Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Groves addressed himself to the console, releasing the optical telescope from its tracking function, re-orienting it according to the computer’s coordinates for the incoming capsule. The fuzzy image of the gray tubular capsule with its belt of fuel tanks and its single little rocket motor came up on the big videoplate; at this distance it appeared to be motionless against the limb of Jupiter.

  The people on the flight deck studied the image in silence.

  “Remarkable,” said Jo Walsh.

  “Now is that luck? Or is that luck?” asked McNeil.

  “I think the answer is no both times,” Groves said dryly.

  Hawkins could stand it no more and broke his silence. “What is everyone clucking about?”

  McNeil explained. The apparently disabled capsule was oriented so that its rocket engine was perfectly aligned to brake its fall onto Amalthea. Even without the help of a retrorocket, the capsule was in the ideal attitude for a crash landing.

  “This looks less like an accident than it did two minutes ago,” Jo Walsh said.

  “Talk about party crashers; this Mays fellow takes the cake,” Groves said.

  “You mean they planned to land here?” Hawkins said, wiping his blond hair, slick with perspiration, away from his staring eyes.

  “Not that it makes much of a practical difference,” said McNeil jovially. “Whether they understand it or not, they’ll have taken damn near a lethal dose of rads by the time they arrive—we’ve no choice but to take them under our wing.”

  “All right, Tony, you’ve got your way,” said Walsh. “We’ll let them hit and pick up the pieces later.”

  “Let’s just hope they don’t hit on top of us,” Groves said brightly, ever the pixie.

  “Now that really would be pushing coincidence into the realm of the supernatural, wouldn’t it?” But Walsh’s riposte landed more heavily than she’d intended—no one laughed.

  Three hours passed. The timing was lousy: the disabled capsule was incoming on the sidescreen, the Manta was upcoming on the main screen. But Walsh was a cool head who’d handled many a more complex emergency.

  She figured Professor Forster and Blake Redfield could fend for themselves. Hawkins and McNeil were already suited up, standing by to rescue the passengers in the capsule when it hit. Groves stayed with her on the flight deck to help her keep track of everything and everybody.

  The capsule arrived first.

  Silence right to the end, too fast to follow by eye, it arrived in a flash of orange light and a hemispherical cloud of vapor.

  “Ouch,” said Tony Groves. Walsh just gave him a look, which they both knew meant, let’s hope you didn’t screw up the calculations.

  Within seconds, Hawkins and McNeil were out the Ventris’s airlock and jetting over the misty landscape toward the impact site.

  “God, they hit fast. Did you see rocket flare?” Hawkins asked, his throat tight. “You think they had time to brake?”

  “Too quick for my eyes,” McNeil replied. He was reluctant to say that there had been no retrorocket flare. “They could have been lucky. People have survived peak gees of sixty, seventy, even more.” Survived, if you could call it that…

  The point of impact wasn’t hard to find even by eye, for the crash had blown a huge hole in the mist and, like a giant smoke ring, a rolling donut-shaped cloud of weightless vapor held its shape and position over a shallow crater in the ice. In the exact center of the wide bowl, wreathed in steam, was the capsule, rapidly cooling but still glowing from impact.

  “Are you all right in there?” Hawkins was shouting into his suitcomm, as if they could somehow hear him better the closer he got and the louder he yelled. “Marianne, can you hear me? Mays?” He flew like an arrow toward the upright capsule.

  “Careful, don’t touch it until the temperature’s manageable,” said McNeil. “You’ll burn your gloves off.”

  “Wha … oh.” Hawkins drew back just in time. “They could be dying in there!”

  “Get hold of yourself, Bill. If you blow the hatch and they haven’t got suit pressure, you’ll finish them.”

  In his frustration, Hawkins hovered beside the steaming capsule and banged on its hatch with the butt of the heavy laser drill he’d brought along. The suitcomm brought them no sign of life inside.

  Walsh’s voice sounded in their helmets. “What’s the situation there, Angus?”

  “The capsule seems to be intact, but we haven’t established contact with the people inside.”

  “What do we do?” Bill Hawkins cried in anguish.

  “Dump the rocket and tanks and bring the whole thing back to the Ventris and shove it into the equipment bay,” Walsh ordered.

  By now the Moon Cruiser had cooled to black and the mist was rising. McNeil showed Hawkins how to trip the latches that fastened the strap-on fuel tanks and rocket motor to the capsule; they kept their distance as the explosive bolts blew the propulsion rig loose.

  Even with their suit maneuvering rockets on full, it took several seconds before the two men could get the big canister to move. Their helmet beams sent odd shafts through the fog as McNeil and Hawkins grappled with it; finally it rose reluctantly from the steaming fumarole it had blasted in the middle of the ice.

  The strange flying assemblage, two white-suited astronauts holding a burned and blackened wreck between them, came through the mist like something from a ruined Baroque ceiling, a mockery of apotheosis. The lights of the far-off Ventris beckoned them through the white limbo.

  The big ship’s equipment bay doors were split wide open. With the Manta still somewhere underwater and the Old Mole parked out on the ice, there was more than enough room inside for the battered Moon Cruiser. Groves had left the bridge and was on hand to help the others wrestle the capsule into the hold. Motors spun in dead silence and the clam-shell hold slowly resealed itself. Valves popped and air poured into the hold, imperceptibly at first, then with a whisper, then in a hissing crescendo.

  The men tore their face plates open.

  “Inside, inside. Get a reaction wrench on those.”

  “Watch out, those are explosive bolts—”

  “Careful, Hawkins!”

  “—let me disarm them before you blow my head off.”

  The Moon Cruiser’s hatch pulled away. Hawkins got his head inside first. He found two bodies, completely limp. Inside their helmets, their faces were black and their staring eyes were full of blood.

  18

  Angus McNeil, designated ship’s doctor, found himself rigging two life-support systems in the ship’s tiny gym, which doubled as the clinic. Bill Hawkins, still wearing his sweat-stinking spacesuit, glued himself to a monitor screen in the wardroom, watching McNeil work, until Jo Walsh finally talked him into getting out of his suit and into fresh clothes.

  Tony Groves was staying out of Hawkins’s way. Hawkins blamed Groves for what had happened—he’d persuaded the captain to let them crash—and for that matter, Groves blamed himself.

  Force against duration, that was the critical curve, and Groves thought he’d blown it. The fluffy sublimed stuff on the moon’s surface hadn’t been deep enough; the underlying ice had been too hard; the capsule had stopped too fast. Worst of all, the retrorocket hadn’t fired. The cynical faith that Groves and McNeil had expressed—that Mays had planned it all, that he knew exactly what he was doing—had apparently been misplaced.

  Hawkins, meanwhile, was driving himself into ecstasies of despair. Unable to help or even get close to the clinic, given the cramped quarters, he was calling up the entries under “kinetic trauma” from the wardroom’s library, trying to make himself an expert.

  Case histories, garnered from accident reports in over a century’s worth of space travel, made grim reading: “Onset of 8,500 gees per second averaged to 96 gees in an exposure lasting 0.192 seconds was fatal within 4 hours with massive gross pathology… The 8,500-gee per second rise time to 96 peak is 0.011 second, corresponding to 23 Hertz, which excites whole-body resonance… Or
ientation of impact force applied to the body relates to axes of internal organ displacements, hydraulic pressure pulsation in blood vessels, and interaction of head, thorax and pelvic masses between spinal couplings…”

  Mays had gotten the worst of it, with a broken neck and lower spine and a severed spinal cord. Marianne, lighter, younger—and shorter—therefore less massive and more flexible, had broken no bones. But her internal organs had suffered as Mays’s had, having been subjected to “whole-body resonance.”

  Hawkins couldn’t bring himself to care if Mays died. But Marianne’s death would desolate him, and for that he would blame himself.

  The Manta was coming up from below. Once clear of the boiling core and its turbulence, with communication between the Ventris and the Manta restored, Blake and the professor had been able to monitor events overhead.

  The submarine rose from the seething surface of Amalthea and made its way unaided through the cloying mists of the vacuum, using short bursts of its auxiliary rockets, to the hold of the Ventris. They managed to dock the awkward little makeshift spacecraft—which had never been intended to be one for more than a few seconds at a time—without incident. Through the mists, the copper sky above the Ventris held a bright new object, a Space Board cutter keeping station in Amalthea’s wake.

  Blake and Forster got through the equipment bay airlock in time to hear the announcement from the ship’s computer over the intercom: CWSS 9, Board of Space Control, now holding in orbit. Inspector Ellen Troy requests permission to board Ventris.

  Up on the flight deck, Jo Walsh said, “Permission granted. Advise Inspector Troy to use the main airlock.”

  I’m already here, Sparta’s voice on her suitcomm came over the cabin speakers. Outside your door. Any problem coming inside?

  “Come aboard,” said Walsh.

  Blake and the professor climbed onto the flight deck as Sparta came through the overhead hatch, helmet in hand. “What’s the condition of the casualties?” she asked.

  “Not good, Inspector,” said Walsh. “Your timing is excellent, though”—suspiciously excellent, she didn’t bother to add. “We need to get them aboard that cutter of yours and into first-rate medical facilities.”

  “Sorry, too late,” said Sparta.

  “What do you mean, too late?” Walsh glared at her.

  “Cutter’s on its way home.” Sparta nodded toward the navigation flatscreen. At that moment the blip of the cutter brightened and the screen displayed the fast-rising trajectory of the departing ship.

  “What’s this all about?” Forster demanded.

  “The quarantine of Amalthea is officially ended,” Sparta said to Forster. “We’re on our own here, Professor. I urgently need to have a word with you in private.”

  Walsh interrupted him before he could reply. “I don’t know what the politics of this are, but I guess they must be pretty important,” said Walsh, who’d put in tens of thousands of hours on the flight decks of Space Board cutters. “I hope you’re prepared to accept responsibility for the deaths of those two people, Inspector. You’ve sent away their only good chance to survive.”

  Sparta faced her old acquaintance, who managed to contain her anger only because her discipline was greater than her pride. “I do take responsibility, Jo. If there’s anything I can do to prevent it, they won’t die.”

  Inside the makeshift clinic there was barely enough room for both crash victims. Loose straps kept them from floating away from their pallets in the near-zero gravity, although they would not have gotten far, entangled in webs of tubes and wires that monitored heart rhythms, brain rhythms, lung function, circulatory system, nervous system, digestion, chemical and hormonal balances…

  On top of damage from torn tissues, broken bones, and displaced internal organs, Mays and Mitchell were suffering from the effects of ionizing radiation absorbed in a lightly shielded capsule during more than eight hours inside Jupiter’s radiation belt. That damage posed more of a problem than fractured bones, ruptured flesh, or severed nerves.

  Through tubes of microscopic diameter, pre-packaged molecules entered their bodies to course like emergency vehicles through their bloodstream. Some were natural biochemicals, others were tiny artificial structures, “tailored nanocytes,” that worked not by snipping and pinching and whirring, not like Lilliputian machines, but by lightning catalysis, the complexification and decomplexification of interlocking molecules. Frayed muscles and ligaments and organ flesh, torn nerve fibers, fractured bones were sought out; damaged bits were gobbled away and digested, the waste products scavenged for their constituent molecules; replacements were constructed on site from the sea of balanced nutrients in which they swam by incalculable swarms of natural and artificial proteins and nucleic acids…

  Sparta joined them in the clinic and stayed there the whole time, with the PIN spines beneath her fingers extended and inserted into the ports of the machine monitors. Beneath her forehead, the dense tissue of her soul’s eye reviewed the analyses, partly smelling the complex equations that presented themselves for her mental inspection, partly seeing them written out on the screen of her consciousness. From time to time, several times a second, she made subtle adjustments to the chemical recipe.

  Six hours passed—less than half a circuit of Jupiter, for Amalthea was less massive now and had gradually moved itself into a higher, slower orbit.

  Life-signs monitors went to yellow: the patients were out of danger. They’d be tired and sore when they woke up, and it would take some getting used to the stiffness of their repaired flesh, but in every measurable respect they were well on their way to good health. Sparta had known it before the monitors announced it. She had already gone to the cabin they’d assigned her and was sound asleep, unconscious from exhaustion.

  Blake was there when she woke up. It was his cabin too.

  She was still wearing the velvety black tunic and pants she’d favored since their reunion on Ganymede. In Blake’s eyes she’d always looked sexy, wearing her usual shiny don’t-touch-me suit or even in a spacesuit, a bag of canvas and metal, but these days she was starting to dress like she didn’t mind people thinking so. It was less a surprise than it might have been when she smiled wearily and began taking off her crushed and slept-in clothes.

  “What’s it about… Linda?”

  Naked now, she sat on the bunk facing him, folding her bare legs into lotus position. “It’s about the Knowledge, and what it really means.” She easily resumed the conversation they’d begun on Ganymede as if no time had passed.

  He nodded. “I knew it was something like that.”

  “I was never initiated, you know. I was never Free Spirit or Salamander. It’s only from your initiation that I know whatever details I do.”

  “I always thought the main thing to know about that was that they really would have let me die—and anybody else who couldn’t get through it.”

  “They were looking for supermen,” she said. “But there must have been more to it than pride. Back at the Lodge I spent hours quizzing my father and the commander and the kids on the staff, finding out what they knew of Free Spirit practices, what they had learned of the Knowledge, how they interpreted what they knew. I tried to see if it fit with my own understanding of the Knowledge. I was never taught, you know; they programmed it right into the neurons.”

  “That’s what they were trying to wipe out?”

  She nodded. “I learned a lot this year, some from other people but most from self-guided deep probes of my own memory. But the most insistent image came from me: a vivid experience I had when I was … crazy. There was a moment in the darkness in the crypt under Kingman’s place, St. Joseph’s Hall—when I looked into the pit—under the ceiling map of Crux. There was a head of Medusa on the stone that covered it.”

  “The Goddess as Death. You told me.”

  “In a dream I had, my name was Circe. She was Death, too.”

  “You still see yourself that way?” he asked carefully.

  “We�
��re many things, Blake, both of us. In the pit, there were scrolls and the chip of Falcon’s reconstruction and a bronze image of the Thunderer, but what I see whenever I think of that moment are the two little skeletons, so delicate—so yellow and old. Infants, identical in size. I knew immediately that they must have been twins. And I knew what they symbolized. Like the king and queen of the alchemists, they were the Heavenly Twins—and the Heavenly Parents—Gold and Silver, the male Sun and the female Moon.”

  “Yes, that’s what Salamander say,” Blake said.

  She smiled. “I warned you it was a long story.”

  “You’re getting to the part I love. The old-book part.”

  “All right. The point is that for thousands of years there’s been a cult of Knowledge, using lots of different names to hide its existence. Free Spirit is a pretty recent one, from the 12th or 13th century. And for all those centuries they’ve been busy putting out false knowledge, to screen their precious truth.”

  Blake couldn’t restrain himself. “Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Greek mythology, it’s loaded with hints. It’s there right in Herodotus, those tales of the Persian Magi—they were the historical adepts of the Knowledge. And Hermes Trismegistus, those books that were supposedly priestly revelations of the ancient Egyptians but were really Hellenistic fictions concocted by worshippers of the Pancreator to put people off the track. Weren’t they marvelous fantasies though, wonderfully vague and suggestive? Some people still believe that stuff today! And the so-called great religions… Don’t get me started.”

  She smiled. “I’ll try not to.”

  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was a lie,” he said vehemently. “The original Free Spirit heresy itself—poor people thumbing their noses at the church and getting crucified—but those were just the shock troops. Half the prophetae by night were cardinals and bishops by day.” He paused and saw her smiling at him. He laughed and shook his head. “Sorry. You’re supposed to be telling it.”