The Medusa Encounter (30 page)

 

“Why should you be? New knowledge, new resources—that’s all very well. Necessary even.” Falcon’s words were more than ironic; they seemed tinged with bitterness.

“People need novelty and excitement too,” Webster answered quietly. “Space travel seems routine to a lot of people, but what you’ve done has restored the great adventure. It will be a long, long time before we understand what happened on Jupiter.”

“The medusa knew my blind spot,” Falcon said.

 

“Whatever you say,” Webster replied, resolutely cheerful.

 

“How do you suppose it knew my blind spot?”

 

“Howard, I don’t have any idea.”

 

Falcon was silent and motionless for an interminable moment. “No matter,” he said at last. Webster’s relief was visible. “Have you thought about your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune . . . ?”

“I’ve thought about Saturn.” Falcon gave the phrase a ponderous weight that might have been intended to mock Webster’s sanctimony. “I’m not really needed there. It’s only one gravity, you know—not two and a half, like Jupiter. People can handle that.”

People
, thought Webster, he said “people.” 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, moving to the pressure window that looked out upon the cracked and frozen landscape of Jupiter’s biggest moon, “we have to get a media conference out of the way before we can do a thorough debriefing.” He eyed Falcon shyly. “No need to mention the events on
Garuda
; we’ve kept the lid on that.”

Falcon said nothing.

 

“Everybody’s waiting to congratulate you, Howard. You’ll see a lot of your old friends.”

 

Webster stressed that last word, but Falcon showed no response; the leather mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult to read.

He rolled away from Webster and unlocked his undercarriage, rising on his hydraulics to his full two and half meters. The psychologists had thought it a good idea to add an extra fifty centimeters as a sort of compensation for everything Falcon had lost when the
Queen
crashed, but Falcon had never acknowledged that he’d noticed.

Falcon waited until Webster had opened the door for him—useless gesture—then pivoted neatly on his balloon tires and headed forward at a smooth and silent thirty kilometers an hour. His display of speed and precision was not flaunted arrogantly; Falcon’s moves had become virtually automatic.

Outside a howling newspack waited, barely restrained by the net barriers, bristling with microphones and photogram cameras that they thrust toward his masklike face.

But Howard Falcon was unperturbed. He who had once been a man—and could still pass for one over a voice-only link—felt only a calm sense of achievement . . . and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. He’d slept soundly aboard the cutter on his return from Jupiter, and for the first time in years his nightmares seemed to have vanished.

He woke from sweet sleep to the realization of why he had dreamed about the superchimp aboard the doomed
Queen Elizabeth
. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds. So was he. As a chimp is to a human, Falcon was to some as-yet-to-be-perfected machine.

He had found his role at last. He alone could travel unprotected on the surface of the Moon, or Mercury, or a dozen other worlds. The life-support system inside the titanium-aluminide cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or underwater. Gravity fields even ten times that of Earth would be an inconvenience, nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.

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

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

The hidden, intricate sequence of directives which supposedly had been programmed into Falcon’s mind and which the mere incantation of the words “Prime Directive” had been intended to activate in him had failed to work as his designers intended—not simply because of mechanical failure, and certainly not because Falcon was less than human—but because he was still, in some essential, deep crevice of his mind, too human to do what no human would do, sacrifice himself for no good reason.

Falcon himself knew nothing of this. He did not know that his instincts for self-preservation—with a little help from electrical overload—had crushed the best hopes of a millenniums-old religious conspiracy. He knew only that he had been
elected
.

He would, after all, be an ambassador—between the old and the new, between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of ceramic and metal who must one day supersede them. He was sure that both species would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.

Epilogue
“Another?”

“Why yes, very good of you . . .” Professor J. Q. R. Forster positioned his glass under the neckof the Laphroaig bottle. The commander poured the darkliquid over chunk of ice. Behind them, an oak fire burned with intense heat in the fireplace of the Granite Lodge library. Outside the tall windows, the early winter sun was setting.

“The ignition sequence was keyed to mission-elapsed time,” the commander said, replacing the bottle on the silver tray. “If the count had continued, Troy’s rewrite of the program would have sent
Kon-Tiki
straight into Jupiter. Half an hour before that could happen, Falcon manually overrode the sequencer to escape from the medusa.”

“So the medusa actually saved his life!” Forster’s terrier brows leaped eagerly upon his forehead—he loved a good yarn.

 

“And Troy’s freedom. She would have been guilty of murder.”

 

Forster shrugged, faintly embarrassed. “In that unfortunate event, surely she could have pled temporary insanity.”

“Not something she likes to talk about.” The commander settled into his armchair, remembering the recent trip from Jupiter. He was not about to burden Forster with the details—details that would remain vivid in his own mind for years.

“You can’t save me from a murder charge that easily,”
Linda had rasped at him for the hundredth time, her eyes dull with weariness. “I killed Holly Singh. And Jack Noble. And the orange man. Maybe others. When I did it, I knew what I was doing.”

One of the swiftest ships in the solar system was taking three weeks to get them back to Earth. It gave her the time she needed to recover her physical health. It gave all of them more time than they needed for debate and discussion.

But Linda was an infinite puzzle to the commander. “Does your conscience require that much of you?” he had asked her.

“You are asking me if I can find
any
reason to justify the murders I committed. I tell you no, none— even though those people tried to murder
me
. And may have murdered my parents, whatever you or I want to believe.”

“The ones you named were murderers, all right. And they meant to enslave humanity. Others like them survive, with goals that haven’t changed.”

 

“That doesn’t justify killing them in cold blood.” Her blood had not been cold, though. It had teemed.

“Well, you’re determined.” He sighed expressively. “Whether you knew what you were doing is not something you’re going to be left to decide for yourself, I’m afraid. Psychiatric observation is all your uncorroborated confession is likely to get you.”

“Uncorroborated?”

He pretended not to hear her. “And after some indeterminate sentence in a mental hospital—you know what that’s like, I think, the sort of things they can do these days with programmed nanochips and so on —after that, if there’s any evidence to support your statement, maybe they’ll lock you in a penitentiary for life. But if that’s what you want. . . .”
“You know I’m telling the truth.”

“Maybe. No one has reported any of those people dead, or even missing.”

 

“But has anyone
seen
them? They were public figures, some of them. Lord Kingman. Holly Singh.”

“No, but Jack Noble had already taken a powder, as they used to say. ’Course, he had cause.” He shrugged. “People can disappear for years at a time for no good reason, maybe because they just feel like it.
You
vanished without warning, Linda. More than once.”

She winced to hear her name from his lips.

“But let’s say I believe they are dead and that you killed them—leaving out Kingman, of course. Do you want my cooperation? Want me to help you take on all the responsibility, let you pay for your mortal sins?”

“What do
you
want?” She swallowed, anticipating the barb in the bait.

“Help us.” Those smooth-talking Jesuit confessors, the childless uncles and cousins of his French Canadian forebears, would have been proud of him—weren’t they just as at home with the sophistries of the cloister as with the lies they told the Indians they’d come to convert?—but the commander was ashamed of himself. “We’ve got a problem. Bigger than your little personal problem. Maybe even bigger than
Homo sapiens
.”

“Just because you try to make it sound important doesn’t let me off the hook.”

“Stay on your damned hook. You hit some of the Free Spirit, but it wasn’t a clean hit. Who the hell taught you to try to hit
anything
with a handgun at five hundred meters?”—he was angry, filled with professional scorn—“Yeah, we did wreck their plans on Jupiter, without
your
help, but we haven’t cleaned them out. Laird, or Lequeu, or whatever he calls himself, is still loose.”

“He can’t do anything. The creatures in the clouds have spoken.”

 

The commander’s eye brightened. “Do you claim to interpret this revelation for us? For
me
, who knows the Knowledge almost as well as you?”

 

“You don’t know what they said.” Sparta grimaced. “Don’t try to make a fool of me.”

 

“The medusas had something to say, though.”

 

“Something, yes.” “What was that? Is the Pancreator coming for us now?”

 

“I don’t know,” she said, huskily, dropping her glance. “I no longer have organs to hear.”

“If they are coming for us, it could be the oldest problem of all, Linda. Down here in the slaughterhouse, could be sheep against goats.” His smile was bleak. “Always thought goats were a hell of a lot more charming than sheep. Maybe that puts me on the wrong side.”

“You make me small,” she whispered. “I am not small.”

He got angry then. “You make yourself small—if you will not fight for the right of free human beings to hear this so-called revelation! You can’t keep it to yourself, any more than Laird and his phony prophets could keep it to themselves.”

She ducked her head—a gesture of shame she had recently acquired—before she looked up at him, still defiant. In the end, his best Jesuitical arguments had failed to move her.

 

But he didn’t need to tell that to Forster.

 

The commander found himself staring into the searing embers of the crumbling oakwood fire. He looked up at the eager little professor. “End of my story, I’m afraid.”

“Ahh—and now for mine,” said Forster, leaning forward in the overstuffed armchair, making the leather squeak. A lookof pure glee stretched his disturbingly youthful face. “I’ve analyzed the material you provided.”

“So you said.”

 

The professor couldn’t resist a moment of pure pedagogy. “It is worth noting that the Medusa—the Gorgon’s head—is an ancient symbol of stewardship. The shield and guardian of wisdom.”

 

“Yeah, I thinkI heard that somewhere before.”

“The recordings of the transmissions of the ring of medusas were easily deciphered—relatively easily, after a bit of play with SETI analysis programs—and according to the linguistic system I had previously outlined for you and Mr. Redfield, I determined that the transmissions were definitely signals, and most definitely in the language of Culture X.”

“Professor, if you would just . . .” “And they signify”—Forster drew out his words, almost crooning them—
“They have arrived.”

 

“They have
arrived?
”

 

“Yes. That’s the message: ‘They have arrived.’ ”

 

Was Forster playing a joke? “I don’t believe it,” the commander said. “Those things were beaming straight at
Kon-Tiki
’s mission control. Why would they . . . ?”

“Why tell those who had just arrived that they had arrived?” Forster chuckled. “Good question. Especially since the medusas hardly seem to be intelligent creatures in any sense that we understand the word—perhaps no more intelligent than trained parrots. Likely they were responding to some stimulus planted eons ago. Even coded in whatever serves them for genes.”

“But why aim at Mission Control?”

 

“I think it
un
likely their message was intended for Mission Control. I believe they were aiming elsewhere.”

 

“Forster . . .”

 

“Thanks to your good offices, Commander, my survey of the moon Amalthea has already been given a firm launch date.” Forster peered into his newly empty glass.

“Let me freshen that,” said the commander, leaning forward. He took the heavy silver tongs and lifted ice cubes from the bucket and dropped them ringing into Forster’s glass. He reached for the whiskey bottle. “Amalthea, you say . . .”

The sun had set beyond the western cliffs, sucking the color into the matte gray forested hills across the river. Lights came on, dim yellow bulbs hidden in crevices of the low stone wall beside the river cliffs. Blake and Sparta walked beside the wall, their boots rustling the dead leaves. Cold air moved heavily against their backs, the breath of winter sliding down the valley from the high ground. Both were hunched against the cold, hands in pockets, insulated from each other.

Blake looked up at the lodge. A light had just come on behind the stained glass window of the pantry. The staff was preparing for supper. “That’s the one I smashed through, that night.”