Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime 2

299 Pages·2016·2.08 MB·English

by  Preuss Paul

A R T H U R C . C L A R K E ’ S
VENUS PRIME
Arthur C. Clarke is the world-renowned author of such science
fiction classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which he shared
an Oscar nomination with director Stanley Kubrick, and its pop-
ular sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and
3001: Final Odyssey; the highly acclaimed The Songs of Distant
Earth; the bestselling collection of original short stories, The
Sentinel; and over two dozen other books of fiction and non-
fiction. He received the Marconi International Fellowship in
1982. He resides in Sri Lanka, where he continues to write and
consult on issues of science, technology, and the future.
PAUL PREUSS
Paul Preuss began his successful writing career after years of
producing documentary and television films and writing screen-
plays. He is the author of thirteen novels, including Secret
Passages and the near-future thrillers Coreand Starfire. His non-
fiction has appeared in The Washington Post, the Los Angeles
Times, New York Newsday, and the San Francisco Chronicle.
Besides writing, he has been a science consultant for several
film companies. He lives near San Francisco, California.
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S
VENUS
PRIME
2
V O L U M E
PA U L P R E U S S
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Untitled-2 1 11/3/00, 9:32 PM
Introduction
by ARTHUR C. CLARKE
T
here cannot be many science fiction novels that end
with a 40-page appendix full of mathematical equa-
tions and electric-circuit diagrams. Don’t worry—this
isn’t one of them; but just such a book inspired it, half a
century ago. And with any luck, during the next half-
century it will cease to be fiction.
It must have been in 1937 or ’38, when I was Treasurer
of the five-year-old British Interplanetary Society (annual
budget to start the conquest of space, about $200), that the
BIS was sent a book with a rather odd title, by an author
with an even odder name. “Akkad Pseudoman’s” Zero to
Eighty (Princeton: Scientific Publishing Company, 1937)
must now be quite a rarity: I am indebted to my old friend
Frederick I. Ordway III (responsiblefor thetechnicaldesigns
in 2001: A Space Odyssey) for the fine copy I possess.
The snappy subtitle says it all:
Being my lifetime doings,
reflections, and inventions
also
my journey round the Moon
Quite an “also”; I can hear the author’s modest cough.
Hewasnot,ofcourse,reallyMr.Pseudoman,asthepref-
v
INTRODUCTION
ace made clear. This was signed “E.F. Northrup,” and ex-
plained that the book had been written to show that the
Moon may be reached by means of known technologies,
without “invoking any imaginary physical features or laws
of nature.”
Dr. E.F. Northrup was a distinguished electrical engi-
neer, and the inventor of the induction furnace whichbears
his name. His novel, which is obviously a wish-fulfillment
fantasy, describes a journey to the Moon (and around it) in
a vehicle fired from the earth by a giant gun, as in Jules
Verne’s classic From the Earth to the Moon. Northrup,how-
ever, tried to avoid the obvious flaws in Verne’s naive pro-
posal,whichwouldhavequicklyconvertedArdanetal.into
small blobs of protoplasm inside a sphere of molten metal.
Northrup used an electric gun, two hundred kilometers
long,mostofithorizontalbutwiththefinalsectioncurving
up Mount Popocatepetl, so that the projectile would be at
analtitude ofmorethanfivekilometerswhenitreachedthe
required escape velocity of 11.2 kilometers per second. In
this way, air-resistance losses would be minimized, but a
small amount of rocket power would be available for any
necessary corrections.
Well—it makes more sense than Verne’s Moongun, but
not by much. Even with 200 kilometers of launch track,the
unfortunatepassengerswouldhavetowithstand30geesfor
more than half a minute. And the cost of the magnets,
power stations, transmission lines, etc. would run into bil-
lions; rockets would be cheaper, as well as far more prac-
tical.
I am sure that “Akkad Pseudoman” would have been
surprised—and delighted—to know that men first circled the
Moon aboard Apollo 8 at Christmas 1969; the date he gave
in his novel was June 28, 1961. Incidentally,hewasnotthe
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INTRODUCTION
first to propose this scheme: the Winter,1930ScienceWon-
der Quarterly has a beautiful Frank R. Paul illustration of a
line of giant electromagnets, shooting a spaceship up a
mountainside. It could very well have served as the frontis-
piece of Zero to Eighty.
A few years after reading Dr. Northrup’s book (which is
still full of interesting ideas, including a remarkably sym-
pathetic—especiallyforthetime—treatmentofRussiantech-
nology) it occurred to me that he had made one slight
mistake. He had put his electric launcher on the wrong
world; it made no sense on Earth—but was ideal for the
Moon.
First: there’s no atmosphere to heat up the vehicle or
destroy its momentum, so the whole launchingtrack canbe
laid out horizontally. Once it’s given escape velocity, the
payload will slowly rise up from the surface of the Moon
and head out into space.
Second:lunarescapevelocityisonlyone-fifthofEarth’s,
andcanthereforebeattainedwithacorrespondinglyshorter
launch track—and a twenty-fifth of the energy. When the
time comes to export goods from the Moon, this will be the
way to do it. Although I was thinking of inanimate pay-
loads, and launchers only a few kilometers long, suitably
protectedhumanpassengerscouldbehandledbylargersys-
tems, if there were ever enough traffic to justify them.
I wrote up this idea, with the necessary calculations, in
a paper titled “Electromagnetic Launching as a Major Con-
tribution to Space-Flight,” which was duly published in the
Journal of the British Interplanetary Society (November,
1950); it may be more conveniently located in my Ascent
to Orbit: A Scientific Autobiography (Wiley, 1984). And be-
causeagoodideashouldbeexploitedineverypossibleway,
I used it in fiction on two occasions: in the chapter “The
vii
INTRODUCTION
Shot from the Moon” (Islands in the Sky, 1952) and in the
short story “Maelstrom II” (Playboy, April 1965, reprinted
in The Wind from the Sun, 1972). This is the tale which
Paul Preuss has ingeniously worked into Venus Prime,Vol-
ume 2.
Some twenty years after the publicationof“Electromag-
netic Launching” by the BIS, the concept was taken much
further by Gerald O’Neill, who made it a key element of his
“space colonization” projects (see The High Frontier, 1977;
Gerry O’Neill is justifiably annoyed by the Star Warriors’
preemptionofhistitle.)Heshowedthatthelargespacehab-
itats he envisaged could be most economically constructed
from materials mined and prefabricated on the Moon, and
then shot into orbit by electromagnetic catapults to which
he gave the name “mass drivers.” (I’ve challenged him to
produce any propulsion device that doesn’t fit this descrip-
tion.)
The other scientific element in “Maelstrom II” has a
much longer history; it’s the branch of celestial mechanics
known as “perturbation theory.” I’ve been able to get con-
siderable mileage out of it since my applied maths instruc-
tor, the cosmologist Dr. George C. McVittie, introduced me
to the subject at Kings College, London, in the late ’40s.
However, I’d come across it—without realizing—in dear old
Wonder Stories almost two decades earlier. Here’s a chal-
lenge to you: spot the flaw in the following scenario....
The first expedition has landed on Phobos, the inner
moon of Mars. Gravity there is only about a thousandth of
Earth’s,so theastronautshaveagreattimeseeinghowhigh
they can jump. One of them overdoes it, and exceeds the
tiny satellite’s escape velocity of about thirty kilometers an
hour. He dwindles away into the sky, toward the mottled
red Marscape; his companions realize that they’ll have to
viii
INTRODUCTION
take off and catch him before he crashes into the planet
only six thousand kilometers below.
A dramatic situation, which opens Lawrence Manning’s
1932 serial “The Wreck of the Asteroid.” Manning, one of
the most thoughtful science fiction writers of the ’30s, was
an early member of the American Rocket Society, and was
very careful with his science. But this time, I’m afraid, he
was talking nonsense: his high jumper would have been
perfectly safe.
Look at his situation from the point of view of Mars. If
he’s simply standing on Phobos, he’s orbiting the planet at
almost eight thousand kilometers an hour (a Moon that
close to its primary has to move pretty fast). As spacesuits
are massive affairs, and not designed for athletic events, I
doubt if the careless astronaut could achieve that critical
thirty kilometers an hour. Even if he did, it would be less
than a half-percent of the velocity he already has, relative
to Mars. Whichever way he jumped, therefore, it will make
virtually no difference to his existing situation; he’ll stillbe
traveling in almost the same orbit as before. He’d recede a
few kilometers away from Phobos—and be right backwhere
hestarted,justonerevolutionlater!(Ofcourse,hecouldrun
out of oxygen in the meantime—the trip round Mars will
take seven-and-a-half hours. So maybe his friends should
go after him—at their leisure.)
This is perhaps the simplest example of “perturbation
theory,” and I developed it a good deal further in “Jupiter
V” (reprinted in Reach for Tomorrow, 1956). This story, in-
cidentally, was based on what seemed a cute idea in the
early ’5Os. A decade earlier, LIFE Magazine had published
space-artist Chesley Bonestell’s famous paintings of the
outer planets. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, if sometime in
the21stcenturyLIFEsentoneofitsphotographersoutthere
ix