Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus

by Paul Preuss

  Auxiliary power had failed to salvage the guidance instrumentation. The radar altimeter remained out of commission, and Khalid had no communication with satellites in space or with any ground station. From the displays, he judged that the onboard inertial systems were fried. He switched off the snowy screens.

  He eased back on the stick and headed the low-flying glider back in what he judged was the direction of Labyrinth City. It was the only plan he had, the only sensible thing to do. He was hundreds of kilometers from his target, but tiny as the city was it had a wider cross-section than any other inhabited place on Mars.

  Each time the plane climbed too high, it would lose ground-measured distance; it was essential to stay out of the opposing winds aloft. The jetstream had already blown them so far in an hour that they would need a day of jibing around buttes and mesas, across canyons and dune fields, to regain the Labyrinth.

  With the plane under his control, Khalid took the time to peer around his seatback. Sparta lolled in her harness, her head thrown back from the last violent swoop of the plane. Her face was ashen; her forehead was dewed with perspiration. Yet her breath came evenly, and the pulsing vein in her throat showed that her heartbeat was strong and steady.

  He turned his attention back to the controls.

  For two hours the plane flew on without incident, entering the huge plain of Tharsis. Khalid had memorized the map of Mars; from thousands of hours aloft he could match much of it to the territory. He could read the windsign in the sand below, spot dust devils spinning like dervishes twenty kilometers away; he could find the updrafts he needed to stay airborne.

  What he could not do without instruments was see over the horizon.

  The marsplane soared along a line of steep cinder cones, their fresh and iridescent black lava dusted with orange sand. The cone at the end of the line was the newest and highest; as the plane banked around its shoulder, an endless dune field opened to the southwest.

  When Khalid saw what was out there he whispered, “God is good.”

  A boiling duststorm was crawling across Tharsis, spreading wings of dust from north to south as far as Khalid could see. Its towering front bristled with dry lightning in a phalanx of glittering spears.

  Wheeling the marsplane back toward the saddle between the two nearest cinder cones, Khalid dove for the ground. He pulled up in time for the plane to skim the steepening slope. He hit switches on the console and the wing sprouted dozens of upright spoilers. At stall angle the plane was hardly a meter above the slag; it lost forward speed and gently grounded itself.

  Khalid slapped his harness release, threw up the canopy, and jumped out. Reaching up under the plane’s wingroots, he threw a series of locking bolts and pulled the left wing free of the fuselage. He ran to the left tail boom attachment and released its latches, laying the boom and its vertical fin flat against the ground.

  He ran on to the wingtip. A slender fiber lanyard was coiled in a recessed pocket at the wingtip. Khalid pulled it out. He took a long piton from the thigh pocket of his pressure suit and clipped it to the lanyard. From the same pocket he took a steel tool like an ice axe and pounded the piton into firm lava.

  More lanyards were concealed at intervals along the leading and trailing edges of the wing and along the tail boom. Working his way back toward the fuselage, Khalid nailed the disassembled left side of the marsplane to the ground. By the time he had repeated the process on the right side of the plane, the sky beyond the saddle was dark with smoking columns of dust.

  His final task was to lash the fuselage pod to the ground. When it was secure he climbed back in and jerked the canopy down. He had to pull it hard in the teeth of the howling wind.

  He looked at Sparta. She was still breathing, still unconscious. The pain had eased from her sleeping face. He faced front again. Inside the rattling cockpit he watched the rolling storm loom over them like an oncoming tank tread over an ant.

  And suddenly it was on them, streaking toward them like a live thing, swallowing them whole. A scurrying stream of soft dust hissed over the canopy. Seconds later the air was dark, made visible again by suspended matter that hid more than it revealed, a murky scab-colored brown through which Khalid could see no more than a meter or two.

  The plane’s detached wings trembled against the ground. No moving atmosphere could get beneath them, and before long their surfaces were obscured by writhing snakes of dust.

  Khalid imagined that the atmosphere was alive with wriggling creatures, with newts and minnows of blowing dust, with anacondas of dust.

  He dug in the pocket of his pressure suit and pulled out his astrolabe. Its electronics no longer functioned. The alidade no longer pointed to Earth. Nevertheless, he had a general notion of the direction of his birth planet.

  It was time to pray.

  Night. Blue lights and stainless steel at the Park-Your-Pain: Blake screamed at Lydia over the howling synthekord. “I don’t know whether you remember me, but…”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “…we met the other night. My name’s … oh, you remember?”

  “You’re Mycroft. What do you want?”

  “Listen, remember Yevgeny said he got me a job at the line head? Well, I really need the job, but they say they’re not running the crummies because of some accident. I’ve got the job, but I need a ride.”

  She looked at him, incredulous. “You want a ride to the line head?”

  “Yeah. I know you said you never take passengers, but if you knew what it meant to me…”

  “Wait here,” she said. “I have to talk to somebody.”

  “I’ll pay you. I mean, I can’t pay you right now, but I’d be willing…”

  “Shut up, will you?” Her irritation was real enough to make him back away. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He watched her elbow her way through the crowd. He could barely see her between the bobbing heads, back there in the blue shadows, yelling into her commlink.

  A minute passed. She came back. “Know anything about trucks?”

  “Not much. I’m a plumber.”

  “Sure you are. I guess that’ll have to do.”

  “You’ll take me?”

  “That’s what I just said.”

  “When do we start?”

  “Dawn.”

  “Great! Thanks, Lydia. Can I buy you a…?”

  “No,” she said, cutting him off. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Do me a favor and get lost until then.”

  Khalid roused himself from a troubled sleep. It took him a moment to realize what was missing: he’d grown used to the buffeting of the wind, but it had fallen to a gentle shiver.

  Outside the canopy the last stars were fading and the sky was warming to dawn. He turned and shook Sparta’s shoulder, but she was deep in sleep.

  He raised the canopy and got out. It took him longer to put the plane back together than it had taken to tear it apart, especially when it came to reattaching the right wing, for with the left wing and boom in place the fuselage was canted over to the left. But a hinge and winch arrangement was built into the wing yoke, and before long the whole huge glider was reassembled and the dust shaken from its wings.

  He left only the wingtip lanyards pinned to the ground.

  In the cockpit, Khalid set the arming switches for the takeoff-assist rockets. His preflight check was almost casual, perhaps because there weren’t any instruments left to worry about. With his left hand he yanked the hydraulic lever that released the wingtips; then, gripping the stick with his right hand, he hit the RATO trigger.

  When nothing happened, he went through the preset again and tried once more. Still nothing happened.

  The plane stirred in the breeze, eager to rise. Without a lift to altitude it could soon tear itself to pieces on the ground.

  Khalid released his harness, swung the canopy up, and jumped to the ground for the third time. He checked the RATO canisters slung beneath the wings. No mechanical problems, and he hadn’t expected any. The marspl
ane had been crippled by a general and catastrophic electrical failure, destroying every electronic system except the multiply-redundant aerodynamic controls and their shielded batteries.

  He went to an access panel in the fuselage and pried it open. There was nothing obviously wrong with the massed circuitry inside, but a foreign object was lodged in the autopilot comparator: a stainless steel ball, discolored to a strange purplish-green that suggested intense heat. He plucked the sphere out of the crevice into which it had been wedged and shoved it into the thigh pocket of his suit.

  After a moment’s thought, Khalid, working more deliberately this time, took the plane apart again and again nailed it to the ground. When this was done he leaned into the cockpit, left his tools and remaining pitons on the seat, and dug into the net bags hanging against the thin walls. He scooped up a little less than half the plane’s emergency ration, of food and water and stuffed the food tubes into his pockets.

  He studied Sparta’s face one last time. There were one or two things he could try, but none that seemed worth the risk. He left her there, in a coma, and after he had sealed the canopy over her he walked into the desert.

  10

  This time when Blake showed up at the dispatch office, everybody was quietly busy. Even the fat clerk seemed to be shuffling his numbers with great attention to duty.

  “I got a ride, like you said,” Blake said.

  “That right?” The clerk didn’t look at him.

  “With Lydia Zeromski. Where do I find her?”

  The clerk pointed through the big window that overlooked the yard. A truck was leaving the loading area, its turbines blowing blue flame into the orange dawn.

  Blake walked through wisps of dust in the raking light, past the blasted fueling shed. The damage was impressive—the twisted remains of the manifold where the explosion had occurred loomed overhead like a plate of spaghetti frozen in midtoss—but the blackened and gutted crummies had been dragged to one side, pipes had been rerouted, and the yard was back in operation.

  As he approached Lydia’s truck he caught the scream of its turbines through his helmet, even in the thin atmosphere.

  In daylight a marstruck was an even more imposing piece of machinery than at night—part tractor, part caterpillar, part train. The turbines were mounted behind the cab, big gas-expansion turbines fueled and oxidized from smoking dewars of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so that the tractor was almost as big as a locomotive. The two cargo beds behind it were covered with fiberglass cowlings to minimize wind resistance, although nearby trailers were uncovered—Blake knew from hanging out at the Porkypine that there was a debate among the drivers as to whether trailer cowlings were more efficient as streamlining or as windfoils to lift the whole rig off the ground; being an independent lot, the drivers rigged their trucks to personal specs.

  Despite their size, there was something spidery about the marstrucks. The treads were steel mesh, not clanking metal plates, and they were mounted away from the body on struts that seemed too narrow to bear the weight. The cargo trailers were long, built like bridges, and looked too fragile for their wide loads.

  All this was an Earthman’s illusion. Blake had yet to get used to a planet where things weighed a third of what they appeared and structures were effectively two and a half times as strong.

  Lydia’s marstruck was pretty much standard issue, with all its cowlings in place, its paint bright and its chrome polished, and only her name on the door of the cab, in blue and white script painted like flames, to indicate the rig was hers. Blake clambered lightly over the treads on the passenger side and banged on the door of the bubble cab. Lydia looked up from the console, raised a cautioning hand, and then unsealed the door. Blake climbed in.

  The inside of the bubble cab was neat and clean, undecorated except for a 19th-century crucifix of polished black wood that hung above the dashboard. Behind the seats was the opening to the fairly spacious sleeping box, veiled with feminine lace.

  Lydia checked the dash lights that indicated the cab was sealed and then popped the air bottles. The cab pressurized. When the board went full green, she pulled open her helmet. Blake did the same.

  “You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been sitting here burning gas.”

  “Sorry. I thought you said dawn.”

  “The sun’s been up five minutes, Mycroft. Work on your timing.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  She threw the levers and the treads began to roll.

  The road out of the shuttleport was the longest highway on Mars. Fifteen minutes after setting out upon it, the last sign of human life—save for the rutted dusty tracks themselves—had disappeared behind them in the thin light of the Martian dawn. The desert crossed by this often-invisible web of ruts was the biggest and driest and deadest in the solar system. Except for the wrecks of other vehicles abandoned along the way, there would be no other sign of life until they reached the camp at the pipeline head, 3,000 kilometers to the northeast.

  Blake looked through the bubble glass, fascinated. Nothing lived here. Not so much as a blackened ocotillo was rooted in the powdery soil; not so much as a horned lizard or a vinegaroon crouched under the desiccated rocks. Everywhere the landforms, down to the smallest rill, were covered with fine dust deposited by the global windstorms that cloaked the entire planet every few years. There was a reason Mars was called the dirtiest planet in the solar system.

  As the small bright sun rose higher on his right and the woman doing the driving indicated that she was determined to keep her eyes on the road and her mouth shut, Blake began to face the superlatives: driest, deadest, dirtiest, widest. A dirt road long enough to cross Australia.

  Better to be stranded in the Sahel in midsummer, better to be abandoned in Antarctica in midwinter, than to be lost on Mars.

  The marstruck bounded over the sand like a running cat, legs stretched, belly to the earth. Wonderful how the human mind adjusts; what was terrifying becomes routine, what was ecstatic becomes dull. The truck’s speed at first astonished Blake, but he soon grew to think of it as normal.

  The truck raced along the lonely road, following the shifting ruts in the sand but guided by satellite. The ruts were an immediate but untrustworthy trace; the road was there even when they blew away, for in reality the road was only a line on a map, and the map was in computer memory. One copy of the map was in the marstruck’s own inertial guidance system; another copy was in computers on Mars Station, which tracked everything that moved on the planet’s surface through its net of sensors—as long as the lines of communication were open.

  In that sense this lonely road was not so lonely. It was in intimate contact with thousands of machines and people, on the planet and in orbit around it. A nice thought—which the unfolding landscape subtly denied.

  Soon after leaving the environs of Labyrinth City the road began its descent and crossing of the western provinces of the Valles Marineris, and Blake faced that ragged planetary scar for the first time.

  To those who have not seen it the Valles Marineris cannot be described. Earthbound analogies are too feeble, but Blake struggled to relate what he saw to what he had experienced before, to images from his youthful summer on the Mogollon Rim and from those other summers touring the North American west—climbing down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or the slopes of Denali in summer, crossing the Salt River or the Scablands, coming into Zion from the east, dropping into Panamint Valley from the west, rolling down the Phantom Canyon behind Pikes Peak, winding down Grapevine Canyon into Death Valley … there was no easy comparison, no real comparison.

  There is a path on Earth—it cannot be called a road—known as the Golden Stair, which descends into the Maze of the western Canyonlands of Utah, near the confluence of the Colorado and the Green rivers; desert aficionados call it the Golden Slide. Built as a mining road, hacked from the ringing rock of stark perpendicular mesas and the slick sides of wind-carved grabens, the sheer slippery slide has claimed many an ATV and even the lives o
f a few walkers.

  The highway into the Valles Marineris was worse. Seconds after Lydia unhesitatingly pushed the speeding marstruck over the edge of the cliff, Blake looked upon the deepest canyon he had ever seen. In the depths of it the distant banded cliffs were lost in blue haze. He could not see ground over the dashboard, and in that instant he was convinced that Lydia was committing suicide and taking him with her, driving straight into thin Martian air.

  When a moment later his heart started again, he found that there was still rock beneath the treads and he could even see the road by leaning his forehead toward the glass of the bubble. What he saw was almost as bad as what he had imagined.

  The angle of attack was twice what it would have been on Earth, the angle of a playground slide rather than that of even the steepest roadgrade. Blake strained to persuade himself that this made sense—things fall more slowly on Mars, don’t they?—but he kept worrying about a diminished coefficient of friction and wondering about side-sway as the truck whipped around these rollercoaster corners. Inertia concerned itself with mass, not weight, wasn’t that true? So what was to keep the whole hurtling pile of pipe from flying into space?

  “Lydia, do you always…?”

  “Shut up. This is tricky.”

  Now that was comforting…

  He did shut up, trying to convince himself that she knew what she was doing. Really there was no question about it, he reasoned; not only did she know what she was doing, she’d done it scores of times before.

  Tell that to your stomach, Mycroft…

  The truck’s speed wasn’t as great as it seemed to Blake, nor was the road quite as narrow or steep, and Lydia was driving with more caution, leaving more margin for error, and employing far more experience than a naive off-worlder could know. Nevertheless, the big truck was rolling down a cliff of sheer slickrock a kilometer high.