Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 3 - Hide and Seek

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

ARTHUR C . CLARKE’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 popular

sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two, 2061: Odyssey Three, and 3001: Final Odyssey; the highly acclaimed The

Songs of Distant Earth; the best selling 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 screenplays. He is the author of eleven novels, including Venus Prime, Volumes 1 and

2, Secret Passages and the near-future thrillers Core, Human Error, and Starfire. His nonfiction 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 in San

Francisco, California.

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime: Volumes 1 and 2

by Paul Preuss

Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Volume 1

by Michael P. Kube-McDowell and Mike McQuay

Isaac Asimov’s Robot City: Volume 2

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

by Jean-Marc Lofficier

X-Men: Shadows of the Past

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X-Men: The Chaos Engine Trilogy

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Introduction

by ARTHUR C. CLARKE

T he wise science fiction writer prefers to operate in galaxies far, far away and long, long ago, where

he is safe from nagging critics–like the small boy who once 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 door and tomorrow

afternoon. 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 their primaries 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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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

Today, we are accustomed to artificial satellites which perform such feats, thus rising in the west and

setting in the 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 illuminating the ancient 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 of coal.

Indeed, it may be largely made of carbon, 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,

during the cold 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 apparently consisted almost entirely of carnivores. The poor beasts must have suffered from acute

malnutrition.)

In “The Wreck of the Asteroid” (Wonder Stories, 1932), explorers first landed on Phobos and had a lot

of fun bouncing 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 an emergency take off and race after their careless colleague, hoping to catch up with him

before he made yet another crater on Mars.

I hate to spoil the fun, but that just couldn’t happen. Small though it is (about 20 meters a second,

compared with Earth’s 11,200) not even an Olympic high-jumper could attain the escape velocity of

Phobos–especially when encumbered with a spacesuit. And even if he did, he would be in no danger of

falling onto Mars–because he would still have the whole of Phobos’s eight thousand meters per second

or bital velocity. His trifling muscular contribution would make 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 order 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

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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 3

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 Peter O’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 gotten around to Forester’s story and missed the chance of discussing

“Brown” with him when we once dined together in the magnificent Painted Hall of the Royal Navy

College at Greenwich. Which was a pity, as it would have given me a chance of trotting out one of my

favorite quotations: “Talent borrows–but Genius 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 Phobians. 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 second childhood.)

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 collaboration 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

observation that it is slowly falling toward Mars.

I have never decided how seriously Iosef took his theory; 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:

The slow descent of Phobos is due to the same effect that 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 demonstrated by the ECHO

balloon, and later by SKYLAB, which was essentially an empty fuel tank.

Working backward from the drag figures, Iosef calculated that the density of Phobos must be much less

than that of water. This could only mean that it was hollow. . . .

Well, it seemed unlikely that Nature could make a hollow world some tens of kilometers across. Phobos

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ARTHURC.CLARKE'SVENUSPRIME:VOLUME3ARTHURC.CLARKE’SVENUSPRIMEArthurC.Clarkeistheworld-renownedauthorofsuchsciencefictioncl\assicsas2001:ASpaceOdyssey,forwhichhesharedanOscarnominationwithdirectorStanleyKubrick,\anditspopularsequels,2010:OdysseyTwo,2061:OdysseyThree,and3001:FinalOdyssey;thehighlyaccla...

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