Arthur C. Clarke's Venus Prime 5 by Paul Preuss

Author:Paul Preuss [Paul Preuss]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: e-ISBN 1-59176-017-8
Publisher: ibooks, Inc.

XV

The columns of white vapor that blew out of the crevices in the ice gave an illusion of great force, but there was nothing to them, only widely spaced water molecules mov­ing at great velocity under virtually no pressure. These most tenuous of winds had blown the huge alien antennas clear off into space; as the ice had dissolved from beneath their roots, the massive structures had drifted free and wafted away as lightly as if they’d been dandelion seeds on a sum­mer breeze. With them went the secret of their communi­cation with the stars—and with the core of their own moon.

Blake and Forster lay side by side in the Europan sub, Blake in the command pilot’s couch, skimming across the lacy ice. Hawkins and McNeil guided the sub by the tips of its wings. The pearly mist was so thick that light from their helmet lamps bounced back into their faces from a meter or two away.

Without a thread to guide them, they could have floun­dered for hours; they had to feel their way to the entrance shaft along the communications cables that hung like garlands in the mist. They found the opening of the shaft, a wider artificial blowhole in the featureless fog and ice, and the Old Mole tethered nearby, stationed there in case the shaft needed re-opening against the tendency of the boiling water down below to freeze over again.

“We’re ready to go in,” Blake said over the commlink.

“All right, then,” came back Walsh’s voice.

The launch was pure simplicity. Blake curled the submarine’s flexible wings around its body until the craft was smaller than the diameter of the shaft in the ice. Hawkins and McNeil positioned it above the opening and gently shoved it into the pressureless blowhole with the force of their suit-maneuvering systems.

The sub dived blind into the impenetrable fog. A hun­dred meters down, the surface of the water came up sud­denly, a vigorously boiling surface over which a steaming skin of ice constantly froze and broke apart and reformed.

Triggered by radar to ignite upon impact, the subma­rine’s rockets fired a brief burst to drive the buoyant craft below the surface that otherwise would have rejected it. The rockets continued firing, blowing out a stream of super-hot bubbles, until the free-swimming craft’s wings could unfurl and grab water. With strong strokes, the submarine swam swiftly down into the deep. Then it turned on its back and sought the undersurface of the ice. The water was murky with life—swarming, concentrated life.

“Hungry little devils.” Forster laughed, the happiest sound he’d made in months. “They’re exactly like krill. Swarms and swarms of them.” His bright eye had fixed upon one among the myriad swarming creatures fumbling against the polyglas, and he followed it closely as it wriggled help­lessly for a moment before orienting itself and darting away.

“Are they feeding?” Walsh’s voice came to them over the sonarlink.

“Yes, most of them,” Blake answered. “They’re feeding on the underside of the ice, on mats of purple stuff. An Earth biologist would call it algae .

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