Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  I took the company rocket plane; we approached Trincomalee just after dawn. Below the plane I caught a glimpse of the huge, complex, harbor, whose surface geography I’ve never quite mastered—a maze of capes, islands, interconnecting waterways, and basins large enough to hold all the navies of Earth. I could see the power project’s big white control building, in a somewhat flamboyant architectural style, on a headland overlooking the Indian Ocean—the site was pure propaganda, although of course if I’d been North Continental staff I’d have called it “public relations.”

  Not that I blamed my clients; they had good reason to be proud of this, the most ambitious attempt yet to harness the thermal energy of the sea.

  It was not the first attempt. There had been unsuccessful ones, beginning with the Frenchman Georges Claude’s in Cuba in the 1930s, and later ones in Africa and Hawaii and in many other places. All of these projects depended on the same interesting fact: even in the tropics the sea a couple of kilometers down is almost at freezing point. When billions of tonnes of water are concerned, this temperature difference represents a colossal amount of energy—and a fine challenge to the engineers of power-starved countries.

  Claude and his successors had tried to tap this energy with low-pressure steam engines. The North Continentals—and particularly the Russians, who were foremost in the work—used a much simpler and more direct method. For a couple of centuries it has been known that electric currents flow in many materials if one end of a sample is heated and the other cooled, and ever since the 1940s Russian scientists had been working to put this thermoelectric effect to practical use. Their earliest devices had not been very efficient—though still good enough to power thousands of radios by the heat of kerosene lamps! But late in the century they had made the crucial breakthrough.

  The technical details were outside my expertise, and though I installed the power elements at the cold end of the system, I never really saw them, covered as they were in layers of shielding and anticorrosive paint. All I know is that they formed a big grid, a bit like lots of old-fashioned steam radiators bolted together.

  As I stepped from the plane I recognized most of the faces in the little crowd waiting on the Trinco airstrip. Friends and enemies, they all seemed relieved to see me. Especially Chief Engineer Lev Shapiro, who greeted me with a dark scowl…

  “Well, Lev,” I said as the robot station wagon drove us away, “what’s the trouble?”

  “We don’t know,” he said, remarkably frankly. He spoke like an Oxonian but he was one of those Russian Jews whose ancestors had bucked the odds and decided to ride out the troubles when the Soviet Empire started coming apart in the late 20th century; I always speculated that that was one of the reasons he was more of a nationalist than was fashionable these days—indeed, more of a Russian chauvinist than most of the other Russians I knew.

  “It’s your job to find out,” he growled at me, “and put it right.”

  “Well, what happened?”

  “Everything worked perfectly up to the full-power tests,” he answered. “Output was within five percent of estimate until oh-one-thirty-four Tuesday morning.” He grimaced; obviously that time was engraved on his heart. “Then the voltage started to fluctuate violently, so we cut the load and watched the meters. I thought some idiot of a skipper had hooked the cables—you know the trouble we’ve taken to avoid that happening—so we switched on the searchlights and looked out to sea. There wasn’t a ship in sight. Anyway, who would have wanted to anchor just outside the harbor on a clear, calm night?”

  I couldn’t answer that, so I said nothing, waiting for him to go on.

  He let go a frustrated sigh. “There was nothing we could do except watch the instruments and keep testing. I’ll show you all the graphs when we get to the office. After four minutes everything went open circuit. We can locate the break exactly, of course—and it’s in the deepest part, right at the grid. It would be there, and not at this end of the system,” he added gloomily, pointing out the window.

  We were just driving past the solar pond, the equivalent of the boiler in a conventional heat engine. This was an idea the Russians had borrowed from the Israelis (Russian-born Israelis, no doubt—I sometimes wondered if Lev appreciated the irony). It was simply a shallow lake, blackened on the bottom, holding a concentrated solution of brine; it acted as a very efficient heat trap, so that the sun’s rays bring the liquid nearly to the boiling point. Submerged in it were the hot grids of the thermoelectric system—every centimeter of two fathoms down.

  Massive cables connected them to my department, about a hundred degrees colder and a thousand meters lower, in the undersea canyon that descends from the entrance of Trinco harbor.

  “I suppose you checked for earthquakes,” I said, not hopefully.

  “Of course.” Lev’s tone implied that I had called him an idiot. “There was nothing on the seismograms.”

  “What about whales?” More than a year ago, when the main conductors were being ran out to sea, I’d told the engineers about a drowned sperm whale once found entangled in a telegraph cable a kilometer down off the coast of South America. “They can be big trouble.”

  About a dozen similar cases were known but this, apparently, was not one of them. “That was the second thing we thought of,” Lev growled. “We got onto Fisheries, and the navy and air force. No whale sign anywhere along the coast.”

  It was at that point that I stopped theorizing. I’d overheard something from the back of the station wagon that made me a little uncomfortable. Like all Swiss I’m good at languages, and in the course of the job I’d picked up a fair amount of Russian—although one didn’t need to be much of a linguist to recognize sabotash.

  Dimitri Karpukhin has said the dirty word. Karpukhin sported some unconvincing title on the organization chart, but he was in fact a political agitator and spy, one of the old-style Russian supremacists who wanted to see that other S in USSR changed back to Socialist—moreover, who believed the Soviets deserved a bigger role in the North Continental Treaty Alliance. Nobody liked Karpukhin, not even Lev Shapiro, but since he worked for one of the biggest Russian consortiums he had to be tolerated.

  Not that sabotage was out of the question, in fact. There were a great many people who would not have been brokenhearted if the Trinco Power Project failed. Politically, the prestige of the North Continentals was committed, and to some extent the prestige of the Russian Republic, but more important, billions were involved economically. If hydrothermal plants proved a success, they would compete with Arabian and Persian and North African oil (not to mention relieving the pressure on Russia’s reserves), as well as with North American coal, with African uranium…

  But I could not really believe in sabotage. Espionage, maybe—it was just possible that someone had made a clumsy attempt to grab a sample of the grid. Even this seemed unlikely. I could count on my fingers the number of people in the world who could tackle such a job—and half of them were on my payroll!

  The underwater videolink arrived that evening. By working through the night we had cameras, monitors, and over a mile of cable loaded aboard a launch. As we pulled out of the harbor I thought I saw a familiar figure standing on the jetty, but it was too far away to be certain, and I had other things on my mind. (If you must know, I am not a good sailor; I am really happy only underneath the sea.)

  We took a careful fix on the Round Island lighthouse and stationed ourselves directly above the grid. The self-propelled camera, looking like a midget bathyscaphe, went over the side. We went with it in spirit, watching the monitors.

  The water was extremely clear and extremely empty, but as we neared the bottom there were a few signs of life. A small shark came and stared at us. Then a pulsating blob of jelly went drifting by, followed by a thing like a big spider with hundreds of hairy legs tangling and twisting together (I know these creatures have names; I’ve been told what they are, dozens of times, but they don’t stick in my memory, which seems to store only technical matte
rs). At last the sloping canyon wall swam into view. We were right on target, for there were the thick cables running down into the depths, just as I had seen them when I made the final check of the installation six months ago.

  I turned on the low-power jets and let the camera drift down the power cables. They seemed in perfect condition, still firmly anchored by the pitons we had driven into the rock. Not until we came to the grid itself was there any sign of trouble…

  Have you ever seen the radiator grille of a robocar whose guidance has failed and driven it into a lamppost? Well, one section of the power grid looked very much like that. Something had battered it in, as if a madman had gone to work on it with a sledgehammer.

  There were gasps of astonishment and anger from the people looking over my shoulder at the videoplates. I heard sabotash muttered again; for the first time I considered it seriously.

  The only other reasonable explanation was a falling boulder. But the slopes of the canyon had been carefully mapped and, where necessary, re-contoured against this very possibility.

  Whatever the cause of the damage, a section of the grid had to be replaced, which would not be done until my Lobster, all twenty tonnes of it, arrived from the Spezia dockyard where it was kept between jobs.

  “Well?” Lev Shapiro demanded, when I had finished my visual inspection and stored the videoplate’s sorry spectacle on chip. “How long will it take?”

  I refused to commit myself. The first thing I ever learned in the underwater business is that no job turns out as you expect. Cost and time estimates can never be firm because it’s not until you are halfway through a contract that you know exactly what you’re up against.

  My private guess was three days. So I said, “If everything goes well, it shouldn’t take more than a week.”

  Lev groaned audibly. “Can’t you do it quicker?”

  “I won’t tempt fate by making rash promises. Anyway, if I do it in a week, that still gives you two weeks before you’re scheduled to come online.”

  He had to be content with that, though he kept nagging at me all the way back into the harbor. Then, when we arrived onshore, Lev found he had something else to think about.

  “Morning, Joe,” I said to the man who was still waiting patiently on the jetty. “I thought I recognized you, on the way out. What brings you here?”

  “I was going to ask you the very same question, Klaus.”

  “You’d better put that through my boss. Chief Engineer Shapiro, meet Joe Watkins, science correspondent for US Newstime.”

  Lev’s response was not cordial. Normally there was noting he liked better than talking to news-hounds, who showed up at the rate of about one a week. Now, as the target date for the commencement of power production approached, they would be flying in from all directions—including from Moscow. At the present moment, Tass would be every bit as unwelcome as Newstime.

  Karpukhin was on hand, of course, and it was amusing to see him take charge of the situation, blitzing Joe with assurances that we were merely reconfirming the superb preparedness of the Russian-designed facility, etc., etc. And from that moment on, Joe found that he had permanently attached to him as guide, philosopher, and drinking companion, a smooth young PR type named Sergei Markov. Despite all Joe’s efforts, the two were inseparable—or more accurately, Joe realized he could not separate himself from Sergei.

  That evening, weary after a long conference in Shapiro’s office, I caught up with the two of them. We had dinner at the district government’s rest-house, where I was staying while onshore—actually a rather posh hotel and club.

  “What’s going on, Klaus?” Joe asked, managing to sound pathetic. “I smell something interesting, but no one will admit to a thing.”

  I toyed with my curry, trying to separate the bits that were safe from those that would take off the top of my head. “You can’t expect me to discuss a client’s affairs,” I replied, stagily glaring at Sergei, who grinned back at me like the idiot he wasn’t.

  “You were talkative enough when you were doing the survey for the Gibraltar Bridge,” Joe reminded me.

  “Well yes—and I appreciate the write-up you gave us. But this time there are trade secrets involved. I’m, ah, making some last-minute adjustments to improve the efficiency of the system.” And that, of course, was the truth; I was indeed hoping to raise the efficiency of the system, from its present value of exactly zero.

  “Thank you very much,” Joe responded sarcastically.

  “Enough about this—you know the project as well as I do,” I said, trying to head him off. “What’s your latest crackbrained theory? Aliens still doing surgery on cattle in the American west? UFO's still cutting circles in English hayfields?”

  For a highly competent science writer, Joe has an odd liking for the bizarre and the improbable. Perhaps it’s a form of escapism; I happen to know that he also writes science fiction, though this is a well-kept secret from his sobersided journalistic employers. But while he has a secret fondness for poltergeists and ESP and flying saucers, his real specialty is lost continents.

  “I am working on a couple of new ideas,” he admitted. “In fact they cropped up while I was doing the research on this story.”

  “Go on,” I said, not yet daring to look up from the analysis of my curry.

  “The other day I came across a very old map—Ptolemy’s, if you’re interested—of Sri Lanka. It reminded me of another old map in my collection, and I turned it up. Sure enough, there was the same central mountain, the same arrangement of rivers flowing to the sea. But this was a map of Atlantis.”

  “Oh, no,” I said with a groan, risking a glance at him. “Last time we talked, you had me convinced that Atlantis was in the Mediterranean. Rhodes or Crete or someplace.”

  Joe gave me his most engaging grin. “I could be wrong, couldn’t I? Anyway, I’ve got a much more striking piece of evidence. Think about the name of this island.”

  “Yes? Sri Lanka?”

  “Sri Lanka,” he said with a vigorous nod. “That name was around a very long time, you know, long before the Sinhalese adopted it in place of Ceylon.”

  “Good Lord, Joe, you can’t be serious,” for I saw what he was driving at. “Lanka—Atlantis?” Although I had to admit that the names did roll smoothly off the tongue.

  “Precisely,” said Joe. “Two clues, however striking and persuasive, don’t make a theory, of course.”

  “Hm, quite. So?”

  “Well…” He looked uncomfortable. “Two clues is all I’ve got. At the moment.”

  “Too bad,” I said, genuinely disappointed. “But you said you were working on a couple of ideas. What’s your other project?”

  “Now this will really make you sit up,” Joe answered smugly. He reached into the battered briefcase he always carried and pulled out a folding flatscreen, which he proceeded to unfold. “This happened only a couple of hundred kilometers from here, and just over two centuries ago. The source of my information, you’ll note, is about the best there is.”

  He called up a document on the flatscreen and handed it to me: it was a page of the London Times for July 4, 1874. I started to read it without much enthusiasm, for Joe was always producing bits of ancient newspapers.

  My apathy did not last for long.

  Briefly—I’d give you the whole thing, but if you want more details you can call it up on your own flatscreen in about ten seconds flat—Joe’s clipping described how the hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner Pearl left Ceylon in early May 1874 and then fell becalmed in the Bay of Bengal. On May 10, just before nightfall, an enormous squid surfaced half a mile from the schooner, whose captain foolishly opened fire on it with his rifle.

  The squid swam straight for the Pearl, grabbed the masts with its tentacles, and pulled the vessel over on its side. It sank within seconds, taking two of the crew with it. The others aboard were rescued only by the lucky chance that the P. and O. steamer Strathowen was in sight and had witnessed the incident.

  “Well,
” said Joe eagerly, when I’d read the piece through for the second time, “what do you think?”

  I’m afraid my Swiss-German accent was a bit thicker and stiffer than usual as I said, “I don’t believe in sea monsters,” and handed him back the flatscreen.

  “The London Times was not prone to sensationalist journalism, even two hundred years ago,” Joe answered smugly. “And giant squids certainly exist, though the biggest we know about are feeble, flabby beasts that don’t weigh more than a tonne.” He added slyly, “Even if they do have arms fifteen meters long.”

  “Again, so? An animal that size—impressive as it is—couldn’t capsize a hundred-and-fifty-ton schooner.”

  “True. But there’s a lot of evidence that the so-called giant squid is merely a, hm, well, a large squid. There may be decapods in the sea that really are giants. Why, only a year after the Pearl incident, a sperm whale off the coast of Brazil was seen struggling inside gigantic coils which finally dragged it down into the sea…”

  “Could it possibly have been the same whale later found drowned in the telegraph cable?” I murmured, too softly.

  “What?” Joe said, distracted from his argument.

  “What’s your reference?” I asked brightly.

  “Um, you’ll find it … um, the incident is described in the Illustrated London News for November 20, 1875…”

  “Another impeccable source,” I said, rather too dryly, perhaps.

  “And then of course there’s that chapter in Moby Dick.”

  “What chapter?”

  “Why, the one aptly called ‘Squid.’ We know that Melville was a very careful observer, but here he really lets himself go. He describes a calm day when ‘a great white mass’ rose out of the sea ‘like a snow-slide, new slid from the hills.’ And this happened here, in the Indian Ocean, perhaps fifteen hundred kilometers south of the Pearl incident. Weather conditions were identical, please note.”