The Medusa Encounter Read online

  “When I think about flying over India I still remember the village sounds,” Falcon said. “The dogs barking, the people shouting and looking up at us, the bells ringing. You could always hear it, even as you climbed, even when that whole sunbaked landscape expanded around you and you got up to where it was nice and cool—five kilometers or so—and you needed the oxygen masks, but otherwise all you had to do was lean back and admire the scenery. Of course the onboard computer was doing all the work.”

  “And meanwhile sucking up all the data it needed to design the big one. The Queen.”

  “We hadn’t named her yet.”

  “No,” Webster concurred, a bit sadly. “That was such a perfect day, Howard. Not a cloud in the sky.”

  “The monsoon wasn’t due for a month.”

  “Time sort of stopped.”

  “For me, too, even though supposedly I was used to it. I got irritated when the hourly radio reports broke into my daydreams.”

  “I tell you, I still dream of that . . .” He searched for the word. “. . . infinite, ancient landscape, that patchwork—villages, fields, temples, lakes, irrigation canals—that earth drenched in history, stretching to the horizon, stretching beyond. . . .” Webster moved away from the globe, breaking the hypnotic spell. “Well, Howard, you certainly converted me to lighter-than-air flight. And I also got a sense of the enormous size of India. One loses sight of that, thinking in terms of low-orbit satellites that go around the Earth in ninety minutes.”

  Falcon’s face stretched into its minimal smile. “Yet India is to Earth . . .”

  “As Earth is to Jupiter, yes, yes.” Webster returned to his desk and was silent a moment, fiddling with the flatscreen that displayed Falcon’s estimates of the Jupiter mission parameters. Then he looked up at Falcon. “Granted your argument—and supposing funds and cooperation are available—there’s another question you have to answer.”

  “Which is?”

  “Why should you do better than the—what it is?—three hundred and twenty-six probes that have already made the trip?”

  “Because I’m better qualified,” Falcon said gruffly. “Better qualified as an observer and as a pilot. Especially as a pilot. I’ve got more experience with lighter-than-atmosphere flight than anyone in the solar system.”

  “You could serve as a controller, sit safely on Ganymede.”

  “That’s just the point!” Fire blazed in Falcon’s unblinking eyes. “Don’t you remember what killed the Queen?”

  Webster knew perfectly well. He merely answered, “Go on.”

  “Time lag—time lag! That poor sap controlling the camera platform thought he was on a direct beam. But somehow he’d gotten his control circuit switched through a satellite relay. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, Web, but he should have known, he should have confirmed and reconfirmed. Switched through a comsat! That’s a half-second time lag for the round trip. Even then it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been flying in calm air, but we were over the Canyon, with all that turbulence. When the platform tipped, the guy corrected instantly—but by the time the platform’s onboard instrumentation got the message, the thing had already tipped the other way. Ever tried to drive a car over a bumpy road with a half-second delay in the steering?”

  “Unlike you, Howard, I don’t drive at all, much less over bumpy roads. But I take your meaning.”

  “Do you? Ganymede is a million kilometers from Jupiter—a round-trip signal delay of six seconds. A remote controller won’t do, Web. You need someone on the spot, to handle emergencies as they emerge—in real time.” Falcon adjusted himself stiffly. “Let me show you something . . . mind if I use this?”

  “Go ahead.”

  Falcon picked up a postcard lying on Webster’s desk; postcards were almost obsolete on Earth, but Webster seemed to have a fondness for things obsolete. This one showed a 3-D view of a Martian landscape; its verso was decorated with exotic and very expensive Martian stamps.

  Falcon held the card so that it dangled vertically. “This is an old trick, but it helps to make my point. Put your thumb and finger on either side, like you’re about to pinch it, but not quite touching.”

  Webster reached across his desk and put out his hand, almost but not quite gripping the card.

  “That’s right,” said Falcon. “And now . . .” Falcon waited a few seconds, then said, “Catch it.”

  A second later, without warning, he let go of the card. Webster’s thumb and finger closed on empty air.

  Falcon leaned over and retrieved the fallen card. “I’ll do it once again,” he said, “just to show there’s no deception. Okay?”

  He held out the card. Webster positioned his fingers, almost brushing the card’s surface.

  Once again the falling card slipped through Webster’s fingers.

  “Now you try it on me.”

  Webster came out from behind his desk and stood in front of Falcon. He held the card a moment, then dropped it without warning.

  It had scarcely moved before Falcon caught it. So swift was his reaction it almost seemed there was an audible “click.”

  “When they put me together again,” Falcon remarked in an expressionless voice, “the surgeons made some improvements. This is one of them”—Falcon placed the card on Webster’s desk—“and there are others. I want to make the most of them. Jupiter is the place where I can do it.”

  Webster stared for long seconds at the postcard, which portrayed the improbable reds and purples of the Trivium Charontis Escarpment. Then he said quietly, “I understand. How long do you think it will take?”

  “With the Space Board’s help and the cooperation of the Indo-Asians, plus all the private foundation money we can drag in—two years. Maybe less.”

  “That’s very, very fast.”

  “I’ve done lots of the preliminary work. In detail.” Falcon’s gaze flicked to the flatscreen display.

  “All right, Howard, I’m with you. I hope you get your luck; you’ve earned it. But there’s one thing I won’t do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Next time you go ballooning, don’t except me as a passenger.”

  The commander touched the button; the hologram collapsed into a dark point and vanished.

  “I don’t know about Ellen, but I’m hungry,” Blake said. “I don’t want to talk about this on an empty stomach.”

  “You’re right. Past time for lunch.”

  III

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The Free Spirit made Falcon,” Sparta said. “Remade him, I should say. For the same reason they remade me. Close your mouth, dear—” Blake’s mouth had opened in disbelief—“your arugula is showing.”

  The commander’s stone face almost softened into a grin, but with effort, by shoveling a forkful of crumpled lettuce into his mouth, he kept his dignity.

  “You were the first to tell me what they were after, remember?” she said to Blake. “The Emperor of the Last Days.”

  Sparta picked at her excellent food, of which there was as usual four or five times too much. Today, the printed menu cards announced, it was a choice of salads, to be followed by a tomato bisque en croute, then a selection of individual quiches and finger-sized croque-monsieurs, and finally orange sorbet with vanilla cookies—all accompanied by several wines which Blake and Sparta and the commander would as usual ignore.

  The people who served this opulent fare (and lunch was nothing compared to dinner) were young and scrubbed and cheerful, uniformed in white, enthusiastically talkative when company was wanted but always remarkably discreet. Today they were staying almost invisible.

  Sparta and Blake had been living as the commander’s guests in this strange “safe house,” as he called it, for a week now, often dining alone together beneath the heraldic banners that hung from the high walls of the gothic main hall. On sunny days like this one, dramatic shafts of golden light poured through the stained glass clerestories, windows that depicted dragons and loosely draped maidens and knights in
armor. The man who’d built the mansion was evidently a fan of Sir Walter Scott’s, or had had dreams of Camelot.

  “We think they had Falcon targeted before the wreck,” said the commander, setting down his plate.

  “Targeted him?” Blake had gotten his greens down without choking, but he was still incredulous—not least because this Space Board officer, this old guy whom at first he’d taken for nothing more than Ellen’s fellow employee, was making sounds like he knew as much about the Free Spirit as Blake himself knew, information that Blake had risked his life to get.

  “The best balloon pilot in the world,” Sparta said, as if it were self-evident. “Someone realized—even before Falcon did—that to live in the clouds of Jupiter, you need a balloon.”

  “What’s Jupiter got to do with it?” Blake demanded.

  “I don’t know,” said Sparta. “But it’s Jupiter that I keep going to in my dreams. . . .”

  “Ellen.” The commander tried to warn her off the subject.

  “Falling into the clouds. The wings overhead. The voices of the deep.”

  Blake eyed the commander. “Her dreams?”

  “We’re working from the evidence,” the commander said. “Consider that even for the Board of Space Control it’s almost impossible to mount an operation of this technical and logistical and political complexity in two years. We think Webster must have known Falcon wanted to go to Jupiter before Falcon told him.”

  “Exactly, Blake. Before he knew it himself,” Sparta said. She turned to the commander. “They sabotaged the Queen.”

  His voice got gruff. “You were always quick to reach conclusions . . .”

  “Nobody’s ever put a remote link through a satellite by accident, before or since.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Blake. “How did they know Falcon would survive the crash?”

  “They have a habit of taking long chances.”

  The commander said, “The camera platform started having trouble as soon as he was topside. Not until then.”

  She nodded. “It should have been the safest place, if you were calculating the odds. Falcon himself thought so.”

  “Then they really screwed up,” Blake protested. “He was back down at the controls before the Queen hit. He almost saved the ship.”

  “The crash worked for them anyway,” Sparta said. “Maybe better than they hoped.”

  “Unlike you,” the commander said, “with him there wasn’t much of a thinking human being left to get in their way later.”

  Blake, agitated, thrust back his chair and stood up. “All right, I asked this before. You—sitting there—you personally represent the high and mighty Space Board Investigations Branch? What do you want from Ellen? What can she do that the Board hasn’t already done?”

  Before he answered Blake, the commander signaled the stewards to clear the table and bring the next course. “There are some things that the Space Board doesn’t do well,” he said. “Investigating itself is one of them.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

  “Don’t assume anything,” the commander said. “And don’t miss the tomato bisque.”

  He hesitated, then abruptly sat down. “If you want my cooperation, sir”—the resort to sarcasm was childish, a measure of Blake’s complete frustration with the course of events—“I need to know that whatever you’re planning, you’re not going to expose her to any more danger than she’s in already.”

  “Before we men make any deals for her, Blake, perhaps Ellen will tell us her own thinking.”

  “I’m certainly curious. I’d like to find out more about Howard Falcon and the Kon-Tiki mission,” she said.

  “Then you’re still on the team.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think this is a team sport.”

  Blake spent the afternoon trying to talk her out of her curiosity about Falcon, which to him seemed founded upon the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Oh, he admitted that he’d been a great conspiracy theorist in his day, but for his own part, he had come to the conclusion that the Free Spirit—the prophetae, the Athanasians, whatever you wanted to call them—while admittedly a bunch of dangerous nuts, had made so many mistakes they were on the verge of putting themselves out of business. Now that the Board of Space Control obviously knew all about them, why should Ellen continue to risk her life?

  She humored him, agreed with him, did everything except promise to do what he asked—resign from the Board of Space Control. On the other hand, she didn’t say she wouldn’t. Her love and affection for him seemed steady. But for all his passion and argument, some cold part in the center of her was untouchable to his reasoning.

  That night they stopped outside her bedroom door and Blake moved impetuously to kiss her. She responded, pressing her taut dancer’s body to his hard frame, but broke off when he tried to go farther and push past her into the room.

  “I’ve told you, there are cameras and microphones in there,” she said. “In your room, too.”

  “I almost don’t care.”

  “I do.” She said, “Until tomorrow, darling,” then closed the door firmly and locked it behind her.

  In the cold dark room she stripped and went naked to bed. In this century and culture, modesty hardly noticed nakedness—and certainly her body had often been rendered transparent, inside and out, to anyone who might be peering at her now. It was not because of Blake that she cared about the watchers; it was because of what they watched while she slept.

  She did not want him to share her visions—her nightmares—as she knew they did.

  With the aid of a private mantra, what some might call a prayer, she forced herself to fall asleep.

  Blake shoved the narrow casement open just enough to let night air enter. He hung his clothes carefully in the walk-in closet; he was a bit of a dandy, some said, and it was true that he liked to look his best, whatever part he was playing. And with the cameras watching, he liked to keep every-thing neat.

  He hopped naked into the bed and stretched out under the cool sheets. He lay there bursting with hope and fear and love—she loves me!—and stiff with renewed, frustrated lust.

  A long time ago they had been children together in the same school, a special school for ordinary kids who were being taught to be something more than ordinary. The SPARTA project, it was called—SPARTA stood for Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment—and it had been created by Linda’s parents . . . Ellen’s parents, that is . . . to demonstrate that every human is possessed of multiple intelligences, and that each of these intelligences may be developed to a high degree by stimulation and guidance. SPARTA vigorously contested the prejudice that intelligence was one thing, some mysterious ectoplasm called “I. Q.,” or that I. Q. was fixed, immutable, or in any meaningful sense real.

  Not all the children in SPARTA were equally capable in every area—people are rather less like each other than are pea plants—but every child blossomed. All became competent athletes, musicians, mathematicians, logicians, writers, artists, social and political beings. In one or more of these fields, each excelled.

  But for Linda and Blake, growing up, this extraordinary education was just school, the school they went to whether they wanted to or not, and to each other they were nothing more than schoolmates. Later, when it came to sex, the experience should have made them treat each other as casually as siblings.

  Not in their case. She’d been slower to realize it—or more reluctant to admit it—but they were in love with each other. And, evidently, very much in the physical way.

  It occurred to him that there is something about making love to the person you love that cannot be mimicked by any other experience in life; no amount of intelligence, no amount of sexual inventiveness, no amount of friendly feeling, not all the goodwill in the world, will lift you to that plane where all seems good and all good things seem possible, without love.

  So he lay there between his fresh cotton sheets, grinn
ing inanely at the stars visible through the narrow slit in the stone wall that was his window, dreaming of Linda . . . of Ellen. And renewing his determination to take her away from all this. He never noticed the moment when his daydreams turned to night dreams.

  An hour later, when the house was dark and her body was immobile and her mind was sunk deep in its own undreaming depths, the locked door to Sparta’s room silently opened.

  The commander entered the room and shone the beam of a tiny bright flashlight into the corners, then gestured to the door. A technician came into the room and, while the commander held the spot of light steady on the side of Sparta’s neck, pressed an injector pistol against her skin. There was no sound of protest, no evidence of sensation as the drug entered her bloodstream.

  Her nightmares resumed not long after.

  IV

  The moon was a fat caïque riding on cold, billowing seas of October cloud. Something was chasing the moon. He heard it coming long before he saw it, a black winged thing whose wings beat the night. . . .

  This was no dream. Blake opened an eye and saw a black silhouette slipping silently down the sky, past his window.

  He tore aside the covers and rolled out of the bed, sprawling flat on the floor. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep—the pattern of moonlight on the carpet suggested that it was already after midnight—but he knew what the thing outside was—

  —a Snark, an assault helicopter, its blades and turbines tuned to whisper mode, settling gently onto the wide lawn below his window.

  One of ours or one of theirs? But who were they? Who were we?

  Whose side was Blake on anyway? He kept low and rolled across the moon-dappled carpet into the cover of his closet. Inside, he dressed as quickly as he could, slipping into dark polycanvas pants and a black wool pullover, snugging black sneakers onto his feet and pulling a roomy, many-pocketed black canvas windbreaker around his shoulders.