no view through the telescope can do justice to a planet with more than a hundred times the surface area of our world. To imagine a somewhat farfetched “thought experiment,” if one skinned the Earth and pinned its pelt like a trophy on the side of Jupiter, it would look about as large as India on a terrestrial globe. That subcontinent is no small piece of real estate; yet Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India…
Unfortunately for would-be colonists, even if they were prepared to tolerate the local two-and-a-half gravities, Jupiter has no solid surface—or even a liquid one. It’s all weather, at least for the first few thousand kilometers down toward the distant central core. (For details of which, see 2061: Odyssey Three…)
Earth-based observers had long suspected this, as they made careful drawings of the ever-changing Jovian cloudscape. There was only one semi-permanent feature on the face of the planet, the famous Great Red Spot, and even this sometimes vanished completely. Jupiter was a world without geography—a planet for meteorologists, but not for cartographers.
As I have recounted in Astounding Days: A Science-fictional Autobiography, my own fascination with Jupiter began with the very first science-fiction magazine I ever saw—the November 1928 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, which had been launched two years earlier. It featured a superb cover by Frank R. Paul, which one could plausibly cite as proof of the existence of precognition.
Half a dozen earthmen are stepping forth onto one of the Jovian satellites emerging from a silo-shaped spaceship that looks uncomfortably small for such a long voyage. The orange-tinted globe of the giant planet dominates the sky, with two of its inner moons in transit. I am afraid that Paul has cheated shamelessly, because Jupiter is fully illuminated—though the sun is almost behind it!
I’m not in a position to criticize, as it’s taken me more than fifty years to spot this—probably deliberate—error. If my memory is correct, the cover illustrates a story by Gawain Edwards, real name G. Edward Pendray. Ed Pendray was one of the pioneers of American rocketry and published The Coming Age of Rocket Power in 1947. Perhaps Pendray’s most valuable work was in helping Mrs. Goddard edit the massive three volumes of her husband’s notebooks: he lived to see the Voyager closeups of the Jovian system, and I wonder if he recalled Paul’s illustration.
What is so astonishing—I’m sorry, amazing—about this 1928 painting is that it shows, with great accuracy, details which at the time were unknown to earth-based observers. Not until 1979, when the Voyager spaceprobes flew past Jupiter and its moons, was it possible to observe the intricate loops and curlicues created by the Jovian tradewinds. Yet half a century earlier, Paul had depicted them with uncanny precision.
Many years later, I was privileged to work with the doyen of space artists, Chesley Bonestell, on the book Beyond Jupiter (Little Brown, 1972). This was a preview of the proposed Grand Tour of the outer solar system, which it was hoped might take advantage of a once-in-179-year configuration of all the planets between Jupiter and Pluto. As it turned out, the considerably more modest Voyager missions achieved virtually all the Grand Tour’s objectives, at least out to Neptune. Looking at Chesley’s illustrations with 20:20 clarity of hindsight, I am surprised to see that Frank Paul, though technically the poorer artist, did a far better job of visualizing Jupiter as it really is.
Since Jupiter is so far from the sun—five times the distance of the Earth—the temperature might be expected to be a hundred or so degrees below the worst that the Antarctic winter can provide. That is true of the upper cloud layers, but for a long time astronomers have known that the planet radiates several times as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Though it is not big enough to sustain thermonuclear fusion (Jupiter has been called “a star that failed”), it undoubtedly possesses some internal sources of heat. As a consequence, at some depth beneath the clouds, the temperature is that of a comfortable day on Earth. The pressure is another matter; but as the depths of our own oceans have proved, life can flourish even at tons to the square centimeter.
In the book and TV series Cosmos, the late Carl Sagan speculated about possible life forms that might exist in the purely gaseous (mostly hydrogen and methane) environment of the Jovian atmosphere. My “Medusae” owe a good deal to Carl, but I have no qualms about stealing from him, as I introduced him to my former agent, Scott Meredith, a quarter of a century ago, with results profitable to both…
For more about the Jovian aerial fauna (or flora), I refer you to 2010: Odyssey Two and 2061: Odyssey Three. Whether life exists on the greatest of the planets might already have been decided by the Galileo spaceprobe—NASA’s most ambitious project—if the Challenger disaster had not postponed it for almost a decade. Meanwhile, take a good look at some of the Voyager images. See those curious white ovals, enclosed by thin membranes? Don’t they remind you of amoebae under the microscope? The fact that they are some tens of thousands of kilometers long is no problem: after all, size is relative.
Now a final bibliographic note. “A Meeting with Medusa”—the story that inspired this volume of Venus Prime—is one of the very few I ever wrote for a specific objective. (Usually I write because I can’t help it, but I am slowly getting this annoying habit under control.) “Medusa” was produced because I needed wordage to round out my final collection of short stories (The Wind from the Sun, 1972). I am pleased to record that it won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best novella of the year—as well as a special bonus from Playboy in the same category.
I happened to mention my association with this estimable magazine, which has printed so many of my more serious technical writings, when I registered a mild complaint in New Delhi years ago. In his witty response after I had delivered the Nehru Memorial Address on 13 November 1986, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi concluded with these words: “Finally, let me assure Dr. Clarke that if Playboy is banned in this country, it is not because of anything he may have written in it.”
Certainly there’s nothing in the original “A Meeting with Medusa” to bring a blush to the most modest cheek.
I’m waiting to see what Paul Preuss can do to r
ectify this situation.
Arthur C. Clarke
Colombo, 7 November, 1988
* I feel a particular sympathy for one of them, the British engineer P.B. Molesworth (1867-1908). Some years ago, I visited the relics of his observatory at Trincomalee, on the east coast of Sri Lanka. Despite his early death, Molesworth’s spare-time astronomical work was so outstanding that his name has now been given to a splendid crater on Mars, 175 kilometers across.
INFOPAK
TECHNICAL
BLUEPRINTS
The following are the computer-generated diagrams representing some of the structures and engineering found in Venus Prime:
Pages 2-6
Kon-Tiki Manned Jupiter probe—wire frame overview; nose cone doors open, instrument booms deployed; re-entry shell cutaway views; plan views.
Pages 7-11
Snark Twin rotor attack helicopter—wire frame overview; rotation; weapons systems; plan views.
Pages 12-16
Falcon Bio-mechanical reconstruction project—standing configuration; sitting configuration, front and back views; side, front and top plan views.
ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 5: THE DIAMOND MOON is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book ten. This work is a novel. Any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Special thanks to John Douglas, Russell Galen, Alan Lynch, Mary Higgins.
AVON BOOKS
A division of
The Hearst Corporation
105 Madison Avenue
New York, New York 10016
Text and artwork copyright © 1990 by Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime is a trademark of Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Published by arrangement with Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc.
Cover design, book design, and logo by Alex Jay/Studio J
Front cover painting by Jim Burns
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 90-93162
ISBN: 0-380-75349-9
All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U.S. Copyright Law. For information address Byron Preiss Visual Publications, Inc., 24 West 25th Street, New York, New York 10010.
First Avon Books Printing: November 1990
AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.
Printed in the U.S.A.
RA 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to Diana Reiss, founder of the Circe Project to investigate dolphin communication, who reminded me of the Dogon people and their beliefs about Sirius and its companion star. My apologies to Carl Sagan, a very plausible debunker of that and other intriguing myths—which remarkably, I had managed to forget that I first read about in his writings—for pulling gently on his leg.
Data on the physical effects of near-instantaneous deceleration come from a paper of Colonel John Stapp in “Bioastronautics and the Exploration of Space,” edited by Bedwell and Strughold, AFSC, USAF (GPO), 1965. And a grisly piece of work it is.
—Paul Preuss
PROLOGUE
All over the northern hemisphere of Earth, it was raining.
Forty minutes before the last episode of “Overmind” was scheduled to be sent throughout the solar system over open channels, Sir Randolph Mays appeared at London’s Broadcasting House, water streaming from his Burberry, coming out of the night to insist that the episode’s opening tease be re-recorded.
Hastily summoned from dinner at his club two streets away, a bedraggled and frantic program director confronted the interplanetary celebrity. “Sir Randolph, you can’t possibly be serious. We’ve already loaded the finished chip for automatic transmission.”
Mays pulled a blue-bound folder from his capacious leather satchel and brandished it in his huge right hand. “Kindly direct your attention to section thirty-three, paragraph two of our contract,” he replied; he always talked as if underlining his key words. “Herein are set forth the penalties to be paid by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the event I am not granted absolute and total editorial control over the content of the series.”
“Well, yes, but you also agreed to deliver a finished chip on a timely basis, following a script previously approved by us.” The director didn’t have to check the contract; the clause was standard. He allowed his old-fashioned steel-rimmed bifocals to slide down his long nose, the better to peer sternly at Mays. “That you have already done. And the time is, ah, no longer timely.”
“You may countersue. However, if you weigh the penalties specified by contract—what my breach will cost me as opposed to what your breach will cost you—I think you will agree that a simple substitution of the opening two minutes of tonight’s program is the preferable solution.” Mays was a gaunt man with a wide-stretched mouth, whose enormous hands chopped the air as he spoke, slicing out each emphasized word.
“I’ll need a moment to…”
“Here is the timed script for the new section. All the visuals to be replaced are on this chip.”
The director pushed his bifocals back up. “Well … let me see, then.”
Within five minutes Mays was ushered to an insert studio, where he sat in front of a matte screen facing a diminutive viddiecam and read half a dozen lines of narration in his unmistakably inflected voice.
Five minutes after that he was ensconced in a plush editing suite, peering over the shoulder of a hastily summoned video editor.
The editor was a pale, thin young man with glossy shoulder-length brown curls. After spending a few moments tapping keys with his delicate fingers he said, “All ready, sir. Old master on one, insert chip on two, unsynched reading on channel thirty, feeding to new master on three.”
“I should like to see if we can do this in real time. Live to chip, as it were.”
“All right, sir. You’ll cue me.”
“You may go ahead at any time. Begin on two.”
On the flatscreen monitor an image appeared, familiar but still majestic, of Jupiter’s clouds filling the screen, swirling in an intricate curdle of yellow and orange and red and brown—and in the foreground, the tiny bright spark of a swift moon.
“Reading,” said Mays.
The editor tapped the keys again; May’s recorded voice, a sort of harsh half-whisper filled with suppressed urgency, filled the upholstered room.
Jupiter’s moon Amalthea. For more than a year, the most unusual object in our solar system—and the key to its central enigma.
The picture enlarged. Amalthea swiftly drew closer, revealing itself as an irregular lump of ice some scores of kilometers long, its major axis pointed toward nearby Jupiter. Too small to feel the internal sag and stretch of tidal forces and the resultant heat of friction—much too small to hold an atmosphere—Amalthea was nevertheless wreathed in a thin fog which trailed away behind it, blown to tatters by an invisible sleet of hard radiation.
“Good picture,” the editor remarked.
Mays only grunted. This very image was the reason he had been insistent on revising the show opening; it was a classified Board of Space Control reconnaissance-satellite recording that Mays had acquired less than twenty-four hours earlier, by methods he did not care to discuss. The editor, with long experience of cutting together investigative news programs, understood Mays’s diffidence and said nothing more.
The ever-enlarging video image now showed that upon Amalthea’s surface, obscured by the clinging mist, hundreds of glittering eruptions were spewing matter into space. The voice-over continued: The ice geysers of Amalthea have no known natural explanation.
“Switch back to one,” said Mays.
Abruptly the screen picture cut to Amalthea as it had been known for the previous century—a dark red rubble-strewn chunk of rock 270 kilometers long, dusted with a few large patches of ice and snow. Since th
e first views returned by robot spacecraft expeditions in the 20th century, Amalthea has been thought to be an ordinary, inert, captured asteroid.
The scene dissolved, and now the image on the flatscreen was a view from deep within Jupiter’s clouds, as recorded by the previous year’s Kon-Tiki expedition. At center screen a giant floating creature, like one of Earth’s many-armed jellyfish but several orders of magnitude larger in dimension, browsed quietly in cloudy pastures. Clearly visible on the side of its immense gas bag were peculiar markings, the checkerboard pattern of a meter-band radio array.
When the medusas that swim in the clouds of Jupiter were disturbed by the research vessel Kon-Tiki, the voice-over continued, they began what some have called a “celestial chorus.”
“Cross to two,” said Mays.
The screen dissolved to another of Mays’s newly acquired illicit images, a false-color radio map of Jupiter’s clouds, seen from Amalthea’s orbit: concentric circles of bright red splotches indicating radio sources spread out over the paler graph lines like ripples on a pond, or the rings of a bull’s-eye.
Six Jupiter days they sang their radio song directly toward Amalthea, commencing when that moon rose above their horizon, pausing when it sank. On the seventh day they rested.
The surface of Amalthea again: seen close, a column of foam stood up high above the slick surface. The geyser’s orifice was veiled in tendrils of mist.
Surely it is no coincidence that these immense geysers suddenly began to spout everywhere on Amalthea at precisely the moment the medusas ceased to sing. So far, Amalthea has expelled more than one-third of its total mass. Every hour it shrinks faster.
“Insert my on-camera reading,” Mays ordered. In the minute or two they had been working together, Mays and the editor had already fallen smoothly into synchrony; the editor had tapped the keys almost before Mays had spoken.
