The Medusa Encounter (3 page)

So far this first test flight had gone perfectly. Ironically enough, the only problem had been the fiftyyear-old aircraft carrier
Chairman Mao
, borrowed from the San Diego Naval Museum for support operations. Only one of
Mao
’s four nuclear reactors was still operable, and the old battlewagon’s top speed was barely thirty knots. Luckily, wind speed at sea level had been less than half this, so it had not been too difficult to maintain still air on the flight deck. Though there had been a few anxious moments during gusts, when the mooring lines had been dropped the great dirigible had risen smoothly, straight up into the sky as if on an invisible elevator. If all went well,
Queen Elizabeth IV
would not meet
Chairman Mao
again for another week.

Everything was under control; all test instruments gave normal readings. Commander Falcon decided to go upstairs and watch the rendezvous. He handed over to his second officer and walked out into the transparent tubeway that led through the heart of the ship. There, as always, he was overwhelmed by the spectacle of the largest space yet enclosed by humans on Earth.
The ten spherical gas cells, each more than thirty meters across, were ranged one behind the other like a line of gigantic soap bubbles. The tough plastic was so clear that he could see through the whole length of the array and make out details of the elevator mechanism at the other end, half a kilometer from his vantage point. All around him, like a three-dimensional maze, was the structural framework of the ship— the great longitudinal girders running from nose to tail, the fifteen hoops that were the circular ribs of this sky-borne colossus, whose varying sizes defined its graceful, streamlined profile.

At this comparatively low speed there was little sound—merely the soft rush of wind over the envelope and an occasional creak from the joints of the ribs and stringers of titanium and carbon-carbon compound, flexing as the pattern of stresses changed. The shadowless light from the rows of lamps far overhead gave the whole scene a curiously submarine quality—

—and to Falcon this was enhanced by the spectacle of the translucent gas bags. Once while diving he had encountered a squadron of large but harmless jellyfish, pulsing their mindless way above a shallow tropical reef, and the plastic bubbles that gave
Queen Elizabeth
its lift often reminded him of these— especially when changing pressures made them crinkle and scatter new patterns of reflected light.

He walked down the axis of the ship until he came to the forward elevator, between gas cells one and two. Riding up to the observation deck, he noticed it was uncomfortably hot.

The
Queen
obtained almost a quarter of its buoyancy from the unlimited amounts of waste heat produced by its miniature “cold” fusion power plant. Indeed, on this lightly loaded test flight, only six of the ten gas cells contained helium, an increasingly rare and expensive gas; the remaining cells were full of plain hot air. Yet the ship still carried 200 tonnes of water as ballast.

Running the gas cells in hot-air mode created technical problems in refrigerating the access ways; obviously a little more work would have to be done there. Falcon dictated a brief memo to himself on his microcorder.

A refreshing rush of cooler air hit him in the face when he stepped out onto the big observation deck, into the dazzling sunlight that streamed through the clear acrylic roof. He was confronted with a scene of controlled chaos. Half a dozen workers and an equal number of superchimp assistants were busily laying the partly completed dance floor, while others were installing electrical wiring, arranging furniture, and fiddling with the elaborate louvers of the transparent roof. Falcon found it hard to believe that everything would be ready for the maiden voyage, only four weeks ahead.

Well, that was not
his
problem, thank goodness. He was merely the captain, not the cruise director.

The human workers waved to him, and the “simps” flashed toothy smiles. They all looked quite spiffy in the blue and white coveralls of the
Queen
’s corporate sponsors. He walked among them, through the orderly confusion, and mounted the short spiral stairs to the already finished Skylounge. This was his favorite place in the whole ship, but he knew that once the
Queen
was in service he would never again have the lounge all to himself. He would allow himself just five minutes of private enjoyment.

He keyed his commlink and spoke to the bridge, confirming that everything was still in order. Then he relaxed into one of the comfortable swivel chairs.

Below, in a curve that delighted the eye, was the unbroken silver sweep of the ship’s envelope. He was perched at the highest point forward, surveying the immensity of the largest vehicle ever built to contend with gravity near a planet’s surface. The only larger craft in the solar system were the space freighters that plied the trajectories among the space stations of Venus, Earth, Mars, the moons, and the Mainbelt; in the absence of weight, size was a secondary concern.

And when Falcon had tired of admiring the
Queen
, he could turn and look almost all the way to the horizon of that fantastic wilderness carved by the Colorado River in half a billion years time.

Apart from the remotely operated camera platform, which had now fallen back and was recording the spectacle from amidships, Falcon had the sky to himself. It was blue and empty up here, although the horizon was opaque with the purple brown stain that had become the permanent color of Earth’s lower atmosphere. Far to the south and north he could see the icy trails of ascending and descending intercontinental space planes, specifically prohibited from the corridor across the desert skies that today had been reserved for the
Queen
.

Someday, cheap fusion plants would supplant the fossil fuels upon which so much of the Earth still depended for economic sustenance, and ships like the
Queen
would ply the atmosphere gently and cleanly, carrying cargo and passengers. Then the sky would belong only to the birds and the clouds and the great dirigibles. But that day was still decades in the future.

It was true, as the old pioneers had said at the beginning of the 20th century: this was the only way to travel—in silence and luxury, breathing the air around you and not cut off from it, near enough to the surface to watch the everchanging beauty of land and sea. The subsonic jets of the past century’s final quarter had been hardly better than cattle cars, packed with hundreds of passengers seated up to ten abreast. Now, a hundred years later, a great many more passengers would soon be able to travel in greater comfort, at comparable speed, and with less real expense.

Not that any of them would be traveling on the
Queen
; the
Queen
and her projected sister ships were not a mass-transit proposition. Only a few of the world’s billions would ever enjoy gliding silently through the sky in highest luxury, champagne in hand, the symphonic strains of a live orchestra drifting from the stage of the observation deck below. . . . But a secure and prosperous global society could afford such follies and indeed needed them for their novelty and entertainment, as a useful distraction from the kind of aggressive interplanetary business affairs that too often threatened to erupt into brushfire wars. And there were at least a million people on Earth whose discretionary income exceeded a thousand “new dollars” a year—that is, a million of the ordinary dollars everybody else was used to having deducted from their credit chips at every transaction. So the
Queen
would not lack for passengers.

Falcon’s commlink beeped, interrupting his reverie. The copilot was calling from the bridge.

 

“Okay for rendezvous, Captain? We’ve got all the data we need from this run, and the viddie people are getting impatient.”

 

Falcon glanced at the camera platform, now matching his speed and altitude a quarter of a kilometer away. “Okay, proceed as arranged. I’ll watch from here.”

He went down the spiral stairs from the Skylounge and walked back through the busy chaos of the observation deck, intending to get a better view amidships. As he walked he could feel a change of vibration underfoot; the silent turbines were powering down, and the
Queen
was coming to rest. By the time he reached the rear of the deck, the ship was hanging motionless in the sky.

Using his master key, Falcon let himself out onto the small external platform flaring from the end of the deck; half a dozen people could stand here, with only low guardrails separating them from the vast sweep of the envelope—and from the ground, thousands of meters below the envelope’s sharply sloping artificial horizon. It was an exciting place to be, and perfectly safe even when the ship was traveling at speed, for it was sheltered in the dead air behind the huge dorsal blister of the observation deck. Nevertheless, it was not intended that the passengers would have access to it; the view was a little too vertiginous.

The covers of the forward cargo hatch had already opened like giant trap doors, and the camera platform was hovering above them, preparing to descend. Along this route in years to come would travel thousands of passengers and tonnes of supplies. Only on rare occasions would the
Queen
have to drop down to sea level to dock with her floating base.

A sudden gust of cross wind slapped Falcon’s cheek, and he tightened his grip on the guardrail. The Grand Canyon could be a bad place for turbulence, although he did not expect much at this altitude. Without anxiety he focused his attention on the descending platform, now some fifty meters above the ship; the crewman who was piloting the robot platform from the
Queen
’s bridge was a highly skilled operator who had performed this simple maneuver a dozen times on this flight already. It was inconceivable that he would have any difficulties.

Yet he seemed to be reacting rather sluggishly. That last gust had drifted the camera platform almost to the edge of the open hatchway.

 

Surely the pilot could have corrected before this. . . .

 

Did he have a control problem? Unlikely. These remotes had multiple-redundancy, fail-safe takeovers— any number of backup systems. Accidents were unheard of.

 

But there he went again, off to the left. Could the pilot be
drunk?
Improbable though that seemed . . .

 

Falcon keyed his commlink. “Bridge, put me in . . .”

Without warning he was slapped violently in the face by a gust of freezing wind. That was not what had interrupted his orders to the bridge. He hardly felt the wind, for he had been checked by the horror of what was happening to the camera platform. The operator was fighting for control, trying to balance the craft on its jets, but he was only making matters worse. The oscillations had increased—twenty degrees, forty degrees, sixty degrees.

Falcon found his voice. “Switch to automatic, you fool!” he shouted at the commlink. “Your manual control’s not working!”

 

The platform flipped over on its back. The jets no longer supported it, but drove it swiftly downward, sudden allies with the gravity they had fought until this moment.

Falcon never heard the crash. He felt it, though, as he raced across the observation deck toward the elevator that would take him down to the bridge. Workers shouted at him anxiously, wanting to know what happened.

It would be many months before he knew the answer to that question.

 

Just as he was about to step into the elevator shaft, he changed his mind. What if there was a power failure? Better be on the safe side, even if it took a few seconds longer. Even if time was the essence.

He ran down the spiral stairway that enclosed the elevator shaft. Halfway down he paused to check the ship for damage. He had a perfect view, and what he saw froze his heart. That damned platform had gone straight through the ship, top to bottom, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were collapsing slowly even now, in great falling veils of plastic.

Falcon wasn’t worried about lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, with eight cells still intact. Far more serious was the structural damage. Already he could hear the latticework of carbon-carbon and titanium all around him, groaning in protest under sudden abnormal, excessive loads. Strong and flexible as the metal and carbon-fiber members were, they were no stronger than their sundered joints.

Lift alone wasn’t enough. Unless it was properly distributed, the ship’s back would break.

Falcon ran again. He’d gotten a few steps down the stairs when a superchimp, one of the workers’ assistants from the observation deck, came racing down the elevator shaft, shrieking with fright— moving with incredible speed, hand over hand, along the
outside
of the elevator’s latticework. In its terror the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its recent ancestors.

Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched the creature’s approach with some alarm. A distraught simp was a powerful and possibly dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning against striking out at humans.

As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance. He felt sorry for the creature, involved in a human disaster beyond its comprehension, for which it bore no responsibility.

It stopped exactly opposite him, on the other side of the lattice. There was nothing to prevent it from coming through the opening framework if it wished. And then it moved toward him, its wide thin lips hovering over yellow fangs, bared in terror.

Now its face was only inches from his, and he was looking straight into its terrified eyes. Never before had Falcon been so close to a simp, able to study its features in such detail. He felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all humans experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.