Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime 3

292 Pages·2016·1.99 MB·English

by  Preuss Paul

A R T H U R C . C L A R K E ’ S
V E N U S P R I M E
Arthur C. Clarke is the world-renowned author of such science
fiction classics as 2001: A Space Odyssey, for which he shared
anOscarnominationwithdirectorStanleyKubrick,anditspop-
ular sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and
3001: FinalOdyssey;the highlyacclaimedTheSongsofDistant
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
producingdocumentaryandtelevisionfilmsandwritingscreen-
plays.Heistheauthorofelevennovels,includingVenusPrime,
Volumes 1 and 2, Secret Passages and the near-future thrillers
Core, Human Error, and Starfire. Hisnonfictionhasappearedin
The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, New York News-
day, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Besides writing, he has
been a science consultant for several film companies. He lives
in San Francisco, California.
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S
VENUS
PRIME
3
V O L U M E
P A U L P R E U S S
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Introduction
by ARTHUR C. CLARKE
T
hewisesciencefictionwriterpreferstooperateingal-
axies far, far away and long, long ago, where he is
safefromnaggingcritics—likethesmallboywhoonce
told Ray Bradbury he had a satellite moving in the wrong
direction. (“So I hit him.”)
However, by exquisitely bad timing, the setting of this
novel occurs practically next doorandtomorrowafternoon.
Desperate attempts to persuade publisher Byron Preiss to
stop the countdown for a year or so have been of no avail.
By the time these words appear in print, Paul and I may
have to eat some of them.
When Phobos was discovered in 1877, it not only made
obsolete Tennyson’s “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,”
but it presented astronomers with a phenomenon they had
never encountered before. Most satellites orbit theirprimar-
ies at substantial distance, in a fairly leisurely manner; our
own Moon takes almost thirty times longer to go around
the Earth than the Earth takes to revolve on its own axis.
But here was a world where the “month” was shorter than
the “day”! Mars rotates in twenty-four and a half hours (to
the great convenience of future colonists, who need make
only minor adjustments to their watches and circadian
rhythms), yet Phobos circles it in only seven and a half!
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INTRODUCTION
Today, we are accustomed to artificial satellites which
performsuchfeats,thusrisinginthewestandsettinginthe
east (see Bradbury, supra), but the behavior of Phobos was
quite a surprise to late-19th-century astronomers. It was
also a bonus to such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs; who
can forget the hurtling inner moon illuminatingtheancient
sea beds of Barsoom?
Alas, Phobos doesn’t hurtle very fast, and you’d have to
watch for some time to see that it’s moving at all. And it’s
a miserable source of illumination; not only is its apparent
size a fraction of our Moon’s, but it is one of the darkest
objects in the Solar System, reflecting about as much light
as a lump ofcoal. Indeed,itmaybelargelymadeofcarbon,
and altogether bears a close resemblance to the nucleus of
Halley’s Comet, as revealed by a whole flotilla of space
probes in 1987. It’s not much use, therefore,duringthecold
Martian nights, to warn travelers of approaching thoats,
seeking whom they might devour.
(The erudite Sprague de Camp once pointed out a very
peculiar feature of Barsoomian ecology: the fauna appar-
ently consisted almost entirely of carnivores. The poor
beasts must have suffered from acute malnutrition.)
In “The Wreck of the Asteroid” (Wonder Stories, 1932),
explorersfirstlandedonPhobosandhadalotoffunbounc-
ing around in its approximately one-thousandth-of-an-
Earth gravity. Until one of them overdid it, achieved escape
velocity—and started to fall helpless toward the looming
face of Mars...
It’s a nice, dramatic situation, which author Lawrence
Manning milked for all it was worth. The crew had to make
anemergencytakeoffandraceaftertheircarelesscolleague,
hoping to catch up with him before he made yet another
crater on Mars.
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INTRODUCTION
I hate to spoil the fun, but that just couldn’t happen.
Smallthoughitis(about20metersasecond,comparedwith
Earth’s 11,200) not even an Olympic high-jumper could at-
tain the escape velocity of Phobos—especiallywhenencum-
bered with a spacesuit. And even if he did, he would be in
no danger of falling onto Mars—because he would stillhave
the whole of Phobos’s eight thousand meters per second or-
bitalvelocity.Histriflingmuscularcontributionwouldmake
virtually no difference to that, so he would continue to
move in just the same orbit as Phobos, but displaced by a
few kilometers. And after one revolution, he’d be back
where he started.
In The Sands of Mars (1954), I brutally turned Phobos
into a minisun (by carefully unspecified technology) in or-
der to improve the climate of Mars. It now occurs to me
that this was a trial run for blowing up Jupiter in 2010:
Odyssey Two.
Soon after the appearance of “Hide and Seek,” another
British science fiction writer asked me rather suspiciously:
“Have you ever read C.S. Forester’s short story ‘Brown on
Resolution’?”
“No,” I answered, truthfully enough. “I’m afraid I’ve
never even read the Hornblower books. What’s it about?”
Well, it seems Brown was a British seaman in the First
World War, armed with only a rifle, who managed to keep
at bay a German cruiser from his various hideouts on a
small, rocky island. (A rather similar story, one war later,
was made into an excellent movie starring PeterO’Toole.In
Murphy’s War, the hero was still coping, more or less
single-handed, with Germans.)
I’m sorry to say that I still haven’t gottenaroundtoFor-
ester’s story and missed the chance of discussing “Brown”
with him when we once dined together in the magnificent
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INTRODUCTION
PaintedHalloftheRoyalNavyCollegeatGreenwich.Which
was a pity, as it would have given me a chance of trotting
outoneofmyfavoritequotations:“Talentborrows—butGe-
nius steals.”
Decades before the Viking spacecraft gave us our first
close-up views of Phobos, it was obvious that a hunk of
rock only a few times larger than Manhattan could possess
no trace of atmosphere, still less harbor any life. Yet unless
my memory has betrayed me completely, I seem to recall
that Burroughs once had Mars invaded by marauding Pho-
bians. The economics—not to mention the ecology—of such
a microcivilization boggles the imagination. Once again, I
fear, ERB hadn’t done his homework.
(I am still prepared to repeat a statement that I made
many years ago: ERB is a much underrated writer. To have
created the best-known character in Western—and perhaps
world—fiction is no small achievement. The Mars novels,
however, should be read before the age of sixteen: I hope
to revisit Barsoom in my rapidly approaching secondchild-
hood.)
Nevertheless, Phobos once featured rather spectacularly
on the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence)
agenda. Back in the sixties, the Russian astrophysicist Iosef
Shkovskii—best known to the general public for his collab-
oration with Carl Sagan on SETI’s sacred book Intelligence
in the Universe (1966)—made an extraordinary suggestion
about the little world, based on the long-established obser-
vation that it is slowly falling toward Mars.
IhaveneverdecidedhowseriouslyIoseftookhistheory;
he had a considerable sense of humor—which he needed to
survive as a Jewish scientist in Stalin’s time (and a lot
later)—but this is how his argument went:
TheslowdescentofPhobosisduetothesameeffectthat
viii
INTRODUCTION
finally brings down close artificial satellites to Earth—the
braking effect of the atmosphere. A satellite made of dense
material will survive a long time; one with low mass per
volume will be brought down more quickly, as was dem-
onstratedbytheECHOballoon,andlaterbySKYLAB,which
was essentially an empty fuel tank.
Working backward from the drag figures, Iosef calcu-
lated that the density of Phobos must be much less than
that of water. This could only mean that it was hollow....
Well,itseemedunlikelythatNaturecouldmakeahollow
world some tens of kilometers across. Phobos must be a
space station, presumably constructed by the Martians.
Which, added another scientist, is why they’re no longer
around. They went broke building it.
Alas, the Viking photos showed that Phobos is undoubt-
edly a natural object, but its surface does show some puz-
zling peculiarities. Much of it is covered with parallel
grooves several hundred meters wide, so that it looks like a
ploughed field on a gigantic scale.
I cannot help recalling that when the Italian astronomer
Schiaparelli reported “grooves” on Mars in 1877, he chose
the unfortunate word “channels” to describe them. What a
lotoftroublethemistranslationcaused—andhowchagrined
Percival Lowell would have been to learn that his beloved
canalshavenowturnedupnotonMars,butontinyPhobos.
ArthurC. Clarke
Colombo,Sri Lanka
ix