The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  Hmm, only a day’s growth of beard. Odd. The back of his hand—he must have scraped it somehow—was shiny with new skin. Had the same Somebody used Healfast on him?

  He ran his chemosonic shaver quickly over his cheeks and chin and throat and splashed his face with lime-scented aftershave; he probed his teeth with his ultrasound brush and ran his tongue over their polished surfaces, then slid a comb through his thick, straight hair and grimaced at his freckled face in the mirror.

  For the first time on months Blake experienced the pleasure of having a full wardrobe open before him. He pulled on snug flexible cords and chose a loose black softshirt from his dresser. His watch and commlink and I. D. sliver were neatly laid out on the dresser top—even his black throwing knife. What must they have thought of that, whoever they were?

  He slipped his bare feet into rope-soled navy blue Basque slippers. He didn’t plan to go anywhere for an hour or two—not until he’d reacquainted himself with his home, not until he’d let the memories filter back. That was one of the little problems with anti-drunk drugs—they tended to block recent memories, at least until they wore off.

  His sunny little kitchen was spotless, dustless, everything put away. Somebody had been over the place and wiped it clean—not his charlady; he didn’t have one—and there was more food in his refrigerator than he could recall leaving there. Fresh, too.

  He was hungry but not famished. On the gleaming gas range he made a two-egg omelet with herb cheese and ate it at the beechwood table overlooking his tiny brick-walled garden and those of his neighbors. The eggs disappeared fast; he followed them with a glass of orange juice he’d squeezed himself and a cup of French-roast coffee. His home was London, but he was still an American; no beans on toast for his breakfast, and he wanted something stronger than black tea to start his day.

  The phonelink chortled, but he heard the click as he picked up the kitchen extension. Wrong number? Or Them, checking.

  He took a second cup of coffee into the living room and sat contemplating the clear autumn sky through the branches of the big elm outside his window. The leaves were falling and the branches glistened in the low sun; sunlight brought out the rich blues and burgundies of the kilim on the floor and illuminated his floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, filled with rare printed books. The bold black Picasso minotaur in the alcove, the warm Arcadian Poussin watercolor over the desk, reassured him that he was home.

  Another sip of coffee. A tiny headache had started throbbing in his right temple. Memory was creeping back.

  Night. An ivy-covered granite wall, lit by brilliant spot lights. Was he climbing on it? Yes, he was inching across its face toward . . . Ellen’s window . . .

  Window glass splintered and sprayed across the kilim. But this was real time! Blake reacted to the crash before he knew what it was, diving and rolling through the door into the hall.

  A dragon’s exhalation of flame spurted through the doorway behind him, searing the painted wooden frame into blisters and charring the papered wall opposite; he’d rolled just half a meter past the plume of fire, and he kept going on knees and elbows, into the kitchen.

  He knew the smell of phosphorus and jellied gasoline intimately, thus knew that his books and paintings were already gone, that in minutes the whole apartment, the whole building would be going. Already the air under the ceiling was seething with black smoke.

  Keeping to the cooler air near the floor, he went on through into his back porch workshop and kicked through the locked back door.

  His flat was on the second floor. He leaped from the backstairs landing and crashed into the roof of a potting shed, taking the impact with flexed knees. On the rebound he jumped, landing in a myrtle tree in the garden.

  He extricated himself from the branches. He didn’t dare linger in the open. The attacker probably didn’t have a gun, or maybe didn’t know how to use one, for Blake had been literally a sitting target. But his assailant must be close, probably on an adjacent roof.

  “Fire! Fire! Everybody out!” Blake yelled as he smashed his way through the garden gate and ran on through the narrow basement passageway to the street. “Fire!”

  He came through the front to find people from across the street already pouring out of their doors. A big red-faced bobby was pelting toward him down the walk, jabbering into his comm unit as he ran. Blake looked up at the side of his flat.

  A sucking gout of oily flame was rushing out of his shattered windows, blackening into a rising column of foul-smelling smoke. The old elm that had shaded his living room—it was in his neighbor’s garden—was on fire. The roof of the building was beginning to shed scales of gray-brown smoke.

  Old Mr. Hicke, his downstairs neighbor, stumbled out onto the porch, wearing flannel pajamas and a threadbare robe. “Mister Redfield! You’ve returned! Oh my—are you aware that your face is scratched?”

  “This way, Mr. Hicke, away from the building. That’s better. I’m afraid there’s been a rather serious mishap.”

  Blake was about to plunge back through the front door when Miss Stilt and her mother, the only other residents of the building, emerged in wraps, bothered by the commotion and blinking at the light.

  “That’s all right, sir, if you’ll just give us a bit of room here . . .” The bobby moved in to escort the ladies to safety; other police had arrived to hold back the quickly gathering crowd. Blake retreated with the crowd to the opposite side of the street.

  He stood watching the graceful old building dissolve in flames. It was well on its way to becoming a gutted ruin before the first trucks arrived minutes later.

  Whoever had thrown or launched the bomb must be long gone, unless that person was a committed firebug or for some other reason lacked a sense of self-preservation. Blake doubted it. Blake had been the specific target of the attack, and there was a message in the medium.

  Blake himself had a weakness for blowing things up. Whoever had tried to kill him knew that.

  He reviewed the morning’s events and simultaneously realized that his memories of the night before—it must have been two nights before, allowing for the change in time zones—were almost fully restored. Along with a full-blown headache.

  He remembered trying to rescue Ellen. He remembered her betrayal. He couldn’t believe it.

  Maybe she’d cut a deal with the commander to get him out safely. The commander knew Blake didn’t trust him, and Blake knew he wanted to get him out of the way. Had she seen to it that Blake was treated well, returned to his home? And had the commander then betrayed her?

  Or was someone else after his well-crisped hide? There were certainly enough candidates.

  He watched the building burn, taking with it the last of the things he cherished. If he was to survive long enough to revenge himself, he’d better not hang around here waiting for the authorities to begin their tedious inquiries.

  The hypersonic aircraft outraced the sun across the sky. It was still early morning when Blake landed on Long Island, and only a little after 10:00 A.M. when he let himself into his parents’ Manhattan penthouse.

  “Blake! Where on Earth have you been?”

  “Mom, you look terrific. As usual.”

  Emerald Lee Redfield was a tall woman whose pampered skin, careful makeup, and exquisite clothing—today she was wearing a gray wool suit and a blouse of blue watered silk—always made her look thirty years younger, at least in the eyes of her son.

  For all her elegance she was not skittish. She hugged him with enthusiasm. Then, keeping her grip on his shoulders, she studied him at arm’s length. “I wish I could say the same for you, dear. Did you sleep in your clothes?”

  He laughed and shrugged.

  “Come.” She took his hand and led him toward the sunny living room. Eighty-nine stories up, it had a 120-degree view of the towers of lower Manhattan and the surrounding shores. “What are you doing home? Why haven’t you called? We were so worried! Your father contacted practically everyone he knew, but no one . . .”

 
; “Oh no!”

  “Discreetly, discreetly.”

  “I’ll have to have a talk with Dad. When I’m on the trail of a rare acquisition, I sometimes have to sort of . . . go underground. I must have explained all this a dozen . . .”

  “Blake, you know how he is.”

  Edward Redfield had endlessly criticized Blake’s career choice—that of a consultant specialist in old books and manuscripts—and occasionally launched into angry tirades against the money Blake was “throwing away” (money Edward could not control, as its source was a trust left to Blake by his grandfather). For Edward was of that class of old-family Eastern Seaboarders who were not required to do anything to make a living except watch over their investments—not that that was an insignificant task.

  But noblesse oblige, and the Redfields were busy in the administrative and cultural affairs of Manhattan—this model city, the center of the Middle-Atlantic Administrative District. Indeed, so active had generations of Redfields been in public life that the present organization of the continent of North America (which no longer included a United States, except as a geographical fiction) owed much to their efforts.

  Emerald seated herself on an Empire chair upholstered in blue velvet and pressed a button on the table beside her. “And I really did emphasize that he should act with discretion.”

  Blake fell back into an overstuffed, brocade-upholstered armchair. “Well, anyway, here I am. And, as you see, in good heath.”

  “This quest of yours . . . did you succeed?”

  “Perhaps I’ll be able to tell you when the, uh, transaction is complete.”

  “I understand, dear.” A maid had appeared in response to Emerald’s signal. “Your father and I are having lunch in today. Will you join us?”

  “Love to.”

  “Another setting for lunch, Rosaria.” The woman nodded and left as silently as she’d come. His mother smiled brightly at him. “Now Blake, what happened?”

  “I got home this morning to find that my flat—not just my flat, the whole building—had burned to the ground. Everything I owned.”

  “My poor boy . . . your furniture? Your clothes?” She peered at his soiled canvas slippers.

  “Not to mention the books, the art.”

  “So depressing, dear. You must be in a state. But of course you’re insured.”

  “Oh, yes. Insured.”

  “That’s a comfort, then.”

  “Well—I’ll tell you all about it at lunch. Will you excuse me long enough to change out of these sweaty clothes?”

  “Blake . . . it’s so good to have you home.”

  He headed for the room that was always there for him, furnished precisely as he’d left it when he’d graduated from college. Despite the slight air of distraction with which his mother navigated life, she spoke from the heart. Love between parents and children is more complicated than it should be, he thought, and more subtle than anyone he’d read had ever been able to express adequately, but despite all the emotional harmonics and bass rumbles that accompanied the love between him and his mom and dad, love was solidly there among them.

  He emerged from his old room wearing a respectable suit and tie, dressed the way he knew his father would want to see him.

  “So you lost all those books you’d spent a small fortune on.” Redfield pere was taller than his son, with a square patrician face mounted upon a squarer, even more patrician jaw. His gingery hair and eyebrows and the sprinkle of freckles across his fine nose hinted at his Boston Irish origins, suggesting that the money in the family was perhaps only two centuries old, instead of the three or four centuries claimed by those with names such as Rockefeller and Vanderbilt.

  “Yes.”

  Edward glared at his son in ill-disguised triumph. “I hope you learned a lesson.”

  “More than a lesson, Dad. I lost everything. I won’t be collecting anything of so perishable a nature again.”

  The dining room was in the southeast corner of the penthouse, overlooking old New York harbor. In the weak sunlight of autumn, the algae farms that covered the wide waters from the Jersey shore to Brooklyn were a dull matte green, like pea soup; stainless steel harvesters grazed languorously on the stuff, converting it to food supplements for the masses.

  The Redfields were not of the masses. Edward sliced through the medium-rare magret de canard and put a left-handed forkful into his mouth, European-fashion. “The insurance wasn’t adequate?” he mumbled.

  “Oh, the financial loss is covered. Not allowing for appreciation. But I realized how ephemeral those old books and paintings are.” Can I really get away with this? Blake wondered—but people are desperate to believe what they want. “Perhaps I’ve finally grown up.”

  Edward kept chewing and mumbled again.

  “I’ve been thinking I might look around a bit and see if I can apply myself to public service,” Blake added. His father having written him off as a dilettante, nothing could be sweeter to Edward than to hear his son come around to his point of view.

  “What a fine idea, dear,” his mother said brightly. “I know our friends will be more than happy to help you find something suitable.”

  “Why government, Blake? Why not something with more potential?” By which Edward meant buying and selling.

  “I’m not really a statistics kind of guy, Dad. The market never made sense to me.” False, but it fit Edward’s prejudices. “If I’d followed your advice I’d have gone to law school,” Blake added, truistically, “but it’s too late for that.”

  “Well, what are you good at?” A whiff of the old rancor. After all, sending Blake to SPARTA had not been an inexpensive proposition; sure, that enhanced-education project had had foundation support, but parents like Edward who could pay had paid plenty to get their kids enrolled.

  “I’m a good investigator—anybody who’s serious about scholarship has to be. I know my way around old libraries as well as I know my way through electronic files. I can be inconspicuous when necessary.” All this was true, and not the half of it; his father would not have believed even the half of it. “I read and write a dozen languages, I’m fluent in almost that many, and I can pick up more when I need them.” Blake added something musical in Mandarin for the benefit of his mother, meaning roughly, I owe it all to you.

  His father, who didn’t speak Mandarin, although he was fluent in German and Japanese and the other old languages of diplomacy, emitted another skeptical mumble. When he finally swallowed his mouthful of duck he asked, “What sort of job do you think all this qualifies you for?”

  “I forgot to mention that I’ve become a fairly experienced space traveler in the last year.”

  “You mean that trip to Venus?”

  “I’ve been to the moon, too. And Mars. I guess it’s been a while since I phoned home.”

  Edward put down his fork and glared at his son. “So. You’re a multilingual . . . investigator . . . who knows computers and doesn’t get spacesick. Maybe you should be a . . . a consumer advocate or something.”

  Emerald’s thin black eyebrows shot up and her delicate mouth curved into a happy smile. “What an excellent suggestion, dear! I’m sure Dexter and Arista would be delighted to have someone of Blake’s talent and abilities on their staff.”

  “At Voxpop?” Redfield looked at his wife, angrily. He hadn’t intended to be taken seriously. “Doing what?”

  Dexter and Arista Plowman, although born to wealth, were a brother and sister team of professional reformers, the sort of ascetics whose roles in previous centuries had been played by such as Ralph Nader and Savonarola. What money the Plowmans had once had, and whatever came their way, they invested in their Vox Populi Institute.

  Emerald said, “If Dexter Plowman or his charming sister . . .”

  “Peculiar sister,” Edward growled. Away from his clubs and boardrooms, Edward’s confusion frequently expressed itself as temper.

  “. . . wish to employ Blake, they will certainly use his best talents.”


  “And he gets nothing in return. No way to get rich.”

  Blake said, “Dad . . .” He cut himself short. We’re already rich was a reminder his father didn’t need to hear.

  “Let’s think about this for a day or two,” said Edward.

  Blake could see the wheels turning in his father’s head. The Plowmans were Currently Fashionable Persons in Manhattan, somewhat of the rank of crusading district attorneys, people whose good opinions Edward Redfield had courted and to whom he would be honored to loan the services of a son. No money in it, but . . . his prodigal son Blake, reformed, and now a well-known public servant . . . Edward allowed himself a thin smile.

  Late that night Blake tiptoed into his father’s den, feeling his way by the faint light reflected through the windows from the hazy sky outside. Years ago, as a child, he had learned the combination to his father’s desk, and he used it now to open the upper drawer in which was secreted Edward’s whisper-quiet, gas-cooled, micro-super computer.

  It was a machine Blake had always regarded with awe and a tinge of jealousy, since his father used only a vanishingly small fraction of its power in his business dealings and did not appreciate what his money had bought. Blake hunched over it and went quietly to work; his project would test the machine’s mettle.

  What was really going on at that “safe house” on the Hudson?

  Four hours later: for all Blake’s skill, his search had so far gained him little but negative knowledge.

  The steel king’s mansion was where it was supposed to be, all right; nowadays it was called Granite Lodge, a good, gray, innocuous name, and was supposedly used as a place where North American Park Service employees and their families could vacation, where dignitaries could retreat, where managers could confer, and so on—the usual sort of cover one might expect for so opulent a safe house.

  Except that this cover seemed airtight. Blake could discover no links whatever between the Park Service and the Space Board, much less the commander’s investigative branch. On the other hand, there were plenty of documented instances of use by vacationing employees, conferring managers, and retreating dignitaries.