by Paul Preuss
Just then Falcon saw something that upset him even more than the exobiologist’s assault on his willpower. The medusa was still hovering more than a kilometer above the balloon, but one of its tentacles had become incredibly elongated—
—and was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time! Remembered video scenes of tornados descending from storm clouds over the North American plains sprang to Falcon’s mind, memories vividly evoked by the black, twisting snake in the sky that was groping for him now.
“See that, Mission Control?”
“Affirmative,” Buranaphorn replied tautly.
“I’m out of options,” Falcon said. “Either I scare it off or give it a bad stomach ache—because I don’t think it will find Kon-Tiki very digestible, if that’s what it has in mind.”
Brenner’s voice came back, fast and frantic: “Howard, listen to me. You must not forget that you are under the dictates of the Prime…”
At that moment Falcon killed the downlink from Mission Control, cutting Brenner off in midexpostulation—a decision that came from the same place as his decision to pull the ripcord, from some deeply engrained respect for his own integrity and survival.
A cruder, more primitive man might have put it more bluntly: screw the Prime Directive.
Perhaps that cruder, more primitive man was sensitive to something that the highly evolved, highly modified, fully conscious Howard Falcon wasn’t, namely that every time Brenner said the words “Prime Directive,” Falcon’s head seemed to fill with throbbing white light, and he felt vague saccharine urges toward—how would one put it?—the Oneness of Being. Urges overlaid with a less romantic compulsion to do any damn thing Brenner told him to do.
Where the hell that came from, he didn’t know. But cutting the squishy little Brenner out of the loop seemed to relieve the immediate symptoms.
“I’m starting the ignition sequencer,” Falcon said, aware that his words were for the record only, and that if he never got back to Mission Control no one would ever really know what happened.
The clinic door stood open. The commander was gone, the guard outside the door had disappeared, and the ship’s doctor had made his getaway. Blake floated into the doorway, his hands full of food containers. “What happened?”
She was oblivious to him, listening. She expelled a long breath. “He’s offline,” she said. “Moonjelly must have taken him.”
“The what?”
“The medusa.”
“Are you sure?”
She studied him with dull eyes. “Whatever happens, he’s dead. I rigged his escape sequence to fail. Wish I hadn’t.”
“Linda, Linda, what’s become of you?” he cried. Blake wiped sudden tears across his red face and propelled himself backward into the corridor.
At last she was alone. She tugged at her wrist straps.
Falcon was twenty-seven minutes early on the countdown, but he calculated—or hoped—that he had the reserves to correct his orbit later.
He couldn’t see the medusa. It was directly overhead. But the descending tentacle must be close to the balloon.
As a heater, the reactor was running fine, but it took five minutes for its microprocessors to run through the complicated checklist needed to get it to full thrust as a rocket. Two of those minutes had passed. The fuser was primed. Computer had not rejected the orbit situation as absurd, or at least not as wholly impossible. The capsule’s scoops were open, ready to gulp in tonnes of the surrounding hydrogen-helium atmosphere on demand. In almost all ways conditions were optimum, and it was the moment of truth. Would the damn thing work?
There had been no way of operationally testing a nuclear ramjet in a Jupiterlike atmosphere—without going to Jupiter. So this was the first real trial.
Something rocked Kon-Tiki, rather gently. Falcon tried to ignore it.
Ramjet ignition had been planned for barometric conditions equivalent to some ten kilometers higher, in an atmosphere less than a quarter of the present density and some thirty degrees cooler.
Too bad.
What was the shallowest dive he could get away with? If and when the scoops worked and the ram fired, he’d be heading in the general direction of Jupiter—down, that is—with two and a half Gs to help him get there. Could he possibly pull out in time?
A large, heavy hand patted the balloon. The whole rig bobbed up and down like one of those antique toys, yoyos, that had recently undergone a rage revival on the playgrounds of Earth. Falcon tried harder to ignore it.
Without success. Brenner could be right, of course. It might be trying to be friendly. Maybe he should try talking to it over the radio. It received radio, didn’t it? What should he say? How about “Pretty pussy” or maybe “Down, Fido!”—or “Take me to your leader.”
Computer showed tritium-deuterium ratio optimum. Time to light the hundred million-degree Roman candle.
The thin tip of the medusa’s tentacle came slithering around the edge of the balloon, less than sixty meters away. It was about the size of an elephant’s trunk and, judging by the delicacy of its exploration, at least as sensitive. There were little palps at its ends, like questing mouths.
Dr. Brenner would have been fascinated.
It was as good a time as any—probably better than any time more than a second or two later—so Falcon glanced swiftly at his control board, saw all green, and started the four-second count.
Four
He broke the safety seal—
Three
And flipped the ENABLE toggle—
Two
And with his left hand squeezed hard on the dead-man switch—
One
And with his right pressed the JETTISON button.
Nothing … until—
There was a sharp explosion and an instant loss of weight.
Half a minute after Falcon went off line, a howl of static erupted through the speakers in Mission Control, momentarily overwhelming the automatic trackers.
A hundred bright points of radio energy blazed into life in the clouds of Jupiter, forming concentric rings that were neatly centered on Falcon’s last known position.
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 h
uman 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.”
26
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.�
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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.