The Medusa Encounter Read online

  The covers of the forward cargo hatch had already opened like giant trap doors, and the camera platform was hovering above them, preparing to descend. Along this route in years to come would travel thousands of passengers and tonnes of supplies. Only on rare occasions would the Queen have to drop down to sea level to dock with her floating base.

  A sudden gust of cross wind slapped Falcon’s cheek, and he tightened his grip on the guardrail. The Grand Canyon could be a bad place for turbulence, although he did not expect much at this altitude. Without anxiety he focused his attention on the descending platform, now some fifty meters above the ship; the crewman who was piloting the robot platform from the Queen’s bridge was a highly skilled operator who had performed this simple maneuver a dozen times on this flight already. It was inconceivable that he would have any difficulties.

  Yet he seemed to be reacting rather sluggishly. That last gust had drifted the camera platform almost to the edge of the open hatchway.

  Surely the pilot could have corrected before this. . . .

  Did he have a control problem? Unlikely. These remotes had multiple-redundancy, fail-safe takeovers—any number of backup systems. Accidents were unheard of.

  But there he went again, off to the left. Could the pilot be drunk? Improbable though that seemed . . .

  Falcon keyed his commlink. “Bridge, put me in . . .”

  Without warning he was slapped violently in the face by a gust of freezing wind. That was not what had interrupted his orders to the bridge. He hardly felt the wind, for he had been checked by the horror of what was happening to the camera platform. The operator was fighting for control, trying to balance the craft on its jets, but he was only making matters worse. The oscillations had increased—twenty degrees, forty degrees, sixty degrees.

  Falcon found his voice. “Switch to automatic, you fool!” he shouted at the commlink. “Your manual control’s not working!”

  The platform flipped over on its back. The jets no longer supported it, but drove it swiftly downward, sudden allies with the gravity they had fought until this moment.

  Falcon never heard the crash. He felt it, though, as he raced across the observation deck toward the elevator that would take him down to the bridge. Workers shouted at him anxiously, wanting to know what happened.

  It would be many months before he knew the answer to that question.

  Just as he was about to step into the elevator shaft, he changed his mind. What if there was a power failure? Better be on the safe side, even if it took a few seconds longer. Even if time was the essence.

  He ran down the spiral stairway that enclosed the elevator shaft. Halfway down he paused to check the ship for damage. He had a perfect view, and what he saw froze his heart. That damned platform had gone straight through the ship, top to bottom, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were collapsing slowly even now, in great falling veils of plastic.

  Falcon wasn’t worried about lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, with eight cells still intact. Far more serious was the structural damage. Already he could hear the latticework of carbon-carbon and titanium all around him, groaning in protest under sudden abnormal, excessive loads. Strong and flexible as the metal and carbon-fiber members were, they were no stronger than their sundered joints.

  Lift alone wasn’t enough. Unless it was properly distributed, the ship’s back would break.

  Falcon ran again. He’d gotten a few steps down the stairs when a superchimp, one of the workers’ assistants from the observation deck, came racing down the elevator shaft, shrieking with fright—moving with incredible speed, hand over hand, along the outside of the elevator’s latticework. In its terror the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its recent ancestors.

  Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched the creature’s approach with some alarm. A distraught simp was a powerful and possibly dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning against striking out at humans.

  As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance. He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a human disaster beyond its comprehension, for which it bore no responsibility.

  It stopped exactly opposite him, on the other side of the lattice. There was nothing to prevent it from coming through the opening framework if it wished. And then it moved toward him, its wide thin lips hovering over yellow fangs, bared in terror.

  Now its face was only inches from his, and he was looking straight into its terrified eyes. Never before had Falcon been so close to a simp, able to study its features in such detail. He felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all humans experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.

  Falcon’s presence seemed to have calmed the animal; its lips closed over its fangs. Falcon pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation deck. He said, very clearly and precisely, “Boss. Boss. Go.”

  To his relief, the simp understood. It gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once raced back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could. If any safety remained aboard the Queen, it lay in that direction, upward.

  His duty lay in the other direction.

  He had almost reached the bottom of the spiral stairs when the lights went out. With a sound of rending polymer, the vessel pitched nose down. He could still see quite well, for a shaft of sunlight streamed through the open hatch and the huge tear in the envelope. Many years ago Falcon had stood in a great cathedral nave watching the light pour through the stained-glass windows, forming pools of multicolored radiance on the ancient flagstones. The dazzling shaft of sunlight through the ruined fabric high above compulsively reminded him of that moment.

  He was in a cathedral of metal and polymer, falling down the sky.

  When he reached the bridge and was able for the first time to look outside, he was horrified to see how close the ship was to the ground. Only a thousand meters below were the beautiful and deadly pinnacles of rock and the red river of mud, carving its way down into the past. There was no level area anywhere in sight where a ship as large as the Queen could come to rest on an even keel.

  A glance at the display board told him all the ballast had gone. However, rate of descent had been reduced to a few meters a second; they still had a fighting chance.

  Without a word, Falcon eased himself into the pilot’s seat and took over such control as remained. The instrument board showed him everything he wished to know; speech was superfluous.

  In the background, he could hear the communications officer giving a running report over the radiolink. By this time all the news channels of Earth and the inhabited worlds would have been preempted—and he could imagine the frustration of the program managers: one of the most spectacular wrecks in history was occurring without a single live camera to transmit it! Someday the last moments of the Queen might fill millions with awe and terror, as had those of the Hindenburg a century and a half before, but not in real time.

  Now the ground was only about four hundred meters away, still coming up slowly. Though he had full thrust, he had not dared use it lest the weakened structure collapse. Now he realized he had no choice. The wind was taking them toward a fork in the canyon where the river was split by a wedge of rock like the prow of some gigantic, fossilized ship of stone. If the Queen continued on its present course it would straddle that triangular plateau and come to rest with at least a third of its length jutting out over nothingness; it would snap like a rotten stick.

  Far away, above the groans of the straining structure and the hiss of escaping gas, came the familiar whistle of the turbines as Falcon opened up the lateral thrusters. The ship staggered, and began to slew to port.

  The shriek of tearing metal was now almost continuous—and the
rate of descent had increased ominously. A glance at the damage-control board showed that cell number five had just gone.

  The ground was only meters away. Even now Falcon could not tell whether his maneuver would succeed or fail. He switched the thrust vectors to vertical, giving maximum lift to reduce the force of impact.

  The crash seemed to last forever. It was not violent, merely prolonged and irresistible. It seemed that the whole universe was falling about them.

  The sound of crunching laminate and metal came rapidly nearer, as if some great beast were eating its way through the dying ship.

  Then the floor and ceiling closed upon Falcon like a vise.

  The holographic image vanished from the briefing room. Sparta and Blake and the commander sat quietly in the dark for a moment.

  Finally Sparta said, “A very convincing reconstruction.”

  “Yeah.” Blake stirred in his armchair. “I remember seeing the videos when I was a kid. They weren’t like this, though. It’s like being inside the guy’s head.”

  “We had good coverage from the flight recorders, a lot of it classified information,” the commander said. “And you’re right, we also had access to Falcon’s experience.”

  “From deep-probe debriefing of the survivors?” Sparta asked.

  “That’s right,” the commander replied. In the gloom, his pale eyes were reflected points of light.

  Sparta locked gazes with him in the dark. His face enlarged itself a dozen times under her telescopic inspection; the little jumps of his cold eyes betrayed him. Even the sudden sharp smell of him betrayed him. She knew the commander and his colleagues were using the same deep molecular-probe techniques on her, tapping her nightly dreams, recording her nightmares for later reconstruction—reconstructions that might easily be as terrifying as this “documentary.”

  His eyes shifted ever so slightly in the direction of Blake, before coming back to her almost instantly. He was acknowledging her suspicions, and at the same time silently telling her this was information they could not afford to share with Blake.

  Sparta said, “Run the incident with the simp again, please.”

  The commander complied, keying the holo controls. Almost instantly they were back inside the Queen, that slowly collapsing cathedral of plastic and metal. . . .

  Falcon, descending the stairs beside the elevator as swiftly as he could, watched the simp’s approach with some alarm. A distraught simp was a powerful and possibly dan gerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning.

  As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “boss”. . . .

  “Stop there,” Sparta commanded.

  The hologram froze.

  “You’ve analyzed the animal’s speech?” she demanded.

  “The crash investigators tried. Falcon’s recollection wasn’t that precise. Not good enough to recover the words.”

  “All right, go on.”

  Even now, Falcon realized, the simp looked toward hu mans for guidance. He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a human disaster beyond its comprehension, for which it bore no responsibility. . . .

  It moved toward him, its wide thin lips hovering over yellow fangs, bared in terror.

  Now its face was only inches from his. Falcon felt a strange mingling of kinship and discomfort. . . .

  Falcon pointed up the elevator shaft. “Boss. Boss. Go.”

  The simp gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and raced back the way it had come.

  “That’s enough,” Sparta said. “You can cut it off.”

  “Poor animals,” said Blake.

  “What analogy are you drawing here, Commander?” Sparta’s tone edged on mockery. “Could it have something to do with the fact that there wasn’t nearly as much of Falcon left as there was of me, each time they tried to kill me?”

  “What are you talking about?” Blake asked her, exasperated.

  The commander evaded her question. “The next scene we’ve reconstructed is much more recent, recorded two years ago in the Earth Central offices of the Board of Space Control. The subjects weren’t aware”—he coughed—“that I had access to the chip.”

  “Why do you want to go to Jupiter?”

  “As Springer said when he lifted for Pluto, ‘because it’s there.’ ”

  “Thanks, I’m sure. And now that we’ve got that out of the way . . . what’s the real reason?”

  Howard Falcon smiled at his interrogator—though only those who knew Falcon very well could have interpreted his slight, leathery grimace as a smile.

  Brandt Webster was one of the few who could. He was the Board of Space Control’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Plans. For twenty years he and Falcon had shared triumphs and disasters, not excluding the greatest disaster of them all, the wreck of the Queen.

  Falcon said, “Springer’s cliche . . .”

  “I think somebody said it before Springer,” Webster put in.

  “. . . is still valid, at any rate. We’ve landed on all the terrestrial planets and a lot of the small bodies—explored them, built cities and orbital stations. But the gas giants are still pristine. They’re the only real challenges left in the solar system.”

  “An expensive challenge. I assume you’ve worked out the costs.”

  “As well as anyone could. You’ve got the estimates there on your flatscreen.”

  “Mmm.” Webster consulted his screen.

  Falcon adjusted himself backward. “Keep in mind, my friend, that this is no one-shot deal. It’s a reusable transportation system—once it’s been proved out it can be used again and again. It will open up not merely Jupiter, but all the giants.”

  “Yes, yes, Howard . . .” Webster peered at the figures and whistled. It was not a happy whistle. “Why not start with an easier planet—Uranus, for example? Half the gravity, and less than half the escape velocity. Quieter weather, too, if quieter is the right word for it.”

  Webster had done his homework. It wasn’t the first time Plans had thought about the giants.

  “There’s very little saving,” Falcon replied, “once you’ve factored in the extra distance and the logistics problems. Beyond Saturn, we’d have to establish new supply bases. On Jupiter, we can use the facilities on Ganymede.”

  “If we can work a deal with the Indo-Asians.”

  “This is a Council of Worlds expedition, not a consortium venture. There’s no commercial threat. The Space Board will simply rent the Indo-Asian facilities on Ganymede we need.”

  “I’m just saying you’d better start now to recruit topnotch Asians for your team. Our prickly friends aren’t going to be happy if they see a lot of European faces peering into their backyard—which is how they think of the Jovian moons.”

  “Some of us European faces are Asians, Web. New Delhi is still my official address. I don’t see it becoming a problem.”

  “No, I suppose it won’t.” Webster studied Falcon, and his thoughts were transparent. Falcon’s argument for Jupiter sounded logical, but there was more to it. Jupiter was lord of the solar system; Falcon was fired by no lesser challenge.

  “Besides,” Falcon continued, “Jupiter is a major scientific scandal. It’s been more than a century since its radio storms were discovered, but we still don’t know what causes them. And the Great Red Spot is as big a mystery as ever, unless you’re one of those who believes that chaos theory is the answer to every unanswerable question. That’s why I think the Indo-Asians will be delighted to support us. Do you know how many probes they’ve dropped into that atmosphere?”

  “A couple of hundred, I believe.”

  “That’s just in the last fifty years. If you count back to Galileo, three hundred and twenty-six probes have penetrated Jupiter—about a quarter of them total failures. We’ve learned a hell of a lot, but we’ve barely scratched the planet. Do you realize how big it is, Web?”

  “More t
han ten times the size of Earth.”

  “Yes, yes—but do you know what that really means?”

  Webster smiled. “Why don’t you tell me, Howard?”

  Four planetary globes stood against the wall of Webster’s office, representing the settled terrestrial planets and Earth’s moon. Falcon pointed to the globe of Earth.

  “Look at India—how small it seems. Well, if you skinned Earth and spread it out on the surface of Jupiter, oceans and all, it would look about as big as India does here.”

  There was a long silence while Webster contemplated the equation: Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India. He stood up and went to the globe of Earth. “You deliberately chose the best possible example, didn’t you, Howard?”

  Falcon moved to face him. “Hardly seems like nine years ago, does it, Web? But it is. We did those initial tests three years before the Queen’s first and last flight.”

  “You were still a lieutenant.”

  “That I was.”

  “And you wanted to let me preview the grand experiment—a three day drift across the northern plains of India. Great view of the Himalayas, you said. Perfectly safe, you promised. Said it would get me out of the office and teach me what the whole thing was all about.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  “You know the answer to that.” Webster’s grin split his round, freckled face. “Next to my first trip to the moon, it was the most memorable experience of my life. And you were right—perfectly safe. Quite uneventful.”

  Falcon’s mask seemed to soften with the memory. “I planned it to be beautiful, Web. The lift off from Srinagar just before dawn, because I always loved the way that big silver bubble would suddenly brighten with the first light of the sun. . . .”

  “Total silence,” Webster said. “That’s what made the first impression on me. None of this blowtorch roar from the burners, like those ancient propane-fueled hot-air balloons. It was impressive enough that you’d managed to package a fusion reactor in a hundred-kilogram bottle, Howard, but that it was silent as well—hanging there right over our heads in the mouth of the envelope, zapping away ten times a second—you must know what a miracle-in-action that seemed.”