A Meeting With Medusa

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The safety line gave a gentle pull as the lugger started to drift downward, moving broadside-on across the patch, and Tibor began to walk forward with the springy, slow-motion step forced on him by weightlessness and water resistance. As Number Two diver, he was working from the bow; amidships was Stephen, still comparatively inexperienced, while at the stern was the head diver, Billy. The three men seldom saw each other while they were working; each had his own lane to search as the Arafura drifted silently before the wind. Only at the extremes of their zigzags might they sometimes glimpse one another as dim shapes looming through the mist.

  It needed a trained eye to spot the shells beneath their camouflage of algae and weeds, but often the molluscs betrayed themselves. When they felt the vibrations of the approaching diver, they would snap shut—and there would be a momentary, nacreous flicker in the gloom. Yet even then they sometimes escaped, for the moving ship might drag the diver past before he could collect the prize just out of reach. In the early days of his apprenticeship, Tibor had missed quite a few of the big silver lips—any one of which might have contained some fabulous pearl. Or so he had imagined, before the glamour of the profession had worn off, and he realised that pearls were so rare that you might as well forget them. The most valuable stone he’d ever brought up had been sold for fifty-six dollars, and the shell he gathered on a good morning was worth more than that. If the industry had depended on gems instead of mother-of-pearl, it would have gone broke years ago.

  There was no sense of time in this world of mist. You walked beneath the invisible, drifting ship, with the throb of the air compressor pounding in your ears, the green haze moving past your eyes. At long intervals you would spot a shell, wrench it from the sea bed, and drop it in your bag. If you were lucky, you might gather a couple of dozen on a single drift across the patch; on the other hand, you might not find a single one.

  You were alert for danger, but not worried by it. The real risks were simple, unspectacular things like tangled air hoses or safety lines—not sharks, groupers, or octopuses. Sharks ran when they saw your air bubbles, and in all his hours of diving Tibor had seen just one octopus, every bit of two feet across. As for groupers—well, they were to be taken seriously, for they could swallow a diver at one gulp if they felt hungry enough. But there was little chance of meeting them on this flat and desolate plain; there were none of the coral caves in which they could make their homes.

  The shock would not have been so great, therefore, if this uniform, level greyness had not lulled him into a sense of security. At one moment he was walking steadily toward an unreachable wall of mist, which retreated as fast as he approached. And then, without warning, his private nightmare was looming above him.

  Tibor hated spiders, and there was a certain creature in the sea that seemed deliberately contrived to take advantage of that phobia. He had never met one, and his mind had always shied away from the thought of such an encounter, but Tibor knew that the Japanese spider crab can span twelve feet across its spindly legs. That it was harmless mattered not in the least; a spider as big as a man simply had no right to exist.

  As soon as he saw that cage of slender, jointed limbs emerge from the all-encompassing greyness, Tibor began to scream with uncontrollable terror. He never remembered jerking his safety line, but Blanco reacted with the instantaneous perception of the ideal tender. His helmet still echoing to his screams. Tibor felt himself snatched from the sea bed, lifted toward light and air—and sanity. As he swept upward, he saw both the strangeness and the absurdity of his mistake, and regained a measure of control. But he was still trembling so violently when Blanco lifted off his helmet that it was some time before he could speak.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ demanded Nick. ‘Everyone knocking off work early?’

  It was then that Tibor realised that he was not the first to come up. Stephen was sitting amidships, smoking a cigarette and looking completely unconcerned. The stern diver, doubtless wondering what had happened, was being hauled up willy-nilly by his tender, since the Arafura had come to rest and all operations had been suspended until the trouble was resolved.

  ‘There’s some kind of wreck down there,’ said Tibor. ‘I ran right into it. All I could see were a lot of wires and rods.’

  To his annoyance and self-contempt, the memory set him trembling again.

  ‘Don’t see why that should give you the shakes,’ grumbled Nick. Nor could Tibor; here on this sun-drenched deck, it was impossible to explain how a harmless shape glimpsed through the mist could set one’s whole mind jangling with terror.

  ‘I nearly got hung up on it,’ he lied. ‘Blanco pulled me clear just in time.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Nick, obviously not convinced. ‘Anyway, it ain’t a ship.’ He gestured toward the midships diver. ‘Steve ran into a mess of ropes and cloth—like thick nylon, he says. Sounds like some kind of parachute.’ The old Greek stared in disgust at the soggy stump of his cigar, then flicked it overboard. ‘Soon as Billy’s up, we’ll go back and take a look. Might be worth something—remember what happened to Jo Chambers.’

  Tibor remembered; the story was famous the whole length of the Great Barrier Reef. Jo had been a lone-wolf fisherman who, in the last months of the war, had spotted a DC-3 lying in shallow water a few miles off the Queensland coast. After prodigies of singlehanded salvage, he had broken into the fuselage and started unloading boxes of taps and dies, perfectly protected by their greased wrappings. For a while he had run a flourishing import business, but when the police caught up with him he reluctantly revealed his source of supply; Australian cops can be very persuasive.

  And it was then, after weeks and weeks of backbreaking underwater work, that Jo discovered what his DC-3 had been carrying besides the miserable few hundred quid’s worth of tools he had been flogging to garages and workshops on the mainland. The big wooden crates he’d never got round to opening held a week’s payroll for the US Pacific forces—most of it in twenty-dollar gold pieces.

  No such luck here, thought Tibor as he sank over the side again; but the aircraft—or whatever it was—might contain valuable instruments, and there could be a reward for its discovery. Besides, he owed it to himself; he wanted to see exactly what it was that had given him such a fright.

  Ten minutes later, he knew it was no aircraft. It was the wrong shape, and it was much too small—only about twenty feet long and half that in width. Here and there on the gently tapering body were access hatches and tiny ports through which unknown instruments peered at the world. It seemed unharmed, though one end had been fused as if by terrific heat. From the other sprouted a tangle of antennas, all of them broken or bent by the impact with the water. Even now, they bore an incredible resemblance to the legs of a giant insect.

  Tibor was no fool; he guessed at once what the thing was. Only one problem remained, and he solved that with little difficulty. Though they had been partly charred away by heat, stencilled words could still be read on some of the hatch covers. The letters were Cyrillic, and Tibor knew enough Russian to pick out references to electrical supplies and pressurising systems.

  ‘So they’ve lost a sputnik,’ he told himself with satisfaction. He could imagine what had happened; the thing had come down too fast, and in the wrong place. Around one end were the tattered remnants of flotation bags; they had burst under the impact, and the vehicle had sunk like a stone. The Arafura’s crew would have to apologise to Joey; he hadn’t been drinking grog. What he’d seen burning across the stars must have been the rocket carrier, separated from its pay load and falling back unchecked into the Earth’s atmosphere.

  For a long time Tibor hovered on the sea bed, knees bent in the diver’s crouch, as he regarded this space creature now trapped in an alien element. His mind was full of half-formed plans, but none had yet come clearly into focus. He no longer cared about salvage money; much more important were the prospects of revenge. Here was one of the proudest creations of Soviet technology—and Szabo Tibor, late of Budapest
, was the only man on earth who knew.

  There must be some way of exploiting the situation—of doing harm to the country and the cause he now hated with such smouldering intensity. In his waking hours, he was seldom conscious of that hate, and still less did he ever stop to analyse its real cause. Here in this lonely world of sea and sky, of steaming mangrove swamps and dazzling coral strands, there was nothing to recall the past. Yet he could never escape it, and sometimes the demons in his mind would awake, lashing him into a fury of rage or vicious, wanton destructiveness. So far he had been lucky; he had not killed anyone. But some day…

  An anxious jerk from Blanco interrupted his reveries of vengeance. He gave a reassuring signal to his tender, and started a closer examination of the capsule. What did it weigh? Could it be hoisted easily? There were many things he had to discover, before he could settle on any definite plans.

  He braced himself against the corrugated metal wall, and pushed cautiously. There was a definite movement as the capsule rocked on the sea bed. Maybe it could be lifted, even with the few pieces of tackle that the Arafura could muster. It was probably lighter than it looked.

  Tibor pressed his helmet against a flat section of the hull, and listened intently. He had half expected to hear some mechanical noise, such as the whirring of electric motors. Instead, there was utter silence. With the hilt of his knife, he rapped sharply on the metal, trying to gauge its thickness and to locate any weak spots. On the third try, he got results: but they were not what he had anticipated.

  In a furious, desperate tattoo, the capsule rapped back at him.

  Until this moment. Tibor had never dreamed that there might be someone inside; the capsule had seemed far too small. Then he realised that he had been thinking in terms of conventional aircraft; there was plenty of room here for a little pressure cabin in which a dedicated astronaut could spend a few cramped hours.

  As a kaleidoscope can change its pattern completely in a single moment, so the half-formed plans in Tibor’s mind dissolved and then crystallised into a new shape. Behind the thick glass of his helmet, he ran his tongue lightly across his lips. If Nick could have seen him now, he would have wondered—as he had sometimes done before—whether his Number Two diver was wholly sane. Gone were all thoughts of a remote and impersonal vengeance against something as abstract as a nation or a machine; now it would be man to man.

  ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’ said Nick. ‘What did you find?’

  ‘It’s Russian,’ said Tibor. ‘Some kind of sputnik. If we can get a rope around it, I think we can lift it off the bottom. But it’s too heavy to get aboard.’

  Nick chewed thoughtfully on his eternal cigar. The pearling master was worried about a point that had not occurred to Tibor. If there were any salvage operations around here, everyone would know where the Arafura had been drifting. When the news got back to Thursday Island, his private patch of shell would be cleaned out in no time.

  They’d have to keep quiet about the whole affair, or else haul the damn thing up themselves and not say where they’d found it. Whatever happened, it looked like being more of a nuisance than it was worth. Nick, who shared most Australians’ profound suspicion of authority, had already decided that all he’d get for his trouble would be a nice letter of thanks.

  ‘The boys won’t go down,’ he said. ‘They think it’s a bomb. Want to leave it alone.’

  ‘Tell ‘em not to worry,’ replied Tibor. ‘I’ll handle it.’ He tried to keep his voice normal and unemotional, but this was too good to be true. If the other divers heard the tapping from the capsule, his plans would have been frustrated.

  He gestured to the island, green and lovely on the skyline.

  ‘Only one thing we can do. If we can heave it a couple of feet off the bottom, we can run for the shore. Once we’re in shallow water, it won’t be too hard to haul it up on the beach. We can use the boats, and maybe get a block and tackle on one of those trees.’

  Nick considered the idea without much enthusiasm. He doubted if they could get the sputnik through the reef, even on the leeward side of the island. But he was all in favour of lugging it away from this patch of shell; they could always dump it somewhere else, buoy the place, and still get whatever credit was going.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Down you go. That two-inch rope’s the strongest we’ve got—better take that. Don’t be all the bloody day; we’ve lost enough time already.’

  Tibor had no intention of being all day. Six hours would be quite long enough. That was one of the first things he had learned, from the signals through the wall.

  It was a pity that he could not hear the Russian’s voice; but the Russian could hear him, and that was what really mattered. When he pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted, most of his words got through. So far, it had been a friendly conversation; Tibor had no intention of showing his hand until the right psychological moment.

  The first move had been to establish a code—one knock for ‘yes,’ two for ‘no.’ After that, it was merely a matter of framing suitable questions; given time, there was no fact or idea that could not be communicated by means of these two signals. It would have been a much tougher job if Tibor had been forced to use his indifferent Russian; he had been pleased, but not surprised, to find that the trapped pilot understood English perfectly.

  There was air in the capsule for another five hours; the occupant was uninjured; yes, the Russians knew where it had come down. That last reply gave Tibor pause. Perhaps the pilot was lying, but it might very well be true. Although something had obviously gone wrong with the planned return to Earth, the tracking ships out in the Pacific must have located the impact point—with what accuracy, he could not guess. Still, did that matter? It might take them days to get here, even if they came racing straight into Australian territorial waters without bothering to get permission from Canberra. He was master of the situation; the entire might of the USSR could do nothing to interfere with his plans—until it was much too late.

  The heavy rope fell in coils on the sea bed, stirring up a cloud of silt that drifted like smoke down the slow current. Now that the sun was higher in the sky, the underwater world was no longer wrapped in a grey, twilight gloom. The sea bed was colourless but bright, and the boundary of vision was now almost fifteen feet away. For the first time, Tibor could see the space capsule in its entirety. It was such a peculiar-looking object, being designed for conditions beyond all normal experience, that there was an eye-teasing wrongness about it. One searched in vain for a front or a rear; there was no way of telling in what direction it pointed as it sped along its orbit.

  Tibor pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted.

  ‘I’m back,’ he called. ‘Can you hear me?’

  Tap

  ‘I’ve got a rope, and I’m going to tie it on to the parachute cables. We’re about three kilometres from an island, and as soon as we’ve made you fast we’ll head toward it. We can’t lift you out of the water with the gear on the lugger, so we’ll try to get you up on the beach. You understand?’

  Tap

  It took only a few moments to secure the rope; now he had better get clear before the Arafura started to lift. But there was something he had to do first.

  ‘Hello!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve fixed the rope. We’ll lift in a minute. D’you hear me?’

  Tap

  ‘Then you can hear this too. You’ll never get there alive. I’ve fixed that as well.’

  Tap, tap

  ‘You’ve got five hours to die. My brother took longer than that, when he ran into your mine field. You understand? I’m from Budapest. I hate you and your country and everything it stands for. You’ve taken my home, my family, made my people slaves. I wish I could see your face now—I wish I could watch you die, as I had to watch Theo. When you’re halfway to the island, this rope is going to break where I cut it. I’ll go down and fix another—and that’ll break, too. You can sit in there and wait for the bumps.’

  Tibor stopped abru
ptly, shaken and exhausted by the violence of his emotion. There was no room for logic or reason in this orgasm of hate; he did not pause to think, for he dared not. Yet somewhere far down inside his mind the real truth was burning its way up toward the light of consciousness.

  It was not the Russians he hated, for all that they had done. It was himself, for he had done more. The blood of Theo, and of ten thousand countrymen, was upon his own hands. No one could have been a better Communist than he had been, or have more supinely believed the propaganda from Moscow. At school and college, he had been the first to hunt out and denounce ‘traitors’. (How many had he sent to the labour camps or the AVO torture chambers?) When he had seen the truth, it was far, far too late; and even then, he had not fought—he had run.

  He had run across the world, trying to escape his guilt; and the two drugs of danger and dissipation had helped him to forget the past. The only pleasures life gave him now were the loveless embraces he sought so feverishly when he was on the mainland, and his present mode of existence was proof that these were not enough. If he now had the power to deal out death, it was only because he had come here in search of it himself.

  There was no sound from the capsule; its silence seemed contemptuous, mocking. Angrily, Tibor banged against it with the hilt of his knife.

  ‘Did you hear me?’ he shouted. ‘Did you hear me?’

  No answer.

  ‘Damn you! I know you’re listening! If you don’t answer, I’ll hole you and let the water in!’

  He was sure that he could, with the sharp point of his knife. But that was the last thing he wanted to do; that would be too quick, too easy an ending.

  There was still no sound; maybe the Russian had fainted. Tiber hoped not, but there was no point in waiting any longer. He gave a vicious parting bang on the capsule, and signalled to his tender.

  Nick had news for him when he broke the surface.