Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Indeed, when I remarked on the tortuous paths through which Blake had led me to reach him and asked why he didn’t simply place himself under the protection of the Board of Space Control, Forster told me that the launch pad we stood in was actually inside the Board’s surface perimeter, but that he did not wish his connection with the Board generally known. It was enough that he and he alone had been granted a permit to explore Amalthea, and that the Space Board were still honoring it despite the subsequent spectacular events there. Professor Forster left many things unsaid, but it was clear to me that—with the possible exception of you, Kip—he trusts no one in the bureaucracy. We broke off then, deferring a deeper conversation until later.”

  Jozsef paused in his narrative. Ari leaned forward to pour more tea for the three of them. Jozsef sipped thoughtfully, then continued.

  “Forster’s camp inside the ice cave resembled that of a military expedition preparing for battle. The pit was piled high with supplies and equipment—food, gas bottles, instruments, fuel tanks—most of it intended for an unmounted strap-on cargo hold, still at ground level and split open like an empty sardine tin. Blake showed me where I was to stay: it was a foam hut built against the wall of the blast chamber, quite warm inside despite its primitive appearance. Not long afterward the work lights dimmed, indicating the approach of night.

  “In the largest temporary shelter, the quartermaster’s hut, I joined the little group for a European-style dinner, accented by selections from Professor Forster’s excellent store of wines—and quickly learned to appreciate Walsh’s wry wit, Groves’s penchant for debate (learning that I was a psychologist, he was eager to take me on about the latest theories of the unconscious, of which he knew very little—but still more than I, since you and I gave the subject up as hopeless, Ari, twenty years ago), and McNeil’s astounding store of salacious gossip (the man may be a noted engineer, but he has the tastes and narrative gifts of a Boccaccio).

  “After dinner, Forster and I went alone to his hut. There, after I had sworn him to secrecy—over glasses of his superb Napoleon brandy—I brought out the holo projector and revealed to him what we had prepared: the distillation of the Knowledge.

  “He watched without comment. He has had a lifetime’s practice defending his academic priority. Nevertheless, he showed less surprise than I might have expected; he told me that he had had glimmerings of the truth as long ago as the discovery of the Martian plaque—long before he had managed to decipher its meaning, long before it was possible to know anything at all about its makers, which he himself had first dubbed Culture X.

  “The conventional theory—intentionally promulgated, as we know, by the Free Spirit—was that Culture X had evolved on Mars and had died out a billion years ago, when the brief Martian summer ended. Forster’s ideas were different, and far more ambitious: he was convinced that Culture X had entered the solar system from interstellar space. The fact that no one else believed this annoyed him, though not very much, for he is one of those people who seem happiest when in the minority.

  “When he learned that an Ishtar Mining Corporation robot had stumbled into an alien cache on Venus, with great energy and dedication he organized an expedition to explore and if possible retrieve the finds. Although his mission was cut short and the material artifacts still rest buried on Venus, he came back with the records”—Jozsef paused and allowed himself a small smile—“I’m retelling these events as I think he views them—at any rate, less than a year elapsed before he proved that the Venusian tablets were translations of texts dating from Earth’s Bronze Age. He was now convinced that representatives of Culture X had visited all the inner planets, had perhaps tried to colonize them.

  “Shortly thereafter he was able to apply his translation of the Venusian tablets to a reading of the Martian plaque, with its references to ‘cloud-dwelling messengers’ and a ‘reawakening at the great world.’ Thus through his own research he skipped over millenniums of our hoarded secrecy, arriving instantly at a very substantial part of the Knowledge.

  “But logic suggested to him—and Kon-Tiki later proved—that the clouds of Jupiter, the ‘great world,’ could hide no creatures capable of having fabricated the material of which the Venusian tablets and the Martian plaque were made, much less of doing the great deeds the plaque commemorates. And decades of onsite exploration of Jupiter’s satellites had uncovered no trace of a past alien presence.

  “Despite this, Professor Forster told me, a single clue convinced him that a more thorough search of one of Jupiter’s moon was justified: it had long been observed that Amalthea radiated almost one third more energy into space than it absorbed from the sun and Jupiter together. It had been assumed that bombardment from Jupiter’s intense radiation belts made up the deficit, but Forster looked up the records and noted that, when the radiation flux had been accounted for, a discrepancy at radio wavelengths remained—duly noted by planetary scientists but small enough to be ignored as uninteresting, much as the precession of the orbit of Mercury was considered a minor anomaly, not a threat to Newton, until Einstein’s theory of gravitation retroactively yielded its precise quantitative value two centuries later.

  “Then the medusas of Jupiter sang their song, and Amalthea erupted. With characteristic spirit, Forster insisted upon pressing ahead with his exploration as already planned and approved, without announcing any design changes that might require bureaucratic meddling. He did make some design changes en route to Ganymede, however, and when I met with him three weeks ago, he and his crew were beginning to implement them—clandestinely.

  “What I had to tell him confirmed the correctness of his vision and underscored the need for the changes he had already made in his mission plan. But of course, the Knowledge implies more…”

  Ari could not contain her distress. “It implies that any attempt to proceed without Linda will meet with disaster.”

  “So I told Professor Forster, and he did not deny the force of the evidence,” Jozsef replied quietly. “Nevertheless he is determined to go ahead, with or without her.”

  “Then he—and all of them, Blake Redfield with them—are doomed to death and worse. He must be stopped … that was why you went to Ganymede, Jozsef! Why did you so easily allow him to dissuade you?” But Jozsef returned her demanding stare with nothing better than soft-eyed resignation. “Kip—you can stop him,” she said.

  “Not even if I wanted to.”

  “If…?” Ari looked at him in despairing unbelief.

  “Ari, the Space Board hasn’t the will or—so the people in the line departments claim the resources to maintain the quarantine of Amalthea much longer. The Indo-Asians are applying tremendous pressure at Council level.” He sighed impatiently. “They talk about safety, about energy resources, even about basic science. Meanwhile they’re counting lost tourist dollars.”

  “What does that have to do with Forster?” she demanded.

  “He’s got a narrow window of opportunity. With or without Ellen—Linda, I mean—somebody’s going to land on Amalthea. And soon.”

  “We’d rather it be Forster,” Jozsef said. “All of us would, I think.”

  “No.” Ari stiffened. “Not without her.”

  “But that’s not…” Jozsef cleared his throat noisily and left the sentence unfinished.

  The commander said it for him. “That’s up to her, Ari. Not you.”

  4

  Blake Redfield forced his way through crowded winding corridors, past stalls selling carved jade and translucent rubber sandals in the many colors of jujubes, past shelves of bargain-priced surveillance electronics, past racks of spot-lit fresh-killed ducks with heads and feet attached—while people pushed him from behind, elbowed him aside, and blocked the way in front of him, none maliciously or even with much force, for gravity here was a few percent of Earth’s and too vigorous a shove was as awkward for the shover as for the shovee. More people sat huddled in circles on the floor throwing dice or playing hsiang-ch’i or stood bargaining exc
itedly before tanks of live trout and mounds of ice clams and piles of pale, wilted vegetables. Students and old folk peered at real paper books through thick rimless glasses and read flimsy newspapers printed in what to most Euro-Americans were indecipherable squiggles. Everyone was talking, talking, talking in musical tones most North Continental visitors heard only as singsong and jabber.

  Usually auburn-haired—even handsome, in a fresh-faced, freckled way—Blake had disguised himself well, looking less like young Ghengis Khan than a Pearl River dock rat. He was in fact half Chinese on his mother’s side, the other half being Irish, and although he did not know more than a few useful phrases of Burmese or Thai or any of the dozens of other Indochinese languages common on Ganymede, he spoke eloquent Mandarin and expressively earthy Cantonese—the latter being the favorite trade language of most of the ethnic Chinese who made up a substantial proportion of the Shoreless Ocean’s non-Indian population.

  From the low overheads hung paper banners which fluttered endlessly in the breeze of constantly turning ventilator fans; these did their inadequate best to clear the corridors of the smell of pork frying in rancid oil and other, less palatable odors. The stall owners had rigged up awnings against the flickering yellow glare of the permanent lighting; the awnings billowed ceaselessly, waves in an unquiet sea of cloth. Blake pushed ahead, against the tide. His destination was the contracting firm of Lim and Sons, founded in Singapore in 1946. The Shoreless Ocean branch had opened in 2068, before there was a sizable settlement on Ganymede; a generation of Lims had helped build the place.

  The firm’s offices fronted on the chaotic intersection of two busy corridors near the center of the underground city. Behind a wall of plate glass bearing the gold-painted ideograms for health and prosperity, shirt-sleeved, bespectacled clerks bent studiously to their flatscreens.

  Blake stepped through the automatic door; abruptly the corridor sounds were sealed out, and there was quiet. No one paid him any attention. He leaned over the rail that separated the carpeted reception area from the nearest clerk and said in careful Mandarin, “My name is Redfield. I have a ten o’clock appointment with Luke Lim.”

  The clerk winced as if he’d had a gas attack. Without bothering to look at Blake he keyed his commlink and said, in rapid Cantonese, “A white guy dressed like a coolie is out here, talking like he just took Mandarin 101. Says he has an appointment with Luke.”

  The commlink squawked back, loud enough for Blake to overhear. “See what happens if you tell him to wait.”

  “You wait,” said the clerk in English, still not looking up.

  There were no chairs for visitors. Blake walked over to the wall and studied the gaudy color holos hanging there, some stiff family portraits and wide-angle views of construction projects. In one, pipes as tangled as a package of dry noodles sprawled over a kilometer of surface ice; it was a dissociation plant, converting water ice to hydrogen and oxygen. Other holos showed ice mines, distilleries, sewage plants, hydroponic farms.

  Blake wondered what role Lim and Sons had played in the construction of these impressive facilities; the holos were uncaptioned, allowing the viewer to assume anything he or she wished. Unlikely that Lim and Sons had been principal contractor in any of them. But one in particular captured his attention: it depicted a big-toothed ice mole cutting through black ice, drilling what was presumably one of the original tunnels of the settlement that had become Shoreless Ocean.

  For twenty minutes Blake patiently cooled his heels. Finally the clerk keyed the link and muttered “Still standing here … no, seems happy as a clam.”

  Another five minutes passed. A man appeared at the back of the room and came to the railing, hand extended. “Luke Lim. So sorry, Mr. Redfield”—Ruke Rim. So solly, Missa Ledfeared—“Most unavoidable detained.” Lim was tall even for the low gravity of Ganymede, almost emaciated, with sunken cheeks and burning eyes. On the point of his chin a dozen or so very long, very black hairs managed to suggest a goatee. Unlike his facial hair the hair of his head was thick and glossy, long and black, hanging to his shoulders. He had inch-long nails on the thumb and fingers of his right hand, but the nails of his left were cut short. He was wearing blue canvas work pants and a shirt patterned like mattress-ticking.

  “No problem,” said Blake coolly, giving the outstretched hand, the dangerous one, a single short jerk. A curious fellow, thought Blake: his accent was as phony as they come, straight out of an ancient Charlie Chan movie-chip; the fingernails were not a Mandarin affectation but apparently for playing twelve-string guitar, and the work clothes suggested that the guy wanted to present himself as a man of the working class.

  “So glad you not in big hurry,” said Lim.

  “You have something to show me?”

  “Yes.” Lim’s voice was suddenly low and conspiratorial, his expression almost a leer. “You come with me now?” Ostentatiously, he held the gate of the railing open and waved Blake through it.

  Blake followed him to the back of the office and into a low dark passageway. He caught glimpses of small, dim rooms on either side, crowded with men and women bent over machine tools.

  A slow ride in a big freight elevator brought them out into a huge service bay, its floor and walls carved from ancient ice. The excavation of the bay wasn’t finished; there was a hole in a sunken corner of the floor as big as a storm drain, to carry off the melt as ice was carved away.

  In the middle of the bay, inadequately lit by overhead sodium units, a spidery flatbed trailer supported a big load, securely tied down and wrapped in blue canvas. “There it is,” Lim said to Blake, not bothering to move from where he was standing by the elevator.

  Two middle-aged women bundled thickly into insulated overalls looked up from the engine of a surface crawler; most of the machine was in pieces, scattered over the ice. “One of the rectifiers in that thing is still intermittent, Luke,” said one of the women in Cantonese. “Supply is supposed to send a rebuild over this afternoon.”

  “How long can this one run?” Lim asked her.

  “An hour or two. Then it overheats.”

  “Tell Supply to forget it,” Lim said.

  “If your customer wants to take delivery…”

  “Ignore the foreigner, go back to work,” Lim said, his breath steaming in the orange light.

  Blake went to the flatbed and released the tie-down catches. He yanked at the canvas, patiently circling the rig until he had all the cloth piled on the floor. The machinery thus revealed was a cylinder compounded of metal alloy rings, girdled by a universal mount and carried on cleated treads; its business end consisted of two offset wheels of wide, flat titanium teeth, each cutting edge glistening with a thin film of diamond.

  An ice mole—but despite its impressive size, it was a mere miniature of the one Blake had seen pictured on the office wall.

  Blake jumped lightly onto the flatbed. He pulled a tiny black torch from his hip pocket and switched on its brilliant white light; from his shirt pocket he took magnifying goggles and slipped them on. For several minutes he crawled over the machine, opening every access port, inspecting circuits and control boards. He checked bearing alignments and looked for excessive wear. He pulled panels off and studied the windings and connections of the big motors.

  Finally he jumped down and walked back to Lim. “Nothing visibly broken. But it’s as old as I am, seen a lot of use. Maybe thirty years.”

  “For the price you want to pay, surplus is what you get.”

  “Where’s the power supply?”

  “You pay extra for that.”

  “When somebody tells me ‘like new,’ Mr. Lim, I don’t think they mean thirty years old. Everything made in this line in the last decade has built-in power supply.”

  “You want it or not?”

  “With power supply.”

  “No problem. You pay five hundred IA credits extra.”

  “Would that be new? Or ‘like new’?”

  “Guaranteed like new.”

  Bl
ake translated the figure into dollars. “For that much I can buy new off the shelf in the Mainbelt.”

  “You want to wait three months? Pay freight?”

  Blake let the rhetorical question pass unanswered. “How do I know this thing isn’t going to break down as soon as we get it to Amalthea?”

  “Like I say, guaranteed.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “We send someone to fix. Free labor.”

  Blake seemed to consider that a moment. Then he said, “Let’s take it for a test drive.”

  Lim looked pained. “Maybe too much to do this week.”

  “Right now. We’ll add some space to your work area here.”

  “Not possible.”

  “Sure it is. I’ll borrow the power supply and commlink from that crawler”—he indicated the machine parts scattered on the floor—“since nobody’s going to need them for a while.” Blake picked his away among the scattered parts in the corner; he hefted one of the massive but lightweight units, jumped onto the trailer, lifted a cowl, and wrestled it into place.

  The women, who hadn’t really been concentrating on their work, now watched Blake openly—meanwhile trying to remain impassive, with cautious and uncertain glances at Lim. Reluctantly, as if he were playing without enthusiasm a role that required him to come up with some protest, however feeble, Lim said, “You can’t just do what you want with our … this equipment.”

  Blake ignored him. He took a pair of heavy rubber-insulated cables from a spring-loaded spool on the wall and shoved their flat, copper-sheathed heads into a receptacle in the rear of the mole; he locked them in place. Then he slipped into the mole’s cockpit and spent a moment fiddling with the controls. With a whine of heavy motors, the machine came to life, its red warning beacon whirling and flashing. The warning horn hooted repeatedly as it backed off the trailer on its clattering cleats. Blake pushed the levers ahead and the mole moved toward a blank spot in the wall of ice.

  Lim watched all this as if stupefied, before shaking himself to action. “Hey! Wait a minute!”