The Medusa Encounter Read online

  “Well, we have no shortage of researchers in this office.” She started to rise, intending to terminate the interview after thirty seconds.

  “Also the work I’ve already done on a case of utmost interest to your Institute.”

  “Redfield . . . Mister Redfield . . .” She was at the office door now, opening it and holding it open.

  He remained sitting. “Powerful agencies of the Council of Worlds have been infiltrated by a pseudo-religious cult, which seeks to take over world government in the name of . . . of an alien deity.”

  “A what?”

  “Yes, it’s crazy. These people believe in an alien deity. I managed to join an arm of that cult. I can recognize several of its members and at least one of its leaders. Because of what I know, several attempts have been made on my life, the most recent only last week.”

  Arista let the door swing closed, but she remained standing. “What sort of cult did you say? UFO nuts?”

  Perhaps he’d been lucky after all. Arista Plowman’s fascination with conspiracy had engaged her attention. Her brother might have just laughed and referred him to the police.

  “They call themselves the prophetae of the Free Spirit, but they have other names and cover organizations. I penetrated a branch working out of Paris and helped put it out of business”—after all, no reason for modesty—“They worship a being they call the Pancreator, an alien creature of some kind who is supposed to return to Earth to grant the enlightened—meaning themselves—eternal life, and carry them off to some sort of Paradise. Or perhaps establish Paradise right here on Earth.”

  “I’m not vulnerable to every conspiracy theory that comes down the pike, Redfield.”

  Oh, I think perhaps you are, he thought happily, keeping a straight face. “I can document everything I’m telling you.”

  “Well, but what possible interest do you suppose Vox Populi might have in this bunch?”

  “The prophetae are crazy, but they are numerous and extremely influential. Less than ten years ago, members of the Free Spirit started the Multiple Intelligence program inside North America’s Security Agency. That program ceased operations—and its leaders disappeared—when the subject of one of their illegal experiments escaped their control. But not before they had murdered a couple of dozen people. Burned them to death in a sanatorium fire.”

  “Ten years ago, though. A dead issue by now, unfortunately.”

  “Less than a month ago, the Space Board discovered an interplanetary freighter, the Doradus, which had been converted to a kind of pirate ship. The chief of one of the largest corporations on Mars was implicated. Jack Noble. He’s disappeared.”

  “I heard about that. Something to do with the Martian plaque.”

  “I was there. I’ll give you whatever details you want.” Blake leaned back in his chair and looked up at her as she thoughtfully returned to her desk. “Doctor Plowman, you’re supposed to be in the business of getting government back into the hands of the governed—after people like my father, if I may speak off the record, helped take it away from them. This is exactly the kind of group I should think you’d want to put out of business.”

  “Your father is a member of this Free Spirit?”

  “I assure you he is not.” He couldn’t tell whether the prospect appalled her or further whetted her appetite. “He is just a well-meaning . . . aristocrat.”

  Arista Plowman resumed her seat behind the steel desk. “Your resume doesn’t say anything about the things you’ve just described to me, Redfield.”

  “I’m a marked man, Doctor Plowman.”

  “So with you here, we could be a target.”

  “You’ve been a target for so long that your defenses are excellent. I made sure of that before I came here.”

  She smiled thinly. “Are you safe in your own home?”

  “My parents have had so much money for so long that their defenses are almost on a par with yours.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the Space Board in the first place?”

  Blake’s smile was grim. “Why do you think?”

  “Are you implying that the Board of Space Control itself . . . ?”

  “Exactly.”

  Her eyes glazed over with the possibilities, and her feral smile made him feel sure he had a job offer. But it wasn’t to be quite that easy. Long experience had taught Arista Plowman caution.

  “Interesting, Redfield, very interesting. I’ll talk to my brother. He’ll want to meet you in person. Meanwhile, don’t call us. We’ll call you. . . .”

  Outside, Blake realized that the interview—not to mention the night’s events—had left him exhausted. Exhaustion is hard on the reflexes. When a tall, emaciated young man crossed the street in front of him and darted into the nearest infobox, throwing a hurried glance over his shoulder, Blake thought nothing of it. Indeed, he hardly noticed, until he’d come within a few meters and the man suddenly wheeled and raised his arm.

  Blake spun on his heel, in that instant finally recognizing the man, and threw himself backward toward the curb.

  The bullet blew a crater in a marble slab on the side of the building, just about where Blake’s head had been. More bullets—real metal bullets, fired with zeal and accuracy that, if less than perfect, was too great for even a split second’s complacency on the part of the target—following Blake’s breathless roll and scramble along the gutter until he reached the shelter of a parked robotaxi. People were screaming and running—this sort of thing never happened in Manhattan—and in seconds the block was deserted.

  Blake swore at himself for not spotting his assailant sooner, for he knew him quite well. Leo—former wimp—one of his buddies from the Athanasian Society. Blake wished he had a gun. He didn’t carry one, not just because they were strictly illegal in England, where he’d resided for the last two years, and not because he had any qualms about defending himself, but because he’d looked at the statistics and calculated the odds and figured he had a better chance of staying alive without one.

  Deliberate assassination wasn’t included in the odds. He reached up to open the front door of the cab. He slipped inside, keeping his head low, and shoved his I. D. sliver into the meter.

  “Where to, Mac?” the cab asked, in a good imitation of early 20th-century New Yorkese.

  Blake stuck his head under the dash and spent a few seconds fiddling with the circuitry. Still crouched on the floor, he said, “Is there a skinny long-haired guy in the infobooth on the next corner, to your left?”

  “He just left the infobooth. Now he’s in the doorway this side of it. Looks like he’s thinking about coming this way.”

  “Run into him,” Blake said.

  “You puttin’ me on?”

  “There’s a twenty in it for you.”

  “Twenty what?”

  “Twenty thousand bucks. You don’t believe me, take the credit off the sliver now.”

  “Yeah, well . . . look, Mac, I don’t do stuff like . . .”

  Blake poked savagely at the circuitry.

  “Yo,” said the taxi, and leaped forward, onto the sidewalk. Bullets splintered the windshield of the Checker—then a grinding jolt threw Blake hard against the firewall.

  He kicked the door open and rolled out onto the sidewalk. He vaulted onto the big square trunk of the Checker and threw himself across the cab roof like a runner diving for home plate.

  The taxi hadn’t touched Leo, but it had him trapped in the recessed doorway with only millimeters to spare. Leo was frantically trying to lift his big feet past the mangled bumper when Blake flew over the roof, into his face, knocking the big nickel-plated .45 revolver sideways and out of his hand. Leo’s head crashed backward into the building’s art deco stainless steel door, and when he tried to jerk away from Blake’s hand around his throat he found that Blake’s other hand held a black knife, poised rigidly upright under the angle of his jaw.

  “Rather have you alive, Leo,” Blake gasped. “So tell me.”

  Leo said nothing, bu
t his round terrified eyes said he’d rather stay alive too—although Blake got the impression he’d been ordered to die instead of letting himself be captured.

  The flutter of helicopter rotors sounded high above the urban canyon, and the scream of sirens converged at street level.

  “Tell me why, Leo, and I’ll let you run. If the cops get you, the prophetae won’t let you live even one night in jail.”

  “You know. You’re a Salamander,” Leo croaked.

  “What the hell’s a salamander?”

  “Let me go,” he croaked. “I won’t come back, I promise.”

  “Last chance—what’s a salamander?”

  “Like you, Guy. Initiates once—now you’re traitors. The ones who know you best . . . we’re sworn to kill you.”

  “You bombed my place in London?”

  “Not me. Bruni.”

  “Yeah, she always had more guts.”

  “You didn’t even hide, Guy. If you’re gonna let me go, please do it now.”

  “My name’s Blake. Might as well get it straight.” He released his grip on Leo’s throat, but held the knife ready. “Cabbie, back up a little,” he yelled. “Go slow.”

  As soon as the Checker had backed far enough away from the doorway, Leo bolted. Blake slipped the knife into its sheath at the small of his back and slid down from the cab’s hood. “We need a story,” he said, sticking his head in the taxi’s window.

  “It’ll cost you more than twenty thou,” the taxi said sourly.

  “Charge what you think is fair.”

  “Okay, Mac. What do you want me to say?”

  Blake reached into the taxi and retrieved the briefcase he’d dropped on the floor. “The guy tried to rob me. You came to my rescue—that’s when he shot at you. You almost had him trapped, but he got away.”

  “What about all the extra dough on my meter?”

  “The truth—I let you charge off my sliver as a reward for saving me. Also to patch your dents.”

  “Sure, Mac. Think they’ll buy it?”

  “You’re programmed for gab, aren’t you?”

  “Hey! Am I a Manhattan cabbie, or what?”

  The first police car, a sleek powder blue hydro—no quaint antiques here—whistled to a halt as the police chopper settled in to hover overhead. Blake watched the cops approach, faceplates down, shotguns leveled. At this rate, who knew which side they were on?

  After almost two hours’ interrogation, the police let Blake go. He got off the subway in Tribeca and walked toward his parents’ home, past columns of steam issuing from manhole covers, down deserted asphalt streets where the robotaxis prowled like jungle beasts. Manhattan had become a showplace in this century, an exclusive enclave of the wealthy, and here and there the atmosphere of old New York was maintained for amusement’s sake.

  Things were busier at the waterfront entrance to his parents’ building. Blake nodded at the guard captain as he punched the code into the lock of the private elevator to the penthouse. The other guards were out of public view.

  Avoiding his mother—his father was on business in Tokyo, business which required his physical presence—Blake went straight to his room.

  He stripped off his torn jacket and soiled shirt and tie and gingerly applied Healfast salve to his blistered neck. The growth factors went to work immediately. By afternoon there would be little evidence of his second-degree burns.

  Comfortably dressed in baggy pants and a blousy, Russian-peasant-style shirt, he took his scarred briefcase into his father’s office and emptied its contents across the top of the desk—the loot from his raid on Granite Lodge.

  A scatter of tiny black chips and two micro-supercomputers, their housings cracked where he’d pulled them out of the system . . . he hoped he hadn’t fried them in their own heat. For micro-supers—not unlike men encased in impermeable plastic suits—generated copious amounts of heat; if they weren’t vigorously cooled by water or some other fluid, they could burn in seconds.

  It took Blake a quarter of an hour to get the first of the two little machines operating; for input he used his father’s keyboard, and the output was displayed on the desktop via his father’s holo unit. But after another hour’s concentrated tapping Blake gave up trying to extract anything from that machine. Nothing he tried got more than a scramble of standard code symbols on the holo projection, and he suspected that the thing was indeed fried.

  He had more luck with the other machine, but only just: after forty minutes of increasingly frustrating play—it kept telling him he was an unauthorized user—he got up and went to stand in front of the window, staring with unseeing eyes into the haze, looking across the lower Hudson to the smoky Jersey shore. He tried to empty his mind of everything except the experiences of the night. It was a species of self-hypnosis, in which he tried to see and hear again everything he had seen and heard inside the lodge.

  He went back to the desk and typed a word. A few millimeters above the green leather surface of Edward Redfield’s desk, the air glowed.

  No message appeared, however, neither a welcome nor a warning. Instead, an animal writhed there in three dimensions. It was a lizardlike creature with a thick tail and a wide triangular head, with tiny gleaming round brown eyes. Its awkward thin legs had splayed toes ending in thick pads. The thing’s moist skin was coppery brown, with a bright yellow underbelly.

  The string Blake had entered into the machine was SALAMANDER, the term Leo had used to accuse him—and the creature he had seen carved on the unconscious girl’s garnet ring.

  Nothing encourages persistence like a minimal reward. Blake persisted for another two hours, trying all the chips he’d stolen, one after the other. He got nothing more. Nothing but that writhing salamander.

  Bone weary from the night’s exertions and the morning’s concentrated effort, hunched over an unyielding machine, Blake fell asleep.

  He was awakened by the beat of wings.

  No, not wings, rotor blades.

  He sat bolt upright, and as soon as he remembered where he was and what he had been doing, he threw himself flat on the floor. But the steady whuff whuff whuff of the helicopter outside the window neither increased nor diminished. He crept across the floor and raised his eye to the level of the sill.

  A black silhouette, a hole in the sky, diffuse and without detail against the bright haze in the west; the thing just hung there in space, eighty-nine stories above the streets of Manhattan, twenty meters away and exactly opposite the window of his father’s office. A Snark. A Snark as Boojum.

  As Blake watched, the machine slowly rotated on its axis, until its strut-mounted rocket launchers and twin Gatling guns were pointed straight at him through the window.

  Blake didn’t move. There was nowhere to run or hide. The Snark carried enough firepower to wipe the penthouse right off the skyscraper on which it sat. The metropolitan police should have been here by now, within seconds of the Snark’s arrival. That they were nowhere in evidence spoke volumes. Blake could reach for the controls to the apartment’s private defenses—they were inside his father’s desk—but even if he reached them alive, he doubted the rooftop rockets could put a dent in a Snark.

  Blake stood up, exposing himself to the full view of the machine’s pilot. If you are here to kill me, do it cleanly, he said without words.

  The Snark bobbed its nose. Yes, we understand each other. Yes, we could do that. Yes, we know it was you, and now you know we can kill you and the people you love, any time we want to.

  Then the machine lazily arched into the air and slid away, peeling off toward the river. Within seconds Blake had lost sight of it in the dazzling bounce of light from the plain of wet algae. It left an unspoken message in its wake: The next move is yours.

  Blake walked back to the desk. He carefully unplugged the functioning computer and put it and the machine he’d probably scragged into an express envelope, along with all the stolen black chips. He took a thick pen from his father’s drawer and wrote in bold block letters
across the face of the envelope, “ATTENTION SALAMANDER, C/O NORTH AMERICAN PARK SERVICE, GRANITE LODGE, HENDRIK HUDSON PRESERVE, NEW YORK ADMINISTRATIVE DISTRICT.” The address wasn’t complete but it was more than sufficient. If they controlled the police, no doubt they had some clout with the postal service.

  He swung a windbreaker over his arm, covering the envelope, then left the penthouse and took the elevator to the bottom of the tower. If anything went wrong, he wanted it to go wrong at some distance from his parents’ building. This package he would mail from some anonymous neighborhood box.

  As he walked the windy streets toward uptown, Blake faced the fact that he was not a happy man. The woman he’d thought he loved wanted nothing to do with him. All the physical possessions he’d valued had been destroyed.

  So the Salamanders were former Initiates, were they? Heretics. Rivals to the prophetae, and like them, deep into the workings of the system. Blake had thought he could make himself so visible he couldn’t be hit without scandal. A forlorn hope. Even if the Plowmans offered him that job at Vox Populi, he owed it to them not to accept.

  He’d dragged his own parents into danger, a degree of danger he had foolishly underestimated. Whatever else he did or didn’t do, he had to move out of his parents’ penthouse. Fast.

  X

  Sparta found a job at J. Swift’s, a large travel agency in the City of London whose computers were rather better connected—for someone of Sparta’s leanings—than the firm’s managers suspected. They readily hired the girl with the sparkling green eyes and the Irish lilt who called herself Bridget Reilly, and who produced an impressive resume of service in the travel industry.

  For the next weeks and months her life was too tedious to contemplate: long hours in front of a flatscreen, speaking into a commlink with clients and other agents, booking and endlessly rebooking flights and rooms and ground transportation for people who couldn’t seem to make up their minds or abide by their agreements, and cheerfully accepting responsibility for atrocities over which she had no control—many of them stemming from the middle-class, middle-aged English tourist’s desire to experience foreign culture as if through a tea-room window, most of the rest resulting from the young English tourist’s conviction (like that of youth everywhere) of personal blamelessness and immortality.