The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  The most obvious and striking change was Kon-Tiki Mission Control itself, the big circular room that sliced right through Garuda’s middle, belting the ship’s equator with dark glass windows below the smaller dome of the bridge. Once Kon-Tiki had been launched, a flight director and five controllers would man the Mission Control consoles, in three shifts around the clock.

  And now that Sofala had topped off Garuda’s propellant tanks, that launch was only hours away.

  Sparta lay curled like a fetus, weightless in the dark, listening to the final countdown. . . .

  With the main airlocks of the two craft mated, the KonTiki module had been carried into Jupiter orbit on Garuda’s bow. Now Sparta heard the sealing of the locks and the clang of the hatches, felt the shudder of shackles springing back in precise sequence and the final bump of separation. She heard the hiss of Garuda’s attitude-control jets compensating almost imperceptibly for the gentle push KonTiki’s own jets had given the mother ship as it separated.

  Sparta imagined the Kon-Tiki module, its intricacies hidden beneath gleaming cowlings and heat shields, carefully increasing its distance from Garuda.

  Now both craft hung virtually motionless a thousand kilometers above the desolate rocks and ice of Amalthea, in the radiation shadow of that modest satellite. For KonTiki, Jupiter would soon rise above the rim of the little moon, but the great planet would remain hidden from Garuda throughout the mission. When orbital separation was complete and all systems had been checked, Kon-Tiki would fire its retrorockets and begin its long fall.

  Howard Falcon’s quest was about to reach its culmination.

  Sparta’s quest over the past two years had been more private and more tortured. She lay listening as his moment of triumph approached, while her consciousness phased in and out of dark dreams and distorted memories . . .

  “Are you all right, dear?”

  The solicitous questioner is a wide woman with the broad hands and bright cheeks of a former milkmaid, whose round Rs betray her Somersetshire origins. Her arms are filled with bundled sheets.

  The girl blinks her blue eyes and smiles apologetically. “Was I at it again, Clara?”

  “Dilys, I warn you that you’ll never work your way out of the laundry if you keep falling asleep standing up.” Clara pushes the armful of dirty sheets into the maw of the industrial-sized washing machine. “Be a good girl and pull those others out of the hamper, will you?”

  Dilys bends to drag the sheets up from the depths of the cart. Above her head opens the maw of the laundry chute, which reaches three stories up to the top floor of the country house.

  Clara lifts an eyebrow. “If I didn’t know you for an innocent, I’d suspect you of listening in. That chute’s a fine telephone to the bedrooms, as you’ve no doubt discovered.”

  Dilys turns wide eyes on her. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that.”

  Clara’s ample bosom shakes with a hearty laugh. “Not that it would do you any good at this hour of the morning. Nobody upstairs but Blodwyn and Kate, stuffing these down the hole.” Clara takes the sheets from Dilys, pushes the slept-on-once linen into the machine, and closes the round glass door on it. Her brown eyes glint with mischief. “You’d learn more about our guests from these. See here, Miss Martita’s sheets haven’t been slept in at all. Why not?” She pulls open a used expanse of bedding. “Here’s a clue: that fellow Jurgen is not the ox he appears.”

  “I don’t understand,” Dilys said.

  “I mean the difference between an ox and a bull, dear.”

  “Clara!”

  “But perhaps a miner’s daughter shouldn’t be expected to understand country matters.” Clara crumples the sheet and shoves it into the washer. “No more daydreaming, now. See that the towels and napkins are pressed and folded by the time I get back.”

  Dilys watches Clara’s broad back and broader hips disappear up the stairs. Rather than attend to the ironing, the slim, dark girl immediately falls back into trance. Although she isn’t standing near the laundry chute now, she is doing just what Clara has accused her of doing. She is listening. Listening not to bedroom antics, in which she has no interest, but to the casual conversations of Lord Kingman’s weekend guests. Voices come to her from the hall. . . .

  “The hunting is rather good to the west—let’s leave it to the others, what do you say?” Kingman’s voice, an older man’s, ripe with good breeding.

  “I’m sure you’ll find us something worth shooting, Ru pert.” A middle-aged man, whose every utterance so far has betrayed a terrible impatience underlying his charm.

  “I won’t disappoint you . . . ahh”—Kingman’s voice drops, his inflection sours—“here’s the German now.”

  Downstairs in the laundry room, the dark-haired girl stands rapt. Her peculiarities will be tolerated in the household for the sake of the centuries-old, romantic, mystical reputation of the Welsh—not to mention that old Lord Kingman seems to have a special fondness for a merch deg. But under her brunette wig her hair is blond and her eyes are not as dark blue as they seem, and Kingman would be profoundly shocked to discover the bitterness in this particular pretty girl’s heart.

  Sparta—but for Kingman and his cronies, alone in all the worlds—knows that Kingman was the captain of the Doradus.

  PIRATE SHIP IN SPACE, the newsheads had screamed. There were no pirates in space, of course. Putting aside practical matters of pursuit and conquest, where could they possibly hide? Not near inhabited planets and moons, and the Mainbelt was not the Caribbean: the asteroids were small and airless and unable to support life, without huge and obvious investments of capital.

  The Doradus had not been a pirate vessel, but a secret warship, intended to be held in reserve against some future conflict with the Council of Worlds. In all the solar system, less than a dozen fast Space Board cutters were authorized to carry offensive weapons; the Doradus was a formidable force. How well guarded had been the secret of that ship! How chagrined the Free Spirit must be at its loss!

  As the news media recounted in great detail, the registry of the mystery ship was aboveboard and normal: the ship was owned by a most respectable bank, Sadler’s of Delhi, which had loaned the capital for its construction. The builders had gone bankrupt and forfeited, and Sadler’s had acquired the ship and hired a reputable shipping line to operate it, a firm which had subsequently leased Doradus to an asteroid-mining venture that made regular voyages between Mars and the Mainbelt. For five years the ship had turned an unremarkable but respectable profit.

  Yet every one of the ten recorded officers and crew of Doradus, it soon developed, were fictitious identities. Even though four bodies had been left on Phobos when Doradus had blown its cover, their true identities could not be established.

  Still, not a glimmer of evidence linked the ship’s phony crew with any wrongdoing on the part of the mining company that had apparently hired them in good faith, or the shipping line that had contracted with the mining venture, or the bank that had contracted with the shipping line, or the bankrupt shipbuilders who had lost their investment.

  Sparta knew that such a complex deceit could never have been successful without the complicity of people deep within the Board of Space Control itself. Through her own access to electronic media she had leveraged her way into the Space Board’s investigations branch, learning the results of the search of Doradus almost as soon as Earth Central did.

  Among the armaments found on board were “12 each passive-target missiles of SAD-5 type, no serial numbers; 24 each high-impulse torpedoes with proximity fused HE warheads, no serial numbers, design previously unknown; 4 each Tooze-Olivier space-adapted repeating shotguns; 24 cases, 24 rounds per case, antipersonnel shells for same; 2 each miscellaneous 9-mm copper-point bullets, possibly of antique manufacture . . .” Along with the heavy stuff, two old pistol bullets—somebody on board the Doradus had been a gun collector.

  As it happened, one of the directors of the Sadler’s Bank who had been active in arranging the bankruptcy and
leasing arrangements of the Doradus was an enthusiast of antique weapons, an Englishman of rather distinguished ancestry—name of Kingsman.

  It was the sort of obscure fact that Space Board investigators would have gotten around to checking sooner or later, by way of doggedly tracking down every possibility. Whether the investigators would have been able to make anything of it was less certain. Sparta’s approach was more intuitive and direct. Her carefully constructed resume was borrowed freely from a real girl from Cardiff named Dilys, and it withstood the intense scrutiny of King man’s household manager; Sparta had seen to it that a position had opened shortly before.

  Soon after arriving at Kingman’s estate, Sparta had confirmed her guess, learning from here voluble belowstairs colleagues of Kingman’s famous ancestor and of a pistol taken off a German soldier in the battle of El Alamein, a pistol that accepted the round Kingman, in his haste, left aboard his abandoned warship.

  Now “Dilys” stands listening until the voices she hears through the walls fade away, one by one. Kingman and his weekend guests are leaving the house for their afternoon of shooting. She turns back to the mountain of linen that needs ironing. By tonight, she knows with a certainty she would not be able to explain, she will learn the final secrets of the prophetae. . . .

  Aboard Garuda, Sparta stirred fitfully and roused herself from sleep. A steadily increasing intake of Striaphan—for almost two years now—had shrunk her emotional life to a black knot of rage, but it had not diminished her powers of perception and calculation . . . so long as she was awake enough and strong enough to focus them. But her head throbbed and her mouth was dry. It took long seconds for her to recall where she was, why it was so cold and dark and foul-smelling in this cramped little space.

  Then the glow of remembered anger once more began warming her from inside. Kon-Tiki had awakened her.

  Kon-Tiki was on its way down.

  XVIII

  The fall from Amalthea’s orbit to the outer atmosphere of Jupiter takes only three and a half hours—plus a few minutes to gain an extra modicum of orbital inclination, thus avoiding the wide stretch of the planet’s diaphanous, rubble-filled rings. Even with the detour, it’s a short trip.

  Few men could have slept on so swift and awesome a journey. Sleep was a weakness that Howard Falcon hated, and the little he still required brought dreams that time had not yet been able to exorcise. But he could expect no rest in the three days that lay ahead, and he must seize what he could during the long fall down into that ocean of clouds, some 96,000 kilometers below.

  Thus, as soon as Kon-Tiki had entered her transfer orbit and all the computer checks were satisfactory, he tried to prepare himself for sleep. Viewed coldly, it was the last sleep he might ever know—so it seemed appropriate that at almost the same moment Jupiter eclipsed the bright and tiny sun, as his ship swept into the monstrous shadow of the planet. For a few minutes a strange golden twilight enveloped the ship; then a quarter of the sky became an utterly black hole in space, while the rest was a blaze of stars.

  No matter how far one traveled across the solar system, the stars never changed; these same constellations now shone on Earth, millions of kilometers away. The only novelties here were the small, pale crescents of Callisto and Ganymede. There were a round dozen other moons somewhere up there in the sky, but they were all much too tiny and too distant for the unaided eye to pick them out.

  “All’s nominal here,” he reported to the controllers far above him on Garuda, drifting in safety in Amalthea’s shadow. “Closing down shop for two hours.”

  “That’s a roger, Howard,” the flight director replied. The bit of jargon from the early days of the American space program might have sounded strange once, pronounced as it was in Thai-accented English, but certain phrases of American and Russian had long since become as familiar in interplanetary space as ancient nautical terminology on the seven seas of Earth.

  Falcon switched on the sleep inducer and fell swiftly into that aimless musing that is prelude to unconsciousness. His brain, which stored information willy-nilly and produced it by free association at moments like this, now reminded him of the etymology of the name Amalthea: it meant “tender,” as in gentle and caring. Amalthea the goat-nymph had been nursemaid to the infant Zeus—whom the Romans fondly equated with Jupiter—in his hiding-cave on Crete.

  For a long time after Jupiter’s inner moon was discovered it was known simply as Jupiter V, the first to be found after the four satellites made famous by Galileo—their names also borrowed from mythological associates of Zeus. If it served no other caring purpose, Amalthea was a cosmic bulldozer perpetually sweeping up the charged particles which made it unhealthy to linger close to Jupiter. Amalthea’s wake was almost free of radiation and chunks of flying matter, and there Garuda could park in perfect safety while death sleeted invisibly all around it.

  Falcon idly pondered these matters as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. While Kon-Tiki fell toward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second in that enormous gravitational field, he slept—at first—without dreams. The dreams always came when he began to awake. He had brought his nightmares with him from Earth.

  He never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found himself face to face again with that terrified super-chimp, seen in those moments when they were both descending through the collapsing gasbags. The simps hadn’t survived, except one, he didn’t really know which; most of those who were not killed outright were so badly injured that they’d been painlessly euthed. He didn’t know if that holdout survivor was the same one he’d confronted in the wreck, but Falcon—in his dreams—always had that one’s face in front of him. He sometimes wondered why he dreamed only of this doomed creature and not of the friends and colleagues he had lost aboard the dying Queen.

  The dreams he feared most always began with his first return to consciousness. There had been little physical pain; in fact there had been little sensation of any kind. He was in darkness and silence, and he did not even seem to be breathing—

  —strangest of all, he could not locate his limbs. He felt them there; he had all their sensations. They seemed to move, but he did not know where they were. . . .

  The silence was the first to yield. After hours, or days, he had become aware of a faint throbbing, and eventually, after long thought, he deduced that this was the beating of his own heart. That was the first of his many mistakes.

  Next there had been faint pinpricks, sparkles of light, ghosts of pressure upon those still ghostly limbs. One by one his senses had returned, and pain had come with them. He had had to learn everything anew.

  He was a baby, helpless, and about as cute as sour milk and dirty diapers; probably there would have been lots of desperate smiling at Mom, if he could have figured out how to smile, and who was Mom. But soon he was a toddling infant: lots of cheers from everybody as he lurched half the length of the room before he folded abruptly. Folded up time after time. Physical therapy, they called it.

  Though his memory was unaffected—it didn’t seem to have been affected, for he could certainly understand the words that were spoken to him—it was months before he could answer his interrogators (why did they always lean over him with those damned lights overhead, those bright lights in a circle?) with more than a flicker of an eyelid.

  Vivid now were the moments of triumph when he had uttered the first word . . . first pressed the pad of a book chip . . . and then, finally, moved. Moved through space (the space of a hospital room), and not in his imagination but under his own power. That was a victory indeed, and it had taken him almost two years to prepare for it.

  A hundred times he’d envied the dead superchimps. They had tried and died. He hadn’t died, so he had to keep trying—he was given no choice in the matter. The doctors, his close friends, had made their deliberate decisions, deliberately.

  And now, years later, he was where no human being had ever traveled, falling planetward faster than any human in history.

&nb
sp; Sparta was falling with him, toward the bright planet, if only in her blazing imagination. Her eyes burned and her heart throbbed painfully in her chest. She hadn’t slept for twenty hours, yet all her senses, the ordinary and the extraordinary, were tuned to a bright pitch.

  The pain of that brightness, the crashing pain of perception and imagination, cried out for relief. Her weak fingers fumbled for the precious vial. She snapped off the cap and tried to extract a wafer, nestled close to the others in their tube, but they were obstinate in the microgravity. She extended her PINspines and prized one out.

  Slowly the wafer melted under her tongue. The brightness softened; imagination dissolved into memory—dreamed memory, or perhaps remembered dream. . . .

  Dilys pauses to listen.

  Except for the night watchman and his assistant, out prowling the grounds, the staff of the great house are deep in exhausted sleep. Upstairs the last of the guests are finally asleep too.

  The shooting parties had set out and had not returned for several hours. Kingman and the man called Bill had taken the east side of the estate; the west side was left to the big, loud German fellow—whose partner was Holly Singh.

  Singh had not bothered to disguise her looks or her name; Dilys had wondered if the others’ identities were as real as hers. When a late guest arrived she knew they were: he was Jack Noble from Mars, who had vanished after the failed attempt to steal the Martian plaque.