Arthur C Clarke's Venus Prime Omnibus by Paul Preuss

Author:Paul Preuss
Language: eng
Format: epub

HIDE AND SEEK

AN AFTERWORD BY

ARTHUR C. CLARKE

The wise science fiction writer prefers to operate in galaxies far, far away and long, long ago, where he is safe from nagging critics—like the small boy who once told Ray Bradbury he had a satellite moving in the wrong direction. (“So I hit him.”)

However, by exquisitely bad timing, the setting of this novel occurs practically next door and tomorrow afternoon. Desperate attempts to persuade publisher Byron Preiss to stop the countdown for a year or so have been of no avail. By the time these words appear in print, Paul and I may have to eat some of them.

How could I have dreamed when I wrote “Hide and Seek” back in 1948 that forty-one years later a Russian robot would be hopping across the face of Phobos, just like the character in my story? (As in the case of every space mission forecast, this sentence must be qualified by the incantation, “If all goes well.”) For early in 1989—probably about the time I’m proofreading this book, dammit—two space probes will have made a rendezvous with Phobos, and one of them will have dropped a small “rover” which will explore the little world by jumping across it in twenty-meter hops, making a whole series of scientific measurements at each landing. (I will be quite embarrassed if, in the course of its wanderings, it encounters a large black monolith.)

When Phobos was discovered in 1877, it not only made obsolete Tennyson’s “The snowy poles of moonless Mars,” but it presented astronomers with a phenomenon they had never encountered before. Most satellites orbit their primaries at substantial distance, in a fairly leisurely manner; our own Moon takes almost thirty times longer to go around the Earth than the Earth takes to revolve on its own axis. But here was a world where the “month” was shorter than the “day”! Mars rotates in twenty-four and a half hours (to the great convenience of future colonists, who need make only minor adjustments to their watches and circadian rhythms), yet Phobos circles it in only seven and a half!

Today, we are accustomed to artificial satellites which perform such feats, thus rising in the west and setting in the east (see Bradbury, supra), but the behavior of Phobos was quite a surprise to late-19th-century astronomers. It was also a bonus to such writers as Edgar Rice Burroughs; who can forget the hurtling inner moon illuminating the ancient sea beds of Barsoom?

Alas, Phobos doesn’t hurtle very fast, and you’d have to watch for some time to see that it’s moving at all. And it’s a miserable source of illumination; not only is its apparent size a fraction of our Moon’s, but it is one of the darkest objects in the Solar System, reflecting about as much light as a lump of coal. Indeed, it may be largely made of carbon, and altogether bears a close resemblance to the nucleus of Halley’s Comet, as revealed by a whole flotilla of space probes in 1987.

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