A Meeting With Medusa (9 page)
The first eruption of dawn took him completely by surprise. Light exploded ahead of him, leaping from peak to peak until the whole arc of the horizon was limned with flame. He was hurtling out of the lunar night, directly into the face of the Sun. At least he would not die in darkness, but the greatest danger was yet to come. For now he was almost back where he had started, nearing the lowest point of his orbit. He glanced at the suit chronometer, and saw that five full hours had now passed. Within minutes, he would hit the Moon—or skim it and pass safely out into space.
As far as he could judge, he was less than twenty miles above the surface, and he was still descending, though very slowly now. Beneath him, the long shadows of the lunar dawn were daggers of darkness, stabbing toward the night land. The steeply slanting sunlight exaggerated every rise in the ground, making even the smallest hills appear to be mountains. And now, unmistakably, the land ahead was rising, wrinkling into the foothills of the Soviet Range. More than a hundred miles away, but approaching at a mile a second, a wave of rock was climbing from the face of the Moon. There was nothing he could do to avoid it; his path was fixed and unalterable. All that could be done had already been done, two and a half hours ago.
It was not enough. He was not going to rise above these mountains; they were rising above him.
Now he regretted his failure to make that second call to the woman who was still waiting, a quarter of a million miles away. Yet perhaps it was just as well, for there had been nothing more to say.
Other voices were calling in the space around him, as he came once more within range of Launch Control. They waxed and waned as he flashed through the radio shadow of the mountains; they were talking about him, but the fact scarcely registered on him. He listened with an impersonal interest, as if to messages from some remote point of space or time, of no concern to him. Once he heard Van Kessel’s voice say, quite distinctly: ‘Tell
Callisto
’s skipper we’ll give him an intercept orbit as soon as we know that Leyland’s past perigee. Rendezvous time should be one hour five minutes from now.’ I hate to disappoint you, thought Cliff, but that’s one appointment I’ll never keep.
Now the wall of rock was only fifty miles away, and each time he spun helplessly in space it came ten miles closer. There was no room for optimism now, as he sped more swiftly than a rifle bullet toward that implacable barrier. This was the end, and suddenly it became of great importance to know whether he would meet it face first, with open eyes, or with his back turned, like a coward.
No memories of his past life flashed through Cliff’s mind as he counted the seconds that remained. The swiftly unrolling moonscape rotated beneath him, every detail sharp and clear in the harsh light of dawn. Now he was turned away from the onrushing mountains, looking back on the path he had travelled, the path that should have led to Earth. No more than three of his ten-second days were left to him.
And then the moonscape exploded into silent flame. A light as fierce as that of the sun banished the long shadows, struck fire from the peaks and craters spread below. It lasted for only a fraction of a second, and had faded completely before he had turned toward its source.
Directly ahead of him, only twenty miles away, a vast cloud of dust was expanding toward the stars. It was as if a volcano had erupted in the Soviet Range—but that, of course, was impossible. Equally absurd was Cliff’s second thought—that by some fantastic feat of organisation and logistics the Farside Engineering Division had blasted away the obstacle in his path.
For it was gone. A huge, crescent shaped bite had been taken out of the approaching skyline; rocks and debris were still rising from a crater that had not existed five seconds ago. Only the energy of an atomic bomb, exploded at precisely the right moment in his path, could have wrought such a miracle. And Cliff did not believe in miracles.
He had made another complete revolution, and was almost upon the mountains, when he remembered that, all this while, there had been a cosmic bulldozer moving invisibly ahead of him. The kinetic energy of the abandoned capsule—a thousand tons, travelling at over a mile a second—was quite sufficient to have blasted the gap through which he was now racing. The impact of the man-made meteor must have jolted the whole of Farside.
His luck held to the end. There was brief pitter-patter of dust particles against his suit, and he caught a blurred glimpse of glowing rocks and swiftly dispersing smoke clouds flashing beneath him. (How strange to see a cloud upon the Moon!) Then he was through the mountains, with nothing ahead but blessed empty sky.
Somewhere up there, an hour in the future along his second orbit,
Callisto
would be moving to meet him. But there was no hurry now; he had escaped from the maelstrom. For better or for worse, he had been granted the gift of life.
There was the launching track, a few miles to the right of his path; it looked like a hairline scribed across the face of the Moon. In a few moments he would be within radio range. Now, with thankfulness and joy, he could make that second call to Earth, to the woman who was still waiting in the African night.
First published in
Dude
, May 1962
Collected in
Tales of Ten Worlds
A timely reminder that we should never underestimate our animal companions’ capabilities.
Granny thought it a perfectly horrible idea; but then, she could remember the days when there were
human
servants.
‘If you imagine,’ she snorted, ‘that I’ll share the house with a monkey, you’re very much mistaken.’
‘Don’t be so old-fashioned,’ I answered. ‘Anyway, Dorcas isn’t a monkey.’
‘Then what is she—it?’
I flipped through the pages of the Biological Engineering Corporation’s guide. ‘Listen to this, Gran,’ I said. ‘“The Superchimp (Registered Trademark)
Pan Sapiens
is an intelligent anthropoid, derived by selective breeding and genetic modification from basic chimpanzee stock—”’
‘Just what I said! A monkey!’
‘“—and with a large-enough vocabulary to understand simple orders. It can be trained to perform all types of domestic work or routine manual labour and is docile, affectionate, housebroken, and particularly good with children—”’
‘Children! Would you trust Johnnie and Susan with a—a
gorilla
?’
I put the handbook down with a sigh.
‘You’ve got a point there. Dorcas
is
expensive, and if I find the little monsters knocking her about—’
At this moment, fortunately, the door buzzer sounded. ‘Sign, please,’ said the delivery man. I signed, and Dorcas entered our lives.
‘Hello, Dorcas,’ I said. ‘I hope you’ll be happy here.’
Her big, mournful eyes peered out at me from beneath their heavy ridges. I’d met much uglier humans, though she was rather an odd shape, being only about four feet tall and very nearly as wide. In her neat, plain uniform she looked just like a maid from one of those early twentieth-century movies; her feet, however, were bare and covered an astonishing amount of floor space.
‘Morning, Ma’am,’ she answered, in slurred but perfectly intelligible accents.
‘She can speak!’ squawked Granny.
‘Of course,’ I answered. ‘She can pronounce over fifty words, and can understand two hundred. She’ll learn more as she grows used to us, but for the moment we must stick to the vocabulary on pages forty-two and forty-three of the handbook.’ I passed the instruction manual over to Granny; for once, she couldn’t find even a single word to express
her
feelings.
Dorcas settled down very quickly. Her basic training—Class A Domestic, plus Nursery Duties—had been excellent, and by the end of the first month there were very few jobs around the house that she couldn’t do, from laying the table to changing the children’s clothes. At first she had an annoying habit of picking up things with her feet; it seemed as natural to her as using her hands, and it took a long time to break her of it. One of Granny’s cigarette butts finally did the trick.
She was good-natured, conscientious, and didn’t answer back. Of course, she was not terribly bright, and some jobs had to be explained to her at great length before she got the point. It took several weeks before I discovered her limitations and allowed for them; at first it was quite hard to remember that she was not exactly human, and that it was no good engaging her in the sort of conversations we women occupy ourselves with when we get together. Or not many of them; she did have an interest in clothes, and was fascinated by colours. If I’d let her dress the way she wanted, she’d have looked like a refugee from Mardi gras.
The children, I was relieved to find, adored her. I know what people say about Johnnie and Sue, and admit that it contains some truth. It’s so hard to bring up children when their father’s away most of the time, and to make matters worse, Granny spoils them when I’m not looking. So indeed does Eric, whenever his ship’s on Earth, and I’m left to cope with the resulting tantrums. Never marry a spaceman if you can possibly avoid it; the pay may be good, but the glamour soon wears off.
By the time Eric got back from the Venus run, with three weeks’ accumulated leave, our new maid had settled down as one of the family. Eric took her in his stride; after all, he’d met much odder creatures on the planets. He grumbled about the expense, of course, but I pointed out that now that so much of the housework was taken off my hands, we’d be able to spend more time together and do some of the visiting that had proved impossible in the past. I looked forward to having a little social life again, now that Dorcas could take care of the children.
For there was plenty of social life at Port Goddard, even though we were stuck in the middle of the Pacific. (Ever since what happened to Miami, of course, all major launching sites have been a long, long way from civilisation.) There was a constant flow of distinguished visitors and travellers from all parts of the Earth—not to mention remoter points.
Every community has its arbiter of fashion and culture, its
grande dame
who is resented yet copied by all her unsuccessful rivals. At Port Goddard it was Christine Swanson; her husband was Commodore of the Space Service, and she never let us forget it. Whenever a liner touched down, she would invite all the officers on Base to a reception at her stylishly antique nineteenth-century mansion. It was advisable to go, unless you had a very good excuse, even though that meant looking at Christine’s paintings. She fancied herself as an artist, and the walls were hung with multicoloured daubs. Thinking of polite remarks to make about them was one of the major hazards of Christine’s parties; another was her metre-long cigarette holder.
There was a new batch of paintings since Eric had been away: Christine had entered her ‘square’ period. ‘You see, my dears,’ she explained to us, ‘the old-fashioned oblong pictures are terribly dated—they just don’t go with the Space Age. There’s no such thing as up or down, horizontal or vertical out
there
, so no really modern picture should have one side longer than another. And ideally, it should look exactly the same whichever way you hang it—I’m working on that right now.’
‘That seems very logical,’ said Eric tactfully. (After all, the Commodore was his boss.) But when our hostess was out of earshot, he added, ‘I don’t know if Christine’s pictures are hung the right way up, but I’m sure they’re hung the wrong side to the wall.’
I agreed; before I got married I spent several years at the art school and considered I knew something about the subject. Given as much cheek as Christine, I could have made quite a hit with my own canvases, which were now gathering dust in the garage.
‘You know, Eric,’ I said a little cattily, ‘I could teach Dorcas to paint better than this.’
He laughed and answered, ‘It might be fun to try it some day, if Christine gets out of hand.’ Then I forgot all about the matter—until a month later, when Eric was back in space.
The exact cause of the fight isn’t important; it arose over a community development scheme on which Christine and I took opposing viewpoints. She won, as usual, and I left the meeting breathing fire and brimstone. When I got home, the first thing I saw was Dorcas, looking at the coloured pictures in one of the weeklies—and I remembered Eric’s words.