Gorgon Planet

Our troubles started the moment the stiffened corpse of Flaherty was found, standing frozen in a field half a kilometer from the ship. We had all hated the big Irishman’s guts, but finding his body, completely unharmed, stock-still and standing alone, was quite a jolt. There was no apparent sign of death—in fact, at first we thought he was sleeping on his feet. Horses do it, and Flaherty wasn’t far removed from a horse.

But he wasn’t. He was dead, dead as hell. And when the entire human population of a planet consists of eight, and one of those eight dies suddenly of unknown causes, the framework of your existence tends to sag a bit. We were scared.

“We” being the first Earth Exploratory Party (Type A-7) to Bellatrix IV in Orion. Eight men, altogether, bringing back a full report on the whole planet. Eight, of whom one, ox-like Flaherty, was stiff as a board before us.

“What did it, Joel?” asked Tavy Ramirez, our geologist.

“How the blazes do I know?” I snapped. I regretted losing my temper instantly. “Sorry, Tavy. But I know as much as you do about the whole thing. Flaherty is dead, and there’s something out there that killed him.”

“But there’s nothing out there,” protested Kai Framer, the biologist. “For three days we’ve hunted up and down and haven’t found a sign of animal life.”

Jonathan Morro, biologist, unwound his six-feet-eight and stretched. “Maybe an intelligent plant did him in, eh, Kaftan?”

I shook my head. “Doubt it, Jon. No sign of violence, no plants in the vicinity. We found him standing in the middle of a field, on his two big feet, frozen dead. Doesn’t figure.”

Over in the corner of the cabin, Steeger—medical officer—was puttering around the corpse. Steeger was an older man than most of us, one who had literally rotted in the service. He had contracted frogpox on Fomalhaut 11, and now wore two chrome-jacketed titanium legs. I looked over at him.

“Any report, Doc?”

Steeger turned watery eyes towards me. “No sign of any physical harm, Joel. But his muscles are all tensed, as if—as if—well, I can’t phrase it. He seems to have been frozen in his tracks by some strange force. I’m stuck, Joel.”

Phil Janus, our chronicler, looked up from the chess game he’d been playing with pilot Curt Holden and laughed. “Maybe he had an overdose of his own joy-juice and it hardened all his arteries.”

That was a reference to the crude still Flaherty had rigged the day we landed on Bellatrix IV. His duties as navigator had kept the big fellow pretty busy all trip, but first day down-planet and he spent his first idle hour building the still. He didn’t say a word about it to anyone, but had shown up at mess that night pretty high. He never told us where the still was, though we searched all over. The second day Janus had located a liter flask of whisky, home-brewed, and his sampling had cost him a black eye.

“No,” said Framer. “Let’s be serious a moment. One of our group is dead, and we don’t know what killed him. There’s something out there that Flaherty crossed. I move we organize a searching party to find out what.”

“Seconded,” murmured Morro.

I looked at the corpse for a moment, then at the six men around me. Framer was my solid man, I knew, the leader of the group. Morro was strong, too, but usually too bored to bother with the welfare of the group. Young Holden, the pilot, was a follower; he didn’t have any thoughts of his own, or at least he didn’t express any. Tavy Ramirez I knew: quiet, smiling, unassuming—not very strong a person. Doc Steeger was small, frightened, not at all the sort of man who’d go gallivanting around space as part of an exploratory crew. Janus was like Morro in many ways: he just didn’t care. Flaherty, thank the Lord, was dead. The big ox had threatened nasty incidents many times, and had been a constant source of dissension on-ship.

As for me—Joel Kaftan, Lieut. (Spatial)—I was scared. Plenty scared. Visible monsters on a planet are bad enough; invisible ones were hell. I looked out at the port and saw the vast, empty, tree-studded plain that was our chunk of Bellatrix IV, and looked back at the men.

“All in favor of a searching party, say aye.”

Aye it was, and we divided up. There were seven of us, now, and that made things awkward. Steeger was indispensable, as our doctor, and he was of no use outdoors anyway. Holden was theoretically dispensable—in a pinch I could probably have piloted the ship—but I would have hated to try, and so I confined him to quarters too. That left just five men for the search.

It was logical to split into two groups, one of three men and one of two. But I didn’t think too clearly for a moment, and announced we’d have three groups. I didn’t figure that one poor chap would have to go out alone.

I teamed up with Ramirez, and Framer with Morro. That left Janus as a searching party of one.

Janus didn’t mind. Phil rarely minded anything. “Looks like I’m lone wolf,” he said. “Okay, gentlemen. If you hear a loud silence from my neck of the woods, run like hell.”

The airlock was open anyway (Bellatrix IV has an atmosphere roughly that of Earth’s, which was a boon) and the five of us left.

I started out with Tavy and we headed towards the site of Flaherty’s finish, very much scared. When your life span is 150 or so years, and you’ve got a hundred of them left, you’re not too anxious to die young, even as a hero on an alien planet. Framer and Morro wandered up towards the big ridge behind the spaceship, and Janus headed for the clump of twisted red-leaved trees about two hundred meters away.

Tavy and I moved slowly, casting our eyes in all directions. As usual, there was no sign of any animal life. Bellatrix IV had an abundance of plants (not chlorophyll-based plants, but ones with some sort of iron-compound base), a temperate climate, flowing streams of real H₂O water. But no visible animals. Of course, we hadn’t covered very much territory yet, maybe two or three square kilometers.

No one dared to make a sound. Then suddenly, in about two seconds flat, we got our first taste of Bellatrician life. Poor Janus came flying out of his copse, and lumbering behind him out of nowhere came a bizarre thing about ten feet high, with non-functional wings, gleaming golden scales, and a headful of writhing, pencil-like tentacles.

We stood transfixed for a moment. I drew my rifle and put a shot into the scales, without any seeming effect. And then Janus turned and stared up at the beast for a fraction of a second as he ran.

The beast stared too, and the frantic pursuit came to an end. They glared at each other for just a moment, and then the monster wheeled and ran off in the other direction. It disappeared over the hill.

But Janus remained where he was, frozen dead.

We planted our second corpse and sat morosely in the cabin. We missed Flaherty just a bit, but not too much. But Janus, though, genial, clever, enormously capable—it was hard to believe he was dead, killed by a gorgon.

For the beast of the forest was unquestionably a gorgon, right out of the old mythology. Doc Steeger gave us the first inkling when he pointed out that death had been caused by a sudden neural blast.

Framer looked up at this. “We didn’t see any physical contact between Phil and the monster, though.”

“No,” broke in Ramirez. “Janus just looked at the thing, and then he froze stiff—”

The thought came to Morro and myself almost instantaneously.

“A gorgon,” I said. “Gorgon,” he echoed. He stood up—preposterous lanky fellow—and stared outside at the wide plain with its deadly clump of trees at one corner. “A gorgon.”

“Pardon me, sir.” It was Holden. “Just exactly what is a gorgon, sir? They said nothing about them in the Academy.”

Framer muttered something under his breath. Kal, I knew, was a man of wide learning, and he had nothing but scorn for modern educational methods, which are highly specialized. Morro spoke.

“A gorgon, Curt, is a mythological beast. It killed by a glance; if you looked at its eyes, you were turned to stone. The thing outside is almost a living version of a gorgon, complete to those tentacles on its head. The original gorgon was supposed to have living snakes instead of hair.”

Holders said nothing, but his eyes widened.

Ramirez scratched his long nose with a thick finger. “Joel, how are we going to fight our friend outside?”

“The same way Perseus did,” I said.

And so Operation Medusa got under way. It took some preliminary discussion. For one thing, Holden, who held most of our technological information behind his freckled forehead, had not the slightest knowledge of the Perseus myth, and we had to bring him up to date.

Morro patiently did most of the explaining.

“A Greek hero named Perseus boasted he could kill Medusa, the gorgon,” the giant said, smothering a yawn. “With the help of the gods he got a pair of magic sandals which enabled him to fly, and a cap of invisibility. Then he polished his shield to mirror brightness and swooped down on the gorgon, watching her in his mirror-shield, and without ever looking her in the face he cut off her head.”

“I see,” Curt said. “We have to hunt down this gorgon too, and we can’t look at it either, or—” He nodded outside at the two brown mounds of earth.

“Right,” Framer said. “But we don’t have a mirror. And we can’t build one. What now?”

We racked our brains. Morro wondered if we could somehow polish the ship to the proper brightness, but we saw the scheme was impractical. “Try radar,” Tavy offered.

“That’s it!” I whooped. “Hunt down the gorgon with radar and blast it without ever looking at the damned thing!”

From there on Medusa’s number was up. But she didn’t go down without a fight.

Holden had the radar screen dismantled and set up for gorgon-hunting in no time at all. The boy’s horizons were limited, perhaps, but in the fields for which he had been educated he was tops. On a warm, summery day, we set out on our gorgon-hunt.

We always had difficulty adjusting to the red leaves on the trees and especially the carpet of red grass on the ground. Bellatrix IV, as far as we could see, was a huge plain, covered with what seemed to be a bloody carpet. Every time I looked down I felt a twinge, and thought of the two graves near the ship, and of the two explorers who would never get back for another lecture tour on Earth.

Steeger remained behind on ship, peering intently into the radar screen. The five of us fanned out slowly, armed to the teeth and scared stiff. I could see myself that evening being borne back to the ship, frozen, and sharing that impromptu graveyard with Janus and Flaherty.

Steeger had more to worry about than any of us. Hunched over the radar screen, his job was to relay instructions to us. We knew the gorgon was somewhere in the copse, because Framer had seen the great thing go thundering into the clump of trees the day before, and no one had seen or heard it since. But only a fool would go in there after a beast that killed by a glance.

Slowly, painfully, the five of us formed a wide circle around the copse, standing no closer than a hundred meters from the edge. Not one of us dared to look up, of course; our eyes remained fixed on the blood-red grass and Steeger directed us to our positions, step by painful step. It took half an hour to form the circle, as Doc would tell first one, then another of us, to move a couple of steps to right or left. Finally the circle was complete—five Perseuses, frightened green.

Then came the rough part, as we waited for the attack. When the call came over the phones from Steeger, I was going to hurl a Johnson flare into the copse, and, if all went right, the gorgon would come lumbering out. Without looking, we would fire.

As I look back, I see it was a pretty harebrained scheme. So many things could have gone wrong that it’s a wonder we ever went ahead with it.

Doc gave the signal, and I drew back my arm and flung the flare, automatically looking up as I did. For one horror-stricken second I feared the gorgon might approach just as I looked up, but there was no sign of it.

Then all hell broke loose in the copse.

A Johnson flare goes off like a lithium bomb—at least it creates enough light to simulate one. That copse lit up bright yellow, and I caught the odd contrast between the red of the leaves and the yellow of the light. And I saw something huge thrashing around in the heart of the copse before I jerked my head down. I stared at my feet.

Try blindfolding yourself some time and walking down a city street, an empty street, at dawn. The terror is something unimaginable, the unreasoning terror of the blind. That’s the way I felt, knowing that at any moment a monster might pop out of the clump of trees and leap at me while I stood studying my boots. An awful ten seconds passed, and seemed like days, and I grew progressively more numb with fear, until I passed the point of fright and seemed almost calm. Nothing happened, though the flare continued to kick up a powerful light. I heard rustling noises in the copse.

And then all at once I heard Steeger’s tinny yell in my phones.

“Joel!”

In the same instant I drew with my right hand and flung my left hand behind my neck, forcing my head down. I aimed the blaster up at a 45-degree angle and began sizzling away for all I was worth. Over to my left I could hear Morro doing the same.

There was the sound of thunder, as of a great beast lumbering around near me. I could hear Steeger screaming something in my phones, but I was unable to stop yelling myself. And I didn’t dare look up.

For all I knew the gorgon was standing right over me and bending to bite me in two. But I had passed the point of any coherent reasoning. I was still screaming and squeezing the trigger of the burned-out blaster five minutes later, when Morro and Framer came over to me and led me back to the ship.

We had killed it, then. And I, Lieut. (Spatial) Joel Kaftan, commander of EExP A-7 to Bellatrix IV, was Perseus.

“We thought we’d never get you up,” said Morro.

Steeger said, “I saw that gorgon come out, and I yelled to you. You started waving the blaster around, and Morro came over too. But by the time he reached you, you had blasted Medusa in the neck and pretty near cut that head right off.”

Ramirez took up the story. “You were still blasting away without looking, even though the gorgon had fallen on its face. Holden came up and cut its head off, but it’s still thrashing its wings out there.”

“You ruined about three trees with your blaster,” Morro added. “Damned careless of you, Joel.”

I looked up. The accumulated tension had built up to such a pitch while I was waiting for the thing to come out of its lair that I felt I had been through a wringer and had been squeezed flat. I looked around at the men ranging the couch on which I lay.

I saw great Morro standing at my feet, and old Steeger looking even older after his remote-control chess-game with the gorgon. And there was Holden, and Ramirez. Four. And I made five. Two dead made seven. It took me another second to realize we were not all together.

“Where’s Framer?”

“Out there,” Ramirez said. “The biologist in him got the upper hand, and he’s out there examining our defunct friend.”

“But you said the wings were still thrashing,” I yelled, leaping from the couch. “That means—”

But the others realized what it meant, too, and we raced through the airlock door in no time at all.

We were too late, of course. We found the biologist bent over the decapitated gorgon, examining the head with interest. And frozen stiff.

Averting our eyes, we carried Kal back to the ship and buried him next to Flaherty and Janus. More than any of us, Kal had been a scientist, and he couldn’t resist trying to solve the puzzle of the gorgon. Whether he had or not we would never know—but apparently the gorgon’s neural network had been of a low order, low enough to remain functioning for a while after the organism’s death. And there had been enough of a charge left in those deadly eyes to give Framer a freezing blast.

I directed operations from the door of the ship, trying hard not to stare at the upturned gorgon-head. Upton and Morro crept up blindfolded and slipped the gorgon’s head into a thick plasticanvas bag, and zipped up the top. We stuck a “danger—do not open” sign on it.

Medusa had cost us three men, but we had beaten her. We loaded her headless corpse into the deep freeze for Earth’s scientists to puzzle over. It took all five of us to lift the huge thing and stow it away, and we were glad to see the end of it. No more monsters, we thought; the expedition would be restful from here on.

Until the next day, when Ramirez found that Sphinx crouching near the ship—