A Meeting With Medusa (33 page)

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—but nothing happened.

His precipitous rate of descent was slackening as the atmosphere thickened and the deflated envelope acted as a parachute. When
Kon-Tiki
had dropped about two miles, he felt that it was safe to close the louvres again. By the time he had restored buoyancy and was in equilibrium once more, he had lost another mile of altitude and was getting dangerously near his safety limit.

He peered anxiously through the overhead windows, though he did not expect to see anything except the obscuring bulk of the balloon. But he had sideslipped during his descent, and part of the medusa was just visible a couple of miles above him. It was much closer than he expected—and it was still coming down, faster than he would have believed possible.

Mission Control was calling anxiously. He shouted: ‘I’m OK—but it’s still coming after me. I can’t go any deeper.’

That was not quite true. He could go a lot deeper—about one hundred and eighty miles. But it would be a one-way trip, and most of the journey would be of little interest to him.

Then, to his great relief, he saw that the medusa was levelling off, not quite a mile above him. Perhaps it had decided to approach this strange intruder with caution; or perhaps it, too, found this deeper layer uncomfortably hot. The temperature was over fifty degrees centigrade, and Falcon wondered how much longer his life-support system could handle matters.

Dr Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the Prime directive.

‘Remember—it may only be inquisitive!’ he cried, without much conviction. ‘Try not to frighten it!’

Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer and an astronaut. After the full implications of the Prime directive had been carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: ‘Then if there was no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?’ The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: ‘That’s an
excellent
summing up.’

It had seemed funny at the time; it was not at all amusing now.

And then Falcon saw something that made him even more unhappy. The medusa was still hovering about a mile above him—but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated, and was stretching down toward
Kon-Tiki
, thinning out at the same time. As a boy he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from a storm cloud over the Kansas plains. The thing coming toward him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the sky.

‘I’m rapidly running out of options,’ he reported to Mission Control. ‘I now have only a choice between frightening it—and giving it a bad stomach-ache. I don’t think it will find
Kon-Tiki
very digestible, if that’s what it has in mind.’

He waited for comments from Brenner, but the biologist remained silent.

‘Very well. It’s twenty-seven minutes ahead of time, but I’m starting the ignition sequencer. I hope I’ll have enough reserve to correct my orbit later.’

He could no longer see the medusa; once more it was directly overhead. But he knew that the descending tentacle must now be very close to the balloon. It would take almost five minutes to bring the reactor up to full thrust…

The fusor was primed. The orbit computer had not rejected the situation as wholly impossible. The air scoops were open, ready to gulp in tons of the surrounding hydrohelium on demand. Even under optimum conditions, this would have been the moment of truth—for there had been no way of testing how a nuclear ramjet would
really
work in the strange atmosphere of Jupiter.

Very gently something rocked
Kon-Tiki
. Falcon tried to ignore it.

Ignition had been planned at six miles higher, in an atmosphere of less than a quarter of the density and thirty degrees cooler. Too bad.

What was the shallowest dive he could get away with, for the air scoops to work? When the ram ignited, he’d be heading toward Jupiter with two and a half g’s to help him get there. Could he possibly pull out in time?

A large, heavy hand patted the balloon. The whole vessel bobbed up and down, like one of the yo-yos that had just become the craze on Earth.

Of course, Brenner
might
be perfectly right. Perhaps it was just trying to be friendly. Maybe he should try to talk to it over the radio. Which should it be: ‘Pretty pussy’? ‘Down, Fido’? Or ‘Take me to your leader’?

The tritium-deuterium ratio was correct. He was ready to light the candle, with a hundred-million-degree match.

The thin tip of the tentacle came slithering around the edge of the balloon some sixty yards away. It was about the size of an elephant’s trunk, and by the delicate way it was moving appeared to be almost as sensitive. There were little palps at its end, like questing mouths. He was sure that Dr Brenner would be fascinated.

This seemed about as good a time as any. He gave a swift scan of the entire control board, started the final four-second ignition count, broke the safety seal, and pressed the
JETTISON
switch.

There was a sharp explosion and an instant loss of weight.
Kon-Tiki
was falling freely, nose down. Overhead, the discarded balloon was racing upward, dragging the inquisitive tentacle with it. Falcon had no time to see if the gasbag actually hit the medusa, because at that moment the ramjet fired and he had other matters to think about.

A roaring column of hot hydrohelium was pouring out of the reactor nozzles, swiftly building up thrust—but
toward
Jupiter, not away from it. He could not pull out yet, for vector control was too sluggish. Unless he could gain complete control and achieve horizontal flight within the next five seconds, the vehicle would dive too deeply into the atmosphere and would be destroyed.

With agonising slowness—those five seconds seemed like fifty—he managed to flatten out, then pull the nose upward. He glanced back only once and caught a final glimpse of the medusa, many miles away.
Kon-Tiki
’s discarded gasbag had apparently escaped from its grasp, for he could see no sign of it.

Now he was master once more—no longer drifting helplessly on the winds of Jupiter, but riding his own column of atomic fire back to the stars. He was confident that the ramjet would steadily give him velocity and altitude until he had reached near-orbital speed at the fringes of the atmosphere. Then, with a brief burst of pure rocket power, he would regain the freedom of space.

Halfway to orbit, he looked south and saw the tremendous enigma of the Great Red Spot—that floating island twice the size of Earth—coming up over the horizon. He stared into its mysterious beauty until the computer warned him that conversion to rocket thrust was only sixty seconds ahead. He tore his gaze reluctantly away.

‘Some other time,’ he murmured.

‘What’s that?’ said Mission Control. ‘What did you say?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied.

8. Between Two Worlds

‘You’re a hero now, Howard,’ said Webster, ‘not just a celebrity. You’ve given them something to think about—injected some excitement into their lives. Not one in a million will actually travel to the Outer Giants, but the whole human race will go in imagination. And that’s what counts.’

‘I’m glad to have made your job a little easier.’

Webster was too old a friend to take offence at the note of irony. Yet it surprised him. And this was not the first change in Howard that he had noticed since the return from Jupiter.

The Administrator pointed to the famous sign on his desk, borrowed from an impresario of an earlier age:
ASTONISH ME
.

‘I’m not ashamed of my job. New knowledge, new resources—they’re all very well. But men also need novelty and excitement. Space travel has become routine; you’ve made it a great adventure once more. It will be a long, long time before we get Jupiter pigeonholed. And maybe longer still before we understand those medusae. I still think that one
knew
where your blind spot was. Anyway, have you decided on your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune—you name it.’

‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about Saturn, but I’m not really needed there. It’s only one gravity, not two and a half like Jupiter. So men can handle it.’

Men
, thought Webster. He said ‘men’.

He’s never done that before. And when did I last hear him use the word ‘we’? He’s changing, slipping away from us….

‘Well,’ he said aloud, rising from his chair to conceal his slight uneasiness, ‘let’s get the conference started. The cameras are all set up and everyone’s waiting. You’ll meet a lot of old friends.’

He stressed the last word, but Howard showed no response. The leathery mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult to read. Instead, he rolled back from the Administrator’s desk, unlocked his undercarriage so that it no longer formed a chair, and rose on his hydraulics to his full seven feet of height. It had been good psychology on the part of the surgeons to give him that extra twelve inches, to compensate somewhat for all that he had lost when the
Queen
had crashed.

Falcon waited until Webster had opened the door, then pivoted neatly on his balloon tyres and headed for it at a smooth and silent twenty miles an hour. The display of speed and precision was not flaunted arrogantly; rather, it had become quite unconscious.

Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement—and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter, the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.

He now knew why he had dreamed about that superchimp aboard the doomed
Queen Elizabeth
. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds; and so was he.

He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface. The life-support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all….

The human race was becoming more remote, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, Moon, Mars.

Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not men—and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a sombre pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal midway between two orders of creation.

He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new—between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.

Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.

Quarantine

First published in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, Spring 1977

Collected in
The Wind From the Sun

This story came about as a result of a suggestion from the late George Hay, editor and man-about-British-SF. George had the ingenious idea of putting out a complete science fiction short story
on a postcard
—together with a stamp-sized photo of the author. Fans would, he believed, buy these in hundreds to mail out to their friends.

Let me tell you—it is damned hard work writing a complete SF story in 180 words. I sent the result to George Hay, and that was the last I ever heard of his scheme.

Earth’s flaming debris still filled half the sky when the question filtered up to Central from the Curiosity Generator.

‘Why was it necessary? Even though they were organic, they
had
reached Third Order Intelligence.’

‘We had no choice: five earlier units became hopelessly infected, when they made contact.’

‘Infected? How?’

The microseconds dragged slowly by, while Central tracked down the few fading memories that had leaked past the Censor Gate, when the heavily buffered Reconnaissance Circuits had been ordered to self-destruct.