Venus Prime 06 - The Shining Ones by Arthur Clarke

Author:Arthur Clarke [Clarke, Arthur]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-12T07:05:00+00:00

15

00.23.03.19

Tony and Angus have finished their airplane at last.

Test flights in the neighborhood have been wildly successful. Oh it is a lovely sight, this ruddy, long-winged craft—to my eye, much more graceful than the Martian sailplanes of our era which inspired it. Its stringers are bamboo, its ribs a kind of willow or poplar, its fabric covering our finest tapa, which is really more like a thin paper made from the fibrous stems of reeds and painted (“doped” Jo says) with a strong-smelling red vegetable lacquer cooked up by Angus.

The plane carries two people, one behind the other; both have controls. Its main instruments are a portable altimeter and an inertial compass, adapted from a now-useless deep-space suit system.

Tomorrow, Jo, our best pilot, and Tony—not only our navigator, but the lightest of us—are to set out on the first long-range flight.

Where to, no one can say for sure. The motive power of this airplane is wind, nothing more; the pilot flies it where the wind carries it. Whoever is not driving has even less to say about the itinerary. Perhaps all this is less tricky than it seems; I am no aeronautical engineer. It has been pointed out to me that in our low gravity, only a third of Earth’s, it is not only easier to get an airplane into the air, it is certainly much easier on the flyers if it fails to stay there.

But what makes the whole project practical is that this Mars, not unlike the Earth of our own era, has thick ionized layers of atmosphere which serve to reflect radio signals over the steep curve of the planet. So if there is a crash landing—even thousands of kilometers away—we can come to the rescue in the Ventris.

00.23.06.12

Jo radioed us at the scheduled time:

“Wind’s still carrying us northeast. In three days we’ve covered seven thousand kilometers on the ground, practically in a great circle. Crossed over Eden, west of Arabia. It’s beginning to look like we’re being sucked into a huge weather vortex over the north pole.”

00.23.07.12

“We’re almost over the pole. Cold as a banker’s heart—good thing these old pressure suits still work, or we could have been forced down just to keep from freezing. There’s lots of medusa activity going on here. Something our friend Troy hasn’t bothered to tell us about. A couple of curious medusas came over to give us a look—we saw those friendly fishy faces peering out at us, but they went away without saying hello.”

00.23.08.12

“There’s definitely something strange going on over the pole. They’re building an enormous silver tower right on the pole itself. And the weather in the upper atmosphere isn’t natural; somehow they’re controlling it.”

00.23.10.12

“We crossed forty degrees north latitude this morning, headed south again; the inertial puts us at about two-forty west, over a stretch of sand Tony tells me is called Aetheria on the map. At this rate, on this heading, we may make it back to within a few hundred kilometers of base. We may even … but never mind, I’m too superstitious to say it out loud.

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