The Medusa Encounter (26 page)

Mission Control stayed silent. He knew that the information banks up on Ganymede were being searched; people and machines were turning their minds to the problem. Meanwhile a signal had gone back to Earth, but just getting there and getting a “hello” back would take an hour.

What as this rising unease, this dissatisfaction? Trying to press into his mind like the gathering of another titanic radio blast—it was as if Falcon knew something he did not want to admit to himself that he knew.

When Mission Control spoke again, it was with Olaf Brenner’s tired voice. “Hello,
Kon-Tiki
, we’ve solved the problem—in a manner of speaking—but we can still hardly believe it.” The exobiologist sounded relieved and subdued at once. One might think the man was in the midst of some great intellectual crisis. “What you are seeing is bioluminescence. Perhaps similar to that produced by microorganisms in the tropical seas of Earth—certainly similar in manifestation—here in the atmosphere, not the ocean, but the principle seems to be the same.”

“That pattern was too regular, too artificial,” Falcon mildly protested. “Hundreds of kilometers across.”

“It was even larger than you imagine. You observed only a small part of it. The whole pattern was almost five thousand kilometers wide and looked like a revolving wheel. You merely saw the spokes, sweeping past you at about one kilometer per second.”

“A
second!
” Falcon could not help interjecting. “Nothing living could move that fast!”

 

“Of course not. Let me explain. What you saw was triggered by the shock wave from Source Beta, moving at the speed of sound.”

 

“What’s that have to do with the pattern?”

“That’s the surprising part. It’s a very rare phenomenon, but identical wheels of light—a thousand times smaller—have been observed in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Listen to this: British India Company’s
Patna
, Persian Gulf, May 1880, 11:30 P.M.: ‘An enormous luminous wheel, whirling ’round, the spokes of which appeared to brush the ship along. The spokes were two hundred to three hundred yards long. . . . Each wheel contained about sixteen spokes. . . .’ And here’s one from the Gulf of Oman, dated May 23, 1906: ‘The intensely bright luminescence approached us rapidly, shooting sharply defined light rays to the west in rapid succession, like the beam from the searchlight of a warship. . . . To the left of us, a gigantic fiery wheel formed itself, with spokes that reached as far as one could see. The whole wheel whirled around for two or three minutes. . . .’ ” Brenner broke off. “Well, they go on like that. Ganymede indexes some five hundred cases. Computer would have printed out the lot if we hadn’t called a halt.”

“All right then, I’m convinced—but still baffled.”

“Can’t blame you for that. The full explanation wasn’t worked out until late in the 20th century. Seems these luminous wheels result from submarine earthquakes, and always occur in shallow waters where the shock waves are reflected and form standing wave patterns, sometimes bars, sometimes rotating wheels —the ‘Wheels of Poseidon,’ they’ve been called. The theory was finally proved by making underwater explosions and photographing the results from a satellite.”

“No wonder sailors used to be so superstitious,” Falcon remarked. He saw the pertinence of the terrestrial examples: when Source Beta blew its top, it must have sent shock waves in all directions— through the compressed gas of the lower atmosphere, and down through the solid body of Jupiter’s core. Meeting and recrossing, these waves canceled here, reinforced there. The whole planet must have rung like a bell.
Yet the explanation did not destroy his sense of wonder and awe; he would never be able to forget those flickering bands of light, racing through the unattainable depths of the Jovian atmosphere. This was a world where
anything
could happen, and no one could guess what the future would bring. And he still had a whole day to go.

Falcon was not merely on a strange planet. He was caught in some magical realm between myth and reality.

Blake, meanwhile, was squeezed between two clusters of pipe in a space that had never been designed for human occupancy, the sort of space that’s left over after the welders have come in and done their job, and the pipefitters have come in and done theirs, and the electricians have come in and done theirs— none of them really expecting to have to come back, but leaving this technically negotiable tiny squeezehole in case some poor sap actually had to get in there with a wrench or set of wire-cutters to fix something broken.

What Blake was doing in here was the sort of thing that got people killed. He was hunting a wounded animal.

Linda, or Ellen, or whatever secret name she called herself, was much smarter and quicker than he, and he knew it. He’d seen enough of her uncanny “luck” to guess at what she had in her brain and nerves but never talked about. Probably she could see in the dark and smell him coming, just like a wounded mountain lion.

Nevertheless she must be stopped. She was too dangerous to allow to go free and way too dangerous to underestimate. If she said she had ensured that Howard Falcon’s mission would fail, she had reason. Yet he couldn’t simply hand her over to the commander, tell him that at last she was back—and wash his hands of the results. Too many things were happening too fast. He had to handle this on his own.

A couple of factors were on his side. With his perverse addiction to sabotage, Blake was a more experienced sneak even than she. With any luck, she wouldn’t be expecting him, for she’d gone out of her way to warn him off, when she must have known he didn’t suspect she was within three planets of here.

And she was sick. But whether her haunted eyes and wasted body meant she was any less formidable, he didn’t know.

He moved slowly through the almost impassable passage until he was next to the AP service bay. He’d already searched the more accessible of the places on his list where she might hide. They’d proved a little too accessible for her to risk.

Through a mere crevice between electrical bus bridges he got a glimpse into the AP service area, dimly illuminated by a couple of glowing green diodes. Nothing was moving in there, nothing visible. Blake listened as hard as he could, but he could hear only the whine and hum and creak of the ship above his own breath and heartbeat. Quiet as they were, they sounded like hurricane wind and surf in his ears.

He inched himself forward, until he was hanging half into the space where he expected to find her.

The madwoman’s ill-timed screech was his only warning. She flew out of the deep shadows into the sickly green light, talons outstretched, screaming like a harpy. She could have torn his throat out—but because of her scream he had a fractional moment in which to register her fiery eyes, her gleaming fangs, as he convulsed, twisted—

—and seized her wrist. Her PIN spines, extended beneath her nails, sliced open his arm like razors, but he didn’t notice. His calves were still wedged fast in the narrow passage; they gave him the leverage he needed, and . . .

With a single jerk of its neck a leopard seal peels the skin off its prey in a spray of blood . . .

The effect on Sparta was not so grisly. Whipped upside down by Blake, she did a rag doll’s somersault and slammed butt first into the bulkhead, legs splayed. Her foul breath came out in an explosive grunt and she feebly waved her free arm, but Blake’s left fist slammed into the point of her chin. Her head snapped back and her eyes rolled up in her head.

His own blood was floating in the little room, little black bubbles in the green light, more of them all the time. He folded his arms around her wasted, filthy body and burst into tears. Sobbing bitterly, he groped with his good hand for the dogged hatch that opened into the maintenance corridor.

He’d been hoping he wouldn’t have to turn her in. He’d wanted to get the truth out of her and, if he could think of any way to do it, help her get free.

 

Too late. He was losing blood fast; he needed to get to the clinic. And she was dying in his arms.
XXIV

When true dawn finally arrived, it brought a sudden change of weather.
Kon-Tiki
was moving through a blizzard; waxen snowflakes were falling so thickly that visibility was reduced to zero. Falcon worried about the weight that might accumulate on the balloon’s envelope. Then he noticed that any flakes settling outside the window quickly disappeared;
Kon-Tiki’s
continual outpouring of heat was evaporating them as swiftly as they arrived.

If he had been ballooning on Earth, he would also have had to worry about the possibility of hitting something solid. No danger of that here. Mountains on Jupiter, in the unlikely event that there were any, would still be hundreds of kilometers below him. As for the floating islands of foam, hitting them would probably be like plowing into slightly hardened soap bubbles.

Nevertheless he took a cautious peek with the horizontal radar. What he saw on the screen surprised him. Scattered across a huge sector of the sky ahead were dozens of large and brilliant echoes, completely isolated from one another, apparently hanging unsupported in space. Falcon remembered the phrase early aviators had used to described one of the hazards of their profession, “clouds stuffed with rocks,” a good description of what seemed to lie in the path of
Kon-Tiki
. The radar screen made for a disconcerting sight, although Falcon reminded himself that nothing really solid could hover in this atmosphere.

Falcon’s conscious mind tried to pigeon-hole the apparition—some strange meteorological phenomenon, then, and still at least 200 kilometers off—but an inchoate emotion welled in his breast. “Mission Control, what am I looking at?” His own tight voice surprised him.

“No help, Howard. All we have to go on is your radar signal.”

 

At least they could see the weather, and Buranaphorn conveyed the welcome news that he would be clear of the blizzard in half an hour.

Yet there was no warning of the violent cross wind that abruptly grabbed
Kon-Tiki
and swept it almost at right angles to his course. Suddenly the envelope was dragging the capsule through the air like a sea anchor, almost horizontally. Falcon needed all his skill and his rattlesnake-quick reflexes to prevent his ungainly vehicle from tangling itself in the guys, even capsizing.

Within minutes he was racing northward at over 600 kilometers per hour.

As suddenly as it had started, the turbulence ceased. He was still moving at high speed, but in still atmosphere, as if he’d been caught in a jet stream. The snowstorm vanished, and he saw with his own eyes what Jupiter had prepared for him.

Kon-Tiki
had entered the funnel of a gigantic whirlpool, at least a thousand kilometers across. The balloon was being swept along a curving wall of cloud. Overhead the sun was shining in a clear sky, but far beneath, this great hole in the atmosphere drilled down to unknown depths until it reached a misty floor where lightning flickered almost continuously.

Though the vessel was being dragged downward so slowly that it was in no immediate danger, Falcon increased the flow of the heat into the envelope until
KonTiki
hovered at a constant altitude. Not until then did he abandon the fantastic spectacle and return to considering the problem of the radar signals. They were still out there.

The nearest echo was now only about forty kilometers away. All of the echoes, he quickly realized, were distributed along the wall of the vortex, moving with it, apparently caught in the vortex like
Kon-Tiki
itself. He peered through the windows with his telescopic eye and found himself looking at a curiously mottled cloud that almost filled the field of view.

It was not easy to see, being only a little darker than the whirling wall of mist that formed its background. Not until he had been staring for over a minute did he realize that he had met it before. Quickly he trained
Kon-Tiki
’s optics on the object, so that Mission Control could share the view.

The first time he’d seen the thing it had been crawling across the drifting mountains of foam, and he had mistaken it for a giant, many-trunked tree. Now at last he could appreciate its real size and complexity, could even give it a name to fix its image in his mind. For it did not resemble a tree at all, but a jellyfish, such as might be met trailing its tentacles as it drifted along the warm eddies of Earth’s ocean currents. To some early naturalist those trailing tentacles had been reminiscent of the twisting snakes of a Gorgon’s head, thus the creature’s name: Medusa.

This
medusa was almost two kilometers across, with scores of tentacles hundreds of meters long; they swayed back and forth in perfect unison, taking more than a minute for each complete undulation— almost as if the creature were rowing itself through the sky.

The other radar blips were other, more distant medusas. Falcon focused his sight, and the balloon’s telescope, on half a dozen of them. He could detect no obvious variations in size or shape; they all seemed to be of the same species. He wondered just why they were drifting lazily around in this thousand-kilometer orbit. Were they feeding upon the aerial “plankton” sucked in by the whirlpool— sucked in as
Kon-Tiki
itself had been?

“Mission Control, I haven’t heard anything from Dr. Brenner. Did he go back to bed?”

 

“Not to bed, Howard,” came Buranaphorn’s delayed reply. “Just to sleep. He’s right beside me, snoring like a baby.”

 

“Wake him up.”

“By the . . .” Brenner’s squawk came through the link a second later. “Howard, that creature is a hundred thousand times as large as the biggest whale! Even if it’s only a gas bag, it must weigh a million tonnes! I can’t even guess at its metabolism. It must generate megawatts of heat to maintain its buoyancy.”

“It couldn’t be just a gas bag. It’s too good a radar reflector.”

 

“You’ve got to get closer.” Brenner’s voice had an edge of contained hysteria.

“I could do that,” Falcon replied—he could approach the medusa as closely as he wanted, by changing altitude to take advantage of differing wind velocities—but he made no move. Something in him had seized up, in a twinge of paralysis like that he’d experienced in the radio storm.