Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  It takes energy to keep water frozen when the surroundings are hot. After all pertinent data had been fed into the Ventris’s computers it was learned that the apparent discrepancy in Amalthea’s energy budget was due not to anything so paltry as a leakage of electrical energy from its radio antennas but to the considerably larger output of what, for want of better name, the expedition called its “refrigerator.”

  A refrigerator is really a heater that heats one part of the thing to be cooled until it is hotter than its surroundings, moving heat from the source to a sink or a radiator. The dark red dust of classical Amalthea made a fine radiator, a surface from which the moon could rid itself of the heat it removed from its underlying ice. Most of the heat loss was disguised in the flux of Jupiter’s radiation belts; for more than a hundred years no one had suspected that diminutive Amalthea was adding measurably to the total energy of the belts themselves.

  But where was the source?

  The Old Mole’s graphics program had its limits—one had to severely restrain it from pretending to more certainty than it really had, when the input was from soft data—so the computer-generated map only sketchily showed that a spheroid of uncertain composition and dimension lay in the core of the moon. For a billion years, presumably, this object had produced the energy necessary to keep Amalthea frozen solid.

  A year ago Amalthea had begun to unfreeze. But the moon was melting far faster than radiation belts or tidal forces could account for. Amalthea was melting because the core object had increased its heat output by several orders of magnitude. The refrigerator had turned into a stove.

  This was what the seismologically generated map of Amalthea on the console displayed: a rind of solid ice, pierced by vents of gas and liquid, its surface subliming into vacuum. A mantle of liquid water, thirty kilometers deep. A core of hard, hot matter, composition unknown, but hot enough to boil the water that touched it.

  The ice mole would come nowhere near that hot inner core, of course. The mole’s function was simply to pierce Amalthea’s frozen crust.

  A slurry of sludge and chips blown back from the blades clumped and writhed over the Polyglas canopy, making it seem as if something out there was alive, but beyond the walls of the smooth-cut shaft there was nothing but dense ice.

  “Almost there,” said Blake.

  “Don’t slow down,” Forster said, as if anticipating some uncharacteristic caution on Blake’s part. Forster tugged at his nose and muttered little ruminative wordless bleats, watching the image of the ice mole boring closer to the bright boundary of ice and water.

  Forster was sure he knew what that thing in the middle of Amalthea was, although he hadn’t known a thing about it until they’d finally started getting the hard data a few days ago. Years had passed since his conviction had started him on the difficult path to these discoveries.

  The view through the window was almost total blackness, relieved only by reflected light from the cockpit instruments; the view on their screen vividly depicted the mole grinding its way straight down through the ice. Behind it, liquified ice flashed into vapor and was propelled up the shaft. But to Forster’s imaginative eye, the deeper they got the more the surrounding ice seemed to glow with some faint and distant source of radiance.

  Up on the flight deck of the Ventris, the same reconstructed graphic from the mole’s mapper was available on the big screens, alongside the projection of the Ventris’s more powerful and sophisticated seismic-tomography program. Here there was nothing uncertain—within the limit of resolution of sound waves in water—about the size and shape of Amalthea’s crust or the object at its core. On these screens were incorporated the dimensions, temperature, density, and reflectivity, at every depth, of multiple imaginary slices through the moon. Yet even on Ventris’s screens the core was represented as a black hole. For the core object was almost perfectly absorptive of sound waves.

  The boiling hot water around it was pictured with perfect clarity, in false colors that showed the intricate eddies and jets surrounding the core. But no image of the inside of the core was possible; whatever it was made of either did not transmit ordinary vibration or somehow actively damped the vibrations of the seismic disturbance that buffeted it on every side.

  Over Jo Walsh’s shoulder, Tony Groves watched in fascination as the mole descended. “Caution now, caution now.” His voice was almost a whisper.

  Walsh pretended to take him at his word. “The navigator urges caution,” she said into the commlink.

  Groves reddened. “Now Jo, we don’t want…” He let his sentence dribble away.

  “What’s that, Tony?” she asked.

  “Silly thing … watching the screen I was afraid for a moment … that when they broke through the ice they might fall.”

  “No danger of that.” She reached up and rotated the graphic 120 degrees. “Sometimes this is a helpful reminder, when up and down aren’t too significant.”

  “You’re making fun of me, Jo,” Groves said disgustedly.

  But a moment later he exclaimed “Oh!” in excitement and hope, for on the screen the ice mole had finally punctured the skin of Amalthea.

  Unfortunately live visuals were missing: the mole’s original designers had not thought it sensible to put a camera on a machine that was meant to spend its working life surrounded by solid ice. “Blake. Professor. Can you see anything? Tell us what you see,” Walsh said.

  Blake’s voice was delayed, coming over the comm. “Well, it’s kind of weird. We don’t have outside lights on this thing, but it doesn’t seem as dark…”

  “We’re in the water,” said Forster. “The lights of our cockpit are having a definite effect on the surroundings.”

  “What are you talking about, sir?” came Blake’s puzzled voice over the commlink—

  —as Walsh added her dry request, “Please be good enough to specify what the hell you’re referring to, Professor.”

  Forster’s voice came back to those who waited in the Ventris, satisfied and unmistakably thrilled. “Swarming all around us. Life. The water is full of it…”

  Lazy spirals of cable descended as slowly as smoke wreaths from the bulk of the Michael Ventris. Power cables and safety cables slithered across the ice toward the hole and disappeared into the vapor plume, following the mole inward. To Hawkins and McNeil, hovering nearby on the surface, the sign of the mole’s progress was a plume of agitated vapor in the mist.

  They heard the reports from the mole over their suitcomms, and for a moment Hawkins shared the thrill of the impossible discovery. Life. For that moment, at least, he was able to stop thinking about Marianne Mitchell and Randolph Mays.

  14

  Randolph Mays knew damned well that spectacular discoveries were being made on Amalthea, and—as he made clear to Marianne—sitting still on Ganymede waiting to hear about them was driving him crazy.

  Even in the midst of his self-described insanity he retained his charm, however. Whether he had really read her so completely, or whether it was just wonderful luck, Marianne found that he exerted a powerful attraction upon her. He was almost old enough to be her father—though not so old as her real father, which perhaps lowered that particular psychological barrier—and he was far from conventionally handsome. Nowhere near as handsome as … well, Bill Hawkins, for example. But his … rugged look and, mm, rangy physique were kind of sexy if you thought about it, and his mind…

  She loved working with him. She wouldn’t have minded something more than work. But he had treated her with nothing but professional courtesy. She did her best to live up to all his expectations in that category, and at first she trotted after him as faithfully as a pet…

  Marianne was not the only woman on Ganymede who was trying to read Randolph Mays’s mind. Sparta had hardly stopped thinking about him since Forster’s press conference, on the eve of the launch of the Ventris. She had never seen him in person before. So intrigued was she by the stagy presence of the historian-reporter, in fact, that she had decided not t
o be aboard the Ventris when it blasted for Amalthea.

  “You need to go openly now,” Sparta said to the commander. “Find out more about this broker Von Frisch. See if Luke Lim is what he claims to be. Be obvious about it—it will take the pressure off of me.”

  “Everyone thinks you’re with Forster.”

  “You’ll get me there later. When I need to be there.”

  “You think I’ll get you wherever you need to be whenever you need to be there, don’t you?”

  “Not always. Only if you can.”

  He said nothing, only stared morosely at the wall. He was sitting on a sprung plastic-covered couch, legs stretched out and arms crossed, and she was pacing the scuffed tile floor of the visitors’ area in the Space Board’s headquarters on Ganymede, a grim, cramped room in a grim, bulging, pressure structure hidden from casual view among blast domes and fuel storage tanks in a remote corner of the spaceport—a structure whose low domed profile and windowless, government-gray skin were a reflection of the uneasy relations between the Space Board and the Indo-Asian communities of the Galilean moons.

  “This is a small settlement,” she continued. “All it takes is one curious person to spread the news. I’ll have to dress up like a Balinese dancing girl or something.”

  He emitted a gravelly chuckle. “You’ll be on every videoplate in Shoreless Ocean if you dress up like a dancing girl.”

  “Like a Tibetan nun, then,” she said. “I know how to be invisible, Commander. With your help.”

  “Not that you really need it.”

  “Mays mustn’t suspect I’m watching him.”

  The commander shifted uneasily on the broken springs of the steel-backed couch. “Why do you want to bother with Mays? He’s got no way of interfering with Forster now, no way of getting to Amalthea. We have him right where we want him, under observation.”

  “He strikes me as a very clever man,” she said. There was nothing flip or clever about the way she said it.

  Ganymede had an electromagnetic cargo launcher like the two on Earth’s moon—proportionally longer, of course, some fifty kilometers overall, to accommodate Ganymede’s greater gravity. In addition to freight services and routine transportation to parking orbit, the Ganymede launcher offered something Earth’s moon couldn’t—self-guided tours of Jupiter’s spectacular Galilean moons.

  But the delta-vees required to send even an essentially free-falling capsule around the Jovian system and get it back again didn’t come cheap, and selling tour tickets at several hundred new dollars a pop wasn’t a cinch. Over the years the hucksters had evolved a graduated pitch:

  Free!—and available at any of the numerous agencies with offices on the main square—was an informational slide show, a minichip’s load of two-and-a-half-dimensional views of the Galilean moons as seen through the portholes of automated tour cruisers, with an accompanying narration consisting mostly of astronomical facts—cleverly presented by leading industrial psychologists to instill in the viewer the conviction that there was something interesting out there, and whatever it was wouldn’t be learned from this feeble presentation.

  “What’d you think, Marianne?” Mays asked her after they’d watched it.

  “If there’s something interesting out there, you wouldn’t know it from that feeble presentation,” she replied.

  For only a few new cents more, one could view a three-dee-feelie in the big Ultimax theater, just off the Shri Yantra square. Breathtaking fly-bys of Callisto, Ganymede, Europa, Io! See Grooved and Twisted Terrain! See History in the Craters! See the Largest Active Volcano in the Solar System! Outside the theater, buy sackfuls of Greasy Dim Sum and Fried Won Ton!

  “What’d you think of that, dear?”

  “Well—it seemed kind of flat.”

  And for just one new dollar more, you could ride Captain Io’s Mystery Tour, which mimicked a close pass right through the plume of Io’s biggest sulfur eruption. The tilting, vibrating seats, the high-speed, high-definition images, the screaming music and sound effects made a thrilling ride for adults and even for very young children.

  “How did that strike you, darling?”

  “My spine hurts.”

  When all else failed, there was the real thing.

  “Countdown’s under way! Let’s get the next couple of folks aboard. Move along smartly please!”

  Randolph Mays and Marianne Mitchell were led through the boarding stages of the Rising Moon Enterprises tour by brightly uniformed young men and women who all seemed to have been cloned from the same pair of traditionally golden-haired Southern Californians—Ken ’n’ Barbies who might have seemed strangely out of place in this Asian culture, were it not for the ancient Disneyland tradition, much admired in Earth’s Mysterious East. If any thoughts lurked behind these white-toothed, blue-eyed smiles, the customer would never know it; these kids were paid to stay cheerful.

  “Doesn’t your spacesuit fit? Why not? Oh dear, who told you to do it that way … sir?”

  “Now keep that helmet buttoned tight until after the launch, Ms… and have a good trip!”

  Marianne was too shrewd not to see the boredom and alarm that alternately lurked just beneath the smiling faces, and it made her uneasy. But unless she was willing to make a scene it was too late, for suddenly she and Mays were left alone, strapped into the cramped cabin of Moon Cruiser Number Four, lying side by side in standard suits that stank of a thousand users before them. They faced a videoplate screen wide enough to virtually fill the field of view. The console below it was so simple it looked fake. There were no instruments on this ship except those needed to monitor volume and frequency, no controls except those needed to change channels and adjust sound and picture quality.

  At the moment, the wide screen videoplate was displaying the view from the capsule of the launcher’s marshalling yard. It was about as attractive as a subway station in mid-20th-century Boston.

  “Somehow this wasn’t how I pictured the business of interplanetary investigative reporting, Randolph,” said Marianne. Her thin voice through the commlink sounded weary, on the verge of discouragement.

  “No one could possibly understand the back ground of the events on Amalthea without a first hand look at the Jovian system,” Mays replied. For all the effort in his delivery, he didn’t sound completely convincing.

  “I must be getting to know you too well,” Marianne murmured. “I could swear there’s something you’re not telling me.”

  The capsule lurched violently, and he was saved from the necessity of a reply. Somewhere machinery had begun to hum, jostling their capsule forward onto magnetic tracks. They were moving through the switchyard to join a string of other capsules, lined up for launch. Most carried cargo destined for transfer to ships in orbit, while others were going up empty, for more cargo came down to the surface of Ganymede than left it. Perhaps once a week, a couple of Moon Cruisers held tourists like themselves.

  “One minute to launch,” said the soothing androgynous voice on the speaker system. “Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip.”

  The image on the videoplate showed the capsule nearing the end of the electromagnetic cannon that would shortly fire them into space. Except for entertainment programs prerecorded on chip, only one other view could be accessed by the passengers, and that was a schematic of the planned trajectory.

  Tour itineraries varied constantly with the positions of the Galilean moons. Often no tours were possible, especially when Io was inaccessible, for Io, with its Technicolor landscape and its sulfur plumes a hundred kilometers high, was the moon tourists really wanted to see.

  When the little Moon Cruisers were running, an average circuit might last sixty hours or so, some two and a half days. What the tour operators didn’t emphasize was how very few minutes of this time would be spent in the near vicinity of any celestial body. The video player was stocked with an exciting selection of programs for all tastes, and the food and liquor cabinets were equally lavish. The personal hygiene facility
at the back of the capsule offered the ultimate in robomassage. Or a passenger could select sleep mode, and with the aid of precisely measured drug injections, skip the boring parts of the trip.

  “Thirty seconds to launch,” said the voice. “Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip.”

  Just as the video showed them about to enter the breech of the launcher, Mays reached up and tapped the plate’s selector switch.

  “Hey,” Marianne protested. “The launch is the last exciting thing that’s going to happen to us for eighteen hours. We’ll have plenty of time to look at the map later.”

  “That is not us on the screen, you know,” said Mays. “It’s prerecorded.” Mays was right. Where things could actually go wrong—however rarely—the tour operators thought it best to let the passengers see only a stage show, a shiny new capsule undergoing a perfect launch.

  “I want to see the launch, not look at some stupid map,” she said heatedly. “Even if it’s only fake-live, at least it’s educational.”

  “As you wish.” He flipped the channel back. Onscreen, the idealized launch capsule that might have been theirs, but wasn’t, was almost into the breech; electromagnetic coils were poised to seize it and hurl it forward. “Do you mind if I monitor the trajectory after we clear the rails? The map at least is generated in real time.”

  “Whatever you wish, Randol…”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the robot voice. “Ten seconds to launch. Please lie back and relax. Have a good trip. Nine seconds, eight, seven … just lie back and relax completely, your tour is about to begin … three, two, one.”

  The acceleration didn’t hit like a fist, it came like a feather pillow laid across their tummies—a feather pillow that magically increased in weight, becoming first a sack of flour, then a sack of cement, then an ingot of cast iron…

  “Only thirty more seconds until our launch is completed. Just relax.”