Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus Read online

  He nodded to her as he passed by, on his way up the stairs. “I’ll just have a look around before I go home.” She looked up, belatedly alert.

  Everything he needed fitted easily inside his luxurious Chesterfield without appreciably adding to his bulk. He climbed the stairs and moved down the second floor corridor, conscientiously poking his head into every ward and private room.

  He came to L. N. 30851005’s room and entered. The photogram camera was watching from its invisible position high in the corner; he could keep his back to it, but someone passing in the hall would have a different angle of view, so he casually swung the door half closed behind him.

  He bent over her unconscious form, then swiftly turned her head upright. Her respiration was steady and deep. First out of his pocket was a flat CT scope the size of a checkbook. He laid it across her closed eyes; its screen displayed a map of her skull and brain as if they had been sliced through. Digital coordinates appeared in one corner of the screen. He adjusted the CT scope’s depth finder until the gray matter of the hippocampus was centered.

  He was still bent over her. He drew a long hypodermic from his sleeve, a seemingly primitive instrument frightening in its undisguised purpose. But within the shank of the steel needle nested other needles, needles within needles, graduated in fineness until the slimmest of them was finer than a human hair, invisible. They were needles that possessed a mind of their own. He dipped the tip of the barrel in disinfectant in a small, clear vial. He felt the bridge of her nose, pressed his fingers down to widen her nostrils, then carefully, inexorably—watching its progress on the miniature screen—he shoved the long, telescoping shaft into her brain.

  2

  The olfactory lobes are perhaps the most atavistic portions of the brain, having evolved in the nervous systems of blind worms that felt their way through the opaque muck of Cambrian seas. To function they must be in close contact with the environment, and so, beneath the bridge of the nose, the brain is almost completely exposed to the outside world. It is a dangerous arrangement. The body’s immune system is incompatible with the brain’s processes, everywhere sealed out by the blood-brain barrier—except in the nasal passages, where mucous membranes are the brain’s only defense, and every winter cold is an all-out struggle against brain disease.

  When the defenses are breached, the brain itself feels nothing; the flower of the central nervous system is itself nerveless. The micro-needle that probed past L. N.’s olfactory lobes and into her hippocampus left no internal sensation. It did, however, leave an infection, spreading fast…

  Waking late, the woman who thought of herself as Sparta felt an itching sensation high in her nose, beside her right eye.

  As recently as yesterday she had been in Maryland, at the project facilities north of the capital. She had gone to bed in the dormitory, wishing she could be in her own room at her parents’ home in New York City but accepting the fact that that would be inappropriate under the current circumstances. Everyone had been very good to her here. She should have felt—she tried to feel—honored to be where she was.

  This morning she was somewhere else. The room was high-ceilinged, layered with a century’s accumulation of white enamel, and its tall windows, hung with dusty lace, were fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She didn’t know where she was, exactly, but that was nothing new. They must have brought her here in the night. She would find her way around, as she had in many other strange places.

  She sneezed twice and briefly wondered if she were catching a cold. The stale taste of her mouth unpleasantly grew to dominate her sensations; she could taste what must have been last night’s dinner as vividly as if it were in front of her, except that all the flavors were here at once, green beans mingling with custard, a fragment of rice throbbing with odors of gunny sack, crumbs of ground beef stewing in saliva… Vaguely apprehended formulas of amines and esters and carbohydrates danced through her mind with a slippery, tickly quality that was familiar although she had no idea what they signified.

  She rose quickly from the bed, put on gown and slippers—she merely assumed they were hers—and went off in search of someplace to scrub her teeth. The smell in the drafty hall was overwhelming, wax and urine and ammonia and bile and turpentine—insistent odors and their accompanying, ungraspable mathematical analogues summoning ghosts, the ghosts of vanished supplicants and benefactors, workers and inmates of this building, and their visitors and keepers, everyone who had passed this way for a century. She sneezed again and again, and finally the clamorous stench subsided.

  She found the bathroom without any trouble. Peering at herself in the mirror on the wooden cabinet, she was suddenly thrust out of herself—her image appeared to enlarge—until she was staring at an immensely magnified view of her own eye. Dark brown, liquid at its surface, it was an eye of glassy perfection. At the same time she could still see her ordinary reflection in the glass; the giant eye was superimposed upon the familiar face. She closed one eye—she saw only her face. She closed the other—she was staring into the liquid depths of an immense open pupil. The blackness within was unfathomable.

  Her right eye seemed to have something … wrong? … with it.

  She blinked a couple of times and the double exposure vanished. Her face was itself. Again it occurred to her to brush her teeth. After several monotonous minutes the vibrating brush massaged her into dreaminess…

  The helicopter made a loud thrumming outside, soundly rattling the windows as it landed on the lawn. The staff scurried hurriedly about; the unexpected arrival of a helicopter generally meant an inspection.

  When the doctor came upstairs from his apartment he found one of the director’s aides waiting in his office. The doctor was bothered but tried not to show it.

  “We promised you the director would get back to you,” said the aide. He was a small fellow and scrupulously polite, with bright orange hair curled tightly against his skull.

  “I thought you were still at Fort Meade.”

  “The director asked me to deliver his message personally.”

  “Surely he could have called.”

  “The director requests that you leave with me and come to headquarters. Right away, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s impossible.” The doctor sat down, tensely upright in his old wooden armchair.

  “Quite.” The aide sighed. “Which is why the phone just wouldn’t do, you see.” The orange-haired fellow was still wearing his camel’s hair overcoat and a Peruvian wool scarf around his neck, bright orange; his shoes were high-tops of some shiny orange leather. All organics, flaunting his high salary. Carefully he opened the coat and removed a .38 caliber Colt Aetherweight with a four-inch suppressor from the open holster under his armpit. He was a symphony in orange. The pistol was of dull blue steel. He leveled it at the doctor’s ample belly. “Do please come with me now.”

  On her way back to her room, Sparta felt a pain in her left ear, so fierce it made her stumble and lean against the plaster wall. Buzz and moan of sixty-cycle current through lath and plaster walls, clatter of pots washing in the kitchen, groans of an old woman—the old woman in 206, Sparta realized, without knowing how she knew there was an old woman in 206—other rooms, other noises, two men talking somewhere, voices that seemed familiar—

  The doctor hesitated. He was not really surprised, but the game was moving faster than he had hoped. “Let’s say…” He swallowed once, and went on, “that I don’t come with you.” He had the feeling that this was happening to someone else, and wished that were true.

  “Doctor…” The orange man shook his head once, ruefully. “The staff here is utterly loyal. Whatever passes between you and me will never be discussed outside this room, I assure you.”

  The doctor stood then and moved slowly to the door. The orange man stood at the same time, never taking his eyes from the doctor, managing to seem deferential even while he kept the long barrel of the Colt, hardly wave
ring, aimed at the fork of the doctor’s wishbone.

  The doctor took his Chesterfield from the coat rack and, hauling it on, got himself tangled with his scarf.

  The orange man smiled sympathetically and said, “Sorry,” indicating that had circumstances permitted he would have lent a hand. Finally the doctor pulled himself into the coat. He glanced backward; his eyes were wet and he was trembling, his face contorted with fear.

  “After you, please,” said the orange man, amiably.

  The doctor plucked at the doorknob, jerked the door open, stepped into the hall—stumbling against the sill in what seemed imminent panic. As he went to one knee the orange man came forward with his left hand outstretched, contempt curling his smile. “Really, there’s nothing to be so upset…”

  But as the hand came toward him the doctor erupted from his crouch, pinned the dapper orange man against the door frame with a massive shoulder, thrust the fist with the gun in it high to the side. The doctor’s right hand came up swiftly with brutal force, brushing aside the man’s flailing left, pushing up hard under his breastbone.

  “Aaahhh…?” It was no scream, but a surprised gasp, rising on a note of anxiety. The orange man lowered his startled eyes to his midriff. The barrel of an outsized hypodermic needle, still gripped in the doctor’s fist, protruded from the camel’s hair coat at the level of his diaphragm.

  No blood showed. The bleeding was internal.

  The orange man was not dead yet, not nearly dead. His coat was thick and the shaft of the hypodermic too short to reach his heart. The telescoping shafts within it were still thrusting, seeking his heart muscle when he twisted his right wrist and brought the barrel of the Colt to bear, pulled the trigger spasmodically—

  The phttt, phttt, phttt, phttt of the silenced weapon howled like a rocket launcher in Sparta’s painfully sensitive ear. She recoiled and stumbled down the hall toward her room, her head ringing with the screams and agonized gasps, the tremor of running feet on the floor below shaking her like an earthquake.

  Into her mind like a slide flashed on a screen came an image to match one of the voices she’d heard—that of a little man who always dressed in expensive clothes that were too loud, a man with curly orange hair, a man she knew she disliked and feared. With the conscious formation of that image, the amplified sounds vanished.

  By now the other inmates were wandering bewildered in the hall, clinging to the walls, for even ordinary hearing was enough to apprehend the commotion downstairs. In her room Sparta tore off her nightgown and quickly dressed in the warmest clothes she could find in the unfamiliar closet, clothes she didn’t really recognize but that were obviously her own. For reasons her memory would not reveal, she knew she must flee.

  The doctor’s body lay face up across the sill, blood pooling under his head. Next to him the orange man was writhing on the floor, plucking at the thing in his midriff. “Help me, help me!” he gasped to the nurses who were already trying their fumbling best to help him. A woman in a pilot’s uniform thrust the nurses aside and bent to catch his words, but a sudden hooting of sirens filled the air. “After her! Take her…” he gasped at the pilot, then tried to shove her out of the way. He screeched in pain—the hypodermic had come out in his hand, but not all of it—“Take her to the director!” Then his voice rose in a terrified howl—“Oh, help me, help me”—as the questing hair-fine remnant of the needle pierced and paralyzed his heart.

  A nurse slammed into L. N.’s room and found it deserted. One side of the bed had collapsed on the floor. The window sash had been thrust up and the yellowing lace curtains were stirring in the frigid outside air—an iron bar was thrust like a spear through the screen of heavy wire that covered the outside of the window, twisting it aside. The iron bar in the screen had been part of the bed frame.

  The nurse rushed to the window as the rising pitch of twin turbine engines reached a near-supersonic shriek. Black against the frozen brown grass of the lawn below, a sleek shape ascended and hovered, a viperlike snout quested this way and that under the thump, thump of counter-rotating rotors.

  The pilot stumbled into the room, holding a drawn pistol; she shoved the nurse away from the window. Below, the black tactical helicopter rose another couple of meters, leaned forward, and skimmed off over the fence between two poplars, hugging the ground.

  “Damm it!” The pilot watched in disbelief, not bothering to waste any rounds on the armored machine. “Who the hell is in that thing?”

  “She is,” said the nurse.

  “Who the hell is she?”

  “The one we were hiding here. The one he wanted you to take to the director.”

  The pilot stared after the helicopter until it dropped into an arroyo beyond the highway and failed to reappear. She swore and turned away.

  Sparta had no clear idea what she was doing. The irregular frozen ground was racing past a meter or two beneath the skids, the arroyo’s low mud and gravel walls swaying too close to the whirling tips of the blades as she played with the stick and pedals. She dug up gravel with a skid: the machine lurched, declined to flip over, flew on.

  A moving map of the terrain was displayed in space in front of Sparta, holographically superimposed upon the reality she saw through the windscreen. Just now she was flying uphill—the interstate magneplane tracks she had crossed before finding the arroyo now reappeared in front of her, carried on a steel trestle, barring her path. She flew under the trestle. The howl of the aircraft’s engines echoed for a split second, and one rotor rang sharp and clear from nicking a steel pylon.

  The arroyo narrowed and its walls grew higher; it had been cut—languidly, over centuries—into an alluvial fan from the uplifted mountains ahead, and there ahead the gorge through which the eroding waters flowed loomed abruptly, a gash in the red rock as acute as a gun sight.

  She was still flying by hand, and she felt more confident with every passing second she stayed in the air. She contemplated her ability to handle a piece of complicated machinery she could not remember ever having seen before—knowing what it was for without thinking about it, knowing the logic of it, knowing the particular layout of its controls and instruments and the capabilities of its brainy subsystems.

  She reasoned that she had practiced in it. Knowing this, she reasoned that there was some weighty cause for her memory lapse.

  She further reasoned that there was cause for her fear of the orange man, the fear that had made her run. She reasoned—because she remembered the entire day (why did that in itself seem strange?) from the moment she had awakened with an urgent desire to brush her teeth, and the accumulated anomalies of that day could not be ignored—that a chunk of her life had been deliberately taken from her and that she was in danger precisely because of that, and that the orange man had had something to do with her missing years and with her present danger.

  Sparta—not her real name, it occurred to her, but an identity she had assumed for a sufficient yet still hidden reason—spoke to the helicopter. “Snark, this is L. N. 30851005, do you acknowledge?”

  After a momentary pause the helicopter said, “I acknowledge your command.”

  “Westerly heading, minimum altitude and maximum ground speed consistent with evasion protocols. On auto, please.”

  “Auto confirmed.”

  Flatiron walls of red Jurassic sandstone loomed and flashed by on either side of the ship. A streambed of tumbled granite boulders mounted in irregular stairsteps up the rapidly ascending gorge—dry now but for patches of snow, it would be an intermittent torrent during the storms of late summer. One moment the ship was brushing the bare pink branches of tangled willows in the streambed, the next it was flying almost straight up the mountainside, dodging leaning ponderosas and overhangs of basaltic cliff, until suddenly the gorge narrowed to a shallow ravine in a forest of pines, and the mountain flattened into meadowland dotted with stands of aspen.

  Sparta had adjusted the scale of the terrain-matching projection that unscrolled in front of her and
now studied it, searching the image until she found the topography she needed. “Snark, proceed to forty degrees north, one hundred and five degrees, forty minutes, twenty seconds west.”

  “Forty north, one-oh-five, forty, twenty west confirmed.” The helicopter slowed suddenly and hesitated at the edge of the aspen woods, its snout quivering as if sniffing for a trail.

  A moment later the ship streaked across the open, snowy flat, toward the range of distant, much higher peaks that glistened in the sun.

  “We have visual acquisition.”

  On a videoplate screen in a basement room fifteen hundred miles to the east, a small group of men and women watched the helicopter racing over the ground, its sharp, highly magnified image observed from a satellite four hundred miles above it.

  “Why isn’t she using evasion protocols?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t know how.”

  “She knows how to fly the thing.” The speaker was a man in his fifties with silver-gray hair clipped close to his scalp. He wore a dark-gray wool suit and patternless gray silk tie over a light-gray cotton shirt; it was business attire, but it might as well have been a military uniform.

  The man’s outburst was an unanswerable accusation; he got no reply but a nervous shifting of feet.

  A woman touched his sleeve, caught his eye, jerked her chin. They stepped into the shadows of the control room, away from the others. “What is it?” he rasped.

  “If McPhee actually did restore her short-term memory using synthetic-cellular implant, she may be accessing skills she acquired before intervention,” she whispered. She was a handsome woman, as clipped and gray and rigid as he was, her dark eyes pools of shadow in the dim room.