The Medusa Encounter Read online

  Introduction

  by ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  O ne of the advantages of living on the Equator (well, only 800 kilometers from it) is that the Moon and planets pass vertically overhead, allowing one to see them with a clarity never possible in higher latitudes. This has prompted me to acquire a succession of ever-larger telescopes during the past forty years, beginning with the classic 3 1/2-inch Questar, then an 8-inch, and finally a 14-inch, Celestron. (Sorry about the obsolete units, but we seem stuck with them for small telescopes-even though centimeters make them sound much more impressive.)

  The Moon, with its incomparable and ever-changing scenery, is my favorite subject, and I never tire of showing it to unsuspecting visitors. As the 14-inch is fitted with a binocular eyepiece, they feel they are looking through the window of a spaceship, and not peering through the restricted field of a single lens. The difference has to be experienced to be appreciated, and invariably invokes a gasp of amazement.

  After the Moon, Saturn and Jupiter compete for second place as celestial attractions. Thanks to its glorious rings, Saturn is breathtaking and unique-but there’s little else to be seen, as the planet itself is virtually featureless.

  The considerably larger disc of Jupiter is much more interesting; it usually displays prominent cloud belts lying parallel to the equator, and so many fugitive details that one could spend a lifetime trying to elucidate them. Indeed, men have done just this: for more than a century, Jupiter has been a happy hunting ground for armies of devoted amateur astronomers.*

  * I feel a particular sympathy for one of them, the British engineer P.B. Molesworth (1867-1908). Some years ago, I visited the relics of his observatory at Trincomalee, on the east coast of Sri Lanka. Despite his early death, Molesworth’s spare-time astronomical work was so outstanding that his name has now been given to a splendid crater on Mars, 175 kilometers across.

  Yet no view through the telescope can do justice to a planet with more than a hundred times the surface area of our world. To imagine a somewhat farfetched “thought experiment,” if one skinned the Earth and pinned its pelt like a trophy on the side of Jupiter, it would look about as large as India on a terrestrial globe. That subcontinent is no small piece of real estate; yet Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India. . . .

  Unfortunately for would-be colonists, even if they were prepared to tolerate the local two-and-a-half gravities, Jupiter has no solid surface—or even a liquid one. It’s all weather, at least for the first few thousand kilometers down toward the distant central core. (For details of which, see 2061: Odyssey Three. . . .)

  Earth-based observers had long suspected this, as they made careful drawings of the ever-changing Jovian cloudscape. There was only one semipermanent feature on the face of the planet, the famous Great Red Spot, and even this sometimes vanished completely. Jupiter was a world without geography—a planet for meteorologists, but not for cartographers.

  As I have recounted in Astounding Days: A Science-fictional Autobiography, my own fascination with Jupiter began with the very first science-fiction magazine I ever saw—the November 1928 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, which had been launched two years earlier. It featured a superb cover by Frank R. Paul, which one could plausibly cite as proof of the existence of precognition.

  Half a dozen earthmen are stepping forth onto one of the Jovian satellites emerging from a silo-shaped spaceship that looks uncomfortably small for such a long voyage. The orange-tinted globe of the giant planet dominates the sky, with two of its inner moons in transit. I am afraid that Paul has cheated shamelessly, because Jupiter is fully illuminated—though the sun is almost behind it!

  I’m not in a position to criticize, as it’s taken me more than fifty years to spot this—probably deliberate—error. If my memory is correct, the cover illustrates a story by Gawain Edwards, real name G. Edward Pendray. Ed Pendray was one of the pioneers of American rocketry and published The Coming Age of Rocket Power in 1947. Perhaps Pendray’s most valuable work was in helping Mrs. Goddard edit the massive three volumes of her husband’s notebooks: he lived to see the Voyager closeups of the Jovian system, and I wonder if he recalled Paul’s illustration.

  What is so astonishing—I’m sorry, amazing—about this 1928 painting is that it shows, with great accuracy, details which at the time were unknown to earth-based observers. Not until 1979, when the Voyager spaceprobes flew past Jupiter and its moons, was it possible to observe the intricate loops and curlicues created by the Jovian tradewinds. Yet half a century earlier, Paul had depicted them with uncanny precision.

  Many years later, I was privileged to work with the doyen of space artists, Chesley Bonestell, on the book Beyond Jupiter (Little Brown, 1972). This was a preview of the proposed Grand Tour of the outer solar system, which it was hoped might take advantage of a once-in-179-year configuration of all the planets between Jupiter and Pluto. As it turned out, the considerably more modest Voyager missions achieved virtually all the Grand Tour’s objectives, at least out to Neptune. Looking at Chesley’s illustrations with 20:20 clarity of hindsight, I am surprised to see that Frank Paul, though technically the poorer artist, did a far better job of visualizing Jupiter as it really is.

  Since Jupiter is so far from the sun—five times the distance of the Earth—the temperature might be expected to be a hundred or so degrees below the worst that the Antarctic winter can provide. That is true of the upper cloud layers, but for a long time astronomers have known that the planet radiates several times as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Though it is not big enough to sustain thermonuclear fusion (Jupiter has been called “a star that failed”), it undoubtedly possesses some internal sources of heat. As a consequence, at some depth beneath the clouds, the temperature is that of a comfortable day on Earth. The pressure is another matter; but as the depths of our own oceans have proved, life can flourish even at tons to the square centimeter.

  In the book and TV series Cosmos, the late Carl Sagan speculated about possible life forms that might exist in the purely gaseous (mostly hydrogen and methane) environment of the Jovian atmosphere. My “Medusae” owe a good deal to Carl, but I have no qualms about stealing from him, as I introduced him to my former agent, Scott Meredith, a quarter of a century ago, with results profitable to both.

  Now a final bibliographic note. “A Meeting with Medusa”—the story that inspired this volume of Venus Prime—is one of the very few I ever wrote for a specific objective. (Usually I write because I can’t help it, but I am slowly getting this annoying habit under control.) “Medusa” was produced because I needed wordage to round out my final collection of short stories (The Wind from the Sun, 1972). I am pleased to record that it won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best novella of the year-as well as a special bonus from Playboy in the same category.

  I happened to mention my association with this estimable magazine, which has printed so many of my more serious technical writings, when I registered a mild complaint in New Delhi years ago. In his witty response after I had delivered the Nehru Memorial Address on 13 November 1986, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi concluded with these words: “Finally, let me assure Dr. Clarke that if Playboy is banned in this country, it is not because of anything he may have written in it.”

  Certainly there’s nothing in the original “A Meeting with Medusa” to bring a blush to the most modest cheek.

  I’m waiting to see what Paul Preuss can do to rectify this situation.

  Arthur C. Clarke

  Colombo, Sri Lanka

  ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S

  VENUS

  PRIME

  Prologue

  S he lay exposed on the operating table. Men a
nd women sheathed in sterile plastic film leaned over her, wielding black instruments. The rank smell of onions threatened to suffocate her. Her mind’s eye involuntarily displayed complex sulfur compounds as the circle of lights above her began to swirl in a golden spiral.

  William, she’s a child

  As the darkness closed in, she clutched harder at the hand she held, trying to keep from falling.

  To resist us is to resist the Knowledge

  She was sliding away. She was tilting up into the spiral. The hand to which she clung slid from her grasp. Around her, shapes swarmed in the maelstrom. The shapes were signs. The signs had meaning.

  The meaning engulfed her. She tried to call out, to shout a warning. But when the blackness closed over her, only one image remained, an image of swirling clouds, red and yellow and white, boiling in an immense whirlpool, big enough to swallow a planet. She left herself then, and fell endlessly into them. . . .

  Blake couldn’t see what was going on; they’d put up a curtain of opaque fabric to screen his view of Ellen’s body. He was frightened. When she’d let go of his hand, her own hand falling limp on the sheets, he’d thought for a moment that she was dead.

  But the blue vein in her throat still pulsed; her chest still rose and fell beneath the rough gown; the surgeon and his assistants went on with their work as if nothing unusual had happened. “She’s under,” one of them said.

  Blake fought back dizziness when he saw the clamps and tongs, saw the scalpel and scissors go down gleaming and reappear above the curtain streaked with blood. The surgeon moved with swift precision, doing whatever he was doing to the middle of Ellen. Suddenly he stopped.

  “What the hell is this stuff?” he said angrily, his voice muffled inside his clear film mask. Blake saw an assistant’s nervous glance in his direction. The young surgeon turned to stare at Blake—they hadn’t wanted him here, but Ellen had refused to let them begin without him at her side. With his tongs the surgeon lifted a bit of something slippery and fishlike and slapped it on a tray. “Biopsy. I want to know what it is before we close.”

  The technician hurried away. Meanwhile the surgeon bent and pulled up more of the stuff and threw it on a larger tray held by his assistant. Blake peered at it in fascination, the silvery tissue lying in sheets like a beached jellyfish, trembling and iridescent.

  The surgeon was still working to clean the last of it out of Ellen when the technician handed him the analysis. On the pages Blake glimpsed graphs, lists of ratios and molecular weights, false-color stereo images.

  “All right, we’d better close,” the surgeon said. “I want this woman under intensive surveillance until we hear what the research committee makes of this.”

  Blake stood looking out upon the glowing glass city and the Noctis Labyrinthus beyond, a maze of rock pinnacles and deep-cut ravines, midnight blue under the unblinking stars.

  Ellen lay deeply sleeping under a coarse sheet, her short blond hair framing her unlined face. Her full lips were slightly parted, as if she were tasting the air. No tubes or wires intruded upon her slim flesh; the monitoring probes hovered without touching her delicate skull and slight breasts and slender abdomen. The silent graphics above the bed displayed reassuringly normal functions. The room was quiet and warm, almost peaceful.

  The silhouette of a tall man appeared in the doorway, blocking the light from the hall. Blake saw the reflection in the glass wall and turned, expecting to see one of the doctors.

  “You!”

  “She needs to get out here. Her life could depend on it.” The man who stood in the darkness had blue eyes that glittered in his dark face. His iron gray hair was cut to within a few millimeters of his scalp, and he wore the dress-blue uniform of a full commander of the Board of Space Patrol.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to take the time to reason with you, Blake . . .”

  “What a favor,” Blake said hotly.

  “. . . for two or three minutes. Did you see what they pulled out of her?”

  “I . . . I saw something, I don’t know what.”

  “You know she’s not like other people.”

  “It doesn’t matter. What she needs is time to get well.”

  “She’s vulnerable here. We’re moving her off Mars. The records are going to show that Inspector Troy had a routine appendectomy, spent the usual eight-hour recovery period in hospital, and walked happily away. That’s what the doctors are going to say, too.”

  Blake’s face darkened. “You’ve got argument down to a fine science, Commander—do it your way or else.”

  “I’ve given you choices before. Think you made a mistake to trust me?”

  Blake hesitated. “Maybe not in Paris.”

  “I promised I’d get you to her and I did. Alot of lives were saved because of it. Trust me again, Blake.”

  “What do you care?” Blake shrugged in frustration. “We both know I can’t stop you. But I’m staying with her.”

  They got her out of town in a sealed van, taking a route that the tourists in Labyrinth City never saw, through the utility tunnel to the shuttleport. They made a quick, silent transfer to the cabin of a sleek spaceplane. In deference to Ellen, the trajectory was low and slow, with minimal gees applied over a long boost out of the thin atmosphere, finally achieving the orbit of Mars Station.

  But the plane didn’t dock with the station. A gleaming white cutter with the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control rode “at anchor” half a kilometer from the giant space station’s star-side docking bay. As the spaceplane sidled up to it on maneuvering jets, a pressure tube snaked out from the cutter’s main hatch and slammed tight over the spaceplane’s airlock.

  Ellen and Blake and the commander were the only people who went through the tube. The cutter’s crew made them secure; countdown took half an hour. Ellen slept through it all.

  Just before the cutter lifted from orbit, Blake overcame his resentment enough to ask the commander a question. “Where are we going?”

  “Earth,” he said.

  “Where on Earth?”

  “For reasons you’ll soon figure out, I’m not telling you.”

  PART ONE

  THE WRECK OF A QUEEN

  I

  They stood on a precipice of dark rock above a wide river. The air was cold and the sky was clear, washed blue. The light was the color of October.

  Her hair was the color of straw, and it glowed in the October light; her high-collared black wool coat reached from her short hair to her high boots, hiding the rest of her and absorbing all the other light that fell upon her. The blackness was relieved only by a scarf tied loosely around her throat, dark blue raw silk woven with fine stripes of red and yellow thread; her small strong hands clutched at its knotted and tasseled ends.

  She looked at the man who stood close to her with a smile so tentative and hopeful that his heart swelled and hurt him.

  “Will you be with me always?” Sparta whispered.

  “Always,” Blake said. The breeze caught his stiff auburn hair and a swatch of it fell across his forehead, shadowing his face with cool shadow, but his green eyes gleamed with warmth. “As long as you want me.”

  “I do,” she said. “I will.”

  Across the wide waters a shimmer of sunlight danced. If light had sound, they would have heard glass wind bells. Sparta took Blake’s hand and tugged. He walked beside her along the wall, holding her hand lightly, glancing back up the hill toward the big house.

  The steel king’s mansion crowned a tor above the Hudson, a chimneyed pile of basalt decorated with exotic granites and limestones from Vermont and Indiana, roofed with slate, pierced with stained-glass windows. The old freebooter who’d had the place built had made his loot in a different age; he would have been startled but not necessarily disapproving of the uses to which his estate had been put in the two centuries since.

  Clipped green lawns, damp in the October sunshine, sloped away from the house, ending at cliff’s edge and the n
eat border of the woods. In front, a long gravel drive meandered through the trees and looped around before the main entrance.

  Behind the stone wall that surrounded the place, hidden among the thickly clustered tree trunks and autumn foliage, were lasers, covered trenches, antiaircraft railguns. . . .

  The gray robot limousine moved slowly up the drive, the crunch of its tires in the gravel louder than the whisper of its turbines. As it stopped, the mansion’s big doors swung open and the commander came out. When he saw the much smaller man who got out of the back seat of the car, his face wrinkled into a smile, thin but warm. “Jozsef!” He strode down the steps, hand outstretched.

  Jozsef met him halfway up the steps. “How very good to see you.” Their handshake was prelude to a quick, firm embrace.

  The two men were the same age but in every other way different. Jozsef’s tweedy suit was elbow-patched and baggy at the knees; it and his middle-European accent suggested that he was a displaced intellectual, an academic, a denizen of the classroom and the library stacks. The commander wore a plaid shirt and faded jeans that said he was most comfortable out of doors.

  “Surprised to see you in person,” said the commander. He had a faint Canadian accent, and his voice had the texture of beach stones rattling in receding surf. “But damn glad.”

  “After I analyzed the material you sent, I thought it would be good to share some of my thoughts with you personally. And I . . . I’ve brought a new drug.”

  “Come in.”

  “Is she inside?”

  “No, they’re both on the grounds. You want to see her?”

  “I . . . not yet. It would be best if she did not see the car,” Jozsef added.

  The commander spoke gruffly into his wrist unit and the robot limousine rolled off toward the garage. The men walked up the steps into the house.

  They walked down an echoing paneled hall toward the library. White-uniformed staff people nodded deferentially and moved out of their way.