The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  The sky below was clearing rapidly and completely, as if something was dissolving the solid overcast. An abyss was opening before his eyes. A moment later he sailed out over the edge of a cloud canyon twenty kilometers deep and a thousand kilometers wide.

  A new world lay spread beneath him; Jupiter had stripped away one of its many veils. The second layer of clouds, unattainably far below, was much darker in color than the first—almost salmon pink, and curiously mottled with little islands of brick red. These were all oval-shaped, with their long axes pointing east-west, in the direction of the prevailing wind. There were hundreds of them, all about the same size, and they reminded Falcon of puffy little cumulus clouds in the terrestrial sky.

  He reduced buoyancy, and Kon-Tiki began to drop down the face of the dissolving cliff.

  It was then that he noticed the snow.

  White flakes were forming in the atmosphere and drifting slowly downward. Yet it was much too warm for snow, and in any event there was scarcely a trace of water at this altitude. Moreover, there was no glitter or sparkle about these flakes as they went cascading down into the depths. When, presently, a few of them landed on an instrument boom outside the main viewing port, he saw that they were a dull, opaque white, not crystalline at all, and quite large, several inches across. They looked like wax.

  He realized that this was precisely what they were. A chemical reaction taking place in the atmosphere around him was condensing the hydrocarbons floating in the Jovian sky.

  About a hundred kilometers ahead there was a disturbance in the cloud layer; the little red ovals were jostling around and were beginning to form a spiral, the familiar cyclonic pattern so common in the meteorology of Earth. This vortex was emerging at astonishing speed; if that was a storm ahead, Falcon said to himself, he was in big trouble.

  And then his concern changed to wonder—and fear.

  What was developing in his line of sight was not a storm at all. Something enormous—something scores of kilometers across—was rising through the clouds.

  The reassuring thought that it, too, might be a cloud, a thunderhead boiling up from the lower levels of the atmosphere, lasted only a few seconds. No, this was solid; it shouldered its way through the pink and salmon overcast like an iceberg rising from the deep.

  An iceberg floating in hydrogen? That was impossible, of course, but perhaps it was not too remote an analogy. He focused his telescopic eye upon the enigma—and moments later adjusted Kon-Tiki’s optics to convey the same image to Mission Control—and he saw that the vast shape was a whitish, crystalline mass threaded with streaks of red and brown. It must be, he decided, the same stuff as the “snowflakes” falling around him—a mountain range of wax.

  It was not, he realized, as solid as he had thought. Around the edges it was continually crumbling and reforming. . . .

  Mission Control had been pestering him with questions for well over a minute now.

  “I know what it is,” he said firmly, answering at last. “A mass of bubbles, some kind of foam, hydrocarbon froth. The chemists are going to have a field day . . . Just a minute!”

  “What’s happening?” Im’s calm but unmistakably urgent voice came in on top of the radio delay. “What do you see, Howard?”

  Falcon heard Brenner babbling excitedly in the background, but he ignored the pleas from Garuda and concentrated his attention on the telescopic image in his own eye. Belatedly he refocused the mechanical optics. He had an idea . . . but he had to be sure. If he made a mistake, he would be a laughingstock to everyone who was watching the feed from this mission, throughout the entire solar system.

  Then he relaxed, glanced at the clock, and cut in on the nagging voice from Mission Control. “Hello, Mission Control,” he said, very formally. “This is Howard Falcon aboard Kon-Tiki. Emphemeris time nineteen hours, twenty-one minutes, fifteen seconds. Latitude zero degrees five minutes north. Longitude one hundred five degrees, forty-two minutes, system one. . . . If Dr. Brenner is still standing by, please tell him there is life on Jupiter. And it’s big.”

  “I’m very happy to be proved wrong,” came back Brenner’s reply, as quickly as the distance allowed. For all his earlier vehemence, Brenner seemed downright cheerful. “Guess Mother Nature always has something up her sleeve, eh? Just keep the long lens on and give us the best pictures you can.”

  If Falcon had been given to irony he would have asked himself what the hell the exobiologist expected he would be doing besides getting the best pictures he could. But Falcon’s sense of irony had never been well developed.

  He tweaked the vibrationless telescope and peered at the videoplate image. That should keep Brenner happy. Then he looked as closely as he could with his own eye. The things moving up and down those distant waxen slopes were still too far away for Falcon to make out many details, although they must have been very large indeed to be visible at all at such a distance. Almost black, shaped like arrowheads, they maneuvered by slow undulations of their entire bodies, so that they looked rather like giant manta rays swimming above some tropical reef.

  Perhaps they were sky-borne grazers, no more carnivorous than cattle browsing upon the cloud pastures of Jupiter, for they seemed to be feeding along the dark red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up riverbeds down the flanks of the floating cliffs. Occasionally one of them would dive headlong into the mountain of foam and disappear completely from sight.

  Kon-Tiki was moving only slowly with respect to the cloud layer below. It would be at least three hours before it was above those ephemeral hills. It was in a race with the sun. Falcon hoped that darkness would not fall before he could get a good view of the mantas, as he had christened them, as well as the fragile landscape over which they flapped their way.

  The commlink crackled. “Howard, I hate to leave at a time like this, but it’s time to change shifts,” said Im. “Dr. Brenner has just ordered another liter of black coffee. I think he plans to be with you awhile.”

  “Indeed I do,” Brenner said jovially.

  “Thanks for your help, Flight,” Howard said. “And hello, Flight.”

  “Hello, Howard.” The voice that came back was that of David Lum, an ethnic Chinese from Ganymede with long service in the Indo-Asian space program. “We had to pry Budhvorn out of here,” said Lum. “She would have hogged all the fun.”

  The fun was some time coming—a long three hours. During the whole period Falcon kept the external microphones on full gain, wondering if this was the source of the booming in the night. The mantas certainly seemed large enough to have produced it. Once he got an accurate measurement, he discovered they were almost 300 meters across the wings! That was three times the length of Earth’s largest whale, although Falcon knew the mantas couldn’t weigh more than a few tonnes.

  Finally, half an hour before sunset, Kon-Tiki was almost above the waxy mountains.

  “No,” said Falcon, again answering repetitive queries from Brenner, “they’re still showing no reaction to my presence. I don’t think they’re very bright. They look like harmless vegetarians. If they were to try to chase me, I doubt they could reach my altitude.”

  Still, he was a little disappointed that the mantas showed not the slightest interest in him as he sailed high above their feeding ground. Perhaps they had no way of detecting his presence. He could see little detail in their structure, and even computer-enhanced photograms through the telescope had detected no sign of anything that resembled a sense organ. The creatures were simply huge black deltas, rippling over hills and valleys that in reality were little more substantial than the clouds of Earth. Though they looked solid, Falcon knew that anyone who stepped on those white mountains would go crashing through them as if they were made of tissue paper.

  At close quarters he could see the myriad cellules or bubbles from which they were formed. Some of these were quite large, a meter or so in diameter, and Falcon wondered in what witches’ cauldron of hydrocarbons they had been brewed. There must be enough petrochemicals deep down
in the atmosphere of Jupiter to supply all humanity’s needs for a million years.

  The short day had almost gone when he passed over the crest of the waxen hills, and the light was fading rapidly along their lower slopes. There were no mantas on this western side, and for some reason the topography was very different. The foam was sculptured into long, level terraces, like the interior of a lunar crater. Falcon could almost imagine that they were gigantic steps leading down to the hidden surface of the planet.

  And on the lowest of these steps, just clear of the swirling clouds that the mountain had displaced when it came surging skyward, was a roughly oval mass, five or six kilometers across. It was difficult to see, since it was only a little darker than the gray white foam on which it rested. Falcon’s first thought was that he was looking at a forest of pallid trees, like giant mushrooms that had never seen the sun.

  Yes, it must be a forest—he could see hundreds of thin trunks springing from the white waxy froth in which they were rooted. But the trees were packed astonishingly close together; there was scarcely any space between them. Perhaps it was not a forest after all, but a single enormous tree like one of the giant multi-trunked banyans of the East. Once he had seen a banyan tree in Java that was over 650 meters across. This monster was at least ten times that size.

  The light had almost gone. The cloudscape had turned purple with refracted sunlight, and in a few seconds that too would vanish. In the last light of his second day on Jupiter, Howard Falcon saw—or thought he saw—something that cast the gravest doubts on his interpretation of the white oval. But it also thrilled him in a way he could not have consciously explained.

  Unless the dim light had totally deceived him, those hundreds of thin trunks were beating back and forth in perfect synchronism, like fronds of kelp rocking in the surge.

  And the tree was no longer in the place where he had first seen it.

  PART FIVE

  A MEETING WITH MEDUSA

  XXIII

  A gleaming white cutter sidled cautiously up to Garuda’s main airlock. The diagonal blue band and gold star on the cutter’s bow declared its authority: the Board of Space Control was the Council of Worlds’ largest agency, manyarmed like Shiva, both nurturing and disciplinary, coordinating space development and sponsoring scientific missions such as Kon-Tiki, but at the same time acting as police, coast guard, and marines. The white cutter had a strangely aerodynamic appearance for a spacecraft, for the Space Board had designed its fusion-powered ships to pursue their objectives even into the depths of planetary atmospheres.

  The cutter was a long way from an atmosphere now. As it hung motionless in space, a docking tube snaked out from its lock and sealed itself to the equally motionless Garuda. A few minutes later, a Space Board commander and a big blond lieutenant with a stun-gun on his hip flew expertly onto Garuda’s bridge.

  They were met by Rajagopal, the first mate. “How can we assist you, Commander?” Somehow, from the woman’s glossy red lips, even the simple courtesy sounded arrogant.

  “We’re here to observe.” He was tall, sunblackened man with a rasping, Canadian-accented voice.

  “Fine, fine. If you wouldn’t mind saying . . .”

  “Sorry,” he said firmly. “If you’ll show us to Mission Control, we’ll stay out of everybody’s hair.”

  Her expression hardened. “This way, please.”

  The passageway from the bridge to Mission Control was short, ending in a hatch in the center of what was, when Garuda was accelerating, the control room’s ceiling. Six controllers looked up curiously as the uniformed spacers entered the room. Rajagopal curtly announced the arrivals to Lum, the flight director, and returned to the bridge.

  A few moments later, the commander and his partner took up different positions, the commander hovering beside the hatch that led to the bridge, the lieutenant moving opposite him to the hatchway in the floor. The silent maneuver had the effect of telling the men and women in this fishbowl of a room that they were under arrest.

  Blake Redfield opened his eyes in time to see her, swinging silently and weightlessly down from the ceiling of his sleeping cubicle. She perched right on top of him, hunched over him like a nightmare.

  He didn’t believe it. He blinked, as if that would give the horrid apparition time to go away. When he opened his eyes again, the nightmare began in earnest.

  Sparta must have seen the look in his eyes, the fear that shifted through recognition to a calmer, deeper apprehension.

  “Are you here to kill me?” He meant to speak boldly, but his words came out in a dry whisper.

  She grinned. In the grease-blackened mask of her face, her teeth were gleaming ivory and her tongue was blood red. “You don’t have to do anything more, Blake. I’ve already taken care of it. Guard your own back.”

  “What do you . . . ?”

  “No, don’t move,” she said.

  He pretended to relax, while staring up at her. “What did you do, Ellen?”

  “Don’t call me Ellen.”

  Don’t call her Ellen?—he took a deep breath; his ears were ringing with the tension—For years she’s insisted I call her Ellen. “What’s your name now?”

  “You know who I am. You don’t need my name.”

  “As you wish.” She was mad. It was plain as the evil grin on her face. Look at her, starved to bones, those red eyes burning in her head. “What have you done?”

  The words hissed out of her in a hot stream. “You don’t need to keep trying to trap them. The mission will fail, I’ve seen to it. When it does, the prophetae who are left will show themselves. Then I’ll take care of them, too.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Don’t betray me to the commander,” she said, unfolding her legs and pushing lightly against his knees as she lifted toward the ceiling.

  “The commander? He’s . . . ?” Blake broke off, watching in amazement as she slithered into the air-exchange duct, an opening he would have thought too small for a human body.

  “Don’t betray me.” She was already out of sight when her words reached him. “You want to live, don’t you?”

  * * *

  “Sorry about this,” said Mission Control over Falcon’s speakers. “Source Beta is looking iffy. Probability seventy percent it’s gonna blow within the next hour.”

  Falcon scrolled through the chart on the map screen. Beta—Jupiter latitude one hundred and forty degrees—was almost 30,000 kilometers away and well below his horizon. Even though major eruptions ran as high as ten megatons, he was much too far away for the shock wave to be a serious danger. The radio storm that it would trigger was a different matter.

  The decameter outbursts that at times made Jupiter the most powerful radio source in the whole sky had been discovered in the 1950s, to the utter astonishment of groundbound astronomers. Well over a century later their underlying cause remained a mystery. Only the symptoms were understood.

  The “volcano” theory had best stood the test of time, although no one imagined that this word had the same meaning on Jupiter as on Earth. At frequent intervals—often several times a day—titanic eruptions occurred in the lower depths of the atmosphere, probably on the hidden surface of the planet itself. A great column of gas, a thousand kilometers high, would start boiling upward as if determined to escape into space.

  Against the most powerful gravitational field of all the planets, it had no chance. Yet some traces—a mere few million metric tonnes—might manage to reach the Jovian ionosphere, and when they did, all hell broke loose.

  The radiation belts surrounding Jupiter completely dwarf the feeble Van Allen belts of Earth. When they are short-circuited by an ascending column of gas, the result is an electrical discharge millions of times more powerful than any terrestrial flash of lightning; it sends a colossal thunderclap of radio noise flooding across the entire solar system and on to the stars.

  Probes had discovered that these radio outbursts were concentrated in four main areas of the planet. Perha
ps there were weaknesses there that allowed the fires of the interior to break out from time to time. The scientists on Ganymede now thought they could predict the onset of a decameter storm; their accuracy was about that of a terrestrial weather forecast a century and a half ago.

  Falcon did not know whether to welcome or fear a radio storm, which would certainly add to the value of the mission—if he survived it. At the moment, he simply felt a vague irritability, as if this was all a distraction from some larger purpose. Kon-Tiki’s course had been planned to keep it as far as possible from the main centers of disturbance, especially the most active, Source Alpha. As luck would have it, the threatening Beta was the closest to him. He hoped that the distance, almost three-fourths the circumference of Earth, was safe enough.

  “Probability now ninety percent,” said Mission Control. Flight Director Lum’s voice held a distinct note of urgency. “Forget what I said about an hour. Ganymede would have us believe it could be any second.”

  The radiolink had scarcely fallen silent when the magnetic field-strength graphic shot upward; before it could go off the screen, it reversed and dropped as rapidly as it had risen, in a spike as sharp as an ice pick. Far away and thousands of kilometers below, something had given the planet’s molten core a titanic jolt.

  Mission Control was late to get the news. “There she blows!”

  “Thanks, I already know.”

  “You can expect onset at your position in five minutes, peak in ten.”

  He already knew that, too. “Copy.” He didn’t tell them how.

  Far around the curve of Jupiter a funnel of gas as wide as the Pacific Ocean was climbing space-ward at thousands of kilometers per hour. Already the thunderstorms of the lower atmosphere would be raging around it, but they were nothing compared with the fury that would explode when the radiation belt was reached and began dumping its surplus electrons onto the planet.