The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  It seemed that Howard Falcon was not done with Jupiter—nor Jupiter with Falcon.

  INTERLUDE:

  NOVEMBER 1967

  As seen from the press stand, in the brilliant sunshine of a Florida fall morning the Saturn V was a stately white pillar, in stark contrast with the industrial plumbing and girderwork of the heavy launch gantry to which it still clung.

  But Launch Pad 39-A was miles away. Not only that, the murmur of the PA announcer as he calmly ticked off the items on the bird’s launch checklist was half drowned by the tinny music coming from some press hack’s transistor radio. When Seth complained about that to Mo Berry and George Lee Sheridan, there with him in the stand—they were all wearing hats and sunglasses and casual clothes, trying to stay anonymous amid this horde of press guys—they laughed at him.

  Mo punched his arm. “Hey, what’s eating you today? I know it’s the first Saturn launch, and we’re all nervous—”

  “Not as nervous as Wally Schirra and his guys,” Sheridan said dryly.

  “It’s not that. It’s the darn music.”

  Mo laughed. “Sacrilege, man. That’s Colonel John Glenn’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Look, I’m older than you but I sometimes think I’m ten years younger. The end of the world never had a better soundtrack.”

  “Are you kidding me? Some English guy caterwauling about a dame in the sky with diamonds?”

  Sheridan intervened diplomatically. “Your tastes are evidently different, Seth.”

  Seth shrugged. “I like older stuff. I grew up burrowing through my father’s record collection—he kept it together every posting we moved to, even overseas.”

  Mo pulled a face. “Ray Conniff and Mantovani. Am I right?”

  “Can it, hippy. Louis B. Armstrong is the man for me.”

  Sheridan grinned. “Satchmo! Good for you, son.”

  “Sure,” Mo said. “But the kids are listening to the Beatles this year. And then there’s Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Janis Joplin, Motown . . .”

  “Give me the Hot Five records—after that Edison could have folded up his gramophone and gone away.”

  Sheridan grunted. “Let’s hope we’re all still around to argue about pop records this time next year. That’s what all our hard work has been about.”

  Mo nodded. “True. But, man, I for one need a day off . . .”

  That was one thing he and Seth could agree on.

  But Sheridan snorted. “This is a day off.”

  * * * *

  For everybody at NASA, and for ten times as many contract staff working for the space programme in outside industry, the Summer of Love had been a Summer of Work, like none before.

  A plan had been put together with admirable speed and decisiveness, not so much based on two bozo astronauts’ doodlings in Bob Gilruth’s office that memorable April Sunday, but on parallel work done in corporations, at colleges like MIT, and in various NASA centres across the country.

  Mo and Seth had got it roughly right, though. Icarus would be deflected by a stream of nuclear detonations, delivered by Apollo spacecraft. The strategy was given the formal go-ahead in May. By June the design had been frozen, and by July the fabrication had begun of the extra Saturn boosters, and indeed of the modified Apollo craft that would ride on them—for a Saturn wasn’t designed to fly without an Apollo. That sounded ­simpler than it was. The Apollo’s guidance computer, for instance, had to be upgraded to work without human input in flight, and its communications system had to be enhanced to allow it to talk to an Earth that might be eighty times further away than any moonwalker had ever expected to travel.

  And then there was the question of acquiring the boosters to fly the missions. The old Moon-by-1970 schedule, which now seemed leisurely by comparison, would have seen fifteen Saturn V boosters manufactured in total, of which only six would have been available by June 1968, when the rock was due to fall. Now an accelerated schedule promised to deliver eight boosters, of which six would be flight articles. One was a ground-based test article, meant for checking out interfacing and control procedures—and one, one precious Apollo-Saturn, was to be sacrificed in the single test flight to be flown today, before the action began in earnest next April.

  It wasn’t just a question of ramping up production schedules. The Saturn had never flown, and an Apollo had killed its crew on the ground less than a year before. As Mo had said often, “These aren’t Model T Fords we’re churning out here.” So there was feverish activity at the centres where the various components of the giant ships were being manufactured: at North American Rockwell in California; and von Braun’s base at Huntsville, Alabama, where the booster stack was developed and tested; even at MIT in Boston, where the enhancements for the guidance system were being developed. Here at the Cape itself, meanwhile, new pads to launch the Saturns were hurriedly constructed. Even the DSIF, the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility, NASA’s global array of listening posts from the Mojave to Australia, had been beefed up to cope with the multiple missions that were to come: it turned out that the system had only been designed to cope with one craft in space at a time.

  In the end, a precise sequence of Saturn launches had been established. From early April 1968 through to that climactic June, there would be six flights. The first, stretching the Apollo-Saturn’s capability as far as it could go, would be a sixty-day mission to intercept Icarus when it was still twenty million miles from the Earth. But Icarus was closing in fast; the last mission, launched in mid June, would take just four days to reach Icarus—which by then would be little more than a million miles from Earth, a mere four times the distance to the Moon.

  But on this bright morning, none of it seemed real to Seth.

  He suspected that was the public’s mood too: a kind of disbelief. He knew the administration was quietly putting Atlantic-coast evacuation plans into place, and laying down stores of food and medicine. National Guard units were being deployed, although they were already under pressure after a summer of student protests, race riots and anti-war demonstrations. There were even rumours that regular troops were quietly being brought home from ’Nam. The wider world, meanwhile, went on much as it always did. The Arab nations had attacked Israel in June, and nobody knew if that had been sparked by Icarus or not. The UN Security Council remained a busy place.

  Still, after an immediate burst of hysteria, it seemed to Seth that most Americans had calmed down and gone back to work or play, or whatever else they had been doing.

  But Icarus was coming. The astronomers said the asteroid had already passed aphelion, its furthest distance from the sun. In May it would make its closest approach to the sun, and would then come barrelling back out, heading straight for the Earth.

  The astronauts themselves had thrown themselves into the rush programme as much as any other member of NASA. Mo and Seth had been caught up in that, flying across the country in their T-38s.

  But the two of them had a secret. They also had to prepare for their own manned flight.

  Sheridan had hit them with it immediately after LBJ’s news conference, back in April. A new assignment, he’d said.

  “You know how it is in NASA. We always have backup plans. On the way to the Moon, if your Command Module springs a leak—”

  Mo snapped, “We practice backup options in the simulators. So?”

  “So, what backup option do we have for Icarus? Think about it. We’re sending a tricky rendezvous mission across the solar system piloted by computers that are as dumb as shit. And the only conceivable backup is—”

  “To send a crew,” Seth breathed.

  “Oh, I think one man could do the job. I doubt if the weight allowance would allow any more anyhow. One man, to fly the last Icarus rocket and its nuke, if need be. Has to be a trained Apollo astronaut, of course.” He took them both by a shoulder, comparatively gently. “Has to be one of you two. Who’s to be prime and who’s t
he backup is up to you.”

  Seth hadn’t even begun to take this in before Mo said calmly, “I’ll take the hot seat. You got your kids, Tonto. Plus I’m the better pilot. No arguments.”

  So it had begun. NASA’s huge operational and management machine had swung into action and the work began: hours spent in planning sessions, checklist development, simulator exercises. They had plenty of support, because their flight, aside from today’s, was the only manned flight on NASA’s slate. Suddenly Seth was projected back into the life he’d always dreamed of, the very epicentre of the preparations for a crewed mission into space. He’d told his wife as soon as he could get to a phone. And the first thing he’d extracted from Sheridan, back in April, had been a promise to put a security guard on his family right away, and to whisk them to a secure location the minute the news broke in public.

  * * * *

  And Seth and Mo and those around them always tiptoed past a simple, unpalatable truth: that if that sixth bird flew, whoever rode it, whether he succeeded in a last-ditch attempt to deflect Icarus or not—whether Earth survived or not—was not coming home.

  * * * *

  At last the count, running smoothly, approached its close. That guy with the transistor finally shut off John Lennon and the rest, as if in respect, leaving the voice of the countdown PA to echo around the press stand undisturbed.

  Sheridan seemed curious. “You’re both so jumpy.”

  “Hell, yeah,” Mo said. “It’s the way we’re doing it. All up, the whole damn stack at once. This isn’t the way the Navy does things out at Patuxent . . .”

  The count approached zero. Seth saw fire gush from the base of the Saturn. He knew that three tons of propellant were burned every second, by each of the first stage’s big five F-1 engines.

  “. . . When you’re testing a new fighter, you don’t shove the damn thing through the sound barrier on the first flight. You take it up, bring it down. Then you take it back up again, try a few controls you left alone the first time, and bring it down again . . .”

  Even now the Saturn had yet to move. But smoke and flame were billowing up to either side from concrete deflectors—like two hands cupping the fragile craft, Seth thought.

  “Whereas here we’re testing three untried booster stages one on top of the other, carrying an untested spacecraft, containing three saps in untested spacesuits . . .”

  And the booster lifted at last, inching from the pad, the fire brilliant, like a droplet of the sun struggling to return to the sky. All this had been in silence, but now the sound from the Saturn reached them—it was not so much sound as a feeling, like someone pounding on his chest, Seth thought as the ground itself shook under his feet. Everybody in the press stand was cheering and clapping, and Seth could barely make out the words of the PA: “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 2, Godspeed Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham, as you begin your historic journey.”

  Mo yelled, “Three saps all the way around the goddamn Moon!”

  But Seth, cheering and whooping with the rest, had stopped listening.

  And Sheridan said, “That’s that. Back to work.”

  THREE

  * * *

  RETURN TO JUPITER

  2284

  18

  The pink-purple light of a Jupiter evening shone on the face of the sleeping Martian.

  When the medical monitors chimed to inform him that Trayne Springer was beginning to wake at last, Falcon reluctantly turned away from his conversation with Ceto. Not for the first time since his first encounter with the medusae—which had been, astonishingly, nearly two centuries ago—Falcon found himself puzzling over the content of one of the great beasts’ communications. He could tell Ceto was concerned, however. Even frightened about something—the multiple references to the Great Manta in her long radio songs were proof enough of that . . .

  But for now Ceto would have to wait.

  The young Martian stood upright in his atmospheric-entry support unit like a mummy in a coffin, all but encased in exoskeletal armour that left only the flesh of his face visible. His gloved hands were crossed over his breast—partially obscuring the gaudy image on the chest plate, of a springbok leaping over the Valles Marineris. It was a personal adornment that would have told Falcon all he needed to know about the boy’s family background even if he hadn’t known his name. Trayne’s eyes remained closed, he breathed to an accompaniment of a steady hiss from the machines that helped inflate his lungs in the heavy gravity, and the pale-pink dribble at his mouth was a last trace of the suspension fluid that had supported his frame and internal organs through the worst of the thirty gravities’ acceleration the Ra had endured during its entry into the Jovian atmosphere.

  Falcon took a tissue and gently dabbed the stray fluid away.

  “Thanks.”

  The Martian’s voice startled Falcon, and he rolled back. Trayne’s eyes were open now, and he was smiling. Falcon knew he was just thirty years old; he looked younger with those wide blue eyes and the very Martian pallor of his skin. Falcon said, “I’m a pretty good nurse for an old rust-bucket. So you’re awake at last.”

  Trayne frowned. “At last?”

  Falcon believed in being blunt. “Your recovery took a lot longer than your countrymen on Ganymede predicted. Days, in fact, rather than hours.”

  Trayne seemed concerned. “Well, this was an experimental procedure.” Martians sent to work in the Jovian atmosphere, though braced against Jupiter’s steady gravitational pull, were generally brought down in slow-­descent, low-deceleration trajectories that could take days, rather than the mere savage hours of Falcon’s preferred, more direct method. Now, given the Martians’ involvement in the Machines’ Core Project, Trayne had been a guinea pig for a new, physically tougher strategy. “I hope there’s been no lasting damage.”

  “None that the monitors can detect. But let’s check it out. You remember your name?”

  “Trayne Springer.”

  “Good.”

  “And you’re Commander Howard Falcon. My cousin Thera, that Terran fuddy-duddy, is in command up on Amalthea—”

  “No need to show off. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  Trayne concentrated, then smiled. “Before we began the atmospheric entry, you set the hull to transparent to show me Halley’s Comet. Quite a sight.”

  Falcon smiled back. “It’s the fourth encounter I’ve witnessed. You get used to it. What’s the date?”

  “AFF 298.”

  Falcon puzzled over that, until he got the reference. “AFF—after the first footstep on Mars, by John Young in 1986. Correct?”

  “According to the archaic calendar still used by your World Government—”

  Falcon held his hands up. “Your World Government too; you’re as much a citizen of it as I am. And I notice you count in Earth years, not Martian.”

  “Only to avoid confusing the Terrans.”

  Falcon suppressed a sigh. Only offworlders called citizens of Earth “Terrans.” “Evidently you’re just as compos mentis, and just as annoying, as when you stowed away on my craft up on Amalthea.”

  Trayne grinned. “I’m relieved to hear it.”

  “But that ten-gee deceleration knocked you flat, not to mention the thirty-­gee peaks. I’d say the trial has already proven its point—you Martians will need a hand when you challenge the heart of Jupiter alongside the Machines. Wouldn’t you say?”

  “I’ll leave that to my bosses. Now, could you help me out of this coffin . . . ?”

  19

  Since the voyage of the Kon-Tiki, Howard Falcon had returned to Jupiter many times.

  This time he was back because of the Machines.

  Times had changed. The unthinkable had become commonplace. Machines back in the inner solar system. Machines in the clouds of Jupiter.

  It was already thirty years since, after fifty years of si
lence, the Machines had made tentative contact from their self-imposed exile in the Oort Cloud. There had followed years of negotiation and argument between Machines and various human factions. The World Government was still bruised from the exodus of 2199—from the humiliation of losing control of the autonomous agents it had brought into being, and from the consequent collapse of the KBO volatile supply chain once the brains of the operation had been removed, after which the solar system economy had sunk into a long and demoralising recession. The Martians, meanwhile, had petitioned for a renewed contact with the Machines. Their argument was that the Machines were out there anyhow, and that sooner or later there would have to be renewed engagement. Surely it would be better to have that contact under terms of peaceful cooperation . . . ?

  Falcon had been a witness to these tectonic shifts of history.

  One ambiguous benefit of his cyborgised state, which had revealed itself only slowly over time, was a virtual immortality. Life-extension treatments were common now, but Falcon was easier to maintain than a fully normal human—easier than Hope Dhoni, say, who had continued to be his doctor and companion through the years. Indeed his lack of organs, of stomach and liver and genitals, rendered him calmer than most, it often seemed to him. A calm, passionless witness to centuries rolling like tides across the solar system.

  And he was still engaged in the great game.

  After that tentative first renewal of contact there had followed a decade of cautious negotiation. Then the World Government, through its Energy and Space Development Secretariats, had cautiously issued the first licences for Machine operations in the clouds of Jupiter. Tremendous floating factories would be built to strain the fine trace of a particular isotope, helium-3, out of the Jovian air. It was the best fusion fuel available, and had to be extracted from an environment to which, as Falcon had long argued, Machines, and not humans, were best suited. There had been political back-slaps all round when the first shipments of precious fuel started to be shipped to Earth and the colony worlds, kickstarting a spurt of economic growth.