The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  After the escape from Mars, when Blake had been shown to his room here, he’d found all his things already neatly cleaned, pressed, and hung up or put away in drawers. Thoughtful of the troops. Only his toys had been missing, his wire-working tools, his oddments of integrated circuitry, his scrounged bits of plastique.

  He didn’t blame them; that stuff was dangerous. And anyway, in the days since he’d arrived he’d managed to replace most of it. Remarkable, the amount of deadly and destructive chemicals required to maintain even the average studio apartment—not to mention the average estate. That thick green lawn upon which the Snark had just come to rest, for example: that kind of lush plant growth doesn’t come without generous applications of nitrogen and phosphorus. Out in the gardener’s shed, high explosives were there for the taking. Fusing and timing circuitry were here and there for the taking, too, hidden in odd corners of the estate, in rarely used alarm and surveillance mechanisms.

  Blake knew where the cameras were. He knew where they were placed in his room, and in Ellen’s, even where they were scattered among the trees in the woods. Ellen wanted to pretend she didn’t know about some of those; fine with him. Meanwhile, he cannibalized whatever he thought the cameras couldn’t see him cannibalizing; he stole what his hosts wouldn’t miss and put it where he hoped they couldn’t find it.

  From behind loose strips of molding, from the undersides of shelves, he retrieved the fruits of his explorations and borrowings. He spent a long minute assembling disparate parts before shoving them into his pockets. Finally he took a roll of adhesive tape from the tie-rack where it hung beneath a handful of knit ties; he circled both his palms with tape, ripping it off the roll.

  He stood at the closet door and listened. He could barely hear the twin rotors of the Snark whispering on the lawn below. He opened the closet door and walked straight to the window, knowing that the cameras would be on him by now, even if earlier he’d managed to elude them. He peered around the stone jamb.

  Three floors below, meshing rotors were whistling in close harmony at the edge of audibility, not free-wheeling; the Snark’s engines weren’t shut down, which meant it was prepared to take off instantly.

  A metallic scrape and click at the door of his room. . . .

  Blake jumped onto the sill. He squeezed through sideways and hung by his fingers until the toes of his rubberized shoes found a deep seam in the rustic masonry. With his right hand he reached into his pocket and brought out a small package, which he left beneath the casement frame, before he transferred his grip sideways and began to move in a deliberate traverse along the face of the mansion.

  The moonlight was mottled and constantly shifting, a drifting cuckaloris pattern on the irregular wall that could not have been better designed to hide him from ordinary visual surveillance.

  Ellen’s room was a long way off, but he’d studied the route for days. It had occurred to him even before they arrived at this place that he and she might be wanting to leave it on short notice, and not through the front gate.

  He made it around the corner bastion of the house before the inevitable white flash and bang split the night. Somebody had shoved at his casement window to look out.

  Phosphorous makes a bright light. Simultaneously he heard the man’s scream. There hadn’t been enough charge to maim, but the stuff did burn fiercely, and Blake wouldn’t be surprised if whoever had tripped the booby trap was in for a bit of skin grafting. He felt only a twinge of guilt. They should have known better than to walk into his room in the middle of the night without knocking.

  Lights went on all over the perimeter; the moonlight was washed away in a glare a hundred times brighter. The house was crossed by searchlight beams like the night sky over London in the blitz. Blake braced himself for the ackack.

  But it seemed he still had a few spare seconds. He moved his taped hands and sneakered feet one at a time, as rapidly as he could, until he found the bay window of Ellen’s room. It was locked.

  No time for subtlety. He had his left hand and both sets of toes firmly lodged in the crevices of the masonry; with his right hand he punched the pane of glass through its leading, taking a nasty scrape across the back of his fist, above the tape.

  As he cranked open the slat, it occurred to him for the first time that something fishy was going on. Extra fishy.

  No alarms. No sirens or bells. All the outside lights were on, but the klaxons hadn’t sounded. Even the window wire hadn’t tripped.

  “Ellen—it’s me,” he said, loud enough to rouse her from sleep. “Don’t do anything drastic.” He pulled himself through the window, a little wider than the one in his room, and landed in a crouch on the floor.

  No bells, no sirens, and the helicopter hadn’t lifted from the lawn. A Snark was smart enough all by itself to find a guy climbing on a wall and shoot him off it. They weren’t out to kill him, then. Maybe they were hoping Ellen wouldn’t wake up.

  Too late for that. By the stark white light that poured in through the windows, it was plain that her bed was empty.

  Warm, with the sheets in a nest where she’d been sleeping until minutes ago, but empty.

  Her door was ajar. Had they gotten her first, or had she heard them—he knew she could hear things no one else could—and made her escape? Gone to rescue him?

  He crouched and stuck his head out the door.

  A loose pattern of rubber bullets from a silenced weapon whacked the floor and doorjamb, hard enough to dent the wood. He rolled back into Ellen’s room, scrabbled in his pocket—

  “Come out of there, Mr. Redfield, we aren’t going to hurt you.”

  —he tossed another little package into the hall.

  This time the flash and bang were instantaneous, and he was through the door almost as quick as the flash. No way they were going to trap him inside the room.

  He rolled across the burning rug and leaned up and over the stair rail in a low vault, ignoring the residual flaming matter that stuck to the back of his jacket. He dropped half a floor to the landing below, rolling again as he hit, rolling right on down the stairs in a tight tuck, shedding the burning stuff as he rolled.

  He hit the corridor and bounded to his feet, a little dizzy but unhurt.

  No pursuit. Teach them to take that superior tone. Mister Redfield, his ass.

  He had an inspiration. Maybe the Snark was still out there on the lawn; maybe it hadn’t moved since it had landed. Maybe there was nobody in it. Maybe they were all inside chasing him and Ellen, because maybe they’d thought this was going to be easy.

  Maybe he’d show them how wrong they were.

  He sprinted down the hall and kicked his way through a door into a corner room, a sort of pantry to one of the mansion’s big reception halls. He knew that everywhere he went the cameras could follow him, so he wasted no time hiding. He punched his already-skinned fist through the face of a knight in shining armor—shining from the light of exterior floodlights—and punched again and again, using his forearm to tear away the leading, until he’d made a big hole in the stained-glass window, big enough to climb through.

  He was close enough to the ground to risk jumping. He flexed his knees and ankles to absorb the shock. He let himself fall from the stone sill.

  He hit the lawn and rolled and bounced to his feet, none the worse for the five-meter drop. The Snark was just sitting there, twenty meters away, its rotors still whispering. When he had that formidable machine in his control, he’d be able to stand off an army. Then he’d find Ellen quick enough, and they’d be out of here. . . .

  He ran, not bothering to conceal himself. They weren’t going to shoot him; they’d had their chance, and they’d used rubber bullets. If somebody came into the chopper’s open door right this minute, Blake would decide what he had to do. Rush? Run? Raise his hands in surrender?

  He ducked under the drooping blades.

  A white face appeared, framed in the darkness of the open door. Ellen. She beckoned sharply.

  His heart lea
ped. “You did it!” She’d already captured the machine! As he ran forward she extended her hand to him. Her hand, slender and strong and white . . . her face, a pale white oval framed in short blond hair . . . the rest of her was armored in black canvas, nearly invisible in the darkness; all he saw of her was a disembodied hand and face.

  He took the hand as he stepped on the chopper’s skid, feeling her firm, familiar grip through the tape. She pulled him into the open doorway—

  —but as she did so she twisted and he staggered, off-balance, and almost before he knew it he was lying on his back on the metal floor. A man leaned out of the darkness behind her. Blake tried to sit up, but in Ellen’s other hand, hidden until now, she held a hypodermic pistol. She’d already shot its paralyzing charge into the base of his skull.

  “Ellen . . .” His mouth lost its ability to form words. His vision seemed to narrow on her face, her moving lips.

  Her face held no sympathy, no love, only a stark white smile in which her teeth gleamed like fangs and her tongue was as wet and red as fresh liver. “You’re starting to get in the way, Blake. We won’t be seeing you for a while.”

  She straightened. The man behind her came forward and tugged Blake upright, hefting him into a canvas sling seat against the bulkhead, strapping him firmly into place. Blake could feel nothing except the cold in his fingers and toes. He could do nothing to prevent the man’s expert fingers from searching all his pockets, his other hiding places, finding everything he’d had time to conceal.

  Ellen hadn’t even stayed to watch. His last glimpse of her was of her shadowy form jumping lithely out the door.

  V

  In places where the day approximated twenty-four hours, Sparta habitually rose a quarter hour before the sun; in other places she had trouble sleeping at all.

  Blake, on the other hand, sometimes managed to sleep until midmorning, a trick Sparta envied but could not comprehend. But she had been around him long enough by now to get used to it, so she didn’t think it odd when he failed to appear at the breakfast table.

  She thought it distinctly odd when he didn’t show up for lunch. His appetite had never, in her experience, allowed him to skip two meals in a row.

  No one else showed up for lunch, either. The young blond steward had no idea where Mr. Redfield was—done with that salad, Inspector? The young blond stewardess couldn’t say why, but she was certain the commander would be returning soon—sure you won’t try the wine, miss?

  The rules here were unspoken, but clear enough: this was a place where guests minded their own business. And everybody else minded Sparta’s.

  When, at the end of another shamefully opulent meal, the perfectly brewed dark-roast arabica coffee arrived, she sipped it without enthusiasm.

  After lunch she went upstairs to Blake’s room. Outside his door, she listened.

  In the walls of Blake’s room she could hear the gurgle of ancient pipes, the clatter of pots and pans in the groundfloor kitchen and the voices of the kitchen workers; they were talking about nothing of consequence.

  The narrow leaded windows of his room had been pushed open; she could hear the curtains stirring in the fitful draft. She could hear birds outside in the autumn trees, only a few sparrows that were late for the southward migration. Overhead she could hear the rattle of a crumb of slate roof-tile—weathered for centuries, warmed by the sun, and expanding until, just at this moment, its last attached grains were stressed beyond crystalline integrity—splitting from its parent and rolling down the steep roof into the copper gutter above Blake’s open window, where it landed with a tiny “ping.”

  She could not hear Blake, however. He was not in his room, not sleeping or rooting around in his closet or in the bathroom shaving or cleaning his teeth. He was not there.

  This was very curious. Sparta bent swiftly until her face was level with the latch, not to peek through the old-fashioned keyhole—as it no doubt appeared to those who watched—but to taste the air near the doorknob. She sensed the spicy flavor of Blake’s characteristic skin oils and acids, freshly overlying a couple of centuries’ worth of brass polish.

  Something else. She remembered the old riddle, “Twenty brothers in the same house. Scratch their heads and they will die.” Matches. A whiff of phosphorus, very faint.

  She stood up. Since she knew they were watching she decided not to enter his room.

  The situation wasn’t necessarily bad. Blake had disappeared before. After the Star Queen incident, for example, when she’d stayed behind on Port Hesperus and he’d gone back to Earth and she hadn’t heard a word from him for months and hadn’t seen him until he’d shown up walking toward her across the surface of the moon. On Mars, when he’d insisted on working underground and they’d both almost gotten themselves killed. But he’d always had a good reason for his vanishing acts.

  Something else odd—she wondered if there was a connection. When she’d gotten out of bed that morning, she’d noticed a smell of fresh putty. One of the panes in her own window had been replaced during the night.

  Sparta spent the next hour wandering the house and grounds, determined to seem unworried. Blake was not in the library or the game room or the screening room; he was not in the basement firing range or the gym or the squash courts or the indoor pool. He wasn’t in the conservatory. He wasn’t playing a solitary game of horseshoes or croquet. He wasn’t lawn bowling or shooting skeet or practicing his fly-casting. He hadn’t taken any of the horses out for a midday canter. In the garage next to the stables, all the estate’s usual cars were in their usual spaces.

  But a big window on the first floor had also broken since yesterday; glaziers were at work replacing a piece of the pearly stained glass.

  At midmorning Sparta stood on the wide back porch, leaning on the rustic railings of peeled and varnished pine, watching the woods. Nothing moved besides the occasional squirrel or field mouse or little gray bird. And the falling leaves. She watched them fall. By listening she could hear each leafy collision with the leaf-covered ground.

  Blake was gone.

  The commander found her there.

  “Where is he?” she asked quietly.

  “I told him he could go when he wanted to.” His voice was a rattle of stones, but there was something hollow in it. This morning he wasn’t wearing his country clothes, he was wearing his crisp blue uniform, with the few imposing ribbons over the breast. “This morning, early. We took him out by chopper.”

  She turned away from the railing and fixed him with her dark blue eyes. “No.”

  “You were asleep. You couldn’t hear . . .”

  “I couldn’t have heard the chopper, I was too full of your drugs. But he didn’t want to go.”

  His blue eyes were lighter than hers, knobs of turquoise. “I can’t change your opinion.”

  “I’m glad you know that. If you want this conversation to continue, Commander, stop lying.”

  His mouth twitched, an aborted smile. He’d used that line himself, a time or two.

  “By now you know quite a lot about me,” she said, “so you may suspect that if I get it into my head, I could bring this house to the ground and bury everybody in it.” Her pale skin was red with anger.

  “But you wouldn’t. You’re not like that.”

  “If you’ve hurt Blake and I find out about it I will do my best to kill you. I’m not a pacifist on principle.”

  He watched the slight, fragile, immensely dangerous young woman for a moment. Then his shoulders relaxed a millimeter or two and he seemed to lean away from her. “We took Blake out of here at four this morning under heavy sedation. He’ll wake up in his place in London with a false memory of a quarrel with you—he’ll have the notion that you told him you were engaged in a project too sensitive and too dangerous for him to get involved, and that for your sake as well as his own you insisted that he leave.”

  “I won’t accept that”—because she knew he was still lying—“I’m leaving here now.”

  “Your ch
oice, Inspector Troy. But you know as well as I do, it’s the truth.”

  “I never said that or anything like it . . .”

  “You should have.” For a split second his anger flared to match hers.

  “. . . whatever memory you planted in him, it was not that.” She walked away.

  “Do you want to know what really happened”—the catch and tension in his voice gave him away; he was playing his last card—“to your parents?”

  She stopped but did not turn. “They died in a car accident.”

  “Let’s drop that pretense. You were told they died in a helicopter crash.”

  Now she turned, poised and dangerous. “Do you know something different, Commander?”

  “What I know I can’t prove,” he said.

  In his rasping voice she heard something else, not exactly a lie. “Oh, but you want me to think you could—and just won’t.” Is that what he really wanted? “Do you know my name too, Commander?—don’t say it.”

  “I won’t say your name. Your number was L. N. 30851005.”

  She nodded. “What do you know about my parents?”

  “What I’ve read in the files, Miss L. N. And what I’ve learned from the prophetae.”

  “Which is?”

  “That’s not for free.” His face had hardened again; this time the simple truth. “Are you on the team or aren’t you?”

  And that’s why the uniform. R & R was over, the whistle had blown, back to the game. She sighed tiredly. “Send me in. . . . Coach.”

  PART TWO

  THE SIGN OF THE SALAMANDER

  VI

  Blake woke up in his London flat feeling as clear-eyed and peppy as he had for months—since before he went underground in Paris, since before he chased Ellen to the moon, since before he went to Mars. Since before the last time he’d slept in this, his own bed, in fact. Which did not necessarily mean he was in good health. Somebody had shot him full of anti-hangover serum.

  He jumped out of bed—he was wearing pajamas, for Pete’s sake; he never wore pajamas, although his mother kept giving them to him for Christmas—and went into his bathroom.