The Medusa Encounter
by ARTHUR C. CLARKE
The Moon, with its incomparable and ever-changing scenery, is my favorite subject, and I never tire of showing it to unsuspecting visitors. As the 14-inch is fitted with a binocular eyepiece, they feel they are looking through the window of a spaceship, and not peering through the restricted field of a single lens. The difference has to be experienced to be appreciated, and invariably invokes a gasp of amazement.
After the Moon, Saturn and Jupiter compete for second place as celestial attractions. Thanks to its glorious rings, Saturn is breathtaking and unique-but there’s little else to be seen, as the planet itself is virtually featureless.
The considerably larger disc of Jupiter is much more interesting; it usually displays prominent cloud belts lying parallel to the equator, and so many fugitive details that one could spend a lifetime trying to elucidate them. Indeed, men have done just this: for more than a century, Jupiter has been a happy hunting ground for armies of devoted amateur astronomers.*
*
I feel a particular sympathy for one of them, the British engineer P.B. Molesworth (1867-1908). Some years ago, I visited the relics of his observatory at Trincomalee, on the east coast of Sri Lanka. Despite his early death, Molesworth’s spare-time astronomical work was so outstanding that his name has now been given to a splendid crater on Mars, 175 kilometers across.
Yet no view through the telescope can do justice to a planet with more than a hundred times the surface area of our world. To imagine a somewhat farfetched “thought experiment,” if one skinned the Earth and pinned its pelt like a trophy on the side of Jupiter, it would look about as large as India on a terrestrial globe. That subcontinent is no small piece of real estate; yet Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India. . . . Unfortunately for would-be colonists, even if they were prepared to tolerate the local two-and-a-half gravities, Jupiter has no solid surface—or even a liquid one. It’s all weather, at least for the first few thousand kilometers down toward the distant central core. (For details of which, see
2061: Odyssey Three
. . . .)
Earth-based observers had long suspected this, as they made careful drawings of the ever-changing Jovian cloudscape. There was only one semipermanent feature on the face of the planet, the famous Great Red Spot, and even this sometimes vanished completely. Jupiter was a world without geography— a planet for meteorologists, but not for cartographers.
As I have recounted in
Astounding Days: A Science-fictional Autobiography
, my own fascination with Jupiter began with the very first science-fiction magazine I ever saw—the November 1928 edition of Hugo Gernsback’s
Amazing Stories
, which had been launched two years earlier. It featured a superb cover by Frank R. Paul, which one could plausibly cite as proof of the existence of precognition.
Half a dozen earthmen are stepping forth onto one of the Jovian satellites emerging from a silo-shaped spaceship that looks uncomfortably small for such a long voyage. The orange-tinted globe of the giant planet dominates the sky, with two of its inner moons in transit. I am afraid that Paul has cheated shamelessly, because Jupiter is fully illuminated—though the sun is almost
behind
it!
I’m not in a position to criticize, as it’s taken me more than fifty years to spot this—probably deliberate —error. If my memory is correct, the cover illustrates a story by Gawain Edwards, real name G. Edward Pendray. Ed Pendray was one of the pioneers of American rocketry and published
The Coming Age of Rocket Power
in 1947. Perhaps Pendray’s most valuable work was in helping Mrs. Goddard edit the massive three volumes of her husband’s notebooks: he lived to see the
Voyager
closeups of the Jovian system, and I wonder if he recalled Paul’s illustration.
What is so astonishing—I’m sorry, amazing—about this 1928 painting is that it shows, with great accuracy, details which at the time were unknown to earth-based observers. Not until 1979, when the
Voyager
spaceprobes flew past Jupiter and its moons, was it possible to observe the intricate loops and curlicues created by the Jovian tradewinds. Yet half a century earlier, Paul had depicted them with uncanny precision.
Many years later, I was privileged to work with the doyen of space artists, Chesley Bonestell, on the book
Beyond Jupiter
(Little Brown, 1972). This was a preview of the proposed Grand Tour of the outer solar system, which it was hoped might take advantage of a once-in-179-year configuration of
all
the planets between Jupiter and Pluto. As it turned out, the considerably more modest
Voyager
missions achieved virtually all the Grand Tour’s objectives, at least out to Neptune. Looking at Chesley’s illustrations with 20:20 clarity of hindsight, I am surprised to see that Frank Paul, though technically the poorer artist, did a far better job of visualizing Jupiter as it
really
is.
Since Jupiter is so far from the sun—five times the distance of the Earth—the temperature might be expected to be a hundred or so degrees below the worst that the Antarctic winter can provide. That is true of the upper cloud layers, but for a long time astronomers have known that the planet radiates several times as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Though it is not big enough to sustain thermonuclear fusion (Jupiter has been called “a star that failed”), it undoubtedly possesses some internal sources of heat. As a consequence, at some depth beneath the clouds, the temperature is that of a comfortable day on Earth. The pressure is another matter; but as the depths of our own oceans have proved, life can flourish even at tons to the square centimeter.
In the book and TV series
Cosmos
, the late Carl Sagan speculated about possible life forms that might exist in the purely gaseous (mostly hydrogen and methane) environment of the Jovian atmosphere. My “Medusae” owe a good deal to Carl, but I have no qualms about stealing from him, as I introduced him to my former agent, Scott Meredith, a quarter of a century ago, with results profitable to both.
Now a final bibliographic note. “A Meeting with Medusa”—the story that inspired this volume of
Venus Prime
—is one of the very few I ever wrote for a specific objective. (Usually I write because I can’t help it, but I am slowly getting this annoying habit under control.) “Medusa” was produced because I needed wordage to round out my final collection of short stories (
The Wind from the Sun
, 1972). I am pleased to record that it won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America for the best novella of the year-as well as a special bonus from
Playboy
in the same category.
I happened to mention my association with this estimable magazine, which has printed so many of my more serious technical writings, when I registered a mild complaint in New Delhi years ago. In his witty response after I had delivered the Nehru Memorial Address on 13 November 1986, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi concluded with these words: “Finally, let me assure Dr. Clarke that if
Playboy
is banned in this country, it is not because of anything
he
may have written in it.”
VENUS PRIME
Prologue
The meaning engulfed her. She tried to call out, to shout a warning. But when the blackness closed over her, only one image remained, an image of swirling clouds, red and yellow and white, boiling in an immense whirlpool, big enough to swallow a planet. She left herself then, and fell endlessly into them. . . .
Blake couldn’t see what was going on; they’d put up a curtain of opaque fabric to screen his view of Ellen’s body. He was frightened. When she’d let go of his hand, her own hand falling limp on the sheets, he’d thought for a moment that she was dead.
But the blue vein in her throat still pulsed; her chest still rose and fell beneath the rough gown; the surgeon and his assistants went on with their work as if nothing unusual had happened. “She’s under,” one of them said.
Blake fought back dizziness when he saw the clamps and tongs, saw the scalpel and scissors go down gleaming and reappear above the curtain streaked with blood. The surgeon moved with swift precision, doing whatever he was doing to the middle of Ellen. Suddenly he stopped.
“What the
hell
is this stuff?” he said angrily, his voice muffled inside his clear film mask. Blake saw an assistant’s nervous glance in his direction. The young surgeon turned to stare at Blake—they hadn’t wanted him here, but Ellen had refused to let them begin without him at her side. With his tongs the surgeon lifted a bit of something slippery and fishlike and slapped it on a tray. “Biopsy. I want to know what it is before we close.”
The technician hurried away. Meanwhile the surgeon bent and pulled up more of the stuff and threw it on a larger tray held by his assistant. Blake peered at it in fascination, the silvery tissue lying in sheets like a beached jellyfish, trembling and iridescent.
The surgeon was still working to clean the last of it out of Ellen when the technician handed him the analysis. On the pages Blake glimpsed graphs, lists of ratios and molecular weights, false-color stereo images.
Ellen lay deeply sleeping under a coarse sheet, her short blond hair framing her unlined face. Her full lips were slightly parted, as if she were tasting the air. No tubes or wires intruded upon her slim flesh; the monitoring probes hovered without touching her delicate skull and slight breasts and slender abdomen. The silent graphics above the bed displayed reassuringly normal functions. The room was quiet and warm, almost peaceful.
“She needs to get out here. Her life could depend on it.” The man who stood in the darkness had blue eyes that glittered in his dark face. His iron gray hair was cut to within a few millimeters of his scalp, and he wore the dress-blue uniform of a full commander of the Board of Space Patrol.
she
needs is time to get well.”
“She’s vulnerable here. We’re moving her off Mars. The records are going to show that Inspector Troy had a routine appendectomy, spent the usual eight-hour recovery period in hospital, and walked happily away. That’s what the doctors are going to say, too.”