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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

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. . . .

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

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

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

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

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

Prologue

S he lay exposed on the operating table. Men and 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.”

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S VENUS PRIME, VOLUME 4

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.”

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Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 4 - The Medusa Encounter.pdf

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