A Meeting With Medusa (28 page)

When he reached the bridge, and was able for the first time to look outside, he was horrified to see how close the ship was to the ground. Only three thousand feet below were the beautiful and deadly pinnacles of rock and the red rivers of mud that were still carving their way down into the past. There was no level area anywhere in sight where a ship as large as the
Queen
could come to rest on an even keel.

A glance at the display board told him that all the ballast had gone. However, rate of descent had been reduced to a few yards a second; they still had a fighting chance.

Without a word, Falcon eased himself into the pilot’s seat and took over such control as still remained. The instrument board showed him everything he wished to know; speech was superfluous. In the background, he could hear the Communications Officer giving a running report over the radio. By this time, all the news channels of Earth would have been preempted, and he could imagine the utter frustration of the programme controllers. One of the most spectacular wrecks in history was occurring—without a single camera to record it. The last moments of the
Queen
would never fill millions with awe and terror, as had those of the
Hindenburg
, a century and a half before.

Now the ground was only about seventeen hundred feet away, still coming up slowly. Though he had full thrust, he had not dared to use it, lest the weakened structure collapse; but now he realised that he had no choice. The wind was taking them toward a fork in the canyon, where the river was split by a wedge of rock like the prow of some gigantic, fossilised ship of stone. If she continued on her present course, the
Queen
would straddle that triangular plateau and come to rest with at least a third of her length jutting out over nothingness; she would snap like a rotten stick.

Far away, above the sound of straining metal and escaping gas, came the familiar whistle of the jets as Falcon opened up the lateral thrusters. The ship staggered, and began to slew to port. The shriek of tearing metal was now almost continuous—and the rate of descent had started to increase ominously. A glance at the damage-control board showed that cell number five had just gone.

The ground was only yards away. Even now, he could not tell whether his manoeuvre would succeed or fail. He switched the thrust vectors over to vertical, giving maximum lift to reduce the force of impact.

The crash seemed to last forever. It was not violent—merely prolonged, and irresistible. It seemed that the whole universe was falling about them.

The sound of crunching metal came nearer, as if some great beast were eating its way through the dying ship.

Then floor and ceiling closed upon him like a vice.

2. ‘Because it’s There’

‘Why do you want to go to Jupiter?’

‘As Springer said when he lifted for Pluto—“because it’s there”.’

‘Thanks. Now we’ve got that out of the way—the real reason.’

Howard Falcon smiled, though only those who knew him well could have interpreted the slight, leathery grimace. Webster was one of them; for more than twenty years they had been involved in each other’s projects. They had shared triumphs and disasters—including the greatest disaster of all.

‘Well, Springer’s cliché is still valid. We’ve landed on all the terrestrial planets, but none of the gas giants. They are the only real challenge left in the solar system.’

‘An expensive one. Have you worked out the cost?’

‘As well as I can; here are the estimates. Remember, though—this isn’t a one-shot mission, but a transportation system. Once it’s proved out, it can be used over and over again. And it will open up not merely Jupiter, but all the giants.’

Webster looked at the figures, and whistled.

‘Why not start with an easier planet—Uranus, for example? Half the gravity, and less than half the escape velocity. Quieter weather, too—if that’s the right word for it.’

Webster had certainly done his homework. But that, of course, was why he was head of Long-Range Planning.

‘There’s very little saving—when you allow for the extra distance and the logistics problems. For Jupiter, we can use the facilities of Ganymede. Beyond Saturn, we’d have to establish a new supply base.’

Logical, thought Webster; but he was sure that it was not the important reason. Jupiter was lord of the solar system; Falcon would be interested in no lesser challenge.

‘Besides,’ Falcon continued, ‘Jupiter is a major scientific scandal. It’s more than a hundred years since its radio storms were discovered, but we still don’t know what causes them—and the Great Red Spot is as big a mystery as ever. That’s why I can get matching funds from the Bureau of Astronautics. Do you know how many probes they have dropped into that atmosphere?’

‘A couple of hundred, I believe.’

‘
Three
hundred and twenty-six, over the last fifty years—about a quarter of them total failures. Of course, they’ve learned a hell of a lot, but they’ve barely scratched the planet. Do you realise how
big
it is?’

‘More than ten times the size of Earth.’

‘Yes, yes—but do you know what that really means?’

Falcon pointed to the large globe in the corner of Webster’s office.

‘Look at India—how small it seems. Well, if you skinned Earth and spread it out on the surface of Jupiter, it would look about as big as India does here.’

There was a long silence while Webster contemplated the equation: Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India. Falcon had—deliberately, of course—chosen the best possible example….

Was it already ten years ago? Yes, it must have been. The crash lay seven years in the past (
that
date was engraved on his heart), and those initial tests had taken place three years before the first and last flight of the
Queen Elizabeth
.

Ten years ago, then, Commander (no, Lieutenant) Falcon had invited him to a preview—a three-day drift across the northern plains of India, within sight of the Himalayas. ‘Perfectly safe,’ he had promised. ‘It will get you away from the office—and will teach you what this whole thing is about.’

Webster had not been disappointed. Next to his first journey to the Moon, it had been the most memorable experience of his life. And yet, as Falcon had assured him, it had been perfectly safe, and quite uneventful.

They had taken off from Srinagar just before dawn, with the huge silver bubble of the balloon already catching the first light of the Sun. The ascent had been made in total silence; there were none of the roaring propane burners that had lifted the hot-air balloons of an earlier age. All the heat they needed came from the little pulsed-fusion reactor, weighing only about two hundred and twenty pounds, hanging in the open mouth of the envelope. While they were climbing, its laser was zapping ten times a second, igniting the merest whiff of deuterium fuel. Once they had reached altitude, it would fire only a few times a minute, making up for the heat lost through the great gasbag overhead.

And so, even while they were almost a mile above the ground, they could hear dogs barking, people shouting, bells ringing. Slowly the vast, Sun-smitten landscape expanded around them. Two hours later, they had levelled out at three miles and were taking frequent draughts of oxygen. They could relax and admire the scenery; the on-board instrumentation was doing all the work—gathering the information that would be required by the designers of the still-unnamed liner of the skies.

It was a perfect day. The southwest monsoon would not break for another month, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. Time seemed to have come to a stop; they resented the hourly radio reports which interrupted their reverie. And all around, to the horizon and far beyond, was that infinite, ancient landscape, drenched with history—a patchwork of villages, fields, temples, lakes, irrigation canals….

With a real effort, Webster broke the hypnotic spell of that ten-year-old memory. It had converted him to lighter-than-air flight—and it had made him realise the enormous size of India, even in a world that could be circled within ninety minutes. And yet, he repeated to himself, Jupiter is to Earth as Earth is to India….

‘Granted your argument,’ he said, ‘and supposing the funds are available, there’s another question you have to answer. Why should you do better than the—what is it—three hundred and twenty-six robot probes that have already made the trip?’

‘I am better qualified than they were—as an observer, and as a pilot.
Especially
as a pilot. Don’t forget—I’ve more experience of lighter-than-air flight than anyone in the world.’

‘You could still serve as controller, and sit safely on Ganymede.’

‘
But that’s just the point!
They’ve already done that. Don’t you remember what killed the
Queen
?’

Webster knew perfectly well; but he merely answered: ‘Go on.’

‘
Time lag—time lag!
That idiot of a platform controller thought he was using a local radio circuit. But he’d been accidentally switched through a satellite—oh, maybe it wasn’t his fault, but he should have noticed. That’s a half-second time lag for the round trip. Even then it wouldn’t have mattered flying in calm air. It was the turbulence over the Grand Canyon that did it. When the platform tipped, and he corrected for that—it had already tipped the other way. Ever tried to drive a car over a bumpy road with a half-second delay in the steering?’

‘No, and I don’t intend to try. But I can imagine it.’

‘Well, Ganymede is a million kilometres from Jupiter. That means a round-trip delay of six seconds. No, you need a controller on the spot—to handle emergencies in real time. Let me show you something. Mind if I use this?’

‘Go ahead.’

Falcon picked up a postcard that was lying on Webster’s desk; they were almost obsolete on Earth, but this one showed a 3-D view of a Martian landscape, and was decorated with exotic and expensive stamps. He held it so that it dangled vertically.

‘This is an old trick, but helps to make my point. Place your thumb and finger on either side, not quite touching. That’s right.’

Webster put out his hand, almost but not quite gripping the card.

‘Now catch it.’

Falcon waited for a few seconds; then, without warning, he let go of the card. Webster’s thumb and finger closed on empty air.

‘I’ll do it again, just to show there’s no deception. You see?’

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

‘Now you try it on me.’

This time, Webster grasped the card and dropped it without warning. It had scarcely moved before Falcon had caught it. Webster almost imagined he could hear a click, so swift was the other’s reaction.

‘When they put me together again,’ Falcon remarked in an expressionless voice, ‘the surgeons made some improvements. This is one of them—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 fallen card, absorbing the improbable colours of the Trivium Charontis Escarpment. Then he said quietly: ‘I understand. How long do you think it will take?’

‘With your help, plus the Bureau, plus all the science foundations we can drag in—oh, three years. Then a year for trials—we’ll have to send in at least two test models. So, with luck—five years.’

‘That’s about what I thought. 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 expect
me
as passenger.’

3. The World of the Gods

The fall from Jupiter V to Jupiter itself takes only three and a half hours. Few men could have slept on so awesome a journey. Sleep was a weakness that Howard Falcon hated, and the little he still required brought dreams that time had not yet been able to exorcise. But he could expect no rest in the three days that lay ahead, and must seize what he could during the long fall down into that ocean of clouds, some sixty thousand miles below.

As soon as
Kon-Tiki
had entered her transfer orbit and all the computer checks were satisfactory, he prepared for the last sleep he might ever know. It seemed appropriate that at almost the same moment Jupiter eclipsed the bright and tiny Sun as he swept into the monstrous shadow of the planet. For a few minutes a strange golden twilight enveloped the ship; then a quarter of the sky became an utterly black hole in space, while the rest was a blaze of stars. No matter how far one travelled across the solar system, they never changed; these same constellations now shone on Earth, millions of miles away. The only novelties here were the small, pale crescents of Callisto and Ganymede; doubtless there were a dozen other moons up there in the sky, but they were all much too tiny, and too distant, for the unaided eye to pick them out.

‘Closing down for two hours,’ he reported to the mother ship, hanging almost a thousand miles above the desolate rocks of Jupiter V, in the radiation shadow of the tiny satellite. If it never served any other useful purpose, Jupiter V was a cosmic bulldozer perpetually sweeping up the charged particles that made it unhealthy to linger close to Jupiter. Its wake was almost free of radiation, and there a ship could park in perfect safety, while death sleeted invisibly all around.

Falcon switched on the sleep inducer, and consciousness faded swiftly out as the electric pulses surged gently through his brain. While
Kon-Tiki
fell toward Jupiter, gaining speed second by second in that enormous gravitational field, he slept without dreams. They always came when he awoke; and he had brought his nightmares with him from Earth.

Yet he never dreamed of the crash itself, though he often found himself again face to face with that terrified superchimp, as he descended the spiral stairway between the collapsing gasbags. None of the simps had survived; those that were not killed outright were so badly injured that they had been painlessly ‘euthed’. He sometimes wondered why he dreamed only of this doomed creature—which he had never met before the last minutes of its life—and not of the friends and colleagues he had lost aboard the dying
Queen
.