The Medusa Encounter (25 page)

 

“Fine, fine. If you wouldn’t mind saying . . .”

 

“Sorry,” he said firmly. “If you’ll show us to Mission Control, we’ll stay out of everybody’s hair.”

 

Her expression hardened. “This way, please.”

The passageway from the bridge to Mission Control was short, ending in a hatch in the center of what was, when
Garuda
was accelerating, the control room’s ceiling. Six controllers looked up curiously as the uniformed spacers entered the room. Rajagopal curtly announced the arrivals to Lum, the flight director, and returned to the bridge.

A few moments later, the commander and his partner took up different positions, the commander hovering beside the hatch that led to the bridge, the lieutenant moving opposite him to the hatchway in the floor. The silent maneuver had the effect of telling the men and women in this fishbowl of a room that they were under arrest.

Blake Redfield opened his eyes in time to see
her
, swinging silently and weightlessly down from the ceiling of his sleeping cubicle. She perched right on top of him, hunched over him like a nightmare.

 

He didn’t believe it. He blinked, as if that would give the horrid apparition time to go away. When he opened his eyes again, the nightmare began in earnest.

 

Sparta must have seen the look in his eyes, the fear that shifted through recognition to a calmer, deeper apprehension.

 

“Are you here to kill me?” He meant to speak boldly, but his words came out in a dry whisper.

She grinned. In the grease-blackened mask of her face, her teeth were gleaming ivory and her tongue was blood red. “You don’t have to do anything more, Blake. I’ve already taken care of it. Guard your own back.”

“What do you . . . ?”

 

“No, don’t move,” she said.

 

He pretended to relax, while staring up at her. “What did you do, Ellen?”

 

“Don’t call me Ellen.”

 

Don’t call her Ellen?
—he took a deep breath; his ears were ringing with the tension—
For years she’s insisted I call her Ellen
. “What’s your name now?”

 

“You know who I am. You don’t need my name.”

 

“As you wish.” She was mad. It was plain as the evil grin on her face. Look at her, starved to bones, those red eyes burning in her head. “What have you done?”

The words hissed out of her in a hot stream. “You don’t need to keep trying to trap them. The mission will fail, I’ve seen to it. When it does, the
prophetae
who are left will show themselves. Then I’ll take care of them, too.”

“What have you
done?
”

 

“Don’t betray me to the commander,” she said, unfolding her legs and pushing lightly against his knees as she lifted toward the ceiling.

 

“The commander? He’s . . . ?” Blake broke off, watching in amazement as she slithered into the airexchange duct, an opening he would have thought too small for a human body.

 

“Don’t betray me.” She was already out of sight when her words reached him. “You want to live, don’t you?”

 

* * *

 

“Sorry about this,” said Mission Control over Falcon’s speakers. “Source Beta is looking iffy. Probability seventy percent it’s gonna blow within the next hour.”

Falcon scrolled through the chart on the map screen. Beta—Jupiter latitude one hundred and forty degrees—was almost 30,000 kilometers away and well below his horizon. Even though major eruptions ran as high as ten megatons, he was much too far away for the shock wave to be a serious danger. The radio storm that it would trigger was a different matter.

The decameter outbursts that at times made Jupiter the most powerful radio source in the whole sky had been discovered in the 1950s, to the utter astonishment of groundbound astronomers. Well over a century later their underlying cause remained a mystery. Only the symptoms were understood.

The “volcano” theory had best stood the test of time, although no one imagined that this word had the same meaning on Jupiter as on Earth. At frequent intervals—often several times a day—titanic eruptions occurred in the lower depths of the atmosphere, probably on the hidden surface of the planet itself. A great column of gas, a thousand kilometers high, would start boiling upward as if determined to escape into space.
Against the most powerful gravitational field of all the planets, it had no chance. Yet some traces—a mere few million metric tonnes—might manage to reach the Jovian ionosphere, and when they did, all hell broke loose.

The radiation belts surrounding Jupiter completely dwarf the feeble Van Allen belts of Earth. When they are short-circuited by an ascending column of gas, the result is an electrical discharge millions of times more powerful than any terrestrial flash of lightning; it sends a colossal thunderclap of radio noise flooding across the entire solar system and on to the stars.

Probes had discovered that these radio outbursts were concentrated in four main areas of the planet. Perhaps there were weaknesses there that allowed the fires of the interior to break out from time to time. The scientists on Ganymede now thought they could predict the onset of a decameter storm; their accuracy was about that of a terrestrial weather forecast a century and a half ago.

Falcon did not know whether to welcome or fear a radio storm, which would certainly add to the value of the mission—if he survived it. At the moment, he simply felt a vague irritability, as if this was all a distraction from some larger purpose.
Kon-Tiki
’s course had been planned to keep it as far as possible from the main centers of disturbance, especially the most active, Source Alpha. As luck would have it, the threatening Beta was the closest to him. He hoped that the distance, almost three-fourths the circumference of Earth, was safe enough.

“Probability now ninety percent,” said Mission Control. Flight Director Lum’s voice held a distinct note of urgency. “Forget what I said about an hour. Ganymede would have us believe it could be any second.”

The radiolink had scarcely fallen silent when the magnetic field-strength graphic shot upward; before it could go off the screen, it reversed and dropped as rapidly as it had risen, in a spike as sharp as an ice pick. Far away and thousands of kilometers below, something had given the planet’s molten core a titanic jolt.

Mission Control was late to get the news. “There she blows!”

 

“Thanks, I already know.”

 

“You can expect onset at your position in five minutes, peak in ten.”

 

He already knew that, too. “Copy.” He didn’t tell them how.

Far around the curve of Jupiter a funnel of gas as wide as the Pacific Ocean was climbing space-ward at thousands of kilometers per hour. Already the thunderstorms of the lower atmosphere would be raging around it, but they were nothing compared with the fury that would explode when the radiation belt was reached and began dumping its surplus electrons onto the planet.
Falcon began to retract all the instrument booms that he’d earlier extended from the capsule. There were no other precautions he could take. It would be four hours before the atmospheric shock wave reached him, but once the discharge had been triggered the radio blast, traveling at the speed of light, would be here in a tenth of a second.

Nothing yet: the radio monitor, scanning the spectrum, showed nothing unusual—just the normal mush of background. But Falcon noticed that the background noise level was slowly creeping upward. The pending explosion was gathering strength.

At such a vast distance he’d never expected to
see
anything. But suddenly a flicker as of far-off heat lightning danced along the eastern horizon. Simultaneously half the circuit breakers on the main board tripped, the capsule lights failed, and all comm channels went dead.

He tried to move, but he could not do so. The paralysis that gripped him was not psychological. He’d lost control of his limbs, and he could feel a painful tingling sensation throughout the network of his nerves. It seemed impossible that the electric field could have penetrated the shielded cabin—which was effectively a Faraday cage—and yet there was a flickering glow over the instrument board, and he could hear the unmistakable crackle of brush discharge.

Bang. Bang!

The emergency systems—
bang!
—threw themselves into operation—
bang!
—and the overloads reset. The lights flickered on. Falcon’s humiliating paralysis disappeared as swiftly as it had come. With a glance at the board, he leaned toward the ports.

No need to try the external inspection lamps, for outside the windows the capsule’s support cables seemed to be on fire. Lines of electric blue light glowed against the darkness, stretching upward from the main lift ring to the equator of the giant balloon; rolling slowly along several of them were dazzling balls of fire.

The sight was so strange and so beautiful that it was hard to read any menace into it—although few people, as Falcon knew, could even have seen ball lightning at such close quarters. And certainly none had survived, if they’d been riding a hydrogen-filled balloon in the atmosphere of Earth. He remembered the flaming death of the
Hindenburg
—how could any dirigible pilot forget it, how could any such pilot fail to have memorized the old newsreel frame by frame?—destroyed by a spark upon docking at Lakehurst in 1937. That could not happen here, though there was more hydrogen above his head than had ever filled the last of the Zeppelins; it would be a few billion years yet before anyone could light a fire in the atmosphere of Jupiter,
sans
oxygen.

With a sound like briskly frying bacon, the speech circuit came back to life—it was Lum’s frantic voice. “Hello,
Kon-Tiki
—are you receiving? Are you receiving?” Chopped and badly distorted, the flight director’s words were barely intelligible.

 

Falcon’s spirits lifted; he had resumed contact with the human world. “I receive you, David,” he said, a bit less formally than usual. “That was quite an electrical display. But no damage so far.”

 

“We were afraid we’d lost you. Howard, please adjust telemetry channels three, seven, and twenty-six. Also gain on video two. And we don’t quite believe the readings from the external ionization sensors.”

Reluctantly Falcon tore his gaze away from the fascinating pyrotechnic display around
Kon-Tiki
. As he worked to recalibrate the instruments he occasionally glanced out the windows. The ball lightning disappeared first, the fiery globes slowly expanding until they reached a critical size, at which they vanished in a silent, almost gentle explosion.

But even an hour later, there were still faint glows around all the exposed metal on the outside of the capsule, and the radio links stayed noisy until after midnight.

 

“We’re changing shifts again, Howard. Meechai will be taking over shortly.”

 

“Thanks for a good job, David.”

 

“Morning, Howard. Welcome to Day Three.” Buranaphorn’s voice was clear in the radiolink.

 

“They go by fast, don’t they?” Falcon said pleasantly.

Deep inside himself, he felt anything but pleasant. That electrical shock, the paralysis . . . something strange was happening, although he could not say what. Lurid images came unbidden into his imagination, and he imagined that someone was speaking right next to him—was right here next to him in the capsule—but the words were in a language he had never heard, as in a dream where one clearly sees the words on the page but can make no sense of them.

Falcon struggled to maintain his concentration. His mission was far from complete.

 

The remaining hours of darkness were completely uneventful—until just before dawn.

Because it came from the east, Falcon thought he was seeing the first faint hint of sunrise. Then he realized that it was twenty minutes too early, and the glow that had appeared along the horizon was moving toward him even as he watched.

It swiftly detached itself from the arch of stars that marked the invisible edge of the planet, and he saw that it was a relatively narrow band, quite sharply defined—the beam of an enormous searchlight, swinging beneath the clouds. Perhaps fifty kilometers behind the first racing bar of light came another, parallel and moving at the same speed. And behind that another and another, until all the sky flickered with alternating sheets of light and darkness.

Falcon thought that he must have become inured to wonders by now, and surely this display of pure, soundless luminosity could not present the slightest danger. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing display, an inexplicable display—and despite himself he felt cold fear gnawing at what was otherwise an almost inhuman self-control. No human could look on such a sight without feeling like a helpless pygmy in the presence of forces beyond his comprehension. Was it possible that Jupiter carried not only life, but . . .

His mind reeled. The windows of his capsule spun in front of his eyes as rapidly as the searchlight beams in the vast dark cloudscape outside them.

 

But also intelligence . . . ?

The thought had literally had to fight its way to consciousness. What could his unconscious know with such fervor and jealousy that it would want to hide it from his own conscious mind, from the spotlight of reason?

An intelligence that only now was beginning to react to his alien presence . . . ?

 

“Yes, we see it,” said Buranaphorn, in a voice that echoed Falcon’s own sense of awe. “We have no idea what it is. We’re calling Ganymede.”

The display was slowly fading; the bands racing in from the far horizon were much fainter, as if the energies that powered them were becoming exhausted. In five minutes it was all over. The last faint pulse of light flickered along the western sky and was gone. Its passing left Falcon with an overwhelming sense of relief. The sight had been so hypnotic, so disturbing, that it could not have been good for anyone’s peace of mind to contemplate it too long. He was more shaken then he cared to admit. An electrical storm was something he could understand, but
this
was totally incomprehensible.