The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  To the human ear the radio noise was just that, meaningless broadband noise, but the analyzers made something quite different of the mess: it seemed that each of the sources was transmitting the same highly directional modulated beam, thousands of watts—straight toward Mission Control!

  Cries of raw emotion burst from the throats of four of the on-duty controllers as they grabbed for their harness latches to free themselves from their consoles. Buranaphorn looked up in disbelief to find himself staring into the maw of a pistol.

  At the same moment, up on the flight deck, First Mate Rajagopal turned to Captain Chowdhury and announced, “You are hereby relieved of your command. Obey me and all will be well.”

  Three off-duty controllers flew in through Mission Control’s lower hatch, shouting through the crackling roar of the speakers, “All will be well!”

  A man holding a pistol intercepted the commander as he was flying up the central corridor toward Mission Control. “If you stop there, Commander, all will be well with you.”

  Garuda was in mutiny.

  Meanwhile Kon-Tiki was falling freely, nose down. Overhead the discarded balloon was racing upward, taking the medusa’s inquisitive tentacle with it. But Falcon had no time to see if the gas bag had ascended so fast that it actually hit the medusa, for at that moment his jets fired and he had other things to think about.

  A roaring column of hot hydrohelium was pouring out of the reactor nozzle, swiftly building thrust toward the heart of Jupiter. Not the way he wanted to go. Unless he could regain vector control and achieve horizontal flight within the next five seconds, his vehicle would dive so deeply into the atmosphere that it would be crushed.

  With agonizing slowness, five seconds that seemed like fifty, he managed to flatten out and pull the nose up. Falcon was still accelerating, in eyeballs-out position. If he’d had a merely human circulatory system, his head would have exploded. He glanced back just once and caught a glimpse of the medusa many kilometers away. The discarded gas bag had evidently escaped its grasp, for he could see no sign of the silver bubble.

  A savage thrill swept through him. Once more he was master of his own fate, no longer drifting helplessly on the winds but riding a column of atomic fire back toward the stars. He was confident the ramjet was working perfectly, steadily increasing velocity and altitude until the ship would soon reach near-orbital speed at the fringes of atmosphere. There, with a brief burst of rocket power, Falcon would regain the freedom of space.

  Halfway to orbit he looked south and saw, coming up over the horizon, the tremendous enigma of the Great Red Spot, that permanent hole in the clouds big enough to swallow two Earths. Falcon stared into its mysterious beauty until a bleating computer warned him that conversion to rocket thrust was only sixty seconds ahead. Reluctantly he tore his gaze from the surface of the planet.

  “Some other time,” he murmured. At the same moment he switched on the commlink to Mission Control.

  “What’s that?” the flight director demanded. “What did you say, Falcon?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Are you locked on?”

  “That’s a roger,” Buranaphorn said drily. “When we do this again, we’d like your cooperation.”

  “Okay. Tell Dr. Brenner I’m sorry if I scared his alien. I don’t think any damage was done.” Mission Control was silent so long that Falcon thought he’d lost the link. “Mission Control?”

  “We are going to concentrate on bringing you in,” said Buranaphorn. “Please stand by for revised reacquisition coordinates.”

  “Roger, and did you copy my message to Brenner?”

  “We copied.” The flight director hesitated only briefly this time. “This will not affect your final approach, Howard, but you should be aware that this ship is presently under martial law.”

  XXVI

  Three minutes after the mutiny started, it was over. The crew and controllers who’d crowded into Mission Control and onto the bridge of Garuda, shouting “All will be well,” found themselves staring into the barrels of stun guns held by their former colleagues.

  Only two rubber bullets were fired, at rebels who’d drawn on the Space Board commander and his lieutenant. The lieutenant had been on the bridge, the commander down in the corridor. They’d both drawn faster.

  A swift victory. Problem was—as if the radio noise howling out of the speakers weren’t enough to interfere with clear thought—that there was no place on Garuda big enough to hold thirteen prisoners. There they all were, up against the roof of Mission Control, a baker’s dozen of them wriggling like caterpillars with their wrists and ankles bound by plastic thongs, kept from floating helplessly into the way of the working controllers by a wide-mesh cargo net drawn across the entire ceiling. The controllers paid no attention to them. They still had Kon-Tiki to worry about.

  Sparta wobbled weightlessly, drunkenly, as she moved up the central corridor toward Mission Control. The deafening radio roar from Jupiter ceased as suddenly as it had begun, just as she approached the hatchway. Blake stopped her before she could enter the room.

  “Linda, you . . .” Whatever he was going to say, he changed his mind. “You shouldn’t be off life-support.”

  “I’ll survive.” She peered past him into the crowded control room. She had a good view overhead of the human menagerie under the roof. “Brenner I knew about. Rajagopal, too?”

  “Half the crew—which is why they thought they could take the ship without a fight. By the time it dawned on them they needed their weapons, it was too late.”

  She shifted her wary gaze back to him. “Who are you, Blake?”

  “I’m Salamander now,” he said. “Eight of us aboard. Plus the commander and Vik. Look, Linda, sorry . . . but this isn’t over yet.”

  He reached for her, but she flinched away. “Why not put me in the net with them?”

  He paled. “Why would I do that?”

  “I killed Falcon,” she said. On her face was the sort of hopeful defiance with which saints and witches once went to the fire. “What you guessed: software. Rewrote the ignition sequence to send him straight into Jupiter.”

  At that moment, over the continuing human commotion inside Mission Control, there came a sudden loud, clear rush of words from the speakers.

  “What’s that?” Buranaphorn yelped. “What did you say, Falcon?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Are you locked on?”

  “That’s a roger,” Buranaphorn answered. “When we do this again, we’d like your cooperation.”

  “He’s still alive!” Blake stared at Sparta. “What should we do?”

  She was a pale ghost in the corridor below him. “Clock time?” she whispered.

  Blake grabbed the hatch frame and pulled himself far enough into the control room to see the nearest clock. “E minus four forty,” he shouted at her.

  Her face was an extraordinary screen of emotions—of shock, exultation, anguish, and shame. “Falcon’s safe. I didn’t know what time it was.” She turned away from Blake, weeping bitterly, and tried to bury her face in her arms.

  Twenty-four hours later the Space Board cutter took its crew and passengers—many of them unwilling—on a short trip back to Ganymede Base. Howard Falcon said nothing to Sparta or Blake or the commander during the brief trip. Falcon had never before met any of them. He knew nothing of them.

  They exited through the long tube into the security lock. Once inside the docking bay Howard Falcon let a Space Board patroller guide him to a separate chamber. Someone he knew well was waiting for him in the VIP lounge.

  For Brandt Webster the long, apprehensive wait was over. “Extraordinary events, Howard. Good to see you safe.” He thought Falcon was looking very well, for a man who’d just lived through what he had. “We’ll get to the bottom of this soon, I assure you.”

  “No concern of mine,” said Falcon. “No effect on the mission.”

  Webster swallowed that and tried a different tack. “You’re a hero,” he said. “In more ways than one.”


  “My name’s been in the news before,” Falcon said. “Let’s get on with the debriefing.”

  “Howard! There’s really no rush. Let an old friend congratulate you, at least.”

  Falcon regarded Webster with an expression that would be impassive forever after. He inclined his head. “Forgive me.”

  Webster tried to take encouragement from the words. “You’ve injected excitement into so many lives—not one in a million will ever get into space, but now the whole human race can travel to the outer giants in their imagination. That counts for something!”

  “Glad I made your job a little easier.”

  Webster was too old a friend to take offense, yet the irony surprised him. “I’m not ashamed of my job.”

  “Why should you be? New knowledge, new resources—that’s all very well. Necessary even.” Falcon’s words were more than ironic; they seemed tinged with bitterness.

  “People need novelty and excitement too,” Webster answered quietly. “Space travel seems routine to a lot of people, but what you’ve done has restored the great adventure. It will be a long, long time before we understand what happened on Jupiter.”

  “The medusa knew my blind spot,” Falcon said.

  “Whatever you say,” Webster replied, resolutely cheerful.

  “How do you suppose it knew my blind spot?”

  “Howard, I don’t have any idea.”

  Falcon was silent and motionless for an interminable moment. “No matter,” he said at last.

  Webster’s relief was visible. “Have you thought about your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune . . . ?”

  “I’ve thought about Saturn.” Falcon gave the phrase a ponderous weight that might have been intended to mock Webster’s sanctimony. “I’m not really needed there. It’s only one gravity, you know—not two and a half, like Jupiter. People can handle that.”

  People, thought Webster, he said “people.” He’s never done that before. And when did I last hear him use the word “we”? He’s changing, slipping away from us. . . . “Well,” he said aloud, moving to the pressure window that looked out upon the cracked and frozen landscape of Jupiter’s biggest moon, “we have to get a media conference out of the way before we can do a thorough debriefing.” He eyed Falcon shyly. “No need to mention the events on Garuda; we’ve kept the lid on that.”

  Falcon said nothing.

  “Everybody’s waiting to congratulate you, Howard. You’ll see a lot of your old friends.”

  Webster stressed that last word, but Falcon showed no response; the leather mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult to read.

  He rolled away from Webster and unlocked his undercarriage, rising on his hydraulics to his full two and half meters. The psychologists had thought it a good idea to add an extra fifty centimeters as a sort of compensation for everything Falcon had lost when the Queen crashed, but Falcon had never acknowledged that he’d noticed.

  Falcon waited until Webster had opened the door for him—useless gesture—then pivoted neatly on his balloon tires and headed forward at a smooth and silent thirty kilometers an hour. His display of speed and precision was not flaunted arrogantly; Falcon’s moves had become virtually automatic.

  Outside a howling newspack waited, barely restrained by the net barriers, bristling with microphones and photogram cameras that they thrust toward his masklike face.

  But Howard Falcon was unperturbed. He who had once been a man—and could still pass for one over a voice-only link—felt only a calm sense of achievement . . . and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. He’d slept soundly aboard the cutter on his return from Jupiter, and for the first time in years his nightmares seemed to have vanished.

  He woke from sweet sleep to the realization of why he had dreamed about the superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds. So was he. As a chimp is to a human, Falcon was to some as-yet-to-be-perfected machine.

  He had found his role at last. He alone could travel unprotected on the surface of the Moon, or Mercury, or a dozen other worlds. The life-support system inside the titanium-aluminide cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or underwater. Gravity fields even ten times that of Earth would be an inconvenience, nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.

  The human race was becoming more remote, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right to live outside atmosphere. Perhaps they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, the moon, Mars.

  Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not men. He was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.

  The hidden, intricate sequence of directives which supposedly had been programmed into Falcon’s mind and which the mere incantation of the words “Prime Directive” had been intended to activate in him had failed to work as his designers intended—not simply because of mechanical failure, and certainly not because Falcon was less than human—but because he was still, in some essential, deep crevice of his mind, too human to do what no human would do, sacrifice himself for no good reason.

  Falcon himself knew nothing of this. He did not know that his instincts for self-preservation—with a little help from electrical overload—had crushed the best hopes of a millenniums-old religious conspiracy. He knew only that he had been elected.

  He would, after all, be an ambassador—between the old and the new, between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of ceramic and metal who must one day supersede them. He was sure that both species would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.

  Epilogue

  “Another?”

  “Why yes, very good of you . . .” Professor J. Q. R. Forster positioned his glass under the neckof the Laphroaig bottle. The commander poured the darkliquid over chunk of ice. Behind them, an oak fire burned with intense heat in the fireplace of the Granite Lodge library. Outside the tall windows, the early winter sun was setting.

  “The ignition sequence was keyed to mission-elapsed time,” the commander said, replacing the bottle on the silver tray. “If the count had continued, Troy’s rewrite of the program would have sent Kon-Tiki straight into Jupiter. Half an hour before that could happen, Falcon manually overrode the sequencer to escape from the medusa.”

  “So the medusa actually saved his life!” Forster’s terrier brows leaped eagerly upon his forehead—he loved a good yarn.

  “And Troy’s freedom. She would have been guilty of murder.”

  Forster shrugged, faintly embarrassed. “In that unfortunate event, surely she could have pled temporary insanity.”

  “Not something she likes to talk about.” The commander settled into his armchair, remembering the recent trip from Jupiter. He was not about to burden Forster with the details—details that would remain vivid in his own mind for years.

  “You can’t save me from a murder charge that easily,” Linda had rasped at him for the hundredth time, her eyes dull with weariness. “I killed Holly Singh. And Jack Noble. And the orange man. Maybe others. When I did it, I knew what I was doing.”

  One of the swiftest ships in the solar system was taking three weeks to get them back to Earth. It gave her the time she needed to recover her physical health. It gave all of them more time than they needed for debate and discussion.

  But Linda was an infinite puzzle to the commander. “Does your conscience require that much of you?” he had asked her.

  “You are asking me if I can find any reason to justify the murders I committed. I tell you no, none—even though those people tried to murder me. And may have murdered my parents, whatever you or I want to believe.”

  “The ones you named were murderers, all right. And they meant to enslave humanity. Others like them survive, with goals that haven’t changed.”

  “
That doesn’t justify killing them in cold blood.” Her blood had not been cold, though. It had teemed.

  “Well, you’re determined.” He sighed expressively. “Whether you knew what you were doing is not something you’re going to be left to decide for yourself, I’m afraid. Psychiatric observation is all your uncorroborated confession is likely to get you.”

  “Uncorroborated?”

  He pretended not to hear her. “And after some indeterminate sentence in a mental hospital—you know what that’s like, I think, the sort of things they can do these days with programmed nanochips and so on—after that, if there’s any evidence to support your statement, maybe they’ll lock you in a penitentiary for life. But if that’s what you want. . . .”

  “You know I’m telling the truth.”

  “Maybe. No one has reported any of those people dead, or even missing.”

  “But has anyone seen them? They were public figures, some of them. Lord Kingman. Holly Singh.”

  “No, but Jack Noble had already taken a powder, as they used to say. ’Course, he had cause.” He shrugged. “People can disappear for years at a time for no good reason, maybe because they just feel like it. You vanished without warning, Linda. More than once.”

  She winced to hear her name from his lips.

  “But let’s say I believe they are dead and that you killed them—leaving out Kingman, of course. Do you want my cooperation? Want me to help you take on all the responsibility, let you pay for your mortal sins?”

  “What do you want?” She swallowed, anticipating the barb in the bait.

  “Help us.” Those smooth-talking Jesuit confessors, the childless uncles and cousins of his French Canadian forebears, would have been proud of him—weren’t they just as at home with the sophistries of the cloister as with the lies they told the Indians they’d come to convert?—but the commander was ashamed of himself. “We’ve got a problem. Bigger than your little personal problem. Maybe even bigger than Homo sapiens.”