Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  She was quick even when the ideas were strange, so the moral force of her anger was slightly sapped by a suspicion of what Forster would say next; the best she could do was display her contempt for his self-satisfaction. “To hell with your numbers. Will you for God’s sake get to the point?”

  “Mm, yes, as you say.” Remarkably he was looking almost sheepish by now. “We did throw him completely away from Amalthea, toward Jupiter. But the extra velocity we gave him was trivial; he’s still moving in practically the same orbit as before. The most he can do, computer says, is drift about a hundred kilometers inward. In one revolution, twelve hours or so, he’ll come right back where he started. Without us having to do anything at all.”

  Marianne locked eyes with the professor. To the other two watchers on the flight deck, Walsh and Hawkins, there was no doubting the meaning of the exchange: Forster was ashamed of himself, but defiant, for he believed that what he had done needed doing; Marianne was relieved, but frustrated and annoyed at having been duped.

  “Which is why you wouldn’t let me talk to him,” she said. “Randolph’s smart enough to realize that he’s in no danger. He would have told me that.”

  “That’s why I wouldn’t let you talk to him, yes,” Forster admitted. “As for his sophistication with orbital mechanics, I warned you of that myself. Indeed, Sir Randolph was so confident of his ability in that regard that he risked your life without compunction.”

  She turned to Hawkins. “You knew.”

  Hawkins steadily returned her accusing gaze. “What the professor hasn’t told you, Marianne, is that Mays tried to murder us all. And made you his accomplice. You two didn’t knock us out for just a few minutes; you gassed us good. Then he set the ship to drift into the radiation belt.”

  The blood drained from her face, but she said, “So what? Radiation effects are curable.” It came out with more defiance than she felt. “I have firsthand knowledge of that fact, too.”

  “So long as someone’s awake to administer the cure. You two dosed us to keep us unconscious for a long time, too long to save ourselves after we woke up. He kept you alive to support his story—but he made sure you wouldn’t really witness a thing.”

  Marianne stared at Hawkins, her face slowly creasing with the horror of what he was saying. She shifted her wavering gaze to the professor. “Then … why would he bother hiding the statue?”

  “He didn’t bother, of course,” said Forster. “I gave your map to Blake to put under seal with the rest of the evidence against him. Mays told you an involved tale so that you would send him back here to the Ventris. It was all your idea, Marianne. You are the guilty party; the innocent Sir Randolph Mays would never have done it on his own. Or so he would have told the Space Board.”

  “If you knew, why did you go through with all of this?” Marianne asked.

  Forster said quietly, “So that you would know too.”

  25

  “We’ve got you, Sir Randolph. You’ll have been listening in, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  McNeil and Groves closed on Mays an hour after Forster told them to retrieve him; he was only twenty kilometers up, and they located him without too much trouble by tracking the radio beacon on his suit, which they’d left intact when they disabled his suitcomm. His radiation exposure would be no worse than that of his rescuers.

  “No need to make the long round trip after all. Ms. Mitchell valued your life too much,” said Groves.

  “Yes, well … good-hearted person. Quick study. Have to give her that.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve rather shaken her faith in you.”

  Mays made no reply.

  Of the two crewmen, quick little Tony Groves was more inclined to play Mercurius, the psychologist; it seemed to him that something had gone out of Sir Randolph Mays, some dark force of resistance, for he came down with them very listlessly out of the bronze-colored, Jupiter-dominated sky.

  It occurred to the navigator to suggest to Professor Forster, that famous rationalist, that now would be a good time to question Mays more closely. Perhaps the historian-journalist was willing to admit, if not defeat, something closer to the unvarnished truth about himself.

  First they had to get back to the Michael Ventris, a barely visible speck of light alongside the glowing fluff-ball of Amalthea, which was virtually plummeting through the night, visibly shifting against the background of fixed stars.

  Even as they watched, diving full speed toward the satellite on their suit maneuvering systems, Amalthea’s aspect changed. The last of the icy husk melted into hot water, and the last of the hot water boiled away in a flash. A rapidly dissipating whiff of vapor slid away, ever so slowly, like the silk scarf of a magician lifting in interminable slow motion and with exquisite grace, to reveal—

  —what they had known was there but could not have seen with their own eyes before now, the mirror-finished spacecraft, the world that was a spaceship. The diamond moon.

  Just then, Jo Walsh’s voice broke in on their suitcomms: “Angus, Tony, get back here as fast as you can. We’ve got an emergency on our hands.”

  “What’s up, Jo?”

  “Give it all you’ve got, guys. Bleed Mr. Mays’s maneuvering gas if you must. Looks like the neighborhood is about to go critical, if our informants know what the hell they’re talking about.”

  And on the flight deck of the Ventris:

  “…bring the Ventris into the one-eighty equatorial hold. I can’t be sure, but I think you’ve got only about twenty minutes to accomplish this,” Sparta’s quiet voice was saying over the speakers.

  “Twenty minutes,” Marianne exclaimed softly. She looked about as if someone could save the situation. But Forster and the captain were staring at the blank videoplate as if by force of concentration they could see Sparta on it. Hawkins was chewing his lip, looking at Marianne helplessly. Even Blake, whose normal impulse in emergencies was to go out and blow something up, stood glumly by, inactive.

  Forster said, “We’re still missing McNeil and Groves, Inspector Troy.”

  “Mays?” came Sparta’s voice on the link.

  “Yes, he’s with them.”

  “Are you in contact?”

  “Captain Walsh has just now instructed them to make all possible speed, but we estimate that they are perhaps fifteen minutes away from our current position.”

  On the bridge of the Ventris all was silent for a moment, until Sparta’s voice spoke again from the radiolink. “You will have to enter the hold now. They’ll have to come in when they arrive.”

  “Their maneuvering fuel…” Marianne began.

  Sparta’s voice continued. “There seems to be no leeway here—it’s my sense of the situation that the … the world-ship is in an automated countdown. And that we’ve already gone past the point of no return.”

  “But Inspector Troy…”

  “Sorry, sir, give me a moment”—Walsh interrupted Forster’s reply with a hired captain’s diplomatic firmness, which under her politeness brooked no contradiction—“I’ll be getting the ship underway, alerting the men. You and Inspector Troy can carry on your debate again shortly.”

  Walsh busily communed with the computer of the Ventris—it was a bit more work than usual to get the ship started without the help of her engineer—and programmed it to head for the equator of the diamond moon. “Better strap in, sir. Blake, please take the engineer’s couch. Ms. Mitchell, Mr. Hawkins, down below, please. Secure for course adjustment.”

  A moment later the maneuvering rockets went off like howitzers, hard enough and loud enough to give them all headaches. The Ventris curved smartly inward, toward the black hole that was even then spiraling open in the side of the glistening world-ship.

  McNeil looked at Groves. They’d just been briefed by Walsh over their suitlinks. “Any help, Mr. Navigator?”

  “Well, Mr. Engineer, I’ve just run a rather preliminary estimate on my sleeve”—he tapped the computer locator pad on his suit’s forearm—“and
it puts us in a bit of a bind. To make the vector change, we’ve got to save what fuel we’ve got. But if we save what we’ve got, we arrive, oh, a tad late.”

  “We haven’t got the delta-vees, then?”

  “That’s putting it succinctly.”

  “Any recommendations?”

  Inside his suit, Groves visibly shrugged. “I say, let’s go like bats out of hell and hope somebody thinks of something before we run out of gas.”

  McNeil looked sideways at their captive. “S’pose you should have a vote, Mays. Not that we have to count it.”

  Mays said, “No matter. I’ve nothing to add.”

  They hit their suit thrusters then, and dived toward the diamond moon.

  The Ventris entered the huge dome originally explored by Forster and Troy in the Manta submarine. Its cathedral-like space was a filigree of ink and silver, drawn with a fine steel needlepoint—for it was full of vacuum now, not water, and its intricate architecture was severely illuminated by in pouring Jupiter light.

  From the floor a bundle of gleaming mechanisms, flexible and alive as tentacles, sprang up to grasp the Ventris and draw it inward. They turned it as they carried it, so that finally it lay on its side, firmly entangled in a nest of sucking tendrils like a fish that had blundered into the grip of an anemone.

  The Ventris was aligned so that it was parallel to the axis of the world-ship, pointed in the direction of what they had called the south pole. On the flight deck, what feeble gravity there was tended to draw people to one wall instead of the floor, but the force was so slight that the sensation was not so much like falling as drifting sideways in a slow current.

  “The Manta’s got fuel,” Blake said to Walsh. “I can ride it out toward them and abandon it, use my suit gas to help them come in.”

  “Sorry, Blake,” she said shortly. “You’d use up your suit gas and more, just matching their trajectory.”

  “I insist upon making the attempt,” Blake said, with all the angry dignity he could muster.

  “I refuse to have four casualties instead of three.”

  “Captain…”

  “If there were the slightest chance”—Walsh was rigid; two of her long-time companions, her oldest friends, were among the men she proposed to abandon—“but there is not. Run the numbers, if you like. Please prove me wrong.”

  Forster—strapped into his couch and brooding, his face in his hands—had stayed out of the dispute. Now he lifted his sad gaze to Blake. “Do as the captain suggests, Blake. Run the numbers.”

  “Sir, computer is using its own fuel estimates. I suggest… I’m saying they’re low.”

  “Or high,” Walsh shot back at him.

  “Run the numbers, Blake,” Forster said. “Leave Mays’s mass out of the calculation.”

  Walsh looked at Blake without saying anything. She was asking him to take the burden.

  “Sorry, Jo. Professor,” Blake whispered. “I won’t say I’d be sorry to see them make that choice for themselves. But…”

  Walsh turned to the console and tapped numbers into the computer manually; it was not the sort of thing you told the machine to do in voice mode. The numbers came back, and the potential trajectories were graphically displayed.

  Walsh and the rest of them stared at the plate. “Well,” she said, “let’s hope that when the idea occurs to them, they’re less squeamish than … than I am.”

  “What are you talking about?” Marianne demanded. She and Bill Hawkins had at that moment arrived on the flight deck.

  Forster didn’t look at her, but he spoke loudly and flatly, “With Mays’s fuel—but without his mass—McNeil and Groves have a chance to make it back here before Inspector Troy’s deadline.”

  “A rapidly diminishing chance,” growled Walsh.

  Marianne sifted that. “You want them to abandon Randolph?” she said.

  “I wish they would.” Forster looked her in the eye. “But I doubt that they will.”

  Marianne could have expressed outrage or horror. But she didn’t.

  Inward toward Jupiter, Tony Groves said, “We just passed it, mate. Point of no return.”

  “Meaning if nobody comes to our rescue, we sail on forever,” said McNeil.

  “’Fraid so.”

  For a moment their suitcomms were filled with nothing but Jupiter static; then Mays spoke. “You’ve got my suit fuel. Just get rid of me. Perhaps you can still save yourselves.”

  “Not the sort of thing that’s usually done,” said Groves.

  “And of course you’re the sort who always does the usual thing,” Mays said spitefully.

  “I think he’s trying to provoke us, Angus,” Groves said.

  “Won’t do him any good. All déjà vu to me,” said McNeil. “Sure, kill off the odd inconvenient fellow and you may live a bit longer. Then try living it down.”

  Groves clucked his tongue. “I say, was that a pun?”

  “Clever you.”

  They sailed on into space, their suit rockets pushing them toward the diamond moon that now almost filled their sky—knowing that they would have no way of stopping, or even of turning, once they reached it.

  “Frankly,” said Mays, “it doesn’t really matter to me whether you two live or die. I would like to make a statement before I die.”

  “We’re listening,” said McNeil.

  “Not to you two. To … to Forster, I suppose. To that woman Troy, or whatever she calls herself these days.”

  McNeil keyed his suitcomm. “Can you still pick us up, Professor?”

  The answer came back so clear that Forster might have been in a suit next to them. “I’ve been listening in, Angus. Say what you have to do, Sir Randolph.”

  “I’m listening too, Sir Randolph,” Sparta said, as clearly as Forster.

  Mays sighed deeply, and took a deep breath of his suit’s cold air. “My name is not Randolph Mays,” he said. “You may know me by other names. William Laird. Jean-Jacques Lequeu. I am none of these. My name does not matter.”

  “That’s right, your name doesn’t matter,” Sparta said, her voice as close as if she were inside his head—and to him the sound of her must have been like the hissing of a lizard, for he had been foolish enough to believe she really did not know him. “You thought you had killed my parents. You thought you had created me. But nothing you did made any difference. None of it mattered, Mr. Nemo. Neither do you.”

  “We do want to hear what you have to say,” Forster said hastily.

  “Well, you will hear it,” Mays said wearily. “The cursed woman is right: I don’t matter anymore. But we prophetae were not mad. We preserved the Knowledge, the Knowledge that made her what she is … that brought all of us to this place.”

  We committed horrible crimes in the name of the Knowledge.

  Perhaps you think it strange that I can admit this so plainly. Conventional thinkers—most people—believe that the daring criminal, the outrageous criminal, the man or woman who murders innocents in cold blood, blows them up in some anonymous bombing or slaughters them with a machine gun, never having seen them before, not knowing anything about them, that such an implacable murderer, as opposed to the congenial spouse-killer or child-butcher, could not possibly be possessed of a conscience. How pitifully mistaken.

  Mays flew alone through space, reciting his macabre soliloquy while the shining bulk of the world-ship expanded to one side. McNeil and Groves were alone too, some distance away—not out of any sense of privacy or decorum, but because they had released their grip on him and in the course of several hundred meters had simply drifted way. All three spacesuits were depleted of maneuvering fuel; the men drifted and turned randomly, sometimes facing each other, sometimes staring away into empty space, or at the mirror surface of the thing that had been Amalthea, or into the awesome cloud-cauldron of Jupiter.

  We prophetae knew well what we did. We ached for those we sacrificed. The ancient primitives who prayed for the souls of the deer they ate were no more devout than we.


  We committed horrible crimes and kept our good cheer, as those before us had done for milleniums. In the end, we believed, the sum of history and the fate of humankind would exculpate us; men and women would bless us.

  None of us hoped to live forever, and if a few—or a great many—innocents had to die before Paradise arrived, it was all to the good, for Paradise would arrive that much sooner; that many more would benefit in future.

  And so, in the name of the Knowledge, to hurry the day when the Pancreator would return, we made another attempt to realize the Emperor of the Last Days, the feast of the gods. We created her.

  Or, as my colleagues and contemporaries insist upon reminding me, I created her. But I cannot take all the credit. Her parents—those subtle, lying Hungarians—sold her to me. Under my direction, a few modifications were made. She refused to cooperate. She, this child, knew the Knowledge better than the knights and elders, she insinuated. Too bad I was unsuccessful in disposing of my failure.

  After she escaped, only a fistful of years passed before she showed us that seven thousand years of the Knowledge were, to phrase it mincingly, incomplete. The Venusian tablets revealed that our translations were in error, especially our translation of the Martian plaque. There would be no signal from the homeworld in Crux. The Doradus, the mainstay of what was to be our final assault, was thrown away by that fool Kingman.

  The monstrous woman went further, striking at us in our most secret strongholds—I myself came within a hair’s-breadth of death at her hands. Then Howard Falcon, who was to have been the new Emperor, failed to rouse the Pancreator on Jupiter; the so-called world of the gods was only a world of elephantine animals. None of us had foreseen the significance of Amalthea; there was not a word of it in the Knowledge. Our plans and our pride were cast in the dust.

  We knights and elders of the prophetae—those of us who survived—lost courage at last. We faced the bitter truth, that everything we had worked for and believed was in error. We had earned no privileges by virtue of our false secrets; if Paradise did come to Earth, we were not among the chosen.