The Medusa Encounter (5 page)

“No,” Webster concurred, a bit sadly. “That was such a perfect day, Howard. Not a cloud in the sky.”

 

“The monsoon wasn’t due for a month.”

 

“Time sort of stopped.”

 

“For me, too, even though supposedly I was used to it. I got irritated when the hourly radio reports broke into my daydreams.”

“I tell you, I still dream of that . . .” He searched for the word. “. . . infinite, ancient landscape, that patchwork—villages, fields, temples, lakes, irrigation canals—that earth drenched in history, stretching to the horizon, stretching beyond. . . .” Webster moved away from the globe, breaking the hypnotic spell. “Well, Howard, you certainly converted me to lighter-than-air flight. And I also got a sense of the enormous size of India. One loses sight of that, thinking in terms of low-orbit satellites that go around the Earth in ninety minutes.”

Falcon’s face stretched into its minimal smile. “Yet India is to Earth . . .”

“As Earth is to Jupiter, yes, yes.” Webster returned to his desk and was silent a moment, fiddling with the flatscreen that displayed Falcon’s estimates of the Jupiter mission parameters. Then he looked up at Falcon. “Granted your argument—and supposing funds and cooperation are available—there’s another question you have to answer.”

“Which is?”

 

“Why should you do better than the—what it is?—three hundred and twenty-six probes that have already made the trip?”

“Because I’m better qualified,” Falcon said gruffly. “Better qualified as an observer and as a pilot.
Especially
as a pilot. I’ve got more experience with lighter-than-atmosphere flight than anyone in the solar system.”

“You could serve as a controller, sit safely on Ganymede.”

 

“That’s just the point!”
Fire blazed in Falcon’s unblinking eyes. “Don’t you remember what killed the
Queen?
”

 

Webster knew perfectly well. He merely answered, “Go on.”

“
Time lag—time lag!
That poor sap controlling the camera platform thought he was on a direct beam. But somehow he’d gotten his control circuit switched through a satellite relay. Maybe it wasn’t his fault, Web, but he should have known, he should have confirmed and reconfirmed. Switched through a comsat! That’s a half-second time lag for the round trip. Even then it wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been flying in calm air, but we were over the Canyon, with all that turbulence. When the platform tipped, the guy corrected instantly—but by the time the platform’s onboard instrumentation got the message, the thing had already tipped the other way. Ever tried to drive a car over a bumpy road with a half-second delay in the steering?”

“Unlike you, Howard, I don’t drive at all, much less over bumpy roads. But I take your meaning.”

“Do you? Ganymede is a million kilometers from Jupiter—a round-trip signal delay of
six
seconds. A remote controller won’t do, Web. You need someone on the spot, to handle emergencies
as
they emerge —in real time.” Falcon adjusted himself stiffly. “Let me show you something . . . mind if I use this?” “Go ahead.”

Falcon picked up a postcard lying on Webster’s desk; postcards were almost obsolete on Earth, but Webster seemed to have a fondness for things obsolete. This one showed a 3-D view of a Martian landscape; its verso was decorated with exotic and very expensive Martian stamps.

Falcon held the card so that it dangled vertically. “This is an old trick, but it helps to make my point. Put your thumb and finger on either side, like you’re about to pinch it, but not quite touching.”

 

Webster reached across his desk and put out his hand, almost but not quite gripping the card.

 

“That’s right,” said Falcon. “And now . . .” Falcon waited a few seconds, then said, “Catch it.”

 

A second later, without warning, he let go of the card. Webster’s thumb and finger closed on empty air.

 

Falcon leaned over and retrieved the fallen card. “I’ll do it once again,” he said, “just to show there’s no deception. Okay?”

 

He held out the card. Webster positioned his fingers, almost brushing the card’s surface.

 

Once again the falling card slipped through Webster’s fingers.

 

“Now you try it on me.”

 

Webster came out from behind his desk and stood in front of Falcon. He held the card a moment, then dropped it without warning.

 

It had scarcely moved before Falcon caught it. So swift was his reaction it almost seemed there was an audible “click.”

“When they put me together again,” Falcon remarked in an expressionless voice, “the surgeons made some improvements. This is one of them”—Falcon placed the card on Webster’s desk—“and there are others. I want to make the most of them. Jupiter is the place where I can do it.”

Webster stared for long seconds at the postcard, which portrayed the improbable reds and purples of the Trivium Charontis Escarpment. Then he said quietly, “I understand. How long do you think it will take?”

“With the Space Board’s help and the cooperation of the Indo-Asians, plus all the private foundation money we can drag in—two years. Maybe less.”

 

“That’s very, very fast.”

 

“I’ve done lots of the preliminary work. In detail.” Falcon’s gaze flicked to the flatscreen display.

 

“All right, Howard, I’m with you. I hope you get your luck; you’ve earned it. But there’s one thing I won’t do.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“Next time you go ballooning, don’t except
me
as a passenger.”

 

The commander touched the button; the hologram collapsed into a dark point and vanished.

 

“I don’t know about Ellen, but I’m hungry,” Blake said. “I don’t want to talk about this on an empty stomach.”

 

“You’re right. Past time for lunch.”
III
“I don’t get it.”

“The Free Spirit
made
Falcon,” Sparta said. “Remade him, I should say. For the same reason they remade me. Close your mouth, dear—” Blake’s mouth had opened in disbelief—“your arugula is showing.”

The commander’s stone face almost softened into a grin, but with effort, by shoveling a forkful of crumpled lettuce into his mouth, he kept his dignity.

 

“You were the first to tell me what they were after, remember?” she said to Blake. “The Emperor of the Last Days.”

Sparta picked at her excellent food, of which there was as usual four or five times too much. Today, the printed menu cards announced, it was a choice of salads, to be followed by a tomato bisque
en croute
, then a selection of individual quiches and finger-sized
croque-monsieurs
, and finally orange sorbet with vanilla cookies—all accompanied by several wines which Blake and Sparta and the commander would as usual ignore.

The people who served this opulent fare (and lunch was nothing compared to dinner) were young and scrubbed and cheerful, uniformed in white, enthusiastically talkative when company was wanted but always remarkably discreet. Today they were staying almost invisible.

Sparta and Blake had been living as the commander’s guests in this strange “safe house,” as he called it, for a week now, often dining alone together beneath the heraldic banners that hung from the high walls of the gothic main hall. On sunny days like this one, dramatic shafts of golden light poured through the stained glass clerestories, windows that depicted dragons and loosely draped maidens and knights in armor. The man who’d built the mansion was evidently a fan of Sir Walter Scott’s, or had had dreams of Camelot.

“We think they had Falcon targeted before the wreck,” said the commander, setting down his plate.

“
Targeted
him?” Blake had gotten his greens down without choking, but he was still incredulous—not least because this Space Board officer, this old guy whom at first he’d taken for nothing more than Ellen’s fellow employee, was making sounds like he knew as much about the Free Spirit as Blake himself knew, information that Blake had risked his life to get.

“The best balloon pilot in the world,” Sparta said, as if it were self-evident. “Someone realized—even before Falcon did—that to live in the clouds of Jupiter, you need a balloon.”

 

“What’s Jupiter got to do with it?” Blake demanded.

 

“I don’t know,” said Sparta. “But it’s Jupiter that I keep going to in my dreams. . . .”

 

“Ellen.” The commander tried to warn her off the subject.

 

“Falling into the clouds. The wings overhead. The voices of the deep.”

 

Blake eyed the commander. “Her dreams?”

“We’re working from the evidence,” the commander said. “Consider that even for the Board of Space Control it’s almost impossible to mount an operation of this technical and logistical and political complexity in two years. We think Webster must have known Falcon wanted to go to Jupiter before Falcon told him.”

“Exactly, Blake. Before he knew it himself,” Sparta said. She turned to the commander. “They sabotaged the
Queen
.”

 

His voice got gruff. “You were always quick to reach conclusions . . .”

 

“Nobody’s ever put a remote link through a satellite by accident, before or since.” “That’s crazy,” said Blake. “How did they know Falcon would survive the crash?”

 

“They have a habit of taking long chances.”

 

The commander said, “The camera platform started having trouble as soon as he was topside. Not until then.”

 

She nodded. “It should have been the safest place, if you were calculating the odds. Falcon himself thought so.”

 

“Then they really screwed up,” Blake protested. “He was back down at the controls before the
Queen
hit. He almost saved the ship.”

 

“The crash worked for them anyway,” Sparta said. “Maybe better than they hoped.”

 

“Unlike you,” the commander said, “with him there wasn’t much of a thinking human being left to get in their way later.”

Blake, agitated, thrust back his chair and stood up. “All right, I asked this before.
You
—sitting there— you personally represent the high and mighty Space Board Investigations Branch? What do you want from Ellen? What can she do that the Board hasn’t already done?”

Before he answered Blake, the commander signaled the stewards to clear the table and bring the next course. “There are some things that the Space Board doesn’t do well,” he said. “Investigating itself is one of them.”

“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

 

“Don’t assume anything,” the commander said. “And don’t miss the tomato bisque.”

He hesitated, then abruptly sat down. “If you want my cooperation,
sir
”—the resort to sarcasm was childish, a measure of Blake’s complete frustration with the course of events—“I need to know that whatever you’re planning, you’re not going to expose her to any more danger than she’s in already.”

“Before we men make any deals for her, Blake, perhaps Ellen will tell us her own thinking.”

 

“I’m certainly curious. I’d like to find out more about Howard Falcon and the
Kon-Tiki
mission,” she said.

 

“Then you’re still on the team.” “No, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think this is a team sport.”

Blake spent the afternoon trying to talk her out of her curiosity about Falcon, which to him seemed founded upon the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Oh, he admitted that he’d been a great conspiracy theorist in his day, but for his own part, he had come to the conclusion that the Free Spirit—the
prophetae
, the Athanasians, whatever you wanted to call them—while admittedly a bunch of dangerous nuts, had made so many mistakes they were on the verge of putting themselves out of business. Now that the Board of Space Control obviously knew all about them, why should Ellen continue to risk her life?

She humored him, agreed with him, did everything except promise to do what he asked—resign from the Board of Space Control. On the other hand, she didn’t say she wouldn’t. Her love and affection for him seemed steady. But for all his passion and argument, some cold part in the center of her was untouchable to his reasoning.

That night they stopped outside her bedroom door and Blake moved impetuously to kiss her. She responded, pressing her taut dancer’s body to his hard frame, but broke off when he tried to go farther and push past her into the room.

“I’ve told you, there are cameras and microphones in there,” she said. “In your room, too.”

 

“I almost don’t care.”

 

“I do.” She said, “Until tomorrow, darling,” then closed the door firmly and locked it behind her.

In the cold dark room she stripped and went naked to bed. In this century and culture, modesty hardly noticed nakedness—and certainly her body had often been rendered transparent, inside and out, to anyone who might be peering at her now. It was not because of Blake that she cared about the watchers; it was because of what they watched while she slept.

She did not want him to share her visions—her nightmares—as she knew
they
did.

 

With the aid of a private mantra, what some might call a prayer, she forced herself to fall asleep.

Blake shoved the narrow casement open just enough to let night air enter. He hung his clothes carefully in the walk-in closet; he was a bit of a dandy, some said, and it was true that he liked to look his best, whatever part he was playing. And with the cameras watching, he liked to keep every-thing neat.

He hopped naked into the bed and stretched out under the cool sheets. He lay there bursting with hope and fear and love—
she loves me!
—and stiff with renewed, frustrated lust.
A long time ago they had been children together in the same school, a special school for ordinary kids who were being taught to be something more than ordinary. The SPARTA project, it was called— SPARTA stood for Specified Aptitude Resource Training and Assessment—and it had been created by Linda’s parents . . . Ellen’s parents, that is . . . to demonstrate that every human is possessed of multiple intelligences, and that each of these intelligences may be developed to a high degree by stimulation and guidance. SPARTA vigorously contested the prejudice that intelligence was one thing, some mysterious ectoplasm called “I. Q.,” or that I. Q. was fixed, immutable, or in any meaningful sense real.