The Medusa Encounter

by Paul Preuss

  “There is nothing more I can do for the patient until . . .”

  “Stay here.”

  “But I haven’t eaten in . . .” The hatch closed on the young doctor’s pained objection.

  Outside, in the corridor, the commander turned to his lieutenant. “Anything, Vik?”

  “Nothing.” The big blond lieutenant had his stun-gun out of its holster.

  The commander peered at Blake. “She’s been on board at least since Ganymede. You’re sure it’s not a bomb?”

  “Not on Kon-Tiki. It would have showed up as extra mass.”

  “She hid her own mass easily enough.”

  “On Garuda she had a couple of orders of magnitude more mass to slop around in. Kon-Tiki was weighed repeatedly before they launched it. Right down to the gram. I watched.”

  “Yeah, I get the impression you made yourself a perfect pest,” the commander grunted. “A pulse bomb, then—something tiny, not explosive, bad enough to fry the circuitry—what they did to her on Mars.”

  “She’s been an outlaw for almost two years, outside anybody’s system. How would she get access to anything that sophisticated and expensive?”

  “I could ask how she stowed away . . .”

  “However she did it, it didn’t take that kind of money.”

  “Yeah.” The commander sighed. “Structural damage?”

  “Kon-Tiki has worked without a hitch, all the major systems—heatshields, drogue chutes, balloon, fusion pack, ramjets, life support, instrumentation, communication. . . . They crawled all over that thing before they let it separate.”

  “Then it’s software.”

  “Every diagnostic has run perfectly.”

  “Still . . . software.”

  Blake nodded, reluctantly. “I think you’re right. But we aren’t going to find out what she did unless she tells us.”

  “Look, Redfield, I’m not trying to get rid of you. But the doctor in there says he’s hungry. How about rounding up some slop from the mess?”

  Blake started to object—why can’t Vik do it? he wanted to ask. But the answer was obvious: the lieutenant had the firepower, and they might need it. Blake headed for the mess.

  The commander went back into the clinic.

  “Food’s on the way,” he said to Ullrich. “Say again what you know about this stuff she was on.”

  “Computer says a guanine nucleotide binding protein . . .”

  “So a cop can understand it.”

  Ullrich flushed. “A neuropeptide—a brain chemical—associated with the visual cortex. Limited use in the treatment of some forms of reading disorder. The typical dosage is about a millionth what this woman has been taking.”

  “What would that do to her?”

  “In rats it apparently produces hallucinations. Auditory and visual. And bizarre behaviors.”

  “Like schizophrenia?”

  “We don’t diagnose rats as schizophrenic.”

  “One for you, Doctor,” said the commander. “Keep talking.”

  “The woman’s left visual cortex is fragile. Redfield’s blow to her jaw thrust the brain against the back of the skull. Preexisting cell-membrane permeability may account for her complaint that she can’t see . . . although obviously she sees well enough in the ordinary sense of the word.”

  At that moment Sparta’s eyes opened. Ullrich glanced at her. He felt less compassion for this patient than he should have. “In any event, her life’s out of danger. Her pneumonia is under control.”

  “Can you talk, Linda?” the commander asked. His rough voice conveyed a curious mix of concern and command.

  The doctor objected, almost by reflex. “That is not . . .”

  “Can talk,” she whispered. She looked away from the commander’s face and frowned at the doctor. “Dangerous.”

  “Never mind him, he’s clean,” said the commander, ignoring Ullrich’s puzzled, offended look. “Do you want to say what you did to Kon-Tiki?”

  “No.” Her eyes locked with the commander’s. “You understand.”

  “You think that Howard Falcon took your place as envoy?”

  “As it was intended by the prophetae.”

  “You want to deny him that? Out of jealousy?”

  “Jealousy?” She tried to smile, with ghastly effect. “Don’t want Free Spirit to make first contact. You neither.” Her gaze drifted to the shadowed metal ceiling. “Been busy, sir. Two years now.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know who you are. Really are.”

  “Howard Falcon is an innocent man,” said the commander.

  “ ‘Man’ not the word,” she said.

  “As human as you.”

  “I am not a human being,” she said, with force that cost her.

  “You are nothing but,” said the commander. He turned to the doctor. “Show her the scans.”

  Beyond protest, Ullrich did as he was told and brought the woman’s brain scans up on the flat-screen. “The area of the hematoma,” he said, pointing, “almost entirely relieved by targeted nano-organisms . . .”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” the commander said, silencing him. “You could see closer or farther than an ordinary human, Linda—not because of anything they did to the eye-ball, but because of what they did to the visual cortex.”

  “Getting to like that,” she said. “Gone now. Fried my brain.”

  “This other knot of matter is still intact,” said the commander, pointing to a dense shadow in the forebrain. “And this. And this.”

  “Can still compute trajectory,” she said.

  “What did you do to Kon-Tiki’s computer?” he repeated.

  “Can still listen.” She closed her eyes. For a single second—it seemed to last forever—she was perfectly still. When she opened them again she said, “Maybe persuade me—if we had longer.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t waste time on me. Mission Control.”

  He understood. “So it’s already happening.”

  XXV

  It had been growing darker, but Falcon had scarcely noticed as he strained his eyes toward the living cloud. The wind that was steadily sweeping Kon-Tiki around the funnel of the great whirlpool had now brought him within twenty kilometers of the creature.

  “If you get much closer, Howard, I want you to take evasive action,” Buranaphorn said. “That thing’s electric weapons are probably short-range, but we don’t want you putting it to a test.”

  “Future explorers,” Falcon said hoarsely.

  “Say again please?”

  “Leave that to future explorers,” Falcon repeated. One part of his brain watched the unfolding events with brilliant clarity, but another seemed to have trouble forming words. “Wish them luck.”

  “That’s a roger,” came the voice of Mission Control.

  It was quite dark in the capsule—strange, because sunset was still hours away. Automatically he glanced at the scanning radar as he had done every few minutes. That and his own senses confirmed that there was no other object within a hundred kilometers of him, aside from the medusa he was studying.

  Suddenly, with startling power, he heard the sound that had come booming out of the Jovian night—the throbbing beat that grew more and more rapid, then stopped in mid-crescendo. The whole capsule vibrated like a pea on a kettledrum.

  Falcon realized two things simultaneously during the sudden, aching silence: this time the sound was not coming from thousands of kilometers away over a radio circuit. It was in the very atmosphere around him.

  The second thought was more disturbing. He had quite forgotten—inexcusable, but there had been other things on his mind—that most of the sky above him was completely blanked out by Kon-Tiki’s gas bag. Lightly silvered to conserve heat, the great balloon also made an effective shield against both radar and vision.

  Not that this hadn’t been considered at length and finally tolerated, as a minor design trade-off of little importance. But suddenly it seemed very important.

/>   Falcon saw a fence of gigantic tentacles descending all around his capsule.

  “Remember the Prime Directive! The Prime Directive!”

  Brenner’s scream filled his head with an extraordinary bright confusion—as if words alone had the power to bend his attention, subvert his very will. For a moment Falcon thought the words had welled up from his subconscious mind, so vividly did they seem to tangle with his own thoughts.

  But no, it was Brenner’s voice all right, again yelling over the commlink: “Don’t alarm it!”

  Don’t alarm it? Before Falcon could think of an appropriate answer, that overwhelming drumbeat started again and drowned all other sounds.

  The sign of a really skilled test pilot is how he reacts not to foreseeable emergencies but to ones that nobody could have anticipated—a reaction that is not conscious, not conditionable, but a capacity for decision built in at the cellular level. Before Falcon could even form a notion of what he was about to do, he had done it. He’d pulled the ripcord.

  Ripcord—an archaic phrase from the earliest days of ballooning, when there was a cord rigged to literally rip open the bag. Kon-Tiki’s ripcord wasn’t a cord but a switch, which operated a set of louvers around the upper curve of the envelope. At once the hot gas rushed out. Kon-Tiki, deprived of her lift, began to fall swiftly in a gravity field two and a half times as strong as Earth’s.

  Falcon had a momentary glimpse of great tentacles whipping upward and away. He had just time to note that they were studded with large bladders or sacs, presumably to give them buoyancy, and that they ended in multitudes of thin feelers like the roots of a plant.

  He half expected a bolt of lightning. Nothing happened.

  Brenner was still yelling at him. “What have you done, Falcon? You may have frightened it badly!”

  “Busy here,” Falcon said, squelching the transmission. His precipitous rate of descent was slackening as the atmosphere thickened and the balloon’s deflated envelope acted as a parachute. When Kon-Tiki had dropped about three kilometers, he thought it must surely be safe to close the louvers again. By the time he had restored buoyancy and was in equilibrium once more, he had lost another two kilometers of altitude and was getting dangerously near the red line.

  He peered anxiously through the overhead windows. He did not expect to see anything but the obscuring bulk of the balloon, but he had side-slipped during his descent, and part of the medusa was barely visible a couple of kilometers above—much closer than he’d expected, and still coming down, faster than he would have believed possible.

  Buranaphorn was on the link from Mission Control, calling anxiously: “Howard, we show your rate of descent . . .”

  “I’m all right,” Falcon broke in, “but it’s still coming after me. I can’t go any deeper.” Which was not quite true; he could go a lot deeper, at least a couple of hundred kilometers, but it would be a one-way trip, and he would miss most of the journey.

  To his great relief he saw that the medusa was leveling out, a bit more than a kilometer above him. Perhaps it had decided to approach the intruder with caution, or perhaps it too had found this deeper layer uncomfortably hot. For the temperature was over fifty degrees Centigrade, and Falcon wondered how much longer Kon-Tiki’s life-support system could handle matters.

  Brenner was back on the circuit, still worried. “Try not to frighten it! It’s only being inquisitive!”

  Falcon felt a stiffness about his neck and jaws as if his gorge were rising. Brenner’s voice did not lack conviction, exactly—what it lacked was the sound of integrity. Falcon recalled a videocast discussion he’d caught between a lawyer and an astronaut in which, after the full implications of the Prime had been spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed, “You mean if there was no alternative I’d have to sit still and let myself be eaten?” and the lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered, “That’s an excellent summation.” As Falcon recalled, his masters—his physicians, that is—had been quite upset to find him watching that show; they thought they’d censored it. It had seemed funny at the time.

  Just then Falcon saw something that upset him even more than the exobiologist’s assault on his willpower. The medusa was still hovering more than a kilometer above the balloon, but one of its tentacles had become incredibly elongated—

  —and was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time! Remembered video scenes of tornados descending from storm clouds over the North American plains sprang to Falcon’s mind, memories vividly evoked by the black, twisting snake in the sky that was groping for him now.

  “See that, Mission Control?”

  “Affirmative,” Buranaphorn replied tautly.

  “I’m out of options,” Falcon said. “Either I scare it off or give it a bad stomach ache—because I don’t think it will find Kon-Tiki very digestible, if that’s what it has in mind.”

  Brenner’s voice came back, fast and frantic: “Howard, listen to me. You must not forget that you are under the dictates of the Prime. . . .”

  At that moment Falcon killed the downlink from Mission Control, cutting Brenner off in midexpostulation—a decision that came from the same place as his decision to pull the ripcord, from some deeply engrained respect for his own integrity and survival.

  A cruder, more primitive man might have put it more bluntly: screw the Prime Directive.

  Perhaps that cruder, more primitive man was sensitive to something that the highly evolved, highly modified, fully conscious Howard Falcon wasn’t, namely that every time Brenner said the words “Prime Directive,” Falcon’s head seemed to fill with throbbing white light, and he felt vague saccharine urges toward—how would one put it?—the Oneness of Being. Urges overlaid with a less romantic compulsion to do any damn thing Brenner told him to do.

  Where the hell that came from, he didn’t know. But cutting the squishy little Brenner out of the loop seemed to relieve the immediate symptoms.

  “I’m starting the ignition sequencer,” Falcon said, aware that his words were for the record only, and that if he never got back to Mission Control no one would ever really know what happened.

  The clinic door stood open. The commander was gone, the guard outside the door had disappeared, and the ship’s doctor had made his getaway. Blake floated into the doorway, his hands full of food containers. “What happened?”

  She was oblivious to him, listening. She expelled a long breath. “He’s offline,” she said. “Moonjelly must have taken him.”

  “The what?”

  “The medusa.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She studied him with dull eyes. “Whatever happens, he’s dead. I rigged his escape sequence to fail. Wish I hadn’t.”

  “Linda, Linda, what’s become of you?” he cried. Blake wiped sudden tears across his red face and propelled himself backward into the corridor.

  At last she was alone. She tugged at her wrist straps.

  Falcon was twenty-seven minutes early on the countdown, but he calculated—or hoped—that he had the reserves to correct his orbit later.

  He couldn’t see the medusa. It was directly overhead. But the descending tentacle must be close to the balloon.

  As a heater, the reactor was running fine, but it took five minutes for its microprocessors to run through the complicated checklist needed to get it to full thrust as a rocket. Two of those minutes had passed. The fuser was primed. Computer had not rejected the orbit situation as absurd, or at least not as wholly impossible. The capsule’s scoops were open, ready to gulp in tonnes of the surrounding hydrogen-helium atmosphere on demand. In almost all ways conditions were optimum, and it was the moment of truth. Would the damn thing work?

  There had been no way of operationally testing a nuclear ramjet in a Jupiterlike atmosphere—without going to Jupiter. So this was the first real trial.

  Something rocked Kon-Tiki, rather gently. Falcon tried to ignore it.

  Ramjet ignition had been planned for barometric conditions equiva
lent to some ten kilometers higher, in an atmosphere less than a quarter of the present density and some thirty degrees cooler.

  Too bad.

  What was the shallowest dive he could get away with? If and when the scoops worked and the ram fired, he’d be heading in the general direction of Jupiter—down, that is—with two and a half Gs to help him get there. Could he possibly pull out in time?

  A large, heavy hand patted the balloon. The whole rig bobbed up and down like one of those antique toys, yoyos, that had recently undergone a rage revival on the playgrounds of Earth. Falcon tried harder to ignore it.

  Without success. Brenner could be right, of course. It might be trying to be friendly. Maybe he should try talking to it over the radio. It received radio, didn’t it? What should he say? How about “Pretty pussy” or maybe “Down, Fido!”—or “Take me to your leader.”

  Computer showed tritium-deuterium ratio optimum. Time to light the hundred million-degree Roman candle.

  The thin tip of the medusa’s tentacle came slithering around the edge of the balloon, less than sixty meters away. It was about the size of an elephant’s trunk and, judging by the delicacy of its exploration, at least as sensitive. There were little palps at its ends, like questing mouths.

  Dr. Brenner would have been fascinated.

  It was as good a time as any—probably better than any time more than a second or two later—so Falcon glanced swiftly at his control board, saw all green, and started the four-second count.

  Four

  He broke the safety seal—

  Three

  And flipped the ENABLE toggle—

  Two

  And with his left hand squeezed hard on the dead-man switch—

  One

  And with his right pressed the JETTISON button.

  Nothing . . . until—

  There was a sharp explosion and an instant loss of weight.

  Half a minute after Falcon went off line, a howl of static erupted through the speakers in Mission Control, momentarily overwhelming the automatic trackers.

  A hundred bright points of radio energy blazed into life in the clouds of Jupiter, forming concentric rings that were neatly centered on Falcon’s last known position.