A Meeting with Medusa

8. Between Two Worlds

You’re a hero now, Howard,” said Webster, “not just a celebrity. You’ve given them something to think about, injected some excitement into their lives. Not one in a million will actually travel to the Outer Giants, but the hole human race will go in imagination. And that’s what counts.”

“I’m glad to have made your job a little easier.”

Webster was too old a friend to take offence at the note of irony. Yet it surprised him. And this was not the first change in Howard that he had noticed since the return from Jupiter.

The Administrator pointed to the famous sign on his desk, borrowed from an impresario of an earlier age: ASTONISH ME.

“I’m not ashamed of my job. New knowledge, new resources, they’re all very well. But men also need novelty and excitement. Space travel has become routine, you’ve made it a great adventure once more. It will be a long, long time before we get Jupiter pigeonholed. And maybe longer still before we understand those medusae. I still think that one knew where your blind spot was. Anyway, have you decided on your next move? Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, you name it.”

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about Saturn, but I’m not really needed there. It’s only one gravity, not two and a half like Jupiter. So men can handle it.”

Men, thought Webster. He said “men’.

He’s never done that before. And when did I last hear him use the word “we’? He’s changing, slipping away from us…

“Well,” he said aloud, rising from his chair to conceal his slight uneasiness, “let’s get the conference started. The cameras are all set up and everyone’s waiting. You’ll meet a lot of old friends.”

He stressed the last word, but Howard showed no response. The leathery mask of his face was becoming more and more difficult to read. Instead, he rolled back from the Administrator’s desk, unlocked his undercarriage so that it no longer formed a chair, and rose on his hydraulics to his full seven feet of height. It had been good psychology on the part of the surgeons to give him that extra twelve inches, to compensate somewhat for all that he had lost when the Queen had crashed.

Falcon waited until Webster had opened the door, then pivoted neatly on his balloon tires and headed for it at a smooth and silent twenty miles an hour. The display of speed and precision was not flaunted arrogantly, rather, it had become quite unconscious.

Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement, and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.

He now knew why he had dreamed about that superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between worlds; and so was he.

He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface. The life support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all…

The human race was becoming more remote, the ties of kinship tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of stable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere, they should stick to their natural homes, Earth, Moon, Mars.

Some day the real masters of space would be machines, not men, he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness the first immortal midway between two orders of creation.

He would, after all, be an ambassador, between the old and the new, between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them.

Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.