The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  Vibrations at the edge of her enhanced sensibility, way off to her right. Delicate footsteps in a slow, intricate rhythm, like the last drips of rain from the eaves, after the storm has passed.

  A deer. Two of them, does probably, stepping slowly and lightly through the woods, searching the undergrowth for fodder.

  But there is another step as well, slower yet, and heavier. Not an animal, but moving almost like one. Footsteps faint and oh-so-cautious. The moves of a professional stalker.

  Kingman’s gamekeeper? No, as of half an hour ago, the old gaffer was sleeping off last night’s binge, in his room in the west wing.

  This is a new player.

  She gets a vector on the sound, then ceases listening and relaxes into movement. Though she can no longer hear as well, she can imagine the stranger’s stepwise moves.

  Now comes Kingman on her left, pressing through the wet brush like an elephant, walking with the unthinking confidence born of a lifetime’s familiarity with these woods. She moves right, not wanting to cut off the unknown player but rather to come in behind, to have a look. She goes through the brightening forest with all the grace and alertness she can muster.

  She catches herself—barely—just before she walks into him. Had she not had the advantage of knowing he was there . . . Well, he is very good. She trembles motionless against the rough bark of a bent old oak.

  Then he moves, and she sees who he is. Curly red hair, camel’s hair coat, pigskin gloves—among the sunlit autumn leaves he is almost better camouflaged than she. His skill comes as no surprise to her.

  The orange man. He’d almost killed her on Mars, and again on Phobos. She’d had a chance to kill him then, but out of some misguided impulse—of what, justice? Fair play?—she’d held back. Even though she knew he’d killed the doctor who had freed her from the sanatorium, even though somehow she knew even then—though she had not quite made the connection in memory—that he’d tried to kill her parents. Perhaps succeeded.

  She rests her cheek against a cushion of emerald green moss on the tree trunk, holding her breath and waiting for him to go on past, down that narrow creek bed choked with fallen leaves. Whatever scruples she’d had are irrelevant now.

  His footsteps stop.

  She pushes her face cautiously forward, peering around the tree trunk. She can not see him. But Kingman’s footsteps keep coming through the woods.

  The loud crack of the orange man’s pistol splits the morning calm. Even without the suppressor he normally uses, she knows the .38 by its sound—

  —which startles the deer. They go bounding deeper into the preserve, crashing through the brush without pausing to look back, two living animals not making enough noise, however, to obliterate the heavy fall of Kingman’s dead body—straight over, he hits the forest floor like a felled tree. Head shot.

  If she could see the orange man she would shoot him, but he is already moving away from her, screened by too many tree trunks, walking calmly in the direction of the house. She creeps after him, until her view of the meadow and the mansion is clear.

  He’s out of the woods now, into the open, making no effort to hide himself. All of Kingman’s guests are gathered on the terrace, chatting calmly with each other as they watch the orange man’s progress. The one called Bill has turned away from the rail to the face the others. His stance is relaxed, arrogant.

  For fifteen seconds she listens. . . .

  “So, Bill, on to Jupiter”—Holly Singh speaking, a smirk bending her red lips—“But how do we know Linda won’t be there ahead of us. As she was on Phobos?”

  Bill takes his time answering. Then he says, “Actually, my dear, I’m depending on it.”

  Her trance takes only an instant. She comes out of it with her mind made up. She aims and squeezes. The orange man’s head comes apart, more pink than orange.

  To get off her other shots takes time, perhaps a third of a second each. The inherent uncertainty of the extreme range takes its toll. Only two of the first four rounds find targets.

  The one aimed at Bill gets Jack Noble instead, in the midsection. The second shot is wasted against the wall of the house. The next one is aimed at Holly Singh, who is ducking. It finds her shoulder, taking the shoulder and half her neck. The fourth shot breaks an irregular block of stone from the balustrade—

  —by which time the others are down, hiding behind it. A few seconds later they begin firing back from its cover.

  She is already gone, running through the woods more lightly than the deer.

  XXI

  That first day, the Father of the Gods smiled upon Falcon. It was as calm and peaceful here on Jupiter as it had been, years ago, when he was drifting with Webster across the plains of northern India. Falcon had had time to master his new skills, until Kon-Tiki seemed an extension of his own body. Such luck was more than he had dared to hope for, and he began to wonder if he might have to pay a price for it.

  He smiled inwardly. Even within the perfect man, shreds of superstition remain.

  The five hours of daylight were almost over. The clouds below were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had not possessed when the sun was higher. Color was swiftly draining from the sky, except in the west itself, where a band of deepening purple lay along the horizon. Above this band was the thin crescent of a closer moon, pale and bleached against the utter blackness beyond.

  With a speed perceptible to the eye, the sun went straight down over the edge of Jupiter almost 3,000 kilometers away. The stars came out in their legions—and there was the beautiful evening star, Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far he was from the place of his origin. It followed the sun down into the west. Humanity’s first night on Jupiter had begun.

  With the onset of darkness, Kon-Tiki began to sink. The balloon was no longer heated by the feeble sunlight and was losing a small part of its buoyancy. Falcon did nothing to increase lift; he had expected this and was planning to descend.

  The invisible cloud deck was still some fifty kilometers below, and he would reach it about midnight. It showed up clearly on the infrared radar, which also reported that it contained a vast array of complex carbon compounds as well as the usual hydrogen, helium, and ammonia. Falcon could see all this for himself, with perceptual abilities that were not general knowledge.

  The chemists were dying for samples of that fluffy, pinkish stuff; though some of the previous atmospheric probes had gathered a total of a few grams, they had had to analyze the compounds on board, with automated instruments, in the brief time before they’d disappeared into the crushing depths. What the chemists had learned so far had only whetted their appetites. Half the basic molecules of life were here, floating high above the surface of Jupiter. Where there was “food,” could life be far away? That was the question that, after more than a hundred years, none of them had been able to answer.

  The infrared was blocked by the clouds, but the micro-wave radar sliced right through and showed layer after layer, all the way down to the hidden “surface” 400 kilometers below. That was barred to him by tremendous pressures and temperatures; not even the robot probes had ever reached it intact. It lay in tantalizing inaccessibility at the bottom of the radar screen, slightly fuzzy, showing a curious granular structure that neither Falcon nor his radar screen could resolve.

  An hour after sunset he dropped his first onboard probe. It fell swiftly for about a hundred kilometers, then began to float in the denser atmosphere, sending back torrents of radio signals, which he relayed to Mission Control. Then there was nothing else to do until sunrise, except keep an eye on the rate of descent and monitor the instruments.

  While she was drifting in this steady current, Kon-Tiki could look after herself.

  Flight Director Im announced the end of Day One. “Good morning, Howard. It’s one minute after midnight, and we’ve got green boards all around. Hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

  Falcon’s reply came back, time-delayed and distorted by s
tatic: “Good morning, Flight. All the boards I’m looking at are green too. Looking forward to sunrise so I can see a little more out the windows.”

  “Call us then. Meanwhile we won’t pester you.”

  Im keyed the ship’s bridge.

  “Mangkorn here, Flight.” The ship’s second mate, a Thai with ten years’ service among Jupiter’s moons, was the officer of the new day; Captain Chowdhury had gone to his cabin to catch some sleep.

  “Good morning, Khun Mangkorn,” she said. “Can you give me an update on our VIPs?”

  “The cutter is on a ballistic Hohmann from Ganymede. No change of ETA.”

  “Thank you.”

  Ten minutes passed without incident. Suddenly graph lines leaped on the screens. Im reached for the command channel. “Howard! Listen in on channel forty-six, high gain.”

  There were so many telemetering circuits that she could have forgiven Falcon if he remembered only those few which were critical, but he didn’t hesitate. Through her commlink she heard the click of the switch on his panel.

  He brought up the frequency on his inboard amplifier, which was linked through to the microphone on the probe that now floated 125 kilometers below Kon-Tiki in an atmosphere almost as dense as water.

  “Put it up on the speakers,” Im said. The communications controller immediately switched the loudspeakers to the probe’s channel.

  At first there was only a soft hiss of whatever strange winds stirred down in the darkness of that unimaginable world. And then, out of the background noise, there slowly emerged a booming vibration that grew louder and louder, like the beating of a gigantic drum. It was so low that it was felt as much as heard, and the beats steadily increased their tempo, though the pitch never changed. Now it was a swift, almost infrasonic throbbing.

  Then, suddenly, in midvibration it stopped—so abruptly that the mind could not accept the silence: memory continued to manufacture a ghostly echo in the deepest caverns of the brain.

  The controllers exchanged glances. It was the most extraordinary sound that any of them had ever heard, even among the multitudinous noises of Earth. None could think of a natural phenomenon that could have caused it. Nor was it like the cry of an animal, not even one of the great whales.

  If Im had not been so engrossed, she might have noticed the barely constrained excitement on the faces of two of her controllers. But she was on the comm to the bridge. “Khun Mangkorn, would you send someone to wake up Dr. Brenner, please,” she said. “This could be what he’s been waiting for.”

  The awesome sound came over the speakers again, following exactly the same pattern. Now they were prepared for it and could time the sequence; from the first faint throb to final crescendo, it lasted just over ten seconds.

  But this time there was a real echo, not an artifact of memory—very faint and far away, it might have come from one of the many reflecting layers deeper in the stratified atmosphere.

  Or perhaps it was from another, more distant source. They waited for a second echo, but none came.

  “Howard, drop another probe, will you? With two mike pickups maybe we can triangulate the source.”

  “Okay, Flight,” came the delayed reply, and over the speakers in Mission Control they heard the nearly simultaneous thump of the robot instrument probe separating from Kon-Tiki’s capsule. Oddly enough, none of Kon-Tiki’s own microphones was picking up anything except wind noise. The boomings, whatever they were, were trapped and channeled beneath an atmospheric reflecting layer far below.

  Olaf Brenner came through the hatch in the center of the control room’s “floor,” emerging from the corridor that led down to Garuda’s living quarters. The pudgy, gray-haired exobiologist was still sleepy, bouncing off the bulk-heads in uncoordinated haste, flying almost out of control. He tried to strap himself to his console next to the flight director’s, pulling on his sweater at the same time. Im had to help him keep from drifting away.

  Brenner didn’t bother to say thanks for the save. “What’s happening?” he demanded.

  “Listen,” Im told him.

  Over the speakers the boomings were repeating themselves. Falcon’s second probe had swiftly dropped through the reflective layers beneath and the bright screens in Mission Control made it clear that the strange sounds were coming from a cluster of sources about 2,000 kilometers away from Kon-Tiki. A great distance, but it gave no indication of their intrinsic power—in Earth’s oceans quite feeble sounds could travel equally far.

  “What does that sound like?” Im asked.

  “What does it sound like to you?” Brenner said gruffly.

  “You’re the expert. But it could be a deliberate signal, maybe?”

  “Nonsense. There may be life down there. In fact I’ll be very disappointed if we find no microorganisms—perhaps even simple plants. But there couldn’t possibly be anything like animals as we know them—individual creatures that move about under their own volition.”

  “No?”

  “Every scrap of evidence we have from Mars and Venus and Earth’s prehistory tells us there’s no way an animal can generate enough power to function without free oxygen. There’s no free oxygen on Jupiter. So any biochemical reactions have to be low-energy.”

  “You picking up this conversation, Howard?” Im inquired.

  Falcon’s carefully neutral voice came over the speakers. “Yes, Flight. Dr. Brenner’s made this argument before.”

  “In any case”—Brenner turned his attention to the data on his flatscreen and spoke directly to Falcon through the commlink—“some of these sound-waves look to be a hundred meters long! Even an animal as big as a whale couldn’t get that out of its pipes! They must have a natural origin, Howard.”

  “Probably the physicists will come up with an explanation,” Falcon replied. His tone was cool.

  “Well, think about it,” Brenner demanded. “After all, what would a blind alien make of the sounds it heard on a beach during a storm, or beside a geyser, or a volcano, or a waterfall? The alien might easily attribute them to some huge beast.”

  An extra second or two passed before Falcon said, “That certainly is something to think about.”

  “Quite,” Brenner harrumphed.

  There, for the time being, their conversation ended.

  From Jupiter, the mysterious signals continued at intervals, recorded and analyzed by batteries of instruments in Mission Control. Brenner studied the accumulating data displayed on his flatscreen; a quick Fourier transform re-vealed no apparent meaning lurking in the rhythmic booming.

  Brenner yawned elaborately and looked around. “Where’s the professional busybody?” he asked Im, seeing the empty harness where Blake Redfield often perched.

  “Even professional snoops have to sleep sometime,” replied the flight director.

  * * *

  Blake was in his tiny cabin, sleeping fitfully. He’d been sleeping about five hours in every twenty-four, and not all at once. He’d spaced his naps, making a point of monitoring the operations of each of Mission Control’s three daily shifts. What it had gained him was a pretty good idea who the ringers were, the controllers who controlled themselves too well under his constant needling and prodding.

  No matter which side of this multi-sided game they were on, they and he shared knowledge denied the rest of the people on Garuda, namely that Falcon had a purpose in the clouds that went well beyond the mission’s stated objectives.

  Even Falcon himself appeared not to know. Was he pretending? It was a question—one of many—that could only be answered in the event.

  In her hiding hole, Sparta stirred from dreams of revenge. Her red eyes opened and she ran a furry tongue over yellow teeth. Reality reemerged only gradually.

  She listened long enough to confirm mission elapsed time. Soon now. . . . She knew it was time to move, if she were to reach Blake. But did she still want to? She pondered. . . .

  Her red eyes had watched from hiding as he went about his officious business, tapping into da
ta without permission, asking rude questions of the off-duty controllers, making a pest of himself. To her, his behavior was transparent. He knew, as she did, that something was rotten in the Kon-Tiki mission. But unlike her, he didn’t know what. He was scratching and prying at scabs, hoping to irritate the beast into striking back—thus revealing itself.

  Some ember of compassion for him still burned in her brain. He had no idea that they were simply biding their time, that he was already marked for death. Blake’s efforts were dangerous and useless.

  She owed him nothing. Still, she could warn him of the cataclysm to come. She had done her best to behead the Free Spirit. Like the Hydra, it grew other heads.

  XXII

  About an hour before sunrise the voices of the deep died away, and Falcon began to busy himself with preparation for the dawn of his second day. Kon-Tiki was now only five kilometers above the nearest cloud layer; the external pressure had risen to ten atmospheres, and the temperature was a tropical thirty degrees Centigrade. A fellow could be comfortable here with no more equipment than a breathing mask and the right grade of heliox mixture.

  Mission Control had been silent for several minutes, but shortly after dawn bloomed in the Jovian clouds, Im’s voice came over the link. “We’ve got some good news for you, Howard. The cloud layer below you is breaking up. You’ll have partial clearing in an hour. You’ll have to watch out for turbulence.”

  “I’m already noticing some,” Falcon answered. “How far down will I be able to see?”

  “At least twenty kilometers, down to the second thermocline. That cloud deck is solid—it’s the one that never breaks.”

  As Falcon well knew. He also knew it was out of his reach. The temperature down there must be over a hundred degrees. This must be the first time a balloonist had ever had to worry not about his ceiling but about his basement.

  Ten minutes later he could see what Mission Control had already observed from its orbiting sensors with their superior vantage points: there was a change in color near the horizon, and the cloud layer had become ragged and humpy, as if something had torn it open. Falcon cranked his nuclear furnace up a couple of notches and gave Kon-Tiki another five kilometers of altitude so that he could get a better view.