The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  “Already three weeks since you rescued her from Mars,” said Jozsef. “Astonishing how time slips past us.”

  “Rescued?” The commander smiled. “Kidnapped is a better word. And ‘persuaded’ Redfield to come along.”

  “You didn’t bother persuading her physicians,” Jozsef remarked.

  “I didn’t much like the chief surgeon.”

  “Yes, well . . . however arrogant, he seems to have done a good job on her,” said Jozsef. “She seems well.”

  “In her body.”

  “Her dreams are not symptoms of illness. They are the key to all that confronts us.”

  “So you’ve explained.”

  “Once we understand what she knows—but does not know she knows—we will triumph at last.”

  “Then maybe you’ll let her know about you,” the commander suggested.

  “I look forward to that day.”

  “You know I’m with you, Jozsef.” The commander fixed the older man with a cold blue stare. “Whatever the cost.”

  Beyond the wall overlooking the river the trees grew to the cliff top. Unseen, screened by the woods below, a magneplane whistled past on the riverside track. A falcon settled in the top of a ruddy oak, carefully folding its angled wings, oblivious to the man and woman who walked a few meters away, at eye level.

  “What did you say when he asked you to join the force?”

  “What I told you. I said no.”

  “You could never resist explanations.”

  “Oh, I made explanations.” He smiled. “I was born rich, I said, and it ruined me. I told him I was insubordinate by nature and disinclined to accept arbitrary discipline from a bunch of . . . from people not self-evidently more intelligent or more experienced or otherwise more deserving of respect than I. That I already knew all I wanted to know about combat and disguise and sabotage and a few other black arts, and that if he wanted to hire me he could hire me as a consultant anytime, but that I had no interest whatever in going through basic training—again—and putting on a funny blue suit and being paid dirt wages just to get in on his fun.”

  “That must have impressed him,” she said dryly.

  “It made my point.” He said it without bravado. “That I’m no soldier, that I’m not interested in dying or killing.”

  “My hero,” she said, pulling him closer to her side with a tug of her hand, meshing her fingers in his. “What are you interested in?”

  “You know. Old books.”

  “Besides old books?”

  He grinned. “A little noise and smoke can be fun.”

  “Besides making things go bang?”

  “I’m interested in keeping us alive,” he said.

  She glanced toward the thick copse of elms and oaks that intruded into the lawn. “Come in here with me,” she whispered, smiling. “I have an urge to live a little. . . .”

  The library’s tall windows overlooked the morning lawn. “What will we do about him?” Jozsef turned away; he’d been watching the two young people by the wall.

  “Give him one more chance. After this morning, let him go,” the commander said. He stood at the fieldstone fireplace, warming himself at the crackling oakwood fire.

  “You said you could recruit him. . . .”

  “I’ve tried. Mr. Redfield is his own man.” His smile was thin. “He was taught well.”

  “Is it safe to let him go?”

  “Her welfare is important to him. Of the greatest importance.”

  “He is in love with her, you mean.” Jozsef’s expression was invisible against the glare of the high window. “Does he have any idea of how she can be hurt?”

  “Do any of us?” It wasn’t cold in the high-ceilinged room, but the commander kept chafing his hands at the fire.

  “Yes, well . . .” Jozsef pulled at the flesh under his chin and cleared his throat. “If we let him go, he must be isolated.”

  “I’ll arrange it.” The commander’s voice was a bare whisper past the gravel in his throat.

  “Can you guarantee it?”

  “Not absolutely.” The commander turned hard blue eyes on his companion. “We’ve got limited choices, old friend. We can explain things to him, ask him to come along. . . .”

  “We can’t tell him more than he knows already. Not even she must know.”

  “She will take the case, I think. He may not want her to.”

  “If he refuses, you know what we must . . .”

  “I hate these drugs of ours,” the commander said vehemently. “Hate using them. They go against the principles you taught me yourself.”

  “Kip, we are in a struggle that . . .”

  “A man’s own memory . . . a woman’s . . . lying. It’s worse than no memories at all.”

  For several seconds Jozsef watched the weather-beaten man who stood by a blazing fire but could not seem to warm himself. What winter was he reliving in memory?

  “Okay,” the commander said. “If he won’t join us on this . . . this Falcon business, I’ll isolate him.”

  Jozsef nodded and turned back to the window. The couple who’d been standing at the wall had disappeared into the trees.

  They tumbled in the autumn leaves, gasping and giggling like children. The smell of mold was as rich as a winery cave, the very smell of it intoxicating, filling her with the joy of life. Their breath steamed in the sharp air. The moment arrived, like the edge of the first rapid, when the emotion they were riding tipped into the current of their blood, and they felt not at all like children. Her dancer’s finely muscled body was pale white against the black of her coat, spread open on the leaves.

  There were microscopic cameras and microphones in the little copse, as there were everywhere on the grounds. Sparta knew they were there, although she thought Blake did not. Her eye sought one out where it glistened like a carbon crystal against the gray trunk of a tree. She stared at it over his shoulder.

  She exposed herself to those who watched and listened partly to defy them, but mostly because she loved Blake and would have him this way if they would not let her have him any other.

  Later he lay touching her, close against her, flank to flank. His skin tingled and his face was flush with a happiness he had often imagined but now knew for the first time. Her head was on his arm; his other arm hovered over her skin, close enough to feel its radiant warmth. He trailed his middle finger down the faint pink line of the scar that ran from her sternum to her navel.

  “It’s almost gone,” he said. “In another week . . .”

  “I’ll pass for a human being again,” she said. Her voice was flat. Her eyes stared past him, up at the colorful leaves overhead, and through them to the dark sky-vault beyond. “And then we’ll leave this place.”

  “Ellen . . . do you understand what’s happening?” With practice it got easier to call her Ellen, although he would always think of her as Linda, the name she was born with.

  Only Sparta thought of herself as Sparta. No one else knew her secret name, any more than a human knows the secret name of an animal. “I think the commander’s keeping his word. This is the R & R he’s been promising me for so long.”

  “R & R.” He smiled. “Very restful.” He leaned over her and kissed the corner of her swollen, perpetually parted lips. “Very recuperative. But why won’t he tell us where we are?”

  “We both know where we are—the Hendrik Hudson nature preserve. We could pinpoint the coordinates on any map.”

  “Yes, but why won’t he name the place? And why not let us come and go? The night we arrived here, after you were asleep, he told me I could leave whenever I wanted, but if I did I couldn’t come back. Why the mystery? We’re on his side.”

  “You’re sure of that,” she said—not quite a question.

  But he took it as a question, and it surprised him. “It was you. . . .”

  “I’m sure of one thing”—she pulled him down to cover her, to feel his warm weight hiding her from the sky—“that I love you.”

 
; II

  “The man who proposed Kon-Tiki is Howard Falcon,” said the commander. “He will personally pilot the Jupiter probe.”

  It was the same bright morning, but no one could have known it from the surroundings—a dim, quiet basement briefing room, its walls and ceiling carpeted with the same brown wool as its floor, its only illumination leaking from brass-shaded lamps on low tables beside the leather armchairs where Sparta, Blake, and the commander nestled.

  “How did one man get that kind of power?” Blake asked.

  “Falcon is . . . an unusual specimen. This will explain.” The commander’s raw voice was without resonance in the slowly vanishing room . . . in the darkest center of which an image had begun to form, filling space with the moving landscape of Arizona’s high sagebrush plains, seen from a great altitude. “What we’ve pieced together here happened eight years ago.”

  * * *

  The Queen Elizabeth was over five kilometers above the Grand Canyon, dawdling along at a comfortable 300 kilometers per hour, when from the liner’s bridge Howard Falcon spotted the camera platform closing in from the right. He had been expecting it—nothing else was cleared to fly at this altitude—but he was not too happy to have company. Although he welcomed any signs of public interest, he also wanted as much empty sky as he could get. After all, he was the first man in history to navigate a ship half a kilometer long.

  So far this first test flight had gone perfectly. Ironically enough, the only problem had been the fifty-year-old aircraft carrier Chairman Mao, borrowed from the San Diego Naval Museum for support operations. Only one of Mao’s four nuclear reactors was still operable, and the old battlewagon’s top speed was barely thirty knots. Luckily, wind speed at sea level had been less than half this, so it had not been too difficult to maintain still air on the flight deck. Though there had been a few anxious moments during gusts, when the mooring lines had been dropped the great dirigible had risen smoothly, straight up into the sky as if on an invisible elevator. If all went well, Queen Elizabeth IV would not meet Chairman Mao again for another week.

  Everything was under control; all test instruments gave normal readings. Commander Falcon decided to go upstairs and watch the rendezvous. He handed over to his second officer and walked out into the transparent tubeway that led through the heart of the ship. There, as always, he was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the largest space yet enclosed by humans on Earth.

  The ten spherical gas cells, each more than thirty meters across, were ranged one behind the other like a line of gigantic soap bubbles. The tough plastic was so clear that he could see through the whole length of the array and make out details of the elevator mechanism at the other end, half a kilometer from his vantage point. All around him, like a three-dimensional maze, was the structural framework of the ship—the great longitudinal girders running from nose to tail, the fifteen hoops that were the circular ribs of this sky-borne colossus, whose varying sizes defined its graceful, streamlined profile.

  At this comparatively low speed there was little sound—merely the soft rush of wind over the envelope and an occasional creak from the joints of the ribs and stringers of titanium and carbon-carbon compound, flexing as the pattern of stresses changed. The shadowless light from the rows of lamps far overhead gave the whole scene a curiously submarine quality—

  —and to Falcon this was enhanced by the spectacle of the translucent gas bags. Once while diving he had encountered a squadron of large but harmless jellyfish, pulsing their mindless way above a shallow tropical reef, and the plastic bubbles that gave Queen Elizabeth its lift often reminded him of these—especially when changing pressures made them crinkle and scatter new patterns of reflected light.

  He walked down the axis of the ship until he came to the forward elevator, between gas cells one and two. Riding up to the observation deck, he noticed it was uncomfortably hot.

  The Queen obtained almost a quarter of its buoyancy from the unlimited amounts of waste heat produced by its miniature “cold” fusion power plant. Indeed, on this lightly loaded test flight, only six of the ten gas cells contained helium, an increasingly rare and expensive gas; the remaining cells were full of plain hot air. Yet the ship still carried 200 tonnes of water as ballast.

  Running the gas cells in hot-air mode created technical problems in refrigerating the access ways; obviously a little more work would have to be done there. Falcon dictated a brief memo to himself on his microcorder.

  A refreshing rush of cooler air hit him in the face when he stepped out onto the big observation deck, into the dazzling sunlight that streamed through the clear acrylic roof. He was confronted with a scene of controlled chaos. Half a dozen workers and an equal number of superchimp assistants were busily laying the partly completed dance floor, while others were installing electrical wiring, arranging furniture, and fiddling with the elaborate louvers of the transparent roof. Falcon found it hard to believe that everything would be ready for the maiden voyage, only four weeks ahead.

  Well, that was not his problem, thank goodness. He was merely the captain, not the cruise director.

  The human workers waved to him, and the “simps” flashed toothy smiles. They all looked quite spiffy in the blue and white coveralls of the Queen’s corporate sponsors. He walked among them, through the orderly confusion, and mounted the short spiral stairs to the already finished Skylounge. This was his favorite place in the whole ship, but he knew that once the Queen was in service he would never again have the lounge all to himself. He would allow himself just five minutes of private enjoyment.

  He keyed his commlink and spoke to the bridge, confirming that everything was still in order. Then he relaxed into one of the comfortable swivel chairs.

  Below, in a curve that delighted the eye, was the unbroken silver sweep of the ship’s envelope. He was perched at the highest point forward, surveying the immensity of the largest vehicle ever built to contend with gravity near a planet’s surface. The only larger craft in the solar system were the space freighters that plied the trajectories among the space stations of Venus, Earth, Mars, the moons, and the Mainbelt; in the absence of weight, size was a secondary concern.

  And when Falcon had tired of admiring the Queen, he could turn and look almost all the way to the horizon of that fantastic wilderness carved by the Colorado River in half a billion years time.

  Apart from the remotely operated camera platform, which had now fallen back and was recording the spectacle from amidships, Falcon had the sky to himself. It was blue and empty up here, although the horizon was opaque with the purple brown stain that had become the permanent color of Earth’s lower atmosphere. Far to the south and north he could see the icy trails of ascending and descending intercontinental space planes, specifically prohibited from the corridor across the desert skies that today had been reserved for the Queen.

  Someday, cheap fusion plants would supplant the fossil fuels upon which so much of the Earth still depended for economic sustenance, and ships like the Queen would ply the atmosphere gently and cleanly, carrying cargo and passengers. Then the sky would belong only to the birds and the clouds and the great dirigibles. But that day was still decades in the future.

  It was true, as the old pioneers had said at the beginning of the 20th century: this was the only way to travel—in silence and luxury, breathing the air around you and not cut off from it, near enough to the surface to watch the everchanging beauty of land and sea. The subsonic jets of the past century’s final quarter had been hardly better than cattle cars, packed with hundreds of passengers seated up to ten abreast. Now, a hundred years later, a great many more passengers would soon be able to travel in greater comfort, at comparable speed, and with less real expense.

  Not that any of them would be traveling on the Queen; the Queen and her projected sister ships were not a mass-transit proposition. Only a few of the world’s billions would ever enjoy gliding silently through the sky in highest luxury, champagne in hand, the symphonic strains of a live orchestr
a drifting from the stage of the observation deck below. . . . But a secure and prosperous global society could afford such follies and indeed needed them for their novelty and entertainment, as a useful distraction from the kind of aggressive interplanetary business affairs that too often threatened to erupt into brushfire wars. And there were at least a million people on Earth whose discretionary income exceeded a thousand “new dollars” a year—that is, a million of the ordinary dollars everybody else was used to having deducted from their credit chips at every transaction. So the Queen would not lack for passengers.

  Falcon’s commlink beeped, interrupting his reverie. The copilot was calling from the bridge.

  “Okay for rendezvous, Captain? We’ve got all the data we need from this run, and the viddie people are getting impatient.”

  Falcon glanced at the camera platform, now matching his speed and altitude a quarter of a kilometer away. “Okay, proceed as arranged. I’ll watch from here.”

  He went down the spiral stairs from the Skylounge and walked back through the busy chaos of the observation deck, intending to get a better view amidships. As he walked he could feel a change of vibration underfoot; the silent turbines were powering down, and the Queen was coming to rest. By the time he reached the rear of the deck, the ship was hanging motionless in the sky.

  Using his master key, Falcon let himself out onto the small external platform flaring from the end of the deck; half a dozen people could stand here, with only low guardrails separating them from the vast sweep of the envelope—and from the ground, thousands of meters below the envelope’s sharply sloping artificial horizon. It was an exciting place to be, and perfectly safe even when the ship was traveling at speed, for it was sheltered in the dead air behind the huge dorsal blister of the observation deck. Nevertheless, it was not intended that the passengers would have access to it; the view was a little too vertiginous.