The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  Falcon began to retract all the instrument booms that he’d earlier extended from the capsule. There were no other precautions he could take. It would be four hours before the atmospheric shock wave reached him, but once the discharge had been triggered the radio blast, traveling at the speed of light, would be here in a tenth of a second.

  Nothing yet: the radio monitor, scanning the spectrum, showed nothing unusual—just the normal mush of background. But Falcon noticed that the background noise level was slowly creeping upward. The pending explosion was gathering strength.

  At such a vast distance he’d never expected to see anything. But suddenly a flicker as of far-off heat lightning danced along the eastern horizon. Simultaneously half the circuit breakers on the main board tripped, the capsule lights failed, and all comm channels went dead.

  He tried to move, but he could not do so. The paralysis that gripped him was not psychological. He’d lost control of his limbs, and he could feel a painful tingling sensation throughout the network of his nerves. It seemed impossible that the electric field could have penetrated the shielded cabin—which was effectively a Faraday cage—and yet there was a flickering glow over the instrument board, and he could hear the unmistakable crackle of brush discharge.

  Bang. Bang!

  The emergency systems—bang!—threw themselves into operation—bang!—and the overloads reset. The lights flickered on. Falcon’s humiliating paralysis disappeared as swiftly as it had come. With a glance at the board, he leaned toward the ports.

  No need to try the external inspection lamps, for outside the windows the capsule’s support cables seemed to be on fire. Lines of electric blue light glowed against the darkness, stretching upward from the main lift ring to the equator of the giant balloon; rolling slowly along several of them were dazzling balls of fire.

  The sight was so strange and so beautiful that it was hard to read any menace into it—although few people, as Falcon knew, could even have seen ball lightning at such close quarters. And certainly none had survived, if they’d been riding a hydrogen-filled balloon in the atmosphere of Earth. He remembered the flaming death of the Hindenburg—how could any dirigible pilot forget it, how could any such pilot fail to have memorized the old newsreel frame by frame?—destroyed by a spark upon docking at Lakehurst in 1937. That could not happen here, though there was more hydrogen above his head than had ever filled the last of the Zeppelins; it would be a few billion years yet before anyone could light a fire in the atmosphere of Jupiter, sans oxygen.

  With a sound like briskly frying bacon, the speech circuit came back to life—it was Lum’s frantic voice. “Hello, Kon-Tiki—are you receiving? Are you receiving?” Chopped and badly distorted, the flight director’s words were barely intelligible.

  Falcon’s spirits lifted; he had resumed contact with the human world. “I receive you, David,” he said, a bit less formally than usual. “That was quite an electrical display. But no damage so far.”

  “We were afraid we’d lost you. Howard, please adjust telemetry channels three, seven, and twenty-six. Also gain on video two. And we don’t quite believe the readings from the external ionization sensors.”

  Reluctantly Falcon tore his gaze away from the fascinating pyrotechnic display around Kon-Tiki. As he worked to recalibrate the instruments he occasionally glanced out the windows. The ball lightning disappeared first, the fiery globes slowly expanding until they reached a critical size, at which they vanished in a silent, almost gentle explosion.

  But even an hour later, there were still faint glows around all the exposed metal on the outside of the capsule, and the radio links stayed noisy until after midnight.

  “We’re changing shifts again, Howard. Meechai will be taking over shortly.”

  “Thanks for a good job, David.”

  “Morning, Howard. Welcome to Day Three.” Buranaphorn’s voice was clear in the radiolink.

  “They go by fast, don’t they?” Falcon said pleasantly.

  Deep inside himself, he felt anything but pleasant. That electrical shock, the paralysis . . . something strange was happening, although he could not say what. Lurid images came unbidden into his imagination, and he imagined that someone was speaking right next to him—was right here next to him in the capsule—but the words were in a language he had never heard, as in a dream where one clearly sees the words on the page but can make no sense of them.

  Falcon struggled to maintain his concentration. His mission was far from complete.

  The remaining hours of darkness were completely uneventful—until just before dawn.

  Because it came from the east, Falcon thought he was seeing the first faint hint of sunrise. Then he realized that it was twenty minutes too early, and the glow that had appeared along the horizon was moving toward him even as he watched.

  It swiftly detached itself from the arch of stars that marked the invisible edge of the planet, and he saw that it was a relatively narrow band, quite sharply defined—the beam of an enormous searchlight, swinging beneath the clouds. Perhaps fifty kilometers behind the first racing bar of light came another, parallel and moving at the same speed. And behind that another and another, until all the sky flickered with alternating sheets of light and darkness.

  Falcon thought that he must have become inured to wonders by now, and surely this display of pure, soundless luminosity could not present the slightest danger. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing display, an inexplicable display—and despite himself he felt cold fear gnawing at what was otherwise an almost inhuman self-control. No human could look on such a sight without feeling like a helpless pygmy in the presence of forces beyond his comprehension. Was it possible that Jupiter carried not only life, but . . .

  His mind reeled. The windows of his capsule spun in front of his eyes as rapidly as the searchlight beams in the vast dark cloudscape outside them.

  But also intelligence . . . ?

  The thought had literally had to fight its way to consciousness. What could his unconscious know with such fervor and jealousy that it would want to hide it from his own conscious mind, from the spotlight of reason?

  An intelligence that only now was beginning to react to his alien presence . . . ?

  “Yes, we see it,” said Buranaphorn, in a voice that echoed Falcon’s own sense of awe. “We have no idea what it is. We’re calling Ganymede.”

  The display was slowly fading; the bands racing in from the far horizon were much fainter, as if the energies that powered them were becoming exhausted. In five minutes it was all over. The last faint pulse of light flickered along the western sky and was gone. Its passing left Falcon with an overwhelming sense of relief. The sight had been so hypnotic, so disturbing, that it could not have been good for anyone’s peace of mind to contemplate it too long. He was more shaken then he cared to admit. An electrical storm was something he could understand, but this was totally incomprehensible.

  Mission Control stayed silent. He knew that the information banks up on Ganymede were being searched; people and machines were turning their minds to the problem. Meanwhile a signal had gone back to Earth, but just getting there and getting a “hello” back would take an hour.

  What as this rising unease, this dissatisfaction? Trying to press into his mind like the gathering of another titanic radio blast—it was as if Falcon knew something he did not want to admit to himself that he knew.

  When Mission Control spoke again, it was with Olaf Brenner’s tired voice. “Hello, Kon-Tiki, we’ve solved the problem—in a manner of speaking—but we can still hardly believe it.” The exobiologist sounded relieved and subdued at once. One might think the man was in the midst of some great intellectual crisis. “What you are seeing is bioluminescence. Perhaps similar to that produced by microorganisms in the tropical seas of Earth—certainly similar in manifestation—here in the atmosphere, not the ocean, but the principle seems to be the same.”

  “That pattern was too regular, too artificial,” Falcon mildly protested. “Hundred
s of kilometers across.”

  “It was even larger than you imagine. You observed only a small part of it. The whole pattern was almost five thousand kilometers wide and looked like a revolving wheel. You merely saw the spokes, sweeping past you at about one kilometer per second.”

  “A second!” Falcon could not help interjecting. “Nothing living could move that fast!”

  “Of course not. Let me explain. What you saw was triggered by the shock wave from Source Beta, moving at the speed of sound.”

  “What’s that have to do with the pattern?”

  “That’s the surprising part. It’s a very rare phenomenon, but identical wheels of light—a thousand times smaller—have been observed in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Listen to this: British India Company’s Patna, Persian Gulf, May 1880, 11:30 P.M.: ‘An enormous luminous wheel, whirling ’round, the spokes of which appeared to brush the ship along. The spokes were two hundred to three hundred yards long. . . . Each wheel contained about sixteen spokes. . . .’ And here’s one from the Gulf of Oman, dated May 23, 1906: ‘The intensely bright luminescence approached us rapidly, shooting sharply defined light rays to the west in rapid succession, like the beam from the searchlight of a warship. . . . To the left of us, a gigantic fiery wheel formed itself, with spokes that reached as far as one could see. The whole wheel whirled around for two or three minutes. . . .’ ” Brenner broke off. “Well, they go on like that. Ganymede indexes some five hundred cases. Computer would have printed out the lot if we hadn’t called a halt.”

  “All right then, I’m convinced—but still baffled.”

  “Can’t blame you for that. The full explanation wasn’t worked out until late in the 20th century. Seems these luminous wheels result from submarine earthquakes, and always occur in shallow waters where the shock waves are reflected and form standing wave patterns, sometimes bars, sometimes rotating wheels—the ‘Wheels of Poseidon,’ they’ve been called. The theory was finally proved by making underwater explosions and photographing the results from a satellite.”

  “No wonder sailors used to be so superstitious,” Falcon remarked. He saw the pertinence of the terrestrial examples: when Source Beta blew its top, it must have sent shock waves in all directions—through the compressed gas of the lower atmosphere, and down through the solid body of Jupiter’s core. Meeting and recrossing, these waves canceled here, reinforced there. The whole planet must have rung like a bell.

  Yet the explanation did not destroy his sense of wonder and awe; he would never be able to forget those flickering bands of light, racing through the unattainable depths of the Jovian atmosphere. This was a world where anything could happen, and no one could guess what the future would bring. And he still had a whole day to go.

  Falcon was not merely on a strange planet. He was caught in some magical realm between myth and reality.

  Blake, meanwhile, was squeezed between two clusters of pipe in a space that had never been designed for human occupancy, the sort of space that’s left over after the welders have come in and done their job, and the pipefitters have come in and done theirs, and the electricians have come in and done theirs—none of them really expecting to have to come back, but leaving this technically negotiable tiny squeeze-hole in case some poor sap actually had to get in there with a wrench or set of wire-cutters to fix something broken.

  What Blake was doing in here was the sort of thing that got people killed. He was hunting a wounded animal.

  Linda, or Ellen, or whatever secret name she called herself, was much smarter and quicker than he, and he knew it. He’d seen enough of her uncanny “luck” to guess at what she had in her brain and nerves but never talked about. Probably she could see in the dark and smell him coming, just like a wounded mountain lion.

  Nevertheless she must be stopped. She was too dangerous to allow to go free and way too dangerous to underestimate. If she said she had ensured that Howard Falcon’s mission would fail, she had reason. Yet he couldn’t simply hand her over to the commander, tell him that at last she was back—and wash his hands of the results. Too many things were happening too fast. He had to handle this on his own.

  A couple of factors were on his side. With his perverse addiction to sabotage, Blake was a more experienced sneak even than she. With any luck, she wouldn’t be expecting him, for she’d gone out of her way to warn him off, when she must have known he didn’t suspect she was within three planets of here.

  And she was sick. But whether her haunted eyes and wasted body meant she was any less formidable, he didn’t know.

  He moved slowly through the almost impassable passage until he was next to the AP service bay. He’d already searched the more accessible of the places on his list where she might hide. They’d proved a little too accessible for her to risk.

  Through a mere crevice between electrical bus bridges he got a glimpse into the AP service area, dimly illuminated by a couple of glowing green diodes. Nothing was moving in there, nothing visible. Blake listened as hard as he could, but he could hear only the whine and hum and creak of the ship above his own breath and heartbeat. Quiet as they were, they sounded like hurricane wind and surf in his ears.

  He inched himself forward, until he was hanging half into the space where he expected to find her.

  The madwoman’s ill-timed screech was his only warning. She flew out of the deep shadows into the sickly green light, talons outstretched, screaming like a harpy. She could have torn his throat out—but because of her scream he had a fractional moment in which to register her fiery eyes, her gleaming fangs, as he convulsed, twisted—

  —and seized her wrist. Her PIN spines, extended beneath her nails, sliced open his arm like razors, but he didn’t notice. His calves were still wedged fast in the narrow passage; they gave him the leverage he needed, and . . .

  With a single jerk of its neck a leopard seal peels the skin off its prey in a spray of blood . . .

  The effect on Sparta was not so grisly. Whipped upside down by Blake, she did a rag doll’s somersault and slammed butt first into the bulkhead, legs splayed. Her foul breath came out in an explosive grunt and she feebly waved her free arm, but Blake’s left fist slammed into the point of her chin. Her head snapped back and her eyes rolled up in her head.

  His own blood was floating in the little room, little black bubbles in the green light, more of them all the time. He folded his arms around her wasted, filthy body and burst into tears. Sobbing bitterly, he groped with his good hand for the dogged hatch that opened into the maintenance corridor.

  He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to turn her in. He’d wanted to get the truth out of her and, if he could think of any way to do it, help her get free.

  Too late. He was losing blood fast; he needed to get to the clinic. And she was dying in his arms.

  XXIV

  When true dawn finally arrived, it brought a sudden change of weather. Kon-Tiki was moving through a blizzard; waxen snowflakes were falling so thickly that visibility was reduced to zero. Falcon worried about the weight that might accumulate on the balloon’s envelope. Then he noticed that any flakes settling outside the window quickly disappeared; Kon-Tiki’s continual outpouring of heat was evaporating them as swiftly as they arrived.

  If he had been ballooning on Earth, he would also have had to worry about the possibility of hitting something solid. No danger of that here. Mountains on Jupiter, in the unlikely event that there were any, would still be hundreds of kilometers below him. As for the floating islands of foam, hitting them would probably be like plowing into slightly hardened soap bubbles.

  Nevertheless he took a cautious peek with the horizontal radar. What he saw on the screen surprised him. Scattered across a huge sector of the sky ahead were dozens of large and brilliant echoes, completely isolated from one another, apparently hanging unsupported in space. Falcon remembered the phrase early aviators had used to described one of the hazards of their profession, “clouds stuffed with rocks,” a good description of what seem
ed to lie in the path of Kon-Tiki. The radar screen made for a disconcerting sight, although Falcon reminded himself that nothing really solid could hover in this atmosphere.

  Falcon’s conscious mind tried to pigeon-hole the apparition—some strange meteorological phenomenon, then, and still at least 200 kilometers off—but an inchoate emotion welled in his breast. “Mission Control, what am I looking at?” His own tight voice surprised him.

  “No help, Howard. All we have to go on is your radar signal.”

  At least they could see the weather, and Buranaphorn conveyed the welcome news that he would be clear of the blizzard in half an hour.

  Yet there was no warning of the violent cross wind that abruptly grabbed Kon-Tiki and swept it almost at right angles to his course. Suddenly the envelope was dragging the capsule through the air like a sea anchor, almost horizontally. Falcon needed all his skill and his rattlesnake-quick reflexes to prevent his ungainly vehicle from tangling itself in the guys, even capsizing.

  Within minutes he was racing northward at over 600 kilometers per hour.

  As suddenly as it had started, the turbulence ceased. He was still moving at high speed, but in still atmosphere, as if he’d been caught in a jet stream. The snowstorm vanished, and he saw with his own eyes what Jupiter had prepared for him.

  Kon-Tiki had entered the funnel of a gigantic whirlpool, at least a thousand kilometers across. The balloon was being swept along a curving wall of cloud. Overhead the sun was shining in a clear sky, but far beneath, this great hole in the atmosphere drilled down to unknown depths until it reached a misty floor where lightning flickered almost continuously.

  Though the vessel was being dragged downward so slowly that it was in no immediate danger, Falcon increased the flow of the heat into the envelope until KonTiki hovered at a constant altitude. Not until then did he abandon the fantastic spectacle and return to considering the problem of the radar signals. They were still out there.