Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  “Climb on, if you’re coming!” Blake shouted, slowing the machine’s wall-ward progress long enough for Lim to scramble up the side of the machine and sling himself into the open cockpit. The door sealed itself behind him; Blake checked the dashboard to see that the little compartment was sealed and pressurized. Then he shoved the potentiometers forward again, all the way to the stops.

  Transformers sang; the giant bits on the mole’s nose spun in a blur of counter-rotating blades. Blake drove the machine squarely into the ice, and there was a sudden screech and rumble; ice chips exploded in an opaque blizzard outside the cockpit’s cylindrical polyglas window.

  Inside the machine, the air was rank with ozone. False color displays on the dashboard showed a three-dimensional map of the machine’s position, built from stored data and updated with feedback from the seismic vibrations generated by the whirling bit. The void in the ice they were enlarging was at the edge of the settlement, only twenty meters below the mean surface, and adjacent to the space-port. The dashboard map displayed the region of ice beneath the port in bright red, with a legend in bold letters: RESTRICTED AREA.

  The machine moved ahead, shuddering and plunging toward the red barrier at top speed—which for the old machine was a respectable three kilometers per hour. Unseen by the riders, a river of melted ice flowed out the rear of the machine and through the tunnel behind them, to pour down the drain.

  “Watch where you go.” Lim’s accent showed signs of slipping. “Cross that barrier, the Space Board impounds us.”

  “I’ll turn here, take the long way back. Let’s see how it holds together after an hour or so.”

  “Must go back now.”

  Blake pulled back on one of the potentiometer levers and the machine skewed, skittering and squirming like a hand drill with a dull bit. “Thing bucks like a wild horse—kind of hard to steer. Say, you smell something hot?”

  “Don’t turn so hard,” Lim said in alarm. “Not good to abuse fine equipment.”

  A panel light on the dashboard began to glow, dull yellow at first, then bright orange.

  “Looks like we’re overloading something,” Blake observed equably.

  “Go slow, go slow!” Lim shouted. “We’ll be stranded!”

  “Okay.” Blake straightened the machine and eased off the drilling rate. The overload warning light dimmed. “Tell me about that guarantee again.”

  “You see yourself, if not abused, machine in very good condition. It breaks, you bring it in and we fix.”

  “No, I’ll tell you what, if it breaks out there on Amalthea we’ll come get your top mechanic. We’ll take that person and whatever parts we need back with us, right then. You pay for everything, including the fuel.” Fuel was gold in the Jupiter system; because of the depth of the giant planet’s gravitational well, the delta-vees between Ganymede and Amalthea were practically the same as between Earth and Venus.

  Lim’s nervous expression vanished. He glared at the man beside him, no more than a few centimeters away. “You not stupid, so you must be crazy.”

  Blake smiled. In fluent Cantonese he said, “Besides an intermittent rectifier, what else did your mechanics find wrong with this bucket?”

  Lim snorted in surprise.

  “Answer my questions, Mr. Lim, or you can look for somewhere else to unload this antique.”

  Caught out, Lim looked as if he might just throw a temper tantrum and let the deal go. Then, suddenly, his extravagant features stretched themselves into a gleeful grin. “Aieeee! You one foxy character, Led-feared. I lose much face.”

  “And you can drop the Number One Son accent. I don’t want to get the idea you’re making fun of me.”

  “Hey, I am my daddy’s number one son. But never mind, I take your point. My people will tell your people whatever you want to know. If anything needs fixing we’ll fix it.” Lim leaned back in his seat, obviously relieved. “But then you sign off. And we forget all this nonsense about guarantees. And rocket fuel.”

  “Okay with me,” Blake said.

  “Take me back to the office. You can write me a check and drive away.”

  “Throw in the power supply?”

  Lim sighed mightily. “The white devil is merciless.” But in fact he seemed to be taking pleasure in Blake’s hard-nosed attitude. “Okay, you win. Get us back in one piece, I’ll even take you to lunch.”

  Late the same evening, Blake returned to the Forster expedition’s secret camp under the ice.

  The rocket nozzles of the ship that would carry them to Amalthea loomed over them, beneath the frozen dome. Forster had leased the heavy tug for the duration; he couldn’t legally change its registration, but he could call it anything he wanted. He had named it the Michael Ventris after his hero, the Englishman who’d been the co-decipherer of Minoan Linear B and who’d tragically been killed at the age of thirty-four, not long after his philological triumph.

  The uneven icy floor of the exhaust-deflection chamber was less cluttered than it had been a few weeks earlier, when Professor Nagy had paid Professor Forster a visit. By now the cargo needed for the month-long expedition had been loaded and the clip-on cargo hold secured to the frame of the big tug. The equipment bay still stood open and empty, however. There was room in it for the ice mole and more.

  Blake knocked at the door of Forster’s foam hut. “It’s Blake.”

  “Come in, please.” Forster looked up from the flatscreen he’d been studying as Blake ducked into the hut. He peered shrewdly at Blake and knew the news was good. “Success, I assume.”

  Blake’s expression sagged only slightly; he wished Forster wouldn’t assume so easily. Finding and leasing a working ice mole, and keeping the search reasonably confidential, was not so straightforward that success could be assumed in advance.

  But Blake had been successful, after all, and Forster—who looked only a few years older than Blake, but who had actually been at this game for decades—was accustomed to compromise and improvisation and had probably developed a sixth sense for the problems that were really hard and the ones that only seemed that way. “Lim’s machine will do the job,” Blake acknowledged.

  “Any particular problems?”

  “Lim tried to cheat me…”

  Forster frowned, affronted.

  “So I asked him to be our agent.”

  “You did what?” One of Forster’s bushy brows shot up.

  Good, that got a rise out of him. Blake smiled—mild enough revenge for Forster’s assumptions. “We played a little game of bargaining. He played by the rules, so I decided to trust him to help us locate the other machine. He’s got unique contacts in the community. My problem is that, even though I can pass, nobody knows who I am. That’s what’s taken me so long to get this far.”

  “Sorry if I’ve been presumptuous.” Forster had finally heard some of his young colleague’s hitherto unstated frustration. “You’ve been carrying a heavy load. As soon as it’s safe for the rest of us to show our faces, we’ll be able to relieve you.”

  “I won’t count on any help until the day we blast off, then,” Blake said, smiling wryly. “According to my informants, guess who’s about to descend on us from Helios.”

  Forster’s cheerful expression folded into gloom. “Oh dear.”

  “’Fraid so. Sir Randolph-Call-Me-Arnold-Toynbee-Mays.”

  5

  After weeks in space, planetfall. The great fusion-powered passenger liner Helios, all its portholes and glassy promenades ablaze, was inserting itself by the gentlest of nudges into parking orbit around Ganymede.

  And in the Centrifugal Lounge, a celebration: passengers chattering at each other, drinking from tall flutes of golden champagne, some of them dancing tipsily to the music of the ship’s orchestra. Randolph Mays was there, although he firmly believed no one recognized him or even knew he’d been among them, for it suited him to travel incognito—as he had been since before Helios had left Earth—thus to see but not be seen. He was one of those men who liked to watch.r />
  And to listen. The curve of the Centrifugal Lounge’s floor-walls, designed to maintain a comfortable half-g of artificial gravity for the comfort of the passengers, also made a good, quasi-parabolic reflector of sound waves. People standing opposite each other in the cylindrical room—thus upside down with respect to each other—could hear one another’s conversations with perfect clarity.

  Randolph Mays craned his neck back and peered upward at a striking young woman, Marianne Mitchell, who stood momentarily alone directly over his head. A few meters away a young man, Bill Hawkins, was trying to work up his nerve to approach her.

  She was certainly the prettiest woman on the ship, slender, dark-haired, green-eyed, her full lips glossy with bold red lipstick. For his part, Hawkins too was passably attractive, tall and broad-shouldered, with thick blond hair slicked straight back—but he lacked confidence. He’d managed no more than a few inconsequential conversations with Marianne in weeks of opportunity. Now his time was short—he would be leaving Helios at Ganymede—and he seemed to be trying to make up his mind to have one last go at it.

  Through one of the thick curving windows that formed the floor, Marianne watched as, far below, the Ganymede spaceport swung into view on the icy plains of the Shoreless Ocean. Beneath her feet paraded what seemed like miniature control towers, pressurized storage sheds, communications masts and dishes, spherical fuel tanks, gantries for the shuttles that plied between the surface and the interplanetary ships that parked in orbit—the practical clutter that any working port required, not much different from Cayley or Farside on Earth’s moon.

  She let out a disconsolate sigh. “It looks like New Jersey.”

  “Beg pardon?” Bill Hawkins had lifted a bottle of champagne and two glasses from a circulating waiter and, having detached himself from the knot of partygoers, was finally moving toward her.

  “Talking to myself,” said Marianne.

  “Can’t believe my luck, finding you alone.”

  “Well, now I’m not alone.” Her cheer seemed forced. What was there to say to him? Aside from the obligatory exchange of life stories, they hadn’t had much success conversing.

  “Whoops. Shall I go away again?”

  “No. And before you ask,” she said, eyeing the champagne, “I’d be delighted.”

  Hawkins poured it—the real thing, from France, a fine Roederer brut—and handed her a glass.

  “À votre santé” she said, and drank off half the glass.

  Sipping his own, Hawkins raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “Oh, don’t look at me like that,” she said. “It’s consolation. Six weeks on this tub and we might as well be back at Newark shuttleport.”

  “Couldn’t disagree more. For my money it’s quite a sight. The largest moon in the solar system. Surface area bigger than Africa.”

  “I thought it was supposed to be exotic,” Marianne complained. “Everybody said so.”

  Hawkins smiled. “Wait and see. Not long now.”

  “Be mysterious, then.”

  Indeed, Ganymede did have a romantic reputation. Not because of all the major settlements in the solar system it was the most distant from Earth. Not for the weird landscapes of its ancient, oft-battered, oft-refrozen crust. Not for its spectacular views of Jupiter and its sister moons. Ganymede was exotic because of what humans had done to it.

  “When are they letting us off?” Marianne demanded, gulping more champagne.

  “Formalities always take a few hours. I imagine we’ll be down below by morning.”

  “Morning, whenever that is. Ugh.”

  Hawkins cleared his throat. “Ganymede can be a bit confusing to the first-time visitor,” he said. “I’d be glad to show you around.”

  “Thanks, Bill.” She favored him with a heavy-lidded glance. “But no thanks. Somebody’s meeting me.”

  “Oh.”

  His face must have revealed more disappointment than he realized, for Marianne was almost apologetic. “I don’t know anything about him. Except my mother is very eager to impress his mother.” Marianne, twenty-two years old, had left the surface of Earth for the first time only six weeks earlier; like other children of wealth—including most of her fellow passengers—she was supposed to be making a traditional year-long Grand Tour of the solar system.

  “Does this fellow have a name?” Hawkins asked.

  “Blake Redfield.”

  “Blake!” Hawkins smiled—partly with relief, for Redfield was rather famously involved with the notorious Ellen Troy. “As it happens, he’s a member of Professor Forster’s expedition. As am I.”

  “Well, lucky for both of you.” When he made no reply, she gave him a sidelong glance. “You’re looking at me again.”

  “Oh, I was just wondering if you’re really going to stick out this whole Grand Tour. You spend two weeks here—which is not enough to see anything, really. Next stop, San Pablo base in the Mainbelt—and anything more than a day there is too much. Then Mars Station and Labyrinth City and the sights of Mars. Then on to Port Hesperus. Then on to…”

  “Please stop.” He’d made his point. For all that the ship would make many ports of call, she would be spending most of the coming nine months en route, in space. “I think I’d like to change the subject.”

  Besides being the ship’s youngest passenger, Marianne was its most easily excited and most easily bored. Most of the others were new graduates of universities and professional schools, taking the year off to acquire a thin coat of cosmopolitan varnish before settling down to a life of interplanetary banking or stock brokerage or art dealing or fulltime leisure. Marianne had not yet found her calling. None of the undergraduate majors she’d undertaken had proved capable of holding her interest; pre-law, pre-medicine, history of art, languages ancient or modern—nothing had lasted beyond a romantic first encounter. Not even a real romance—she would tell this part delicately, hinting at a brief affair with a professor of classics—had carried her past the midterm in the subject. Semester after semester she’d started with A’s and ended with incompletes.

  Her mother, possessed of a seemingly inexhaustible fortune but beginning to balk at financing Marianne’s ongoing education without some glimmer of a light at the end of the tunnel, had finally urged Marianne to take time off to see something of the rest of Earth and the other inhabited worlds. Perhaps somewhere in Europe or Indonesia or South America or out there among the planets and satellites and space stations, something would capture her daughter’s imagination for longer than a month.

  Marianne had spent the year after her twenty-first birthday wandering Earth, acquiring clothes and souvenirs and intellectually stylish acquaintances. If she lacked discipline, she was nevertheless gifted with a restless intelligence and was quick to pick up the latest in modes pensées—among which the ideas of Sir Randolph Mays figured prominently, at least in North Continental circles.

  “You’re actually working for Professor Forster? You didn’t tell me that before.” Her customary boredom was overcome. “You don’t look much like a conspirator type to me.”

  “Conspirator? Oh … don’t tell me.”

  “What?”

  “You’re not one of those who take Randolph Mays seriously.”

  “Several million people do.” Her eyes widened. “Including some very intelligent ones.”

  “‘The ultimate spiritual presence that is the dweller in the innermost, besides being the creator and sustainer of the universe’—do I quote him correctly?”

  “Well…” Marianne hesitated. “Why is Forster going to Amalthea, if he doesn’t know something he’s not telling?” she demanded.

  “He may suspect he knows something, but he’s going for pure research. What else?” Hawkins, a postdoc in xeno-archaeology at the University of London, was a blind loyalist where his thesis advisor was concerned. “Remember, Forster applied for his grants and permits long before Amalthea got into the news; that anomalous radiation signature has been known for over a century. As for this wa
rmed-over conspiracy business—really, that too belongs back in the 20th century,” Hawkins said a bit huffily.

  Marianne was uncertain whether to be miffed; having formed few opinions of her own, she found herself at the mercy of people who claimed authority. She struggled bravely on. “So you think there’s no such thing as the Free Spirit? That aliens never visited the solar system?”

  “I’d be a right fool to say that, wouldn’t I? Seeing as how I’m one of less than half a dozen people who can read Culture X script. So is Forster, which is how I know him. Which has nothing to do with Mays and his theories.”

  Marianne gave it up then, and drained the last of her champagne. She studied the empty flute and said, “There’s a lot I don’t know about you.” She was stating a fact, not starting a flirtation.

  Panic creased his brows. “I’ve done it again, launched into a lecture. I always…”

  “I like to learn things,” she said plainly. “Besides, you shouldn’t try to be somebody you aren’t.”

  “Look, Marianne … if you don’t mind my tagging alone with you and Redfield, maybe we could talk more. Not about me,” he said hastily. “I mean about Amalthea and Culture X … or whatever you’d like.”

  “Sure. Thanks,” she said, with an open and thoroughly charming smile. “I’d like that. Got any more of this?” She wiggled the glass at him.

  Watching from over their heads, Randolph Mays observed that Hawkins, having offered to continue his conversation with her later, soon ran out of things to say; when his bottle was dry he awkwardly retreated. Marianne watched him thoughtfully, but made no effort to stop him.

  Mays chuckled quietly, as if he’d been privy to a confidential joke.

  6

  Under the ice of the Shoreless Ocean, night passed by the artificial count of the hours, and morning came like clockwork. Morning changed imperceptibly to afternoon.

  Luke Lim, having skipped breakfast and then lunch in order to pursue his commission into the commercial corridors and back alleys—it was one of the ways he maintained his skinny charm—tugged pensively at the straggling hairs on his chin while he studied the holographic nude Asian female on the wall calendar. She was kneeling, leaning forward with an innocent smile on her red-painted lips, and she held a pure white lotus blossom in her lap, its golden heart ablaze with the date and time. Luke’s stomach growled.