A Meeting with Medusa

6. Medusa

When the true dawn finally arrived, it brought a sudden change of weather. Kon-Tiki was moving through a blizzard, waxen snowflakes were falling so much, that visibility was reduced to zero. Falcon began to worry about the weight that might be accumulating on the envelope. Then he noticed that flakes settling outside the windows 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 worried about the possibility of collision. At least that was no danger here, any Jovian mountains were several hundred miles below him. And as for the floating islands of foam, hitting them would probably be like ploughing into slightly hardened soap bubbles.

Nevertheless, he switched on the horizontal radar, which until now had been completely useless; only the vertical beam, giving his distance from the invisible surface, had thus far been of any value. Then he had another surprise.

Scattered across a huge sector of the sky ahead were dozens of large and brilliant echoes. They were completely isolated from one another and apparently hung unsupported in space. Falcon remembered a phrase the earliest aviators had used to describe one of the hazards of their profession:

“clouds stuffed with rocks’. That was a perfect description of what seemed to lie in the track of Kon-Tiki.

It was a disconcerting sight, then Falcon again reminded himself that nothing really solid could possibly hover in this atmosphere. Perhaps it was some strange meteorological phenomenon. In any case, the nearest echo was about a hundred and twenty-five miles.

He reported to Mission Control, which could provide no explanation. But it gave the welcome news that he would be clear of the blizzard in another thirty minutes.

It did not warn him, however, of the violent cross wind that abruptly grabbed Kon-Tiki and swept it almost at right angles to its previous track. Falcon needed all his skill and the maximum use of what little control he had over his ungainly vehicle to prevent it from being capsised. Within minutes he was racing northward at over three hundred miles an hour. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the turbulence ceased, he was still moving at high speed, but in smooth air. He wondered if he had been caught in the Jovian equivalent of a jet stream.

The snow storm dissolved, and he saw what Jupiter had been preparing for him.

Kon-Tiki had entered the funnel of a gigantic whirlpool, some six hundred miles 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 heat into the envelope until Kon-Tiki hovered at a constant altitude. Not until then did he abandon the fantastic spectacle outside and consider again the problem of the radar.

The nearest echo was now only about twenty-five miles away. All of them, he quickly realised, were distributed along the wall of the vortex, and were moving with it, apparently caught in the whirlpool like Kofl-Tiki itself.

He aimed the telescope along the radar bearing and found himself looking at a curious 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 several minutes did Falcon realise that he had met it once before.

The first time 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 and could give it a better name to fix its image in his mind. It did not resemble a tree at all, but a jellyfish, a medusa, such as might be met trailing its tentacles as it drifted along the warm eddies of the Gulf Stream.

This medusa was more than a mile across and its scores of dangling entacles were hundreds of feet long. They swayed slowly back and forth in perfect unison, taking more than a minute for each complete undulation, just as if the creature was clumsily rowing itself through the sky.

The other echoes were more distant medusae. Falcon focused the teleope on half a dozen and could see no variations in shape or size. They all seemed to be of the same species, and he wondered just why they were drifting lazily around in this six-hundred-mile orbit. Perhaps they were dining upon the aerial plankton sucked in by the whirlpool, as Kon-Tiki self had been.

“You realise, Howard,” said Dr Brenner, when he had recovered from his initial astonishment, “that this thing is about a hundred thousand times as large as the biggest whale? And even if it’s only a gasbag, it must still weighs a million tons! I can’t even guess at its metabolism. It must generate megawatts of heat to maintain its buoyancy.

“But if it’s just a gasbag, why is it such a damn good radar reflector?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea. Can you get any closer?”

Brenner’s question was not an idle one. If he changed altitude to take Vantage of the differing wind velocities, Falcon could approach the medusa as closely as he wished. At the moment, however, he preferred his present twenty-five miles and said so, firmly.

I see what you mean,” Brenner answered, a little reluctantly. “Let’s stay where we are for the present.” That “we” gave Falcon a certain wry usement, an extra sixty thousand miles made a considerable difference one’s point of view.

For the next two hours Kon-Tiki drifted uneventfully in the eye of the whirlpool, while Falcon experimented with filters and camera constantly trying to get a clear view of the medusa. He began to wonder if its coloration was some kind of camouflage; perhaps, like many animals Earth, it was trying to lose itself against its background. That was a trick used by both hunters and hunted.

Which category was the medusa? That was a question he could hardly try to have answered in the short time that was left to him. Yet just before noon, without the slightest warning, the answer came…

Like a squadron of antique jet fighters, five mantas came sweeping through the wall of mist that formed the funnel of the vortex. They were flying in a V formation directly toward the pallid grey cloud of the medusa, and there was no doubt, in Falcon’s mind, that they were on the attack. He had been quite wrong to assume that they were harmless vegetarians.

Yet everything happened at such a leisurely pace that it was like watching a slow-motion film. The mantas undulated along at perhaps thirty miles an hour, it seemed ages before they reached the medusa, which continued to paddle imperturbably along at an even slower speed. Huge though they were, the mantas looked tiny beside the monster they were approaching. When they flapped down on its back, they appeared about as large as birds landing on a whale.

Could the medusa defend itself, Falcon wondered. He did not see how the attacking mantas could be in danger as long as they avoided those huge clumsy tentacles. And perhaps their host was not even aware of them, they could be insignificant parasites, tolerated as are fleas upon a dog.

But now it was obvious that the medusa was in distress. With agonising slowness, it began to tip over like a capsising ship. After ten minutes it had tilted forty-five degrees, it was also rapidly losing altitude. It was impossible not to feel a sense of pity for the beleaguered monster, and to Falcon the sight brought bitter memories. In a grotesque way, the fall of the medusa was almost a parody of the dying Queen’s last moments.

Yet he knew that his sympathies were on the wrong side. High intelligence could develop only among predators, not among the drifting browsers of either sea or air. The mantas were far closer to him than was this monstrous bag of gas. And anyway, who could really sympathise with a creature a hundred thousand times larger than a whale?

Then he noticed that the medusa’s tactics seemed to be having some effect. The mantas had been disturbed by its slow roll and were flapping heavily away from its back, like gorged vultures interrupted at mealtime. But they did not move very far, continuing to hover a few yards from the still-capsising monster.

There was a sudden, blinding flash of light synchronised with a crash of static over the radio. One of the mantas, slowly twisting end over end, was plummeting straight downward. As it fell, a plume of black smoke trailed behind it. The resemblance to an aircraft going down in flames was quite uncanny.

In unison, the remaining mantas dived steeply away from the medusa, gaining speed by losing altitude. They had, within minutes, vanished back into the wall of cloud from which they had emerged. And the medusa, longer falling, began to roll back toward the horizontal. Soon it was sailing along once more on an even keel, as if nothing had happened.

“Beautiful!” said Dr Brenner, after a moment of stunned silence. “Its developed electric defences, like some of our eels and rays. But that must have been about a million volts! Can you see any organs that might produce the discharge? Anything looking like electrodes?”

“No,” Falcon answered, after switching to the highest power of the telescope. “But here’s something odd. Do you see this pattern? Check back on the earlier images. l’m sure it wasn’t there before.

A broad, mottled band had appeared along the side of the medusa. It formed a startlingly regular checkerboard, each square of which was itself speckled in a complex subpattern of short horizontal lines. They were spaced at equal distances in a geometrically perfect array of rows and columns.

“You’re right,” said Dr Brenner, with something very much like awe in voice. “That’s just appeared. And I’m afraid to tell you what I think it is.”

“Well, I have no reputation to lose, at least as a biologist. Shall I give my guess?”

“Go ahead.”

“That’s a large meter-band radio array. The sort of thing they used back at the beginning of the twentieth century.

“I was afraid you’d say that. Now we know why it gave such a massive echo.”

“But why has it just appeared?”

“Probably an aftereffect of the discharge.

“I’ve just had another thought,” said Falcon, rather slowly. “Do you suppose it’s listening to us?”

“On this frequency? I doubt it. Those are meter, no, decameter antennas judging by their size. Hmm… that an idea!”

Dr Brenner fell silent, obviously contemplating some new line of thought. Presently he continued: “I bet they’re tuned to the radio outbursts! That’s something nature never got around to doing on Earth… We have animals with sonar and even electric senses, but nothing ever developed a radio sense. Why bother where there was so much light?

But it’s different here. Jupiter is drenched with radio energy. It’s worth hue using it, maybe even tapping it. That thing could be a floating power plant!”

A new voice cut into the conversation.

“Mission Commander here. This is all very interesting, but there’s a much more important matter to settle. Is it intelligent? If so, we’ve got to consider the First Contact directives.”

“Until I came here,” said Dr Brenner, somewhat ruefully, “I would have sworn that anything that could make a shortwave antenna system must be intelligent. Now, I’m not sure. This could have evolved naturally. I suppose its no more fantastic than the human eye.

“Then we have to play safe and assume intelligence. For the present, terefore, this expedition comes under all the clauses of the Prime directive.

There was a long silence while everyone on the radio circuit absorbed the implications of this. For the first time in the history of space flight, the rules that had been established through more than a century of argument, might have to be applied. Man had, it was hoped, profited from his mistakes on Earth. Not only moral considerations, but also his own self-interest demanded that he should not repeat them among the planets. It could be disastrous to treat a superior intelligence as the American settlers had treated the Indians, or as almost everyone had treated the Africans.

The first rule was: keep your distance. Make no attempt to approach, or even to communicate, until “they” have had plenty of time to study you. Exactly what was meant by “plenty of time’, no one had ever been able to decide. It was left to the discretion of the man on the spot.

A responsibility of which he had never dreamed had descended upon Howard Falcon. In the few hours that remained to him on Jupiter, he might become the first ambassador of the human race.

And that was an irony so delicious that he almost wished the surgeons had restored to him the power of laughter.