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 popular
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 nonfiction.
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 thirteen novels, including Secret
Passages and the near-future thrillers Core 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 near San Francisco, California.
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ARTHUR C. CLARKE’S
VENUS
PRIME
V O L U M E 1
PAUL PREUSS
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Kristina Anderson, San Francisco artist and
bookbinder, for an introduction to the bookmaker’s craft.
Carol Dawson, writer, and Lenore Coral, librarian at Cornell,
refreshed my memories of London in general and Sotheby’s
in particular. My daughter, Mona Helen Preuss, slogged
through old auction catalogues at the library of the University
of California and Berkeley. The staff of the rare-book room
of the San Francisco Public Library were customarily, anonymously,
efficient and helpful. Thanks to them all, and let them
be reassured that my mistakes are my own.
—Paul Preuss
1
Introduction
by ARTHUR C. CLARKE
Unlike some authors, I have not generally been
given to collaborative work in the science fiction
area, especially in regard to my novels which, for
the most part, have been written alone. There have been,
however, some notable exceptions. In the 1960s, I worked
with director Stanley Kubrick on the most realistic SF film
done to that time, an ambitious little project called 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Over a decade and a half later, I had
another close encounter with a Hollywood director named
Peter Hyams, who produced and directed the visually impressive
adaptation of my sequel, 2010.
Both films were rewarding experiences, and I found
myself both surprised and delighted by some of the results.
Now I find myself once again involved in an intriguing
collaborative venture that has evolved from my original
story, Breaking Strain.
The novella (horrid word!) Breaking Strain was written
in the summer of 1948, while I was taking my belated
degree at King’s College, London. My agent, Scott Meredith,
then in his early twenties, promptly sold it to Thrilling
Wonder Stories; it can be more conveniently located
in my first collection of stories, Expedition to Earth (1954).
Soon after Breaking Strain appeared, some perceptive
critic remarked that I apparently aspired to be the Kipling
of the Spaceways. Even if I was not conscious of it, that
V E N U S P R I M E
2
was certainly a noble ambition—especially as I never
imagined that the dawn of the Space Age was only nine
years ahead.
And if I may be allowed to continue the immodest
comparison, Kipling made two excellent attempts to being
the Clarke of the Air Age; see ‘‘With the Night Mail’’ and
‘‘As Easy As ABC.’’ The ABC, incidentally, stands for Aerial
Board of Control.
Oh, yes, Breaking Strain. The original story is of course
now slightly dated, though not as much as I had expected.
In any case, that doesn’t matter; the kind of situation it
describes is one which must have occurred countless times
in the past and will be with us—in ever more sophisticated
forms—as long as the human race endures.
Indeed, the near-catastrophe of the 1970 Apollo 13
mission presents some very close parallels. I still have
hanging up on my wall the first page of the mission summary,
on which NASA Administrator Tom Paine has written:
‘‘Just as you always said it would be, Arthur.’’
But the planet Venus, alas, has gone; my friend Brian
Aldiss neatly summed up our sense of loss in the title of
his anthology Farewell, Fantastic Venus . . .
Where are the great rivers and seas, home of gigantic
monsters that could provide a worthy challenge to heroes
in the Edgar Rice Burroughs mold? (Yes, ERB made several
visits there, when Mars got boring.) Gone with the
thousand-degree-Farenheit wind of sulphuric acid vapor
. . .
Yet all is not lost. Though no human beings may ever
walk the surface of Venus as it is today, in a few centuries
—or millennia—we may refashion the planet nearer to
the heart’s desire. The beautiful Evening Star may become
the twin of Earth that we once thought it to be, and the
V E N U S P R I M E
3
remote successors of Star Queen will ply the spaceways
between the worlds.
Paul Preuss, who knows about all these things, has
cleverly updated my old tale and introduced some elements
of which I never dreamed (though I’m amazed to
see that The Seven Pillars of Wisdom was in the original;
when I read the new text, I thought that was Paul’s invention).
Although I deplore the fact that crime stories
have such a universal attraction, I suppose that somebody
will still be trying to make a dishonest buck selling life
insurance the day before the Universe collapses into the
final Black Hole.
It is also an interesting challenge combining the two
genres of crime and science fiction, especially as some
experts have claimed that it’s impossible. (My sole contribution
here is ‘‘Trouble with Time’’; and though I hate to
say so, Isaac What’s-His-Name managed it superbly in his
Caves of Steel series.)
Now it’s Paul’s turn. I think he’s done a pretty good
job.
—Arthur C. Clarke
Columbo, Sri Lanka
5
PART ONE
THE FOX
AND THE HEDGEHOG
7
I
‘‘Does the word Sparta mean anything to you?’’
A young woman sat on a spoke-backed chair of varnished
pine. Her face was turned to the tall window; her
unmarked features were pale in the diffuse light that
flooded the white room, reflected from the wintry landscape
outside.
Her interrogator fussed with his trim salt-and-pepper
beard and peered at her over the top of his spectacles as
he waited for an answer. He sat behind a battered oak desk
a hundred and fifty years old, a kindly fellow with all the
time in the world.
‘‘Of course.’’ In her oval face her brows were wide ink
strokes above eyes of liquid brown; beneath her upturned
nose her mouth was full, her lips innocent in their delicate,
natural pinkness. The unwashed brown hair that lay in
lank strands against her cheeks, her shapeless dressing
gown, these could not disguise her beauty.
‘‘What does it mean to you?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
8
‘‘What?’’
‘‘The word Sparta, what does that mean to you?’’
‘‘Sparta is my name.’’ Still she did not look at him.
‘‘What about the name Linda? Does that mean anything
to you?’’
She shook her head.
‘‘Or how about Ellen?’’
She did not respond.
‘‘Do you know who I am?’’ he asked.
‘‘I don’t believe we’ve met, Doctor.’’ She continued to
stare out the window, studying something a great distance
away.
‘‘But you do know that I’m a doctor.’’
She shifted in her chair, glanced around the room, taking
in the diplomas, the books, returning her gaze to him
with a thin smile. The doctor smiled back. Though in fact
they had met every week for the past year, her point was
taken—again. Yes, any sane person would know she was
in a doctor’s office. Her smile faded and she turned back
to the window.
‘‘Do you know where you are?’’
‘‘No. They brought me here during the night. Usually
I’m in . . . the program.’’
‘‘Where is that?’’
‘‘In . . . Maryland.’’
‘‘What is the name of the program?’’
‘‘I . . .’’ She hesitated. A frown creased her brow.
‘‘. . . I can’t tell you that.’’
‘‘Can you remember it?’’
Her eyes flashed angrily. ‘‘It’s not on the white side.’’
‘‘You mean it’s classified?’’
‘‘Yes. I can’t tell anyone without a Q clearance.’’
‘‘I have a Q clearance, Linda.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
9
‘‘That is not my name. How do I know you have a
clearance? If my father tells me I can talk to you about
the program, I will.’’
He had often told her that her parents were dead. Invariably
she greeted the news with disbelief. If he did not
repeat it within five or ten minutes, she promptly forgot;
if, however, he persisted, trying to persuade her, she became
wild with confusion and grief—only to recover her
sad calm a few minutes after he relented. He had long
since ceased to torture her with temporary horrors.
Of all his patients, she was the one who most excited
his frustration and regret. He longed to restore her lost
core and he believed he could do it, if her keepers would
permit him to.
Frustrated, bored perhaps, he abandoned the script of
the interview. ‘‘What do you see out there?’’ he asked.
‘‘Trees. Mountains.’’ Her voice was a longing whisper.
‘‘Snow on the ground.’’
If he were to continue the routine they had established,
a routine he remembered but she did not, he would ask
her to recount what had happened to her yesterday, and
she would recite in great detail events that had occurred
over three years ago. He rose abruptly—surprising himself,
for he rarely varied his work schedule. ‘‘Would you like
to go outside?’’
She seemed as surprised as he.
The nurses grumbled and fussed over her, bundling her
into wool trousers, flannel shirt, scarf, fur-lined leather
boots, a thick overcoat of some shiny gray quilted material
—a fabulously expensive wardrobe, which she took for
granted. She was fully capable of dressing herself, but she
often forgot to change her clothes. They found it easier to
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0
leave her in her robe and slippers then, pretending to
themselves that she was helpless. They helped her now,
and she allowed it.
The doctor waited for her outside on the icy steps of
the stone veranda, studying the French doors with their
peeling frames, the yellow paint pigment turning to powder
in the dry, thin air. He was a tall and very round man,
made rounder by the bulk of his black Chesterfield coat
with its elegant velvet collar. The coat was worth the price
of an average dwelling. It was a sign of the compromises
he had made.
The girl emerged, urged forward by the nurses, gasping
at the sharpness of the air. High on her cheeks two rosy
patches bloomed beneath the transparent surface of her
blue-white skin. She was neither tall nor unusually slender,
but there was a quick unthinking certainty in her
movements that reminded him she was a dancer. Among
other things.
He and the girl walked on the grounds behind the main
building. From this altitude they could see a hundred miles
across the patchwork brown and white plains to the east,
a desert of overgrazed, farmed-out grit. Not all the white
was snow; some was salt. Afternoon sun glinted from the
windows of a moving magneplane heading south, too far
away to see; ice-welded blades of brown grass crunched
under their feet where the sunlight had sublimed the snow
cover.
The edge of the lawn was marked by bare cottonwoods
planted close together, paralleling an ancient wall of
brownstone. The ten-foot electrified fence beyond the wall
was almost invisible against the mountainside, which rose
abruptly into shadow; higher up, blue drifts of snow persisted
beneath squat junipers.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1
They sat on a bench in sunlight. He brought a chess
pad from the pocket of his coat and laid it flat between
them. ‘‘Would you like to play?’’
‘‘Are you any good?’’ she asked simply.
‘‘Fair. Not as good as you.’’
‘‘How do you know?’’
He hesitated—they had played often—but he was weary
of challenging her with the truth. ‘‘It was in your file.’’
‘‘I would like to see that file someday.’’
‘‘I’m afraid I no longer have access to it,’’ he lied. The
file she had in mind was a different file.
The chess pad assigned her the white pieces and she
opened swiftly with the Giuco Piano, throwing the doctor
off balance with pawn to bishop-three on the fourth move.
To give himself time to think he asked, ‘‘Is there anything
else you would like?’’
‘‘Anything else?’’
‘‘Is there anything we can do for you?’’
‘‘I would like to see my mother and father.’’
He didn’t answer, pondering the board instead. Like
most amateurs, he struggled to think two or three moves
deep but was unable to hold all the permutations in his
mind. Like most masters, she thought in patterns; although
at this moment she could no longer recall her opening
moves, it didn’t matter. Years ago, before her short-term
memory had been destroyed, she had stored uncounted
patterns.
He pushed the piece-keys and she replied instantly. On
her next move one of his bishops was pinned. He smiled
ruefully. Another rout in the making. Nevertheless he did
his best to stay with her, to give her an interesting game.
Until her keepers untied his hands he had little else to give
her.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 2
An hour passed—time was nothing to her—before she
said ‘‘check’’ for the last time. His queen was long gone,
his situation hopeless. ‘‘Your game,’’ he said. She smiled,
thanked him. He slipped the chess pad into his pocket.
With the pad out of sight, her longing stare returned.
They made a final tour of the wall. The shadows were
long and their breath congealed before their faces; overhead
the hazy blue sky was crisscrossed with a thousand
icy contrails. A nurse met them at the door, but the doctor
stayed outside. When he said good-bye the girl looked at
him curiously, having forgotten who he was.
Some rekindled spark of rebellion inspired the doctor
to key the phonelink. ‘‘I want to talk to Laird.’’
The face on the videoplate was bland and polite.
‘‘Terribly sorry. I’m afraid the director cannot accept
unscheduled calls.’’
‘‘It’s personal and urgent. Please tell him that. I’ll wait.’’
‘‘Doctor, believe me, there’s simply no way . . .’’
He was on the link a long time with one aide after
another, finally wringing a promise from the last of them
that the director would call him in the morning. These
obstinate encounters fanned the rebellious spark, and the
doctor was deeply angry when the last connection was cut.
His patient had asked to see her file—the file of which
she had been the subject until a year before her arrival at
the hospital. He had meant to wait for clearance, but why
bother? Laird and the rest of them would be incredulous,
but there was no way she could use, or abuse, what she
would see: she would forget it almost instantly.
That, after all, was the point of this whole shameful
exercise.
He knocked on the door of her upstairs room. She
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3
opened it, still wearing the boots and shirt and trousers
she had put on for her walk. ‘‘Yes?’’
‘‘You asked to see your file.’’
She studied him. ‘‘Did my father send you?’’
‘‘No. One of the M.I. staff.’’
‘‘I’m not allowed to see my file. None of us are.’’
‘‘An . . . exception has been made in your case. But it’s
at your discretion. Only if you’re interested.’’
Wordlessly, she followed him down the echoing corridor,
down flights of creaking stairs.
The basement room was bright and warm, thickly carpeted,
quite unlike the drafty halls and wards of the old
sanatorium above. The doctor showed her to a carrel. ‘‘I’ve
entered the appropriate code already. I’ll be right here if
you have any questions.’’ He sat across the narrow aisle,
two carrels down, with his back turned to her. He wanted
her to feel that she had some privacy, but not to forget
that he was present.
She studied the flatscreen on the desk. Then her fingers
expertly stroked the hemispheres of the manual input. Alphanumerics
appeared on the screen: ‘‘WARNING: unauthorized
access to this file is punishable by fine and/or
imprisonment under the National Security Act.’’ After a
few seconds a stylized logo appeared, the image of a fox.
That image disappeared, to be replaced by more words and
numbers. ‘‘Case L. N. 30851005, Specified Aptitude Resource
Training and Assessment project. Access by other
than authorized Multiple Intelligence personnel is strictly
forbidden.’’
She stroked the input again.
Across the aisle the doctor nervously smoked a cigarette
—ancient and hideous vice—while he waited, seeing
what she saw on the screen in front of him. The procedures
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4
and evaluations would be familiar to her, embedded in
long-term memory, engrained there, because so much of
what she had learned was not mere information, but was
process, performance. . . .
She was reminded of what had become part of her. She
had been taught languages—many of them, including her
own—by conversing and reading aloud at far beyond the
level of vocabulary considered appropriate to her age. She
had been taught to perform on the violin and the piano
since infancy, since long before the fingers of her hands
could stretch to form chords, and in the same way she had
been taught dance and gymnastics and horseback riding,
by being made to practice incessantly, by having the most
expected of her. She had manipulated space-filling images
on a computer, and learned drawing and sculpture from
masters; she had been immersed in a swirling social matrix
in the schoolroom since before she could speak; she had
been tutored in set theory, geometry, and algebra from the
time she had been able to distinguish among her toes and
demonstrate Piagetian conservation. ‘‘L. N.’’ had a long
number attached to her file name, but she was the first
subject of SPARTA, which had been created by her father
and mother.
Her parents had tried not to unduly influence the rating
of their daughter’s achievements. But even where doubleblind
scoring was impossible, her mastery was evident.
Revealed here on the flatscreen, as she had never seen it
confirmed before, her excellence was enough to make her
weep.
The doctor was immediately at her side. ‘‘Is something
wrong?’’ She wiped at her tears and shook her head, but
he gently insisted. ‘‘It’s my job to be of help.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
1 5
‘‘It’s only—I wish they could tell me,’’ she said. ‘‘Tell
me themselves. That I’m doing all right.’’
He pulled a chair around and sat beside her. ‘‘They
would if they could, you know. They really can’t. Under
the circumstances.’’
She nodded but did not answer. She advanced the file.
How would she respond to what came next? he wondered,
and watched with what he hoped was strictly professional
curiosity. Her memories terminated abruptly in
her seventeenth year. The file did not. She was almost
twenty-one now. . . .
She frowned at the screen. ‘‘What is that evaluation?
‘Cellular programming.’ I never studied that. I don’t even
know what it is.’’
‘‘Oh?’’ The doctor leaned forward. ‘‘What’s the date?’’
‘‘You’re right.’’ She laughed. ‘‘It must be what they’re
planning for next spring.’’
‘‘But look, they’ve already assigned you scores. A
whole group.’’
She laughed again, delighted. ‘‘They probably think
that’s what I ought to score.’’
For him, no surprises after all—and in her mind, no
surprises would be permitted. Her immersion in the reality
her brain had recreated for her could not be drained by a
few numbers on a flatscreen. ‘‘They think they know you
pretty well,’’ the doctor said dryly.
‘‘Perhaps I’ll fool them.’’ She was happy at the prospect.
The file ended abruptly at the conclusion of her standard
training, three years ago. On the screen, only the logo
of the Multiple Intelligence agency: the fox. The quick
brown fox. The fox who knows many things . . .
V E N U S P R I M E
1 6
The doctor observed that her cheerfulness persisted
longer than usual, while she stared at that logo. Perhaps
it maintained her in a present of some continuity with her
past.
‘‘Perhaps you will,’’ he murmured.
Leaving her at the door of her room—she already forgetting
him, having already forgotten what they both had
seen—he moved his bulk ponderously down the old stairs
to his office. The high-ceilinged, drafty brick building,
built on the flanks of the Rocky Mountains in the late 19th
century as a tuberculosis sanatorium, now two hundred
years later well served its role as a private asylum for
disturbed members of the families of the modestly wellto-
do. The doctor did his best for those who were innocently
committed here, but case L. N. 30851005 was quite
different, and increasingly absorbed his attention.
On his own flatscreen he called up the clinical file the
institution had kept since her arrival. An odd emotion took
hold of him then—when decision overtakes a mind, even
a normal one, it often happens so quickly it erases the
track of its own processes—and the doctor was shaken by
a shuddering warmth, the certainty of revealed truth.
He pressed his finger against his ear and keyed his
commlink with the sanatorium staff. ‘‘I’m concerned that
Linda has not been sleeping well this week.’’
‘‘Really, Doctor?’’ The nurse was surprised. ‘‘Sorry. We
haven’t noticed anything unusual.’’
‘‘Well, let’s try sodium pentobarbital tonight, shall we?
Two hundred milligrams.’’
The nurse hesitated, then acquiesced. ‘‘Certainly, Doctor.’’
* * *
V E N U S P R I M E
1 7
He waited until everyone was asleep except the two
night nurses. The man would be prowling the corridors,
supposedly alert for trouble, actually nursing his own insomnia.
The woman would be dozing in front of the videoplate
monitors at her station on the main floor.
He nodded to her as he passed by, on his way up the
stairs. ‘‘I’ll just have a look around before I go home.’’ She
looked up, belatedly alert.
Everything he needed fitted easily inside his luxurious
Chesterfield without appreciably adding to his bulk. He
climbed the stairs and moved down the second floor corridor,
conscientiously poking his head into every ward and
private room.
He came to L. N. 30851005’s room and entered. The
photogram camera was watching from its invisible position
high in the corner; he could keep his back to it, but
someone passing in the hall would have a different angle
of view, so he casually swung the door half closed behind
him.
He bent over her unconscious form, then swiftly turned
her head upright. Her respiration was steady and deep.
First out of his pocket was a flat CT scope the size of a
checkbook. He laid it across her closed eyes; its screen
displayed a map of her skull and brain as if they had been
sliced through. Digital coordinates appeared in one corner
of the screen. He adjusted the CT scope’s depth finder until
the gray matter of the hippocampus was centered.
He was still bent over her. He drew a long hypodermic
from his sleeve, a seemingly primitive instrument frightening
in its undisguised purpose. But within the shank of
the steel needle nested other needles, needles within needles,
graduated in fineness until the slimmest of them was
finer than a human hair, invisible. They were needles that
V E N U S P R I M E
1 8
possessed a mind of their own. He dipped the tip of the
barrel in disinfectant in a small, clear vial. He felt the
bridge of her nose, pressed his fingers down to widen her
nostrils, then carefully, inexorably—watching its progress
on the miniature screen—he shoved the long, telescoping
shaft into her brain.
1 9
II
The olfactory lobes are perhaps the most atavistic portions
of the brain, having evolved in the nervous systems of
blind worms that felt their way through the opaque muck
of Cambrian seas. To function they must be in close contact
with the environment, and so, beneath the bridge of
the nose, the brain is almost completely exposed to the
outside world. It is a dangerous arrangement. The body’s
immune system is incompatible with the brain’s processes,
everywhere sealed out by the blood-brain barrier—except
in the nasal passages, where mucous membranes are the
brain’s only defense, and every winter cold is an all-out
struggle against brain disease.
When the defenses are breached, the brain itself feels
nothing; the flower of the central nervous system is itself
nerveless. The micro-needle that probed past L. N.’s olfactory
lobes and into her hippocampus left no internal sensation.
It did, however, leave an infection, spreading
fast. . . .
V E N U S P R I M E
2 0
* * *
Waking late, the woman who thought of herself as
Sparta felt an itching sensation high in her nose, beside
her right eye.
As recently as yesterday she had been in Maryland, at
the project facilities north of the capital. She had gone to
bed in the dormitory, wishing she could be in her own
room at her parents’ home in New York City but accepting
the fact that that would be inappropriate under the current
circumstances. Everyone had been very good to her here.
She should have felt—she tried to feel—honored to be
where she was.
This morning she was somewhere else. The room was
high-ceilinged, layered with a century’s accumulation of
white enamel, and its tall windows, hung with dusty lace,
were fitted with panes of imperfect glass whose pinhole
bubbles refocused the sun into golden liquid galaxies. She
didn’t know where she was, exactly, but that was nothing
new. They must have brought her here in the night. She
would find her way around, as she had in many other
strange places.
She sneezed twice and briefly wondered if she were
catching a cold. The stale taste of her mouth unpleasantly
grew to dominate her sensations; she could taste what
must have been last night’s dinner as vividly as if it were
in front of her, except that all the flavors were here at
once, green beans mingling with custard, a fragment of
rice throbbing with odors of gunny sack, crumbs of
ground beef stewing in saliva . . . Vaguely apprehended
formulas of amines and esters and carbohydrates danced
through her mind with a slippery, tickly quality that was
familiar although she had no idea what they signified.
She rose quickly from the bed, put on gown and slip-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 1
pers—she merely assumed they were hers—and went off in
search of someplace to scrub her teeth. The smell in the
drafty hall was overwhelming, wax and urine and ammonia
and bile and turpentine—insistent odors and their
accompanying, ungraspable mathematical analogues summoning
ghosts, the ghosts of vanished supplicants and
benefactors, workers and inmates of this building, and
their visitors and keepers, everyone who had passed this
way for a century. She sneezed again and again, and fi-
nally the clamorous stench subsided.
She found the bathroom without any trouble. Peering
at herself in the mirror on the wooden cabinet, she was
suddenly thrust out of herself—her image appeared to enlarge
—until she was staring at an immensely magnified
view of her own eye. Dark brown, liquid at its surface, it
was an eye of glassy perfection. At the same time she
could still see her ordinary reflection in the glass; the giant
eye was superimposed upon the familiar face. She closed
one eye—she saw only her face. She closed the other—she
was staring into the liquid depths of an immense open
pupil. The blackness within was unfathomable.
Her right eye seemed to have something . . . wrong? . . .
with it.
She blinked a couple of times and the double exposure
vanished. Her face was itself. Again it occurred to her to
brush her teeth. After several monotonous minutes the vibrating
brush massaged her into dreaminess. . . .
The helicopter made a loud thrumming outside,
soundly rattling the windows as it landed on the lawn.
The staff scurried hurriedly about; the unexpected arrival
of a helicopter generally meant an inspection.
When the doctor came upstairs from his apartment he
V E N U S P R I M E
2 2
found one of the director’s aides waiting in his office. The
doctor was bothered but tried not to show it.
‘‘We promised you the director would get back to you,’’
said the aide. He was a small fellow and scrupulously polite,
with bright orange hair curled tightly against his skull.
‘‘I thought you were still at Fort Meade.’’
‘‘The director asked me to deliver his message personally.’’
‘‘Surely he could have called.’’
‘‘The director requests that you leave with me and
come to headquarters. Right away, I’m afraid.’’
‘‘That’s impossible.’’ The doctor sat down, tensely upright
in his old wooden armchair.
‘‘Quite.’’ The aide sighed. ‘‘Which is why the phone just
wouldn’t do, you see.’’ The orange-haired fellow was still
wearing his camel’s hair overcoat and a Peruvian wool
scarf around his neck, bright orange; his shoes were hightops
of some shiny orange leather. All organics, flaunting
his high salary. Carefully he opened the coat and removed
a .38 caliber Colt Aetherweight with a four-inch suppressor
from the open holster under his armpit. He was a symphony
in orange. The pistol was of dull blue steel. He
leveled it at the doctor’s ample belly. ‘‘Do please come with
me now.’’
On her way back to her room, Sparta felt a pain in her
left ear, so fierce it made her stumble and lean against the
plaster wall. Buzz and moan of sixty-cycle current through
lath and plaster walls, clatter of pots washing in the
kitchen, groans of an old woman—the old woman in 206,
Sparta realized, without knowing how she knew there was
an old woman in 206—other rooms, other noises, two men
talking somewhere, voices that seemed familiar—
V E N U S P R I M E
2 3
* * *
The doctor hesitated. He was not really surprised, but
the game was moving faster than he had hoped. ‘‘Let’s
say . . .’’ He swallowed once, and went on, ‘‘that I don’t
come with you.’’ He had the feeling that this was happening
to someone else, and wished that were true.
‘‘Doctor . . .’’ The orange man shook his head once, ruefully.
‘‘The staff here is utterly loyal. Whatever passes between
you and me will never be discussed outside this
room, I assure you.’’
The doctor stood then and moved slowly to the door.
The orange man stood at the same time, never taking his
eyes from the doctor, managing to seem deferential even
while he kept the long barrel of the Colt, hardly wavering,
aimed at the fork of the doctor’s wishbone.
The doctor took his Chesterfield from the coat rack and,
hauling it on, got himself tangled with his scarf.
The orange man smiled sympathetically and said,
‘‘Sorry,’’ indicating that had circumstances permitted he
would have lent a hand. Finally the doctor pulled himself
into the coat. He glanced backward; his eyes were wet and
he was trembling, his face contorted with fear.
‘‘After you, please,’’said the orange man, amiably.
The doctor plucked at the doorknob, jerked the door
open, stepped into the hall—stumbling against the sill in
what seemed imminent panic. As he went to one knee the
orange man came forward with his left hand outstretched,
contempt curling his smile. ‘‘Really, there’s nothing to be
so upset . . .’’
But as the hand came toward him the doctor erupted
from his crouch, pinned the dapper orange man against
the door frame with a massive shoulder, thrust the fist with
the gun in it high to the side. The doctor’s right hand came
V E N U S P R I M E
2 4
up swiftly with brutal force, brushing aside the man’s flailing
left, pushing up hard under his breastbone.
‘‘Aaahhh . . . ?’’ It was no scream, but a surprised gasp,
rising on a note of anxiety. The orange man lowered his
startled eyes to his midriff. The barrel of an outsized hypodermic
needle, still gripped in the doctor’s fist, protruded
from the camel’s hair coat at the level of his
diaphragm.
No blood showed. The bleeding was internal.
The orange man was not dead yet, not nearly dead. His
coat was thick and the shaft of the hypodermic too short
to reach his heart. The telescoping shafts within it were
still thrusting, seeking his heart muscle when he twisted
his right wrist and brought the barrel of the Colt to bear,
pulled the trigger spasmodically—
The phttt, phttt, phttt, phttt of the silenced weapon
howled like a rocket launcher in Sparta’s painfully sensitive
ear. She recoiled and stumbled down the hall toward
her room, her head ringing with the screams and agonized
gasps, the tremor of running feet on the floor below shaking
her like an earthquake.
Into her mind like a slide flashed on a screen came an
image to match one of the voices she’d heard—that of a
little man who always dressed in expensive clothes that
were too loud, a man with curly orange hair, a man she
knew she disliked and feared. With the conscious formation
of that image, the amplified sounds vanished.
By now the other inmates were wandering bewildered
in the hall, clinging to the walls, for even ordinary hearing
was enough to apprehend the commotion downstairs. In
her room Sparta tore off her nightgown and quickly
dressed in the warmest clothes she could find in the un-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 5
familiar closet, clothes she didn’t really recognize but that
were obviously her own. For reasons her memory would
not reveal, she knew she must flee.
The doctor’s body lay face up across the sill, blood
pooling under his head. Next to him the orange man was
writhing on the floor, plucking at the thing in his midriff.
‘‘Help me, help me!’’ he gasped to the nurses who were
already trying their fumbling best to help him. A woman
in a pilot’s uniform thrust the nurses aside and bent to
catch his words, but a sudden hooting of sirens filled the
air. ‘‘After her! Take her . . .’’ he gasped at the pilot, then
tried to shove her out of the way. He screeched in pain—
the hypodermic had come out in his hand, but not all of
it—‘‘Take her to the director!’’ Then his voice rose in a
terrified howl—‘‘Oh, help me, help me’’—as the questing
hair-fine remnant of the needle pierced and paralyzed his
heart.
A nurse slammed into L. N.’s room and found it deserted.
One side of the bed had collapsed on the floor. The
window sash had been thrust up and the yellowing lace
curtains were stirring in the frigid outside air—an iron bar
was thrust like a spear through the screen of heavy wire
that covered the outside of the window, twisting it aside.
The iron bar in the screen had been part of the bed frame.
The nurse rushed to the window as the rising pitch of
twin turbine engines reached a near-supersonic shriek.
Black against the frozen brown grass of the lawn below,
a sleek shape ascended and hovered, a viperlike snout
quested this way and that under the thump, thump of
counter-rotating rotors.
The pilot stumbled into the room, holding a drawn pis-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 6
tol; she shoved the nurse away from the window. Below,
the black tactical helicopter rose another couple of meters,
leaned forward, and skimmed off over the fence between
two poplars, hugging the ground.
‘‘Damm it!’’ The pilot watched in disbelief, not bothering
to waste any rounds on the armored machine. ‘‘Who
the hell is in that thing?’’
‘‘She is,’’ said the nurse.
‘‘Who the hell is she?’’
‘‘The one we were hiding here. The one he wanted you
to take to the director.’’
The pilot stared after the helicopter until it dropped
into an arroyo beyond the highway and failed to reappear.
She swore and turned away.
Sparta had no clear idea what she was doing. The irregular
frozen ground was racing past a meter or two beneath
the skids, the arroyo’s low mud and gravel walls
swaying too close to the whirling tips of the blades as she
played with the stick and pedals. She dug up gravel with
a skid: the machine lurched, declined to flip over, flew on.
A moving map of the terrain was displayed in space in
front of Sparta, holographically superimposed upon the
reality she saw through the windscreen. Just now she was
flying uphill—the interstate magneplane tracks she had
crossed before finding the arroyo now reappeared in front
of her, carried on a steel trestle, barring her path. She flew
under the trestle. The howl of the aircraft’s engines echoed
for a split second, and one rotor rang sharp and clear from
nicking a steel pylon.
The arroyo narrowed and its walls grew higher; it had
been cut—languidly, over centuries—into an alluvial fan
from the uplifted mountains ahead, and there ahead the
V E N U S P R I M E
2 7
gorge through which the eroding waters flowed loomed
abruptly, a gash in the red rock as acute as a gun sight.
She was still flying by hand, and she felt more confi-
dent with every passing second she stayed in the air. She
contemplated her ability to handle a piece of complicated
machinery she could not remember ever having seen before
—knowing what it was for without thinking about it,
knowing the logic of it, knowing the particular layout of
its controls and instruments and the capabilities of its
brainy subsystems.
She reasoned that she had practiced in it. Knowing this,
she reasoned that there was some weighty cause for her
memory lapse.
She further reasoned that there was cause for her fear
of the orange man, the fear that had made her run. She
reasoned—because she remembered the entire day (why
did that in itself seem strange?) from the moment she had
awakened with an urgent desire to brush her teeth, and
the accumulated anomalies of that day could not be ignored
—that a chunk of her life had been deliberately taken
from her and that she was in danger precisely because of
that, and that the orange man had had something to do
with her missing years and with her present danger.
Sparta—not her real name, it occurred to her, but an
identity she had assumed for a sufficient yet still hidden
reason—spoke to the helicopter. ‘‘Snark, this is L. N.
30851005, do you acknowledge?’’
After a momentary pause the helicopter said, ‘‘I acknowledge
your command.’’
‘‘Westerly heading, minimum altitude and maximum
ground speed consistent with evasion protocols. On auto,
please.’’
‘‘Auto confirmed.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
2 8
Flatiron walls of red Jurassic sandstone loomed and
flashed by on either side of the ship. A streambed of tumbled
granite boulders mounted in irregular stairsteps up
the rapidly ascending gorge—dry now but for patches of
snow, it would be an intermittent torrent during the storms
of late summer. One moment the ship was brushing the
bare pink branches of tangled willows in the streambed,
the next it was flying almost straight up the mountainside,
dodging leaning ponderosas and overhangs of basaltic
cliff, until suddenly the gorge narrowed to a shallow ravine
in a forest of pines, and the mountain flattened into
meadowland dotted with stands of aspen.
Sparta had adjusted the scale of the terrain-matching
projection that unscrolled in front of her and now studied
it, searching the image until she found the topography she
needed. ‘‘Snark, proceed to forty degrees north, one hundred
and five degrees, forty minutes, twenty seconds
west.’’
‘‘Forty north, one-oh-five, forty, twenty west con-
firmed.’’ The helicopter slowed suddenly and hesitated at
the edge of the aspen woods, its snout quivering as if
sniffing for a trail.
A moment later the ship streaked across the open,
snowy flat, toward the range of distant, much higher peaks
that glistened in the sun.
‘‘We have visual acquisition.’’
On a videoplate screen in a basement room fifteen hundred
miles to the east, a small group of men and women
watched the helicopter racing over the ground, its sharp,
highly magnified image observed from a satellite four
hundred miles above it.
‘‘Why isn’t she using evasion protocols?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9
‘‘Maybe she doesn’t know how.’’
‘‘She knows how to fly the thing.’’ The speaker was a
man in his fifties with silver-gray hair clipped close to his
scalp. He wore a dark-gray wool suit and patternless gray
silk tie over a light-gray cotton shirt; it was business attire,
but it might as well have been a military uniform.
The man’s outburst was an unanswerable accusation;
he got no reply but a nervous shifting of feet.
A woman touched his sleeve, caught his eye, jerked her
chin. They stepped into the shadows of the control room,
away from the others. ‘‘What is it?’’ he rasped.
‘‘If McPhee actually did restore her short-term memory
using synthetic-cellular implant, she may be accessing
skills she acquired before intervention,’’ she whispered.
She was a handsome woman, as clipped and gray and rigid
as he was, her dark eyes pools of shadow in the dim room.
‘‘You led me to believe she’d already forgotten everything
she saw or did for the last three years,’’ he said
petulantly, straining to keep his voice down.
‘‘The permanence—that is, the degree—of retroactive
amnesia due to loss of short-term memory is often unpredictable
. . .’’
‘‘Why am I learning this now?’’ he snarled, loud
enough to make heads turn.
‘‘. . . except that, as ever, we can be completely confi-
dent that she will never remember anything that occurred
after the intervention.’’ The gray woman paused. ‘‘Until
the reintervention. Before today, that is.’’
The two of them fell silent, and for a moment no one
in the dark room spoke. They all studied the helicopter,
which was fleeing its own shadow over snowy hummocks,
over frozen ponds, among pines and aspens, down steep
defiles, a darting dragonfly with its twin interlocking ro-
V E N U S P R I M E
3 0
tors fluttering like membranous wings in the crosshairs of
the tracking satellite, but with a more evident purpose to
its flight.
The image stuttered momentarily, then steadied at a
slightly different angle, as a new satellite took over the
tracking task.
‘‘Mr. Laird,’’ said the tracking operator, ‘‘I don’t know
if this is significant. . . .’’
‘‘Let’s have it,’’ said the gray man.
‘‘The target has been gradually turning counterclockwise
for the past two minutes. It is now on a southeasterly
heading.’’
‘‘She’s lost,’’ someone—an enthusiastic aide—volunteered.
‘‘She’s flying blind and she doesn’t know which
way she’s going.’’
The gray man ignored him. ‘‘Give me the whole sector.’’
The image on the screen immediately widened to show
the Great Plains surging like a frozen ocean against the
Front Range, the cities beached there like flotsam: Cheyenne,
Denver, Colorado Springs, fused by their suburbs
into a single threadlike agglomeration. The helicopter was
microscopic, invisible at this scale, although its position
was still clearly marked by the centered crosshairs.
‘‘The target appears to be holding steady on course,’’
said the operator.
‘‘Dammit, she’s heading straight for Space Command,’’
said the gray man. He stared bitterly at the gray woman.
‘‘Seeking sanctuary?’’ she said mildly.
‘‘We’ve got to shoot it down,’’ blurted the same enthusiastic
aide, whose enthusiasm had been converted to
panic.
‘‘With what?’’ the gray man inquired. ‘‘The only armed
V E N U S P R I M E
3 1
vehicle we own within five hundred miles of her position
is the one she’s flying.’’ He turned to the woman, hissing
the words but hardly bothering to keep them inaudible.
‘‘If only I’d never listened to your clever explanations . . .’’
He bit off the sentence, snapping his teeth in his fury, and
bent over the console. ‘‘She’s not using evasion protocols.
What’s the chance of jamming her?’’
‘‘We can’t jam the target’s navigation and control circuits,
sir. They’re shielded against everything.’’
‘‘Outgoing transmissions?’’
‘‘We’d have a good chance there.’’
‘‘Do it right away.’’
‘‘Sir, that’s not exactly a surgically precise operation.
Air Defense Command will pop a gasket.’’
‘‘Do it now. I’ll take care of ADC.’’ He turned to an
aide. ‘‘A blackline to Commander in Chief, NORAD. Let me
see the profile before you put it through.’’
The aide handed him a phonelink. ‘‘CINCNORAD is a
General Lime, sir. His profile’s coming on screen B.’’
The gray man spoke into the phonelink and waited,
quickly reading the general’s psychological profile off the
little flatscreen, planning his spiel as he shifted his attention
to the big screen.
The spy satellite’s crosshairs moved inexorably toward
Air Force Space Command headquarters east of Colorado
Springs. A curt voice came on the line, and the gray man
quickly replied. ‘‘General, Bill Laird here’’—his voice was
warm, confiding, deferential—‘‘I’m very sorry to disturb
you, but I have a serious problem and I’m afraid I’ve let
it get out of hand—so much so, in fact, I confess it’s become
your problem too. Which will explain the EM interference
your people are experiencing on combat
channels . . .’’
V E N U S P R I M E
3 2
* * *
The phone conversation drew heavily upon the director’s
resources of amiability and persuasion. It was not the
last call he had to make; General Lime refused to commit
to action without confirmation from Laird’s superior.
More earnest lies went through the aether, and when
the director finally put the phone down he was trembling
behind his tight smile. He yanked at the gray woman’s
sleeve and propelled her back into the shadows. ‘‘This program
is about to be ended, thanks to you,’’ he said angrily.
‘‘And we will have lost years of work. Do you think I can
hold my post after this debacle? We’ll be lucky to escape
prosecution.’’
‘‘I certainly doubt that the president would . . .’’
‘‘You! Keep her alive, you said.’’
‘‘She was magnificent, William. In the early stages. She
was a natural adept.’’
‘‘She never committed herself to the Knowledge.’’
‘‘She’s still a child!’’
He gave her an angry cough for a reply. He paced
about, brooding, then halted, shaking his head. ‘‘Right.
Time we dissolve our band, disperse into the common
herd.’’
‘‘William . . .’’
‘‘Oh, we’ll be in touch,’’ he said bitterly. ‘‘There will be
places in government for both us, I’m sure. But a great
deal of reconstruction lies ahead.’’ He knitted his fingers,
flexed his arms in his jacket, cracked his knuckles. ‘‘That
sanatorium will have to go. All of them will have to go.
Right now’s the time to do it.’’
The gray woman knew better than to object.
* * *
V E N U S P R I M E
3 3
‘‘This bogie’s a drone?’’ The sergeant was incredulous.
Efficiently she tapped the coordinates of the approaching
helicopter into AARGGS, the anti-aircraft railgun guidance
system.
‘‘Story is, it’s some kind of experimental ECM ship that
went nuts,’’ replied the captain. ‘‘Ops says the people who
let it loose think it’s homing on our ground stations.’’
Out on the perimeter of the Space Command headquarters
base, batteries of TEUCER railguns bobbed and
swung on their pedestals.
‘‘Interceptors can’t catch it?’’
‘‘Sure they could catch it. An F-41 could climb right
on top of it, look down, shoot down. You seen any of these
new army choppers in action, Sergeant? They can fly
about three feet off the ground at six hundred klicks. And
what’s on the ground between here and the mountains?’’
‘‘Oh.’’
‘‘That’s right. Houses, schools, that sort of thing. So it’s
up to us in perimeter defense.’’
The sergeant looked at the radar scope. ‘‘Well, in about
twenty seconds we’ll know. It’s still coming.’’ She ordered
AARGGS to arm even before the captain told her to do so.
The Snark howled across suburban ranch-house rooftops
and backyard swimming pools and rock gardens,
across wide boulevards and artificial lagoons, lifting loose
shingles, shaking the last dead leaves from ornamental aspens,
terrifying pedestrians, raising dust, and leaving
muddy recirculated lagoon water surging in its wake. The
helicopter’s antennas were continually broadcasting on all
restricted and unrestricted channels as it closed on the
base, but it received no reply to its urgent communica-
V E N U S P R I M E
3 4
tions. The bare flat ground of the base perimeter swiftly
approached. . . .
As the helicopter screamed in over the fences, over the
waiting fire trucks and ambulances and police vehicles,
some observers noted—and later testified—that the craft
did not appear to be aiming for the forest of space-directed
radio antennas that were HQ Space Command’s most distinctive
feature, but instead was headed for the Operations
Building, in front of which there was a helipad. It was a
fine distinction—much too fine upon which to base a splitsecond
decision.
Three TEUCER hypervelocity missiles leaped into the
air as the Snark crossed the perimeter. They were no more
than shaped steel rods, dead rounds carrying no explosives,
but they impacted with the momentum of meteoroids,
of flying bulldozers. Two-tenths of a second after
they left the launcher they ripped through the armored
helicopter. There was no explosion. The disintegrated aircraft
simply scattered itself over the parade ground like a
handful of burning confetti. The larger bits of smoking
metal rolled away like charred wads of newspaper.
3 5
III
Sparta waited among the bare aspens on the edge of the
frozen field, waited until the buttery light had faded from
the cloud-clotted western sky. Her toes and fingers and
earlobes and the tip of her nose were numb, and her stomach
was growling. Walking, she hadn’t minded the cold,
but when she finally had to stand and wait for darkness
she’d begun to shiver. Now that darkness had come, she
could move in.
She’d garnered valuable information from the Snark
before—in that split second when it had paused, hovering
motionless inches above the ground, computing new coordinates
—she’d jumped clear and sent it on its unprotected
way. Precisely where she was. Precisely what day,
month, and year it was. That last had come as a shock.
Memories had been swarming more thickly with every
passing minute, but now she knew that even the most
recent of them was more than a year old. And in the hours
since she’d jumped, while she’d been trudging through the
V E N U S P R I M E
3 6
snow, she’d contemplated the burgeoning strangeness of
her sense of herself.
She grasped, viscerally, that in the past hour—even had
she not been indulging in self-inspection—her wild and
surging sensibilities had started to bring themselves partially
under her conscious control; she’d even managed to
remember what some of those sensibilities were for . . . and
thus she could better modulate the insistent vividness of
her senses—taste, smell, hearing, touch. And her remarkably
flexible vision.
But those senses were still getting away from her—only
sporadically, but then overwhelmingly. The acid sweetness
of pine needles fallen upon snow threatened more
than once to overcome her with swooning ecstasy. The
melting mother-of-pearl of the setting sun more than once
sent the visible world a-spinning kaleidoscopically, inside
her throbbing brain, in an epiphany of light. She waited
out those intoxicating moments, knowing that in the
scheme of things they must recur, knowing that when
they did she could, with effort, suppress them. Then she
pressed on.
She had a much better understanding of the nature of
her predicament. She knew it could be fatal if anyone
learned of her peculiarities, and equally fatal to put herself
in the hands of the authorities, any authorities.
At last it was dark enough to cover her approach. She
trudged across the snowy field toward a far cluster of
lights where two narrow asphalt roads, recently plowed,
formed a T intersection. One of the weather-bleached
wooden buildings had a sign hanging from its rusted iron
eaves, lit by a single yellow bulb: ‘‘BEER. FOOD.’’
Half a dozen cars were parked in front of the rustic
V E N U S P R I M E
3 7
tavern, sporty cars and all-terrain-vehicles with ski racks
on top. She stopped outside and listened. . . .
She heard the clink and thump of bottles, a cat whining
for its dinner, the creak of wooden chairs and floorboards,
a toilet flushing in the back, and over all a surround-sound
system cranked up just shy of pain level. Under the music
—hoarse energetic anger of a male singer, rolling
thunder of a bass line, twined sinuous howls of a synthekord
doing harmony and three kinds of percussion—she
picked out some conversations.
‘‘Rocks and straw,’’ a girl was saying, ‘‘they got a nerve
even selling a lift ticket,’’ and elsewhere a boy was trying
to wheedle college class notes out of his companion. At
another location—the bar, she estimated—someone was
talking about a remodeling job on a nearby ranch. She
listened a moment and tuned in on that one; it sounded
the most promising—
‘‘. . . and this other dolly, blond hair down to there, just
standing there staring through me, wearin’ nothin’ but this
little pink piece of transparent silk like you see in those
department store ads. But like I wasn’t even in the same
room.’’
‘‘Prob’ly on somethin’. They’re all on somethin’ up
there, man. You know that big sensie-mixer they got,
that’s supposed to be payin’ for the place? That guy that
runs it’s so Z-based all the time, I don’t know how he feels
anythin’ . . .’’
‘‘But the dollies,’’ said the first voice. ‘‘That’s what impressed
me. I mean, we’re walkin’ back and forth carryin’
about one plank of knotty pine panel per trip, right? And
these blond and brunette and red-headed dollies are just
sittin’ and standin’ and lyin’ around there. . . .’’
V E N U S P R I M E
3 8
‘‘Most of the people who come through here, claim
they’re goin’ up to rent the studio facilities? They’re just
dealin’, man,’’ the second voice confided. ‘‘Just buyin’ and
sellin’ . . .’’
Sparta listened until she had what she needed. She let
the cacophony fade and turned her attention to the vehicles
in the parking lot.
She tuned her vision toward the infrared until she
could see warm handprints glowing on the doorhandles,
the brightest of them only a few minutes old. She inspected
the more recent arrivals. Their occupants were less
likely to be leaving soon. She peered into the interior of
a mud-spattered two-seater; bright outlines of human bottoms
glowed like valentines in both bucket seats. A lap
robe bundled on the floor in front of the passenger seat
hid another warm object. Sparta hoped it was what she
was looking for.
Sparta pulled off her right glove. Chitinous spines slid
from beneath her fingernails; gingerly, she worked the
probes extending from her index and middle fingers into
the sliverport in the door on the passenger side. She sensed
the minute tingle of electrons along her conducting polymers:
images of numerical patterns danced at the threshold
of consciousness; the surface molecules of her probes
reprogrammed themselves—all so quickly that only the intention
was conscious, not the process. As she withdrew
her fingertips the probes retracted. The car door swung
open, its lock-and-alarm disarmed.
She pulled her glove on and lifted the lap rug. The
object under it, recently handled, was a purse. She removed
the registration sliver, then left it as it had been—
exactly as it had been, with the lap robe folded precisely
as it was folded before, according to the image of it tem-
V E N U S P R I M E
3 9
porarily stored in her memory. She nudged the door
closed.
Sparta stomped the snow off her boots on the covered
porch and pushed through the ramshackle double doors,
to be greeted by a blast of smoky air and badly amplified
surround-sound. Most of the small crowd were couples,
college kids on the way back from skiing. A few local
males, wearing tattered jeans and threadbare plaid flannel
shirts over red long-johns, were hanging out at the end of
the long mahogany bar. Their eyes fixed on her as she
walked boldly toward them.
The carpenter she’d overheard was easy to identify; he
was the one wearing a laser-rule in a worn leather holster
on his hip. She hitched herself onto the stool beside him
and gave him a long, contemptuous stare, her eyes focused
slightly behind his head, before turning her eyes to the
bartender.
The bartender’s curly orange hair startled her. That
passed quickly—he also wore a frizzy beard. ‘‘What’ll it be,
lady?’’
‘‘Glass of red. You got anything decent to eat? I’m
starved.’’
‘‘Usual autochef stuff.’’
‘‘Hell . . . cheeseburger, then. Medium. Everything on it.
Fries.’’
The bartender went to the grease-streaked stainless
steel console behind the bar and shoved four buttons. He
took a glass from the overhead rack and stuck a hose into
it, filling it with fizzy wine the color of cranberry juice.
On the way back he took the burger and fries from the
maw of the steel autochef, holding both plates in his wide
right hand, and slid everything onto the bartop in front
of Sparta. ‘‘Forty-three bucks. Servee-compree.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
4 0
She handed him the sliver. He recorded the transaction
and laid the sliver in front of her. She let it sit there,
wondering which of the women in the tavern was buying
her dinner.
The bartender, the carpenter, and the other men at the
bar had apparently run out of conversation; they all stared
at Sparta wordlessly while she ate.
The sensations of smelling, tasting, chewing, swallowing
nearly overloaded her eager internal systems. The curdled
fat, the carbonized sugar, already half-digested
proteins were at once desperately craved and nauseating
in their richness. For a few minutes hunger suppressed
revulsion.
Then she was done. But she didn’t look up until she
had licked the last drop of grease from her fingers.
She peered at the carpenter again, giving him the same
cold, lingering stare, ignoring the black-bearded man behind
him, who stared at her in pop-eyed fascination.
‘‘I know you from somewhere,’’ the carpenter said.
‘‘I never laid eyes on you before in my life,’’ she said.
‘‘No, I know you. Wasn’t you one of them up at Cloud
Ranch this mornin’?’’
‘‘Don’t mention that place to me. I never want to hear
that place mentioned in my presence as long as I live.’’
‘‘So you was up there.’’ He nodded in satisfaction, giving
the bartender a significant glance. His bearded buddy
also gave the bartender a significant glance, but what it
signified was a mystery to them all. The carpenter turned
back to Sparta, looking her slowly up and down. ‘‘I knew
it was you, just from the way you stared at me. ’Course
you don’t much look the same as you did.’’
‘‘How good would you look if you’d been walking in
V E N U S P R I M E
4 1
the snow half the day?’’ She tugged at a strand of her
matted brown hair, as if he’d hurt her feelings.
‘‘Nobody willin’ to give you a ride out?’’
Sparta shrugged and stared straight ahead, pretending
to sip the glass of foul wine.
He persisted. ‘‘Get in over your head?’’
‘‘What are you, a stinking shrink?’’ she snarled. ‘‘I play
the fiddle. When somebody hires me to play the fiddle, I
expect to play the fiddle, period. How come the only people
who make money in this business are creeps?’’
‘‘Lady, don’t get me wrong.’’ The carpenter ran a hand
through his matted blond hair. ‘‘I thought everybody
around here knew they made a lot more than just music
sensies up there.’’
‘‘I’m not from around here.’’
‘‘Yeah.’’ He sipped thoughtfully at his beer. So did his
buddy. ‘‘Well . . . sorry.’’ For a while they all stared at their
drinks, a school of philosophers deep in contemplation.
The bartender absently swiped at the bartop with his rag.
‘‘Where are you from?’’ the carpenter resumed, hopefully.
‘‘Back east,’’ she replied. ‘‘And I wish I was back there
now. Tell me there’s a bus out of here in ten minutes and
you’ll make my day.’’
The bearded guy behind the carpenter laughed at that,
but the carpenter didn’t. ‘‘There’s no buses through here,’’
he said.
‘‘No surprise.’’
‘‘Don’t get me wrong, but I’m driving down to Boulder
tonight. You could get a bus from there.’’
‘‘Don’t get me wrong.’’ she said. ‘‘I said you’d make my
day.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
4 2
‘‘Sure, lady.’’
He seemed humble enough, but he was male and naturally
he was playing the odds. That was fine with her, as
long as she got within reach of civilization.
The carpenter ended up having his van drive them both
all the way to the Denver shuttleport, almost a hundred
miles away. He gave her no trouble during the seventyminute
ride. He seemed grateful for what little conversation
she was willing to give him, and parted from her
cheerfully with a firm handshake.
Sparta went into the terminal and threw herself joyfully
into the nearest contoured, chrome-and-black-plastic
chair in the busy lobby. To her, the noise and the winking
neon ads and glaring videoplate billboards, the diffuse
green light that bounced off every reflective surface, were
soothing. She pulled her quilted coat tight around her,
hugging herself, letting fatigue and relief wash over her—
she was back, back among crowds of people, with access
to transportation and communication and financial services,
the whole vast neural network of electronics that knit
the country, the world, the colonies of space together. She
could get what she wanted without making herself memorable.
And for a few minutes she could sit right here in
the open and rest, not bothering to hide, confident that
nothing about her nondescript appearance would attract
the slightest attention.
Her eyes opened to find an airport cop looking down
at her suspiciously, his finger poised at his right ear, about
to key his commlink. ‘‘You been out for half an hour, lady.
You need sleep, use the hive in Five.’’ He tapped his ear.
‘‘Or you want me to call work-shelter?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
4 3
‘‘Goodness, officer. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t realize.’’
She looked past him, startled, in the direction of the flight
announcement screen. ‘‘Oh, don’t tell me I’m going to miss
this one too!’’ She stood up and dashed for the nearest
people-mover headed for the launch pads.
She didn’t look back until she was surrounded by other
passengers. There was a certain air of glumness about the
belt riders, huddled in their festive plastic-and-foil vacation
clothes, probably because for most of them the vacation
was over; they were headed back to the reservation.
She made a discreet show of searching her pockets in distress
before stepping off the rolling walkway at the first
interchange and heading back toward the waiting area.
She walked straight into the women’s room and peered
into the mirror. She got a shock. Nondescript wasn’t the
word for her; she was bedraggled. Her drab brown hair
hung in greasy snakes; there were dark circles under her
eyes; her boots and pants and the skirts of her coat were
splashed with dried red mud to the knee.
No wonder the cop had suspected her of being non-R.
He was right, of course—only one agency held her registration
—but right for the wrong reasons, and she’d have
to do something about those reasons quickly.
She washed her face, splashing it repeatedly with icy
water until she was wide awake. Then she left to find the
nearest information booth.
She slipped into the booth and peered at the blank
flatscreen. Here, on this little flat plate and mounded keyboard,
was light-speed access to anyone on Earth or in
space who wished to be accessible (access to persons who
didn’t want to be accessible took a bit longer). Here was
access to vast libraries of data (access to protected data
took a bit longer). Here were the means of making or se-
V E N U S P R I M E
4 4
curing loans, paying debts, investing, wagering, buying
every imaginable kind of legal goods or services, or just
giving money away (other kinds of goods, services, and
transactions took a bit longer). All that was required of
the client was a valid I.D. sliver and sufficient credit in a
registered account.
Sparta no longer had the sliver she had stolen, having
deliberately dropped it in the snow outside the door of the
mountain tavern, for she had no intention of leaving a
trail of illicit transactions behind her. But in the intimate
privacy of an information booth—the sort of privacy only
a place surrounded by crowds could provide—her lack of
a sliver was not an immediate concern.
Like the long struggle between people who design armor
and people who design armor-piercing projectiles, the
long struggle between people who design software and
people who want to penetrate it was an endless evolutionary
spiral. In these days of the late 21st century, fiddling
with open-access programs wasn’t easy, even for
those with inside knowledge.
Yet it was another of the things Sparta was sure she
had been trained for—to what purpose, she could not remember.
With fingerprobes thrust deep into the sliverport
she was able to bypass the keyboard and taste the flavor
of the system directly. . . .
Alas, there are no glittering informationscapes, no
pretty crystal structures of data, no glowing nodes of inference
and signification. There are no pictures in the electricity
—nor in the light—except as encoded, and such
pictures as there are must be filtered through crude external
analogue devices, steerable beams, glowing phosphors,
excited diodes, writhing liquid magnetized suspensions,
the raster. But although there are no pictures in the elec-
V E N U S P R I M E
4 5
tricity, there are relationships. There are patterns, harmonics,
conformations.
Datastreams are numbers, huge numbers of huge numbers,
huger numbers of lesser numbers, a virtual infinity
of bits. To attempt to visualize even part of the stream is
beyond the capacity of any general-purpose system ever
evolved. Smell and taste are different. Feel is different. The
sense of harmony is different. All are acutely sensitive to
pattern, and because there are higher-process analogues
of these patterns, it is possible for some people to savor
numbers. Calculating prodigies—geniuses, and more frequently
idiots savants—occur naturally in every age; to
create one purposely requires a prodigious grasp of the
peculiar neurology of the numerically gifted. So far the
task had been accomplished just once.
Sparta didn’t even know it. Sparta, like natural calculators,
had a particular fascination and facility with prime
numbers; unlike natural calculators, her right brain housed
artificial neural structures that vastly expanded the range
and size of the primes she could manipulate, structures of
which she was yet unaware, even as she used them. It was
not wholly by coincidence that data encryption systems
often depend on keys that are large primes.
Sitting quietly in the Denver information booth, watching
the flatscreen, Sparta appeared to be studying the
dance of the alphanumerics; the blurring symbols on the
screen had no significance, however, for she was questing
far beyond the interface, following the sharp tang of a
familiar key through the communication networks like a
salmon following the trace of its home brook through the
labyrinth of ocean—except that Sparta was immobile, and
the informational ocean surged through her mind. Sitting
still, she swam ever closer to home.
V E N U S P R I M E
4 6
The budgets of the most secret agencies of government
are not labeled in public print but are broken up and scattered
through the budgets of many other agencies, disguised
as insignificant line items, with the funds
frequently channeled through transactions with cooperative
contractors and commercial bankers. Occasionally the
ploy backfires—as when a legate whose colleagues have
kept him in the dark inquires loudly and publicly why the
defense forces, for example, have paid millions for ‘‘helicopter
replacement parts’’ and have only a handful of
cheap nuts and bolts to show for it—but generally only a
few people know or care what the money is really for, or
where it really goes.
The money is electronic, of course, spreadsheet numbers
of constantly changing magnitude, transactions
tagged in electronic code. Sparta was tracking the routes
of one code in particular. Sliding into the memory of the
First Tradesmen’s Bank of Manhattan through a coded trap
door, Sparta’s awareness uncovered the golden thread she
had been seeking.
The people who had created her had not imagined the
playful uses to which she would put her talents.
Here in the information booth it was a simple matter
to transfer a modest and reasonable amount, a few hundreds
of thousands, from an insignificant line item in her
target’s budget (‘‘office maintenance and custodial’’) to a
real contractor, to that contractor’s real subcontractor, to
a well-known phony consultant firm, and now into a cutout
loop through the black side of another agency—who
would not miss what they had held for only a microsecond
flip-flop, but would stop any inquiries cold—and finally
through a random cascade of addresses to another, much
smaller New York institution, the Great Hook Savings and
V E N U S P R I M E
4 7
Loan, which appealed to her for the naivete´ of its pseudoprime
key and whose Manhattan branch thus acquired a
new customer without even knowing it—a young woman
whose name was . . .
She needed a name, fast, not her real name, not Linda,
not L. N., but Ellen, and now a last name, Ellen, Ellen . . .
before the flatscreen dumped her she keyed in the first
word that popped into her mind. Her name was Ellen Troy.
Sparta needed the information booth only a few seconds
longer, to reserve a seat for Ellen Troy on the next
hypersonic ramjet flight from Denver to JFK. The voucher
and gate pass slid soundlessly from the printer slot. She
withdrew her newly programmed fingernail PIN spines
from the sliverport.
Her flight was not until morning. She would walk to
the hive in Terminal Building Five, take a cubicle for the
rest of the night, wash up, clean her clothes, get some rest.
It would have been nice to shop for new clothes, but with
the economy as it was, robots doing all the technical stuff
and people competing for the rest, the shops in heavily
used public places were overcrowded with sales people on
duty around the clock. She couldn’t buy from machines
just yet; she would have to wait until she had managed
to secure an ID sliver of her own before she could buy
anything, right out in public.
She was confident that the Great Hook Savings and
Loan would be more than happy to replace the sliver Ellen
Troy had ‘‘lost.’’ Their records would show that Miss Troy
had been a loyal customer for the past three years.
4 8
IV
The plan seemed a good one at first. She wanted to find
her parents, or find out what had become of them. Meanwhile
she had to survive. She needed an occupation that
would help her do both, and before long she found one.
The old United Nations buildings on Manhattan’s East
River now housed the U.N.’s successor, the Council of
Worlds. Beside Earth, the worlds in question were the
orbiting space stations and colonized moons and planets
of the inner solar system, dominated by shifting coalitions
of Earthly nations. The historic U.N. treaties against
territorial claims in space were still honored in letter, if
not in spirit; like Earth’s open oceans, space knew no
borders, but its resources went to those who could exploit
them.
Among the Council of Worlds’ largest bureaucracies
was, therefore, the Board of Space Control, formulating
and enforcing safety regulations, shipping rates and
schedules, customs and passport restrictions, and inter-
V E N U S P R I M E
4 9
planetary treaties and law. The Space Board had huge
data banks, sophisticated forensic laboratories, its own
gleaming-white fast ships emblazoned with a diagonal
blue band and gold star, and an elite corps of trained and
motivated inspectors.
The Space Board also employed thousands of nonelite
—technicians and clerks and administrators—scattered
among offices on every space station and inhabited body
of the solar system but particularly concentrated at Earth
Central, near the Council of Worlds headquarters in Manhattan.
Central as it was on the interplanetary scale, the
Board’s administrative functions were widely dispersed
throughout the city. Twenty-one-year-old ‘‘Ellen Troy’’
had no difficulty getting a job with the Space Board, for
her credentials were excellent—electronic transcripts from
her Queens high school and the Flushing Meadow College
of Business, from which she had graduated at age twenty,
showed that she had excellent word-and data-processing
skills. References from the employer she had worked for
the year after her graduation, the now unfortunately defunct
Manhattan Air Rights Development Corporation,
showed that she had been a model employee. Ellen breezed
through the Space Board’s qualifying exam and found
herself placed exactly where she wanted to be, with access
to the largest interlinked computer network in the solar
system, protected in her anonymity by a new name and a
new appearance (Sparta’s hair was no longer brown, her
face was no longer gaunt in its beauty, her teeth were no
longer hidden by perpetually closed thin lips; instead her
full lips were always slightly parted), and further camou-
flaged by an enormous bureaucracy in which she figured
only as another cipher.
V E N U S P R I M E
5 0
Sparta’s plan was at once bold and cautious, simple
and intricate. She would learn what she could from the
Board’s vast stores of information. Later, whatever effort
it took, she would earn the badge of a Space Board inspector;
having achieved that, she would have gained
the freedom to act. . . .
In this plan there were only a few minor hitches. She
knew now that sometime during her eighteenth year, the
first of the three years she could not recall, she had been
altered significantly, beyond what was obvious—altered,
that is, beyond her enhanced senses of taste, smell, hearing
and sight, beyond even the PIN spines under her fingers,
the polymer inserts which were already coming into fashion
among the more avant-garde rich. (She did what she
could to conceal hers, for Ellen Troy was a daughter of
the working class.)
These alterations had left their marks inside her body,
some of which showed up on routine medical scans. She
devised a cover story, not too difficult a task . . . but
she further had to learn to control certain extraordinary
abilities, some of them obvious, some unexpected, and
some that manifested themselves at inconvenient moments.
For the most part she no longer tasted what she
did not want to taste, heard what she did not want to
hear, saw what she did not want to see—at least while
she was conscious—but now and then strange sensations
overcame her, and she felt urgencies she could not fully
bring to awareness.
Meanwhile, life and work went on; a year passed, then
two. On a hot and humid August morning Sparta bent
close over the papers on her desk, hardcopies of documents
and articles she had pored over many times before,
none of them secret, all easily available to the public, doc-
V E N U S P R I M E
5 1
umenting the innocent beginnings of the SPARTA project.
One of them began:
A PROPOSAL submitted to the United States Of-
fice of Education for a demonstration project in the
development of multiple intelligences.
Introduction
It has frequently been suggested that the brain
of the average human being has unrealized potential
for growth and learning—potential which is unrealized,
that is, in all but a tiny, haphazard
minority of individuals we recognize as ‘‘geniuses.’’
From time to time educational programs have been
suggested which would have as their goal the maximization
of this unused intellectual capacity in the
developing child. At no time before the present,
however, have actual methods of stimulating intellectual
growth been precisely identifiable, much less
subject to conscious control and application. Claims
to the contrary have proven at worst false, at best
difficult to verify.
Moreover, the mistaken view persists that intelligence
is a single, quantifiable trait, a heritable or
even a genetic trait—a view perpetuated by the continued
widespread use of long-discredited Intelligence
Quotient (IQ) tests by schools and other
institutions. This continued use can only be understood
as an attempt by administrators to find a convenient
(and most probably a self-fulfilling)
predictor upon which to base the allocation of resources
perceived as scarce. The continued use of
the IQ has had a chilling effect on the testing of
alternate theories.
V E N U S P R I M E
5 2
The authors of this proposal intend to demonstrate
that there are no unidimensional geniuses,
that each individual human being possesses many
intelligences, and that several, perhaps all, of these
intelligences may be nurtured and encouraged to
grow by simple, mindful intervention on the part
of appropriately trained teachers and educational
technicians. . . .
Shaved of its academic fuzz, this document—a draft,
rejected by the government to which it had been submitted,
and dating from some years before Sparta herself had
been born—was a fair statement of what Sparta’s parents
had set out to do.
They were cognitive scientists, Hungarian immigrants
with a special interest in human development. In their
view an IQ number, lacking inherent meaning, was a label
that blessed some, damned many, and gave easy comfort
to racists. Most pernicious was the peculiar notion that
some mysterious something, reified as IQ, was not only
heritable but fixed, that not even the most beneficial intervention
in the growth of the child could increase the
quantity of this magical mental substance, at least not
more than a few insignificant percentage points.
Sparta’s parents intended to prove the opposite. But
despite their revolutionary rhetoric, the public and the
granting agencies perceived something old-fashioned
about their up-by-your-bootstraps ideas, and it was several
years before support materialized, in the form of a
modest grant from an anonymous donor. Their first subject,
as their convictions demanded, was their own young
daughter. Her name was still Linda, then.
Not long after, New York State and then the Ford
V E N U S P R I M E
5 3
Foundation chipped in grants of their own. The SPARTA
project got its acronymous name, plus a small staff and
several new students. After it had been officially underway
for two years, the Science section of the New York Times
carried a notice:
Bullish on Fox, Bearish on Hedgehog
Psychologists at the New School for Social Research
hope to resolve an argument that goes back
at least as far as the 8th century B.C., when the
Greek poet Archilochus made the enigmatic statement,
‘‘The fox knows many things, but the
hedgehog knows one big thing.’’ In recent times
the poet’s remark has symbolized the debate between
those who think intelligences are many—
linguistic, bodily, mathematical, social, and so
forth—and those who believe intelligence comes as
a lump sum, symbolized by an IQ score, which is
resistant to change and can probably be blamed
on one’s genes.
Now comes new evidence from the New
School, favoring the fox. . . .
Other articles and stories, in a widening circle of media,
glamorized the SPARTA project. The little girl who was its
first and for a while its only subject became a star—a mysterious
star, whose parents insisted she be kept out of public
view; there were no pictures of herself among the chips
and clippings on Ellen Troy’s desk. Then at last the U.S.
territorial government showed interest in the project. . . .
‘‘Ellen, you’re hiding something.’’
Sparta looked up at the broad brown face in front of
her. The big woman wasn’t smiling, exactly, but her ac-
V E N U S P R I M E
5 4
cusatory expression hid mischief. ‘‘What are you talking
about, boss?’’ Sparta asked.
The woman settled her considerable weight into the
chair facing Sparta’s desk, Ellen Troy’s desk. ‘‘Taking first
things first, honey, you applied to get out from under my
thumb, again. You think Sister Arlene doesn’t know what
goes on in her own department?’’
Sparta shook her head once, sharply. ‘‘I’m not hiding
anything. I’ve been trying to get out from behind this desk
for the past two years. As often as the regs let me apply.’’
The desk in question was one of fifty just like it in the
information-processing department of the Board of Space
Control’s Investigatory Services Division, housed in a pink
brick and blue glass building overlooking Manhattan’s
Union Square.
The boss, Arlene Diaz, was the IP department manager.
‘‘You and me both know, anybody’s had the surgery
you’ve had doesn’t stand a prayer of getting out of the
office and onto the beat. So how come you keep doin’ it,
Ellen? Tryin’ to get out there?’’
‘‘Because I keep hoping somebody upstairs has some
common sense, that’s why. I want to be judged by what I
can do, Arlene. Not by what’s on my scans.’’
Arlene sighed heavily. ‘‘Truth is, field supervisors are
mighty partial to perfect physical specimens.’’
‘‘There’s nothing wrong with me, Arlene.’’ She let the
color come into her cheeks. ‘‘When I was sixteen some
drunk squashed me and my scooter against a light pole.
Okay, the scooter was a total loss. But me they patched
up—it’s all on file for anybody who wants to look.’’
‘‘You got to admit it was a pretty weird fix, honey. All
those lumps and wires and hollow places . . .’’ Arlene
paused. ‘‘I’m sorry. You wouldn’t know it, but it’s policy
V E N U S P R I M E
5 5
that when a person wants to transfer, their supervisor sits
on the review panel. I’ve pondered your scans, dear. More
than a couple of times.’’
‘‘The docs who patched me up did the best they could.’’
Sparta seemed embarrassed, as if she were apologizing for
them. ‘‘They were local talent.’’
‘‘They did fine,’’ Arlene said. ‘‘Mayo Clinic it wasn’t,
but what they did works.’’
‘‘You think so’’—Sparta studied her boss from under
arched brows, and became suspicious—‘‘what do the others
on the panel think?’’
When Arlene didn’t say anything, Sparta smiled.
‘‘Faker,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re the one who’s hiding something.’’
Arlene grinned back at her. ‘‘Congratulations, honey.
We’re gonna miss you around here.’’
It wasn’t quite that easy.
There were the physicals to do all over again, the lies
to rehearse and keep straight, the phony electronic documents
to plant instantly, backing up the new stories.
And then the work. The six-month basic training for a
Space Board Investigator was as rigorous as any astronaut’s.
Sparta was smart, quick, coordinated, and she
could store far more knowledge than the academy’s instructors
had to give (a capacity she did not reveal), but
she was not physically strong, and some of the things that
had been done to her for reasons she was still trying to
understand had left her highly sensitive to pain and vulnerable
to fatigue. It was clear from day one that Sparta
was in danger of washing out.
The investigator-trainees did not live in barracks; the
Space Board regarded them as adults who would show up
V E N U S P R I M E
5 6
for classes if they wanted to and meanwhile keep their
noses out of trouble, being responsible for themselves.
Sparta reported daily to the training division’s facilities in
the New Jersey marshes and each night boarded the magneplane
back to Manhattan, wondering if she would have
the courage to return the next morning. It was a long ride,
not long in minutes so much as in the repeated lesson of
what sort of world she lived in. Sweet Manhattan was a
jewel nestled in a swamp, cinched in by seaweed and algae
farms that filled the once flowing rivers that made it an
island, ringed by hideous shacks and crumbled slums beyond
the river shores, wholly walled about by smoking
refineries that transformed human waste and garbage into
hydrocarbons and salvageable metals.
She barely survived early cut on the shock tests—electrical,
thermal, chemical, light, noise, high gees on the
centrifuge, spatial disorientation in the bird cage—extreme
stresses that consumed all her energy in her silent, secret
defense of her delicate neural structures. She struggled
through the obstacle courses, the heavy weapons courses,
the team contact sports where the brute strength of the
other players often overwhelmed her grace and quickness.
Exhausted, bruised, her muscles afire and her nerves ragged,
she would stumble into the magneplane, glide
smoothly through the fires and smoke of Purgatory, arrive
late at her NoHo home and climb into her bed in the
condo-apt she shared with three strangers she rarely saw.
Her loneliness and discouragement would get the better
of her sometimes, and then she would cry herself to sleep—
wondering why she was doing it, how long she could keep
doing it. The second question was dependent on the first.
If she wavered in her belief that earning credentials as a
Space Board investigator would give her the access, the
V E N U S P R I M E
5 7
freedom she needed to know what she needed to, her resolve
would quickly crumble.
At night there were the dreams. In a year she had not
found a sure way to control them. They would begin innocently
enough with some fragment of the distant past,
her mother’s face—or with the immediate past, some boy
she’d met that very day, or a classroom lecture she’d not
been prepared for, or been overprepared for—and then
they’d segue´ into the dark corridors of an endless building,
a vague goal to be achieved if only she could find her way
through the maze, the sense that her friends were with her
but that she was utterly alone, that it made no difference
whether or not she found what she needed but that if she
didn’t she would die—and then the colored lights came
wheeling in, gently, from the edges, and the riot of smells
overcame her.
Trainees had Sundays off. Sparta habitually spent hers
walking Manhattan, from one side to the other, from the
Battery to the Bronx, even in rain, snow, sleet, and wind.
Although she was not strong, she was tough. Twenty-five
miles in a day was not unusual for her. She walked to free
her mind of focused thought, of the need to detect and
plan and store data. Periodic mental rest was essential to
avoid overload and breakdown.
As originally conceived, the SPARTA project would
never have used artificial brain implants. But when government
agencies came in, the project changed; suddenly
there were many more students, and new and larger facilities.
Sparta was a teenager then, and it didn’t seem
strange at first that she saw less of her busy parents, and
less of the others, most of them younger children, of whom
only one or two were near her own age. One day her father
V E N U S P R I M E
5 8
called her into his office and explained that she was to be
sent away to Maryland for a series of government evaluations.
He promised that he and her mother would visit as
often as they could manage. Her father seemed under great
strain; before she left the room he hugged her tightly, almost
desperately, but he said nothing beyond a murmured
‘‘Good-bye’’ and ‘‘We love you.’’ A man with orange hair
had been there in the office the entire time, watching.
Of what came next her memory was still fragmented.
Down in Maryland they had done far more than test her,
but much of what they had done to her brain she had only
recently deduced. What they had done to her body she
was still learning.
Sparta walked up the airy length of Park Avenue, toward
the Grand Central Conservatory. It was early spring;
the day was sunny and warm. Along the avenue the rows
of decorative cherry trees were in full bloom, their fragrant
pink petals drifting like perfumed confetti onto the glittering
esplanade. Shining glass and steel, scrubbed concrete
and polished granite rose all about her; helicopters
threshed the lanes of air among their tops. Omnibuses and
an occasional police cruiser whispered past on the smooth
pavement. Magneplanes hummed in swift assurance along
thin steel tracks held aloft on high pylons, while quaint
old electric subway cars, painted in cheerful colors, clattered
and screeched beneath Sparta’s feet, visible through
blocks of glass paving.
Early in the century, when the mid-Atlantic states had
been merged for administrative convenience, Manhattan
had been designated a federal demonstration center—
‘‘Skyscraper National Park,’’ as cynics would have it. Although
the island was ringed with stinking industries and
V E N U S P R I M E
5 9
fetid suburbs, the streets of the model city were crowded,
and most people in the crowd were sleek, colorfully and
expensively dressed, happy-faced. In federal demonstration
centers poverty was a crime, punishable by resettlement.
Sparta was not among the cheerful. Pass/fail in her
training program was two months away. After that the
physical stress would lift a bit and the academic side
would take over, but just now she trembled on the brink
of quitting. Sixty exhausting days to go. At this moment
she felt she couldn’t make it.
As she approached the formal gardens of the 42nd
Street mall she noticed a man following her. She wondered
how long he’d been at it; she’d been deliberately tuned
out, walking in a semi-trance, or she would have seen him
instantly. He could be someone in the training division
checking up on her. He could be someone else.
She roused herself to maximum alertness. Stopping at
a flower stand, she raised a bunch of yellow daffodils to
her nose. The flowers had no perfume, but their heady
vegetable odor exploded in her brain. She peered through
them, closing one eye, her macrozoom gaze zeroing in . . .
He was young, with thick auburn hair chopped in the
fashion of the day, and he wore a stylish, shiny black
polymer jacket. He was a handsome young man of obvious
Chinese and Black Irish ancestry, with high cheekbones,
soft dark eyes, and a sprinkle of freckles; at present he
seemed oddly uncomfortable and uncertain.
As soon as she’d stopped at the flower stand he had
hesitated, and for a moment she thought he was going
to come forward, say something. Instead he turned and
pretended to study a display in the nearest store win-
V E N U S P R I M E
6 0
dow. To his evident dismay, it was a clothing store displaying
expensive women’s underwear. When he realized
what he was looking at, his skin brightened under his
freckles.
She had identified him instantly, although the last time
she’d seen him he’d looked quite different; he’d only been
sixteen years old. He’d had even more freckles then, and
his crewcut hair had been redder. His name was Blake
Redfield. He was a year younger than she was, and he was
the closest to her age of all the other students in the original
SPARTA.
But she could see that he wasn’t yet sure he recognized
her. Unlike the girl she reminded him of, whose hair had
been long and brown, Ellen Troy was a dishwater blond;
she wore her unremarkable medium light hair in a practical
cut, straight and short. Her eyes were blue and her
lips were full. But despite these superficial alterations, Ellen’s
facial bone structure had not been altered, could not
have been safely altered, so to a great extent Ellen still
resembled the girl whose name had been Linda.
Luckily Blake Redfield was as bashful as ever, too shy
to walk up to a strange woman on the street.
Sparta handed the flower vendor her sliver, took the
daffodils, and walked on. She tuned her hearing to Blake’s
footsteps, selectively amplifying the distinctive click, click
of his heels from the hundreds of other slaps and taps and
shuffles that rolled around her. It was essential that she
lose him, but in a way that kept him from realizing he’d
been seen. Strolling as aimlessly as before, she passed under
the arches of the Grand Central Conservatory.
The last time she’d visited the conservatory the scenery
was sand and rocks and spiny things, with twisted desert
peaks rising in the distance, but the theme this month was
V E N U S P R I M E
6 1
tropical. On every side palms and hardwoods reached for
the lofty ceiling and lacy draperies of vines and orchids
descended. Eastman Kodak’s panoramic hologram extended
the jungle view to a distant landscape of mist and
waterfalls.
There were a lot of people in the conservatory, but
most of them were on the mezzanine looking into the forest
galleries from above, or strolling the broad paths that
surrounded the central forest. She paused, then walked
casually into the trees. The thick mat of leaves on the floor
muffled the hoots of monkeys and the screeches of parrots
overhead. She’d gone a few steps into the green shadows
and then, even without amplification, she could plainly
hear Blake’s footsteps on the path behind her.
Another casual turn here, into a narrow path behind a
screen of vines as fat and tangled as the tentacles of a
giant squid . . . Blake’s footsteps hesitated, but he made the
turn and stayed on her trail.
Another turn, behind glossy dark leaves as big as the
elephant ears they were named for, but stiffer, like dead,
dried leather. Yet another turn among the knees of a
sprawling banyan, its roots like veils of pale wood as
smooth and thin as travertine stone. Suddenly she came
upon the awesome waterfall, which descended in soundless
torrents into the glistening gorge below. Behind her,
Blake was still coming—but hesitantly now.
The true thunder of the waterfall was muted, but realistic
mist drifted from sprinklers high in the walls, invisible
behind the holographic projection. A vista point
with a rustic bamboo railing, presently deserted, was
perched on the edge of the vast, illusory gorge into which
the water careened.
Sparta crouched against a tree trunk, wondering what
V E N U S P R I M E
6 2
to do. She had hoped to leave Blake Redfield behind her
in the movie-set rain forest, but he was not to be shaken so
easily. She took the risk of losing track of his whereabouts
in order to tune her hearing to the high-frequency hum of
the Kodak hologram’s projection system. The depth-offocus
circuitry was mounted somewhere on the wall a few
feet in front of her. The shape of the electric pulses gave her
a crude approximation of its program, but she had no physical
access to the control center—
—then an unsettling sensation came over her, spreading
from her midsection up through her chest to her arms.
Her belly began to burn. The sensation was strange and
familiar at the same time. When studying her own scans,
months ago, she had seen the sheetlike structures under
her diaphragm and suspected she knew what they were,
powerful polymer batteries, but she could not remember
how to utilize them, or even what they were for. Suddenly,
responding to her unconscious demand, that memory returned.
She stretched out her arms and hands and curved them
into the arc of a microwave-length antenna. Her facial
mask set in concentration. Data cascaded through her
frontal lobes; she beamed a single burst of instructions
into the heart of the projection control processor.
The hologram leaped forward. Tons of water descended
upon her—
—and she was staring at the old railroad station’s polished
marble wall. She lowered her arms and relaxed her
trance. She walked to the fake bamboo railing of the vista
point, which stood on the floor less than three feet from
the wall. Above her an array of hologram projectors twinkled
yellow, cyan, and magenta. She turned back and
looked at the jungle trees. She could see nothing of the
V E N U S P R I M E
6 3
animated hologram from inside the projection, but if her
beamed instructions had worked, the apparent edge of that
deep gorge should now be at the end of the path, just in
front of the trees. . . .
Blake emerged from the jungle, took two steps toward
her and stopped, staring past her head at torrents of cascading
water. His eyes followed the water down into the
gorge.
Her back was to the railing. In a step she could have
reached out and touched his handsome, friendly, freckled
face. A crumpled chewing gum pack lay on the floor between
them, where he saw canyons of mist. The light on
him was just that which the conservatory’s skylights and
the projected whitewater of the hologram spilled on him.
There was nothing at all between them except the chewing
gum pack and that insubstantial light.
She was reminded how much she had liked him, once,
although at that age she wasn’t much interested in
younger kids—she was a sophisticated seventeen and he
was only a gawky sixteen, after all—and she probably
hadn’t been much good at communicating simple feelings
anyway.
Now, simply by knowing that she existed, he could
destroy her. Blake ran a hand through his auburn hair,
then turned away, bemused, into the jungle. Sparta ducked
under the rail. She walked along the smooth marble wall,
emerged from behind the waterfall, and disappeared into
a crowded passage that led toward Madison Avenue.
Blake Redfield paused in the trees and looked back at
the tumbling water. He was a product of the early
SPARTA, the pure SPARTA, before it had been disbanded.
There had been no tinkering with his physical nature, only
V E N U S P R I M E
6 4
with the conditions of his education. He had no zoom-lens
eyes or tunable ears, no enhanced RAM in his skull or PIN
spines under his fingernails, no batteries in his belly or
antennas wrapped around his bones.
But he was multiply intelligent too, bright enough to
have recognized Linda immediately, bright enough to have
realized immediately that she did not wish to be recognized.
And he was curious enough to wonder why. After
all, he’d half-suspected she was dead. . . .
So he’d followed her until she disappeared. He wasn’t
quite sure how she’d managed that, but he knew it was
deliberate.
He had long wondered what became of her. Now he
wondered just how hard it would be to find out.
6 5
PART TWO
THE SEVEN PILLARS
OF WISDOM
6 7
V
In the last part of the 21st century the sky had grown ever
more crowded, from ground level right on up into space,
until little Earth was ringed like giant Saturn—with machines
and vehicles, not with innocent snowballs. There
were bright power stations collecting sunlight and beaming
microwaves to antenna farms in Arabia and Mongolia
and Angola and Brazil. There were refineries, using sunlight
to smelt metal from moon sand and captured asteroids,
distilling hydrocarbons from carbonaceous
chondrites and mining diamonds from meteoroids. There
were factories that used these materials to cast the perfect
ball bearing, to brew the perfect antibiotic, to extrude the
perfect polymer. There were luxury terminals to serve the
great interplanetary liners and entertain their wealthy passengers,
and there were orbiting dockyards for the working
freighters. There were a dozen shipyards, two dozen scientific
stations, a hundred weather satellites, five hundred
communications satellites, a thousand spy-eyes twinkling
V E N U S P R I M E
6 8
among the night stars, measuring the Earth, seeking out
the last of its resources, gauging the flow of its precious
and dwindling fresh water, watching and listening to the
constantly shifting alliances, the occasional flare-ups of
battle on the surface of the world below—like the vicious
tank and helicopter engagement presently raging in south
central Asia. By intricate international treaty, all weapons
with a range of over one kilometer were barred from space,
including rockets, railguns, beam projectors, every sort of
directed-energy device, and even exploding satellites,
whose debris would spread unchecked, but excluding satellites
themselves. So another few thousand objects orbiting
the Earth were essentially inert, little more than bags
of moon rocks, mischievous threats by one power bloc
against another to destroy orbiting facilities by simple collision,
although implicit was the ability to destroy whole
cities on Earth by guided artificial meteorite.
Yet most of the whirling planet, wondrously, maintained
an awkward peace. The North Continental Treaty
Alliance, consisting of the Russians, Europeans, Canadians,
and Americans, usually called the Euro-Americans,
had been on good terms for many years with the Azure
Dragon Mutual Prosperity Sphere, usually known as the
Nippon-Sino-Arabs. Together the industrial conglomerates
had cooperated to build stations on or around the inner
planets and in the Mainbelt. The Latin-Africans and the
Indo-Asians had stations of their own, and had founded
tenuous settlements on two of Jupiter’s moons. The lure
of solar system colonization had both sharpened and, paradoxically,
attenuated Earthly rivalries: the rivalry was
real, but no group wanted to risk its lines of communication.
Space travel had never been inexpensive, but early in
V E N U S P R I M E
6 9
the century an economic watershed had been crossed, like
a saddle in low hills that nevertheless marks a continental
divide. Nuclear technology moved into its most appropriate
sphere, outer space; the principles were sufficiently
simple and the techniques sufficiently easy to master that
private companies could afford to enter the interplanetary
shipping market. With the shippers came the yards, the
drydocks, the outfitters.
The Falaron shipyards, one of the originals, orbited
Earth two hundred and fifty miles up. Presently the only
vessel in the yards was an old atomic freighter, getting an
overhaul and a face lift—a new reactor core, new main
engine nozzles, refurbished life-support systems, new
paint inside and out. When all the work was done the ship
was to be recommissioned and given a new, rather grand,
name: Star Queen.
The huge atomic engines had been mounted and tested.
Spacesuited workers wielding plasma torches were fitting
new holds, big cylinders that fastened to the thin central
shaft of the ship below the spherical crew module.
The flicker and glare of the torches cast planes of
shadow through the windows of the outfitter’s office. In
the odd light young Nikos Pavlakis’s bristling mustache
sprouted horns of black shadow, rendering his appearance
demonic. ‘‘Curse you for a liar and a thief, Dimitrios. Repeatedly
you assured us everything was on schedule,
everything was under control. No problem, no problem,
you told me! Now you say we will be a month late unless
I am prepared to bear the cost of overtime!’’
‘‘My boy, I am terribly sorry, but we are helpless in the
hands of the workers’ consortium.’’ Dimitrios spread his
own hands to demonstrate helplessness, although it was
hard to find remorse on his broad, wrinkled face. ‘‘You
V E N U S P R I M E
7 0
cannot expect me to absorb the entire cost of the extortion
by myself.’’
‘‘How much are you getting back from them? Ten percent?
Fifteen? What is your commission for helping to rob
your friends and relatives?’’
‘‘How do you find the hardness to say such things to
me, Nikos?’’
‘‘Easily, old thief.’’
‘‘I have dandled you on my knee as if you were my
own godson!’’ the old man objected.
‘‘Dimitrios, I have known you for what you were since
I was ten years old. I am not blind, like my father.’’
‘‘Your father is hardly blind. Do not doubt that I will
report these slanders to him. Perhaps you had better
leave—before I lose my patience and dandle you into the
vacuum.’’
‘‘I’ll wait while you make the call, Dimitrios. I would
like to hear what you have to say to him.’’
‘‘You think I won’t?’’ Dimitrios shouted, his face darkening.
But he made no move to reach for the radiolink. A
magnificent scowl gathered on his brow, worthy of Pan.
‘‘My hair is gray, my son. Your hair is brown. For forty
years I have . . .’’
‘‘Other shipyards hold to their contracts,’’ Pavlakis impatiently
interrupted. ‘‘Why is my father’s own cousin an
incompetent? Or is it more than mere incompetence?’’
Dimitrios stopped emoting. His face froze. ‘‘There is
more to business than what is written in contracts, little
Nikos.’’
‘‘Dimitrios, you are right—you are an old man, and the
world has changed. These days the Pavlakis family runs a
shipping line. We are no longer smugglers. We are not
pirates.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
7 1
‘‘You insult your own fa—’’
‘‘We stand to make more money from this contract
with Ishtar Mining Corporation than you have dreamed of
in all your years of petty larceny,’’ Pavlakis shouted angrily.
‘‘But the Star Queen must be ready on time.’’
What hung in the close artificial air between them,
known to them both but unmentionable, was the desperate
situation of the once powerful Pavlakis Lines, reduced
from the four interplanetary freighters it had owned to the
single, aging vessel now in the yards. Dimitrios had intimated
that he had creative solutions to such problems, but
young Pavlakis would not hear of them.
‘‘Instruct me, young master,’’ the old man said poisonously,
his voice trembling. ‘‘How does one, in this new
world of yours, persuade workers to finish their jobs without
the inducement of their accustomed overtime?’’
‘‘It’s too late, isn’t it? You’ve seen to that.’’ Pavlakis
drifted to the window and watched the flashing of the
plasma torches. He spoke without facing the old man.
‘‘Very well, keep them at it, and meanwhile take as many
bribes as you can, gray-hair. It will be the last job you do
for us. And who else will deal with you then?’’
Dimitrios thrust his chin up, dismissing him.
Nikos Pavlakis took a convenient shuttle to London
that same afternoon. He sat cursing himself for losing his
temper. As the craft descended, screaming through the
atmosphere toward Heathrow, Pavlakis kept a string of
amber worry beads moving across his knuckles. He was
not at all certain his father would support him against
Dimitrios; the two cousins went back a long way, and
Nikos did not even want to think about what they might
have gotten up to together in the early, loosely regulated
V E N U S P R I M E
7 2
days of commercial space shipping. Perhaps his father
could not disentangle himself from Dimitrios if he wanted
to. All that would change when Nikos took over the firm,
of course . . . if the firm did not collapse before it happened.
Meanwhile, no one must know the true state of the
Company’s affairs, or everything would collapse immediately.
The worry beads clicked as Nikos muttered a prayer
that his father would enjoy a long life. In retirement.
It had been a mistake to confront Dimitrios before Pavlakis
was sure of his own position, but there could be no
backing down now. He would have to put people he could
trust on the site to see to the completion of the work.
And—this was a more delicate matter—he would have to
do what he could about extending the launch deadline.
Freighters, blessedly, did not leave for the planets every
month; it was not a simple matter to find room for a shipment
as massive as this consignment of robots from the
Ishtar Mining Corporation. A delay in Star Queen’s departure
for Venus was not the most auspicious beginning
to a new contract, but with luck it would not be fatal.
Perhaps he could arrange an informal discussion with
Sondra Sylvester, the Ishtar Mining Corporation’s chief
executive, before talking the situation over with his father.
Rehearsing his arguments, Pavlakis descended toward
London.
At the same moment Mrs. Sondra Sylvester was flying
through the dark overcast sky west of London in a Rolls-
Royce executive helicopter, accompanied by a ruddy,
tweedy fellow, Arthur Gordon by name, who having failed
to press a cup of Scotch whiskey upon her was helping
V E N U S P R I M E
7 3
himself from a Sterling Silver decanter from the recessed
bulkhead bar. Gordon was head of Defence Manufactures
at Rolls-Royce, and he was much taken with his tall, darkeyed
passenger in her elegant black silks and boots. His
helicopter flew itself, with just the two of them in it, toward
the army proving grounds on the Salisbury Plain.
‘‘Lucky for us the army were eager to help,’’ Gordon
said expansively. ‘‘Frankly your machine is of great interest
to them—they’ve been pestering us for details ever
since we undertook development. Haven’t given them
anything proprietary, of course,’’ Gordon said, fixing her
with a round brown eye over the lip of the silver cup.
‘‘And they’ve declined to go all official on us, so there’s
been no unpleasantness.’’
‘‘I can’t imagine the army is planning maneuvers on
the surface of Venus,’’ Sylvester remarked.
‘‘Bless me, neither can I, ha ha.’’ Gordon took another
sip of the whiskey. ‘‘But I imagine they’re thinking that a
machine which can operate in that sort of hell can easily
do so in the mundane terrestrial variety as well.’’
Two days earlier Sylvester had arrived at the plant to
inspect the new machines, designed to Ishtar Mining Corporation’s
specifications and virtually handmade by Rolls-
Royce. They were lined up at attention, waiting for her on
the spotless factory floor, six of them squatting like immense
horned and winged beetles. Sylvester had peered at
each in turn, looking at her slim reflection in their polished
titanium-alloy skins, while Gordon and his managers
stood by beaming. Sylvester had turned to the men and
briskly announced that before taking delivery she wished
to see one of the robots in action. See for herself. No use
hauling all that mass to Venus if it wouldn’t do the job.
V E N U S P R I M E
7 4
The Rolls-Royce people had traded shrewd glances and
confident smiles. No difficulty there. It had taken them
very little time to make the arrangements.
The helicopter banked and descended. ‘‘Looks like
we’re just about there,’’ Gordon said. ‘‘If you look out the
window to your left you can catch a glimpse of Stonehenge.’’
Without undue haste he screwed the top back on
the silver flask of Scotch; instead of returning it to the bar
he tucked it into the pocket of his overcoat.
The helicopter came down on a wind-blasted moor,
where a squad of soldiers in battle fatigues stood to attention,
their camouflage trousers flapping about their knees
like flags in a stiff breeze. Gordon and Sylvester dismounted
from the helicopter. A group of officers approached.
A lieutenant colonel, the highest ranking among them,
stepped forward smartly and inclined his head in a sharp
bow. ‘‘Lieutenant Colonel Guy Witherspoon, madame, at
your service.’’ He pronounced it ‘‘lef-tenant.’’
She held out her hand and he shook it stiffly. She had
the impression he would rather have saluted. The colonel
turned and shook Gordon’s hand. ‘‘Marvelous beast you’ve
constructed here. Awfully good of you folks to let us look
on. May I introduce my adjutant, Captain Reed?’’
More handshakes. ‘‘Are you making records of these
tests, Colonel?’’ Sylvester asked him.
‘‘We had planned to do, Mrs. Sylvester.’’
‘‘I have no objection to the army’s knowing, as long
as the information is kept strictly confidential. Ishtar is
not the only mining company on Venus, Colonel Witherspoon.’’
‘‘Quite. The Arabs and Ni . . . hmm, that is, the Japanese
—need no help from us.’’
‘‘I’m glad you understand.’’ Sylvester hooked a loose
V E N U S P R I M E
7 5
strand of her long black hair away from her red lips. She
had one of those faces that was impossible to place—Castilian?
Magyar?—and equally impossible to overlook or
forget. She gave the belted young officer with the gingery
mustache a warm smile. ‘‘We are grateful for your cooperation,
Colonel. Please proceed whenever you’re ready.’’
The colonel’s flat-fingered right hand sprang to the bill
of his peaked cap, his urge to salute having proved irrepressible.
He instantly turned away and barked orders at
the waiting soldiers.
The machine to be tested, one chosen at random by
Sylvester from among the six on the factory floor, had
been airlifted to the proving ground yesterday; it was now
crouched at the edge of the raw earth landing pad. Six
jointed legs held its belly only inches from the ground, but
it was a fat beast, its back as high as a man’s head. Two
soldiers in white suits with hoods and faceplates stood at
ease beside the machine; their overalls bore bright yellow
radiation warning signs. Silhouetted against a sky of scudding
black clouds, the robot’s diamond-studded eye ports
and spiny electromagnetic sensors gave it the visage of a
samurai crab or beetle. No wonder the very sight of it had
fired the military imagination.
‘‘Captain Reed, when you’re ready.’’ The whitesuited
team double-timed to a truck plastered with yellow radiation
warnings and opened its rear doors. They removed
a three-foot metal cylinder, which they carried slowly and
carefully to the robot, then proceeded to load it into the
metal insect’s abdomen.
Meanwhile Colonel Witherspoon led Sylvester and
Gordon to a bank of seats erected on the lip of the landing
pad, shielded from the blustery wind by plastic windscreens.
The little observation post looked northward from
V E N U S P R I M E
7 6
a low ridge into a wide, shallow valley. The ridge crests
on both sides were pocked with pillboxes, and the ground
around had been torn up by generations of horses’ hooves,
gun-carriage wheels, cleated tires, tank treads, and countless
booted feet.
While they waited Sylvester once more declined Gordon’s
urgings to sip from his flask.
Within a few seconds the robot was fueled and critical.
The soldiers stood well back. Witherspoon gave the signal
and Captain Reed manipulated the sticks and knobs on the
tiny control unit he held in his left hand.
On the control unit’s screen Reed could see what the
robot saw, a view of the world that encompassed almost
two hundred radial degrees but was oddly distorted, like
an anamorphic lens—a distortion programmed to compensate
for the glassy atmosphere of Venus.
Within moments, the carbon-carbon cooling fins on
the back of the robot began to glow—first dull orange,
soon a bright cherry, finally a pearly white. The robot was
powered by a high-temperature nuclear reactor cooled by
liquid lithium. The extreme temperature of the cooling fins
was excessive on Earth, but essential to create a sufficient
gradient for radiative cooling in the eight-hundred degree
surface temperatures on Venus.
The smell of hot metal reached them across the flat,
windy ground. Witherspoon turned to his guests. ‘‘The robot
is now fully powered, Mrs. Sylvester.’’
She cocked her head. ‘‘Possibly you have a demonstration
of your own in mind, Colonel?’’
He nodded. ‘‘With your permission, ma’am—first, unguided
terrain navigation according to stored satellite
maps. Objective, the crest of that far ridge.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
7 7
‘‘Carry on,’’ Sylvester said, her lips curving in an anticipatory
smile.
Witherspoon signaled his adjutant. With a chorus of
whining motors the robot came to life. It raised its
radiator-crested, antennaed head. Its chassis was of heatresistant
molybdenum steel and titanium-alloy, mounted
on six titanium-alloy legs for traversing terrain more
wildly irregular than any that could be found in England
or anywhere else on Earth. It moved its legs with intricate
and startling rapidity, and as it scuttled forward, turned,
then plunged down the hillside, a novel set of tracks was
left in the earth of Salisbury Plain.
The gigantic metal beast scurried along, raising a
plume of dust behind it that blew strongly to the east, like
a dust devil racing across the desert.
For some forgotten exercise in siegecraft, moats had
been dug across the breadth of the valley and berms piled
behind them; the robot scurried into trenches and over the
rises without pause, thundering straight up the valley like
the entire Light Brigade at Balaklava. Now outcroppings
of gray rock blocked it from its goal at valley’s end. The
robot ran around the sheerer cliffs, but where the slope
was not too steep, it simply scrambled over them, scrabbling
for purchase among cracks and ledges of stone.
Within a few moments it had reached its objective, a row
of concrete pillboxes on the scudding heights. There it
stopped.
‘‘Those emplacements were constructed in the 19th
century, Mrs. Sylvester,’’ Witherspoon informed her. ‘‘Four
feet of steel-reinforced concrete. The army have declared
them surplus.’’
‘‘I would be delighted for you to proceed with the sec-
V E N U S P R I M E
7 8
ond part of your demonstration,’’ Sylvester said. ‘‘I only
wish I had a better view.’’
‘‘Captain Reed? Over here, if you will,’’ Witherspoon
called sharply. Reed brought his control unit close enough
for Sylvester and the others to see the robot’s-eye view on
its videoplate. ‘‘And please take these, ma’am.’’ Witherspoon
handed her a pair of heavy binoculars, sheathed in
sticky black plastic.
The binoculars were electromagnetically stabilized oillens
viewers with selective radiation filtration and image
enhancement. When she held them to her eyes she saw
the robot so close and sharp she could have been standing
ten feet away, although the perspective was markedly flat
and graphic. There it crouched, a firebug, implacable, facing
the squat bunker.
The robot needed to do more than move about on the
surface of Venus. It was a prospector and a miner; it was
equipped to seek out and analyze mineral samples and,
when it came upon ore of commercial value, to dig out
and partially process the ore, preparing it for further processing
by other machines and eventual transportation offplanet.
‘‘Go ahead, Colonel,’’ Sylvester said.
Witherspoon gave the signal; Reed manipulated the
controls. The robot’s diamond-edge proboscis and claws
slashed into the old bunker. Rust and gray dust flew up
in a cloud. The robot ate into the bunker, ate around the
walls, and when the roof collapsed on top of it, ate
through that. It ate into the floor; slab-iron gun mounts
and railings went into its maw, and rubber and steel and
copper cables, and even the contents of the drains, choked
with ancient grease. Soon there was nothing left of the
bunker except a cavity in the hillside. The robot ceased
V E N U S P R I M E
7 9
working. Behind itself it had deposited neat molten piles—
gleaming iron, ruddy copper, baked calcium.
‘‘Excellent,’’ said Sylvester, handing the binoculars to
Witherspoon. ‘‘What’s next?’’
‘‘We thought possibly, remote control navigation?’’ the
officer suggested.
‘‘Fine. Any problem if I do the controlling?’’ she asked.
‘‘Our pleasure.’’ Witherspoon waved Reed over; he
handed her the control unit. She studied it a moment, and
Gordon leaned his head to hers and judiciously murmured
something about forward and back, but by the time he’d
finished her fingers were already conjuring with the controls.
The robot, a glowing dot in the naked-eye distance,
scuttled backward, away from the ex-bunker. It turned and
headed downslope, toward them.
She deliberately tried to run it over one of the steep
outcrops. At the very edge of the cliff, it refused to go.
She would not countermand her order, so the robot took
rudimentary thought and found a solution: it began to eat
the outcrop away from under itself. Sylvester laughed to
see it chew its own switchbacks to the bottom of the cliff.
She ran it at full speed toward their position. It scrambled
over the red ground, growing impressively larger as
it came, leaving dust and wavering plumes of heat in its
wake.
She turned to Witherspoon, her eyes gleaming. ‘‘Heat!’’
He blinked at her fervor. ‘‘Why, yes . . . we had thought—’’
He pointed to a long open bunker lying to the north, halfway
up the ridge. ‘‘Phosphorus,’’ Witherspoon said. ‘‘Close
as we could come on short notice. If you’ll just steer the
machine in there.’’
She bent to the controls again. The robot swerved toward
the open bunker. As it rushed close, the bunker sud-
V E N U S P R I M E
8 0
denly erupted with a glaring white light. Coruscating
fountains of whistling, hissing flame leaped high into the
air. Without pausing, the robot charged into the midst of
the inferno. There it stopped.
It rested there, its own radiators gleaming through the
fire. After several long seconds the pyre subsided. At Sylvester’s
gentle urging on the controls, the robot turned,
quite unperturbed, and climbed straight up to the crest of
the ridge. The soldiers stolidly kept their positions as the
metal juggernaut rose above the ridge and bore down
upon them. When the fiery beetle was a few yards away
Sylvester lifted her hands from the control unit. The robot
halted, radiant.
‘‘Well done, Colonel,’’ said Sylvester, handing the controls
to Witherspoon. Again she hooked her long hair out
of her eyes. ‘‘Mr. Gordon, my congratulations to Rolls-
Royce.’’
When Sylvester reached her hotel that evening the desk
clerk informed her that a Mr. Nikos Pavlakis was waiting
for her in the lounge. She marched straight in and surprised
him hunched over the bar, his big shoulders straining
the tight jacket of his suit, a tumbler of water and a
shot glass of cloudy ouzo in front of him, deep into what
looked like his second bowl of peanuts. She smiled when
he mumbled something she took to be an invitation to
have a drink.
‘‘I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Pavlakis, but I’ve had a busy
day and I’m facing a full evening. If you’d called earlier
. . .’’
‘‘Apologies, dear lady’’—he choked as he downed a
peanut—‘‘on my way to Victoria, unexpected stopover. I
V E N U S P R I M E
8 1
thought I would take a minute to catch you up. But some
other time . . .’’
‘‘So long as there is no delay in the schedule we discussed,
you don’t need to trouble yourself to report to me,’’
she said. He had a very expressive face; she could have
sworn that his mustache drooped, that his hair had just
lost some of its curl. Her own expression hardened.
‘‘What’s the problem, Mr. Pavlakis?’’
‘‘There is no problem, I assure you. We will be ready
on time. No problem. Some additional costs we must absorb
. . .’’
‘‘There is a problem, then.’’
‘‘Our problem, dear lady. Not yours.’’ He smiled, displaying
fine white teeth, but his eyes were not smiling
with them.
Sylvester contemplated him. ‘‘All right then. If in fact
there’s no problem please wire me tomorrow, here at the
hotel, reconfirming your intention to begin loading cargo
within two weeks, as agreed.’’ When he nodded glumly
she added, ‘‘Until then, we won’t need to talk again.’’
Pavlakis muttered, ‘‘Good night, dear lady,’’ but she
was already marching away.
8 2
VI
London had not fared as well as Manhattan in the new
century; it was as cramped and soot-blackened as ever, as
severely Balkanized by differences of accent, skin color,
class. In a moment one’s square black taxicab passed from
elegant brick townhouses and clever converted carriage
houses on quaint mews into steaming, crumbling slums.
The weather was as foul as ever, too, with gray-bellied
clouds excreting thin drizzle and the occasional riverbottom
fog bringing equal parts romance and respiratory disease.
Nevertheless Sondra Sylvester liked the place—if not
as much as she liked Paris or Florence, which were even
less changed from what they had been, still rather better
than she liked New York, which was no longer real. Living
on Port Hesperus, Sylvester got her fill of artificial luxury
ten months out of the year; when she took her annual trip
to Earth she wanted the thing itself, the dirt with the polish,
the noise with the music, the sour with the sweet.
The taxi stopped in New Bond Street. Sylvester pushed
V E N U S P R I M E
8 3
her sliver into the taxi’s meter slot, then opened the door
and stepped to the damp pavement; while she waited for
the machine to record the transaction she adjusted the line
of her silk skirt and pulled her chinchilla coat closer
against the clinging fog. The sliver rebounded and the
cab’s robot voice said, ‘‘Much obliged, m’um.’’
She pushed through hungry-looking crowds on the
sidewalk and walked briskly into the building, nodding to
a rosy-cheeked young staffer at the door who smiled back
in recognition. She entered the cramped auction room
where the book and manuscript sales were held. She’d
been here often, as recently as yesterday afternoon, when
she’d come to preview today’s offerings. Up for sale were
bits and pieces of two private collections, one of them
from the estate of the recently deceased Lord Lancelot
Quayle, the other anonymous. The two collections had
been broken into a hundred lots—most of them of little
interest to Sylvester.
Although she was early the room had begun to fill. She
took a folding chair in the middle of the room and sat
down to wait. It was like being early to church. There was
a little transeptlike wing to her right, difficult to see into
from her position; bidders who preferred anonymity often
seated themselves there. The oldest booksellers, Magg’s,
Blackwell’s, Quaritch, the rest, were already at their traditional
places around the table in front of the podium.
The first rows of folding chairs had been grabbed by outlandishly
dressed viddie people whose demeanor was less
than dignified. All that preening and squawking! Surely
they would be asked to leave if they continued making so
much noise. . . .
Two items drew the entertainers and the rest of the
unusually large crowd. One of them was a distinct oddity.
V E N U S P R I M E
8 4
As a result of Lord Quayle’s lifelong Romish mania, his
library had tossed up, among the miscellany, what purported
to be an eyewitness account—scrawled in squid ink
on fragmented parchment in execrable Greek by a fellow
named Flavius Peticius, an undereducated, obviously gullible
Roman centurion (or perhaps written by his nearly
illiterate scribe)—of the crucifixion of one Joshua of Nazareth
and two other malefactors outside the Jerusalem
wall, early in the first century A.D.
Here was spectacle, the very stuff of epic! Not to mention
timely publicity—and this is what drew the movie
folk—for the BBC had recently mounted a lavish
production of Desiree Gilfoley’s ‘‘While Rome Burns,’’ featuring
the lissome former model, Lady Adastra Malypense,
in an acting debut made memorable by the fact that in
only one of her many scenes had Lady Malypense appeared
wearing any clothes at all, and those in the Egyptian
mode of pleated linen, which is to say transparent.
Perhaps Lady Malypense herself was among the noisemakers
in the front row; Sylvester would not have recognized
her, clothed or otherwise.
As far as Sylvester was concerned they could have
been auctioning a piece of the True Cross—so much for
the intrinsic value of the parchment. Sonya Sylvester and
most of the serious collectors had been attracted by lot 61,
a single, thick volume; ironically, had its text not formed
the basis of a classic British film of the previous century,
the news media might have overlooked it, which Sylvester
would have preferred.
She had inspected it yesterday on the plain bookshelf
behind the podium, where it was guarded by burly porters
in their dust coats and discreetly watched over by the
V E N U S P R I M E
8 5
business-suited young men and women of the staff. The
book rested open to reveal a scrap of paper lying on its
title page, written in an irregular vertical hand: ‘‘To Jonathan
. . .’’
Using this pseudonymous address, the last of the truly
great, truly mad English adventurers—who was also the
first of the great, mad philosophers of modern war—had
conveyed his book into the hands of a close friend. Who
could trace its travels since? Not Sotheby’s.
Valuable books—fortunately or unfortunately, depending
upon one’s point of view—had never been as valuable
as, for example, valuable paintings. Even the rarest printed
book was understood to be one of a set of duplicates, not
a unique original. Conversely, the rarest painting, while
unique, could easily be reproduced in a hundred billion
copies, its likeness distributed throughout the inhabited
worlds in hardcopy texts and magazines and stored electronic
images, thus becoming widely known—while no
book, rare or common, could be so casually copied or so
casually apprehended. Printed books were not unique, thus
subtracting from their value. But printed books could not
be easily reproduced, thus subtracting from their fame—
and so again subtracting from their speculative market
value.
Rarely there came upon the auction block a book both
famous and unique. Lot 61 was such a book, The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom in its first, private, and very limited
edition—different from subsequent editions not only in its
printing and binding but by almost a third of its text.
Before today’s auction only one copy had been known to
exist, all others having disappeared or been destroyed; the
survivor resided in the Library of Congress in Washington,
V E N U S P R I M E
8 6
D.C. Not even the Gutenberg Bible could combine fame
with such rarity; this was the only available original copy
of an acknowledged masterwork of 20th century literature.
Sylvester’s hopes of acquiring the book were not unreasonable,
although every major collector and library on
this and the colonized planets would be represented at the
sale. Quaritch would be acting for the University of Texas,
who were surely frantic to add this missing and most precious
piece to their extensive collection of the author’s
works and memorabilia. Sotheby’s staff held orders from
other bidders, and some of them flanking the auctioneer’s
podium already had their heads cocked to the phone-links
in their ears, receiving last minute instructions from far
places. But all the bidders would have their top limits, and
Sylvester’s was very high.
Promptly at eleven the auctioneer stepped to the podium.
‘‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to
Sotheby and Company.’’ He was a tall man, striving to
overcome the East End and to achieve Oxbridge in his
speech and demeanor, and he got the sale moving without
delay. Although there were flurries of interest over 16th
century English translations of Caesar’s Commentaries and
Plutarch’s Lives, most of Quayle’s library was disposed of
rapidly.
Then the crucifixion parchment came up, and the mediahounds
zeroed in with their photogram cameras. The
viddie denizens of the front row cooed and fluttered. Sure
enough, someone addressed the blond woman who made
the first bid as ‘‘Adastra, darling,’’ in a stage whisper loud
enough to be heard at the back of the room. After a few
quick rounds only Lady Malypense and two other serious
bidders remained. A Sotheby’s staffer was representing
one of them, and Sylvester suspected that the bidder was
V E N U S P R I M E
8 7
Harvard, perhaps hoping to acquire a crucifixion account
to match the one Yale already possessed. The third bidder
was behind her, a man with the accent of an Alabama
preacher. It became a two-way contest when Harvard
dropped out; the Southern churchman was implacable.
At last Lady Malypense failed to respond to the last
‘‘do I hear . . . ?’’ As if the gavel were a cue, the actress
and her claque abruptly marched out, looking daggers at
the portly victor.
The anonymous collection, ‘‘the property of a gentleman,’’
was now offered in lots. Most were items of military
history, in which Sylvester took no special interest; her
field was early 20th century literature, particularly English
—that is, British.
Eventually lot 60, a first edition account of Patrick
Leigh Fermor’s exploits during the Cretan resistance of
World War II, went under the gavel. Sylvester would have
liked to have had that book, and she bid on it—not that
she cared about Crete or a half-forgotten war, but Leigh
Fermor was a fine describer of places—but its price rose
swiftly higher than she was willing to go. Soon the auctioneer
said ‘‘sold’’ and the room immediately fell silent.
‘‘Lot 61. Lawrence, T. E., The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’’
—as the director spoke, a solemn young man bore
the heavy book forward and held it aloft, turning it slowly
from side to side. ‘‘Printed in linotype on Bible paper, recto
only, double columns. Bound in full tan morocco, edges
gilt, in marbled slipcase. Inserted loose in the front, two
leaves, handwritten, one a note in dedication ‘to Jonathan’
and signed by the author ‘at Farnborough, 18 November
1922,’ the other being comments written in pencil, in a
hand thought to be that of Robert Graves. This very rare
book is one of eight printed by the Oxford Times Press in
V E N U S P R I M E
8 8
1922 at the author’s behest, three of which were destroyed
by him, and three others presumed lost. The reserve is five
hundred thousand pounds.’’
He had hardly concluded his description when the bidding
commenced. A little rustle of excitement rippled
through the room as the auctioneer recited increasingly
greater numbers, almost without pausing: ‘‘Six hundred
thousand, I am bid six hundred thousand . . . six hundred
and fifty thousand . . . seven hundred thousand.’’ No one
spoke, but fingers were flickering and heads were nodding,
at the dealers’ table and elsewhere in the room, so rapidly
that the auctioneer did not even have time to acknowledge
those who had made the bids.
‘‘Eight hundred and seventy-five thousand pounds,’’
said the auctioneer. For the first time there was a momentary
pause before he got a response. It was clear that many
bidders were approaching their limits. By the rules of the
game, the higher the price, the higher the minimum advance;
the price was now so high that the minimum advance
was five thousand pounds. ‘‘Am I bid eight hundred
and eighty thousand pounds?’’ the auctioneer asked
matter-of-factly.
Quaritch and a single other bookseller responded. The
auctioneer’s gaze flickered to the transept on his left; evidently
whoever was seated there, out of sight, had also
bid.
‘‘Am I bid eight hundred and eighty-five thousand?’’
‘‘Nine hundred thousand pounds,’’ Sondra Sylvester
said, speaking for the first time. Her voice in the crowded
room was new, rich, darkly colored, a voice—it was obvious
to everyone—accustomed to giving orders. The auctioneer
nodded at her, smiling in recognition.
At the front table the gentleman from Quaritch, who
V E N U S P R I M E
8 9
was in fact representing the University of Texas, seemed
unperturbed—the humanities department of Texas had an
extensive Lawrence collection and was no doubt prepared
to go to extreme lengths to acquire the prize—but the remaining
rival bookseller leaned back in resignation, dropping
his pencil.
‘‘I am bid nine hundred thousand pounds. Am I bid
nine hundred and five?’’ The auctioneer glanced to his left
once, twice, then announced, ‘‘One million pounds.’’
An appreciative groan rumbled through the audience.
The man from Quaritch glanced curiously over his shoulder,
made a note on the pad in front of him—and declined
to bid further, having reached his client’s top. The minimum
advance was now ten thousand pounds.
‘‘One million ten thousand pounds,’’ Sylvester said. She
sounded confident, more confident than in fact she felt.
Who was in the transept? Who was bidding against her?
The auctioneer nodded. ‘‘I am bid . . .’’ He hesitated as
he glanced to his left, then momentarily fixed his gaze
there. He turned to look straight at Sondra Sylvester and
almost shyly indicated the transept with a spasm of his
hand. ‘‘I am bid one million, five hundred thousand
pounds,’’ he said, his voice carrying to her with peculiar
intimacy.
A collective hiss whiffled through the audience. Sylvester
felt her face grow stiff and cold. For a moment she
did not move, but there was little point in calculating her
resources; she was soundly beaten.
‘‘I am bid one million and five hundred thousand. Am
I bid one million five hundred thousand and ten?’’ The
auctioneer was still looking at her. Still she did not move.
He averted his gaze then, politely, looking without seeing
into the bright eyes of his delighted audience. ‘‘I am bid
V E N U S P R I M E
9 0
one million five hundred thousand.’’ The gavel hovered
over the block. ‘‘For the last time . . . I have a bid of one
million five hundred thousand.’’ The gavel descended.
‘‘Sold.’’
The audience burst into applause, spiced with little
cries of delight. Who was being applauded, Sylvester wondered
bitterly—a deceased author, or a spendthrift acquisitor?
Porters ceremoniously removed the printed relic from
public view. A few people leaped up, scuttling for the door
as the auctioneer cleared his throat and announced. ‘‘Lot
62, miscellaneous autographs . . .’’
Sylvester sat where she was, not moving, feeling the
eyes of the curious burning into her. In the depths of her
disappointment she was curious, too, to know who had
outbid her. She rose slowly and moved as quietly as she
could toward the aisle. Inching toward the transept wing,
standing beside it, waiting there patiently as the sale continued
. . . more and more people leaving throughout the
final routine minutes . . . and then it was over. Sylvester
stepped in front of the transept wing.
She confronted a young man with chopped auburn
hair, wearing a lapel button in his conservative suit that
identified him as a member of the staff. ‘‘You were the
one?’’
‘‘On behalf of a client, of course.’’ His accent was mid-
Atlantic—American, cultured, East Coast. His face was
handsome in an odd way, soft-eyed and freckled.
‘‘Are you free to divulge . . . ?’’
‘‘I’m very sorry, Mrs. Sylvester, I’m under strict instructions.’’
‘‘You know me.’’ She scrutinized him: very handsome,
V E N U S P R I M E
9 1
rather appealing. ‘‘Are you free to tell me your own
name?’’
He smiled. ‘‘My name’s Blake Redfield, ma’am.’’
‘‘That’s some progress. Perhaps you would like to join
me for lunch, Mr. Redfield?’’
He inclined his head in the merest sketch of a bow.
‘‘You are very gracious. Unhappily . . .’’
She watched him a moment. He seemed in no hurry to
leave; he was watching her as closely as she was watching
him. She said, ‘‘Too bad. Another time?’’
‘‘That would be delightful.’’
‘‘Another time, then.’’ Sylvester walked briskly out of
the room. At the entrance she paused, then asked the girl
to call a taxi; while she waited she asked, ‘‘How long has
Mr. Redfield been with the firm?’’
‘‘Let me see’’—the red-cheeked girl twisted her little
rosebud mouth charmingly as she made the effort to recall
—‘‘perhaps a year, Mrs. Sylvester. He’s not a regular
employee, really.’’
‘‘No?’’
‘‘More like a consultant,’’ said the girl. ‘‘Books and
manuscripts, 19th and 20th centuries.’’
‘‘So young?’’
‘‘He is rather, isn’t he? But quite the genius, to hear the
assessors speak of him. Here’s your taxi now.’’
‘‘I’m sorry I troubled you.’’ Sylvester hardly glanced at
the square black shape humming driverless at the curb. ‘‘I
think, after all, that I’ll walk a bit.’’
Her pace was determined, not meditative; she needed
to let her angry blood circulate. She strode rapidly down
the street toward Piccadilly, turning east through the maze
of all the little Burlingtons and across the end of Saville
V E N U S P R I M E
9 2
Row, her destination a shop near Charing Cross Road, an
ancient and, in the past, sometimes disreputable place
presently wearing a veneer of renewed respectability.
She reached it in no time. Gold letters on a plate glass
window announced ‘‘Hermione Scrutton, Bookseller.’’
While she was still half a block from the shop she saw
Scrutton herself at the green-enameled door, twisting a
decorative iron key in a decorative iron lock while putting
her eye to the eye of a bronze lion head that served as a
doorknocker, but which also contained the retina-reader
that triggered the door’s real lock.
By the time Scrutton got the door open, Sylvester was
close enough to hear the spring-mounted brass bell clamor
as she entered.
Moments later the same bell announced Sylvester’s arrival;
from an aisle of crumbling yellow volumes Scrutton
emerged, having seen to the alarm system. She was a
stocky, bushy-browed imp in brown tweeds, a gold ascot
at her throat, a bald patch visible through her thin graying
hair, the color high on her cheeks—which were incongruously
tan to begin with—and a smile playing on her mobile
red lips. ‘‘My dear Syl. Can’t say. Ah, really. Mm, simply
devastated . . .’’
‘‘Oh, Hermione, you’re not bothered in the least. I
couldn’t have afforded to spend a penny on you for the
next five years.’’
‘‘Mm, I confess the thought had occurred to me. And
certainly I would have missed your, ah, most elegant presence
in my humble, ah establishment.’’ Scrutton smirked.
‘‘But then one has no difficulty placing the really rare
items, does one? Mm?’’
‘‘Who outbid me? Do you know?’’
She shook her head, once, her dewlaps flapping. ‘‘No
V E N U S P R I M E
9 3
one whose agent I recognized. I was seated behind you.
’Fraid I couldn’t see the bidder.’’
‘‘Anon was the bidder,’’ she informed her. ‘‘Represented
by a young man named Blake Redfield.’’
Scrutton’s eyebrows fluttered up and down rapidly.
‘‘Ahh, Redfield. Mm, I say.’’ She turned away to fuss with
the nearest shelf of books. ‘‘Redfield, eh? Indeed. Oh, yes.’’
‘‘Hermione, you’re toying with me’’—the words came
out of the back of her throat, a panther’s warning growl—
‘‘and I’ll have your artificially tanned hide for it.’’
‘‘That so?’’ The bookseller half turned, cocking a cantilevered
eyebrow. ‘‘What’s it worth to you?’’
‘‘Lunch.’’ Sylvester said immediately.
‘‘Not your local pub fare,’’ she warned.
‘‘Wherever you choose. The Ritz, for God’s sake.’’
‘‘Done,’’ said Scrutton, rubbing her palms. ‘‘Mm.
Haven’t eaten since breakfast, at least.’’
Somewhere between the butter lettuce and the prawns,
encouraged by half a bottle of Moe¨t et Chandon, Scrutton
revealed her suspicion that Redfield was representing none
other than Vincent Darlington—at which Sylvester
dropped her fork.
Scrutton, her eyebrows oscillating with alarm, gaped
at her. In all the years she had known Sylvester she had
never seen her like this: her beautiful face was darkening
quite alarmingly, and Scrutton was not at all certain that
she had not suffered a stroke. She glanced around, but to
her relief no one in the airy dining room seemed to have
noticed anything amiss, with the possible exception of a
poised and anxious waiter.
Sylvester’s color improved. ‘‘What a surprise,’’ she
whispered.
V E N U S P R I M E
9 4
‘‘Syl, dearest, I had no idea . . .’’
‘‘This is vendetta, of course. Never mind the language,
never mind the period, sweet Vincent has not the least
interest in literature. I doubt he could distinguish The
Seven Pillars of Wisdom from Lady Chatterly’s Lover.’’
‘‘Hm, yes’’—Scrutton’s cheek quivered, but she could
not resist—‘‘they are rather close in date . . .’’
‘‘Hermione,’’ Sylvester warned, fixing a cool eye upon
her; chastened, Scrutton subsided. ‘‘Hermione, Vincent
Darlington does not read. He did not buy that book because
he knows its worth; he bought it to shame me, because
I shamed him—in quite another arena.’’ Sylvester
leaned back in her chair, dabbing at her lips with a heavy
linen napkin.
‘‘Really, my dear girl,’’ Scrutton murmured. ‘‘Understand
perfectly.’’
‘‘No, not really, Hermione.’’ Sylvester said sharply. ‘‘But
you mean well, I think. Therefore I am about to put my
life, or at least my reputation, into your hands. If you ever
need to blackmail me, remember this moment—the moment
I swore I would revenge myself upon that worm Darlington.
If it costs me my fortune.’’
‘‘Mm, ah.’’ Scrutton sipped her champagne, then set it
down carefully upon the linen. ‘‘Well, Syl, let us hope it
doesn’t come to that.’’
One ships an object worth a million and a half pounds
discreetly, and with due regard for its physical well-being.
Fortunately The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had been printed
in those long gone days when it was assumed as a matter
of course that printed pages ought to last. Blake Redfield
had only to place the book into a padded gray Styrene
V E N U S P R I M E
9 5
briefcase and find a shipper who could provide
temperature-and humidity-controlled storage.
Lloyd’s register listed two suitable ships that would arrive
at Port Hesperus within twenty-four hours of each
other. Neither would get to Venus in much less than two
months, but no one else would arrive sooner, and no other
ships were scheduled for several more weeks; that was the
nature of interplanetary travel. One of the two was a
freighter, Star Queen, due to depart Earth orbit in three
weeks. The other ship was a liner, Helios, scheduled to
leave later on a faster crossing. Prudence suggested that
Blake reserve space on both; the asterisk beside Star
Queen’s name warned that the ship was undergoing repairs
and had yet to be cleared for commerce by the Board of
Space Control.
Blake was sealing the magnetic lock on the Styrene
case when the door of Sotheby’s back room exploded with
a loud bang.
A young woman was silhouetted against the brick hallway.
‘‘Heavens, Blake, what have you been up to?’’ she
inquired, waving a hand to dispel the acrid smoke.
‘‘I’ve been up to a few grains of potassium chlorate
and sulfur, actually. If you hadn’t been you, dear, this
rather expensive object before me would have been
whisked out of your sight and into the vault before you’d
cleared the air in front of your cute nose.’’
‘‘Couldn’t you have used a little buzzer or something?
Did you have to destroy the doorknob?’’
‘‘I didn’t destroy the doorknob. More noise than punch.
Might have blistered the venerable paint. Regrets.’’
The apple-cheeked young woman was modestly uniformed
in a conservative metal skirt. She came to the desk
V E N U S P R I M E
9 6
and watched Blake lock the plastic case. ‘‘Didn’t you think
it was too bad she lost the bidding? She had such good
taste.’’
‘‘She?’’
‘‘She came up to you after the sale,’’ she said. ‘‘Very
beautiful for someone her age. She asked you something
that made you blush.’’
‘‘Blush? You have quite a vivid imagination.’’
‘‘You’re no good at pretending, Blake. Blame your Irish
grandfather for your freckles.’’
‘‘Mrs. Sylvester is an attractive woman. . . .’’
‘‘She asked about you afterwards. I told her you were
a genius.’’
‘‘I doubt she has any personal interest in me. And I
certainly have no interest in her.’’
‘‘Oh? Do you have an interest in Vincent Darlington?’’
‘‘Oh yes, pure lust.’’ He laughed. ‘‘For his money.’’
She leaned a mesh-covered hip against the back of his
chair; he could feel her heat on his cheek. ‘‘Darlington’s
an illiterate pig,’’ she announced. ‘‘He doesn’t deserve that
thing.’’
‘‘ ‘ ’Tis a thing, devised by the enemy,’ ’’ he murmured,
and he rose abruptly, moving away from her, to put the
locked case into the vault. ‘‘Right.’’ He turned to face her
across the cluttered yellow office. ‘‘Did you bring me the
pamphlet?’’
She smiled, her rosy cheeks and sparkling eyes signaling
her frank interest. ‘‘I found a shelf full, but they’re still
at my flat. Come home with me and I will introduce you
to the secrets of the prophetae.’’
He eyed her, a bit askance, then shrugged. ‘‘Sure.’’ After
all, it was a subject that had long intrigued him.
9 7
VII
A discreet knocking at the door, repeated at intervals . . .
Sondra Sylvester came striding out of the bathroom, her
blue silk nightgown clinging heavily to her long body. She
unchained the door.
‘‘Your tea, mu’m.’’
‘‘By the window, that will be fine.’’
The uniformed young man picked his way through
feminine litter and laid the heavy silver tray of tea things
on the table. The windows of the spacious suite had a fine
view of Hyde Park, but this morning they were heavily
curtained against the light. Sylvester searched the dim
room and spotted her velvet clutch purse on the floor beside
a clothes-draped armchair. She found paper money
inside and dug out a bill in time to thrust it into the young
man’s hand.
‘‘Thank you, mu’m.’’
‘‘You’ve been very good,’’ she said, slightly flustered.
V E N U S P R I M E
9 8
She closed the door behind him. ‘‘God, how much did I
give him?’’ she muttered. ‘‘I’m hardly awake.’’
A rounded form stirred under the bedsheets. Nancybeth’s
tousled dark hair and violet eyes peered from the
sheets.
Sylvester watched as the rest of Nancybeth rose into
view, graceful neck, slender shoulders, heavy breasts
darkly nippled. ‘‘How becoming of you to wait until he
left. And how novel.’’
‘‘What are you bitching about?’’ Nancybeth yawned,
displaying perfect little teeth, a darting pink tongue.
Sylvester crossed to the videoplate on the wall and fiddled
with the controls hidden in its carved and gilded
frame. ‘‘You said you were awake. I asked you to turn on
the news.’’
‘‘I went back to sleep.’’
‘‘You were into my purse again.’’
Nancybeth glared at her with pale eyes that tended to
cross when she was concentrating. ‘‘Syl, sometimes you
act more like a mother . . .’’ She sprang from the bed and
strode to the bathroom.
‘‘Than like what?’’
But Nancybeth ignored her, walking through the dressing
room, leaving the door open, on into the shower stall.
Sylvester’s heart was thudding—God, that shelf, those
majestic flanks, those vibrant calves. Part Italian, part Polynesian,
she was a bronzed Galatea, sculpture made flesh.
Irritably Sylvester punched the controls of the video picture
until the plastic mask of a BBC announcer appeared.
She set the volume just loud enough to hear the announcer
talk about rising tensions in south central Asia
as she went about picking clothes off the floor and hurling
them onto the bed. From the bathroom came the hiss and
V E N U S P R I M E
9 9
dribble of the shower and Nancybeth’s husky, off-tune
voice singing something torchy and unintelligible. Sylvester
looked at the heavy silver teapot and the china cups
with distaste. She went into the dressing room and pulled
a bottle of Moe¨t et Chandon from the refrigerator under
the counter. The videoplate mumbled words that caught
her attention: ‘‘A secret unveiled: develops that the winning
bid in yesterday’s spectacular auction at Sotheby’s
. . .’’ Sylvester darted to the wall screen and boosted
the volume. ‘‘. . . first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom by
T. E Lawrence—the legendary Lawrence of Arabia—was
placed by Mr. Vincent Darlington, director of the Hesperian
Museum. Reached by radio-link, Mr. Darlington at
first refused comment but later admitted that he had
bought the extremely rare book on behalf of the Port Hesperus
museum, an institution of which he is the proprietor
—not, it might be said, an institution hitherto known
for its collection of written works. In other news of the art
world . . .’’
Sylvester punched off the video. She ripped the foil off
the bottle and untangled its wire cage. She began twisting
the bulging champagne cork with a strong, steady grip.
Nancybeth emerged from the shower. Steam rose from
her skin, backlit in the glow from the dressing room light.
She was perfectly unconcerned about the water she was
dripping onto the rug. ‘‘Was that something about Vince?
On the news?’’
‘‘Seems he was the one who outbid me for the
Lawrence.’’ The champagne cork came out with a satisfying
thud.
‘‘Vince? He doesn’t care about books.’’
Sylvester watched her, a heavy dark Venus deliberately
manifesting herself naked, deliberately letting her wet skin
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1 0 0
chill, letting her nipples rise. ‘‘He cared about you,’’ Sylvester
said.
‘‘Oh.’’ Nancybeth smiled complacently, her violet eyes
half-lidded. ‘‘I guess it cost you.’’
‘‘On the contrary, you’ve saved me a great deal of
money I might otherwise have thrown away on a mere
book. Fetch some glasses, will you? In the refrigerator.’’
Still naked, still wet, Nancybeth brought the tulip
glasses to the table and settled herself on the plush chair.
‘‘Are we celebrating something?’’
‘‘Hardly,’’ Sylvester said, pouring out the cold, seething
liquid. ‘‘I’m consoling myself.’’
She handed a tulip to Nancybeth. They bent toward
each other. The rims touched and chimed. ‘‘Still mad at
me?’’ Nancybeth mewed.
Sylvester was fascinated, watching Nancybeth’s nostrils
widen as she lowered her upturned nose into the
mouth of the tulip. ‘‘For being who you are?’’
The tip of the pink tongue tasted sharp carbonic acid
from dissolving bubbles. ‘‘Well, you don’t have to console
yourself, Syl.’’ The violet eyes under the long, wet lashes
lifted to transfix her.
‘‘I don’t?’’
‘‘Let me console you.’’
The magneplane whirred through the genteel greenery
of London’s southwestern suburbs, pausing now and again
to drop off and take on passengers, depositing Nikos Pavlakis
a mile from his Richmond destination. Pavlakis hired
an autotaxi at the stand and as it drove away from the
station he rolled down the windows to let the wet spring
air invade the cab. Beyond the slate roofs of the passing
semi-detached villas, pearly cloud puffs in the soft blue
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1 0 1
sky kept pace with the cab as it rolled past spruce lawns
and hedges.
Lawrence Wycherly’s house was a trim brick Georgian.
Pavlakis put his sliver in the port, paying the cab to wait,
then walked to the door of the house, feeling heavy in a
black plastic suit that, like all his suits, was too tight for
his massive shoulders. Mrs. Wycherly opened the door before
he could reach for the bell. ‘‘Good morning, Mr. Pavlakis.
Larry’s in the sitting room.’’
She did not seem overjoyed to see him. She was a pale,
smooth-skinned woman with fine blond hair, pretty once,
now on the verge of fading into invisibility, leaving only
her regret.
Pavlakis found Wycherly sitting in his pajamas, his feet
up on a hassock, a plaid lap robe tucked under his thighs
and an arsenal of plastic-back space thrillers and patent
medicines littering the lamp table beside him. Wycherly
lifted a thin hand. ‘‘Sorry, Nick. Would get up, but I’ve
been a bit wobbly for the past day or two.’’
‘‘I’m sorry to have to give you this trouble, Larry.’’
‘‘Nothing of it. Sit down, will you? Be comfortable. Get
you anything? Tea?’’
Mrs. Wycherly was still in the room, somewhat to Pavlakis’s
surprise, temporarily reemerging from the shadows
of the arch. ‘‘Mr. Pavlakis might prefer coffee.’’
‘‘That would be very nice,’’ he said gratefully. The English
repeatedly amazed him with their sensitivity to such
things.
‘‘Right, then,’’ Wycherly said, staring at her until she
dissolved again. He cocked a canny eyebrow at Pavlakis,
who was perching his muscular bulk delicately on an
Empire settee. ‘‘All right, Nick. Something too special for
the phone?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 2
‘‘Larry, my friend . . .’’ Pavlakis leaned forward, hands
primly on his knees, ‘‘Falaron Shipyards is cheating us—
my father and me. Dimitrios is encouraging the worker
consortiums to bribe us, and then taking kickbacks from
them. For all of which we must pay. If we are to meet the
launch window for Star Queen.’’
Wycherly said nothing, but a sour smile played over
his lips. ‘‘Frankly, most of us who’ve worked with the firm
over the years have accepted that that was always part of
the arrangement between Dimitrios and your dad.’’ Wycherly
paused, then coughed repeatedly, making a humming
sound like a balky two-cycle engine deep in his chest. For
a moment Pavlakis was afraid he was choking, but he was
merely clearing his throat. He recovered himself. ‘‘Standard
practice, so to say.’’
‘‘We can’t afford this standard practice anymore,’’ Pavlakis
said. ‘‘These days we face worse than just the old
competition . . .’’
Wycherly grinned. ‘‘Besides which, you’re no longer
allowed to get rid of them by something as simple as, say,
slitting a few throats.’’
‘‘Yes.’’ Pavlakis jerked his head forward, solemnly.
‘‘Because we are regulated. So many regulations. Set fees
per kilo of mass . . .’’
‘‘. . . divided by time of transport, multiplied by minimax
distance between ports,’’ Wycherly said wearily.
‘‘Right, Nick.’’
‘‘So to attract business one must abide by the strictest
adherence to launch windows.’’
‘‘I have been with the firm awhile.’’ Again Wycherly
made that lawnmower sound in the back of his throat,
struggling for breath.
‘‘These calculations—I keep making them in my head,’’
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1 0 3
Pavlakis said. He was thinking that Wycherly did not look
well; the whites of his eyes were rimmed in bright red and
his gingery hair was standing up in tufts, like the feathers
of a wet bird.
‘‘Sorry for you, old man,’’ Wycherly said wryly.
‘‘We are so close to doing well. I have negotiated a
long-term contract with the Ishtar Mining Corporation.
The first shipment is six mining robots, nearly forty tonnes.
That will pay for the trip, even give us a profit. But
if we miss the launch window . . .’’
‘‘You lose the contract,’’ Wycherly said, keeping it matter
of fact.
Pavlakis shrugged. ‘‘Worse, we pay a penalty. Assuming
we have not declared bankruptcy first.’’
‘‘What else have you got for cargo?’’
‘‘Silly things. A pornography chip. A box of cigars.
Yesterday we got a provisory reservation for a damned
book.’’
‘‘One book?’’ Pavlakis jerked his head again, yes, and
Wycherly’s eyebrow shot up. ‘‘Why ‘damned’?’’
‘‘The entire package weighs four kilos, Larry.’’ Pavlakis
laughed, snorting like a bull. ‘‘Its freight will not pay your
wages to the moon. But it is to be accompanied by a certificate
of insurance in the amount of two million pounds!
I would rather have the insurance.’’
‘‘Maybe you could load it and then arrange a little accident.’’
Wycherly started to laugh, but was taken by a
spasm of coughing. Pavlakis looked away, pretending to
be interested in the horse prints on the cream walls of the
sitting room, the bookcases of unread leatherbound classics.
At last Wycherly recovered. ‘‘Well, of course you must
know what book that is.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 4
‘‘Should I know?’’
‘‘Really, Nick, it was all the news yesterday. That
book’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Must be. Lawrence of
Arabia and all that.’’ Wycherly’s wasted face twisted in a
grin. ‘‘Another of the old empire’s treasures carried off to
the colonies. And this time the colony’s another planet.’’
‘‘Very sad.’’ Pavlakis’s commiseration was brief. ‘‘Larry,
without the Ishtar contract . . .’’
But Wycherly was musing, staring past Pavlakis into
the shadows of the hall. ‘‘That’s a rather odd coincidence,
isn’t it?’’
‘‘What’s odd?’’
‘‘Or maybe not, really. Port Hesperus, of course.’’
‘‘I’m sorry, I fail to . . .’’
Wycherly focused on him. ‘‘Sorry, Nick. Mrs. Sylvester,
she’s the chief exec at Ishtar Mining, isn’t that right?’’
His head bobbed forward. ‘‘Oh, yes.’’
‘‘She was the other bidder for The Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
you see. Went to over a million pounds and lost out.’’
‘‘Ah.’’ Pavlakis’s eyelids drooped at the thought of that
much personal wealth. ‘‘How sad for her.’’
‘‘Port Hesperus is quite the center of wealth these
days.’’
‘‘Well . . . you see why we must retain the Ishtar contract.
No room for Dimitrios and his . . . ‘standard practices.’
’’ Pavlakis struggled to get the conversation back on
track. ‘‘Larry, I am not certain that my own father fully
understands these matters—’’
‘‘But you’ve had no trouble making it all clear to Dimitrios.’’
Wycherly studied Pavlakis and saw what he expected.
‘‘And he is not at all happy with you.’’
‘‘I was foolish.’’ Pavlakis fished for his worry beads.
‘‘Could be so. He’ll know this is his last chance to steal.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 5
And still plenty of opportunities for the old crook to buy
cheap and charge dear on the specs.’’
‘‘I found no sign of cheating on the specifications when
I inspected the work two days ago . . .’’
‘‘I won’t be wanting to captain any substandard ship,
Nick,’’ Wycherly said sharply. ‘‘Whatever else has been
going on between Dimitrios and your dad—and I suspect
plenty—your dad never asked me to risk my neck in a craft
that was unspaceworthy.’’
‘‘I would not ask you that either, my friend . . .’’ Pavlakis
was startled by Mrs. Wycherly, silently materializing
at his elbow with a saucer. On it was balanced a cup filled
with something brown. He looked up at her and smiled
uncertainly. ‘‘You are very gracious, dear lady.’’ He took
it and sipped the liquid cautiously; normally he took Turkish
coffee with double sugar, but this was coffee in the
American style, plain and bitter. He smiled, hiding his chagrin.
‘‘Mmm.’’
His polite charade was wasted on Mrs. Wycherly, who
was looking at her husband. ‘‘Please don’t let yourself become
exhausted, Larry.’’ Wycherly shook his head impatiently.
When Pavlakis looked up from his cup, he discovered
that she had gone. He set the coffee carefully aside. ‘‘What
I had hoped was that you could help insure that Star
Queen would not fail recertification by the board, Larry.’’
‘‘How would I do that?’’ Wycherly muttered.
‘‘I would be happy to put you on flight pay immediately,
with bonuses, if you would consent to go up to
Falaron and live there for the next month—as soon as you
feel fit, of course—to act as my personal agent. To inspect
the work daily, until the ship is ready.’’
Wycherly’s dull eyes brightened. He hummed and sput-
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 6
tered a moment. ‘‘You’re a clever fellow, Nick. Hiring a
man to see to his own safety . . .’’ His gravelly voice broke
into grinding coughs, and Pavlakis was aware that Mrs.
Wycherly was nervously regaining solidity in the shadows.
Wycherly’s spasms subsided, and he glared at his wife with
eyes full of pain. ‘‘An offer I can hardly refuse’’—his eyes
fell back to Pavlakis—‘‘unless I’m unable.’’
‘‘You’ll do it?’’
‘‘I’ll do it if I can.’’
Pavlakis stood up with unseemly haste, his dark bulk
looming in the nebulous room. ‘‘Thank you, Larry. I’ll let
you be by yourself, now. I hope your recovery is swift.’’
As he hurried to the waiting autocab his amber beads
were swirling and clicking. He muttered a prayer to Saint
George for Wycherly’s health, while voices were raised in
anger in the house behind him.
Fifteen minutes on the swift magneplane brought Pavlakis
back to the Heathrow Shuttleport and the local
freight office of Pavlakis Lines. It was a cramped shed
tacked onto the end of a spaceplane hangar, an enormous
steel barn full of discarded, egglike fuel tanks and scavenged
sections of booster fuselages. A smell of odorized
methane and Gunk had worked its way into the paneling.
When neither of the Pavlakises, Senior or Junior, was in
England, the place was deserted except for the underemployed
mechanics who hung around trying to make time
with the secretary-receptionist, one of Nikos’s cousins’
sisters-in-law. Her name was Sofia, she was a wiry-yellow
blond from the Peloponnese, heavier than her years, and
she brooded. When Pavlakis walked into the office she had
an open carton of yogurt on her desk, which she appeared
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 7
to be ignoring in favor of the noonday news on her desktop
videoplate.
‘‘For those of you who may have needed an excuse,
here’s a good reason to plan a trip to Port Hesperus,’’ the
announcer was simpering. ‘‘Early this morning it was revealed
that the buyer of that first-edition Seven Pillars of
Wisdom . . .’’
Sofia lifted smoldering eyes to Pavlakis when he came
in, but no other part of her body moved. ‘‘A woman has
been calling you.’’
‘‘What woman?’’
‘‘I could not say what woman. She says you were to
write her a letter. Or send her a wire. I forget.’’ The smoldering
eyes strayed back to the flatscreen.
‘‘Mrs. Sylvester?’’
Sofia’s eyes stayed fixed on the screen, but her palms
opened: maybe.
Cursing the very concept of cousins and in-laws, Pavlakis
went past a paste-board divider into the inner sanctum.
The desk that everybody used whenever they felt like
it was piled high with greasy flimsies. A pink slip sat on
top, scratched out in Sofia’s degraded demotic, conveying
the gist of Sondra Sylvester’s last communication: ‘‘Imperative
you reaffirm contract in writing this date. If Pavlakis
Lines cannot guarantee launch window, Ishtar
Mining Corporation must immediately terminate proposed
contract.’’
Proposed contract . . . ?
The worry beads clicked. ‘‘Sofia,’’ Pavlakis shouted.
‘‘Reach Mrs. Sylvester immediately.’’
‘‘Where to reach the lady?’’ came the delayed reply.
‘‘At the Battenberg.’’ Idiot. By what folly did her father
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 8
name her Sofia, Wisdom? Pavlakis scuffled through the
flimsies, searching for anything new and hopeful. His
hand fell on yesterday’s query from Sotheby’s. ‘‘Can you
guarantee shipment of one book, four kilograms gross
mass in case, to arrive Port Hesperus . . . ?’’
‘‘I’ve reached the woman,’’ Sofia announced.
‘‘Mr. Pavlakis? Are you there?’’
Pavlakis snatched at the phonelink. ‘‘Yes, dear lady, I
hope you will accept my personal apologies. Many unexpected
matters . . .’’
Sylvester’s image coalesced on the little videoplate. ‘‘I
don’t need an apology. I need a confirmation. My business
in England was to have been finished yesterday. Before I
can leave London I must be persuaded that my equipment
will arrive at Venus on time.’’
‘‘Just at this very moment I have been sitting down to
write a letter.’’ Pavlakis resisted the urge to twist his beads
in view of the videoplate.
‘‘I’m not talking about a recording or a piece of paper,
Mr. Pavlakis,’’ said the cool, beautiful face on the screen.
How was her face so alluring? Something disarranged
about the hair, the heightened color around the cheeks,
the lips—Pavlakis forced himself to concentrate on her
words. ‘‘Frankly, your behavior has not been reassuring. I
sense that I should look for another carrier.’’
Her words galvanized him. ‘‘You may have faith, dear
lady! Indeed, you must. Even the Hesperian Museum has
honored us to carry its recent and most valuable acquisition
. . .’’ He hesitated, confused. Why had he said such
a thing? To be . . . to be friendly, of course, to reassure her.
‘‘In which you yourself have had much interest, if I am
correct?’’
Great Christ, the woman had turned to metal. Her eyes
V E N U S P R I M E
1 0 9
flashed like spinning drillpoints, her mouth was steel shutters,
slammed shut. Pavlakis turned away, desperately
swiped away the sweat that was pouring from his hairline.
‘‘Mrs. Sylvester, please, you must forgive me, I have
been . . . under much strain lately.’’
‘‘Don’t trouble yourself so much, Mr. Pavlakis.’’ To his
surprise, her tone was as smooth and warm as her words
. . . warmer, even. He half turned, looked at the screen. She
was smiling! ‘‘Write me that letter you promised. And I
will talk to you again when I return to London.’’
‘‘You will trust in Pavlakis Lines? Oh, we will not fail
you, dear lady!’’
‘‘Let us trust in one another.’’
Sylvester cut the phonelink and leaned back in the bed.
Nancybeth was sprawled face down on top of the sheets,
eyeing her from the slit of a heavy-lidded eye. ‘‘Will you
be awfully unhappy if we delay the island for a day or
two, sweet?’’ Sylvester whispered.
‘‘Oh, God, Syl.’’ Nancybeth rolled onto her back. ‘‘You
mean I’m stuck in this soot pile for two more days?’’
‘‘I have unexpected work to do. If you want to go
ahead without me . . .’’
Nancybeth writhed in indecision, her round knees falling
open. ‘‘I suppose I can find something . . .’’
Suddenly Sylvester felt a touch of nausea. ‘‘Never
mind. Once you’re settled I may have to come back for a
day or two.’’
Nancybeth smiled. ‘‘Just get me to the beach.’’
Sylvester picked up the phonelink and tapped out a
code. Hermione Scrutton’s ruddy face came on the screen
with surprising quickness. ‘‘You, Syl?’’
‘‘Hermione, I find that my vacation plans have
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1 0
changed. I require your advice. And possibly your assistance.’’
‘‘Mm, ah,’’ the bookseller replied, her eyes sparkling.
‘‘And what will that be worth to you?’’
‘‘More than lunch, I assure you.’’
1 1 1
VIII
Captain Lawrence Wycherly made a remarkably rapid recovery
from his chest ailment and took up residence at
the Falaron Shipyards, where he ably represented the Pavlakis
Lines as clerk of the works. The gaunt, determined
Englishman bore down hard on the frustrated Peloponnesian,
inspecting the ship daily without warning and hectoring
the workers, and despite Dimitrios’s surliness and
frequent tantrums the job was finished on time. It was with
a certain grim satisfaction that Nikos Pavlakis watched
spacesuited workers electrobonding the name Star Queen
across the equator of the crew module. He praised Wycherly
lavishly and added a bonus to his already handsome
pay before leaving to make the final arrangements at Pavlakis
Lines headquarters in Athens.
Star Queen, though of a standard freighter design, was
a spacecraft quite unlike anything that had been imagined
at the dawn of modern rocketry—which is to say it looked
nothing like an artillery shell with fins or the hood or-
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1 2
nament of a gasoline-burning automobile. The basic con-
figuration was two clusters of spheres and cylinders
separated from each other by a cylindrical strut a hundred
meters long. The whole thing somewhat resembled a Tinkertoy
model of a simple molecule.
The forward cluster included the crew module, a sphere
over five meters in diameter. A hemispherical cage of superconducting
wires looped over the crew module, partially
shielding the crew against cosmic rays and other
charged particles in the interplanetary medium—which included
the exhaust of other atomic ships. Snugged against
the crew module’s base were the four cylindrical holds,
each seven meters across and twenty meters long, grouped
around the central strut. Like the sea-land cargo containers
of the previous century, the holds were detachable and
could be parked in orbit or picked up as needed; each was
attached to Star Queen’s central shaft by its own airlock
and was also accessible through outside pressure hatches.
Each hold was divided into compartments which could be
pressurized or left in vacuum, depending on the nature of
the cargo.
At the other end of the ship’s central strut were bulbous
tanks of liquid hydrogen, surrounding the bulky cylinder
of the atomic motor’s reactor core. Despite massive radiation
shielding, the aft of the ship was not a place for
casual visits by living creatures—robot systems did what
work needed to be done there.
For all its ad hoc practicality, Star Queen had an air of
elegance, the elegance of form following function. Apart
from the occasional horn of a maneuvering rocket or the
spike or dish of a communications antenna, the shapes
from which she had been assembled shared a geometric
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1 3
purity, and all alike shone dazzling white under their fresh
coats of electrobonded paint.
For three days, Board of Space Control inspectors went
over the refurbished ship, at last pronouncing it fully
spaceworthy. Star Queen was duly recertified. Her launch
date was confirmed. Heavy-lift shuttles brought up cargo
from Earth; other, smaller parcels were delivered by
bonded courier.
Captain Lawrence Wycherly, however, did not pass the
Board’s inspection. With one week to go before launch,
flight surgeons discovered what Wycherly had disguised
until now with illegal neural-enhancement preparations
he had obtained from sources in Chile: he was dying from
an incurable degeneration of the cerebellum. The viral infections
and other minor illnesses that had plagued him
were symptoms of a general failure of homeostasis. Never
mind that the drugs might have accelerated his disease;
Wycherly figured he was a dead man, and he was desperate
for the money this last assignment was to have
brought, for without it—the tale of his feckless investments
and frantic spiral into debt was a cautionary tale of the
age—his soon-to-be widow would lose their home, would
lose everything.
The Board of Space Control notified the Pavlakis Lines
home office in Athens that Star Queen was short a captain
and that her launch permit had been withdrawn pending
a qualified replacement. At the same time the Board routinely
notified the ship’s insurors and every firm and individual
who had placed cargo on the ship.
Delayed by ‘‘technical difficulties’’ on his way from
Athens to Heathrow (stewards were staging a slow-down
in protest against the government-owned airline), Nikos
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1 4
Pavlakis did not learn the devastating news until he
stepped off the supersonic ramjet jitney at Heathrow. Miss
Wisdom was glowering at him from behind the passport
control screens, her paint-blackened eyes the very eyes of
Nemesis beneath her helmet of wiry yellow hair. ‘‘This
from your father,’’ she spat at him, when he came within
reach, thrusting into his hands the flimsy from Athens.
Temporarily, but only temporarily, it appeared that
Saint George had let Nikos Pavlakis down. Pavlakis spent
the next twenty-four hours on the radio and phonelinks,
sustained by a kilo or so of sugar dissolved in several liters
of boiled Turkish coffee, and at the end of that time a
miracle occurred.
Neither God nor Saint George had provided a new pilot.
No such luck, for Pavlakis could find no qualified pilots
who would be free of their commitments or current
assignments in time for Star Queen’s Venus window. And
the miracle was not wholly unqualified, for no saint had
prevented the prompt defection of a few of the shippers
on the manifest—those for whom the arrival of their cargo
at Port Hesperus was not time-critical, or whose cargo
could easily be sold elsewhere. Bilbao Atmospherics was
even now off-loading its tonne of liquid nitrogen from
Hold B, and a valuable shipment of pine seedlings, the
bulk of the cargo that was to have travelled in Hold A,
had already been reclaimed by Silvawerke of Stuttgart.
Pavlakis’s miracle was the intervention of Sondra Sylvester.
He did not call her, she called him, from her rented
villa on the Isle du Levant. She informed him that after
their last conversation she had made it her business to
check up on him and the members of Star Queen’s crew.
She praised Pavlakis for his measures to safeguard the in-
V E N U S P R I M E
1 1 5
tegrity of Star Queen during the refitting; he could hardly
be blamed for Wycherly’s private difficulties. Her London
solicitors had given her very full briefs on pilot Peter
Grant and engineer Angus McNeil. In view of what she
had learned, she had personally contacted the Board of
Space Control and submitted an amicus brief on behalf of
Pavlakis Lines’s application for a waiver of the crew-ofthree
rule, citing her faith in the integrity of the firm and
overriding economic considerations. She had also contacted
Lloyd’s, urging that insurance not be withdrawn.
According to Sylvester’s best information, the waiver was
sure to be granted. Star Queen would launch with two men
aboard, carrying sufficient cargo for a profitable voyage.
When Pavlakis signed off the phonelink he was giddy
with elation.
Sylvester’s best information proved correct, and Peter
Grant was promoted to commander of a two-man crew.
Two days later heavy tugs moved Star Queen into launch
orbit, beyond the Van Allen belts. The atomic motor
erupted in a stream of white light. Under steady acceleration
the ship began a five-week hyperbolic dive toward
Venus.
1 1 7
PART THREE
BREAKING STRAIN
1 1 9
IX
Peter Grant rather enjoyed command. He was as relaxed
as a working man can be—lying weightless, loosely
strapped into the command pilot’s couch on Star Queen’s
flight deck, dictating the ship’s log between puffs of a rich
Turkish cigarette—when a skullcracker slammed into the
hull.
For the second or two that it took Grant to crush his
cigarette and reset the switches, red lights glared and sirens
hooted hysterically. ‘‘Assess and report!’’ he barked.
He yanked an emergency air mask from the console and
jammed it over his nose and mouth, and abruptly all was
silent again. He waited an eternity as the console graphics
rapidly shifted shape and color—thirty more seconds at
least—while the computer assessed the damage.
‘‘We have experienced severe overpressure in the
southeast quadrant of the life support deck,’’ the computer
announced in its matter-of-fact contralto. ‘‘Number two
fuel cell has been ruptured. Automatic switchover to num-
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1 2 0
ber one and number three fuel cells has occurred. Gas lines
from oxygen supply one and two have been sheared.
Emergency air supply valves have been opened’’—Grant
knew that; he was breathing the stuff now. But what the
hell happened?—‘‘Sensors have recorded supersonic air-
flows at exterior hull panel L-43. Loss of pressure on the
life support deck was total within twenty-three seconds.
The deck has been sealed and is now in vacuum. There
has been no further systemic or structural damage. There
has been no further loss of atmospheric pressure in the
connecting passages or in any other part of the crew module’’
—hearing which, Grant took the mask from his face
and let it withdraw into the console panel. ‘‘This concludes
damage assessment. Are there further queries?’’ the computer
asked.
Yes, damn it all, what the hell happened? The computer
didn’t answer questions like that unless it knew the answer,
unambiguously. ‘‘No further queries,’’ Grant said,
and keyed the comm: ‘‘McNeil, are you all right?’’
No answer.
He tried the hi-band. ‘‘McNeil, Grant here. I want you
on the flight deck.’’
No answer.McNeil was out of touch, possibly hurt. After
a moment’s thought Grant decided to steal just a couple of
seconds more in an attempt to learn the cause of their predicament.
With a few flicks of his fingertips he sent one of
the external monitor eyes scurrying over the command
module hull toward panel L-43, on the lowest part of the
sphere.
The image on the videoplate was a racing blur until
the robot eye halted over the designated panel. Then there
it was, fixed and plain on Grant’s screen: a black dot in
the upper right quadrant of the white-painted steel panel
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1 2 1
as neat as a pellet hole in a paper target. ‘‘Meteoroid,’’
Grant whispered. He flicked grids over the monitor image
and read the hole at just under a millimeter in diameter.
‘‘Big one.’’
Where the devil was McNeil? He’d been down in the
pressurized hold checking the humidifiers. Simple enough,
so what was the problem?—the meteoroid hadn’t penetrated
the holds. . . . Grant slipped out of his straps and
dived into the central corridor.
His feet had hardly cleared the deck when he grabbed
a ladder rung and yanked himself to a halt. Immediately
below the flight deck was the house-keeping deck. Unlike
the curtains of the other two cabins, the curtain that partitioned
McNeil’s private cabin from the common areas
stood open. And inside was McNeil, doubled up and turned
toward the bulkhead, his face hidden, his fists knotted
around the bulkhead grips.
‘‘What’s the matter, McNeil? Are you sick?’’
The engineer shook his head. Grant noticed the little
beads of moisture that broke away from his head and went
glittering across the room. He took them for sweat, until
he realized that McNeil was sobbing. Tears.
The sight repulsed him. Indeed. Grant was surprised at
the strength of his own emotion; immediately he suppressed
his reaction as unworthy. ‘‘Angus, pull out of it,’’ he
urged. ‘‘We’ve got to put our heads together.’’ But McNeil
didn’t move, nor did Grant move to comfort him, or even
touch him.
After a moment’s hesitation Grant viciously yanked the
curtain closed, veiling his mate’s display of cowardice.
In a quick tour of the lower decks and the hold access
corridor, Grant assured himself that whatever the damage
to the life support deck the integrity of the crew’s living and
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1 2 2
working quarters was not threatened. With a single bound
he leaped through the center of the ship back to the flight
deck, not even glancing at McNeil’s cabin as he passed, and
hooked himself into the command couch. He studied the
graphics.
Oxygen supply one: flat. Oxygen supply two: flat.
Grant gazed at the silent graphs as a man in ancient London,
returning home one evening at the time of the plague,
might have stared at a rough cross newly scrawled on his
door. He tapped keys and the graphs bounced, but the
fundamental equation that produced a flat curve did not
yield to his coaxing. Grant could hardly doubt the message:
news that is sufficiently bad somehow carries its own
guarantee of truth, and only good reports need confirmation.
‘‘Grant, I’m sorry.’’
Grant swung around to see McNeil floating by the ladder,
his face flushed, the pouches under his eyes swollen
from weeping. Even at a range of over a meter Grant could
smell the ‘‘medicinal’’ brandy on his breath.
‘‘What was it, a meteoroid?’’ McNeil seemed determined
to be cheerful, to make up for the lapse, and when
Grant nodded yes, McNeil even assayed a faint attempt at
humor. ‘‘They say a ship this size could get hit once a
century. We seem to have jumped the gun with ninetynine
point nine years still to go.’’
‘‘Worse luck. Look at this’’—Grant waved at the videoplate
showing the damaged panel. ‘‘Where we were holed,
the damned thing had to be coming in at practically right
angles to us. Any other approach and it couldn’t have hit
anything vital.’’ Grant swung around, facing the console
and the wide flight deck windows that looked out on the
starry night. For a moment he was silent, collecting his
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1 2 3
thoughts. What had happened was serious—deadly serious
—but it need not be fatal. After all, the voyage was
forty percent over. ‘‘You up to helping out?’’ he asked.
‘‘We should run some numbers.’’
‘‘That I am.’’ McNeil made for the engineer’s work station.
‘‘Then give me figures for total reserves, best and worst
cases. Air in Hold A. Emergency reserves. Don’t forget
what’s in the suit tanks and portable O-two packs.’’
‘‘Right,’’ said McNeil.
‘‘I’ll work on the mass ratios. See if we can gain anything
by jettisoning the holds and making a run for it.’’
McNeil hesitated and muttered, ‘‘Uh . . .’’
Grant paused. But whatever McNeil had been about to
say, he thought better of it. Grant took a deep breath. He
was in command here, and he already understood the obvious
—that dumping the cargo would put the owners out
of business, even with insurance, and put the insurance
underwriters into the poor house, most likely. But after all,
if it came to a matter of two human lives versus a few
tonnes of dead weight, there really wasn’t much question
about it.
Grant’s command of the ship at this moment was somewhat
firmer than his command of himself. He was as much
angry as he was frightened—angry with McNeil for breaking
down, angry with the designers of the ship for assuming
that a billion-to-one chance meant the same as impossible
and therefore failing to provide additional meteor shielding
in the soft underbelly of the command module. But the
deadline for oxygen reserves was at least a couple of
weeks away, and a lot could happen before then. The
thought helped, for a moment anyway, to keep his fears
at arm’s length.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 2 4
This was an emergency beyond doubt—but it was one
of those peculiarly protracted emergencies, once characteristic
of the sea, these days more typical of space—one
of those emergencies where there was plenty of time to
think. Perhaps too much time.
Grant was reminded of an old Cretan sailor he had met
at the Pavlakis hangar in Heathrow, some ancient relativeof-
a-relative of the old man’s, there on a courtesy invitation,
who had held an audience of clerks and mechanics
in thrall as he recited the tale of a disastrous voyage he
had worked as a young man, on a tramp steamer through
the Red Sea. The captain of the vessel had inexplicably
failed to provide his ship with sufficient fresh water
against emergencies. The radio broke down, and then the
engines. The ship drifted for weeks before attracting the
attention of passing traffic, by which time the crew had
been reduced to stretching the fresh water with salt. The
old Cretan was among the survivors who merely spent a
few weeks in hospital. Others were not so lucky; they had
already died horribly of thirst and salt poisoning.
Slow disasters are like that: one unlikely thing happens,
and that’s complicated by a second unlikely event,
and a third puts paid to somebody’s life.
McNeil had grossly oversimplified matters when he
said that the Star Queen might expect to be hit by a meteoroid
once in a century. The answer depended on so
many factors that three generations of statisticians and
their computers had done little but lay down rules so
vague that the insurance companies still shivered with apprehension
when the great meteoroid swarms went sweeping
like gales through the orbits of the inner worlds.
Otherwise desirable interplanetary trajectories were put
out of bounds by the insurors if they required a ship to
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1 2 5
intersect the orbit of the Leonids, say, at the peak of a
shower—although even then the real chance of a ship and
a meteoroid intersecting was, at worst, remote.
Much depends on one’s subjective notion of what the
words meteor and meteorite and meteoroid mean, of
course. Each lump of cosmic slag that reaches the surface
of the Earth—thus earning the moniker ‘‘meteorite’’—has a
million smaller brethren that perish utterly in the noman’s-
land where the atmosphere has not quite ended and
space has yet to begin, that ghostly region where Aurora
walks by night. These are meteors—manifestations of the
upper air, the original meaning of the word—the familiar
shooting stars, which are seldom larger than a pin’s head.
And these in turn are outnumbered a millionfold again by
particles too small to leave any visible trace of their dying
as they drift down from the sky. All of them, the countless
specks of dust, the rare boulders and even the wandering
mountains that Earth encounters perhaps every dozen million
years—all of them, flying free in space, are meteoroids.
For the purposes of space flight a meteoroid is only of
interest if, on striking the hull, the resulting explosion interdicts
vital functions, or produces destructive overpressures,
or puts a hole in a pressurized compartment too
big to prevent the rapid loss of atmosphere. These are matters
both of size and relative speed. The efforts of the statisticians
had resulted in tables showing approximate
collision probabilities at various radiuses from the sun for
meteoroids down to masses of a few milligrams. At the
radius of Earth’s orbit, for example, one might expect any
given cubic kilometer of space to be traversed by a onegram
meteoroid, travelling toward the sun at perhaps forty
kilometers per second, just once every three days. The like-
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1 2 6
lihood of a spacecraft occupying the same cubic kilometer
of space (except very near Earth itself) was much lower,
and so was the calculated incidence of larger meteoroids—
so that McNeil’s ‘‘once in a century’’ collision estimate was
in fact absurdly high.
The meteoroid which had struck Star Queen was big—
likely a gram’s worth of concreted dust and ice the size of
a ball bearing. And it had somehow managed to avoid
striking either the upper hemisphere of the crew module
or the large cylindrical cargo holds below, in its nearly
perpendicular angle of attack on the life support deck. The
virtual certainty that such an occurrence would not happen
again in the course of human history gave Grant and
McNeil very little consolation.
Still, things might have been worse. Star Queen was
fourteen days into her trajectory and had twenty-one days
still to go to reach Port Hesperus. Thanks to her upgraded
engines she was travelling much faster than the slow
freighters, the tramp steamers of the space-ways who were
restricted to Hohmann ellipses, those long tangential flight
paths that expended minimum energy by just kissing the
orbits of Earth and Venus on opposite sides of the sun.
Passenger ships equipped with even more powerful
gaseous-core reactors, or fast cutters using the still-new
fusion drives, could slice across from planet to planet in
as little as a fortnight, given favorable planetary alignments
—and given a profit margin that allowed them to
spend an order of magnitude more on fuel—but Star Queen
was stuck in the middle of the equation. Her optimal acceleration
and deceleration determined both her launch
window and her time of arrival.
Surprising how long it takes to execute a simple computer
program when your life depends on the outcome.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 2 7
Grant entered the pertinent numbers a dozen different ways
before he gave up hoping that the bottom line would
change.
He turned to McNeil, still hunched over the engineering
console across the circular room. ‘‘Looks like we can shave
the ETA by almost half a day,’’ he said. ‘‘Assuming we
blow all the holds within the next hour or so.’’
For a second or two McNeil didn’t reply. When at last
he straightened and turned to face Grant his expression
was calm and sober. ‘‘It appears the oxygen will last us
eighteen days in the best case—fifteen in the worst. Seems
we’re a few days short.’’
The men regarded each other with a trancelike calmness
that would have been remarkable had it not been obvious
what was racing through their minds: there must be a way
out!
Make oxygen!
Grow plants, for example—but there was nothing green
aboard, not even a packet of grass seeds—and even if there
were, despite the tall tales, when the entire energy cycle
is taken into account, land plants are not efficient oxygen
producers on much less than the scale of a small world.
The only good it would have done them to have those
pine seedlings aboard would have been the greater volume
of air in the pressurized hold.
Electrolyze water then, reversing the fuel-cell cycle,
getting from it elemental hydrogen and oxygen—but there
was not enough water in the undamaged fuel cells or in
the water tanks, or even in the two men’s bodies, to keep
them breathing for an additional seven days. At least not
past their deaths from dehydration.
Extra oxygen was not to be had. Which left that last
standby of space opera, the deus ex machina of a passing
V E N U S P R I M E
1 2 8
spaceship—one that conveniently happened to be matching
one’s course and velocity exactly.
There were no such ships, of course. Almost by defi-
nition, the spaceship that ‘‘happened to be passing’’ was
impossible. Even if other freighters already were skidding
toward Venus on the same trajectory—and Grant and
McNeil would have known if there were—then by the laws
that governed their movements, the very laws propounded
by Newton, they must keep their original separations without
a heroic sacrifice of mass and a possibly fatal squandering
of fuel. Any ship passing at a significantly greater
velocity—a passing liner, say—would be pursuing its own
hyperbolic trajectory and would likely be as inaccessible
as Pluto. But a fully provisioned cutter, if it started now
from Venus . . .
‘‘What’s docked at Port Hesperus?’’ McNeil inquired, as
if his thoughts had been on the same trajectory as Grant’s.
Grant waited a moment, consulting the computer, before
he replied. ‘‘A couple of old Hohmann freighters, according
to Lloyd’s Register—and the usual litter of
launches and tugs.’’ He laughed abruptly. ‘‘Couple of solar
yachts. No help there.’’
‘‘Seems we’re drawing a blank,’’ McNeil observed.
‘‘P’raps we should have a word with the controllers on
Earth and Venus.’’
‘‘I was about to do just that,’’ Grant said irritably, ‘‘as
soon as I’ve decided how to phrase the query.’’ He took a
swift breath. ‘‘Look, you’ve been a great help here. You
could do us another favor and do a personal check on
possible air leaks in the system. All right with you, then?’’
‘‘Certainly, that’s all right.’’ McNeil’s voice was quiet.
Grant watched McNeil sidelong as he unbuckled his
loose straps and swam down, off the flight deck. The en-
V E N U S P R I M E
1 2 9
gineer was probably going to give him trouble in the days
that lay ahead, Grant mused. That shameful business,
breaking down like a child . . . Until now they had got on
well enough—like most men of substantial girth, McNeil
was good-natured and easy-going—but now Grant realized
that McNeil lacked fiber. Obviously he had become
flabby, physically and mentally, through living too long
in space.
1 3 0
X
The parabolic antenna on the communications boom was
aimed at the gleaming arc lamp of Venus, less than twenty
million kilometers away and moving on a converging path
with the ship. A tone sounded on the console, indicating
that a signal from Port Hesperus had been acquired.
The physical convergence would not occur for a
month, but the three-millimeter waves from the ship’s
transmitter would make the trip in under a minute. How
nice, at this moment, to be a radio wave.
Grant acknowledged the ‘‘go ahead’’ and began to talk
steadily and, he hoped, quite dispassionately. He gave a
careful analysis of the situation, appending pertinent data
in telemetry, ending his speech with a request for advice.
His fears concerning McNeil he left unspoken; the engineer
was doubtless monitoring the transmission.
And on Port Hesperus—the Venus orbital station—the
bombshell was about to burst, triggering trains of sympathetic
ripples on all the inhabited worlds, as video and
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3 1
faxsheets took up the refrain: STAR QUEEN IN PERIL. An
accident in space has a dramatic quality that tends to
crowd all other items from the newsheads. At least until
the corpses have been counted.
The actual reply from Port Hesperus, less dramatic, was
as swift as the speed of light allowed: ‘‘Port Hesperus control
to Star Queen, acknowledging your emergency status.
We will shortly forward a detailed questionnaire. Please
stand by.’’
They stood by. Or rather they floated by.
When the questions arrived Grant put them on printout.
The message took nearly an hour to run through the
printer and the questionnaire was so detailed, so extremely
detailed—so extraordinarily detailed, in fact—that Grant
wondered morosely if he and McNeil would live long
enough to answer it. Two weeks, more or less.
Most of the queries were technical, concerning the
status of the ship. Grant had no doubt the experts on Earth
and Venus station were wracking their brains in an attempt
to save Star Queen and her cargo. Perhaps especially
her cargo.
‘‘What do you think?’’ Grant asked McNeil, when the
engineer had finished running through the message. He
was studying McNeil carefully now, watching him for any
signs of strain.
After a long, rigid silence, McNeil shrugged. His first
words echoed Grant’s thoughts. ‘‘It will certainly keep us
busy. I doubt we’ll get through this in a day. And I’ve got
to admit I think half of these questions are crazy.’’
Grant nodded but said nothing. He let McNeil continue.
‘‘ ‘Rate of leakage from the crew areas’—sensible
enough, but we’ve already told them that. And what do
they want with the efficiency of the radiation shields?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3 2
‘‘Could have something to do with seal erosion, I suppose,’’
Grant murmured.
McNeil eyed him. ‘‘If you were to ask me, I’d say they
were tryin’ to keep our spirits up, pretendin’ they have a
bright idea or two. And meanwhile we’re to keep ourselves
too busy to worry about it.’’
Grant peered atMcNeil with a queer mixture of relief and
annoyance—relief because the Scot hadn’t thrown another
tantrum and, conversely, annoyance because he was now so
damned calm, refusing to fit neatly into the mental category
Grant had prepared for him. Had that momentary lapse after
the meteoroid struck been typical of the man? Or might it
have happened to anyone? Grant, to whom the world was
very much a place of blacks and whites, felt angry at being
unable to decide whether McNeil was cowardly or courageous.
That he might be both never occurred to him.
In space, in flight, time is timeless. On Earth there is
the great clock of the spinning globe itself, marking the
hours with whole continents for hands. Even on the moon
the shadows creep sluggishly from crag to crag as the sun
makes its slow march across the sky. But in space the stars
are fixed, or might as well be; the sun moves only if the
pilot chooses to move the ship, and the chronometers tick
off numbers that say days and hours but as far as sensation
goes are meaningless.
Grant and McNeil had long since learned to regulate
their lives accordingly; while in deep space they moved
and thought with a kind of leisure—which vanished
quickly enough when a voyage was nearing its end and
the time for braking maneuvers arrived—and though they
were now under sentence of death, they continued along
the well-worn grooves of habit. Every day Grant carefully
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3 3
dictated the log, confirmed the ship’s position, carried out
his routine maintenance duties. McNeil was also behaving
normally, as far as Grant could tell, although he suspected
that some of the technical maintenance was being carried
out with a very light hand, and he’d had a few sharp words
with the engineer about the accumulation of dirty food
trays following McNeil’s turns in the galley.
It was now three days since the meteoroid had struck.
Grant kept getting ‘‘buck up’’ messages from traffic control
on Port Hesperus along the lines of ‘‘Sorry for the
delay, fellows, we’ll have something for you just as soon
as we can’’—and he waited for the results of the high-level
review panel convened by the Board of Space Control,
with its raft of specialists on two planets, which was running
simulations of wild schemes to rescue Star Queen. He
had waited impatiently at first, but his eagerness had
slowly ebbed. He doubted that the finest technical brains
in the solar system could save them now—though it was
hard to abandon hope when everything still seemed so
normal and the air was still clean and fresh.
On the fourth day Venus spoke. ‘‘Okay, fellows, here’s
what we’ve got for you. We’re going to take this one system
at a time, and some of this gets involved, so you be sure
and ask for clarification if you need it. Okay, first we’ll go
into the cabin atmosphere system file, locus two-three-nine
point four. Now I’ll just give you a moment to find that
locus. . . .’’
Shorn of jargon, the long message was a funeral oration;
the thrust of the instructions was to insure that Star
Queen could arrive at Port Hesperus under remote control
with its cargo intact, even if there were two dead bodies
in the command module. Grant and McNeil had been written
off.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3 4
One comfort: Grant already knew from his training in
high-altitude chambers that death from hypoxia, near the
end, anyway, would be a positively giddy affair.
McNeil vanished below soon after the message concluded,
without a word of comment. Grant did not see him
again for hours. He was frankly relieved, at first. He didn’t
feel like talking, either, and if McNeil wanted to look after
himself that was his affair. Besides, there were various letters
to write, loose ends to see to—though the last-willand-
testament business could come later. There were a
couple of weeks left.
At supper time Grant went down to the common area,
expecting to find McNeil at work at the galley. McNeil was
a good cook, within the limitations of spacecraft cuisine,
and he usually enjoyed his turn in the kitchen. He certainly
took good enough care of his own stomach.
But there was no one in the common area. The curtain
in front of McNeil’s cabin was pulled shut.
Grant yanked the curtain aside and found McNeil lying
in midair near his bunk, very much at peace with the universe.
Hanging there beside him was a large plastic crate
whose magnetic lock had somehow been jimmied. Grant
had no need to examine it to know its contents; a glance
at McNeil was enough.
‘‘Ay, and it’s a dirty shame,’’ said the engineer without
a trace of embarrassment, ‘‘to suck this stuff up through
a tube.’’ He cocked an eye at Grant. ‘‘Tell you what, cap’n—
whyn’t you put a little spin on the vessel so’s we can drink
’er properly?’’ Grant glared at him contemptuously, but
McNeil returned his gaze unabashed. ‘‘Oh, don’t be a sourpuss,
man—have some yourself! For what does it matter?’’
He batted a bottle at Grant, who fielded it deftly. It was
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1 3 5
a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Napa Valley of California—
fabulously valuable, Grant knew the consignment—and the
contents of that plastic case were worth thousands.
‘‘I don’t think there’s any need,’’ Grant said severely,
‘‘to behave like a pig—even under these circumstances.’’
McNeil wasn’t drunk yet. He had only reached the
brightly lit anteroom of intoxication and had not lost all
contact with the drab outer world. ‘‘I am prepared,’’ he
announced with great solemnity, ‘‘to listen to any good
argument against my present course of action. A course
which seems eminently sensible to me.’’ He blessed Grant
with a cherubic smile. ‘‘But you’d better convince me
quickly, while I’m still amenable to reason.’’
With that he squeezed the plastic bulb into which he’d
off-loaded a third of the bottle’s contents, and shot a
ruddy purple jet into his open mouth.
‘‘You’re stealing company property—scheduled for salvage,’’
Grant announced, unaware of the absurdity but
conscious as he said it that his voice had taken on the
nasality, the constriction, of a young schoolmaster, ‘‘and
. . . and besides, you can hardly stay drunk for two weeks.’’
‘‘That,’’ said McNeil thoughtfully, ‘‘remains to be seen.’’
‘‘I don’t think so,’’ retorted Grant. With his right hand
he secured himself to the bulkhead, with his left he swiped
at the crate and gave it a vicious shove that sent it soaring
through the open curtain.
As he wheeled and dived after it he heard McNeil’s
pained yelp: ‘‘Why you constipated bastard! Of all the
dirty tricks!’’
It would take McNeil some time in his present condition
to organize a pursuit. Grant steered the crate down
to the hold airlock and into the pressurized, temperaturecontrolled
compartment it had come from. He sealed the
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1 3 6
case and replaced it on its rack, strapping it securely into
place. No point in trying to lock the case; McNeil had
made a mess of the lock.
But Grant could make sure McNeil wouldn’t get in here
again—he would reset the combination on the hold airlock
and keep the new combination to himself. As it happened,
he had plenty of time to do it. McNeil hadn’t bothered to
follow him.
As Grant swam back toward the flight deck he passed
the open curtain to McNeil’s cabin. McNeil was still in
there, singing.
‘‘We don’t care where the oxygen goes
If it doesn’t get into the wine. . . .’’
Evidently he’d already removed a couple of bottles before
Grant had arrived to grab the case. Let them last him
two weeks then, Grant thought, if they last the night.
‘‘We don’t care where the oxygen goes
If it doesn’t get into the wine. . . .’’
Where the hell had he heard that refrain? Grant, whose
education was severely technical, was sure McNeil was deliberately
misquoting some bawdy Elizabethan madrigal or
the like, just to taunt him. He was suddenly shaken by an
emotion which, to do him justice, he did not for a moment
recognize, and which passed as swiftly as it had come.
But when he reached the flight deck he was trembling,
and he felt a little sick. He realized that his dislike of
McNeil was slowly turning to hatred.
1 3 7
XI
Certainly Grant and McNeil got on well enough in ordinary
circumstances. It was nobody’s fault that circumstances
were now very far from ordinary.
Only because the two men had shown wonderfully
smooth personality curves on the standard psychological
tests; only because their flight records were virtually flawless;
only because thousands of millions of pounds and
dollars and yen and drachmas and dinars were involved
in the flight of Star Queen had the Board of Space Control
granted the ship a waiver of the crew-of-three rule.
The crew-of-three rule had evolved during a century
and a half of space flight and ostensibly provided for a
minimally sound social configuration during long periods
of isolation—a problem that had not been pressing in the
20th century, before occupied spacecraft had ventured farther
than the moon and the time delay for communication
with Earth was still measured in seconds. True, in any
group of three, two will eventually gang up on the third—
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1 3 8
as the ancient Romans learned after several hard political
lessons, in human affairs the least stable structure is the
tripod. Which is not necessarily bad. Certainly three is better
than two, and two is much better than one. And any
group larger than three will soon enough degenerate into
sub-groups of diads and triads.
A man or woman alone will almost certainly go mad
within a relatively short time. It may be a benign madness,
even an exemplary madness—taking the form of an obsessive
writing of romantic poetry, for example—but no
form of madness is encouraging to spacecraft insurors.
Experience shows that a crew of one man and one
woman will experience a crisis within days. Their relative
ages do not matter. If the text of their conversation is
power, the subtext will be sex. And vice versa.
On the other hand, two men alone together or two
women alone together, provided their sexual vectors are
not convergent, will dispense with the sexual subtext and
will get down to the nitty-gritty of power every time:
who’s in charge here? . . . Although in the case of two
women the resolution of that question is, for cultural reasons,
somewhat less likely to lead to fatal violence.
With three people of whatever sex, everybody will try
to get along for a while and eventually two will gang up
on the third. Thus the power question resolves itself, and
depending on the make-up of the crew, sex will take care
of itself also, i.e. two or more may be doing it together
and one or more will be doing it alone.
Two men, not close friends, both of them heterosexual
and of comparable age and status but fundamentally different
in temperament, are the worst possible combination.
* * *
V E N U S P R I M E
1 3 9
Three days without food, it has been said, is long
enough to remove the subtle differences between a socalled
civilized man and a so-called savage. Grant and
McNeil were in no physical discomfort, nor would they be
in extreme pain even at the end. But their imaginations
had been active; they had more in common with a couple
of hungry cannibals lost in a log canoe than they would
have cared to admit.
One aspect of their situation, the most important of all,
had never been mentioned; the computer’s analysis had
been checked and rechecked, but its bottom line was not
quite final, for the computer refrained from making suggestions
it had not been asked to make. The two men on
the crew could easily take that final step of calculation in
their heads—
—and each arrived at the same result. It was simple,
really, a macabre parody of those problems in first-grade
arithmetic which began, ‘‘If two men had six days to assemble
five helicopters, how long . . . ?
At the moment the meteoroid destroyed the stored liquid
oxygen, there were approximately forty-eight hundred
cubic feet of air inside the crew module and twelve hundred
cubic feet of air in the pressurized compartment of
Hold A. At one atmosphere a cubic foot of air weighs one
and two-tenths ounces, but less than a fourth of that is
oxygen. Adding in the space-suit and emergency supplies,
there were less than seventy pounds of oxygen in the ship.
A man consumes almost two pounds of oxygen a day.
Thirty-five man-days of oxygen . . .
The oxygen supply was enough for two men for two
and a half weeks. Venus was three weeks away. One did
not have to be a calculating prodigy to see that one man,
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1 4 0
one man only, might live to walk the curving garden paths
of Port Hesperus.
Four days had passed. The acknowledged deadline was
thirteen days away, but the unspoken deadline was ten.
For ten more days two men could breathe the air without
endangering the chances of the one who might survive
alone. Beyond ten days one man only would have any
hope of reaching Venus. To a sufficiently detached observer
the situation might have seemed highly engaging.
Grant and McNeil were not detached, however. It is not
easy at the best of times for two people to decide amicably
which of them shall commit suicide; it is even more dif-
ficult when they are not on speaking terms.
Grant wished to be perfectly fair. Therefore, as he conceived
matters, the only thing to do was to wait until
McNeil sobered up and emerged from his cabin; then
Grant would put it to him directly.
As these thoughts swirled over the surface of his mind
Peter Grant was staring through the windows of the flight
deck at the starry universe, seeing the thousands upon
thousands of individual stars and even the misty nebulas
as he had never seen them before. He was moved by a
certain conviction of transcendence—
—which mere speech would surely betray.
Well, he would write McNeil a letter. And best do it
now, while they were still on diplomatic terms. He clipped
a sheet of notepaper to his writing pad and began: ‘‘Dear
McNeil.’’ He paused, his ballpoint poised above the paper.
Then he tore that sheet out and began again: ‘‘McNeil.’’
It took him the best part of three hours to get down
what he wanted to say, and even then he wasn’t wholly
satisfied. Some things were damned difficult to put on paper.
At last he finished; he folded the letter and sealed it
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1 4 1
with a strip of tape. He left the flight deck, taking the letter
with him, and closed himself into his cabin. The business
of actually handing the letter to McNeil could wait a day
or two.
Few of the billions of videoplate addicts on Earth—or
the additional thousands on Port Hesperus and Mars and
in the Mainbelt and on the colonized moons—could have
had any true notion of what was going on within the
minds of the two men aboard Star Queen. The public media
was full of rescue schemes. All sorts of retired spaceship
pilots and writers of fantasy fiction had been dredged
up to give their opinons over the airwaves as to how Grant
and McNeil should comport themselves. The men who
were the cause of all this fuss wisely declined to listen to
any of it.
Traffic control on Port Hesperus was a bit more disreet.
One could not with any decency give words of advice or
encouragement to men on death row, even if there was
some uncertainty about the date of execution. Therefore
traffic control contented itself with few emotionally neutral
messages each day—relaying the newsheads about the
war in southern Asia, the growing sector dispute in the
Mainbelt, new mineral strikes on the surface of Venus,
the fuss over the censorship of ‘‘While Rome Burns,’’
which had just been banned in Moscow. . . .
Life on Star Queen continued much as before, not withstanding
the stiffness between the two men that had attended
McNeil’s emergence—classically hung-over—from
his cabin. Grant, for his part, spent much of his time on
the flight deck writing letters to his wife. Long letters. The
longer the better. . . . He could have spoken to her if he’d
wished, but the thought of all those news addicts listening
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1 4 2
in prevented him from doing so. Unhappily, there were no
truly private lines in space.
And that letter to McNeil. Why not deliver it, get it
over with? Well, he would do that, within a couple of days
. . . and then they would decide. Besides, such a delay
would give McNeil a chance to raise the subject himself.
That McNeil might have reasons for his hesitation other
than simple cowardice did not occur to Grant.
He wondered how McNeil was spending his time, now
that he’d run out of booze. The engineer had a large library
of books on videochip, for he read widely and his range
of interests was unusual. Grant had seen him delving into
Western philosophy and Eastern religion and fiction of all
kinds; McNeil had once mentioned that his favorite book
was the odd early-20th century novel Jurgen. Perhaps he
was trying to forget his doom by losing himself in its
strange magic. Others of McNeil’s books were less respectable,
and not a few were of the class curiously described
as ‘‘curious. . . .’’
But in fact McNeil, lying in his cabin or moving silently
through the ship, was a subtler and more complicated
personality than Grant knew, perhaps too
complicated for Grant to understand. Yes, McNeil was a
hedonist. He did what he could to make life comfortable
for himself aboard ship, and when planetside he indulged
himself fully in the pleasures of life, all the more for being
cut off from them for months at a time. But he was by no
means the moral weakling that the unimaginative, puritanical
Grant supposed him to be.
True, he had collapsed completely under the shock of
the meteoroid strike. When it happened he’d been passing
through the life support deck’s access corridor, on his way
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1 4 3
back from the hold, and he understood the seriousness of
the violent explosion instantly—it happened hardly a
meter away, on the other side of the steel wall—without
having to wait for confirmation. His reaction was exactly
like that of an airline passenger who sees a wing come off
at 30,000 feet: there are still ten or fifteen minutes left to
fall, but death is inevitable. So he’d panicked.
Like a willow in the wind, he’d bowed under the
strain—and then recovered. Grant was a harder man—an
oak—and a brittler one.
As for the business of the wine, McNeil’s behavior had
been reprehensible by Grant’s standards, but that was
Grant’s problem; besides, that episode too was behind
them. By tacit consent they’d gone back to their normal
routine, although it did nothing to reduce the sense of
strain. They avoided each other as much as possible except
when meal times brought them together. When they did
meet, they behaved with an exaggerated politeness, as if
each were striving to be perfectly normal—yet inexplicably
failing.
A day passed, and another. And a third.
Grant had hoped that McNeil would have broached the
subject of suicide by now, thus sparing him a very awkward
duty. When the engineer stubbornly refused to do
anything of the sort it added to Grant’s resentment and
contempt. To make matters worse he was now suffering
from nightmares and sleeping very badly.
The nightmare was always the same. When Peter Grant
was a child it had often happened that at bedtime he had
been reading a story far too exciting to be left until morning.
To avoid detection he had continued reading under
the bedclothes by flashlight, curled up in a snug white-
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4 4
walled cocoon. Every ten minutes or so the air had become
too stifling to breathe and his emergence into the delicious
cool air had been a major part of the fun. Now, thirty years
later, these innocent childhood hours returned to haunt
him. He was dreaming that he could not escape from the
suffocating sheets while the air was steadily and remorselessly
thickening around him.
He’d intended to give McNeil the letter after two days,
yet somehow he’d put it off again. This procrastination
was very unlike Grant, but he managed to persuade himself
that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. He was
giving McNeil a chance to redeem himself—
—to prove that he wasn’t a coward, by raising the issue
first. It never occurred to Grant that McNeil might be waiting
for him to do the same. . . .
The all-too-literal deadline was three days off when,
for the first time, Grant’s mind brushed lightly against the
thought of murder. He’d retired to the flight deck after the
‘‘evening’’ meal, trying to relax by gazing at the starry
night through the wide windows that surrounded the flight
deck, but McNeil was doing a very thorough and noisy
job of cleaning up the galley, clattering around with what
must surely be an unnecessary, even a deliberate, amount
of noise.
What use was McNeil to this world? He had no family,
no responsibilities. Who would be the worse for his death?
Grant, on the other hand, had a wife and three children,
of whom he was moderately fond, even if they were
no more than dutiful in their perfunctory displays of affection
for him. An impartial judge would have no diffi-
culty in deciding which of them should survive, and if
McNeil had had a spark of decency in him he would have
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4 5
come to the same conclusion already. Since he appeared
to have done nothing of the sort he had surely forfeited
all further claims to consideration. . . .
Such was the elemental logic of Grant’s subconscious
mind, which of course had arrived at this conclusion days
before but had only now succeeded in attracting the attention
for which it had been clamoring.
To Grant’s credit he at once rejected the thought. With
horror.
He was an upright and honorable person, with a very
strict code of behavior. Even the vagrant homicidal impulses
of what is misleadingly called a ‘‘normal’’ man had
seldom ruffled his mind. But in the days—the very few
days—left to him, they would come more and more often.
The air was noticeably fouler. Although air pressure
had been reduced to a minimum and there was no shortage
of the canisters that were used to scrub carbon dioxide
from the circulating atmosphere, it was impossible to prevent
a slow increase in the ratio of inert gases to the dwindling
oxygen reserves. There was still no real difficulty in
breathing, but the thick odor was a constant reminder of
what lay ahead.
Grant was in his cabin. It was ‘‘night,’’ but he could
not sleep—a relief in one way, for it broke the hold of his
nightmares. But he had not slept well the previous night
either, and he was becoming physically run down; his
nerve was rapidly deteriorating, a state of affairs accentuated
by the fact that McNeil had been behaving with a
calmness that was not only unexpected but quite annoying.
Grant realized that in his own emotional state it would
be dangerous to delay the showdown any longer. He freed
himself from his loose sleep restraint and opened his desk,
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1 4 6
reaching for the letter he had intended to give to McNeil
days ago. And then he smelled something—
A single neutron begins the chain reaction that in an
instant can destroy a million lives, the toil of generations.
Equally insignificant are the trigger-events that can alter
a person’s course of action and so alter the whole pattern
of the future. Nothing could have been more trivial than
what made Grant pause with the letter in his hand; under
ordinary circumstances he would not have noticed it at
all. It was the smell of smoke—tobacco smoke.
The revelation that McNeil, that sybaritic engineer, had
so little self-control that he was squandering the last precious
pounds of oxygen on cigarettes filled Grant with a
blinding fury. For a moment he went quite rigid with the
intensity of his emotion. Then, slowly, he crumpled the
letter in his hand. The thought that had first been an unwelcome
intruder, then a casual speculation, was now fi-
nally accepted. McNeil had had his chance and had
proved, by this unbelievable selfishness, unworthy of it.
Very well—he could die.
The speed with which Grant arrived at this selfjustifying
conclusion would have been obvious to the rankest
of amateur psychiatrists. He had needed to convince
himself that there was no point in doing the honorable
thing, suggesting some game of chance that would give
McNeil and him an equal chance at life. Here was the
excuse he needed, and he seized upon it. He might now
plan and carry out McNeil’s murder according to his own
particular moral code.
Relief as much as hatred drove Grant back to his
bunk, where every whiff of tobacco aroma salved his conscience.
* * *
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4 7
McNeil could have told Grant that once again he was
badly misjudging him. The engineer had been a heavy
smoker for years—against his better judgment, it’s true,
and quite conscious that he was unavoidably an annoyance
to the majority of folk who did not care to breathe
his exhaust. He’d tried to quit—it was easy, he sometimes
quipped, he’d done it often—but in moments of strain he
inevitably found himself reaching for those fragrant paper
cylinders. He envied Grant, the sort of man who could
smoke a cigarette when he wanted one but put them aside
without regret. He wondered why Grant smoked at all, if
he didn’t need to. Some sort of symbolic rebellion . . . ?
At any rate, McNeil had calculated that he could afford
two cigarettes a day without producing the least measurable
difference in the duration of a breathable atmosphere.
The luxury of those six or seven minutes, twice a day—
one late at night, one at mid-morning, hidden deep down
in the central corridor of the ship—was in all likelihood
beyond the capacity of Peter Grant to imagine, and it contributed
greatly to Angus McNeil’s mental well-being.
Though the two cigarettes made no difference to the oxygen
supply, they made all the difference in the world to
McNeil’s nerves, and thus contributed indirectly to Grant’s
peace of mind.
But no use trying to tell Grant that. So McNeil smoked
privately, exercising a self-control that was in itself surprisingly
agreeable, even voluptuous.
Had McNeil known of Grant’s insomnia, he would not
have risked even that late night cigarette in his unsealed
cabin. . . .
For a man who had only an hour ago talked himself
into murder, Grant’s actions were remarkably methodical.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4 8
Without hesitation—beyond that necessitated by caution—
Grant floated silently past his cabin partition and on
across the darkened common area to the wall-mounted
medicine chest near the galley. Only a ghostly blue safelight
illuminated the interior of the chest, in which tubes
and vials and instruments were snugly secured in their
padded nests by straps of Velcro. The ship’s outfitters had
provided tools and medicines for every emergency they
had ever heard of or could imagine.
Including this one. There behind its retaining strap was
the tiny bottle whose image had been lying far down in
the depths of Grant’s unconscious all these days. In the
blue light he could not read the fine print on the label—
all he could see was the skull and crossbones—but he knew
the words by heart: ‘‘Approximately one-half gram will
cause painless and almost instantaneous death.’’
Painless and instantaneous—good. Even better was a
fact that went unmentioned on the label. The stuff was
tasteless.
Most of another day went by.
The contrast between the meals prepared by Grant and
those organized with considerable skill and care by McNeil
was striking. Anyone who was fond of food and who spent
a good deal of his life in space usually learned the art of
cooking in self-defense, and McNeil had not only learned
it but had mastered it. He could coax a piquant sauce from
dried milk, the juices of rehydrated beefsteak, and his private
stash of herbs; he could coax flavor from the deep
freeze with his flasks of oils and vinegars.
To Grant, eating was one of those necessary but annoying
jobs that was to be got through as quickly as possible,
and his cooking mirrored this attitude. McNeil had
V E N U S P R I M E
1 4 9
long ago ceased to grumble about it; imagine his bemusement,
then, had he seen the trouble Grant was taking
over this particular dinner.
They met wordlessly, as usual—only the constraints of
habit and civility kept them from grabbing their trays and
retreating to their own lairs. Instead they hovered on opposite
sides of the little convenience table, each perched
in midair at a careful angle, not quite looking at or looking
away from the other. If McNeil noticed any increasing
nervousness on Grant’s part as the meal progressed, he
said nothing; indeed they ate in perfect silence, having
long since exhausted the possibilities of light conversation.
When the last course, succotash, had been served in
those bowls with the incurved rims, designed to restrain
their contents, Grant cleared the litter and went into the
adjacent galley unit to make coffee.
He took quite a long time, considering the coffee was,
as always, instant—for at the last moment something maddening
happened. He was on the point of squeezing boiling
water from one container into another, looking at the
two hot-liquid bulbs in front of him, when he remembered
an ancient silent film he’d seen on a chip somewhere, featuring
a clown who usually wore a bowler hat and a funny
mustache—Charlie somebody—who in this movie was trying
to poison an unwanted wife. Only he got the glasses
accidentally reversed.
No memory could have been more unwelcome. Grant
nearly lapsed into psychopathic giggles. Had the erudite
McNeil known what was going on in Grant’s mind (assuming
he could have retained his equanimity and humor),
he might have suggested that Grant had been
attacked by Poe’s ‘‘Imp of the Perverse,’’ that demon who
delights in defying the careful canons of self-preservation.
V E N U S P R I M E
1 5 0
A good minute passed before Grant, shivering, managed
to regain control. His nerves must be in even worse
condition than he had imagined.
But he was sure that outwardly at least he was quite
calm as he carried in the two plastic containers and their
drinking tubes. There was no danger of confusing them
now: the engineer’s had the letters M A C painted boldly
around it. He pushed that one toward McNeil and watched,
fascinated—trying hard to disguise his fascination—as
McNeil toyed with the bulb. He seemed in no great hurry;
he was staring moodily at nothing. Then, at last, he put
the drinking tube to his mouth and sipped—
—and spluttered, staring at the drinking bulb with
shock. An icy hand seized Peter Grant’s heart. McNeil
cleared his throat, then turned to him and said evenly—
‘‘Well na’, Grant, you’ve made it properly for once. And
very hot, too.’’
Slowly Grant’s heart resumed its interrupted work. He
did not trust himself to speak, but he did manage a noncommittal
nod.
McNeil parked the bulb carefully in midair, a few
inches from his face. His fleshy face settled into a ponderously
thoughtful expression, as if he were weighing his
words in preparation for some momentous pronouncement.
Grant cursed himself for making the coffee so hot. Just
the sort of detail that hanged murderers. And if McNeil
waited any longer to say whatever he was going to say,
Grant would probably betray himself through nervousness.
Not that it would do McNeil any good now.
At last McNeil spoke. ‘‘I suppose it’s occurred to you,’’
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1 5 1
he said in a quietly conversational way, ‘‘that there’s still
enough air to last one of us to Venus.’’
Grant forced his jangling nerves under control and tore
his eyes away from McNeil’s fatal bulb of coffee; his throat
seemed very dry as he answered. ‘‘It . . . it had crossed my
mind.’’
McNeil touched the floating bulb, found it still too hot,
and continued thoughtfully: ‘‘Then it would be more sensible
—wouldn’t it?—if one of us simply decided to walk
out the airlock, say—or take some of the poison in there.’’
He jerked his head toward the medicine chest, on the curve
of the wall not far from where they were floating.
Grant nodded. Oh yes, that would be quite sensible.
‘‘The only trouble, of course,’’ McNeil mused, ‘‘is deciding
which of us is to be the unlucky fella’. I suppose
we could draw a card . . . or something equally arbitrary.’’
Grant stared at McNeil with a fascination that almost
outweighed his mounting nervousness. He never would
have believed the engineer could discuss the subject so
calmly. Obviously McNeil’s thoughts had been running on
a line parallel with his own, and it was scarcely even a
coincidence that he had chosen this time, of all times, to
raise the question. From his talk it was certain that he
suspected nothing.
McNeil was watching Grant closely, as if judging his
reaction.
‘‘You’re right,’’ Grant heard himself say. ‘‘We must talk
it over. Soon.’’
‘‘Yes,’’ McNeil said impassively. ‘‘We must.’’ And then
he reached for the bulb of coffee and brought the drinking
tube to his lips. He sucked at it slowly, for a long time.
Grant could not wait for him to finish. Yet the relief
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1 5 2
he had hoped for did not come; indeed, he felt a stab of
regret. Regret, not quite remorse. It was a little late now
to think of how lonely he would be aboard Star Queen,
haunted by his thoughts, in the days to come.
He knew he did not wish to see McNeil die. Suddenly
he felt rather sick. Without another glance at his victim
he launched himself toward the flight deck.
1 5 3
XII
Immovably fixed, the fierce sun and the unwinking stars
looked down on Star Queen, which on the grand scale of
cosmic affairs was as motionless as they were.
There was no way for a naive observer to know that
the tiny model molecule of a spaceship had now reached
its maximum velocity with respect to Earth and was about
to unleash massive thrust to brake itself into a parking
orbit near Port Hesperus. Indeed, there was no reason for
an observer on the cosmic scale to suspect that Star Queen
had anything to do with intelligent purpose, or with life—
—until the main airlock atop the command module
opened and the lights of the interior glowed yellow in the
cold darkness. For a moment the round circle of light hung
oddly within the black shadow of the falling ship; then it
was abruptly eclipsed, as two human figures floated out
of the ship.
One of the two bulky figures was active, the other passive.
Something not easy to perceive happened in the
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1 5 4
shadows; then the passive figure began to move, slowly
at first but with rapidly mounting speed. It swept out of
the shadow of the ship into the full blast of the sun. And
now the cosmic observer, given a powerful telescope,
might have noted the nitrogen bottle strapped to its back,
the valve evidently left open—a crude but effective rocket.
Rolling slowly, the corpse—for such it was—dwindled
against the stars, to vanish utterly in less than a minute.
The other figure remained quite motionless in the open
airlock, watching it go. Then the outer hatch swung shut,
the circle of brilliance vanished, and only the reflected
sunlight of bright Venus still glinted on the shadowed wall
of the ship.
In the immediate vicinity of Star Queen, nothing of
consequence happened for the next seven days.
1 5 5
PART FOUR
A QUESTION OF HONOR
1 5 7
XIII
When she caught up with the uniformed man, he was
marching along the river walk in the Council of Worlds
grounds, heading away from the Earth Central offices of
the Board of Space Control. The formal gardens were green
with the tender new leaves of budding trees; another
spring had come to Manhattan . . .
‘‘Assistant Inspector Troy, Commander. They told me
to catch you before you left.’’
He kept walking. ‘‘I’m not going anywhere, Troy. Just
getting out of the office.’’ She fell into step beside him.
He was a gaunt man, of Slavic ancestry by the look of
him, with an iron-gray crewcut and a Canadian-accented
voice so hoarse it was hardly more than a whisper. His
blue uniform was pressed and spotless; the gold insignia
on his collar gleamed; his chest was pinned with only a
few ribbons, but they were the ones that count. Despite
the blue suit and the headquarters job, the commander’s
deeply creased face, burned almost black, betrayed his
V E N U S P R I M E
1 5 8
years in deep space. He opened a silver pill case and
popped a tiny purple sphere into his mouth—then seemed
to remember Sparta, marching beside him. He paused at
the steel railing and held out the open case. ‘‘Care for one?
Rademas.’’ When she hesitated he said, ‘‘Lots of us use
them, I’m sure you know that—mild boost, wash out of
your system in twenty minutes.’’
‘‘No thank you, sir,’’ she said firmly.
‘‘I was kidding,’’ he rasped. ‘‘Actually they’re breath
mints. Violet flavor. Strongest thing in ’em is sugar.’’ He
stretched his face into a shape that was not much like a
grin. He still held out the open case. Sparta shook her head
again and he flipped it closed. ‘‘As you wish.’’ Grimacing
in distaste, he spit the mint he’d been holding under his
tongue over the rail, into the gelid East River. ‘‘Guess I’ve
pulled that dumb stunt too often; you rookies are wise.’’
He gazed out across the water, its thick green surface
crowded with long-legged algae harvesters like water
skates on a pond, their stainless steel manifolds reflecting
the golden sunlight of early morning. The commander was
staring past them, straight at the sun—probably wishing
he had a different view of it, one without a lot of muggy
atmosphere in the way. After a few moments he turned to
Sparta, clearing his throat roughly. ‘‘Okay. Seems Inspector
Bernstein thinks highly of you. She wrote you a good
ER. We’re giving you a solo.’’
Sparta’s pulse raced; after two years, the prospect of a
mission of her own! ‘‘I’mgrateful for her recommendation.’’
‘‘I’ll bet you are. Especially since you never thought
she’d let you out of her grasp.’’
Sparta allowed herself to smile. ‘‘Well sir, I admit I was
getting to know Newark better than I ever wanted to.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
1 5 9
‘‘No guarantee you won’t go back there when this is
over, Troy. Depends.’’
‘‘What’s the assignment, Commander?’’
‘‘TDY to Port Hesperus. The Star Queen thing.
Shouldn’t be too hairy. Either the ship was holed by a
meteoroid or it wasn’t, in which case it broke or somebody
broke it. The owner and most of the people concerned are
already on their way to Port Hesperus in Helios, but we’ll
get you there first. You’ll be working with a guy named
Proboda from the local. He’s got seniority, but you’re in
charge. Which reminds me . . .’’ He reached into the inside
pocket of his jacket and took out a leather folder. ‘‘Since
we don’t want the locals to push you around’’—he flipped
open the folder to reveal a gold shield—‘‘you’re promoted.’’
He handed it to her. ‘‘Here’s the visual aid. Sliver in the
case. The electronics are already in the system.’’
Sparta took the badge case in both hands and studied
the intricate shield. A delicate flush bloomed on her cheekbones.
The commander watched her a moment, then said
abruptly, ‘‘Sorry there’s no time for ceremony, Inspector.
Congratulations anyway.’’
‘‘Thank you, sir.’’
‘‘Here’s your ride now.’’ She turned with him as a lowslung
white helicopter dropped shrieking toward the helipad
in front of the Council of Worlds tower. It touched
down gently, its turbines spinning down to idle, its rotors
whistling in lazy circles. ‘‘Forget your personal gear, you
can req what you need,’’ said the commander. ‘‘Within
reason, of course. You’ve got a shuttle to catch at Newark
and a torch waiting in orbit. Everything you need to know
is in the system. We’ll update you if we have to.’’
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She was startled at her sudden impending departure,
but she tried not to show it. ‘‘One question, sir.’’
‘‘Go ahead.’’
‘‘Why anyone from Earth Central, sir? Why not leave
the investigation to Port Hesperus?’’
‘‘Port Hesperus is short a body. Captain Antreen is in
charge there; she looked at what we had available and
asked for you by name.’’ The commander grinned again.
‘‘Be grateful to her. Bernstein never would have let you
out of Customs.’’
Sparta saluted and walked briskly toward the waiting
helicopter. The commander watched her go on with undisguised
envy.
Beside its three-person crew the torch-powered cutter
carried Sparta and no one else. The slender white ship,
bearing the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space
Control, streaked sunward on a hyperbolic orbit and closed
on Port Hesperus a week after Sparta’s hasty Earthside
promotion. Two days out, less than a week from rendezvous
with Port Hesperus, a radio message came through.
‘‘This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking. Engineering
Officer McNeil and I have jointly concluded that
there is sufficient oxygen remaining for one man . . .’’
Earth Central was on the horn to Sparta in less than
an hour; the commander’s lined and blackened face appeared
on the videoplate in the cutter’s comm shack. ‘‘All
right, Troy, this adds a wrinkle. We need to know whether
this crewman went out the airlock this morning on his
own, or did he get pushed?’’
‘‘Yes, sir. Are the dossiers I requested on the Helios
passengers available?’’
There was a minute’s delay while her words made the
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trip to Earth and his made their way back. ‘‘We’re squirting
you with what we have on the blackchannels,’’ he said. ‘‘I
can tell you that you’re dealing with an odd bunch there.
A guy working for the insurance people who’s a known
con—they know it too, so apparently it’s all right with
them. A woman into heavy machinery and old books. Her
temperamental girlfriend. A guy who owns a spaceship
with a history so odd it had to have its name changed.
Another guy with practically no history at all.’’
‘‘Thanks, Commander.’’
A minute later he said, ‘‘Watch yourself, Inspector.’’ He
signed off.
Three days before arriving at Port Hesperus, the cutter
crossed Helios’s path and a day after that, Star Queen’s. If
Sparta had had a telescope, she could have looked at the
fast ships with the perspective of a cosmic observer. But
it was the people aboard them that interested her.
With its mighty torch blazing, the cutter decelerated
toward the great rings and spokes and cylinders of Port
Hesperus, that whole spinning conglomerate of a space
station hanging in high orbit over the dazzling clouds of
Venus, with its axis pointing straight at the center of the
planet.
At the radiation perimeter the cutter’s torch flamed out.
It approached under chemical power, gingerly.
Port Hesperus was one of the triumphs of 21st-century
engineering, built almost entirely from the raw materials
of captured asteroids. Exploiting the resources of the
planet’s surface, it had paid back its cost within two decades;
it currently housed a hundred thousand people in
conditions that ninetenths of Earth’s population would
have considered luxurious. Parks, for example, and green
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things . . . The great glass central sphere of the station was
filled with lush gardens, some of them in tribute to the old
dreams of Venus as a world of swamps and jungles. Come
to Venus and you could see jungles, all right, as long as
you stuck to the paths of Port Hesperus’s brilliantly lit
central sphere. Don’t try to visit the surface of the planet,
don’t even ask. Of the five human beings who had made
the attempt in armored and heat-shielded landers, only
two had returned to tell the tale.
Sparta’s cutter matched spin with the star-side docking
bay under chemical power; in fifteen minutes, under automated
landing controls, it had made it into the huge
axial bay, crowded with local traffic.
The high-security side of the docking bay was all business,
no nonsense, without amenities—all white steel and
black glass, pipes and hoses and blinking lights. A tube
like a giant leech closed over the cutter’s lock, the air
slammed into it under high pressure, and the cutter’s hatch
popped.
Sparta clapped her hands over her painful ears. Floating
in the airlock, she found herself suddenly face-to-face
with a delegation from the local Board of Space Control
headquarters, advancing toward her in the docking tube.
They didn’t look all that friendly.
The tallest of the locals facing her was the Port Hesperus
unit captain, Kara Antreen. She was dressed in a
gray wool suit worth a month of her respectable salary;
her gray hair was cut in a severe pageboy, and her pale
gray eyes fixed on Sparta from beneath thick black brows.
Even without her hands over her ears, Sparta was at a
social disadvantage. It was this matter of her clothes. She
had found little to requisition from ship’s stores, despite
the commander’s invitation—the quartermaster’s imagi-
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nation seemed limited to gym shorts, personal care products,
near-beer, and ‘‘entertainment’’ items emphasizing
soft-porn videochips—so besides picking up a few changes
of socks and underwear and acquiring a comb and a
toothbrush, she’d arrived at Port Hesperus still wearing the
mufti of an assistant inspector assigned to shuttleport customs
and entry—that is, the plainclothes disguise of a bribable
dock rat: plastic patch-pocket cargo pants, olive drab
tank top, polymer canvas windbreaker. The outfit was distinctly
on the casual side, but at least it was neat and
clean.
‘‘Ellen Troy, Captain,’’ Sparta said. ‘‘I look forward to
working with you and your people.’’
‘‘Troy.’’ Antreen smiled then, lessening the tension.
‘‘And we look forward to working with you. Any cooperation
we can give you—anything at all—we want to be
there helping out.’’
‘‘That’s very . . .’’
‘‘Understood?’’
‘‘Certainly, Captain. Thanks.’’
Antreen extended her hand; they shook vigorously.
‘‘Inspector Troy, this is my aide Lieutenant Kitamuki. And
this is Inspector Proboda.’’
Sparta shook hands with the others—Kitamuki, a slender
woman with long black hair knotted back and floating
over one shoulder in a sinuous ponytail, Proboda, a roughhewn
blond male giant, Polish or maybe Ukrainian, with
a touch of the old hell-for-leather cossacks about his
slanted eyes. Antreen was all smiles, but her two sidekicks
studied Sparta as if considering arresting her on the spot.
‘‘Let’s get into some gravity,’’ Antreen said. ‘‘We’ll
show you to your quarters, Troy. And when you’re settled
we’ll see if we can clear off a desk for you at unit HQ.’’
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She moved off quickly; Kitamuki and Proboda parted to
let Sparta through, then closed in tight formation behind
her.
Sparta followed Antreen easily enough through the
weightless passage—she’d had three days without acceleration
in the middle of her trip and she hadn’t lost the
body-memory of what it was like to have space legs—
passing from the station’s motionless hub through the
gray metal bulkheads of the security sector. They passed
the station’s huge sliding collar, and Sparta paused a moment
to adjust to the spin. They moved on, through blackand
yellow-striped emergency hatches into wider
corridors, until they reached one of the main halls in the
turning section of the station, far enough outside the hub
to create fractional gees which established a ‘‘floor,’’ that
being the inner cylindrical surface of the hall itself. Once
in the hall, Antreen turned planetward, toward the Space
Board headquarters in the station’s central sphere.
Sparta paused. Kitamuki and Proboda almost tumbled
into her. ‘‘Something wrong, Inspector?’’ Antreen asked.
‘‘It’s very good of you,’’ Sparta said, smiling. ‘‘But time
is too short, I’ll have to check out my quarters later.’’
‘‘If you say so. I’m sure we can get you settled at HQ,
anyway.’’
‘‘I’ll be going to traffic control first. Star Queen is due
within the hour.’’
‘‘We haven’t arranged authorization,’’ Antreen said.
‘‘No problem,’’ Sparta replied.
Antreen nodded. ‘‘You’re right, of course. Your badge
is enough. Do you know the way?’’
‘‘If any of you want to come with me . . .’’ Sparta said.
‘‘Inspector Proboda will accompany you. He’ll take care
of anything you need,’’ Antreen said.
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‘‘Okay, thanks. Let’s go.’’ Sparta was already moving
starward, heading for the transparent traffic control dome
that capped the huge space station. Although she had
never been beyond Earth’s moon, she knew the layout of
Port Hesperus in such detail she would have astonished its
oldest residents, even its designers and builders.
It took her only moments to thread through the passages
and corridors, past busy workers and clerks. By the
time she arrived at the center’s double glass doors, Proboda
had closed in behind her. He was her equal in rank,
but older; handling that was going to be the first challenge
of her assignment.
The local station patroller glanced at Sparta’s badge
and then at the hard-breathing Proboda, whom he recognized.
The guard waved them both through the glass
lock, into the glittering darkness of Hesperus Traffic Control.
Through the arching glass dome Sparta could see the
hard points of thousands of fixed stars. Below the dome,
row upon circular row of softly glowing terminals were
arranged like benches in a Roman amphitheater. In front
of each console floated a weightless controller in loose
harness. The doors through which Sparta and Proboda had
entered were in the center of the ring, and they came in
like a pair of gladiators onto the sand, although no one
noticed their arrival. High above their heads, higher than
the highest row of consoles, the chief controller’s platform
was suspended on three fine struts at the dishshaped
room’s parabolic focus.
Sparta launched herself upward.
She turned as she touched down lightly on the platform
edge. The chief controller and his deputy seemed only
mildly interested in her arrival.
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‘‘I’m Inspector Ellen Troy of Central Investigative Services,
Mr. Tanaka. . . .’’—she’d stored the names of all the
key personnel in the station—‘‘And this is Inspector Proboda,’’
she added as the blond hulk arrived behind her,
scowling. ‘‘I’m instructed to direct the investigation of Star
Queen.’’
‘‘Hi, Vik,’’ the controller said cheerily, grinning at the
flustered cop. He nodded to Sparta. ‘‘Okay, Inspector.
We’ve had Star Queen on auto for the past thirty-six
hours. We should have her onboard in about seventy-two
minutes.’’
‘‘Where are you parking the ship, sir?’’
‘‘We’re not. You’re right, normally we wouldn’t dock a
ship of this mass, we’d stand her in the roads. But Captain
Antreen of your office here suggested we bring Star Queen
on into the security sector to facilitate the removal of the
. . . survivor. That will be dock Q3, Inspector.’’
Sparta was mildly surprised at Antreen’s order—the
crewman on Star Queen had survived a week on his own,
and the extra half hour it would take to bring him in from
a parking orbit on a utility shuttle would hardly make a
difference.
‘‘I’d like to stay to observe the docking procedure, if
you don’t mind,’’ she said. ‘‘And I’ll want to be first in
line when the lock is opened, if you’d be good enough to
inform your personnel of that.’’ She turned her head, sensing
that Proboda was about to object. ‘‘Of course you’ll be
with me at the airlock, Inspector,’’ she said.
‘‘That’s fine with us,’’ Tanaka said. He could care less.
‘‘Our job’s over when the ship’s in and secured. Now if
you’ll excuse me. . . .’’ The muscular little man ran a thick
hand lightly over his black crewcut. Not until he moved
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forward out of the harness in which he’d been floating did
Sparta notice he had no legs.
An hour passed in Traffic Control; the hot sun rose
somewhere below. From her perch on the chief controller’s
platform Sparta could see up to the stars and across to the
intense ascending sun; she could see down to the first ring
of multi-ringed Port Hesperus, which turned ceaselessly
about its stationary hub like a heavenly carousel. She
could not see the disk of Venus, which was immediately
under the station, but the glare of the planet’s sulfuricacid
clouds reflected onto the station’s painted metalwork
was almost as bright from below as the direct rays of the
sun were from above.
Sparta’s attention was not on the station but on the
hundred-meter white ship, standing straight up against the
stars, which lowered itself by inches with spurts of its maneuvering
thrusters, toward the gaping bay in the hub below
the traffic control dome.
The sight triggered an odd memory, of a backyard barbecue
in Maryland—who had been there? Her father? Her
mother? No. A man, a woman with gray hair, other older
couples whom she could not now quite picture or place—
but that was not the memory, the memory was of a bird
feeder suspended from the branch of an elm in the backyard
by a long, thin wire, the sort of wire used as baling
wire, and at the end of this wire was the bird feeder full
of seeds, hanging from the wire a good two meters below
the branch and a meter above the ground, to protect the
seeds from squirrels. But one squirrel was not to be
thwarted; this squirrel had learned to grip the wire with
all four paws and slide—slowly, and with obvious trepi-
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dation—headfirst down the wire, from the branch above
to the feeder below. The people who were giving the barbecue
were so impressed by the squirrel’s daring they had
not even bothered yet with any new scheme to frustrate
it. They were so proud they wanted Sparta to see the animal
perform its trick.
And here was a huge white space freighter, sliding
headfirst down an invisible wire, into the maw of the
docking bay. . . .
Something else that memory was trying to tell her . . .
but she couldn’t dredge it up. She forced her attention
back to the moment. Star Queen was almost docked.
Outside the security sector the passage to the lock was
jammed with media people. Sparta, with Proboda dogging
her, arrived at the back of the crowd.
‘‘I wonder what he’s feeling like now?’’ a cameraman
was saying, fussing with his videochip photogram.
‘‘I can tell you,’’ replied a sleek brushcut type, a standup
reporter. ‘‘He’s so pleased to be alive . . .’’
Sparta sensed that Proboda, beside her, was about to
pull his rank and clear the mediahounds out of the passage.
She gently preempted him. ‘‘I want to hear this,’’ she
murmured, touching his arm.
‘‘. . . that he doesn’t give a damn about anything else,’’
the reporter concluded.
‘‘I’m not so sure I’d want to leave a mate in space so I
could get home.’’
‘‘Who would? But you heard the transmission—they
talked it over and the loser went out the lock. It was the
only sensible way.’’
‘‘Sensible? If you say so—but it’s pretty horrible to let
somebody sacrifice himself so you can live . . .’’
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‘‘Don’t act the bloody sentimentalist. If that happened
to us you’d shove me out before I’d had a chance to say
my prayers.’’
‘‘Unless you did it to me first . . .’’
Sparta had heard enough. She pushed close to the reporter
and said quietly, ‘‘Space Control. Move aside,
please,’’ and kept repeating it, ‘‘Space Control, move aside
please . . .’’—effortlessly opening a path before her. Proboda
followed.
They left the pack behind at the security sector lock.
Beyond the sealed collar of the core they reached the Q3
lock, which was almost as crowded with technicians and
medical personnel. Through the big plate glass port the
bulbous head of Star Queen was nosing into place a few
meters away, patiently tugged and shoved by mechanical
tractors. Sparta had a few words with the medics and the
others as the tube fastened itself over the ship’s main airlock.
When the pressure popped and Star Queen’s hatch
opened, Sparta was standing in front of it, alone.
The smell from inside the ship was an assault. Nevertheless
she inhaled deeply, tasted the air with her tongue.
She learned things from the flavor of the air that no subsequent
tests could have told her.
Almost a minute passed before, rising from the depths
of the ship, a haggard man drifted into the circle of light.
He paused while still inside Star Queen, just shy of the
docking tube. He took a deep, shuddering breath—and another
—and then he let his watery eyes focus on Sparta.
‘‘We’re happy to have you safe with us, Mr. McNeil,’’
she said.
He watched her for a moment, then nodded.
‘‘My name’s Ellen Troy. I’m from the Board of Space
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Control. I’ll be going with you while the medics assist you.
I must ask you not to speak to anyone but me, until I give
you permission—no matter who asks, or what they ask. Is
that acceptable to you, sir?’’
Wearily, McNeil nodded again.
‘‘If you will move toward me, sir . . .’’
McNeil did as he was told. When he was clear of the
hatch Sparta darted past him and twisted the handle of
the exterior lock. The massive outer door slid closed, seating
itself with a palpable thud. Sparta pushed her hand
into the right thigh pocket of her cargo pants and pulled
out a bright red flexible plastic disk, which she slapped
over the rim of the hatch—sealing it like a lump of wax
over the flap of an envelope. She turned and took McNeil
by the arm. ‘‘Come with me, please.’’
Viktor Proboda was blocking the tube exit. ‘‘Inspector
Troy, it is my understanding that this man is to be placed
under arrest, and that the ship is to be inspected without
delay.’’
‘‘You are mistaken, Inspector Proboda.’’ Good, she was
thinking, he didn’t use the word ‘‘orders,’’ as in ‘‘my orders
are . . .’’—which meant that she could put off the inevitable
confrontation a little longer. ‘‘Mr. McNeil is to be extended
every courtesy. I’m taking him to the clinic now. When he
feels up to it, he and I will talk. Until then, no one—not
anyone—is to enter Star Queen.’’ Her gaze had not left
Proboda’s pale blue eyes. ‘‘I’m confident you’ll be diligent
in carrying out Central’s orders, Viktor.’’
It was an old trick, but he was surprised when she used
his first name, as she’d intended. This slender girl was
perhaps twenty-five, he was well into his thirties, and he’d
struggled a decade to achieve his rank—but her easy as-
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sumption of authority was genuine, and Proboda, a good
soldier, recognized it. ‘‘As you say,’’ he gruffly conceded.
Sparta guided engineer McNeil, who seemed on the
point of nodding off, to the waiting medics. One of them
clamped an oxygen mask over McNeil’s face: McNeil’s expression
was that of a man taking a drink of cold water
after a week in the tropical sun. Sparta repeated her injunction
to the medics about talking to the media; they
would disobey her, of course, but not until she had left
McNeil’s side.
The little group emerged from the security lock.
McNeil, with an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth,
guided by medics, with Sparta and Proboda bringing up
the rear, ran the gauntlet of frantic questions. . . .
But, after another week of waiting, the media had only
the arrival of Star Queen and the confirmation of McNeil’s
survival to add to the electrifying radio message that had
initiated their death watch. The broadcast had been as succinct
as it was chilling:
‘‘This is Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking.
Engineering officer Angus McNeil and I have jointly concluded
that there is sufficient oxygen now remaining for
one man and one man only to live until our ship docks at
Port Hesperus. Therefore one of us must die if either of us
is to live. We have mutually agreed to decide the matter
with a single draw of playing cards. Whoever draws the
low card will take his own life.’’
A second voice had spoken: ‘‘McNeil here, confirmin’
that I’m in agreement with everything the commander
says.’’
The radiolink had been silent then, for several seconds,
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except for the shuffle and snap of playing cards. Then
Grant came back on the air. ‘‘This is Grant. I’ve drawn the
low card. I want to make it clear that what I’m about to
do is the result of my personal decision, freely undertaken.
To my wife and children, I should like to affirm my love
for them; I’ve left letters for them in my cabin. A final
request: I wish to be buried in space. I’m going to put my
suit on now, before I do anything else. I’m asking Officer
McNeil to put me out the lock when it’s all over and send
me away from the ship. Please don’t search for my body.’’
Aside from routine automated telemetry, that was the
last anyone had heard from Star Queen until today.
The Port Hesperus clinic was in the station’s halfgee
torus. An hour after his arrival McNeil lay propped up
between clean sheets. His color was rosy, although the
dark circles under his eyes remained and the once full
flesh of his cheeks hung in folds. He was a much thinner
man than he had been when he left Earth. There had been
more than enough food on Star Queen, but for the last
few days under deceleration he’d had hardly enough energy
to drag himself to the galley.
He’d just begun to remedy that lack with a dinner of
medium-rare Chateaubriand, accompanied by puff potatoes
and garden vegetables, and preceded by a crisp green
salad with a light herb vinaigrette and accompanied by a
half-bottle of velvety California Zinfandel—all of which
had been laid on by the Board of Space Control according
to Sparta’s instructions.
She knocked lightly on the door, and when he said
‘‘Come in’’ she entered the room, followed by the brooding
Proboda.
‘‘I hope everything was all right?’’ she asked. The salad
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was gone but the Chateaubriand was only half eaten and
many of the vegetables were untouched. Not so the wine;
bottle and glass were empty. McNeil was wreathed in tobacco
smoke, halfway through a pungent unfiltered cigarette.
‘‘It was delicious, Inspector, simply delicious, and I’m
sorry to let the rest go. But I’m afraid my stomach’s
shrunk—that bit just filled me up.’’
‘‘That’s certainly understandable, sir. Well, if you feel
rested . . .’’
McNeil smiled patiently. ‘‘Aye, there’ll be lots of questions
now, won’t there be?’’
‘‘If you’d rather we came back later . . .’’
‘‘No point in putting off the inevitable.’’
‘‘We sincerely appreciate your cooperation. Inspector
Proboda will record our conversation.’’
When everyone was settled McNeil launched into his
tale. He spoke quite calmly and impersonally, as if he were
relating some adventure that had happened to another
person, or indeed had never happened at all—which,
Sparta suspected, was to some extent the case, although
it would be unfair to suggest that McNeil was lying. He
wasn’t making anything up. She would instantly have detected
that from the rhythm of his speech, but he was
leaving a good deal out of his well-rehearsed narrative.
When, after several minutes, he’d finished speaking,
Sparta sat thoughtfully in silence. Then she said, ‘‘That
seems to wrap it up, then.’’ She turned to Proboda. ‘‘Are
there any points you’d like to explore further, Inspector?’’
Again Proboda was caught by surprise—any points
he’d like to explore? He’d already resigned himself to a
passive role in the investigation. ‘‘One or two,’’ he said,
clearing his throat, ‘‘as a matter of fact.’’
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McNeil drew on his cigarette. ‘‘Have at me,’’ he said
with a cynical grin.
‘‘Now, you say you lost your grip—I believe those were
your words—when the meteoroid or whatever it was struck
the ship? What exactly did you do?’’
McNeil’s pale features darkened. ‘‘I blubbered—if you
want to know the details. Curled up in my cabin like a
little boy with a skinned knee and let the tears come. Grant
was a better man than I, calm as could be throughout it
all. But I hadn’t been a meter away from the oxygen tanks
when they exploded, you see—just the other side of the
wall in fact—loudest damn noise I’ve heard in my life.’’
‘‘How did you happen to be at just that place at just
that moment?’’ Proboda asked.
‘‘Well, I’d been down doing the periodic check on the
temperature and humidity in Hold A. The top compartment
of that hold’s pressurized and temperature-controlled because
we’re carrying things like specialty foods, cigars and
so forth, organics—whereas in the vacuum holds we’ve got
inert stuff, machinery mostly. I’d just come up through the
hold airlock and I was in that part of the central corridor
that passes through the life support deck, on my way up
to the flight deck, when—blam.’’
‘‘The life support deck was also pressurized?’’
‘‘We normally keep it that way so we can get into it
from inside the crew module. It’s really a very small space,
crammed with tanks and pipes, but you can reach in there
if you have to. When it was hit the inside hatches seized
up automatically.’’
‘‘Now, this business about the wine crate . . .’’
McNeil grinned sheepishly. ‘‘Yes, I did behave rather
badly. I suppose I’m going to have to pay someone a pretty
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penny for the bottles I managed to down before Grant
caught me.’’
‘‘That wine was the personal property of the director
of the Hesperian Museum, Mr. Darlington,’’ Proboda
grunted. ‘‘I imagine he’ll have something to say about it.
. . . But you say Grant put the partial crate back where you
got it?’’
‘‘Yes, and then he changed the combination on the airlock
so I couldn’t get back in.’’
A feral gleam appeared in Proboda’s pale eye. ‘‘You
claim the airlock of that hold hasn’t been opened since the
day after the accident?’’
‘‘That’s right, sir.’’
‘‘But the top compartment of that hold is pressurized.
It’s a vessel almost half the volume of the command module.
And it was full of fresh air!’’
‘‘Aye, it was, and if we’d had another like it, Peter
Grant would be alive today,’’ McNeil said quietly. ‘‘Originally
we were to carry some seedlings. They wouldn’t have
saved us, but the extra air that came with ’em might
have.’’ He seemed to notice Proboda’s confusion for the
first time. ‘‘Oh, I see your problem, sir. And you’re right,
about the old ships . . . but Star Queen and most of the
newer freighters are piped to allow any combination of
gas exchange through all the airtight compartments, without
having to open the airlocks. That allows us to carry
cargo that the shipper wouldn’t want us to know about or
get into, you see. If they’re willin’ to pay freight on the
entire hold. Which is the usual procedure on military contracts.’’
‘‘So you had access to the air in that compartment even
though you couldn’t get inside?’’
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‘‘Right. If we’d wanted, we could have pumped the air
out of that hold and jettisoned the whole thing, got rid of
the mass. In fact Grant ran some calculations, but we
wouldn’t have saved enough time.’’
Proboda was disappointed, but still he persisted. ‘‘But
after Grant had, uh, left the ship . . . you could have found
his new combination for the airlock, couldn’t you?’’
‘‘Could be, but I doubt it, even if I’d been interested.
I’m no computer whiz, and a man’s private files aren’t easy
to crack into. But why would I have wanted to?’’
Proboda glanced significantly at the empty bottle and
glass beside McNeil’s half full plate. ‘‘Because there were
still three and a half crates of wine in there, for one thing.
And no one to stop you from drinking it.’’
McNeil studied the blond inspector with an expression
that struck Sparta as calculating. ‘‘I like a glass as well as
the next person, Inspector. Maybe better. Maybe a little
too much better. I’ve been called a hedonist and maybe I
am that, but I’m not a complete fool.’’ McNeil ground out
the remains of his cigarette.
‘‘What did you have to fear,’’ Proboda insisted, ‘‘beyond
the commission of a felony, of course, if that really
did concern you?’’
‘‘Just this,’’ McNeil said quietly, and the steel edge of
his affable personality finally slid out from under the
smile, glittering. ‘‘Alcohol interferes with the functioning
of your lungs and constricts your blood vessels. If you’re
going to die anyway, you might not mind that. But if you
intend to survive in an oxygen-poor environment, you
won’t be taking a drink.’’
‘‘And cigarettes? Do they interfere with the functioning
of the lungs?’’
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‘‘After two packs a day for twenty years, Inspector, two
cigarettes a day are but a crutch for the nerves.’’
Proboda was about to plunge on when Sparta interrupted.
‘‘I think we ought to leave Mr. McNeil in peace for
now, Viktor. We can continue at a later time.’’ She had
watched the exchange with interest. As a cop, Proboda had
his strong points—she liked his bulldog persistence even
when he knew he looked foolish—but his shortcomings
were numerous. He was easily sidetracked, having here
fixated on the trivial issue of destruction of property—
Sparta suspected that was due to an excessive concern for
powerful interests in the Port Hesperus community—and
he hadn’t done his homework, or he would have known
about the hold airlocks.
But his most serious error was that he had already
passed moral judgment on McNeil. McNeil was not to be
judged so easily. Everything he had said about himself was
true. He was not a fool. And he intended to survive.
Sparta rose and said, ‘‘You are free to go wherever you
like on the station when the medics release you, Mr.
McNeil, although if you prefer to avoid the media this is
probably the best place to do it. Star Queen is off limits,
of course. I’m sure you understand.’’
‘‘Perfectly, Inspector. Thanks again for arrangin’ this
lovely dinner.’’ He gave her a jaunty salute from the comfort
of his bed.
Before they reached the corridor, Sparta turned to Proboda
and smiled. ‘‘You and I make a good team, Viktor.
Good guy, bad guy, you know. We’re naturals.’’
‘‘Who’s the good guy?’’ he asked.
She laughed. ‘‘Right. You were hard on McNeil, but I
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read you as the good guy when it comes to your neighbors.
Whereas I intend to show them no mercy.’’
‘‘I don’t follow. How could anybody on Port Hesperus
be involved in this?’’
‘‘Viktor, let’s go climb into spacesuits and take a look
at that hole in the hull, shall we?’’
‘‘All right.’’
‘‘But first we’ve got to get through the mob.’’
They stepped lightly through the clinic doors, into a
crowd of waiting mediahounds. ‘‘Inspector Troy!’’ ‘‘Hey,
Vik, old buddy . . .’’ ‘‘Please, Inspector, what have you got
for us? You’ve got something for us, right . . . ?’’
1 7 9
XIV
They left the howling newspack outside the security sector.
‘‘I’ve never seen them like this,’’ Proboda muttered. ‘‘You’d
think they’d never had a chance to report a real story
before.’’
Sparta had no experience with the media. She’d
thought she could use the standard techniques of command
and control, the voice and personality tricks, and
they did work up to a point, but she had underestimated
the mob’s ability to tear at her concentration, to sour her
internal functions. ‘‘Viktor, excuse me—I’ve got to have a
moment.’’ She paused in a corner of the empty passage,
closing her eyes, floating in midair, willing the tension in
her neck and shoulders to dissolve. Her mind emptied itself
of conscious thought.
Proboda eyed her curiously, hoping no one would
come along and he would have to explain. The formidable
young Inspector Troy was suddenly vulnerable, her eyes
closed and her head pitched forward, floating with her
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hands up like a small animal’s paws; he could see the
down on the back of her slender white neck, bared where
her straight blond hair had fallen clear.
Seconds later, Sparta allowed her eyes to open fully.
‘‘Viktor, I need a spacesuit. I’m a size five and a half,’’ she
said, and just like that her expression was firm again.
‘‘I’ll see what I can find in the lockers.’’
‘‘And we’ll need some tools. Limpet clamps and suction
cups. Grip struts. Inertial wrench with a full set of heads
and bits. Bags and tape and stuff.’’
‘‘That’s all in a grade ten mechanic’s kit. Anything special?’’
‘‘No. I’ll meet you at the lock.’’
She moved forward, toward the Star Queen docking
tube, and Proboda went off to the tool shed.
Two patrollers were on duty beside the entrance to the
tube, wearing blue spacesuits with helmets on, although
unlatched. They were armed with stunguns—air rifles using
rubber bullets that were capable of severely injuring
a human, even one in a spacesuit, although not likely to
puncture crucial space station systems. Metal cartridges
and the weapons that fired them were barred on Port Hesperus.
Through the double glass windows behind the guards
the enormous bulk of Star Queen almost filled the docking
bay. Star Queen was of average size as freighters go, but
she was much larger than the tenders, launches, and shuttles
that normally docked inside Port Hesperus.
‘‘Has anyone been here since McNeil was taken off the
ship?’’ Sparta asked the guards.
They glanced at each other and shook their heads. ‘‘No,
Inspector.’’ ‘‘No one, Inspector.’’ They betrayed it in their
voices and they smelled of it: they were lying.
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‘‘Good,’’ she said. ‘‘I want you to report to me or Inspector
Proboda if anyone attempts to get past you. Anyone
at all, even someone from our office. Understood?’’
‘‘Right, Inspector.’’
‘‘Certainly, Inspector. You bet.’’
Sparta went into the boarding tube. The red plastic seal
was still in place over the rim of the hatch. She laid her
hand over it and leaned close to it.
The plastic seal was little more than it seemed, an adhesive
patch. It concealed no microcircuitry, although its
conducting polymers were sensitive to electric fields and
preserved the patterns of any that had recently been applied.
By placing her hand over the patch, by leaning close
to it and inhaling its odor, Sparta learned what she needed.
The field detectors under her palm picked up the
strongly impressed pattern of a diagnostic device—someone
had passed a field detector of their own over the plastic,
hoping to discover its secrets. Doubtless they had
learned that it had no secrets. Then they’d grown bold
enough to handle the seal, presumably with gloves. The
inquisitive one had left no fingerprints, but from the odor
that clung to the surface of the plastic, Sparta had no
difficulty identifying who had been there.
Each person’s skin exudes oils and perspiration that
contain a blend of chemicals, especially amino acids, in a
combination as unique as the pattern of the iris. When
Sparta inhaled these chemicals she instantly analyzed
them. She could call the specific chemical formulas into
consciousness or, more usefully, match them to patterns
she had already stored. She routinely stored the amino
acid signatures of most people she met, eventually discarding
those of no interest.
Two hours ago she had stored the amino acid signature
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of Kara Antreen. She was not surprised to recognize it
here. Nor could she blame the guards for lying to her.
They’d been told to keep quiet; and they’d have to live
with Antreen long after Sparta had gone back to Earth.
Sparta couldn’t blame Antreen for her curiosity, either.
She’d examined the seal, but there was no evidence she
had opened the hatch. The only other entrance to the ship
was through the midships airlock aft of the cargo holds,
and Sparta doubted she’d used that. Antreen would have
been in full view of a hundred controllers and dockside
workers had she donned a spacesuit and gone into the ship
that way.
Viktor arrived, pulling the tool bag and a suit for her—a
blue one, the uniform suit of the local law. He’d already
climbed into his own suit; his gold badge was blazoned
on his shoulder.
Minutes later they were drifting close to the spotlit hull
of Star Queen, their attention concentrated on a small
round hole in a metal plate.
Behind them in the cavernous docking bay great metal
clamps clashed, shackling craft to the station, and selfguiding
hoses and cables snaked out from the refueling
manifolds, seeking the orifices of fuel tanks and capacitors.
Tugs and tenders were arriving and launching from
the bay, sliding in and out of the huge bay doors open to
the stars. All this activity took place in the dead silence
of vacuum. The Space Board cutter was moored next to
Star Queen in the security sector. A launch stood by at the
commercial lock across the way, fueled and ready to bring
passengers into the station when the liner Helios arrived.
Over the whole scene the clear dome of Traffic Control
presided.
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They’d gone through one of the worker’s locks, dragging
the translucent nylon bag of tools, tethered to Proboda’s
wrist, behind them. Sparta had carefully worked her
way around the superconducting coils of the radiation
shield that looped in a lacy hemisphere over the top of
Star Queen’s crew module, keeping a respectful distance.
If Proboda wondered why, he said nothing, and she didn’t
care to explain what she’d learned through unsettling personal
experience, that strong electric and magnetic fields
were dangerous to her in intimate ways that other people
could not sense: induced currents in the implanted metal
elements next to her skeleton were disorienting and, in
extremis, threatening to her vital organs.
But she maneuvered to hull plate L-43 without diffi-
culty. It was not easily accessible for even one person in
a spacesuit, since it was tucked away on the underside of
the crew module just above the convex end of the long
cylinder of Hold C.
‘‘I’ll take a look,’’ she said, squeezing close. ‘‘Here, put
this someplace else.’’ She popped the crablike robot eye
off the hull where it perched over the hole and handed it
to Proboda; the magnetic rollers on the ends of its legs
were whirring as it searched for a grip. Proboda put it up
higher on the module and it scurried away toward its
home hatch.
Sparta got her head up next to the damaged plate and
focused her right eye upon the hole. She zoomed in and
examined it in microscopic detail.
‘‘Doesn’t look like much from here,’’ Proboda’s voice
said from the commlink in her right ear.
‘‘Wait ’til you see inside. But let me get a picture of
this first,’’ she murmured. She snapped it with the ordinary
photogram camera looped around her left wrist.
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What Sparta could see on the outside of the hull, even
at a magnification that would have astonished Proboda,
corresponded to just what she would have expected from
the collision with the hull plate of a one-gram meteoroid
traveling at forty kilometers per second—a hole the size of
a BB, in the center of a small circle of gleaming smooth
metal that had melted and recrystallized.
The damage done to a ship’s hull by a meteoroid travelling
at typical interplanetary velocities approximates
what happens when, say, a hypervelocity missile strikes
armor. The indentation on the outside of the plate may be
modest in itself, but the deposited energy creates a coneshaped
shock wave travelling inward that spalls a wide
circle of material off the inside of the plate. This molten
material keeps on moving and does its own damage;
meanwhile, if the interior of the hull is filled with air, the
shock wave quickly expands, producing overpressures
which are intensely destructive near the hole, although
they fall off rapidly with distance.
‘‘Is that one of the ones that comes off easily?’’ Proboda
asked.
‘‘We’re not quite that lucky,’’ she said. ‘‘Want to hand
me that wrench and a standard Philips?’’
Almost a third of the surface area of the life support
deck consisted of removable panels, and L-43 was one of
these—not, unfortunately, a door that conveniently swung
open like others nearby, but a plate that could be removed
by patiently unscrewing some fifty flathead bolts around
its edges. Proboda took a power drill from the nylon tool
bag and fixed a bit to it. ‘‘Here,’’ he said, handing it to
her, ‘‘anything I can do to help?’’
‘‘Catch these damn little screws.’’ It took her almost ten
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minutes to remove the bolts. He plucked them from the
vacuum and corralled them in a plastic bag.
‘‘Let’s try the limpet now.’’
He handed her a small, massive electromagnet and she
set it against the painted yellow triangle in the center of
the plate, which marked the presence of a ferrous laminate
hardpoint. She flipped the magnet’s switch and tugged
hard. The magnet stuck fast to the hardpoint, but—
‘‘That’s what I was afraid of. Can you get your feet on
something? Then tug on my legs.’’ He braced himself and
grabbed her feet. He tugged on her and she tugged on the
plate, but the plate was stuck fast in the hull.
‘‘We’ll have to set up the grip rig.’’
Proboda reached into the tool bag and withdrew a set
of steel rods with sliding couplings. He fed her the pieces
one by one, and in a few minutes she had rigged a bridge
of parallel rods over the recalcitrant hull plate, set against
the hull to either side on gimbaled feet. She mounted a
worm gear in a heavy bracket in the center of the bridge.
She fitted a crossbar handle to its top; its lower end rotated
in a joint on the back of the magnet. When Sparta twisted
the crossbars the worm gear turned and began to exert an
inexorable pull. After three complete turns the bulging
plate, like a stiff cork sliding out of a bottle, popped free.
‘‘This is what was holding it.’’ She showed him the
inside of the plate. ‘‘Sealant all over the place.’’
Blobs of hardened yellow plastic had held the plate
tight, plastic foam that had spewed from emergency canisters
inside the deck. Some of it had been carried by the
outrush of air into the meteoroid hole, where it congealed
and sealed the leak as it was designed to; the rest had
simply made a mess.
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Sparta inspected the inner side of the plate and the
hard dark mound of plastic that covered the hole. She
photogrammed it, then peered back over her shoulder. ‘‘Let
me see that knife kit.’’ He held it out and she took a
curved, thin-bladed knife from the set. ‘‘And give me some
of those little bags.’’ She carefully worked the edge of the
blade under the brittle plastic. She began peeling back the
plastic, which came away in thin layers like sediment, like
wood grain.
‘‘What are you doing that for?’’
‘‘Don’t worry, I’m not destroying any evidence.’’ She
saved the shavings in a clear bag. ‘‘I want to see what the
hole looks like under the goop.’’ Beneath the plastic was
the wide side of the conical hole, as big as a nickel, surrounded
by an aureole of bright recrystallized metal.
‘‘Well, that’s certainly by the book.’’ She photogrammed
it again, then passed him the hull plate. ‘‘Let’s put all this
in the sack.’’
Sparta shone her hand-lamp into the blackened interior
of the life support deck. In her private way she spent a
moment studying what she saw. Then she took more photograms.
‘‘Can you get your head in here, Viktor? I want
you to see this.’’
He squeezed his helmet in close beside hers, so that
they were touching. ‘‘What a mess.’’ His voice was as loud
by conduction through their helmets as it was by commlink.
Everything within two meters of the point of the hole
in the hull was severely damaged. Pipes writhed crazily
and ended in jagged mouths, like frozen benthic worms.
‘‘Both oxygen tanks in one whack. Hardly a more vulnerable
spot in the whole ship.’’ One oxygen sphere was
torn open, while another lay in shards like a broken egg
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shell. Fragments of the shattered fuel cell still floated near
the ceiling, where they had collected under the gentle deceleration
of docking. ‘‘ ’Scuse me a minute, I’ve got to
get my arm in there.’’ Sparta reached up and gathered
glittering bits of debris from the ceiling. She carefully
placed these and other samples in plastic bags. She took
a final look around inside the ravaged deck, then withdrew.
They replaced the tools and the evidence they had
gathered in the net bag. ‘‘That should do it here.’’
‘‘Did you find what you expected?’’
‘‘Maybe. We’ll have to wait for the analysis. Before we
go back let’s have a peek inside the ship.’’
They pulled themselves along the bulging cylinder of
Hold C, tugging themselves from one handhold to the
next, until they reached Star Queen’s midships airlock.
The midships airlock was set into the long central shaft
that separated Star Queen’s fuel tanks and nuclear engines
from the holds and the crew module, just aft of the holds
themselves. Sparta manipulated the external controls that
opened the hatch—controls that by law were standardized
on all spacecraft—then entered the cramped space. Proboda
squeezed in behind her, towing the tool bag.
She closed the outer hatch. From inside she could pressurize
the lock, if there were no overriding commands
from inside the spacecraft. But a big red sign lit up beside
the inner hatch wheel: WARNING. VACUUM.
‘‘I’m going to pressurize,’’ she said. ‘‘This won’t smell
too good.’’
‘‘Why don’t we just stay suited?’’
‘‘We’ve got to face it sooner or later, Viktor. Keep your
helmet on, if you want.’’
He didn’t discuss it with her, but he did keep his helmet
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on. She didn’t let him see her grin. He had delicate feelings
for a man of his size and profession.
She used the controls to pressurize the interior of the
ship’s central shaft. After a few moments the warning indicator
shifted from red to green—‘‘Atmospheric pressure
equalized’’—but she did not yet open the inner hatch. First
she pulled off her helmet.
Crashing into Sparta’s brain came the smell of sweat,
stale food, cigarette smoke, spilled wine, ozone, new paint,
machine oil, grease, human waste . . . and above it all, carbon
dioxide. The air was not nearly as bad as it had been
for McNeil in those final days, for it had already mingled
with fresh air from the station, but it was bad enough;
Sparta needed a moment of conscious effort to clear her
head.
What she didn’t tell Proboda was that she wasn’t doing
this for the sake of torturing herself.
Eventually she could not only directly sense the chemical
constituents of her surroundings, but evaluate and
bring to consciousness what she sensed. She had an urgent
question to ask here, before going inside: had anyone used
this lock during the voyage? The main airlock was not a
problem. If either Grant or McNeil had left the ship
through it during the flight, the other man would have
known about it—until they went through it the last time
together, of course, and only McNeil returned. But this
airlock was another matter. Conceivably one of them
might have snuck outside the ship through this secondary
airlock while the other slept or was busy elsewhere. The
question had recently assumed new importance.
The smell of the place answered her question.
‘‘Okay, I think I can take it now.’’ She grinned at Pro-
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boda, who looked at her dubiously from within the safety
of his helmet.
She twisted the wheel, opened the inner hatch, and
entered the central corridor. For a moment the experience
was profoundly disorienting: she was in a narrow shaft a
hundred meters long, a constricted polished tube so
straight that it seemed to vanish aft to a black point. For
a moment she had the unsettling sensation of staring into
a rifle barrel.
‘‘Anything wrong?’’ Proboda’s voice was loud in her
commlink.
‘‘No . . . I’m fine.’’ She looked ‘‘up,’’ toward the bow of
the ship, to the hatch of the hold airlock a few meters
overhead. Above that hatch was access to the cargo hold,
and then to the crew module itself.
The light beside it was green: ‘‘Atmospheric pressure
equalized.’’ She turned the wheel, lifted the hatch, and
entered the large airlock that segregated the huge detachable
holds—each of which had its own airlock—from the
crew module. The outer hatches of the four hold airlocks
surrounded her: bright red signs gleamed on three of them.
DANGER. VACUUM.
The notice beside the hatch to Hold A, however, glowed
a less frantic yellow: ‘‘Unauthorized entry strictly forbidden.’’
All of them were of the standard design, heavy-duty
wide spoked wheels in the midst of circular, hinged steel
doors. Anyone who could strike the correct combination
of numbers into the pad beside the wheel would gain quick
entry.
She took a moment to bend her head close to each in
turn, before Proboda clambered up from below with his
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bag of tools. Holds B and D hadn’t been touched in weeks,
but Hold A’s keyboard and wheel showed expected signs
of handling. So, less expectedly, did Hold C’s.
‘‘A’s the only one that’s locked, Viktor,’’ as he climbed
up beside her. ‘‘We’ll have to retrieve the combination
later, or force it. Want to look in B? I’ll check out C.’’
‘‘Sure,’’ he said. He punched buttons to pressurize B’s
airlock. She latched her helmet and entered Hold C. The
ritual of closing the outer hatch behind her, evacuating
the lock, and opening the inner hatch to the airless hold—
restraining any temptation to impatience—had to be performed
carefully. Then she was inside.
It was a steel cylinder as big as a grain silo, dark but
for a worklight beside the airlock. In the dim green worklight
the metal monsters, each almost six metric tons in
mass, stood against the wall like a zaftig chorus line.
They were all strongly shackled to the hold’s steel-alloy
ribs and stringers. In the shadows they seemed to expand
as she approached them, and their compound eyes of diamond
seemed to follow her like the eyes in trompe l’oeil
portraits.
They were nothing but inert machines, of course. Without
their fissile fuel rods, stacked nearby within shielding
assemblies of graphite, the huge robots could not move a
millimeter. Yet Sparta could not deny the impression they
made upon her, their segmented titanium bodies made to
withstand furnace temperatures, their insectlike legs made
for negotiating the most abrupt terrain, their diamondedged
mouth parts and claws made for shredding the most
recalcitrant natural matrices . . .
And those glittering diamond eyes.
As Sparta floated closer to the nearest robot she felt a
tingling in her inner ear. She paused a moment before
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recognizing the effects of latent radioactivity, recognizable
by the same sort of induction currents—minute, in this
case—that she had feared from the ship’s radiation shield.
A glance at the machine’s serial number confirmed that it
was the one Sondra Sylvester had had tried at the Salisbury
proving grounds three weeks before it was loaded
aboard Star Queen.
She cautiously moved past the first robot and inspected
the others, one by one, peering at their erect and fearsome
heads. All but the first were cold as stones.
Back in the hold access, with the airlock sealed behind
her, Sparta waited for Proboda to climb out of Hold D.
Apparently he had satisfied himself with whatever he saw
in B and had gone on into the remaining vacuum hold
while she was still admiring the robots. The top of his head
stuck out of the hatch, his helmet looking like an ant’s
head. She tapped his blue plastic noggin. ‘‘Why don’t you
take that thing off?’’ she said. ‘‘The stink won’t kill you.’’
He looked at her and twisted the helmet off his head.
He got one whiff and his bold Slavic nose wrinkled all the
way up into his forehead. ‘‘He lived in this for a week,’’
he said.
She thought maybe the smell gave him a little better
appreciation of McNeil, if not more respect for him. ‘‘Viktor,
I want you to do something for me. It means us splitting
up for a few minutes.’’
‘‘Before we’re finished in here? We still have to check
on McNeil’s story.’’
‘‘I’m pretty sure we’ve already got the important stuff.
I want you to get this evidence to the lab.’’
‘‘Inspector Troy’’—going all formal on her—‘‘my orders
are to be with you. Not to leave your side.’’
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‘‘Okay, Viktor, tell Captain Antreen everything you
think you have to.’’
‘‘First you have to tell me,’’ he said, exasperated.
‘‘I will. Then as soon as you get that stuff into the lab
I want you to go out and intercept Helios. Before anybody
disembarks. Keep them busy. . . .’’
As soon as she had explained her suspicions and he
understood them, he left. This business of being persuasive
was draining, she found. Social intelligence—the peoplemanipulative
intelligence—came hardest to her. Almost
immediately, almost involuntarily, she collapsed into
trance again.
The brief meditation restored her. As she allowed the
external world to trickle back into her awareness, she began
to listen. . . .
At first she did not filter or focus what she heard but
took in the whole symphony of the great space station,
spinning in space above Venus, its sounds vibrating
through the wall of Star Queen. Gases and fluids coursed
through its pumps and conduits, the bearings of its great
hubs and rings rolled smoothly on their eternal rounds,
the hum of thousands of circuits and high-voltage buses
made the aether tremble. She could hear the muted voices
of the station’s hundred thousand inhabitants, a third of
them at work, a third breathing deeply, asleep, a third
concerned with the rich trivia of existence, buying, selling,
teaching, learning, cooking, eating, fighting, playing. . . .
Simply by listening, she could not pick out individual
conversations. No one seemed to be talking in the immediate
neighborhood. She could have tuned in on the radio
transmissions and the communications links, of course,
had she chosen to go into receptor state, but that was not
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her purpose. She wanted a feel for the place. What was it
like to live in a metal world constantly orbiting a hell
planet? A world with parks and gardens and shops and
schools and restaurants, to be sure—a world with unparalleled
views of the starry night and the brilliant sun—but
a contained world, one from which only the rich could
easily get relief. It was a world where people from disparate
cultures—Japanese, Arab, Russian, North American—
were thrown into close proximity under conditions that
inevitably produced strain. Some came for the money,
some because they had imagined that space would somehow
be free of the restrictions of crowded Earth. Some
came, of course, because their parents brought them. But
only a few had the pioneering spirit that made hardship
an end itself. Port Hesperus was a company town, like an
oil platform in the North Atlantic or a mill town in the
Canadian forest.
The message Sparta had through the metal walls was
one of tension in reserve, of time bided, of a feeling close
to indentured servitude. And there was something more,
partly among the recent, reluctant immigrants but especially
among the younger residents, those who had been
born on the station—a sense of humdrum, a certain resentment,
the half-conscious undercurrent of brewing discontent
—but for now the older generation was firmly in
charge, and they had little in mind beyond vigorously exploiting
the resources of Venus’s surface, making themselves
as comfortable as possible while they did so, and
earning the wherewithal to get off Port Hesperus forever.
. . .
Almost a kilometer away from where Sparta drifted
dreaming in the freighter, the off-duty life of Port Hes-
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perus was at its busiest. The enormous central sphere of
the station was belted with tall trees—their tops all pointing
inward—and ribbed with louvered glass windows that
continually adjusted to compensate for the whirl of Venuslight
and sunlight. Among the trees, paths wove
among lush gardens of passion flowers and orchids and
bromeliads, under cycads and tree ferns, beside trickling
brooks and still reflecting ponds of recirculated water,
over arched bridges of wood or stone.
A stroller who made the entire three-and-a-halfkilometer
circuit would come upon seven strikingly different
views, separately climate-controlled, laid out by the
master landscape architect Seno Sato to suggest the diversity
of cultures that had contributed to build Port Hesperus,
and the mythic past of its mother planet. Step
through this torii: here is Kyoto, an eaved castle, raked
pebbles, twisted pines. Brush aside these tamarisk
branches: Samarkand, its arabesque pavilions of inlaid
blue stone reflected in perfumed pools. Through these bare
birches to Kiev, blue onion domes above a frozen canal,
where today two skaters circle. The snow underfoot becomes
powdered marble, then plain sand: here is the
Sphinx, in a garden of bare red rocks. Up this rocky path
and past this flowering plum to vanished Changan, a
seven-story stone pagoda with gilded finials. Through
these yellow ginkgos the boat pond of New York’s Central
Park appears, complete with toy schooners, watched over
with perplexed amusement by the well-polished bronze of
Alice. An aisle of silent hemlocks leads to Vancouver,
dripping cedars and totem poles and verdigrised gargoyles.
And under these dripping tree ferns to the fern swamps of
legendary, fictitious Venus, with a notable collection of
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carnivorous plants glistening in the eternal rain. Around
this tall monkey-puzzle: Kyoto’s gate . . .
On either side of the magnificent gardens, in parallel
belts around the central sphere, were the Casbah, plaka,
Champs E´ lyse´es, Red Square, Fifth Avenue, and Main
Street of Port Hesperus—shops, galleries, dime stores, Russian
tea shops, rug merchants, restaurants of fifteen distinct
ethnic persuasions, fish markets (aquacultured bream
a specialty), fruit and vegetable markets, flower stands,
temples, mosques, synagogues, churches, discreetly
naughty cabarets, the Port Hesperus Performing Arts Center,
and the streets outside jammed with shoppers and
hawkers, jugglers and strolling musicians, people wearing
bright metals and plastics and their own colorized skin.
Sato’s gardens brought wealthy tourists from throughout
the solar system. Port Hesperus’s merchants and boosters
were ready for them.
The central sphere was frequented by the station’s
workers and families too, of course. It’s just that a Disney
kind of world—even a Disney world equipped with a cosmopolitan
selection of foods and beverages and real,
sometimes kinky people—grows familiar after the fifth or
sixth visit, and deadly dull after the hundredth. Every excuse
for news, for a diversion, becomes precious. . . .
Which is why Vincent Darlington was in a snit.
Darlington waddled about the spectacularly gaudy
main hall of the Hesperian Museum aimlessly straightening
the baroque and rococo paintings in their ornate
frames, trying to keep his fingers out of the piles of cultured
shrimp and caviar and tiny lobster tails and synthetic
ham rolls the caterers had hauled in by the kilo and
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which now gleamed oilily beneath the odd light of the
room’s stained glass dome. Every few seconds Darlington
returned to the empty display case at the head of the
room—positioned where, had this place been a church, as
its spectacularly intricate overarching stained glass apotheosis
suggested, the altar would have stood. He drummed
his chubby fingers on the gilt frame. It had been specially
built to hold his newest acquisition, and he’d placed it
where no one entering the museum could possibly miss
it—especially that Sylvester woman, if she had the brass
to come.
One reason he’d staged the reception. And invited
someone, that oh-so-special someone, who was quite
likely to drag her along. He hoped she did come; he
couldn’t wait to see the hunger on her face. . . .
But now the whole thing was off. Or at least postponed.
First the news that his acquisition had been impounded.
Then the news just now that the police were delaying the
disembarkation of Helios! What in heaven’s name could
be so complicated about a simple accident in space . . . ?
Horribly embarrassing, but he certainly had no intention
of reopening the Hesperian Museum until his treasure
was safely enthroned.
Darlington pushed himself away from the empty altar.
He’d recoiled from the notion of mingling with the crowd
of media persons and other rabble that had rushed to the
security sector when Star Queen, at last, had arrived. He
had subsequently placed one discreet call to the powersthat-
be, urging—one might in fact say pleading, but only
really in the gentlest possible fashion—that something be
done about the red tape that prevented him from taking
immediate delivery of the most valuable book in the entire
history of the English language—and honestly now, if it
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weren’t the most valuable book, then why had he been
forced to pay such an outrageous sum for it, surely the
largest sum ever paid for a book in the English language
in the history of the English language itself, and that
surely said something . . . and out of his own pockets,
which weren’t, shall we say, bottomless, after all . . . ?
Not, of course, that he cared about the book, actually,
the actual contents of the book, that is to say, the words
in the book. War stories, you know. Given that this fellow
Lawrence was said to have written rather well, and there
were those endorsements, G. B. Shaw, Robert Graves, whoever
they were, but they were said to have written well
themselves, for the period, that is, anyway someone said
so, and really, any reputation that lasts a century has some
value, wouldn’t-you-say? But not really what he thought
he was getting, in fact—permitting himself to make a small
confession to himself—some confusion actually, quite understandable,
another chap named Lawrence from the
same period, after all it was more than a hundred years
ago.
Which was quite beside the point. He’d paid money for
this bloody book. There were only five copies in the universe,
and three of those were lost, and now there was
only the one in the Library of Congress of the United
States of America and his—the Hesperian Museum’s, which
itself was his. And he’d bought it for one reason, to humiliate
that woman, who had humiliated him in the aftermath
of her disgraceful public pursuit of his . . . well,
that oh-so-special someone. His legal companion, once.
He supposed he should simply say good riddance to
the little slut. But he couldn’t. She had her quite remarkable
charms, and Darlington was not likely to find her
equivalent on this sardine-can-in-space.
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Which set him to brooding, as he did endlessly, over
whether he would ever get off Port Hesperus, whether he
could ever go home again. He knew, deep down, that he
wouldn’t. They’d bury poor Vince Darlington in space, unless
by some miracle they buried his sisters first. Not a
matter of fighting extradition to Earth, nothing so public, or
so legal. No, it was the price the family—the poisonous sisters,
actually—had exacted for keeping their persimmonlips
puckered tightly—for keeping him out of a Swiss jail,
to be precise. Of course it would have had to be their
money . . .
This was the retreat he’d made for himself, and here
he would stay, in these few small rooms with their velvet
walls and this . . . really amazing glass dome (perhaps it
really had been built as a church?), surrounded by his dead
treasures.
He eyed the shrimps. They weren’t getting any fresher.
He set off on another round of picture straightening.
When would he be allowed to take possession? Perhaps he
should cancel now. Captain Antreen had been most unhelpful.
Oh, smiles and all that, said she’d do the best she
could, but results? No promises there, darling. It all had a
sour taste to it, rather curdling his intended triumph over
Sylvester.
Darlington passed nervously into one of the smaller,
darker side rooms, He stopped beside a glass case, caught
by his reflection in its lid. He patted his thinning black
hair and adjusting his old-fashioned horn-rimmed eyeglasses
—hadn’t lost his looks quite yet, thank God—twitching
his lips in a little moue, then moving on, ignoring the
contents of the case.
What Darlington left behind in this small room were
his real treasures, although he refused to acknowledge
V E N U S P R I M E
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them. Here were those odd scraps of fossil imprints, found
on the surface of Venus by robot explorers, which had
made the Hesperian Museum a place of intense interest to
scientists and scholars, and, after Sato’s gardens, one of
the chief tourist attractions of Port Hesperus. But Darlington,
absurdly wealthy even on a negotiated allowance, was
a collector of second-rate European art of the melodramaand-
curlicue periods, and to him rocks and bones belonged
in some desert gas station or Olde Curiosity Shoppe
on Earth. His Venusian fossils brought him system-wide
attention, so he grudgingly allowed them their space.
He continued to pace, staring at his garish paintings
and sculptures and expensive bric-a-brac and brooding on
what that busybody police person from Earth was up to,
poking about on the derelict ship that held his precious
book.
Shortly before Helios was due to rendezvous with Port
Hesperus and shortly after Sparta had asked him to assure
its quarantine while she went off on business of her own,
Viktor Proboda presented himself at the Board of Space
Control’s local headquarters. Captain Antreen called him
into her office; Lieutenant Kitamuki, her aide, was already
in the room.
‘‘Your instructions were simple, Viktor.’’ Antreen’s
smiling mask had slipped; she was rigid with anger. ‘‘You
were not to leave Troy’s side.’’
‘‘She trusts me, Captain. She has promised to inform
me promptly of everything she finds.’’
‘‘And you trust her?’’ Kitamuki demanded.
‘‘She seems to know what she’s doing, Lieutenant.’’
Proboda felt it was getting awfully warm in this office.
‘‘And Central did put her in charge.’’
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2 0 0
‘‘We requested a replacement. We didn’t ask that the
investigation be taken away from us.’’ Antreen said.
‘‘I didn’t like that any better than you did, Captain,’’
Proboda said stoutly. ‘‘In fact I took it personally at first,
considering you’d already given me the assignment. But
after all, most of the principals in the case are Earthbased.
. . .’’
‘‘Most of the principals are Euro-Americans,’’ Kitamuki
said. ‘‘Does that give you a clue?’’
‘‘Sorry,’’ Proboda said stoutly. He could see the conspiracy
theory coming—Kitamuki was big on them—but
conspiracy theories were not his thing. He put his faith in
simpler motivations, like vengeance, greed, and stupidity.
‘‘I really think you ought to take a look at these lab results.
We did—Troy did, in fact—a very close inspection of the
impact site, and what she found . . .’’
‘‘Someone back there has passed the word that this
department is to be discredited,’’ Kitamuki interrupted.
‘‘Here on Port Hesperus, Azure Dragon is producing spectacular
results, and some among the Euro-Americans, on
the station and back on Earth, don’t like it.’’ She paused
to let her dark suspicions sink in.
‘‘We’ve got to watch our step, Viktor,’’ Antreen said
evenly. ‘‘To preserve our integrity. Port Hesperus is a
model of cooperation, and unfortunately some would like
to destroy us.’’
Proboda suspected somebody was blowing smoke in
his face—he wasn’t sure who. But while Captain Antreen
didn’t always choose to make her reasoning clear, she did
make her point. ‘‘How do you want me to handle it, then?’’
‘‘You do as Troy asks you. Just know that we’ll be
working with you too, sometimes behind the scenes. Troy
is not to be made aware of this. We want the situation
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resolved, but there’s no need to go beyond the pertinent
facts.’’
‘‘All right, then,’’ Proboda concurred. ‘‘Shall I see to
Helios?’’
‘‘You do that,’’ Lieutenant Kitamuki said. ‘‘Leave Troy
to us.’’
‘‘Now what did you want to tell us about these lab
results?’’ Antreen asked him.
2 0 2
XV
Alone in Star Queen, Sparta started her investigation from
the top down.
Immediately below the inner hatch of the main airlock
was a claustrophobic space jammed with stores and equipment
lockers. Three spacesuits normally hung against the
wall in one quadrant of the round deck. One was missing.
Grant’s. Another appeared unused. Wycherly’s, the unfortunate
pilot’s. Curious, Sparta checked its oxygen supply
and found it partially charged—enough there for half an
hour. Had McNeil been saving it, in case things went
wrong, and he too decided to lose himself in space? Sparta
poked here and there among the supply lockers—tools,
batteries, spare lithium hydroxide canisters and such—but
she found nothing of significance here. She quickly moved
down to the flight deck.
The flight deck was spacious by comparison, taking up
a slice through the wide tropics of the crew module’s
sphere. The consoles that circled the deck beneath the wide
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2 0 3
windows were alive with flickering lights, their blue and
green and yellow indicator lamps glowing softly on auxiliary
power. Facing them were seats for commander, second
pilot, and engineer—although Star Queen, like other
modern freighters, could be flown by a single crewmember
or none, if placed under remote control.
The room was a pragmatic mix of the exotic and the
mundane. The computers were state of the art and so were
the window shades, although the state of the windowshade
art had not changed a whole lot in the past century,
and the fire extinguishers were still just red-painted metal
bottles, clipped to the bulkheads. There were racks and
cabinets of machines, but there was also plenty of good
working space and a good view out the surrounding windows;
the deck had been designed in the awareness that
crews would spend many months of their lives within its
confines. Sparta was struck, however, that there were no
personalizing touches, no cut-out cartoons or posters or
pin-ups, no cute notes. Perhaps neo-commander Peter
Grant had not been the sort to tolerate individual litter.
Besides the ship’s working programs, the logs—Grant’s
verbal log and the ship’s black-box recorders—were accessed
from these consoles. In fact almost all of the codable
information about the ship and its cargo, except
Grant’s and McNeil’s personal computer files, was accessed
from this deck.
Sparta expelled a breath and got down to work. From
the chemical traces left on the consoles, armrests, handrails,
and other surfaces she confirmed that no one besides
Grant and McNeil had been on this deck for several weeks.
There were still a jumble of traces, but most were months
old, left by the workmen who had refurbished the ship.
Sparta had internalized the computer’s standard access
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2 0 4
codes. In little more time than it took to slip her gloves
off and slide her PIN probes into the ports, she’d offloaded
its memory into her own much denser, much more
capacious cellular storage mechanisms.
She raced lightly through the first few files of interest.
The cargo manifest was as she had memorized it on the
trip from Earth—no additions, no subtractions, no surprises.
Four detachable cargo holds, capable of pressurization.
On this voyage, only the first compartment of Hold
A pressurized—the usual foodstuffs, medicines, so on—and
that diminutive bit of mass worth two million pounds
Sterling, a book in its carrying case. . . .
A few other items in Hold A were insured for relatively
large amounts of money per unit of mass: two crates of
cigars consigned to none other than Kara Antreen, valued
at a thousand pounds each—Sparta smiled at the thought
of the stiff Space Board captain savoring her stogies—and
four crates of wine, one of which McNeil had already confessed
to looting, worth a total of fifteen thousand American
dollars and consigned to the same Vincent Darlington
who was the new owner of the very famous book.
But there were also items that had cost more to ship
than they were worth to insure: the newest BBC epic on
videochip, ‘‘While Rome Burns,’’ massing less than a kilo
(and almost all of that was protective plastic packaging),
wholly uninsured. Although the original had cost millions
to produce, the chips were much cheaper to reproduce
than an old-fashioned celluloid-based movie or a tape cassette,
and indeed (admittedly with some loss of fidelity)
the whole show could have been beamed to Venus for the
cost of transmission time. Plus an item that had earlier
struck Sparta as worthy of close attention: a case of ‘‘mis-
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cellaneous books, 25 kilos, no intrinsic value’’ consigned
to Sondra Sylvester.
The contents of Holds B, C, and D, which had remained
in vacuum throughout the flight, were of much less interest
—tools, machinery, inert matter (a tonne of carbon in
the form of graphite bricks, for example, marginally
cheaper to ship from Earth than to extract from the atmospheric
carbon dioxide of Venus)—except for the ‘‘6
Rolls-Royce HDVM,’’ Heavy Duty Venus Miners, ‘‘at 5.5
tonnes each, total mass 33.5 tonnes gross including separate
fuel assemblies,’’ etc., consigned to the Ishtar Mining
Corporation. Sparta satisfied herself that the onboard
manifest was identical with the one that had been published.
And she and Proboda had already confirmed its
accuracy.
Sparta turned quickly to the mission recorder, which
contained the entire public record of the voyage. Bringing
the full record to consciousness, with the time-slip that
involved, would be a lengthy process. For the time being
she contented herself with a rapid internal scan, searching
for anomalies.
One anomaly stood out, in data space, in smell space,
in harmony space—an explosion, secondary explosions,
alarms, calls for help . . . human voices, shocked, coping,
accusing—the black-box mission recorder contained the
entire sequence of events attendant upon the meteoroid
strike.
Sparta heard it through at lightning speed and played
it back to herself mentally. It confirmed in fine detail what
she had learned in her firsthand look at the site of the
accident.
One other anomaly stood out in the mission recorder’s
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datastream, a conversation, taking place immediately before
Grant’s fateful radio message had been beamed to
Earth and Venus. ‘‘This is Star Queen, Commander Peter
Grant speaking. Engineering Officer McNeil and I have
jointly concluded that there is sufficient oxygen remaining
for one man. . . .’’
But in the moments preceding the announcement,
Grant and McNeil had not been on the flight deck. . . . The
two men’s voices were muffled by the intervening bulkhead.
One voice was momentarily raised to the threshold
of audibility—McNeil’s—and his words were stern: ‘‘You’re
in no position to accuse me of anything. . . .’’
Accuse him . . . ?
The whole conversation might be recovered, but Sparta
would have to put herself into light trance to do it. And
there were other chunks of data that might yield to analysis,
but she must set aside the time to deal with them. It
was too soon to sacrifice alertness again. For now she had
to move quickly. . . .
The fast liner Helios, driven by a powerful gaseouscore
atomic reactor, had been a week out of Earth, a week
and a day from Port Hesperus, when that somber message
had been received throughout the solar system: ‘‘This is
Star Queen, Commander Peter Grant speaking . . .’’
Within minutes—even before Peter Grant had left the
Star Queen’s airlock for the last time—the skipper of Helios
had received orders from the Board of Space Control, acting
under interplanetary law, to notify his passengers and
crew that all transmissions from Helios were being recorded
and that any pertinent information thus obtained
would be used in subsequent administrative and legal pro-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 0 7
ceedings, including criminal proceedings, if any, bearing
on the Star Queen incident.
In other words, everyone aboard Helios was a suspect
in the investigation of some as yet unspecified misdeed on
Star Queen.
Not without reason. Helios had left Earth on a hyperbolic
orbit for Venus two days after the meteoroid struck
Star Queen. The departure date for the fast liner had been
on the boards for months, but at the last minute, after the
meteoroid strike, Helios acquired several new passengers.
Among them was Nikos Pavlakis, representing the owners
of the stricken freighter. Another was a man named Percy
Farnsworth, representing the Lloyd’s group who had insured
the ship, its cargo, and the lives of its crew.
Other passengers had booked the flight long in advance.
There was an emeritus professor of archaeology
from Osaka, three Dutch teenage girls setting forth on a
grand planetary tour, and half a dozen Arabian mining
technicians accompanied by their veiled wives and rebellious
children. The Dutch girls rather relished the notion
of being suspected of interplanetary crime, while
Sondra Sylvester, another passenger who had booked in
advance, did not. Sylvester’s young travelling companion,
Nancybeth Mokoroa, was simply bored rigid by the
whole affair.
These were not the sort of passengers who mixed easily:
the Japanese professor smiled and kept to himself, the
Arabs kept to themselves without bothering to smile. The
teenagers staggered about in their high-heeled shoes during
periods of constant acceleration and twitched uncomfortably
in their unaccustomed tight dresses, whether
under acceleration or not, and at all times made a point
V E N U S P R I M E
2 0 8
of ogling the one unaccompanied male passenger over fifteen
and under thirty. He did not return their compliment.
He was Blake Redfield, a last minute addition to the manifest
who kept very much to himself throughout the voyage.
Such social encounters as did occur took place in the
ship’s lounge. There Nikos Pavlakis did his nervous best
to be gracious to his client Sondra Sylvester whenever
their paths crossed. That wasn’t often, as she generally
avoided him. The poor man was distracted with worry
anyway; he spent most of his time nursing a solitary
ouzo and a plastic bag of Kalamata olives. Farnsworth,
the insurance man, was often to be found lurking in the
nearby shadows, sipping on a bulb of straight gin and
ostentatiously glowering at Pavlakis. Pavlakis and Sylvester
both made it a point to avoid Farnsworth altogether.
But it was in the lounge, not long after Grant’s public
sacrifice, that Sylvester found Farnsworth plying Nancybeth
with a warm bulb of Calvados. The middle-aged man
and the twenty-year-old woman were floating, weightless
and slightly giddy, before a spectacular backdrop of real
stars, and the sight infuriated Sylvester—as Nancybeth had
no doubt intended. Before approaching them Sylvester
thought about the situation—what, after all, should she
care? The girl was possessed of heart-stopping beauty, but
she had the loyalty of a mink. Nevertheless, Sylvester felt
she could not afford to ignore the sly Farnsworth any
longer.
Nancybeth watched Sylvester’s approach, her malice
diffused only slightly by weightlessness and alcohol. ‘‘ ’Lo,
Sondra. Meet m’ friend Prissy Barnsworth.’’
‘‘Percy Farnsworth, Mrs. Sylvester.’’ One did not get to
V E N U S P R I M E
2 0 9
one’s feet in microgravity, but Farnsworth straightened
admirably nonetheless, and tucked his chin in a credible
bow.
Sylvester looked him over with distaste: although he
was approaching fifty, Farnsworth affected the look of a
young army officer, off duty for the weekend to do a bit
of pheasant slaughtering, say—Sylvester’s recent acquaintance
at the Salisbury proving grounds, Lieutenant Colonel
Witherspoon, was a model of the type. Farnsworth had the
mustache and the elbow-patched shooting jacket and the
rigid set of the neck right down. The public school accent
and the clipped Desert Rat diction were strictly secondhand,
however.
Sylvester looked past his outstretched hand. ‘‘You’ll
want to be careful, Nancybeth. A brandy hangover’s not
pleasant.’’
‘‘Dear mother Sylvester,’’ she simpered. ‘‘What’d I tell
you, Farny? Expert on everthn’. I never heard of this stuff
’fore she innerduced me.’’ Nancybeth batted her bulb of
apple brandy from hand to hand. On the third toss she
missed, and Farnsworth snatched it out of the air for her,
returning it without comment.
‘‘Understand you had a very pleasant visit to the south
of France, Mrs. Sylvester,’’ Farnsworth said, braving her
determined unpleasantries.
Sylvester gave him a look intended to silence him, but
Nancybeth piped up brightly. ‘‘She had verry pleasan’ two
days. Three days? I had verr’ boring three weeks.’’
‘‘Mr. Farnsworth,’’ Sylvester hastily interrupted, ‘‘your
attempt to pump my companion for information that you
imagine may somehow be of use to you is . . . is transparent.’’
Nancybeth’s eyes widened—‘‘Pump me? Why, Mister
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2 1 0
Farmerworthy’’—and she snatched dramatically at the billowing
skirt of her flowery print dress.
‘‘And despicable,’’ Sylvester added.
But Farnsworth pretended to take no notice. ‘‘No offense
meant, Mrs. Sylvester. Light chat, that’s all. Comes
to business, much prefer to talk to you straight from the
shoulder. Eh?’’
Nancybeth growled, ‘‘Man to man, so to speak,’’ then
pretended to flinch when Sylvester glared at her. Evidently
she was farther into her cups than Sylvester had feared.
‘‘Got me wrong, Mrs. Sylvester,’’ Farnsworth said
smoothly. ‘‘Represent your interests too, y’know. In a
sense.’’
‘‘In the sense that you’ll be forced to pay your clients
whatever sum you can’t weasel out of?’’
He drew himself up a bit. ‘‘You’ve nothing to fear, Mrs.
Sylvester. Star Queen would dock safely with your cargo
even if she were a ghost ship. Take more than a measly
meteoroid to do in a Rolls-Royce robot, what?’’
Throughout their exchange Nancybeth was contorting
her face into a series of exaggerated masks, miming first
Sylvester’s aloof contempt, then Farnsworth’s wounded
innocence. It was the sort of childish display that under
some circumstances lent her a gamin attractiveness. At the
moment she was about as attractive as a two-year-old on
a tantrum.
‘‘Thanks for your interest, Mr. Farnsworth,’’ Sylvester
said coldly. ‘‘And perhaps you would leave us alone now.’’
‘‘Let me be blunt, Mrs. Sylvester, begging your pardon
—’’
‘‘No, why don’t you be pointed?’’ Nancybeth suggested
brightly.
V E N U S P R I M E
2 1 1
Farnsworth pushed on. ‘‘After all, we’re both aware of
the difficulties of the Pavlakis Lines. Eh?’’
‘‘I’m aware of no such thing.’’
‘‘Doesn’t take much imagination to see what Pavlakis
had to gain by doing in his own ship. Eh?’’
‘‘Nancybeth, I’d like you to leave with me, this moment,’’
Sylvester said, turning away.
‘‘But he did it rather badly, didn’t he?’’ Farnsworth
said, floating closer to Sylvester, his voice deeper and
harsher. ‘‘No significant damage to the ship, no damage
whatever to the cargo? Not even that famous book you
were so interested in?’’
‘‘Don’ forget crew,’’ cried Nancybeth, still the giddy
imp. ‘‘Tried to kill ’em all!’’
‘‘Good God, Nancybeth . . .’’ Sylvester glanced across
the lounge to where Nikos Pavlakis hovered over his ouzo.
‘‘How can you say such a thing? About a man you’ve
never met?’’
‘‘Only got half of ’em, though,’’ the girl finished. ‘‘Good
ol’ Angus won through.’’
‘‘That’s a shrewd guess, Mrs. Sylvester, and I’d lay odds
she’s right.’’ Farnsworth’s insinuating gaze narrowed melodramatically.
‘‘Pavlakis Lines holds rather large
accidental-death policies on its crewmembers—did you
know that?’’
Her eyes fastened on his, almost against her will. ‘‘No,
Mr. Farnsworth, actually I didn’t.’’
‘‘But suicide, though. Now there’s another matter. . . .’’
Sylvester jerked her gaze away from him. Something
about his teeth, his gingery hair, set her stomach to seething.
She glared at Nancybeth, who peered back in fuddled
and exaggerated innocence. Taking hold of a nearby con-
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2 1 2
venience rail, Sylvester turned her back on both of them
and launched herself hastily outward, into the gloom.
‘‘Bye-bye, Sondra . . . sooorry we made you mad,’’
Nancybeth crooned as Sylvester disappeared through the
nearest doorway. She squinted at Farnsworth. ‘‘Suicide?
‘Sat mean you don’ have to pay Grant? I mean, for Grant?
’Cause he killed himself?’’
‘‘Might mean.’’ Farnsworth peered back owlishly. ‘‘Unless
he didn’t, of course.’’
‘‘Didn’t? Oh, yeah . . . an’ if he was murdered?’’
‘‘Ah, murder. Gray area, that.’’ Farnsworth tugged at
the knot of his blood-colored polymer tie. ‘‘I say, been
awfully good. But ’fraid I must run.’’
‘‘Yes, Wusspercy,’’ cooed the abandoned Nancybeth. So
that’s what he’d wanted from her, nothing more than a conversation
with Syl. ‘‘Run along, why don’t you? And while
you’re at it, take a hint from Commander Grant . . . ? Lose
your body too.’’
Across the room, not far away, Nikos Pavlakis floated
near the bar with his bulb of ouzo and his bag of olives.
He was well aware that they had been talking about him.
His temper urged him to confront Farnsworth, to call him
to immediate account, but his business sense urged him to
stay calm at all costs. He was frantic over the condition
of his beautiful new ship. He was almost equally sorrowful
for the man Grant, who had been a dependable employee
of his and his father’s for many years, and for Grant’s
widow and children. He was even more apprehensive
about the prospects of McNeil, another good man. . . .
Pavlakis thought he knew what had happened to Star
Queen. To him it was retrospectively obvious, transparently
so—but not, he hoped, to anyone else. Nor could he
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afford to breathe a word of his suspicions to anyone.
Farnsworth least of all.
As Helios slid into its parking orbit near Port Hesperus,
Sparta was poking about in Angus McNeil’s private cabin
on Star Queen.
She’d quickly looked through the galley, the personal
hygiene facility, the common areas. She’d found nothing
inconsistent with McNeil’s account. A slot in the medicine
chest which would have held a tiny vial of tasteless, odorless
poison was vacant. There were two packs of playing
cards in the drawer of the table in the common room, one
of which had never been opened, one of which had been
handled by both McNeil and Grant—McNeil’s traces were
strongest, although Grant had gripped one card tightly.
She noted its face.
After the common areas Sparta had visited the pilot’s
cabin next. It had not been entered since Wycherly was
last on the ship, before it left Falaron Shipyard.
Grant’s cabin, then—notable mostly for what it failed
to reveal. His bed was still made, the corners squared off
and the blanket so tight one could have bounced a nickel
off it at one gee. His clothes were neatly folded in the
restraining hampers. His bookshelf and personal-computer
files were mostly electronics manuals and selfimprovement
books; there were no signs that Grant did
any reading for pleasure or had any hobbies except fiddling
with microelectronics. The promised letters to his
wife and children were clipped to the little fold-down writing
desk, and Sparta left them there after ascertaining that
no one except Grant had touched them. McNeil, if he’d
been curious about their contents—as well he might have
been—had had the integrity to leave them strictly alone.
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In fact there was no trace of McNeil’s presence anywhere
in the room.
There was another letter, addressed to McNeil himself,
in Grant’s desk drawer. But as McNeil had not searched
the drawer, presumably he did not know of its existence.
McNeil’s cabin painted a portrait of quite a different
man. His bed had not been made for days, perhaps weeks—
Sparta noted purplish splotches of spilled wine on the
sheets that, if he’d been telling the truth about not getting
into Hold A after Grant changed the combination, had
been there since four days after the explosion. His clothes
were in a jumble, jammed into the hampers of his locker.
His chip library was a fascinating mix of titles. There were
works of mysticism: the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tsu, a treatise
on alchemy, another on the Cabala. And of philosophy:
Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, Nietzsche’s
The Birth of Tragedy.
Some of McNeil’s books were real, photogrammed onto
plastic sheets that imitated the paper of a hundred years
ago. Games: a slim little book on parlor magic, another
on chess, another on go. Novels: Cabell’s odd Jurgen, a
recent work of the Martian futurists, Dionysus Redivivus.
McNeil’s personal computer files revealed a different
but similarly wide range of interests—it took Sparta only
moments to discover that he had been playing master level
chess with his machine, that he had carefully followed the
London, New York, Tokyo, and Hong Kong stock exchanges,
that he subscribed to a variety of clubs, from
rose-of-the-month to wine-of-the-month. Wine and
roses—he must collect several months’ worth of each,
between trips.
There were other files on the computer, protected by
passwords that would have stopped a casual browser but
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2 1 5
which were so trivial Sparta barely noted them—files that
made full use of the machine’s high-resolution graphics.
The invention of the home video player a century ago had
brought erotic films into the living room, but that was a
mild innovation compared to what followed when the invention
of the cheap supercomputer-on-a-chip brought
new meaning to the phrase ‘‘interactive fantasy.’’ McNeil’s
id was much on display in these private files, which Sparta
closed hastily; despite her opinion of herself as sophisticated
beyond her years, her face had turned bright pink.
She made her way into the corridor that passed
through the center of the life support deck. Just on the
other side of these close, curving, featureless steel walls
the fatal explosion had occurred; at the same moment the
access panels had been automatically dogged shut to prevent
decompression of the crew module.
She went through the lock into the hold access then,
to the three locks that warned VACUUM and the one that
sternly wagged its bright yellow finger: ‘‘Unauthorized entry
strictly forbidden.’’
McNeil had told the truth. The traces of his and many
other hands resided on the keypad, but the most recent
trace was Peter Grant’s—his touch on six of the keys overlaid
all others. Sparta could not recover the order of
touch—six keys gave rise to six-factorial possible
combinations—but if she’d wanted to play a game with
herself she probably could have deduced the likelier possibilities
within a few seconds, from her knowledge of
probabilities and, mostly, from what she’d learned of the
man himself.
There was no point in taking the time. She’d already
uncovered the combination where Grant had noted it in
his personal computer files.
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2 1 6
She tapped the keys. The indicator diode beside the
lock blinked from red to green. She turned the wheel and
tugged on the hatch. Inside the airlock the indicators con-
firmed that the interior pressures of the hold were equal
to those outside the lock. She turned the wheel on the
inner hatch and a moment later floated into the hold.
It was a cramped circular space, hardly big enough to
stand erect in, ringed by steel racks filled with metal and
plastic bags and cases. The roof of the compartment was
the reinforced cap of the hold itself; the floor was a removable
steel partition, sealed to the walls. The wooden
ships that once plied Earth’s oceans commonly carried
sand and rocks for ballast when travelling without a paying
cargo, but ballast was worse than useless in space. Aft
of the few stacked shelves ringing the pressurized top of
the hold, the vessel was just a big bottle of vacuum.
The pallets near the airlock were strapped down securely,
carrying sacks of wild rice, asparagus tips in gel,
cases of live game birds frozen in suspended animation—
delicacies that, having made the trip from Earth, were
worth far more than their weight in gold.
And of course that miscellany which had snagged
Sparta’s attention in the manifest. Kara Antreen’s Cuban
cigars. Sondra Sylvester’s ‘‘books of no intrinsic value.’’
Sylvester’s books were in a gray Styrene case which
showed little sign of handling—Sparta noted Sylvester’s
own traces, McNeil’s, Grant’s, others unknown, but none
recent. Sparta quickly deduced the simple combination.
Inside she found a number of plastic-wrapped paper and
plastic books, some bound in cloth or leather, others with
quaint and lurid illustrated covers, but nothing she did not
expect to find. She resealed the case.
She moved next to Darlington’s consignment, a similar
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2 1 7
but not identical gray Styrene case equipped with an elaborate
magnetic lock, something even more complex than
the numeric pad on the airlock. The case showed no signs
of tampering. Oddly, it showed no signs of having been
handled at all. The only chemical signals on the entire case
were the strong contending odors of detergent, methyl alcohol,
acetone, and carbon tetrachloride. It seemed to have
been throughly scrubbed.
A defensive measure, that, like the human hair laid
across the crack in the closet door, intended to divulge
any attempts at searching or tampering? Well, there had
been no tampering.
Sparta proceeded to tamper with it. The lock’s code was
based on a short stack of rather small primes. No one without
Sparta’s sensitivities could have cracked the combination
in less than a few days, without the aid of a sizable
computer—it would take that long just to run through half
the possible combinations. But Sparta eliminated possibilities
by the millions and billions, instantly, simply by
reading electronic pathways deep in the lock’s circuitry
and discarding those that were dormant.
She was in trance while she did it. Five minutes later
she had the lock open. Inside the case was the book.
The man who had had this book made for himself had
reveled in fine things. He had valued the presentation of
his hard-wrought words so much that he would not let
those he hoped to impress with it, or even his friends, see
anything but the best. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had
not only been given the trappings of a marbled slipcase,
leather binding, and beautiful endpapers, it had been
printed like the King James Bible itself, on Bible paper, set
in double columns of linotype.
Sparta had heard about metal type, although she had
V E N U S P R I M E
2 1 8
never actually seen the effect of it. She slid the book from
its case, let it gently push itself open. Sure enough, each
single letter and character was pressed onto the paper, not
simply appearing there as a filmy overlay but as a precise
quantity of ink pushed crisply into the pulp. That sort of
craftsmanship in an object of ‘‘mass production’’ was beyond
Sparta’s experience. The paper itself was thin and
supple, not like the crumbling discolored sheets she had
seen in the New York library, displayed as relics of the
past. . . .
The richness and glory of the book in her hand was
hypnotic, calling her to handle its pages. For the moment
she forgot investigation. She only wanted to experience
the thing. She studied the page to which it had spontaneously
opened.
‘‘An accident was meaner than deliberate fault,’’ the author
had written. ‘‘If I did not hesitate to risk my life, why
fuss to dirty it? Yet life and honour seemed in different categories.
. . . or was honour like the Sybil’s leaves, the more
that was lost the more precious the little left . . . ?’’
An odd thought. ‘‘Honour’’ considered as a commodity,
the more that was lost the more precious what was left.
Sparta closed the fabulous book and slid it back into
its slipcase, then settled the whole thick package into its
padded case. She had seen what she needed to of Star
Queen.
2 1 9
XVI
‘‘Ladies and gentlemen, I regret to announce that there will
be a delay in the disembarkation process. A representative
from Port Hesperus will be joining us shortly to explain.
To facilitate matters, all passengers should report to the
lounge as soon as possible. Stewards will assist you.’’
Unlike Star Queen, Helios had arrived at Port Hesperus
in the normal way, grappled into parking orbit by shortrange
tugs. Plainly visible through the windows of the
ship’s lounge, the space station hung in the sky a kilometer
away, its wheels revolving grandly against the bright crescent
of Venus, the green of its famous gardens glinting
through the banded skylights of its central sphere. Murmuring
resentment, the passengers gathered in the lounge;
the most reluctant found themselves ‘‘helped’’ by stewards
who seemed to have forgotten deference. All aboard the
ship, passengers and crew, were frustrated to have travelled
millions of kilometers across a trackless sea and at
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2 2 0
the last moment to be prevented from setting foot on the
shore.
A bright spark moved against the insect cloud of other
spacecraft drifting about the station, and soon resolved
itself into a tiny white launch bearing the familiar blue
band and gold star insignia. The launch docked at the
main airlock and a few minutes later a tall, square-jawed
blond man pulled himself briskly into the lounge.
‘‘I’m Inspector Viktor Proboda, Port Hesperus office of
the Board of Space Control,’’ he said to the assembled passengers,
most of whom were unhappily glowering. ‘‘You
will be detained here temporarily while we continue our
investigation into the recent events aboard Star Queen; we
sincerely regret any inconvenience this may cause. First
I’ll need to establish that your registration slivers are in
order. Then I will soon be approaching some of you individually
and asking you to assist us in our inquiries. . . .’’
Ten minutes after she left Star Queen, Sparta knocked
on the door of Angus McNeil’s private ward. ‘‘Ellen Troy,
Mr. McNeil.’’
‘‘C’m in,’’ he said cheerily, and when she opened the
door he was standing there smiling at her from his freshly
shaved face, wearing a freshly pressed, luxurious cotton
shirt with its sleeves folded above the elbows and crisp
plastic trousers, and puffing lightly on a cigarette he had
evidently lit only moments before.
‘‘I’m sorry to interrupt you,’’ she said, seeing the open
kit on the bed. He had been packing bathroom articles;
she noted that they seem to have been issued from the
same government stores as her own hastily acquired
toothbrush.
‘‘Good time for a fresh start. Sorry you had to see that
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2 2 1
mess of mine—might just chuck the lot, whenever you decide
to let me back aboard.’’
‘‘That will be a while yet, I’m afraid.’’
‘‘More questions, Inspector?’’ When she nodded yes, he
gestured to a chair and took another for himself. ‘‘Better
make ourselves comfortable, then.’’
Sparta sat down. For a moment she watched him without
speaking. McNeil’s color was much better, and although
he would be gaunt for some time to come, he
appeared not to have lost his muscle tone. Even after days
of near-starvation, his forearms were powerfully muscled.
‘‘Well, Mr. McNeil, it’s fascinating what the latest diagnostic
techniques can recover from even the most obscure
pools of data. Take Star Queen’s mission recorder, for example.’’
McNeil drew on his cigarette and watched her. His
pleasant expression did not change.
‘‘All the data from the automatic systems is complete,
of course. And the microphones get every word spoken on
the flight deck. What I listened to confirmed your account
of the incident in every detail.’’
McNeil raised an eyebrow. ‘‘You’ve hardly had time to
screen a couple of weeks’ worth of real-time recordings,
Inspector.’’
‘‘You’re right, of course. A thorough review will take
months. I employed an algorithm that identifies areas of
maximum interest. What I want to talk to you about now
is the discussion that took place in the common area
shortly before you and Grant made your last broadcast.’’
‘‘I’m not sure I recall . . .’’
‘‘That’s where these new diagnostic techniques are so
helpful, you see.’’ She leaned forward, as if to share her
enthusiasm. ‘‘Even though there are no microphones in the
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2 2 2
living areas, enough sound carries to be picked up by the
main flight recorder. In the past we wouldn’t have been
able to recover the exact words.’’
She let that sink in. His expression still didn’t change,
but his features almost imperceptibly stiffened. She knew
he was wondering whether she was bluffing.
She would remove that hope. ‘‘You’d just eaten dinner
together. Grant had served you coffee—it was hotter than
usual. He left you there and started for the corridor.
‘What’s the hurry?’ you asked him. ‘I though we had something
to discuss. . . .’ ’’
Now the last hint of relaxation left McNeil’s eyes. As
he crushed his cigarette his fleshy cheeks jiggled.
‘‘Well, Mr. McNeil,’’ Sparta said softly, ‘‘do you and I
have something to discuss?’’
For a moment McNeil seemed to look past her, into the
blank white wall behind her head. Then his eyes refocused
on her face. He nodded. ‘‘Aye, I’ll tell you everythin’,’’ he
whispered. ‘‘I would make one request—not a condition, I
know better than that—but simply a request, that once
you’ve heard me out, if you agree with my reasonin’,
you’ll keep what I’m about to say off the record.’’
‘‘I’ll bear that request in mind,’’ she said.
McNeil sighed deeply. ‘‘Then here’s the whole truth,
Inspector. . . .’’
Grant had already reached the central corridor when
McNeil called softly after him, ‘‘What’s the hurry? I
thought we had something to discuss.’’
Grant grabbed a rail to halt his headlong flight. He
turned slowly and stared unbelievingly at the engineer.
McNeil should be already dead—but he was sitting quite
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2 2 3
comfortably, looking at him with a most peculiar expression.
‘‘Come over here,’’ McNeil said sharply—and in that
moment it suddenly seemed that all authority had passed
to him. Grant returned to the table without volition, hovering
near his useless chair. Something had gone wrong,
though what it was he could not imagine.
The silence in the common area seemed to last for ages.
Then McNeil said rather sadly, ‘‘I’d hoped better of you,
Grant.’’
At last Grant found his voice, though he could barely
recognize it. ‘‘What do you mean?’’ he whispered.
‘‘What do you think I mean?’’ replied McNeil, with
what seemed no more than mild irritation. ‘‘This little attempt
of yours to poison me, of course.’’
Grant’s tottering world collapsed at last. Oddly, in his
relief he no longer cared greatly that he’d been found out.
McNeil began to examine his beautifully kept fingernails
with some attention. ‘‘As a matter of interest,’’ he
asked, in the way that one might ask the time, ‘‘when did
you decide to kill me?’’
The sense of unreality was so overwhelming that Grant
felt he was acting a part, that this had nothing to do with
real life at all. ‘‘Only this morning,’’ he said, and believed it.
‘‘Hmm,’’ remarked McNeil, obviously without much
conviction. He rose to his feet and moved over to the medicine
chest. Grant’s eyes followed him as he fumbled in
the compartment and came back with the little poison bottle.
It still appeared to be full. Grant had been careful
about that.
‘‘I suppose I should get pretty mad about this whole
business,’’ McNeil continued conversationally, holding the
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2 2 4
bottle between thumb and forefinger. ‘‘But somehow I’m
not. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had many illusions
about human nature. And, of course, I saw it coming a
long time ago.’’
Only the last phrase really reached Grant’s consciousness.
‘‘You . . . saw it coming?’’
‘‘Heavens, yes! You’re too transparent to make a good
criminal, I’m afraid. And now that your little plot’s failed
it leaves us both in an embarrassing position, doesn’t it?’’
To this masterly understatement there seemed no possible
reply.
‘‘By rights,’’ continued the engineer thoughtfully, ‘‘I
should now work myself into a good temper, call Port
Hesperus, denounce you to the authorities. But it would
be a rather pointless thing to do, and I’ve never been much
good at losing my temper anyway. Of course, you’ll say
that’s because I’m too lazy—but I don’t think so.’’ He gave
Grant a twisted smile. ‘‘Oh, I know what you think about
me—you’ve got me neatly classified in that orderly mind
of yours, haven’t you? I’m soft and self-indulgent, I
haven’t any moral courage—any morals at all, for that
matter—and I don’t give a damn for anyone but myself.
Well, I’m not denying it. Maybe it’s ninety percent true.
But the odd ten percent is mighty important, Grant. At
least to me.’’
Grant felt in no condition to indulge in psychological
analysis, and this seemed hardly the time for anything of
the sort. He was still obsessed with the problem of his
failure and the mystery of McNeil’s continued existence.
And McNeil, who knew this perfectly well, seemed in no
hurry to satisfy his curiosity.
‘‘Well, what do you intend to do now?’’ Grant asked,
anxious to get it over.
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2 2 5
‘‘I would like,’’ McNeil said calmly, ‘‘to carry on our
discussion where it was interrupted by the coffee.’’
‘‘You don’t mean . . .’’
‘‘But I do. Just as if nothing had happened.’’
‘‘That doesn’t make sense! You’ve got something up
your sleeve!’’ cried Grant.
McNeil sighed. ‘‘You know, Grant, you’re in no position
to accuse me of plotting anything’’—he released the little
bottle to float above the surface of the table between them;
he looked up sternly at Grant. ‘‘To repeat my earlier remarks,
I am suggesting that we decide which one of us
shall take poison. Only we don’t want any more unilateral
decisions. Also’’—and he drew another vial from his jacket
pocket, similar in size to the first but bright blue in color;
he allowed it to float beside the other—‘‘it will be the real
thing this time. The stuff in here,’’ he said, pointing to the
clear bottle, ‘‘merely leaves a bad taste in the mouth.’’
The light finally dawned in Grant’s mind. ‘‘You
changed them.’’
‘‘Naturally. You may think you’re a good actor, Grant,
but frankly, from the balcony, I thought the performance
stank. I could tell you were plotting something, probably
before you knew it yourself. In the last few days I’ve deloused
the ship pretty thoroughly. Thinking of all the ways
you might have done me in was quite amusing; it even
helped pass the time. The poison was so obvious that it
was almost the first thing I fixed.’’ He smiled wryly. ‘‘In
fact I overdid the danger signal. I nearly gave myself away
when I took that first sip—salt doesn’t go at all well with
coffee.’’
McNeil fixed unblinking eyes on the embittered Grant
before going on. ‘‘Actually, I’d hoped for something more
subtle. So far I’ve found fifteen infallible ways of mur-
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2 2 6
dering anyone aboard a spaceship.’’ He smiled again,
grimly. ‘‘I don’t propose to describe them now.’’
This was simply fantastic, Grant thought. He was being
treated, not like a criminal, but like a rather stupid schoolboy
who hadn’t done his homework properly. ‘‘Yet you
are willing to start all over again?’’ he asked, unbelieving.
‘‘And you’d take the poison yourself if you lost?’’
McNeil was silent for a long time. Then he said, slowly,
‘‘I can see that you still don’t believe me. It doesn’t fit at
all nicely into your tidy little picture, does it? But perhaps
I can make you understand. It’s really simple.’’ He paused,
then continued more briskly. ‘‘I’ve enjoyed life, Grant, without
many scruples or regrets—but the better part of it’s over
now and I don’t cling to what’s left as desperately as you
might imagine. Yet while I am alive I’m rather particular
about some things.’’ He allowed himself to drift farther from
the table. ‘‘It may surprise you to know that I’ve got any
ideals at all. But I’ve always tried to act like a civilized,
rational being, even if I’ve not always succeeded. And when
I’ve failed I’ve tried to redeem myself. You might say that’s
what this is about.’’ He gestured at the tiny weightless bottles.
He paused, and when he resumed it was as though he,
and not Grant, were on the defensive. ‘‘I’ve never exactly
liked you, Grant, but I’ve often admired you and that’s
why I’m sorry it’s come to this. I admired you most of all
the day the ship was hit.’’ He seemed to have difficulty
finding his words: he avoided Grant’s eyes. ‘‘I didn’t behave
well then. I’ve always been quite sure, complacent
really, that I’d never lose my nerve in an emergency—but
then it happened right beside me, something I understood
instantly and had always thought to be impossible—happened
so suddenly, so loud, that it bowled me over.’’
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2 2 7
He attempted to hide his embarrassment with humor.
‘‘Of course I should have remembered—practically the same
thing happened on my first trip. Spacesickness, that time
. . . and I’d been supremely confident it couldn’t happen to
me. Probably made it worse. But I got over it.’’ He met
Grant’s eyes again. ‘‘And I got over this . . . and then I got
the third big surprise of my life. I saw you, of all people,
beginning to crack.’’
Grant flushed angrily, but McNeil met him sharply.
‘‘Oh yes, let’s not forget the business of the wines. No
doubt that’s still on your mind. Your first good grudge
against me. But that’s one thing I don’t regret. A civilized
man should always know when to get drunk. And when
to sober up. Perhaps you wouldn’t understand.’’
Oddly, that’s just what Grant was beginning to do, at
last. He had caught his first real glimpse of McNeil’s intricate
and tortured personality and realized how utterly
he had misjudged him. No—misjudged was not the right
word. In some ways his judgment had been correct. But it
had only touched the surface; he had never suspected the
depths that lay beneath.
And in his moment of insight Grant understood why
McNeil was giving him a second chance. This was nothing
so simple as a coward trying to reinstate himself in the
eyes of the world: no one need ever know what happened
aboard Star Queen. And in any case, McNeil probably
cared nothing for the world’s opinion, thanks to the sleek
self-sufficiency that had so often annoyed Grant. But that
very self-sufficiency meant that at all costs he must preserve
his own good opinion of himself. Without it life
would not be worth living; McNeil had never accepted life
save on his own terms.
McNeil was watching Grant intently and must have
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2 2 8
guessed that Grant was coming near the truth. He suddenly
changed his tone, as if sorry he had revealed so
much of his own character. ‘‘Don’t think I get some quixotic
pleasure from turning the other cheek,’’ he said
sharply, ‘‘it’s just that you’ve over-looked some rather basic
logical difficulties. Really, Grant—didn’t it once occur
to you that if only one of us survives without a covering
message from the other, he’ll have a very uncomfortable
time explaining what happened?’’
Grant was dumbstruck. In the depths of his seething
emotions, in the blindness of his fury, he had simply failed
to consider how he was going to exculpate himself. His
righteousness had seemed so . . . so self evident.
‘‘Yes, I suppose you’re right,’’ he murmured. Still, he
privately wondered if a covering message was really all
that important in McNeil’s thoughts. Perhaps McNeil was
simply trying to convince him that his sincerity was based
on cold reason.
Nevertheless, Grant felt better now. All the hate had
drained out of him and he felt—almost—at peace. The truth
was known and he accepted it. That it was rather different
from what he had imagined hardly seemed to matter.
‘‘Well, let’s get it over,’’ he said, unemotionally. ‘‘Don’t we
still have that new pack of cards?’’
‘‘Yes, a couple of them in the drawer there.’’ McNeil
had taken off his jacket and was rolling up his shirtsleeves.
‘‘Find the one you want—but before you open it, Grant,’’
he said with peculiar emphasis, ‘‘I think we’d better speak
to Port Hesperus. Both of us. And get our complete agreement
on the record.’’
Grant nodded absently; he did not mind very much
now, one way or the other. He grabbed a sealed pack of
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2 2 9
the metallized cards from the game drawer and followed
McNeil up the corridor to the flight deck. They left the
glinting poison bottles floating where they were.
Grant even managed a ghost of a smile when, ten
minutes later, he drew his card from the pack and laid it
face upward beside McNeil’s. It fastened itself to the metal
console with a faintly perceptible snap.
McNeil fell silent. For a minute he busied himself lighting
a fresh cigarette. He inhaled the fragrant, poisonous
smoke deeply. Then he said, ‘‘And the rest you already
know, Inspector.’’
‘‘Except for a few minor details,’’ Sparta said coolly.
‘‘What became of the two bottles, the real poison and the
other?’’
‘‘Out the airlock with Grant,’’ he replied shortly. ‘‘I
thought it would be better to keep things simple, not run
the risk of a chemical analysis—revealing traces of salt,
that kind of thing.’’
Sparta brought a package of metallized playing cards
from her jacket pocket. ‘‘Do you recognize these?’’ She
handed them to him.
He took them in his large, curiously neat hands, hardly
bothering to look at them. ‘‘They could be the ones we
used. Or others like them.’’
‘‘Would you mind shuffling the pack, Mr. McNeil?’’
The engineer glanced at her sharply, then did as he was
told, expertly shuffling the thin, flexible cards in midair
between his curved palms and nimble fingers. Finished, he
looked at her inquisitively.
‘‘Cut, if you don’t mind,’’ she said.
‘‘That would be your privilege, wouldn’t it?’’
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‘‘You do it.’’
He laid the deck on the nearby lamp table and swiftly
moved the top section of the deck to one side, then placed
the bottom section on top of it. He leaned away. ‘‘What
now?’’
‘‘Now I’d like you to shuffle them again.’’
The look on his face, as blank as he could make it,
nevertheless barely concealed his contempt. He had shared
one of the more significant episodes of his life with her,
and her response was to ask him to play games—no doubt
in some feeble attempt to trick him into something. But
he shuffled the cards quickly, making no comment, letting
the hiss and snarl of their separation and swift recombination
make the comment for him. ‘‘And now?’’
‘‘Now I’ll choose a card.’’
He fanned the deck and held it toward her. She reached
for it but let her fingers hover over the cards, moving back
and forth as if she were trying to make up her mind. Still
concentrating, she said, ‘‘You’re quite expert at handling
these, Mr. McNeil.’’
‘‘Nor have I made a secret of it, Inspector.’’
‘‘It was no secret to begin with, Mr. McNeil.’’ She
tugged a card from the edge of the deck and held it up,
toward him, without bothering to look at it herself.
He stared at it, shocked.
‘‘That would be the jack of spades, wouldn’t it, Mr.
McNeil? The card you drew against Commander Grant?’’
He barely whispered yes before she plucked another
card from the deck he still rigidly held out to her. Again
she showed it to him without looking at it. ‘‘And that
would be the three of clubs. The card Grant drew, which
sent him to his death.’’ She flipped the two cards onto the
bed. ‘‘You can put the deck down now, Mr. McNeil.’’
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His cigarette burned unnoticed in the ashtray. He had
already anticipated the point of her little demonstration,
and he waited for her to make it.
‘‘Metallized cards aren’t allowed in professional play
for a simple reason,’’ she said, ‘‘with which I’m sure you’re
quite familiar. They aren’t as easy to mark with knicks and
pinholes as the cardboard kind, but it’s a simple matter to
impose a weak electric or magnetic pattern on them that
can be picked up by an appropriate detector. Such a detector
can be quite small—small enough, say, to fit into a
ring like the one you’re wearing on your right hand. That’s
a handsome piece—Venusian gold, isn’t it?’’
It was handsome and intricate, portraying a man and
woman embracing; if examined closely, in fact, it was
more than a little curious. Without hesitating, McNeil
twisted the heavy sculpted ring over his knuckle. It came
off easily, for his finger was thinner than it had been a
week ago. He held it out to her, but to his surprise, she
shook her head—
—and smiled. ‘‘I don’t need to look at it, Mr. McNeil.
The only coherent patterns on these cards were imposed
by me, a few minutes ago.’’ She leaned away from him,
relaxing in her chair, inviting him to relax as well. ‘‘I used
other methods to determine which cards had been drawn
by you and Grant. They were the only two cards in the
deck which seemed to have been handled beyond a light
shuffle. Frankly, I was partly guessing.’’
‘‘You made a lucky guess, then,’’ he said hoarsely,
having found his voice. ‘‘But if you aren’t accusing me of
cheating on Grant, why this demonstration? Some people
might call it unusual, maybe even cruel.’’
‘‘Oh, but you,’’ she said fiercely. ‘‘You wouldn’t have
needed electromagnetic patterns to cheat, would you, Mr.
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McNeil?’’ She glanced at his forearms, which rested on his
thighs, his hands clasped between his knees. ‘‘Even with
your sleeves rolled up.’’
He shook his head no. ‘‘I could have cheated him easily
enough, Inspector Troy. But I swear I didn’t.’’
‘‘Thank you for saying so. Although I was confident
that you would admit the truth.’’ Sparta got to her feet.
‘‘ ‘Life and honour seemed in different categories. . . . the
more that was lost the more precious the little left.’ ’’
‘‘What’s that mean?’’ McNeil growled.
‘‘From an old book I glanced at recently—a passage
that made me want to read the whole thing someday. It
gave me considerable insight into your situation. You’re
quite good at concealing truths, Mr. McNeil, but your particular
sense of honor makes it very difficult for you to lie
outright.’’ She smiled. ‘‘No wonder you almost choked on
that coffee.’’
McNeil’s expression was puzzled now, almost humble.
How could this pale, slim child have peered so deeply into
his soul? ‘‘I still don’t understand what you mean to do.’’
Sparta reached into her jacket again and brought out
a small plastic book. ‘‘Star Queen will be inspected by
other people after me, and they will be at least as thorough
as I’ve been. Since you and I know you didn’t cheat Grant
out of his life, it’s probably a good thing you thought to
bring this book out with you, and that I never found it,
and that I never had any suspicion of what a gifted amateur
magician you are.’’
She tossed the book on the bed, beside the cards. It
landed face up: Harry Blackstone on Magic.
‘‘Keep the cards, too. Little gift to help you get well
soon. I bought them ten minutes ago at a kiosk in the
station.’’
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McNeil said, ‘‘I’m having the feelin’ that nothing I said
came as much of a surprise to you, Inspector.’’
Sparta had her hand on the door panel, poised to leave.
‘‘Don’t think I admire you, Mr. McNeil. Your life and the
way you choose to live it is your business. But it so happens
I agree that there’s no justification for destroying the
late, unfortunate Peter Grant’s reputation.’’ She wasn’t
smiling now. ‘‘That’s me speaking privately, not the law.
If you’ve kept anything else from me, I’ll find it out—and
if it’s criminal, I’ll have you for it.’’
2 3 5
PART FIVE
BLOWOUT
2 3 7
XVII
Sparta reached Viktor Proboda on the commlink: he could
stop playing games now. The passengers from Helios could
come aboard.
Spaceports in space—unlike planetside shuttleports,
which resemble ordinary airports—have a flavor all their
own, part harbor, part trainyard, part truckstop. Small
craft abound, tugs and tenders and taxis and cutters and
self-propelled satellites, perpetually sliding and gliding
around the big stations. There are very few pleasure craft
in space (the eccentric billionaire’s hobby of solar yachting
provides a rare exception) and unlike a busy harbor, there
is no swashing about, no bounding over wakes or insolent
cutting across bows. The daily routine is orbit-matching—
exquisitely precise, with attendant constant recalculation
of velocity differentials and mass/fuel ratios—so that in
space even the small craft are as rigidly constrained to
preset paths as freight cars in a switching yard. Except
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that in space, gangs of computers are continually rearranging
the tracks.
And aside from local traffic, spaceports are not very
busy. Shuttles from the planet’s surface may call a few
times a mouth, interplanetary liners and freighters a few
times a year. Favorable planetary alignments tend to concentrate
the busy times; then local chambers of commerce
turn out costumed volunteers in force, greeting arriving
liners the way Honolulu once greeted the Lurline and the
Matsonia. Lacking indigenous grass skirts or flower leis,
space station boosters have invented novel ‘‘traditions’’ to
reflect a station’s ethnic and political mix, its economic
base, its borrowed mythologies: thus, arriving at Mars Station,
a passenger might encounter men and women wearing
Roman breastplates, showing their bare knees, and
carrying red flags emblazoned with hammers and sickles.
At Port Hesperus the passengers from Helios, disembarking
after a long delay, traversed a winding stainless
steel corridor rippling with colored lights, garish signs
boasting of the station’s mineral products in English and
Arabic and Russian; kanji-splashed paper banners, fluttering
in the breeze from the exhaust fans, added an additional
touch of festivity.
When the passengers reached a glass-roofed section of
the corridor they were distracted by a silent commotion
overhead; looking up, they were startled to see a chitoned
Aphrodite riding a plastic seashell, smiling and waving at
them, and near her a Shinto sun goddess wafting prettily
in her silk kimono. Both women floated freely in zero-gee,
at odd angles to each other and everyone else. These apparitions
of the station’s goddess (the Japanese were
stretching the identity some) were haloed by a dozen grinning
men, women, and children gesturing with fruit-and-
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flower baskets, products of the station’s hydroponic farms
and gardens.
The passengers, before being allowed to ascend to the
level of these heavenly creatures, faced one last obstacle.
At the terminus of the corridor Inspector Viktor Proboda,
flanked by respectful guards with stunguns at their sides,
ushered them into a small cubical room upholstered on all
six sides with dark blue carpet. Some were admitted individually,
some in groups. On one wall of the carpeted
cube a videoplate displayed the stern visage of Inspector
Ellen Troy, bigger than life-size. She was ostentatiously
studying a filescreen in front of her, its surface invisible
to the videoplate watcher.
Sparta was actually in a hidden room not far from the
disembarkation tube, and in fact she was paying no attention
to the filescreen, which was a prop. She had arranged
with Proboda to bring the passengers into the room in a
specific order, and she had already disposed of most of
them, including the Japanese professor and the Arabs with
their families, and various engineers and travelling salesmen.
At the moment she was trying to hustle the Dutch
schoolgirls on their way. ‘‘We won’t have to detain you
any longer,’’ she said with a friendly smile.
‘‘Hope the rest of your trip is more fun.’’
‘‘This has been the best part,’’ one of them said, and
another added, with much batting of lashes at Proboda,
‘‘We really are liking your comrade.’’ The third girl, however,
looked as prim as Proboda himself.
‘‘Through here, please,’’ he said, ‘‘all of you. To your
right. Let’s move it along.’’
‘‘Bye, Vikee . . .’’
‘‘Vikee’’ felt Sparta’s amused gaze from the videoplate,
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but he managed to hurry the girls out and get Percy Farnsworth
into the room without having to look her image in
the eye. ‘‘Mr. Percy Farnsworth, London, representing
Lloyd’s.’’ Farnsworth came into the interrogation cube
with mustache twitching. ‘‘Mr. Farnsworth, Inspector
Troy,’’ Proboda said, indicating the videoplate.
Farnsworth managed to be brisk and breathless at the
same time. ‘‘Eager to be of assistance in your investigation,
Inspector. Say the word. This sort of thing my specialty,
you know.’’
Sparta watched him, expressionless, for two seconds: a
veteran confidence man who’d done his time, now working
for the other side. That was the story, at any rate.
‘‘You’ve already been helpful, sir. Given us a great many
leads.’’ She pretended to peruse his file on her dummy
filescreen. ‘‘Mm. Your Lloyd’s syndicate seems to have
been quite enthusiastic about Star Queen. Insured the ship,
most of the cargo, the lives of the crew.’’
‘‘Quite. And naturally I’d like to contact Lloyd’s as soon
as possible, file a preliminary . . .’’
She interrupted. ‘‘Well, off the record, I’d say the underwriters
have gotten off lightly.’’
Farnsworth mulled this bit of information—what exactly
did she mean?—and apparently decided the inspector
was willing to play cozy with him. ‘‘Encouraging, that,’’
he said, and dropped his voice to a confidential murmur.
‘‘But would you mind terribly . . . this business with
Grant . . .’’
‘‘I suppose you’d like to know if it was legally an accident
or a suicide. That’s the big question here. Unfortunately
the solicitors will just have to fight it out, Mr.
Farnsworth. I have nothing to add to the public record.’’
Her tone conveyed no coziness. ‘‘I’ll accept your kind offer
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of further assistance. Please move through that door on
the left and wait for me inside.’’
‘‘There?’’ A door into a grim steel tube had suddenly
opened in the carpetry. He peered through it hesitantly, as
if expecting to meet a wild animal.
Sparta prodded him. ‘‘I won’t keep you more than ten
minutes, sir. Carry on. Eh?’’
With a mumbled ‘‘Quite,’’ Farnsworth moved through
the door. The moment he was clear it popped shut behind
him. Proboda quickly opened the door to the disembarkation
tube. ‘‘Mr. Nikos Pavlakis, Athens, representing
Pavlakis Lines,’’ Proboda said. ‘‘This is Inspector Troy.’’
Pavlakis bobbed his big head and said, ‘‘Good day, Inspector.’’
Sparta did not acknowledge him until she had
finished reading something from her filescreen. Meanwhile
he tugged nervously at the cuffs of his tight jacket.
‘‘I see this is your first visit to Venus, Mr. Pavlakis,’’
she said, looking up. ‘‘Regrettable circumstances.’’
‘‘How is Mr. McNeil, Inspector?’’ Pavlakis asked. ‘‘Is he
well? May I talk to him?’’
‘‘The clinic has already released him. You’ll be able to
talk to him soon.’’ His concern struck her as sincere, but
it did not deflect her from her line. ‘‘Mr. Pavlakis, I note
that Star Queen is a new registry, yet the ship is actually
thirty years old. What was her former registry?’’
The heavyset man flinched. ‘‘She has been completely
refurbished, Inspector. Everything but the basic frame is
new, or reconditioned, with a few minor . . .’’
Viktor Proboda cut into Pavlakis’s nervous improvisation.
‘‘She asked for the former registry.’’
‘‘I . . . I believe the registry was NSS 69376, Inspector.’’
‘‘Kronos,’’ Sparta said. The word was an accusation.
‘‘Ceres in ’67, two members of the crew dead, a third
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woman injured, all cargo lost. Mars Station ’73, docking
collision killed four workers on the station, cargo in one
hold destroyed. Numerous accidents since involving loss
of cargo. Several people have been injured and at least
one other death has been attributed to below-standard
maintenance. You had good reason to rechristen the ship,
Mr. Pavlakis.’’
‘‘Kronos was not a good name for a spaceship,’’ Pavlakis
said.
She nodded solemnly. ‘‘A titan who ate his own children.
It must have been difficult to line up qualified
crews.’’
Pavlakis’s amber beads were working their way over
and through his strong fingers. ‘‘When will I be allowed
to examine my ship and its cargo, Inspector?’’
‘‘I’ll answer your questions as best I can, Mr. Pavlakis.
As soon as I finish this procedure. Please wait for me—
through that door to your left.’’
Again the invisible door yawned unexpectedly on the
cold steel tube. Grimly, staring down over his mustache,
Pavlakis moved through it without another word.
When the door closed Proboda admitted the next passenger
from the disembarkation tube. ‘‘Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa,
Port Hesperus, unemployed.’’ She came in mad,
glared at Proboda wordlessly, sneered at the videoplate.
As the corridor door closed, sealing her inside, Proboda
said, ‘‘This is Inspector Troy.’’
‘‘Ms. Mokoroa, a year ago you sued to break a threeyear
companionship contract with Mr. Vincent Darlington,
shortly after you both had arrived here. The grounds were
sexual incompatibility. Was Mr. Darlington aware at the
time that you had already become the de facto companion
of Mrs. Sondra Sylvester?’’
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2 4 3
Nancybeth stared silently at the image on the videoplate,
her face set in a mask of contempt that was the
product of long practice—
—and which Sparta easily recognized as cover for her
desperate confusion. Sparta waited.
‘‘We’re friends,’’ Nancybeth said huskily.
Sparta said, ‘‘That’s nice. Was Mr. Darlington aware at
the time that you were also lovers?’’
‘‘Just friends, that’s all!’’ The young woman stared
wildly around at the claustrophobic carpeted room, at the
hulking policeman beside her. ‘‘What the hell do you think
you’re trying to prove? What is this . . . ?’’
‘‘All right, we’ll drop the subject. Now if you
would . . .’’
‘‘I want a lawyer,’’ Nancybeth shrieked, deciding that
offense was better than defense. ‘‘In here, right now. I
know my rights.’’
‘‘. . . answer just one more question,’’ Sparta finished
quietly.
‘‘Not another damned word! Not one more word, bluesuit.
This is unlawful detainment. Unreasonable
search. . . .’’
Sparta and Proboda traded glances. Search?
‘‘Impugnment of dignity,’’ Nancybeth continued.
‘‘Slanderous implication. Malicious aforethought . . .’’
Sparta almost grinned. ‘‘Don’t sue us until you hear the
question, okay?’’
‘‘So we don’t have to arrest you first,’’ Proboda added.
Nancybeth choked on her anger, realizing she’d jumped
the gun. They hadn’t arrested her yet. Possibly they
wouldn’t. ‘‘What d’you wanna know?’’ She sounded suddenly
exhausted.
‘‘Nancybeth, do you think either of them—Sylvester or
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Darlington—would be capable of committing murder . . .
for your sake?’’
Nancybeth was startled into laughter. ‘‘The way they
talk about each other? They both would.’’
Proboda leaned toward her. ‘‘The Inspector didn’t ask
you what they . . .’’
But Sparta silenced him with a glance from the videoplate.
‘‘Okay, thanks, you can go. Through that door to
your right.’’
‘‘Right?’’ Proboda asked, and Sparta nodded sharply.
He opened the doorway.
Nancybeth was suspicious. ‘‘Where’s that go?’’
‘‘Out,’’ Proboda said. ‘‘Fruits and costumes. You’re
free.’’
The young woman stared wide-eyed around the room
again, her flaring nostrils seeming almost to quiver. Then
she darted through the door like a wildcat freed from a
trap. Proboda looked at the videoplate, exasperated. ‘‘Why
not her? It looked to me like she had a lot to hide.’’
‘‘What she’s hiding has nothing to do with Star Queen,
Viktor. It’s from her own past, I’d guess. Who’s next?’’
‘‘Mrs. Sylvester. Look, I have to say I hope you’ll handle
this with more tact than . . .’’
‘‘Let’s play the game the way we agreed.’’
Proboda grunted and opened the door to the tube.
‘‘Mrs. Sondra Sylvester, Port Hesperus, chief executive of
the Ishtar Mining Corporation.’’ His voice was as formal,
as heavy with respect as a majordomo’s.
Sondra Sylvester floated smoothly into the small carpeted
room, her heavy silks clinging about her. ‘‘Viktor?
Must we go through this yet again?’’
‘‘Mrs. Sylvester, I’d like to present Inspector Troy,’’ he
said apologetically.
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2 4 5
‘‘I’m sure you’re eager to get to your office, Mrs. Sylvester,’’
Sparta said, ‘‘so I’ll be brief.’’
‘‘My office can wait,’’ Sylvester said firmly. ‘‘I’d like to
unload my robots from that freighter.’’
Sparta dipped her gaze to the phony filescreen, then
up to Sylvester’s eyes. The women stared at each other
through the electronics. ‘‘You’ve never dealt with Pavlakis
Lines before,’’ Sparta said, ‘‘yet you helped persuade both
the Board of Space Control and the ship’s insurers to waive
the crew-of-three rule.’’
‘‘I believe I’ve just told Inspector Proboda why. I have
six mining robots in the cargo, Inspector. I need to put
them to work soon.’’
‘‘You were very lucky, then.’’ Sparta’s relaxed voice
conceded no sign that she was being pressured. ‘‘You
could have lost them all.’’
‘‘Unlikely. Less likely, even, than that a meteoroid
would strike a ship in the first place. Which at any rate
has nothing to do with the size of Star Queen’s crew.’’
‘‘Then would you have preferred to trust your robots—
insured for approximately nine hundred million dollars, I
believe—to an unmanned spacecraft?’’
Sylvester smiled at that. It was an astute question, with
political and economical overtones one hardly expected
from a criminal inspector. ‘‘There are no unmanned interplanetary
freighters, Inspector—thanks to the Space Board,
and a long list of other lobbyists, the predictable sort of
special interest groups. I don’t waste time on hypothetical
questions.’’
‘‘Where did you spend the last three weeks of your
Earth holidays, Mrs. Sylvester?’’
A decidedly non-hypothetical question—and it cost
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Sylvester effort to cover her surprise. ‘‘I was vacationing
in the south of France.’’
‘‘You rented a villa on the Isle du Levant, in which,
except for the first day and last day and two occasions
when you visited, Ms. Nancybeth Mokoroa stayed alone.
Where were you the rest of the time?’’
Sylvester glanced at Proboda, who avoided her look.
His earlier superficial questioning had not prepared her to
face this level of detail. ‘‘I was . . . I was on private business.’’
‘‘In the United States? In England?’’
Sondra Sylvester said nothing. With visible effort she
settled her features.
‘‘Thank you, Mrs. Sylvester,’’ Sparta said coldly.
‘‘Through that door to the left’’—and Sparta noted that
Proboda took just a little too long opening the hidden
door, softening the impact of its surprise. ‘‘It will be necessary
to detain you a short while longer. Not more than
five or six minutes.’’
Sylvester kept the mask in place as she went through
the door, but she could not disguise her apprehension.
Proboda hurried the next passenger into the room.
‘‘Mr. Blake Redfield. London. Representing Mr. Vincent
Darlington of the Hesperian Museum.’’
In the instant Proboda was opening the corridor door,
Sparta’s fingers flicked out to the monitoring lens, degrading
the videoplate image visible to Redfield. He came
into the small room, looking alert, relaxed, proper in his
expensive English suit, but showing just the edge of a
young man’s temptation to strut his stuff in that certain
cut of the lapels, that certain length of his shiny auburn
hair.
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‘‘Inspector Troy, Space Board,’’ Proboda said, nodding
at the videoplate, failing to notice the image had lost its
crips focus. Blake turned toward the screen with the reserved,
expectant half-smile that marks the socially adept.
If he recognized her he did not betray himself, but she
knew he was as good at this game as she was. If he had
a reason to hide, he could hide better than any of the
others.
She inspected him intensely, although her macrozoom
eye was largely disabled by the limited resolution of the
videoplate, and she had no sense whatever of his chemical
presence. She had not seen him in two years; he did not
look older so much as more sure of himself. He was holding
something in reserve, something she had not known
in him before. The only sound from him, floating weightless
in the acoustically deadened room, was his quiet
breathing. He waited for her to speak.
If someone had made a voiceprint graph when she did
finally speak, its very flatness would have been suspicious.
‘‘You acted as Mr. Darlington’s agent in the purchase of
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Mr. Redfield?’’
‘‘That’s correct.’’ His voice, by contrast, was warm and
alert; its graph would have said, if you’re not giving anything
away, neither am I.
‘‘The purpose of your trip?’’
‘‘I’m here to see that the famous book you just named
is safely delivered to Mr. Darlington.’’
Sparta paused. It seemed an illogical reply, deliberately
provocative, which she could not let pass without challenge.
‘‘If you were planning to personally insure its delivery,
why ship it aboard Star Queen? Why not keep it
with you?’’
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Redfield grinned. ‘‘Perhaps I did.’’
He knew she knew he didn’t. ‘‘I’ve confirmed that the
book is aboard Star Queen, Mr. Redfield.’’
‘‘That’s reassuring. May I see it too?’’
Sparta’s heart thudded, hard and quick. Well below the
level of anything she could bring quickly to consciousness,
she knew something was happening that she had not anticipated.
On the spot she decided that Mr. Blake Redfield
was not to be given more information than he had already.
‘‘Soon, Mr. Redfield. Through that door to your right,
please. Sorry to keep you waiting.’’
As he went out she could see that he was smiling
broadly. He meant for her to see it. Impatiently she said,
‘‘All right, Viktor, he was the last of the sheep.’’
‘‘The last of the what?’’
‘‘The goats are in the pen. Let’s get ’em.’’
The tiny room into which Farnsworth, Pavlakis, and
Sylvester deposited themselves after negotiating a dogleg
twist in the steel tube was another cube—this one of raw
steel, as featureless as a submarine’s brig. The cell had no
visible exit; the way back had been closed off by sliding
panels. The blank videoplate overhead filled the entire
ceiling.
The sullen conversation among the three inmates was
on the verge of slicing into vicious bickering when the
dark videoplate suddenly brightened. A close-up image of
Inspector Ellen Troy, now three times life size, formed on
the screen.
‘‘I promised that this wouldn’t take long, and it won’t,’’
the iconic face announced. Sparta’s image was replaced
by a crisp view of a convexly curving metal plate. ‘‘This
hull plate from Star Queen’s life support deck, designated
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L-43, has a hole in it.’’ The image zoomed in rapidly to
the upper right corner, to the neat black hole in the paint.
The screen switched to another view of the plate, its
inner surface blackened, concave. ‘‘The plate displays internal
spalling characteristic of a high-velocity projectile,
such as a meteoroid’’—and again the image changed, moving
in closer to show a crater in the steel as vast as
Aetna’s—‘‘which was covered by hardened plastic foam,
making the hole airtight.’’ A new image showed a shiny,
viscid lump of yellow plastic mounded over the spot in
the plate where the crater had been displayed—a view of
the hole before the protective plastic had been removed.
Sparta’s pedantic, almost hectoring voice continued
over the succession of images. ‘‘The significant damage to
Star Queen was done by an explosion that destroyed both
major oxygen tanks and a fuel cell,’’ she said, as a view
of the blackened mess inside the flight deck came up on
the screen.
She paused a moment to let them study the wreckage
before saying, ‘‘Neither the hole in the hull plate nor the
internal explosion was caused by a meteoroid, however.’’
Their solemn faces were washed in the screen’s cold
light. If her audience of three were surprised by this news,
none betrayed it except by the deepening silence.
Another close-up, this one a micrograph, snapped into
view. ‘‘The melt pattern around the hole shows large, irregular
metal crystals, characteristic of slow melting and
cooling—not the fine regular crystals that would have resulted
from an instantaneous deposition of energy. This
hole was probably cut with a plasma torch.’’ Another micrograph.
‘‘Here you see that there are in fact two separate
strata of the hardened plastic plug—the first is very thin
and its laminations do not show the turbulence patterns
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expected from a supersonic airflow through the hole—you
can see the smooth exfoliation here.’’ A computerized
chart, this time. ‘‘As this spectrograph proves, this layer
of plastic was actually catalyzed over two months ago. In
other words, the hole was in the plate and sealed with
plastic before Star Queen left Earth. Note that this same
thin layer has been shattered in the center, blasted outward.
The explosion occurred inside the ship—blew the
hole open, allowing the air to escape—then was quickly
sealed again by the ship’s emergency systems.’’
More charts and graphs. ‘‘The interior explosion was
caused by a charge of fulminate of gold, detonated by
acetylene, placed inside the casing of the fuel cell—these
spectrographs reveal the nature of the explosives. Ignition
was electrical and was probably triggered through the fuel
cell monitor, by a preset signal in the ship’s computer.’’
Sparta’s stern image reappeared, fiercely bright in the
stark steel cell. ‘‘Who sabotaged Star Queen? Why was it
sabotaged? Anyone who can shed light on this may speak
now. Or if you prefer, please privately contact the local
office of the Board of Space Control. Star Queen will remain
off limits pending the completion of our investigation.’’
A shaft of light pierced the room and partially washed
out the screen. A double door had opened at the back of
the cell; right outside was one of the core’s busiest hallways.
Meanwhile Sparta had flipped a switch that cycled her
austere videoplate image. Her tiny control room, hardly
more than a closet full of glittering panels, was tucked
into a crevice between corridors. She was physically closer
to them than any of the people in the cell realized. Under
cover of the cycled frame she turned to Proboda, who hov-
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2 5 1
ered near her in the control room. ‘‘Viktor, you thought I
was impertinent with Mrs. Sylvester. You follow her, then.
If she goes to her office or approaches Star Queen, signal
me right away. Wherever she goes, call me in five minutes.
She’s already leaving—get going!’’
Sparta flipped her videoplate image back to live feed.
Farnsworth and Pavlakis were still in the room, although
Pavlakis had one tentative foot out the door and Farnsworth
was walking boldly up to the videoplate.
‘‘Odd, that,’’ Farnsworth said to the giant screen over
his head. ‘‘Revealing your evidence without making an
accusation.’’
‘‘We’re aboard a space station, Mr. Farnsworth. More
isolated than a town in Kansas.’’
‘‘And if the villain isn’t here with us?’’
‘‘Then no harm done,’’ she said.
The man was transparent, but bold—standing there as
much as telling her he knew what she knew about his past,
that she would be mistaken to suspect him. ‘‘D’you expect
your revelations to remain secret more than a few
minutes? Even from Earth?’’
‘‘Did you have a specific comment to make, Mr. Farnsworth?’’
Farnsworth jerked his thumb toward Pavlakis, who was
still hulking in the background, silhouetted against the
brightly lit corridor outside. ‘‘That one. Family history of
defrauding insurors. Never been able to prove it. But if
he’s not your man he can tell you who is.’’
He was an insolent man, even if in this case he was,
as she had already decided, quite innocent. ‘‘What would
you say if I told you Sylvester did it?’’ Sparta asked. Good.
That set him back a bit—
He took it seriously. ‘‘Jealousy, you mean?’’—as if he’d
V E N U S P R I M E
2 5 2
never thought of it. ‘‘This fellow Darlington buys the book
she wanted, so she makes sure he never . . . and so forth?’’
‘‘And so forth.’’
‘‘Novel theory, that. . . .’’ Farnsworth muttered.
‘‘It’s not a theory, Farnsworth.’’ Her face, three times
life size, leaned toward him.
‘‘Not a theory?’’
‘‘Not a theory at all.’’
‘‘Quite enough said then. Do forgive . . .’’ He was suddenly
in a hurry to radio his employers. He swam off awkwardly
toward the door.
Pavlakis had disappeared.
The commlink chimed in her right ear. ‘‘Go ahead.’’
‘‘This is Proboda. Mrs. Sylvester went straight to the
headquarters of the Ishtar Mining Corporation. I’m outside
the Ishtar Gate right now.’’ The Ishtar Mining Corporation
was located almost two kilometers away, at the far end of
the space station; there its windows and antennas could
look straight down on the bright clouds of Venus.
‘‘That seems to eliminate her, too. Meet me back here
as soon as you can.’’
‘‘What happens next?’’ Proboda sounded irritated.
She’d sent him on another wild goose chase.
‘‘We’ll wait. Our list is very short, Viktor. I think we’re
going to see a confession or an act of desperation. Not
long. Maybe ten or fifteen min—’’
She felt as much as heard the massive thud. The lights
went out, all of them, all at once, and in the blackness the
low moan of the warning sirens rose quickly to a thin,
desperate wail. Wall speakers urgently addressed everyone
within hearing, repeating themselves in English, Arabic,
Russian, Japanese: Evacuate core section one immediately.
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2 5 3
There is a catastrophic loss of pressure in core section one.
Evacuate core section one immediately. . . .
Proboda shouted into the commlink, loud enough to
deafen her. ‘‘Are you all right? What happened up there?
Troy?’’ But no one answered him.
2 5 4
XVIII
A space station’s vital systems are both independent and
redundant. Someone who knew Port Hesperus well had
managed to isolate the entire starward quarter of the
hub, interrupting main bus power from the nuclear reactor
and cutting the lines from the solar arrays. All this
in the instant that a pressure hatch blew out in the security
sector—
Until emergency batteries cut in, it was going to be
very dark.
But not to Sparta, who tuned her visual cortex to infrared
and made her way swiftly through a strange world
of glowing shapes, an environment eerily resembling some
giant plastic model of a complex organism lit only in red
neon. Otherwise-dark light fixtures still glowed from the
warmth in their diodes. Wires in the wall panels still
glowed from resistance to the electricity that had recently
flowed through them, and the panels themselves glowed
faintly with borrowed heat.
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2 5 5
Although most of the microminiaturized devices in the
station consumed only trickles of electricity, their extreme
density made for glowing hotspots in every phonelink and
datalink. Every flatscreen and video-plate glowed with the
alphanumerics or graphics or images of human faces they
had displayed when the power was cut. Every place that
human hands and feet had touched within the last hour
glowed with the warmth of their passage. If there were
rats in the walls, Sparta would see them.
Out in the halls and corridors the emergency lights
flashed on quickly, drawing from their own self-contained
batteries, throwing hard beams and stark strobing shadows
down crowded passages. People swam swiftly through this
flashing world like schools of squid, moving with single
purpose toward the central part of the core—moving, for
the most part, soundlessly, except for a few frightened
cries, quickly answered by quiet commands, as emergency
personnel took frightened newcomers in tow and firmly
steered them to safety.
Pressure loss was the primal fear in space, but the regular
inhabitants of Port Hesperus had run drills for just
this sort of thing so often that when the reality occurred,
it was almost routine. Old-timers were comfortable in the
knowledge that so huge was the volume of air in even one
quarter of Port Hesperus’s core that it would be eight hours
before the pressure dropped from its current luxurious sealevel
value to the thinness of a mountaintop in the Andes.
Long before then the repair crews would have done their
job.
Sparta stayed in the dark, avoiding the corriders and
the crowds, swimming through the dull infrared glow of
access passages, along freight shafts, past pipes and cable
racks in the ventilation tunnels, toward the site of the
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2 5 6
blown hatch. She was moving against the crowds but with
the air; she’d needed only a moment of listening to pinpoint
the wind’s destination, for it wailed through the
blown pressure plate, playing the core like a vast organ
pipe.
As she flew she felt the breeze, stirring gently at
first, steadily freshening. Twenty or thirty meters from
the hole the airflow reached hurricane velocity, and if
she were to slip over that imaginary boundary she would
be sucked into a supersonic funnel and shot into space
like a rifle bullet. She would have to get close, but not
that close.
The open hatch was in the Q3 security lock, and the
purpose of this second act of sabotage was clear to her—
someone had needed to create a diversion that would draw
people away from Star Queen, that would make the neighborhood
unsafe. Someone much cleverer than Sparta had
suspected. So Sparta took the shortcut through the alleys
and backyards of the space station, dashing to get to Star
Queen, while the culprit was still aboard.
It occurred to her, as she approached the lock through
a final stretch of ventilator duct, that the diversion had
been not just clever but shrewd, provoking maximum terror
with minimum risk of injury—the only people in the
immediate vicinity of the blown hatch were the spacesuited
guards, and even if they had been sucked into the
vacuum of the docking bay they would have been protected.
A softhearted villain, then?
Not the one who blew up Star Queen’s oxygen supply.
Perhaps safety in this case was more apparent than real,
the accidental byproduct of a fundamentally pragmatic
scheme.
Sparta knocked the panel from the end of the ventilator
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2 5 7
and saw it skitter away, dragged by the wind; she peered
from her hole into dark, howling desolation. The approach
to the security lock was deserted. The guards, if not in the
wrong place at the wrong time and thus instantly sucked
out, would by now have been ordered to clear out. That
would have been what the perpetrator planned, needed.
And if Sparta was right, the individual was still aboard
the ship, having left the hatch wide open—with no time to
waste putting on a spacesuit—and would be coming out
again any second.
Sparta would forestall the escape. She pulled herself
out of the ventilator. Clinging to the walls against the
sucking vacuum, she pulled herself hand over hand into
Star Queen’s docking tube. She pulled herself along by
inches while the excruciating wind tore at her ears. Finally
she reached Star Queen’s main hatch.
Inside the ship she punched the switches and watched
as the hatch slowly sealed itself shut behind her; inside
the airlock there was silence. She saw the red glow of
handprints on the switches and on the ladder rungs, one
person’s handprints.
The two of them were in here together. Sparta leaned
close to a glowing print and inhaled its chemical essence.
Not anyone she had met on Port Hesperus, not anyone she
had touched in weeks. The spicy amino acid pattern, called
to full visualization, teased at her memory but was nowhere
within its access. . . .
In one scenario, Sondra Sylvester was to have been in
the hold, attempting to steal The Seven Pillars of Wisdom;
two minutes ago, Sylvester was two kilometers away. In
another scenario—Sparta’s favorite—Nikos Pavlakis was to
have been in the ship, on the flight deck, setting its automatic
systems to undock and blast its way out of the
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2 5 8
station, into the sun, forever burying the evidence of his
and his partners’ treachery. But without accomplices, Pavlakis
had had no time to rig the diversion.
Sparta pulled herself cautiously into the ship, past the
stores deck—paused—then floated down through the flight
deck. The glow of the console lights, running on batteries,
made a soft circular kaleidoscope in the darkness. She
paused again, listening—
A distant careful movement, the brush of a glove, perhaps,
or the scrape of a shoe against metal. She pinpointed
it: her quarry was in Hold A. It was no one she had expected
to find.
If whoever was in the hold was not Sylvester, it was
one of her agents. Not Nancybeth, who was as somatically
focused as an infant, incapable of concentrating on anything
but her own needs and pleasures for more than a
minute at a time. All communications to and from Helios
had been tightly monitored; someone who had been
aboard Helios, then. Sparta knew she’d been a fool. . . .
She crept weightless through the life-support-deck corridor
with every augmented sense atingle, through the
hatch of the hold airlock—which was ajar—until her face
was inches from the outer hatch of Hold A. It too stood
open. She moved as silently as she could, pulling herself
along by the friction of the merest pressure of her fingertips,
into the lock.
‘‘Don’t be afraid of me,’’ he said. His voice was as warm
as before, but this time it rose from a deeper, firmer base.
He was quite near. ‘‘I needed to learn something.’’
His control was extraordinary, she thought. If she’d
made a voiceprint of his words, they would have betrayed
no insincerity.
She stopped where she was, breathless, pausing for
V E N U S P R I M E
2 5 9
thought. She could hear him and smell him, she knew
approximately where he was, but she had no weapon and
he was not in the line of sight.
‘‘You don’t have to show yourself,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m not
sure where you are, in fact, although I think you can hear
me easily. Let me explain.’’
Seconds passed while she inched closer to the inner
hatch. The empty interior darkness of the hold was cold
and black, what she could see of it, except for the dull red
glow of the places he had touched.
Their pattern made plain what he was after—the space
where the book’s Styrene case had rested was a cold,
empty pit.
‘‘I’m going to make the assumption that you’re willing
to listen,’’ he said.
She had him located now, but still not as precisely as
she wanted. He was lurking just inside the airlock. That
sound—that was probably his hand, maybe his hip, rubbing
lightly against the shell of the hold, no more than a
foot or two from her head. Keep him talking, talking and
moving in the way that talking entrains unconsciously,
keep him talking a half a minute more and she would
know where to grab. . . .
‘‘I needed to look at this book before you let it off the
ship,’’ he said. ‘‘You said it was here, but I needed to know
if the book you saw was the real book. You’re not an
expert. I am.’’
She inched closer, breathing in and breathing out in
long, slow, controlled inhalations and exhalations that no
ear but her own could hear. His breath, because she was
so close to him, was a visible cloud of warmth, pulsing
slowly in the dark air beyond the lock.
A foot away in the darkness he was explaining himself
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2 6 0
to her. ‘‘Someone with time and a lot of money to spend
could, just conceivably, have counterfeited a book from
the early 20th century. They would have had to find
craftsmen who could set metal type, to begin with—printers
who were willing to print a book in the old way, line
by line, from a text a third of a million words long. They
would have had to cast the type—it would take months, if
the person had the skills—unless the original type was still
in existence and they could get hold of it. They would
have had to find old paper of the right sort—or reproduce
it, watermarks and all, and make it look old. Then the
bindings, the marbled slipcase, the leather covers . . . think
of the craftsmanship, the incredible skill!’’
In his passion for the thing he was describing, that
peculiar old book, he seemed momentarily to have forgotten
about Sparta.
She hesitated, then spoke in a whisper that would carry
only to him. ‘‘I’m listening.’’ No answer. Perhaps he was
startled by her closeness. ‘‘Why so important to look at it
now? Why not wait?’’ she whispered.
‘‘Because the real book may still be aboard.’’
Had he hoped to find the real book first? Or was all
this an elaborate alibi because she’d already caught him
with the real book in his hands?
‘‘Sondra Sylvester flew to Washington, then back to
London three weeks before she boarded Helios,’’ she said.
‘‘She made other trips from France to England. What was
she doing there?’’
‘‘She was in Oxford. She had a book made.’’ His voice
was bolder now, darker, like old hardwood. ‘‘I have it in
my hand.’’
A shutter clicked in her mind, a wall descended, a decision
was made. She slipped her hands over the rim of
V E N U S P R I M E
2 6 1
the hatch and pulled hard, darting into the hold. She
brought herself up against the steel racks opposite the
hatch and turned to face him. He was a glowing blob of
red in the darkness, beside the open hatch. The thing in
his hand was . . . a book—
—only a book.
‘‘Can we have some light now?’’ he asked.
‘‘Go ahead.’’
He reached up and hit the switch beside the hatch.
Green worklights illuminated the hold and her vision
shifted into the visible spectrum. For a moment Blake’s
eyes held hers. He looked a bit sheepish, as if regretting
all the fuss.
She had an odd thought, then—she thought he looked
rather charming with his reddish hair awry and his thoroughly
rumpled suit.
He held up the book. ‘‘A beautiful counterfeit. The
typeface is perfect. The paper is perfect—the kind they still
print Bibles on. The binding is extraordinarily good.
Chemical analysis will prove the book is new, but if you’d
never seen the original, you would have to read a lot of
it even to become suspicious.’’
She was watching him, listening to him. He was different
indeed. ‘‘What gives it away?’’ she asked.
‘‘There must have been a gang of them at different
print shops, whacking the linotype keyboards. Three hundred
thousand words. Some of the typesetters weren’t as
careful as others.’’
‘‘Errors?’’
‘‘A few typos. Only a few, remarkably.’’ He smiled.
‘‘There really wasn’t time for a thorough proofreading.’’
She saw what he was driving at. ‘‘But Darlington probably
wouldn’t have read it anyway.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
2 6 2
‘‘From what I know of the man he would never have
opened it.’’ He smiled. ‘‘Well, maybe to the title page.’’
‘‘What makes you think the original is still on board?’’
‘‘Because I personally brought the book up by shuttle
and saw it secured in that rack only a few hours before
Star Queen left Earth. Unless it went back off the ship
immediately, it’s got to be here.’’
‘‘Is that the case it came in?’’ The gray Styrene case
floated beside him.
‘‘I’m pretty sure. I wasn’t that worried about the lock.
A determined thief with plenty of time and access to the
ship’s computer . . . I thought I knew what Sylvester was
up to, you see, but it hadn’t occurred to me that she would
move so quickly. News of the meteoroid strike started me
thinking about how anxious she’d been for Star Queen to
leave on schedule. Then I learned Inspector Ellen Troy had
been assigned. . . .’’
How had he learned that? She’d worry about it later—
she was going to have plenty of time to interview Blake
Redfield. ‘‘All right, Mr. Redfield. Let me have this exquisite
counterfeit. Exhibit A.’’ Ruefully she added, ‘‘Thanks
for your help—I’ll put in a good word at your trial. If
you’re lucky you can get a change of venue.’’
‘‘Sorry I had to blow a hole in the station. But the fuss
I made wasn’t just for the book’s sake—not that it isn’t
worth it.’’ He made no move to hand it to her. ‘‘A wise
salesman once told me that anything for sale is worth
exactly what the buyer and seller agree it’s worth. By that
standard the real Seven Pillars is worth a million and a
half pounds. This fake could have cost Sondra Sylvester a
half a million pounds. Labor and materials. Bribes and
payoffs.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
2 6 3
She liked his voice, but he was talking too much. ‘‘The
book, please.’’
His eyes never left hers. ‘‘You see, I knew if anyone
came before I left Star Queen, it would be you. In fact, I
counted on it.’’
Again something had escaped her. Again her heart was
suddenly racing. Once she’d known Blade Redfield well,
as well as one child could know another. Why was he a
mystery to her now?
‘‘SPARTA,’’ he said, quietly. ‘‘I never believed what
they told us about what happened to you, what happened
to your folks, why they closed the program. I recognized
you the second I saw you on that street in Manhattan. But
you didn’t want me to know you even existed. So I . . .’’
A great rending and tearing of metal cut him off in
midsentence, its obscene screech crushing the warmth of
his voice.
Creeping up on him, before she knew who he was, she’d
seen that other hold open, but she’d ignored it. ‘‘Follow
me,’’ she shouted, diving past him into the airlock.
In the corridor a blast of heat seared her face. The open
Hold C airlock was the mouth of a furnace. She slammed
the hatch shut and spun its wheel. ‘‘Blake, move!’’
He scrambled out of the hold, still clutching the counterfeit
book. ‘‘Get up there,’’ she urged him. ‘‘We’ve got to
get off the ship, fast!’’
Blake pulled himself out of the access lock—just as the
hatchcover bulged from a massive impact, slamming him
sideways off the ladder. Sparta boosted him and leaped
after him, an instant before the diamond-edged proboscis
ripped through the hatch’s steel plate like a chainsaw
through plywood, spraying weightless shrapnel. The Rolls-
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2 6 4
Royce robot was rapidly carving a hole for itself through
the sealed lock.
The mining robot, which had been loaded through an
outer pressure hatch, was not only too big for the airlock
but too big for the corridor; that it had to tear the ship to
pieces to make progress did not deter it.
Blake sailed up past the cabins, through the flight deck,
through the stores deck, toward the main airlock, pulling
and steering himself with one hand in the darkness, holding
his book in the other. Sparta followed closely, pausing
only to slam the lower corridor hatch after herself.
Blake reached the top of the crew module. He careened
to a halt against the outer hatch of the main airlock,
reached to punch the switches—
—and yanked his hand back as if he’d been scalded.
Sparta pulled herself to a stop below him. ‘‘Go, Blake,
go!’’ she barked, before she saw what he saw, the red sign
blazing: WARNING. VACUUM. ‘‘They must’ve sealed off
the security area,’’ she said, ‘‘let it go to vacuum.’’
‘‘Spacesuits—on the wall beside you.’’
The robot’s progress was a demolition derby; an endless
mashing and tearing of metal and plastic. Any moment
it would rip through the hull, and then they would
perish in vacuum.
‘‘No time,’’ she said. ‘‘Our only chance is to disable it.’’
‘‘Do what?’’
‘‘Not here. We’re trapped.’’
She dived back down to the flight deck. He fumbled
after her. To him the place was pitch dark but for the glow
of the console lights, but she saw everything. She could
see through the steel deck to what looked like the glow of
an oncoming white dwarf star.
‘‘Forget that damned book!’’ she yelled at Blake—but
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2 6 5
he held onto the exquisite counterfeit as if it were worth
as much as his life. The robot arrived on the flight deck
at the same time he did, a creature of nightmare preceded
by the flare of its radiators. Having widened the corridor
opening with its saw-toothed proboscis, its bristling sensors
appeared first above the edge of the hole, followed in
milliseconds by its great samurai-helmet head thrusting
into the room. Its head swiveled in rapid jerks, diamondpaned
compound eyes reflecting the multi-colored glow
from the instrument panel.
The wave of heat from its radiators was enough to send
Blake and Sparta thrashing away in retreat.
The robot’s glittering eyes fixed on Sparta. Its leg motors
accelerated with a whine, and it jumped—five and a
half weightless tonnes, its ore-scoops out-stretched—toward
the corner of ceiling where she cringed. She possessed
a small fraction of the machine’s mass and could
accelerate much faster; by the time it had smashed into
the flight deck ceiling she was bouncing off the floor.
‘‘Fire extinguisher,’’ Blake cried, and for a half second
she thought he’d panicked, lost his wits—what good’s a fire
extinguisher against a nuclear reactor?—but in the next
half second she realized that the heat had inspired him.
That the mining robot was not built to work in freefall
gave them a slim advantage in the battle. One other
advantage, hardly more robust, had occurred to her when
she’d leaped to evade its grasp. The brute machine acted
as if it had a personal grudge—against her. It didn’t want
to just punch a hole in the ship and let her die, drunk on
hypoxia. It wanted to tear her to pieces. It wanted to
watch.
Someone was looking through its eyes, controlling its
every move—
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2 6 6
—until Blake flew deftly toward its head, aiming a fire
extinguisher as he came, pressing its trigger, covering its
eyes with thick foam. . . .
‘‘Aaahh!’’ Blake’s cry was sharp, quickly stifled. The
robot had swiveled as he’d passed; a radiator had come
within inches of his arm; The Seven Pillars of Wisdom had
exploded in flames. Frantically he turned the fire extinguisher
on the book, then on himself, on his burning
jacket.
The huge robot was thrown into a frenzy, writhing and
slashing. It had lost its purchase, lost its view, like a beetle
flipped on its back. But in seconds it would get a grip on
something, tear into some fixed structure. Then surely its
remote operator, forced to settle for efficient death, would
ignore personal revenge and simply use the machine to
smash through Star Queen’s windows.
Meanwhile the berserk and fiery robot dominated the
flight deck, blocking their escape; even if it never got a
good foothold it would kill them by setting them afire,
melting the cabin around them.
Sparta knew what she had to do. It would leave her
utterly vulnerable. The thought flashed through her brain
that she couldn’t trust Blake Redfield, and instantly the
rest of her brain said store it, first things first.
She fell into trance. The ultra-high frequency datastream
—the frantic-smelling datastream, the hate-filled
datastream of the robot’s controlling transmission—flowed
into her mind. She raised her arms and hands and curved
them in an antenna’s arc. Her belly burned. She beamed
the message.
The robot jerked spasmodically and then froze.
She had it like a cat, by the scruff of its neck, clamped
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2 6 7
in her mind instead of her fist—but it took all her concentration
to do it. She could override the strong signal from
the nearby transmitter only because she was a few feet
from the robot; the power stored in the batteries beneath
her lungs would trickle away in less than a minute.
‘‘Blake!’’ The word was plosive, hollow. ‘‘Pull the fuel
capsule,’’ she gasped. Her beam wavered and the creature
twitched violently.
Blake gaped at her. She hung like a levitating Minoan
priestess in the lurid light, her arms curved into hooks,
conferring a savage benediction. She forced out the words,
thin as husks: ‘‘In its belly. Pull it.’’
He moved at last, under it, between its wavering legs
and claws. Above the paralyzed machine the ceiling was
charring from the heat of the radiators; the smoldering
plastic padding began pouring acrid smoke into the room.
Blake fumbled at the fuel port—she wanted to tell him
what to do but she didn’t dare—and after a moment he
figured it out and got the port open.
Then he was stymied again. He paused to study the
fuel cell assembly for endless seconds.
He saw that it was made for safety, for simplicity. It
was, after all, a Rolls-Royce. He wrapped his fingers
around the chrome staples of the fuel assembly, braced his
feet against the robot’s shell, and pulled.
The fuel assembly slid out. Its cladding telescoped to
shield it as he withdrew it. In that instant the massive
robot was gutted, dead. Its radiators cooled—
—not soon enough to prevent the ceiling exploding
into flames.
‘‘Damn it, there’d better be another fire extinguisher in
here,’’ he shouted.
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2 6 8
There was. Sparta yanked it from its bracket, shot past
him, and covered the blazing padding with creamy foam.
She emptied the bottle on it, then flung it away.
They looked at each other—keyed up, the pair of them—
exasperated, singed and sooty, choking on smoke, and
then he managed a grin. She forced herself to return it.
‘‘Let’s get those suits on before we suffocate.’’
He put on McNeil’s, she Wycherly’s. As she was bleeding
some of Wycherly’s oxygen into McNeil’s empty tank,
she paused. She’d had another inspiration.
‘‘Blake . . . it was Sylvester who stole the book—who
had it stolen. And I think I know where it is now.’’
‘‘She had a case of other books aboard, but I looked in
there. . . .’’
‘‘So did I. This is a guess. Don’t hold it against me if
I’m wrong.’’ She twisted the oversize spacesuit’s gloves
and yanked them off.
‘‘Where are you going?’’
‘‘I need my fingers for this.’’
She pulled herself back to the flight deck. She moved
between the claws and legs of the inert robot until she
found its main processor access. She opened the port and
reached inside.
Blake watched her from the ceiling, barely visible in
the dark. ‘‘What are you doing in there?’’ She’d been at it
for what seemed a long time.
‘‘I’m going to have to reinsert the fuel assembly. Don’t
worry, it’s lobotomized now.’’
He said nothing. He couldn’t think of anything to say
except, you must be crazy.
When the fuel assembly slid into the robot its head
wobbled, its claws clashed feebly, but its movements were
those of a drugged rhinoceros. Sparta, tiny inside Wych-
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2 6 9
erly’s borrowed suit, moved into the robot’s sluggish embrace
again and reached into the processor. Motors
whined. The robot’s abdomen split down the center and
unfolded in layer upon layer of compound chambers, until
the complex metal intestines of the ore-processing cavity
lay exposed. In the grisly light the machine seemed to
have disemboweled itself.
Sparta pulled herself over the carapace of the gutted
robot and peered inside. There, propped between two massive
worm gears in a mesh of tube snouts and grillwork,
nestled a fragile, beautiful book, snug in its slipcase.
2 7 0
XIX
The lights came on first, and spacesuited teams of workers
moved efficiently into the empty security sector, evacuated
both of people and of air, to replace the blown pressure
hatch. Within half an hour of the emergency, the
core had been repressurized and business had resumed
as usual.
Before that, while air was still flowing back into the
Q3 lock, a patrol squad, pressure-suited and with stunguns
drawn, burst into Star Queen. They were hardened cops,
used to dealing with drunkenness and homicidal rage and
other forms of insanity that commonly afflict the human
residents of space stations, but the destruction astonished
them.
For one thing, they’d had few occasions to see, up
close, the mining robots that prowled the surface of the
planet beneath them, the machines that paid all their salaries,
and to find one looming amid the wreckage of Star
Queen’s bridge, even exposed and enfeebled, was plain ter-
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2 7 1
rifying. They approached the machine as divers might approach
a comatose great white shark.
Except for the robot, which proved disabled, the ship
was deserted. For a long time none of the patrollers noticed
that the two spacesuits which had hung on the stores
deck were missing.
Sparta and Blake had ditched the suits five minutes
after they’d put them on. Again they’d taken to the darkened
ventilator shafts, the conduits. She knew the back
ways as he could not, having stored a thousand engineering
diagrams in her memory, but he’d been careful to
memorize what he needed to know about the internal layout
of Port Hesperus before he’d left Earth, even then planning
his assault on Star Queen.
‘‘Three half-ounce wads of plastique on a timer for the
pressure hatch,’’ he told her. ‘‘Cutter charge on the auxiliary
cables, also on a timer. Threw the main bus breakers myself
—wanted to make sure I didn’t do any real damage. A
couple of the power plant workers will have ether hangovers.
. . .’’
‘‘C-4? Not fulminate of gold? Acetylene detonators?’’
They spoke on the move, chasing each other through the
shadowy maze.
‘‘Who’d use that junk? That’s dangerous as hell.’’
‘‘Somebody who didn’t care about danger and wanted
the debris to look like an explosion in a fuel cell.’’
‘‘Star Queen was sabotaged?’’
‘‘You may be the last person in the solar system to hear
the news. Assuming you didn’t do it yourself.’’
He laughed.
‘‘I need the rest of your story, Blake, before I make up
my mind what to do with you.’’
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2 7 2
‘‘Let’s stop here a minute,’’ he said. Following a manifold
of pipes and cables, they had reached the mid-region
of the core. They were in a substation, surrounded by huge
pumps and fat gray transformers; the twilight gloom was
striped with bright bars of light projected from a grating
below, creeping slowly with the station’s rotation. Through
the bars they could see straight into the central sphere,
ringed with trees and gardens and the twin concourses of
the station’s social center.
‘‘I didn’t take explosives courses in SPARTA, Linda—’’
‘‘Don’t call me that, ever.’’ Her angry warning echoed
in the metal chamber.
‘‘It’s too late. They know who you are.’’
‘‘Yeah? Well I know who they are.’’ Her voice betrayed
her, for she was tired, and the fear surfaced. ‘‘What I don’t
know is where they are.’’
‘‘One of them is here, on this station. Looking for you.
That’s why I went for all the fireworks—so I could get to
you alone. Before they did.’’
‘‘Who is it?’’
‘‘I don’t think I’d recognize him. Or her. Maybe you
would.’’
‘‘Dammit.’’ She sighed. ‘‘Start from the beginning, will
you?’’
He took a breath, closed his eyes, and let his breath
out slowly. When he opened his dark eyes they glowed in
the warm light from below. ‘‘SPARTA broke up a year after
you left it. There were probably a dozen of us at my level
then, the sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds—Ron, Khalid,
Sara, Louis, Rosaria . . .’’
She interrupted him. ‘‘That far back my memory is excellent.’’
‘‘The spring after you left some weird characters came
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2 7 3
around to see us from a government agency. These people
were recruiters, looking for volunteers for a ‘supplementary
training program,’ making lots of heavy hints about
the black side. We were given the distinct impression that
you had gone before us . . . and you were everybody’s idol,
of course.’’
‘‘Everybody’s scapegoat, you mean.’’
‘‘That too, sometimes.’’ He smiled at the memory.
‘‘Anyway, we were suckers for the pitch. I was, anyway. I
signed up—got into a shouting match with my mom and
dad, but they finally gave in—and I went off to summer
camp with a few of the others. This was in eastern Arizona,
high up on the Mogollon Rim. We were there maybe three
weeks. They knew we were in good shape, so they got right
into the intellectual stuff. Survival. Ciphers. Demolition.
Silent killing. Later I realized it was all lightweight, child’s
play. An audition—a sieve, really, to catch those of us who
were talented. Psychologically susceptible.’’
‘‘Who’d they catch? You and who else?’’
‘‘Nobody. Your father showed up one afternoon. He
had plainclothes heavies with him, FBI maybe. I never saw
him so angry; he just terrorized these selfstyled tough guys
who were running the place. To us kids he didn’t say
much, but we could see his heart was breaking. We were
on carriers back to Phoenix an hour later. That was the
end of summer camp.’’ Blake paused. ‘‘That was the last
time I saw your father. I never saw your mother again,
either.’’
‘‘They’re dead. Officially. Chopper crash in Maryland.’’
‘‘Yes. Did you go to the funeral?’’
‘‘Maybe. Maybe not. That’s the year that’s missing from
my memory.’’
‘‘Nobody I’ve talked to went to the funeral. We heard
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2 7 4
that—about the crash—a month, after we got home.
SPARTA just fell apart, then. Next fall we were dispersed,
most of us in private colleges—surrounded by people we
thought of as retarded. We still had a whole lot to learn.
What happened to you, nobody ever heard.’’
‘‘What did happen to me?’’
Blake looked at her, his warm eyes softening. ‘‘This
isn’t from experience, this is from research,’’ he said. ‘‘In
some of the journals you’ll find that about that time, there
was a program to inject self-replicating biochips into human
subjects. This program was supposed to be under
Navy control, because they were the biochip experts, instead
of under Health or Science as you’d expect. The first
subject was somebody who was supposedly clinically
dead, brain-dead.’’
‘‘A neat cover story.’’ She laughed, but there was bitterness
in her voice. ‘‘All they did was reverse cause and
effect.’’
He waited, but she said no more. ‘‘This subject supposedly
showed remarkable improvement at first, but then
became severely disturbed and had to be placed in permanent
care. A private place in Colorado.’’
‘‘Biochips wasn’t all they did, Blake,’’ she whispered.
‘‘They had a lot to hide.’’
‘‘I’ve begun to gather that,’’ he said. ‘‘They did their
best. Four years ago the place in Colorado burned down.
Killed a dozen people. End of trail.’’
‘‘Everything you’ve told me I’ve already reconstructed
for myself,’’ she said impatiently.
‘‘If I hadn’t already seen you alive, I would have given
up. How did you escape?’’
‘‘The doctor who was supposed to be my watchdog—
his conscience must have started bothering him. He used
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2 7 5
biochips to repair the lesions they’d made. I started remembering.
. . .’’ She turned to him and without thinking
gripped his arm, hard. ‘‘What happened during that missing
year? What were they really trying to do? What did I
do that scared them, made them turn me into a vegetable?’’
‘‘Maybe you learned something,’’ he said.
She started to speak but hesitated; his tone alerted her
that she might not like what she heard. She withdrew her
hand and quietly asked, ‘‘What do you suppose it was?’’
‘‘I think you learned that SPARTA was more than your
father and mother claimed. The tip of a huge iceberg, an
ancient iceberg.’’ He studied her while the station rolled
in space and the bright bars of light through the grill sliced
his shadowy features to ribbons. ‘‘There’s a theory. An
ideal. Men and women have been burned in the service of
that ideal. Others who believed in it have been praised as
great philosophers. And some believers gained power and
became monsters. The more I study this subject, the more
connections I find, and the farther back they reach—in the
13th century they were known as adepts of the Free Spirit,
the prophetae—but whatever name they used, they’ve
never been eradicated. Their goal has always been godhood.
Perfection in this life. Superman.’’
Sparta’s mind was tingling; images danced in the halflight
but flickered strobing away before she could raise
them to consciousness. The peculiar vibration overcame
her ordinary sight; she pressed her fingers to her closed
eyelids. ‘‘My parents were psychologists, scientists,’’ she
whispered.
‘‘There has always been a dark side and a light side, a
black side and a white side.’’ Patiently he waited until she
opened her eyes again. ‘‘The man who ran M.I. was named
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2 7 6
Laird,’’ he said. ‘‘He tried to keep his involvement a secret.’’
‘‘I recognize the name.’’
‘‘Laird knew your parents for years, decades. Since before
they immigrated. Maybe he knew something that
would embarrass them.’’
‘‘No,’’ she whispered. ‘‘No, Blake, I think he seduced
them with visions of an easier route to perfection.’’
‘‘You’ve remembered something new?’’
She looked around, distracted and nervous. ‘‘You’ve
been helpful, Blake. It’s time we got to the rest of our
business.’’
‘‘Laird’s changed his name, maybe his appearance, but
I think he’s still influential in the government.’’
‘‘I’ll worry about it later.’’
‘‘If he could have controlled you, he could have made
himself anything he wanted.’’ He paused. ‘‘Maybe even a
president.’’
‘‘He failed to control me. He also failed to make me
perfect.’’
‘‘I think he’d like to bury the evidence of his failure.’’
‘‘I know that well enough. But that’s my problem.’’
‘‘I’ve made it mine,’’ he said.
‘‘Sorry. You can’t play this game.’’ Her voice had regained
its confidence. ‘‘Let’s get on with the game we’re
already playing. Catching a thief.’’
‘‘Inspector Ellen Troy, Board of Space Control.’’
The expression on Vincent Darlington’s round face
wavered between disgust and disbelief—‘‘Whatever could
have . . . ?’’—and finally settled on deference to authority.
He reluctantly opened the doors of the Hesperian Museum.
Sparta pocketed her badge. She was still wearing her
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2 7 7
dock rat disguise, and at the moment she felt more like
the dock rat than the cop. ‘‘I believe you know Mr. Blake
Redfield of London.’’
‘‘Goodness, Mr. Redfield,’’ Darlington fluttered. ‘‘Oh,
come in, inside, both of you. Do please excuse the frightful
disarray. There was to have been a celebration. . . .’’
The place looked like a mortuary. White cloths covered
lumpy mounds on long tables standing against the walls.
Lush and reverent scenes in thick oils hung in ornate
frames. Colored light from the glass dome lay over everything.
‘‘Well!’’ Darlington hesitantly extended a plump hand
to Blake. ‘‘It is . . . good to meet you personally at last.’’
Blake shook hands firmly, while Darlington’s scandalized
gaze fell to the charred sleeve of his jacket. Blake
followed his glance. ‘‘Sorry, I’ve just been involved in the
pressure-loss incident,’’ he said, ‘‘and I haven’t had time
to clean up.’’
‘‘My goodness, that was terrifying. Whatever happened?
It’s the sort of thing that makes one long to be
back on solid ground.’’
‘‘It’s under investigation,’’ Sparta said. ‘‘Meanwhile it
has been decided to release your property from Star Queen.
I think it will be just as safe here with you.’’
In the crook of his left arm Blake held a blocky package
wrapped in white plastic. ‘‘Here’s the book, sir,’’ Blake said,
holding out the package. He let the plastic fall away to
reveal the pristine marbled paper of the slipcase.
Darlington’s eyes widened behind his thick round
glasses and his mouth pursed with delight. He quietly took
the book from Blake, gazed at it a moment, then carried
it with ceremony to the display case at the head of the
hall.
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2 7 8
Darlington laid the book on top of the glass and slid
the leather-covered volume from its slipcase. The gilt
edges of the pages glittered in the strange, dramatic light.
Darlington stroked the tan cover as gently as if it had been
living skin, turning the precious object in his hands to
inspect its flawless binding. Then he reverently set it down
again and opened it—to the title page.
He left it there. Blake looked at Sparta. She smiled.
‘‘Did you ship it like this?’’ Darlington said abruptly.
‘‘This beautiful book might have been . . . badly soiled.’’
‘‘We’re keeping the carrying case in evidence,’’ Sparta
replied. ‘‘I asked Mr. Redfield to inspect the book and
vouch for its authenticity.’’
‘‘I wanted to see it safely into your hands, Mr. Darlington.’’
‘‘Yes, indeed. Well!’’ Darlington smiled cheerily, then
glanced around the room with sudden inspiration. ‘‘The
reception! What do you know, it’s not too late after all!
I’m going to call everyone at once.’’
Darlington started off toward his office, got two steps,
and remembered that he’d left The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
sitting in the open. Sheepishly, he returned.
He fiddled with the complex locks of the display case
and carefully arranged the book on velvet pillows inside.
He slid the case closed.
When Darlington had reset the magnetic locks he
looked up, simpering at Sparta, and she nodded approvingly.
‘‘We’ll be going, then. Please keep the book available
in the event it may be required in evidence.’’
‘‘Right here, Inspector! It will be right here!’’ Darlington
patted the display case, then dashed to one of the
tables and pulled off the shroud with a flourish, unveiling
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2 7 9
a mound of cracked prawns. He was so excited he almost
clapped.
Blake and Sparta walked to the doors.
‘‘Oh, by the way, you must come to the party,’’ Darlington
called after them as the entrance slid open. ‘‘Both
of you! . . . After you’ve had a chance to freshen up.’’
The concourse outside the museum was crowded with
pedestrians. They were opposite the Vancouver garden;
they walked swiftly across metal paving and down a path
among fern-covered granite rocks, seeking the shelter of
arching pine branches and totem poles. When they were
alone Blake said, ‘‘If you won’t let me come with you, I’m
going to take Darlington up on his offer. I’m starved.’’
She nodded. ‘‘I notice, Blake, that you’re as accomplished
a dissimulator as I am. ‘Involved in the incident . . .’ ’’
‘‘It’s a distinction without a difference, isn’t it? Knowingly
conveying a false impression is lying, period.’’
‘‘It’s the nature of my job,’’ she said shortly. ‘‘What’s
your rationale?’’
As she turned he seized her gently by the elbow.
‘‘Guard your back. I don’t know what they fixed you up
with, but they left out the killer instinct.’’
She recovered the package she’d hidden in the transformer
room, then pressed the commlink in her ear, whose
insistent chiming she’d switched off half an hour ago.
‘‘Where have you been?’’ Proboda’s half-concern, halfpanic,
was almost touching.
‘‘I underestimated our quarry, Viktor. I went to Star
Queen hoping to . . .’’
‘‘You were aboard?’’ he shouted, so loudly she yanked
the commlink from her ear.
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2 8 0
‘‘Dammit, Viktor . . . I was hoping to catch the culprit
in the act,’’ she resumed, gingerly bringing the link to her
ear. ‘‘Unfortunately, I ran into a large robot.’’
‘‘My God, Ellen, did you hear what went on inside that
ship?’’
‘‘I just told you I was there,’’ she said, exasperated. ‘‘I
want you to meet me at the offices of the Ishtar Mining
Corporation. By yourself. Right now.’’
‘‘Commander Antreen is terribly angry, Ellen. She
wants you to report back here immediately.’’
‘‘I have no time. Tell her I’ll make a full report as soon
as I can.’’
‘‘I can’t—I mean, on my own initia—’’
‘‘Viktor, if you don’t meet me at Ishtar I’ll have to handle
Sondra Sylvester on my own. And I’m much too tired
to be polite.’’ She disconnected. This time she wasn’t lying;
to her dismay, she found herself trembling with fatigue.
She hoped she wasn’t too tired for the task remaining.
The two major mining companies on Port Hesperus
provided the economic base for the entire colony; Ishtar
and Azure Dragon were cordial but serious rivals, their
headquarters located opposite each other in projecting
arms on the planetward end of the station. Outside, these
facilities bristled with antennas that transmitted and received
coded telemetry. Only spies saw the interiors of
their competition’s armored ore shuttles, and the smelting
and finishing facilities were located on satellite stations
several kilometers away.
After displaying her badge to a videoplate monitor,
Sparta was allowed to enter Ishtar through its bronzestudded
front doors, the so-called Ishtar Gate, which
opened on a long spiraling corridor, paneled in dark
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2 8 1
leather, leading outward from the weightless core toward
Earth-normal gravity. No guards were in evidence, but she
was aware that her progress was monitored throughout the
approach.
At the end of the corridor she found herself in a room
lavishly paneled in carved mahogany, carpeted in Chinese
and Persian rugs. There was no other apparent exit from
the room, although Sparta knew better. In the center of
the shadowy room a small spotlight illuminated a gold
statuette of the ancient Babylonian goddess Ishtar, a modern
interpretation by the popular Mainbelt artist Fricca.
Sparta paused, taken by it, her macrozoom eye drawn
to a microscopic inspection. It was a stunning work, tiny
yet swelling with power, supple yet knotted, like one of
Rodin’s studies in wax. Around the base were carved, in
letters meant to suggest cuneiform, verses from a primeval
hymn: Ishtar, the goddess of evening, am I. Ishtar, the
goddess of morning, am I. The heavens I destroy, the earth
I devastate, in my supremacy. The mountain I sweep away
altogether, in my supremacy.
‘‘How may I assist you?’’ The question, phrased not
helpfully but with disdain, came from a young woman
who had stepped silently from the shadows.
‘‘Inspector Troy. Board of Space Control,’’ Sparta said,
turning to her. The tall receptionist was wearing a long
purple gown of something with the texture of crushed velvet;
Sparta was acutely conscious of her own singed hair
and smudged cheeks, her torn, stained trousers. ‘‘Please
inform Mrs. Sylvester’’—she cleared her throat—‘‘that I’m
here to talk to her.’’
‘‘Is she expecting you, Inspector?’’—smooth and cold,
definitely uncooperative . . .
The receptionist’s name was engraved on a solid gold
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2 8 2
pin beneath her throat, a pin that would have been invisible
to ordinary eyes. Not to Sparta’s.
One talent of a better-than-average cop is to be able
to say more than one thing at once; some simple statements
carry a wealth of implication (obey me or go to
jail), and the first-name trick never hurts, even if it only
makes ’em mad. ‘‘I require your full cooperation, Barbara.’’
Barbara responded with a jerk, freezing the image on
the handheld videoplate she’d been consulting.
‘‘I’m here to see Sondra Sylvester on urgent official
business,’’ Sparta told her, ‘‘regarding The Seven Pillars of
Wisdom.’’
The receptionist stiffly poked out a three-digit code and
spoke softly to the gadget. A moment later Sylvester’s
lush, husky voice filled the room. ‘‘Bring Inspector Troy
to my office at once.’’ The young receptionist lost her hauteur.
‘‘Follow me, please,’’ she whispered.
Sparta followed her through double locking panels that
slid silently aside. One curving hall led to another, and
that soon opened upon scenes of Escherlike ambiguity:
below Sparta and beside her, curving smoky windows
overlooked control rooms peopled by dozens of operators
in front of green and orange flatscreens and videoplates.
Other curving glass corridors crossed above and below,
and other control rooms were visible through distant windows.
Many of the screens Sparta could see displayed
graphics or columns of numbers, but on others live video
pictures of a bizarre fishbowl world unreeled like the view
from a carnival ride.
Somewhere on the surface of the planet below—on the
bright visible side or away in the darkness beyond the
terminator—radio signals relayed by synchronous satellites
moved robots by remote control, to prospect, to delve, to
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2 8 3
mill, and to stockpile. The views through the moving
screens were robot-eye views of hell.
Abruptly they were past the control rooms. Sparta followed
the receptionist through a door, down another corridor,
and finally into an office of such opulence that
Sparta hesitated before entering.
A desk of polished chalcedony stood before a wall of
rough-textured, curving bronze. Ruddy light fell fitfully
over the surface of the wall, illuminating statues in their
niches, exquisite works by the solar system’s major artists:
a duplicate cast of Fricca’s Ishtar, flanked by Innanna, Astarte,
Cybele, Mariana, Aphrodite, Lakshmi. Another wall
contained shelf upon shelf of books bound in colored
leather and stamped with gold and silver. Through heavily
filtered windows the sulfurous clouds of the planet rolled
in twilight.
It was a room that spoke, paradoxically, of despair—a
prison, its static luxuries meant to substitute for the random
simplicities of freedom.
‘‘You may leave us, Barbara.’’
Sparta turned to find Sylvester behind her, wearing the
same dark silk gown she’d worn disembarking from Helios.
And when Sparta glanced around, the receptionist had
gone; these women had an uncanny trick of moving silently.
Sparta found herself wishing that Proboda had
made his appearance.
‘‘You’re much smaller than I expected, Inspector Troy.’’
‘‘Videoplate images have that effect.’’
‘‘And I have no doubt you intended the effect,’’ Sylvester
said. She crossed the carpeted room to her stone
desk and sat down. ‘‘Normally I’d ask you to make yourself
comfortable, but in fact I am extremely busy just now. Or
perhaps you are ready to release my cargo?’’
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2 8 4
‘‘No.’’
‘‘What can I tell you about The Seven Pillars of Wisdom?’’
Sparta realized that she was too tired to work at subtlety;
the directness of her question surprised even her.
‘‘How much did you spend counterfeiting it? As much as
you would have paid for the real thing?’’
Sylvester laughed, a startled bark. ‘‘An ingenious question
—for which there is no answer.’’ But unlike Sparta,
Sylvester was a bad liar; she held herself on a tight leash,
and what passed for coolness was the result of long practice
at restraining a tempestuous nature.
‘‘You left your rented villa on the Isle du Levant the
day after you arrived there, took a magneplane from Toulon
to Paris, a ramjet to Washington, D.C., where you
spent a day in the Library of Congress recording on chip
the entire contents of the only remaining Oxford edition
of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom still accessible to the public.
You then flew to London, where with the help of the
bookseller Hermione Scrutton—whose record of involvement
in literary fraud might almost be considered distinguished
in some circles—you arranged to meet certain
parties in Oxford, a city where the craft of printing is cherished
and its ancient tools preserved, where even the
working typefonts of the past are displayed as treasures in
museums, where the revered techniques are still occasionally
practiced. With the help of several printers and a
bookbinder, people whose love of the making of books is
so great they allowed themselves to engage in counterfeiting
for the sheer joy of practicing their skills—although
the very substantial amounts you paid them didn’t
dampen their enthusiasm—you made an almost perfect
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copy of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. It was even easier
to bribe a notoriously luxury-loving member of Star
Queen’s crew to practice his calculating skills on a locked
case and steal a book from the cargo of his own ship,
replacing it with your counterfeit.’’
As Sylvester listened to this recitation the color in her
pale cheeks deepened. ‘‘That is an extraordinary scenario,
Inspector. I can’t imagine what comment you wish me to
make.’’
‘‘Only confirm it.’’
‘‘I am not a pond for you to fish in.’’ Sylvester willed
herself to relax. ‘‘Please leave now. I have no more time.’’
‘‘I was very careless on my first inspection of Star
Queen—I knew that one of your robots had been field
tested; I thought that explained its residual radioactivity.
I didn’t bother to examine the fuel assemblies.’’
‘‘Get out,’’ Sylvester said flatly.
‘‘. . . but sometimes a little knowledge is dangerous. If
I’d checked the hot robot I would have seen that McNeil
had reinserted the fuel rods so that he could open the
machine. The oversight almost cost Blake Redfield and me
our lives. At your hands.’’
‘‘You’re talking utter nonsense. . . .’’
In two quick steps Sparta was at the desk. She raised
the package wrapped in plastic she’d been holding at her
side and slammed it down on the polished stone. ‘‘Here’s
what’s left of your book, Mrs. Sylvester.’’
Sylvester froze. She stared at the package. Her indecision
was so transparent, so agonizing, that Sparta could
feel the woman’s apprehension and pain.
‘‘A bluff will gain you nothing but a little time,’’ Sparta
said. ‘‘I may not have all the details right, but I’ll get at
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your financial records, I’ll talk to the people who know.
McNeil, for starters. The details and the witnesses will be
along shortly. And there’s your book.’’
It lay there, a rectangular bundle wrapped in plastic.
‘‘Difficult to recognize in its present condition,’’ Sparta
said harshly, her own fear and resentment for the attack
on her life finally spilling into anger, wiping out the empathy
that had threatened her judgment, ‘‘so perhaps you
will be good enough to tell me which of the two copies it
is.’’
Sylvester sighed. Trembling, she reached to the flimsy
plastic, threw it back. . . . The charred block of pages lay
in flakes of ash, in the crumbling fragments of its slipcase.
‘‘This is too cruel,’’ she whispered. Sylvester steadied herself
in her chair, grasping the edge of her desk so tightly
that her knuckles whitened. ‘‘How can I know?’’
Sparta pulled the book around and pried open its baked
pages. ‘‘ ‘The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,’ ’’
she read, ‘‘ ‘for they may act their dreams with open eyes,
to make it possible.’ ‘Dreams’ should be ‘dream,’ singular.’’
Sparta turned the wrecked book and, leaning over the
desk, pushed it toward Sylvester. ‘‘Blake Redfield informs
me that the text contains many similar errors. This is the
counterfeit. The original has been returned to its owner.’’
‘‘To Darlington?’’
‘‘That is corr . . .’’
In her near exhaustion, in the heady rush of revenge
on the woman who’d tried to take her life, Sparta had not
been listening . . . Her reaction to the black pistol that appeared
in Sylvester’s hand, arcing toward her, was woefully
sluggish.
2 8 7
XX
Blake Redfield spent a few quick minutes in his Venusview
room at the Hesperus Hilton; then, in a white shirt,
maroon tie, and dark silk suit of stylish cut, he sallied forth
to make a second, more respectable appearance at the Hesperian
Museum.
His adventures of the past hour had left him curiously
undecided, unsettled. His chance sighting of Linda on that
Manhattan street corner had awakened something in him,
a feeling not urgent at first, but insistent and increasingly
intense.
He’d found it a simple matter to combine his researches
into his childhood friend’s mysterious disappearance with
his own collector’s passion, for he was nowhere more at
home than in old bookstores and library stacks and data
files, whether electronic or ‘‘fiber-based.’’ Thus he had
stumbled upon the long, deliberately obscured trail of the
shadowy international cult he had only recently been able
to tie to the prophetae of the Free Spirit. With his nose for
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2 8 8
inference and testable hypothesis, he’d learned more than
he’d expected.
Long before that, other, more savage passions had been
awakened, ones he’d indulged as a teenage boy playing
half-serious secret-agent games with his peers in the Arizona
mountains. Smearing themselves with shoe polish.
Sneaking up on each other. Plinking at each other with
capsules of red paint. Blowing things up. Etc.
He’d resumed his lessons, privately. No more games
with paint.
But tracking down Linda, Ellen as she called herself,
had lacked something of the fantastic quality he’d anticipated.
When he finally found her—a nice surprise he’d
arranged, too—he’d expected to be greeted as a kindred
soul; instead she’d seemed preoccupied by matters she was
unwilling to share, layers of concern, woven branches of
potential—so many crimes, so many villains, doing an invisible
gavotte. So many loyalties to balance. So many
corners to watch. She’d grown skilled at hiding her
thoughts and feelings from people, too skilled. And he had
hoped to touch her feelings.
Now he wondered how much of a surprise his dramatic
revelations had been. She was mysteriously adept at things
he was hardly aware of.
Vincent Darlington, giddy with social success, greeted
Blake lavishly and ushered him into the ersatz chapel.
Space station society was a hothouse affair, fluid and incestuous,
and gaudy display was part of the game. Plumes
and trapezes of glitter bobbed on heads whose hair, when
not shaved off altogether, had been tortured into extraordinary
shapes, wagon wheels and ratchets and Morning
Star maces, ziggurats, corkscrews. The faces below came
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2 8 9
in every natural color and several artificial ones, enlivened
by splashes of paint and, on the men, odd swatches of
whiskers. The room was filled to capacity and it seemed
like everybody was trying to stand in the same place, next
to the food tables. These were obviously people who appreciated
Darlington’s taste, if not in art, then in champagne
and hors d’ oeuvres.
Blake recognized a few of his recent companions
aboard Helios, including, to his mild surprise, Sondra Sylvester’s
companion Nancybeth, who welled up in front of
him as he tried to push closer to the display case containing
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Nancybeth was resplendent
in green plastic kneeboots, and above them a
miniskirt of real leather, dyed white and hanging in
fringes all the way from her raw hemp belt. Her top was
thinly veiled in low-slung, purple-anodized aluminum
mesh, which went well with her violet eyes.
‘‘Open your mowffy,’’ she coaxed, her chin raised and
her lips pooched, and when he started to ask her ‘‘what
for’’ he got no further than the ‘‘what,’’ which gave her
the opening she needed to shove a tube of something pink
and orange and squishy between his teeth. ‘‘You looked
hungry,’’ she explained as he masticated.
‘‘I was,’’ he said, when he’d swallowed, wincing.
‘‘Not just your tummy, Blakey. You have hungry eyes.’’
Her voice fell a few decibels, so that he had to lean closer to
hear her. Her six-inch mirrored earrings swung like pendulums,
threatening to hypnotize him. ‘‘All the way here on
the liner I could feel your hungry eyes eating at me.’’
‘‘How ghastly for you,’’ he said. He said it louder than
he’d intended; adjacent heads turned.
Nancybeth recoiled. ‘‘Blake, silly! Don’t you understand
what I’m saying?’’
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2 9 0
‘‘I wish I didn’t.’’ He took advantage of her temporary
retrenchment to gain a few inches toward his goal. ‘‘Have
you seen the book yet? Do you think Darlington’s given
it a decent burial in this mausoleum?’’
‘‘What do you mean?’’ she asked suspiciously. Her chin
was abeam his shoulder now, and there was danger she
would be swept aft. ‘‘Vince has very good taste. I think
the gold on the edge of the pages goes really well with
the ceiling.’’
‘‘That’s what I meant.’’ He’d finally reached the altar
that enshrined the relic, only to discover that it was almost
impossible to see; the party guests in the vicinity were
using the glass top of the display case as a handy tabletop
for their plates and wine glasses. Blake turned queasily
away, Nancybeth still with him.
‘‘I’m surprised to see you here without Mrs. Sylvester,’’
he said bluntly.
She wasn’t sophisticated, but she had a sixth sense for
the needs of others, and Blake’s matter-of-factness got
through to her; she answered in kind. ‘‘Vince won’t talk
to Sondra. He invited me ages ago—because he thought
I’d drag her along. His idea was that she was going to rub
me in his face, and he was going to rub that book in hers.’’
Blake smiled. ‘‘You’re okay, Nancybeth. You call it the
way you see it.’’
‘‘I’m seeing it now. And I’m calling it. But it’s not answering.’’
‘‘Sorry. Fact is, I’m looking for someone else.’’
Her eyes went cold. She shrugged and turned her back
on him.
He moved through the crowd searching the faces of
strangers. After filling a plate he tried to get away from
the crowd and found himself alone for the moment in a
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2 9 1
small chapellike room off the grotesque glass-domed nave
of Darlington’s cathedral. In this small room were cases
displaying objects quite different from the run of execrable
gimcracks Darlington had pushed to center stage. Inside
the cases Blake recognized the fossils of Venusian life that
had gotten Darlington’s silly art gallery a place on the map
of the solar system.
They were dusty red and gray things, fragmented, morphologically
ambiguous. He knew nothing of paleontology,
but he understood that these had been authenticated
as the remains of creatures that had burrowed and
crawled, maybe flapped and glided, during a brief paradise
of liquid water and free oxygen that had prevailed millions
of years ago, before the catastrophic positive feedback of
the greenhouse effect had turned Venus into the aciddrenched,
high-pressure inferno it was now.
The remains were more suggestive than descriptive.
Scholarly volumes had been devoted to these dozen scraps
of stone, but no one could say for sure what things had
made them, or left them behind, except that whatever they
were, they’d been alive.
Blake brooded unhappily on the puzzle, hardly new to
him, that so many people like Vincent Darlington possessed
so many treasures of which they had not the
slightest conception of value—aside from money, aside
from possession itself.
His ponderings were abruptly interrupted.
In the adjoining room a woman’s scream rose above
the babble, a man yelled, and in quick succession there
were seven very loud whacks—overtaken by a long splintering
of glass.
For a moment the air hung still, echoing, before everyone
in the crowd began screaming and shouting and fight-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 2
ing each other to get out. Blake dodged panicked refugees
and seconds later found himself in an empty room, confronting
a bloody tableau.
Sondra Sylvester was writhing in the grip of Percy
Farnsworth and a horrified Nancybeth. Sylvester’s heavy
silk gown had been slashed by falling glass, and blood
was streaming down over her livid face from cuts in her
scalp. Her right arm was raised stiffly over her head, where
Nancybeth was trying to pull it down to get at the black
pistol that Sylvester still held in a steel grip, yelling at
her, ‘‘Syl, no more, no more . . .’’ Meanwhile Farnsworth
had Sylvester around the waist and was trying to throw
her to the glass-strewn floor; he and Nancybeth had also
suffered cuts on the scalp and shoulders. Sylvester’s finger
tightened on the trigger and an eighth bullet smashed into
the riddled stained-glass ceiling, loosing another shower
of fragments.
Then Sylvester dropped the pistol, having exhausted
the ammunition clip. She relaxed almost luxuriously into
the arms of the others, who suddenly found themselves
supporting her.
Blake helped them carry her to the side of the room,
away from the glass. So much blood was pouring over
Sylvester’s eyes that she must have been blinded by it—
scalp wounds flow copiously, even when they’re not serious
—but she’d been seeing clearly enough when she sent
the first rounds from the illegal weapon into Vincent Darlington’s
body.
Darlington lay on his back in a spreading pool of crimson,
staring open-eyed through the shattered dome at the
tops of tall trees on the opposite surface of the central
sphere, his body frosted over with powdered glass.
Behind him, safe inside the case that served as a table
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2 9 3
for smeared plates and empty glasses, rested the object of
Sylvester’s passion.
Sparta was inside a kaleidoscope, its broken bits of
glass falling with rapid stuttering leaps into new symmetric
patterns that repeated themselves endlessly out to
the edge of her vision, and beyond. The slowly spinning
vortex of jagged colors seemed to be sucking her into
infinity. With each shift, a strung-out, whistling explosion
echoed through her mind. The scene was dizzying
and vivid—
—and part of her consciousness stood to one side
watching it with enjoyment. That part was reminded of a
cartoon she’d seen on an eye doctor’s wall, a car speeding
across a desert on a long straight road, passing a sign that
read ‘‘Vanishing point, ten miles.’’
She laughed at the memory, and the sound of her own
laughter woke her up.
Her blue eyes opened to find Viktor Proboda’s brighter,
bluer ones, wide in his square pink face, only inches away.
‘‘How do you feel?’’ His blond eyebrows were twitching
with concern.
‘‘Like somebody hit me in the head. What was I laughing
about?’’ With his help she sat up. There was a heavy
ache in the muscle of her jaw that brought back an old
memory, from circa age fourteen, of an abscessed wisdom
tooth. Cautiously she touched her cheek. ‘‘Oww! I bet
that’s pretty.’’
‘‘I don’t think the jaw’s broken. You’d know.’’
‘‘Great. Do you always look on the bright side, Viktor?’’
She pulled herself to her feet with his help.
‘‘We should get you to the clinic. A concussion requires
immediate . . .’’
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2 9 4
‘‘Hold off a minute. Did you pass your friend Sondra
Sylvester on your way in here?’’
Proboda looked distinctly uncomfortable. ‘‘Yes, in the
core, just outside the Ishtar gate. I knew something was
wrong from her face. She looked at me but she didn’t even
see me. I was thinking about what that mining robot did
on Star Queen, and I thought that’s why you came here,
so I thought I’d better find you.’’
‘‘Thanks. . . . Dammit.’’ She grabbed at her ear, but her
commlink had fallen out. ‘‘She knocked it loose. Viktor,
call in and send a squad to the Hesperian Museum on the
double. Call the museum too, try to warn Darlington. I
think she went to kill him.’’
He knew better than to ask for explanations. He keyed
the emergency channel, but as soon as he mentioned the
Hesperian Museum the squad dispatcher interrupted.
He listened, his jaw sagging, then broke the link. He
looked at Sparta. ‘‘Too late.’’
‘‘Is he dead?’’
His chin jerked in a nod. ‘‘She put four .32 slugs in
him. After they grabbed her, she put four more through
his glass ceiling. It’s lucky she didn’t kill somebody on the
other side of the station.’’ Still looking on the bright side.
She touched his arm, half urging him to start moving
and half comforting the big, sad cop—recognizing that he
was sad for Sylvester, whom he’d admired, not for Darlington,
that silly leech. ‘‘Come on, let’s go,’’ she said.
A tall woman was standing in the doorway, Kara Antreen.
Rigid and gray, her square-shouldered severity was
at odds with the luxury of Sylvester’s office. ‘‘Viktor, I
want you to take immediate charge of the investigation
into the shooting of Vincent Darlington.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 5
Proboda halted, perplexed. ‘‘Not much of an investigation,
Captain. There was a roomful of witnesses . . .’’
‘‘Yes, it shouldn’t take long,’’ Antreen said.
‘‘But Star Queen . . .’’
‘‘You are relieved of your responsibilities with respect
to Star Queen,’’ Antreen said flatly. She cocked an eye at
Sparta, daring contradiction. ‘‘That’s a new case, now.’’
Sparta hesitated, then nodded. ‘‘That’s right, Viktor.
You’ve been very helpful, and I appreciate it. . . .’’
Proboda’s unhappy face grew longer.
‘‘The captain and I should be able to wrap things up
pretty quickly,’’ Sparta said.
Proboda stepped away stiffly. He’d been impressed by
Inspector Ellen Troy and had unbent enough to let her
know it. He had even defended her to his boss. Now she’d
grabbed the first chance to cut him out of the case. ‘‘Whatever
you say,’’ he growled. He marched out past Antreen
without wasting a backward glance on Sparta.
Alone, the two women watched each other in silence.
Antreen was impeccable in her gray wool suit, Sparta was
a weary urchin, battered but streetwise. But Sparta no
longer felt at a disadvantage. She only felt the need for
rest.
‘‘You’ve repeatedly and ingeniously managed to avoid
me, Inspector Troy,’’ Antreen said. ‘‘Why the sudden
change of attitude?’’
‘‘I don’t think this is the place to talk, Captain,’’ Sparta
said, tilting her chin to indicate the room’s invisible bugs
and eyes. ‘‘Corporations like this one are good at keeping
secrets. But it could still be considered a violation of the
suspect’s chartered rights.’’
‘‘Yes, certainly.’’ Antreen’s eyelids drooped over her
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 6
gray eyes—and here was an excellent liar indeed, Sparta
saw, who did not betray herself when she had been anticipated,
even two moves deep. ‘‘Back to headquarters,
then?’’ Antreen suggested.
Sparta walked confidently past her; Antreen fell into
step immediately behind. They walked into the spiraling
transparent corridor that overlooked the control rooms.
Sparta paused at the rail.
‘‘Something wrong?’’ Antreen asked.
‘‘Not at all. I didn’t really get to see this on the way
in. I was too busy. For someone who’s never left Earth
before, it’s an impressive sight.’’
‘‘I suppose it is.’’
From ten meters overhead, behind the curving glass,
Sparta and Antreen peered down at the men and women
of Ishtar at their consoles. Some were alert and hard at
work, some were lounging, idly chatting with each other,
sipping their coffees and smoking their cigarettes while
watching on giant screens as loyal robots sliced and shoveled
through the underworld.
Antreen’s right hand was in her outside jacket pocket.
She leaned in close to Sparta, a movement that an Arab
or a Japanese might not have noticed. But she was close
enough to make a typical Euro-American nervous.
Sparta turned to her, relaxed, alert. ‘‘We can talk here,’’
Sparta whispered. ‘‘They left the eyes and ears out of this
stretch.’’
‘‘You’re positive?’’
‘‘I checked the corridor coming in,’’ Sparta said. ‘‘So
let’s stop playing games.’’
‘‘What?’’
Sparta heard offended dignity, not guilt, overlaying
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 7
Antreen’s caution—she was excellent. Sparta’s tone grew
exaggerated. ‘‘By now you’ve got the files I ordered from
Central, haven’t you?’’ She was playing the tough cop
from headquarters, dressing down the locals.
‘‘Yes, of course.’’
Anger, persuasively laid over confusion, but Sparta
laughed in her face. ‘‘You don’t know what the hell I’m
talking about.’’
Antreen was suddenly prickling with suspicion. She
said nothing.
Sparta prodded her hard. ‘‘The files on Pavlakis Lines.
Get your staff in shape, will you?’’—but behind the contemptuous
sneer on her bruised and blackened face, Sparta
was striving to keep her throbbing consciousness from
fractioning again. The broken bits of the kaleidoscope
were whirling at the edge of her vision. ‘‘If you’d seen the
reports you’d know it was that ape Dimitrios, taking it out
on young Pavlakis. Revenge. Because the kid ended the
forty-year-old insurance con Dimitrios had been running
with his dad. Pavlakis played into his hands by hiring
Wycherly to protect him—a guy who was already in on
the scam, who needed money more than anything and had
the added advantage of being a dead man in advance. Got
all that?’’
‘‘We have that information,’’ Antreen snapped. Anger
again, this time laid over smug relief, for Sparta was talking
police work after all. ‘‘We have Dimitrios’s statement,
the widow’s statement. Pavlakis came to us himself before
we could pick him up—before the blowout. He says he
suspected it all along, that Dimitrios rigged a phony accident.’’
‘‘He did?’’ Sparta grinned, but it was a weird grin com-
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 8
ing out of that swollen, seared face. ‘‘Then what are you
really doing here?’’
‘‘I came to tell . . .’’ But this time Antreen couldn’t disguise
the shock. ‘‘. . . you . . .’’
‘‘You came for me. Here I am. Took you forever to get
me alone.’’
‘‘You know!’’ Antreen looked around wildly. They were
hardly alone. But they were isolated from the workers below
in a glass tube with no ears. Afterward, what would
witnesses make of what was about to happen?
Whatever Captain Antreen told them to think.
Antreen jerked her right hand up and out, but she was
close—it had been a mistake to move in so close. Sparta’s
own right hand came across the space between their bodies
and seized Antreen’s wrist as it cleared her pocket. In
a microsecond Antreen was stumbling; Sparta was taking
her down sideways along the direction of the resisting
arm, using the resistance. Startled, Antreen’s left leg tried
to move across for balance, but it went nowhere except
into Sparta’s solidly planted left thigh. Antreen dove, but
Sparta did not let her dive; controlling the weapon, Sparta
never let go of Antreen’s right wrist, and Antreen spun
onto her back as she fell. She hit the carpeted floor heavily.
If Sparta had been a little stronger, a little bigger, a
little less tired—if she’d been perfect—she might have prevented
what happened next. But Antreen was quick and
strong and as practiced at unarmed combat as Sparta.
With the leverage of her long legs and free arm she rolled,
pulling Sparta across her—Sparta brought Antreen’s arm
up sharply behind her back as she rolled—another half roll
and Sparta would lose her grip; Antreen would be on top
of her. . . .
V E N U S P R I M E
2 9 9
Antreen screamed when she drove the spike into her
own spine.
It was a crescendo of pain, but she screamed with more
than pain. She screamed in the horror of what was happening
to her, what was about to happen to her—what
would happen quickly, but not quickly enough.
Sparta yanked the thing out of Antreen’s back almost
instantly. Only then did she see what the weapon was. She
knew she was too late—
—for the telescoping needle had already sprung out and
was writhing like a hair-fine worm in Antreen’s spinal
cord, questing for her brain. Although she could no longer
feel the fast approaching mind-death, still she screamed.
Sparta tossed the barrel of the empty hypodermic on
the mat and sat back, legs splayed, sagging onto her rigid
backthrust arms, sucking in great gulps of air. The corridor
thundered with booted feet and around its curve a squad
of blue-suits appeared, stunguns drawn. They stumbled to
a halt in good order, the front rank to their knees, half a
dozen gun snouts pointing at Sparta.
Antreen had kept on rolling, onto her back. She was
crying now, great sobs of pity for her dwindling awareness.
Viktor Proboda shoved his way through the patrollers
and knelt beside her. He reached out his big hands and
hesitated, afraid to touch her.
‘‘You can’t do anything for her, Viktor,’’ Sparta whispered.
‘‘She’s not in pain.’’
‘‘What’s happening to her?’’
‘‘She’s forgetting. She’ll forget all this. In a few seconds
she’ll stop crying, because she won’t remember why she’s
crying.’’
Proboda looked at Antreen’s face, the handsome face
V E N U S P R I M E
3 0 0
framed in straight gray hair, a face momentarily stretched
into the mask of Medusa but where even now the terror
was fading and the tears were drying.
‘‘Isn’t there anything we can do for her?’’
Sparta shook her head. ‘‘Not now. Maybe later, if they
want to. But they probably won’t.’’
‘‘Who are they?’’
Sparta waved him off. ‘‘Later, Viktor.’’
Proboda decided he’d wait; Inspector Troy said lots of
things that went past him the first time. He stood and
shouted at the ceiling. ‘‘Where’s that stretcher? Let’s get
moving.’’ He stepped over Antreen to Sparta, holding out
his hand. She took it and he pulled her to her feet. ‘‘Practically
the whole company was watching you. They called
us right away.’’
‘‘I told her it was clean. She was so eager to get me
she believed me. What’s happening to her is what would
have happened to me. . . .’’
‘‘How did you know they’d call us?’’
‘‘I . . .’’ She thought better of it. ‘‘Lucky guess.’’
There was a commotion among the police, and the
stretcher came through. As the two bearers were kneeling
beside Antreen she spoke, calmly and clearly. ‘‘Awareness
is everything,’’ she said.
‘‘Are my parents alive?’’ Sparta asked her.
‘‘The secrets of the adepts are not to be shared with the
uninitiated,’’ Antreen replied.
‘‘Are my parents adepts?’’ Sparta asked. ‘‘Is Laird an
adept?’’
‘‘That’s not on the white side,’’ said Antreen.
‘‘I remember you now,’’ Sparta said. ‘‘I remember the
things you did to me.’’
‘‘Do you have a Q clearance?’’
V E N U S P R I M E
3 0 1
‘‘I remember your home in Maryland. You had a squirrel
that slid down a wire.’’
‘‘Do I remember you?’’ Antreen asked.
‘‘And I remember what you did to me.’’
‘‘Do I remember you?’’ Antreen repeated.
‘‘Does the word SPARTA mean anything to you?’’
Sparta asked.
Uncertainty creased Antreen’s brow. ‘‘Is that . . . is that
a name?’’
Sparta felt her throat tighten, felt tears well in her eyes.
‘‘Good-bye, gray lady. You’re an innocent again.’’
Blake Redfield was waiting in the weightless corridor
outside the Ishtar Gate, mingling with the floating pack of
gawkers and mediahounds who had been trailing the police
in eager desperation. Sparta slipped past the yellow
tape and sought him out.
When he saw her face he was surprised, then concerned.
She let him study her bruises. ‘‘I watched my back,
like you told me.’’ She tried to grin with swollen lips. ‘‘She
got me from the front.’’
When he held out his hand, she took it. Holding his
hand, it was easier to ignore the questions the reporters
were shouting at them, the curses of those who sounded
like they were ready to kill for a quote. But when Kara
Antreen was pulled past on a floating stretcher the photogram
recorders all swung to follow the procession, and
the mediacrowd swam off after them like sharks after
chum. Sparta and Blake lingered behind a moment—
‘‘Want to take the short cut?’’
—and a few seconds later they had disappeared.
They darted through the darkened tunnels and conduits
toward the central sphere, keeping pace with each other.
V E N U S P R I M E
3 0 2
‘‘Did you know it was Antreen all along?’’ Blake asked.
‘‘No, but the first sight of her prodded my memory.
Something down deep, something I couldn’t bring to consciousness
made me know it was a good idea to stay out
of her way. This just now was her second attempt. She
was the one who used the robot on us.’’
‘‘I thought that was Sylvester!’’
‘‘So did I. Anger is the enemy of reason, and I was so
mad I wasn’t thinking straight. Sondra Sylvester wanted
that book more than anything, much more than she
wanted Nancybeth, or even to humiliate Darlington. She
never would have risked the real book, even if she’d overheard
us talking and knew she was caught. It was Antreen
who bugged the ship and heard us.’’
They flew in silence, then, until they came to their
lookout overlooking the central gardens and went to
ground. Perfectly alone in the swinging cage of light, they
found themselves suddenly, unaccountably shy.
Sparta forced herself to go on. ‘‘Antreen went aboard
Star Queen and fueled the robot, while I was staging my
show-and-tell lecture about sabotage. Setting a trap for
the wrong people.’’ She laughed wearily. ‘‘She got the opportunity
she wanted before she was ready for it. She sure
didn’t expect to deal with you. When the robot didn’t do
the job I think she realized how hard it was going to be
to kill me outright, at least in a way that wouldn’t bring
suspicion on herself. So she went for my memory. After
all, it worked once before. She’d have been after you,
next.’’
‘‘Did you learn anything about your parents?’’ he
asked, quietly and urgently. ‘‘About the rest of them?’’
Sparta shook her head. ‘‘Too late,’’ she said sadly. ‘‘An-
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3 0 3
treen couldn’t tell us anything now if she wanted to.’’ This
time she reached out to him and gently took his hand.
He covered her hand with his, then reached to cup her
chin. ‘‘Then we’ll have to do it alone, I guess. The two of
us. Find them. If you’re ready to let me play this game.’’
His spicy aroma was especially delicious when he was
only inches away. ‘‘I should have let you before.’’ She
leaned weightlessly forward and let her bruised lips rest
on his.
3 0 4
Epilogue
McNeil told the rest of the untold truth without further
hedging, the next time she confronted him. He had moved
out of the clinic and rented a room in transient crew quarters,
but he spent most of his time in his favorite French
restaurant, on the concourse opposite the poplars of Samarrand.
Recorded meadowlarks sang sweetly among the
nearby trees.
‘‘I knew you’d be back,’’ he said. ‘‘Will you have some
of this excellent St. Emilion?’’
She declined. She told him what she knew, and he filled
in the rest. ‘‘And if I cooperate fully, how much time do
you think they’ll give me for it?’’ he challenged her.
‘‘Well, since the property was recovered . . .’’
‘‘Don’t forget, you’d have a hard time proving intent,
if my lawyer was to be wise enough to keep me off the
stand,’’ he said cheerfully.
‘‘Slim chance. At any rate, we’d get you for the wine
bottles.’’
V E N U S P R I M E
3 0 5
‘‘Alas, the owner of all the commodities in question is
since deceased.’’
Sparta knew the cause of justice would not be served
if she laughed out loud, so she nodded solemnly. ‘‘McNeil,
you’ll be cooling your heels in a cell for at least four to
six months.’’
‘‘Pity. Almost the length of a quick trip to the Mainbelt.
Always tried to avoid those.’’
‘‘Perhaps I will have a glass of that,’’ she said. He
poured and she sipped. She thanked him. McNeil grew serious.
‘‘One thing you may be overlooking, Inspector. That
is a magnificent book, not merely an object. It deserved to
be owned by someone who could appreciate its contents.
As well as its binding.’’
‘‘Are you suggesting you were motivated by more than
greed, Mr. McNeil?’’
‘‘I’ve never told you a lie, Inspector. I admired Mrs.
Sylvester. I’m sorry to see her come to ruin.’’
‘‘I believe you, McNeil. I always did.’’
McNeil could take care of himself. Blake Redfield
needed help. The investigation of Kara Antreen’s inexplicable
pathological behavior would no doubt continue for
months, if not years; it was with fleeting regret that Sparta
laid sins at her door that she had not committed. Blake
was never suspected of having blown a hatch, of having
cut power, assaulted workers, broken into and burgled impounded
government property. Instead, he faded into
Sparta’s shadow. . . .
Viktor Proboda was there at the docking bay to see
them off with a bouquet of hydroponic asters. Accompanied
by a chorus of mediafolk, Blake and Sparta were
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about to board the Helios, the first step in the long return
trip to Earth.
‘‘It was a pleasure, Viktor. If there’s any justice, it won’t
be long until we . . .’’ Her commlink softly chimed. ‘‘One
sec.’’
She cocked her head and listened to the breathless dispatcher:
‘‘Inspector Troy! Inspector Troy! New orders from
Earth Central! Your trip is canceled—you’re to report to
headquarters right away.’’
‘‘What’s this about?’’ She looked up to see a squad of
blue-suits already swimming toward them—her escort to
unit headquarters.
A few seconds later, when she found time to answer
Blake’s and Proboda’s insistent questions, all she could say
was, ‘‘I’ll have to catch up with you later, Blake. I can’t
tell you what’s happened. And you wouldn’t believe me if
I did.’’
Through the many-layered scandal that had absorbed
their attention for the past weeks—through the burials and
depositions and hearings and trials—the inhabitants of
Port Hesperus had never ceased or even slowed their work.
Five of Ishtar’s huge new robots had gone to the surface
immediately after the Star Queen impoundment was lifted.
The sixth was released to Ishtar and followed its fellows
after forensic teams had lifted the last molecule of evidence
from it and the ship it had ravaged.
The new robot corps was sent to explore a promising
syncline on the glacis of the huge Lakshmi Plateau, in an
area previously only lightly surveyed by surface rovers.
Among the ore samples gathered on these prospecting expeditions
was one odd fragment now residing in the Hes-
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perian Museum—a fossil, one among only a dozen
Venusian fossils.
It was not unexpected that when serious mining began
in the region another fossil or two might appear. The operators
on Port Hesperus had been asked to keep a close
eye on their screens for just such an event.
The atmosphere of Venus is so dense at the surface and
the light of the sun so diffuse that operating one of the
glowing robots in many ways resembled operating a nodule
miner on the bottom of Earth’s oceans. It was not always
easy for an operator to know what he was seeing on
the big screens. They showed him a bowl-shaped world
with close horizons tilting sharply up on every side, the
sere rock everywhere glowing a dark orange. Looking at
such a screen was like looking at the world through the
bottom of a thick ashtray of orange glass. To drive an
immense robot up a narrow canyon and under the overhang
of an arching stratified canyon, sampling rock outcrops
every few yards, could be both strenuous and
disorienting.
So the operator of the Rolls-Royce HDVM, alert as he
was, may be forgiven for not immediately recognizing that
the creature’s slashing proboscis had broken into a cavern
that was not, as it first appeared, a natural hollow in the
cliff. So bizarre were the forms suddenly illuminated by
the glare of the white-hot radiators that the operator had
only moments to react—moments dangerously extended
by the radio delay of the remote signal—to prevent the
destruction of the lines upon lines of carved inscriptions
and the gaunt, monstrous representations that loomed up
suddenly on his screen.
3 0 8
Afterword
by PAUL PREUSS
Aglance at the copyright page will show when the
first of the six novels that make up the Venus Prime
series was published. All six incorporate superb stories
by Arthur C. Clarke, with the first volume based on
Arthur’s novella ‘‘Breaking Strain.’’ My version of ‘‘Breaking
Strain’’ had an earlier genesis, however, in a rather
different form.
In the late 1980s, computer text games of the Adventure
type—‘‘You are standing in a small room painted
white. In front of you is a door. In the ceiling there’s a
trap door to the attic. On the floor lies a bloody axe,’’ and
so on—had spawned a literary genre that would become
known as hypertext. While the games were often Agatha-
Christie-style mysteries, the sheer novelty of branching interactive
text engaged many impressive talents; one,
Robert Pinsky, was to become America’s poet laureate.
Interactive text was fun, and the serious stuff certainly
raised intriguing issues concerning the pact between writer
and reader, but animated graphics swiftly overwhelmed
text on most personal computer screens. ‘‘Breaking Strain,
The Game’’ never made it to diskette.
A few months earlier, when Byron Preiss had proposed
the project and invited me to choose among Arthur’s stories
one with the milieu and the maguffin to make a
science-fiction mystery, I accepted happily. Clarke had
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been my favorite hard-science fiction writer since long
before 2001, A Space Odyssey, and the chance to study
how the master did it line by line, the chance to play in
the same universe—at once both rational and humanistic—
was appealing. In the movie business, they call it homage;
in science fiction, the terms were to be less polite, but all
that came later.
As for mystery material, ‘‘Breaking Strain’’ leaped out
at me, a classic life-boat tale of the lone survivor, and sure
enough, the maguffin was right there on Star Queen’s
cargo manifest—that first-edition Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
which Arthur was later surprised to find was not my invention
but his own.
By the time the game died, I had gotten deeply involved.
I had a couple of hundred pages of script and
flow charts that laid out everything which could be allowed
to happen interactively (given personal-computer
speed and memory of the time) from the moment Star
Queen docked at Port Hesperus. I had made crude sketches
of the ship and the station and the mining robots; artist
Darrell Anderson had already transformed some of these
into spare, elegant graphics, using programs of his own
that were ahead of their time. I had a long list of all the
things the bionic Sparta could do. Sparta’s tool kit even
contained a Swiss Army knife for when things got really
complicated.
There was one significant lack. As a character, Sparta
was a hollow shell, a nobody. Or rather an anybody—anybody
who might sit down at the keyboard to play the
game, any ‘‘you’’ who found himself or herself in the airlock
of Port Hesperus, challenged with this mystery. Any
‘‘you’’ at all, really, but assumed to be young, and of unspecified
sex. For a computer game that was okay and,
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like Darrell’s graphics, maybe even a little ahead of its
time.
A novel, however, depends crucially on such details as
the age, sex, and history of its protagonist. When Byron
asked me if I’d be interested in transmuting the canceled
game into the first of a series of novels, I was eager to do
so, not least because Sparta, conceived as a computerized
nonentity, weighed heavily upon my storyteller’s conscience.
I agonized over whether Sparta was male or female for
all of about ten minutes. Of course she was a young
woman—the whole point of not specifying Sparta’s sex in
the game was to invite girl players to identify with ‘‘you.’’
And I had no trouble finding the foundations of her
superhero status. My appreciation of psychologist Howard
Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences is more explicitly
acknowledged in the second volume of the series, but
in fact I had earlier taken up the notion that monolithic
IQ is a sham—that there are several different kinds of intelligence,
and that they are more or less incommensurable.
Sparta was someone in whom multiple intelligences
had been fostered from birth.
But the perversion of her talents, their bionic enhancement?
Her mysterious and fragmented past? For that impulse,
although I suppose I have to acknowledge several
parts mass-media influence and wishful thinking, I have
no easy explanation. I’m not much for conspiracy theories.
Like the CIA man in John Le Carre’s The Honourable
Schoolboy, when things go spectacularly wrong I tend to
favor the screw-up theory.
So in rereading the first chapter of this book, I’m a
little taken aback to see how urgently the need to recover
an erased identity springs to the fore: ‘‘Does the word
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Sparta mean anything to you? . . . The word Sparta, what
does that mean to you?’’ Indeed, Sparta’s search for her
identity, her determination to recover her history and personal
integrity, became the plot drivers of the entire series.
I remember calling up Byron and excitedly reading him
passages from the first chapter over the phone. Her memory
starts to come back! She makes a daring escape in a
helicopter! He was bemused, I think, but he encouraged
me to carry on. Perhaps he sensed that Sparta had become
real to me, a lost soul possessed of immense potential—
and that I had internalized her.
Having decided that Sparta was the victim of a conspiracy,
I had to decide who was conspiring about what.
Again the answer came easily. What to do about the aliens
is a question that figures in a number of Arthur’s works;
he’s had fun at the expense of those who would try to
manipulate hidden knowledge of alien visitation to their
own ends (‘‘Dave, this mission is just too important. . . .’’).
So there would be aliens in the works—truly Clarkeian
aliens, not pallid little humanoids—and there would be
shadowy characters trying to keep the rest of us in the
dark (although not a cigarette addict among them). On the
trail of the aliens, eluding the conspirators, I would begin
Sparta’s grand tour on Venus in the inner solar system
and move outward, through fits and starts, to Earth’s
moon, to Mars, to Jupiter and its moons, and finally into
interstellar space.
The vehicle for the journey was Arthur’s incomparable
imagination, as expressed in a handful of chosen stories,
each a favorite of mine for a different reason. After
‘‘Breaking Strain’’ came ‘‘Maelstrom II,’’ a thrilling adventure
that uses orbital mechanics to spring a shocking surprise,
while ‘‘Hide and Seek’’ is another neat twist on
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3 1 2
Newtonian mechanics. ‘‘A Meeting with Medusa,’’ on the
other hand, is epic in its scope and majesty, and ‘‘Jupiter
V’’ isn’t far behind, broaching the theme Arthur later made
famous in his Rama novels. Finally, ‘‘The Shining Ones’’
is an alien vision of rare beauty and mystery.
In Arthur’s exemplary science fiction, the dilemma or
resolution of every story depends on some physical principle,
some fact of nature, but nothing he wrote ever failed
to give his characters their due—even as he put them in
their place, human sparks against the backdrop of an in-
finite cosmos, a cosmos inhabited in unimaginable variety.
Sparta and her pyrotechnically inclined sidekick Blake are
intended to embody just such striving, mostly rational,
mostly optimistic Clarkeian beings. At times desperate or
discouraged, at times fatally mistaken, at times fragile to
the point of collapse, Sparta, who started as a bionic cipher,
ended by being as human as I could write her. In
Arthur’s honor, it was the least I could do.
—Paul Preuss
Sausalito, California
March 1999
Infopak
Technical
Blueprints
On the following pages are computergenerated
diagrams representing some
of the structures and engineering found
in Venus Prime:
Pages 314–317: Star Queen Interplanetary freighter—2
perspective views; wireframe and cutaway
views of crew module; main engines;
fuel tanks.
Pages 318–320: Port Hesperus Venus-orbiting space
station—2 cut-away perspective views;
axial components.
Pages 321–323: Mining Robot Mechanism for analysis
and processing of Venusian surface elements
—2 full-figure side views; individual
mining components.
Page 324: Visual Feedback Enhancement A geological
analysis of the Venus surface as
seen by mining robot.
Pages 325–328: Sparta Neuronal implant schematics—
visual components; auditiory components;
olfactory components; tactile
components.
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