Medusa's Children

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In the three years since he had last worn a space suit Tarrant had forgotten most of the discomfort and indignity. The breathing mixture it was supplying him smelt strongly of rubber, plastics and cleaning fluids—a choking combination which served as a constant reminder that he was totally at the mercy of his life support system.

There were disconcerting popping and scraping sounds each time he moved his left arm—suggesting that the pressure seals in the elbow were not properly adjusted—and, as always seemed to happen, he had difficulty in connecting his relief tube to the ship’s waste disposal system. In common with the other young pilots, he had often laughed at tales of the gruesome accidents which had befallen men who had been careless in that respect, but as he struggled to tighten slippery rings the old stories, apocryphal or not, no longer seemed funny. By the time he had made himself secure he was sweating profusely.

He sat back in the G-seat and looked over his shoulder at his four companions, all of whom were still fumbling in their laps. It struck him as ironic that the portion of a man’s anatomy which was least amenable to the restraints of civilisation should also prove the most troublesome at a time like this, when he was about to prove that his technology was more than equal to the challenge of space.

“A sadist designed this thing,” Martine growled, his breathing amplified by his microphone. “Probably a woman with a chronic case of penis envy.”

“There’s nothing to worry about—unless we suddenly lose pressure,” Tarrant said. As he had expected, his words provoked a renewed flurry of elbow movements, and he smiled in enjoyment of his own touch of sadism. He turned back to make a last-second check on the flight instruments and controls. The Type 7 ship was a de-militarised version of the Type 6B on which he had done his basic training. Removal of the weapons consoles and associated equipment had made it possible to accommodate two extra seats on the flight deck. The resultant gaps in the interior trim had been blanked off with unpainted alloy sheeting, but the work had been neatly executed and the general appearance of the ship left Tarrant reasonably confident about his own safety. He depressed several buttons, caused data about the drive unit to be projected on to the windscreen in front of him, and was examining it when he noticed a cluster of lights moving above the eastern horizon.

“Aircraft on finals,” he announced. “Must be our visitors.”

“That’s correct,” came Miss Orchard’s voice from the small tower. “Can you get off all right?”

“As long as they don’t try to land down wind.” Until that moment Tarrant had been sustaining himself on coffee and pep pills, but his tiredness and apprehension abruptly left him as he reached for the single thrust control lever. The feeling was similar to the one he had got in the early days at the beginning of an interceptor sortie, except that it was magnified and enhanced by the knowledge that when he reached the limits of the stratosphere his flight would have only just begun.

Spaceflight had never really been more than a dream, but it was a dream which had exerted such a powerful influence on men’s minds that they had gone on pursuing it—for a time—even when it had become apparent that the Solar System had nothing more to offer, and that the stars were too far away. This, too, was the ultimate form of the dream—uncluttered by any need for skyscraper tanks of liquid explosive or armies of ground controllers. A man, alone if need be, could step into a craft smaller than Columbus’s Santa Maria, and sail it, if he dared, beyond the atmosphere, beyond the Moon, and across the tides of space. The dream had faded because there was no fitting destination for such travellers, but on this occasion Tarrant had a goal and a purpose, and he could almost see himself as the protagonist in one of his childhood fantasies, riding skywards on a bright plume of fire.

He moved the thrust control lever forward and at once the distant sheds on each side of the airstrip were illuminated by a flare of light from the ship’s exhaust cone. The ship moved along the runway, still heavy, being rocked and jolted by irregularities in the concrete surface. Tarrant advanced the lever in its slot and the twilight outside abated as the pink brilliance, caused by ions recombining in the exhaust, neared its maximum intensity. The runway streamed by, seemingly smoother now that the ship’s wings were creating lift, and the marker lights on each side became continuous wavering glows. Tarrant held the pointed nose down until he had a comfortable margin of air speed, then eased back on the control stick. At once, effortlessly, the ship was airborne and there was nothing visible ahead but a rectangle of sky, sparsely patterned by major stars.

This was the moment, well remembered from his training flights, which offered the headiest satisfaction. He allowed himself to be driven back into the heavily padded seat as the ship burned its way up the invisible slopes of infinity. Unlike the position with first-generation space craft, there was no need to reach an escape velocity—the continuity of thrust available from the ion drive would have made it possible to go into space at walking speed, provided one did not mind the immense waste of energy. But Tarrant, who was in a hurry and also anxious to avoid running the century-old engine at peak output for longer than necessary, chose to get away from the Earth’s greedy embrace in a short time.

By holding the acceleration steady at just over one gravity, he had taken them to the upper edge of the stratosphere in five minutes, and a further five minutes saw the ship spiralling out of the historic orbital levels. The Earth swam away beneath them, a blue immensity whorled with white. As the silence of space descended over the craft, Tarrant—who had been using the skills of an aircraft pilot until then—began refreshing his memory of space flying technique by testing the primary attitude control jets. He was relieved to find they were in a functional condition.

“So this is what it’s like,” Martine said, breaking his silence for the first time. “In a way it’s almost nothing.”

Tarrant looked back at him. “You want to take over?”

“I didn’t mean that. It’s just that there was so little … fuss.”

Tarrant nodded without speaking. People thought of 20th century space exploration with nostalgia because it provided the last perfect example of the Big Project. There was a romance about the long-lost ability to funnel billions of dollars and the energies of tens of thousands of men into the achieving of a single objective—especially a technological objective—and it still coloured racial thinking. Almost unnoticed, against a background of global trauma, the ion drive had been developed and made practical and then abandoned, but not before it had wrought a vast change in the realities of space flight. It had become possible for an individual to climb into a small ship and fly to, say, Venus simply by pointing the nose of the craft at the evening star and keeping going until he caught up with it.

Such a procedure would have been highly inefficient, but a brief session with a slide rule or hand-held calculator would have been sufficient to compensate for planetary movements and produce a reasonably effective flight plan. The same amount of work, coupled with some basic astrogation, made it just as easy to fly to an unseen objective like an asteroid. A final discrepancy of a million kilometres or of a few hours in the rendezvous time—disastrous to a 20th century chemically-driven craft—meant nothing more than an extra set of ad hoc course corrections.

In keeping with the premise that any experienced aircraft pilot could fly a space ship, Tarrant’s astronaut training had been almost totally concerned with learning how to destroy satellites before their automatic defences destroyed him, but he was humanly reluctant to make this clear to Martine and the others.

“There’s no need for any fuss,” he said, “as long as everybody knows what they’re doing.”

He checked that the pressure shell had not begun to leak and that the air regeneration system was functioning, then told Martine and the three volunteers to open their helmets and conserve the oxygen supplies in their suits. Two of the young men—Gerald Osaka and Bram Scotland—were dysteleonics researchers, and the third was a marine biologist called Evan Petersdorff. Their preparation for the flight had consisted of some hours of theoretical instruction almost two years earlier, and their nervousness was evident from the way in which they grinned too easily when they met his eye, and began nodding agreement before he had reached the end of a sentence. They gave the impression of being resourceful and competent, however, and he was satisfied they were level-headed enough to be told the basic facts of life in space.

“As you already know,” he said, “we’re going to rendezvous with a planetoid made of sea water. It’s the one on this side of the Solar System, which is why I’m interested in it, so we’ll be there in a few hours. When we get there I’m going to park the ship about two kilometres out, and we will complete the journey on suit power only.

“If the planetoid is rotating—and we have good reason to believe it is—we will penetrate the surface near one of the poles. We have these suits which were specially modified, and no doubt tested, by Miss Orchard,” Tarrant paused while the three youngsters gave their ready smiles, “so getting about inside the planetoid should be very easy, even for a non-swimmer. I’ve had a fair amount of experience with this type of suit, and I think I can promise you they won’t give any trouble.

“You four will remain near the surface, collecting samples, taking readings, and doing whatever you have to do. I have my own work to take care of, but I’ll be near you at all times and I foresee no difficulty at all in our wrapping the job up in two or three hours and getting back to the ship. After that, it’s an easy ride home.”

“Who’s got the picnic hamper?” Scotland said.

Tarrant was careful to join in the laughter which ensued. “The principal element of risk—and I must tell you this—comes from the ion drive unit of this ship.”

“It seems to be working very well,” Martine commented in a calm voice.

“It’s working perfectly, but I want everybody to be in possession of all the facts—just in case.” Tarrant twisted in his seat so that he could face his audience. “I might as well tell you that I quit the Air Force three years ago because they were making me fly these things, and I didn’t want to do it.”

“What was your objection?”

“Let me put it this way—the South Newzealand Air Force designation for this ship is Type 7, but its original Brazilian designation was Interceptor Type 83 Mark R2. In case you’re not familiar with the mark number system, the further through the alphabet you get the closer you are to flying a thing which is made of nothing but patches and plasticine. The term Interceptor means that the drive was originally rated for six hours at continuous maximum thrust—and that was a hundred years ago.”

Petersdorff looked thoughtful. “But the Air Force must have overhauled the propulsion unit in the meantime.”

“They tried that, but the units they tampered with always gave more trouble than the ones they left alone, so now they don’t bother. The pile, alternators and ion guns come in a sealed pack and they leave them that way.”

“Oh, Christ,” Petersdorff breathed. “Did you have to tell us that?”

“Yes, but don’t worry too much,” Tarrant said. “I wouldn’t have taken the ship up if I thought anything was going to go wrong with it, but I want everybody to stay strapped in their seats and only move around when absolutely necessary. Above all, if there’s a loss of thrust don’t allow yourselves to float—because it could come on again, without warning, at full boost and you might fall on something sharp. Even worse, you might fall on something delicate which we need.”

As Tarrant went on to outline the safety procedures he had learned from more experienced pilots, he found his thoughts straying to a small boat which was slicing through the Pacific night, provided it had not already been located and turned into incandescent gas. The only reason Will Somerville was caught in such a deadly trap was that he had taken a friendly interest in another man’s well-being. Tarrant had a yearning to set him free which went far beyond the obligations of his own code of ethics, but at the same time he found himself wondering about the girl called Myrah.

Her real personality was a mystery to him, and it would have been ridiculous to suppose they could have anything in common, yet she had a quality which in his mind distinguished her from the other two women. He could see the pallid nakedness of her everywhere he looked, and yet—perhaps for the first time in his life as an adult—he was overwhelmingly aware of an attractive female as a thinking individual, distinct and separate from all those physical attributes to which he was conditioned to respond.

It occurred to him that he might never have given Beth Kircher anything like a fair deal, and he was beginning to explore the novel idea when there was a slight fall-off in thrust from the ship’s drive. He glanced at the control panels, verified the change in impulsion and was composing words of reassurance when he saw that none of his companions had noticed the minute loss of weight. Deciding there would be little point in making his amateur crew more edgy than they already were, he suggested they should try to sleep while he refined the flight calculations. He ran the revised performance parameter through the ship’s minicomputer and established a new time for going into the deceleration phase which would span the second half of the journey.

During the next four hours there were three more marginal losses of thrust, and each time he computed a new flight profile on the assumption there would be no further deterioration. His instructors had told him that some drive units were inclined to be skittish in the early stages of operation, but the continued stepping down of output caused Tarrant some concern. He experimented with the various simplified controls, wishing he knew more about what lay beneath their housings, and then—playing a hunch—pulled the thrust control lever back a short distance and pushed it forward again to its original setting. There was an immediate boost in power, which caused someone behind him to give a low exclamation, and a glance at the instrumentation showed Tarrant the ship was back on the original acceleration of 1.1 gravities.

He stared at the thrust lever, appalled by what he might have discovered. The idea of controlling a ship on its progress through space was reduced to a preposterous fantasy unless the pilot could be certain of a number of basic engineering verities. High on the list, possibly at the top, was the requirement for a control linkage whose output had a perfect, fixed and unvarying relationship to the input. The guarantees a pilot demanded were routinely given by competent mechanical engineers, but—and this was every flier’s nightmare—they could be invalidated by an incident as trivial as a fitter dropping a lighted cigarette into his overalls and consequently forgetting to insert a locking pin in a push-rod joint.

Tarrant had no way of knowing if he was dealing with something as criminally simple as that, or if the fault lay in the exotic equipment at the heart of the drive unit, but suddenly he felt as though he was sitting on a time bomb. In particular, he disliked the possibility that the engine might cease delivering thrust altogether, especially at the peak velocities of turn-around time, in which case the ship was destined to carry five skeletons on a sight-seeing tour of the galaxy.

The sight of the Earth-Moon system shrinking to a brilliant double star failed to distract Tarrant’s mind from his fears. He maintained a broody silence until it was time to shut down the drive and reverse the direction of thrust, then he carried out the manoeuvre with painstaking deliberation, his senses alert for the slightest discrepancy between what the ship was doing and what he was commanding it to do.

There was no trouble at any point in the procedure, and with the engine configuration changed to bring the forward ion guns into play, he gradually advanced the thrust lever in its slot. His morbidly sensitive touch could detect no sloppiness or lack of response as the increasing thrust pushed him forward against his seat harness.

Somewhat mollified, Tarrant turned his seat to the aft-facing position and forced himself to relax. He was now positioned behind the rest of the crew, looking over the backs of their seats and through the rear canopy of the flight deck. The ship’s tail fins, illuminated by the drive flare and marker lights, were as steady as structures implanted in bedrock, and the slow wheeling of the stars beyond them was comfortingly like that caused by the Earth’s diurnal rotation.

Tarrant thought again about Myrah, and in a few seconds was in the heavy, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.

The planetoid was a crescent of searing brilliance whose horns spanned the entire field of view from the forward canopy, and in the absence of spatial referents Tarrant had difficulty with orientation. As far as his senses were concerned he could have been a million miles out from an object the size of Jupiter. Only the obvious changes in the planetoid’s aspect as he jockeyed the ship into position told him he was close to what, in cosmic terms, was a relatively insignificant body.

At a radar height of two kilometres above the northern pole he began work on the tricky task of matching velocities with the planetoid. The ship had not been provided with instrumentation suitable for measuring slow drifts, and Tarrant had to improvise as best he could with the coarse navigational equipment and direct sightings. It was only necessary to satisfy himself that, during a crew sortie of several hours, the ship would not blunder into the planetoid or recede beyond the effective range of the miniature propulsion units in the space suits, but a good twenty minutes of shunting and balancing had gone by before he felt any degree of confidence about quitting the ship.

“That’s it,” he announced finally. “We can go now.”

The others had grown noticeably more tense during the prolonged and cautious manoeuvring, and to offset their mood he locked all the flight controls with a series of confident flourishes. The last one he touched was the thrust control lever. It travelled perhaps a centimetre along its slot before locking into the zero impulsion notch. Tarrant, who had been under the impression it was already in the last notch, felt his mouth go dry. He signalled the others to make ready to leave the ship and, trying not to be too obvious about it, he ran a final check on their position relative to the planetoid. Within the limits of observational error, it was unchanging. The only conclusion he could draw was that there had been a short period in which the control system had been demanding thrust and the drive unit had not been supplying it.

Martine floated into view beside him. “Something wrong, Hal?”

Tarrant hesitated, then decided to confide his alarm. “There seems to be a bit of free play in the thrust control linkage. When the lever position indicated the drive was on, it was actually off.”

“It must have been in the lowest ranges.”

“The very bottom.”

Martine gave the equivalent of a shrug with his eyebrows. “I shouldn’t worry about it.”

“It’s not your. …” Tarrant hesitated. “All right—let’s go.”

While they were sealing their helmets and assembling the equipment for the expedition, Tarrant secretly pondered those traits in his character which had rendered him unsuitable for the profession of astronaut. Did he suffer from an excess of imagination? Or, was he—quite simply—a coward? To him it seemed blindingly obvious that a drive unit which was off when it should have been on could, with the lethal arbitrariness of a flawed machine, decide to be on when it was supposed to be off. The trouble was that his principal commitment of the hour was the shepherding of four inexperienced men on their first space walk, and to do it effectively he would have to inspire them with confidence in himself and in all the artifacts upon which their lives depended. He pushed the vague forebodings to the back of his mind and concentrated on the practicalities of preparing to destroy an enemy he had never seen, and which was protected by a cocoon of water many kilometres in thickness.

The torpedo which Miss Orchard’s technicians had hastily cobbled together for Tarrant’s use had started life as a deep-ocean, self-propelled camera sled. They had removed the photographic equipment and replaced it with fifty kilos of commercial explosive wired to detonate in proximity to a mass as large as they conceived the matter transceiver to be. The theory, explained by Miss Orchard with the aid of blackboard sketches, was that although the transceiver was drawing in water at a rate great enough to set up far-reaching currents there would be a dead spot—corresponding to the low-pressure zone behind a moving body—close to its inactive side.

“You’ll appreciate that we’re working on very low-grade evidence,” Miss Orchard had said, “but, if we grant the existence of this monster of yours, that’s where it has to be. I’m having a gravimeter fitted to the sled to enable it to find its own way to the centre of the planetoid, and when it gets to within five hundred metres or so the charge will detonate. At that range the shock wave won’t damage the transceiver, but it should play hell with any organism as loosely constructed as a siphonophore.”

She had paused to give Tarrant and Martine a malign smile. “It would probably be enough for your purpose if you only succeeded in wafting the beast out of the dead spot and into the current. It would probably come apart quite nicely in that case.”

The conversation had impressed Tarrant with the ability of the scientific mind to pursue a thread of logic to the end, regardless of the twists and turns on the way, and it kept returning to his mind while he made ready to leave the ship.

As soon as he had checked on his companions’ suits Tarrant bled the flight deck air into space and opened the forward canopy. This operation was new to him and he was unprepared for the sense of awe which held him as the canopy parted like the wing-casings of an insect, putting him in direct communion with silent expanses beyond. He experienced in an intensified form a childhood feeling that the first step of a long journey was just as significant as the last, that the road itself was somehow mysterious and frightening because it extended from the familiar present to an unknown future.

As he was unstrapping the sled from its anchorages he was acutely aware—and the knowledge both chilled and exhilarated him—that were he to push a small object away from him, no matter how gently, it would begin a slow flight which might last for ever, and if he imparted spin to it the object would still be rotating at the same rate a million years later. Every movement he made seemed to have implications for eternity.

Trying not to let himself be distracted, Tarrent guided the sled out into the vacuum while the others were experimenting with their suit propulsers. The miniature thrusters were positioned on the lower edges of the backpacks, supposedly at each individual’s centre of gravity, but there was an unavoidable degree of eccentricity and it took some practice before a man could progress through space without gently tumbling head over heels. Finally, however, the five were gathered around the sled with all their equipment, and began their descent to the planetoid. They remained silent as the globe of water expanded to meet them.

The layer of mist which covered the sunward side appeared to be quite thin and Tarrant soon was able to distinguish a greenish mottling here and there. This, he deduced, was caused by the vegetation which thrived in the freakish conditions and among whose deep-probing roots Myrah’s people still lived.

Pressure of events had prevented him from thinking much about that strange offshoot of the human race—a lost tribe of two hundred men, women and children—but they represented a problem which he and others would soon have to face. The grand plan laid down by Bergmann’s ancient technocrats made no provision for them, and they were doomed to extinction as their world shrank to nothing, unless a major effort could be made to bring them back to Earth. There were enough serviceable space craft littered around the planet to form a rescue fleet, but international cooperation on that scale was no longer feasible. A remote possibility was that they might be contacted and persuaded to swim voluntarily into the maw of the matter transceiver, but the obstacles along that route were so numerous that Tarrant’s mind shied away from considering them. His present burden of responsibility was already in danger of becoming insupportable. …

At a height of about one kilometre he gave the order to decelerate and began squirting jets of compressed gas from the suit’s forward nozzle. As the surface of the planetoid drew nearer he saw that it was not as even as he had at first supposed. Hillocks of water arose and gradually subsided in response to internal forces, their peaks sometimes emerging through the covering mist, creating the impression that the entire globe was a living entity. The notion led Tarrant’s thoughts in the direction of the dark, sentient core of the planetoid, and he felt a return of the unmanning revulsion and dread which had been inspired in him by the sight of a small fragment of Ka-tissue.

Miss. Orchard had confidently stated that fifty kilos of explosive would bring about the loss of connectivity necessary to reduce Ka to mindless protoplasm, but such assurances meant little when it came to a confrontation with the living enormity, the vast obscenity that was Ka. Tarrant became aware of the harsh, irregular sound of his own breathing, and knew it would be transmitted by the suit radio.

“Retain some velocity and go in feet first,” he said, taking refuge in practicalities. “We can muster again just below the surface and start getting used to. …” His voice was lost in a prolonged burst of static which lasted until the surface of the planetoid had been transformed into a vapour-shrouded plain only metres beneath him. Tarrant’s bafflement lasted perhaps a second, then he looked back over his shoulder and saw a very small, intensely brilliant constellation in stealthy movement against the hinterland of fixed stars.

“No!” he shouted, rationality swept away. “You can’t!”

There was a soft impact and suddenly he was in a clear blue universe where the suited figures of his companions threshed amid sprays of silver bubbles. He stabilised himself automatically and brought the sled under control at the end of its short tether. Other men clustered around him, making uncertain movements with their arms and legs, looking remarkably similar to divers in conventional underwater gear. The surface of the water, disturbed by their arrival, undulated nearby like a blanket of white fire.

“That radio interference,” Bram Scotland said, “was it from the ship’s ion guns?”

“We’ve lost her,” Tarrant replied tersely.

“Lost her! What do you mean we’ve lost her?” Petersdorff dosed with Tarrant, the panic-pitch of his voice slipping beyond his suit transducer’s range. “What sort of a bloody pilot are you?”

Tarrant fended him off. “It looks as though the drive unit was only dormant.”

“You bastard!” Petersdorff shouted. “I said, what sort of a bloody pilot are you supposed to be?”

“Your people had the ship for two years. That was long enough to make sure. …”

“This is wasting time,” Martine put in. “Hal, is there any chance of catching her? Using the suit thrusters?”

“No chance. No chance at all.”

“Does that mean we’re finished?” Gerald Osaka said, speaking for the first time.

Petersdorff turned to him, flailing a huge bubble out of his way. “What else can it mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it means, gentlemen.” Martine spoke in a calm but authoritative voice. “It means—and Hal will confirm this—that we go back to Earth the quick way. Through the matter transceiver.”