Medusa's Children

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The helicopter which picked up Tarrant and Martine was a high-speed machine with rotor-tip jets and the initials of the Marine Technology Board in bold lettering on its fuselage.

As soon as both men had been safely winched inside, it dipped its nose and accelerated away to the south-west with a surge of power which Tarrant found exhilarating. It was the first time in three years that he had been airborne and his whole body took part in remembering the sensations of flight. The experience would have been entirely pleasant had it not served as a reminder that—incredibly—he was soon to be reintroduced to another type of flying.

It was too noisy for normal conversation in the helicopter’s passenger compartment, so he sat close to a window and stared down at the vivid blue ocean and its white-chevroned ships. The world’s supply of petroleum was virtually exhausted, which meant that the small number of remaining aircraft were destined to grow even fewer, and men had flocked back to the highways of the sea. The generous physics of water buoyancy made the solar-cell-battery-motor combination viable as means of propulsion, and the ordinary traveller had once more learned to measure his journeys in weeks rather than hours. As a military aviator Tarrant had to some extent been insulated from the forces of technological necessity. Aloft again, he felt that the crews of the seemingly motionless vessels far below might have been members of an alien race. Certainly, they were a generation of new men with whom, at that moment, he felt very little in common.

Tired and dissociated, he slumped in his seat as the helicopter carried him towards an undisclosed destination. It stopped to refuel on a small and nameless atoll, then flew on to a larger island which was traversed by an airstrip. He and Martine were transferred to a fixed-wing aircraft which, after a two-hour flight, put down on yet another island which Tarrant suspected might be one of South Newzealand’s acquisitions in the Kermadec group. They disembarked and were met by four civilians who greeted Martine warmly while appearing not to notice Tarrant’s existence, and the group went towards an administration block at the edge of the airfield.

Tarrant, who was becoming used to his ambiguous role—somewhere between that of a prisoner and a valuable item of luggage—looked all around him as he walked. His attention was immediately caught by a large hangar whose blocky shape he recognised as having been specially designed to accommodate a Type 7 ion rider. He took a deep breath, finally convinced that it was all true, that he was committed to flying into interplanetary space in a century-old craft which had been none too reliable when it was new.

“Feeling okay?” Martine fell into step beside him.

“Of course,” Tarrant said. “This is all routine for me.”

Martine smiled sympathetically. “I’m sorry about all the cloak-and-dagger stuff. You’ll be meeting Miss Orchard in a minute and she’ll fill in the background for you—until then I’m not free to speak.”

Tarrant had not heard Miss Orchard mentioned previously and his imagination conjured up an image of an archetypal stenographer, complete with high heels, short skirt and notebook. They entered the administration building, went up a flight of stairs, and passed through a series of interconnected offices where their four escorts discreetly faded from sight. Men and women working at desks and drafting machines glanced at them incuriously as they passed.

Finally Martine ushered Tarrant into a larger, square room which had a window overlooking the airfield and on the opposite wall—traditional appurtenance of the senior scientist and engineer—an old-style blackboard. A tall, plump, scholarly-looking woman of about sixty was seated at an overflowing desk. She wore a loose-fitting grey dress and had her hair drawn back into a bun, but Tarrant’s first impression of austerity was offset by the broad smile with which she greeted his appearance. Her teeth were strong and well preserved, but stained with tobacco.

“Miss Orchard,” Martine said. “I’d like you to meet Hal Tarrant.”

She nodded and flipped a pack of cigarettes at him. “Have a smoke, Hal—by the look of you, you’re bloody near all-in.”

Tarrant caught the pack and, although he had not wanted one, took out a cigarette to give himself time to adjust to Miss Orchard’s manner, which was vastly different from that of the demure ladies of Cawley Island. He picked up a lighter from the desk and puffed the cigarette into life.

“Hasn’t much to say for himself, has he?” Miss Orchard leaned back in her chair and surveyed Tarrant appraisingly.

“He’s had a rough time,” Martine replied.

“Nonsense! There’s nothing like a quick drown before breakfast to set you up for the day.” Miss Orchard grimaced at her own lack of finesse and pointed to a chair. “Do you want to sit down, Hal?”

“I’m all right,” he said stiffly, still unsure of his ground.

“Take a seat anyway—you make the place look untidy standing there. You too, Theo.” While they were sitting down Miss Orchard lit a cigarette with practised movements, all the while continuing to stare frankly at Tarrant. “From what I hear, you’re lucky to be alive, young man.”

He nodded. “I think I am.”

“That tissue you had in your lungs might have had something to do with your survival, you know—by overriding the normal panic response to drowning.”

“How do you …?” Tarrant looked in surprise from her to Martine.

“Oh, I had the biologist on the Trilby carry out some tests on it while you were on your way here.” Miss Orchard narrowed her eyes behind a screen of smoke. “On what’s left of it, I should say. Destroying half the specimen in acid was one hell of bloody waste, Theo.”

“That was my idea,” Tarrant said. “I wanted to destroy all of it.”

Martine leaned forward with his head tilted. “What sort of test did you organise?”

“I had Norden put a laboratory animal in a container with a small piece of the tissue.”

“Nice.” Martine nodded his approval. “And what happened?”

Tarrant tried to ignore the crawling sensation in his spine as Miss Orchard described how a white rat had nosed the black jelly, apparently under the impression it was a foodstuff. The tissue had been seen to flow into its mouth, and from that moment the animal’s behaviour patterns had been highly abnormal. It had refused to take part in mazerunning tests, had stopped responding to stimuli, and when deliberately presented with a chance to escape from the laboratory had bolted towards the side of the ship in an attempt to reach the sea. The biologist had recaptured and killed it, and was currently sectioning the lungs to investigate the link-up with the rat’s central nervous system.

“I’ll be interested to hear what he finds,” Miss Orchard concluded, turning back to Tarrant. “What’s the matter with you, young man?”

“If you really want to know about that tissue,” Tarrant said, “try the experiment I suggested to Mr Martine this morning. Try swallowing some of it yourself.”

“So you have got something to say.” Miss Orchard looked pleased. “Do you know, Hal, that I’m Project Leader on the dysteleonics investigation?”

“Nobody told me.”

“Are you surprised?”

“No.”

“I see.” A malicious glint appeared in Miss Orchard’s eyes. “You don’t think I’m too young and pretty for the job?”

“All I’m thinking about is that a friend of mine is going to be killed.”

“I’m sorry.” She looked genuinely apologetic. “Well, here’s the position. Until today the biggest leap forward we managed to achieve on the dysteleonics thing came two years ago when we discovered the water planetoids which Bergmann had postulated. On the strength of that I managed to appropriate a space craft, and I even got funds for an expedition which would have obtained water samples and looked for a matter transceiver.”

“What went wrong?”

“We’ve got all kinds of enemies in the Government—some of them I don’t even know about. They let me keep the ship, but all of a sudden the Air Force decided it couldn’t release any qualified pilots for research work.”

“I’m not a qualified astronaut,” Tarrant said, feeling a touch of coolness on his brow. “I flew three training missions.”

“Three or thirty—it makes no difference.”

Tarrant’s jaw sagged. “Are you serious?”

“I mean that an ion ship isn’t like a first-generation space capsule. You don’t measure your fuel reserves in seconds. Once you’re up there you can fly around to your heart’s content—practise as much as you want.”

“It’s all so simple.” Tarrant wondered if he had made the sarcasm sufficiently obvious. “Why didn’t you get somebody else to do it a couple of years ago? An out-of-work janitor, perhaps, or a. …”

“Don’t go huffy on me, Hal,” Miss Orchard said impatiently. “I’m the one who’s offering you a ship—and a volunteer crew, as well. Of course, I’d want my interests properly looked after when you were up there.”

Tarrant felt a sensation akin to drowning, and he made a damping movement with both hands. “Miss Orchard—what are you talking about?”

“As far as I’m concerned, I’m talking about proving a scientific theory. As far as you’re concerned, I’m talking about saving the lives of your friends.”

“How?”

Miss Orchard looked at him reproachfully. “I should have thought that was obvious—you need to destroy the central mass of the creature you refer to as Ka.”

“I. …” Tarrant had difficulty in speaking. “I didn’t think anybody was going to believe me about that.”

“Most people wouldn’t,” Martine put in. “But we’ve satisfied ourselves that the scrap of tissue we got out of your chest isn’t an autonomous unit. There has to be the equivalent of a biological broadcasting station somewhere.”

“But you accept the principle of telepathy?”

Martine glanced at Miss Orchard, and she nodded. “We believe that dysteleonics transmission and a number of mental phenomena—including so-called telepathy—are manifestations of the same thing,” he said. “I’m prepared to bet that a good dysteleonics detector, if such a thing existed, would show a weak dysteleonics field surrounding that blob of jelly. Surrounding our brains too, for that matter.”

Tarrant tried to weigh the implications of Martine’s words, but Miss Orchard’s earlier statement was in the process of exploding in his mind like a depth charge, sending up fountains of idea-shards. He looked at her in awe.

“Did you say we should destroy Ka?” He fought to keep his voice steady. “You want me to go up there and kill Ka?”

She shook her head. “Let’s try to be a bit more precise, Hal. I want that planetoid investigated at first hand—you want your friends released from an outside control which is endangering their lives.” She paused to light another cigarette from the end of her first. “As a scientist, I would prefer the creature to be kept alive for study by my colleagues. Luckily, though, it won’t be necessary for you to annihilate it completely—breaking up the central mass and reducing its connectivity should be enough for your purposes. As soon as its cohesion is gone the boosters in your friends’ lungs will cease to be boosters, and they’ll be themselves again.

“We’ll have to work out a technique for expelling the tissue, of course. We could always half-drown them, but I think that method has a certain lack of elegance, don’t you? Luckily we have. …”

“Luckily, you say?” Tarrant gave a shaky laugh as he strove to rise up through the spate of words. “You’ve got nothing to lose.”

“On the contrary, Hal,” Martine said soberly. “Miss Orchard is risking her job and a long term in prison. By bringing you here instead of handing you over to the Navy we’ve made ourselves accessories to your nuclear bomb theft. By tomorrow morning we could all be under arrest.”

The telephone on the desk blinked an amber light and Miss Orchard picked it up. She listened for a moment, set the instrument down and stubbed out her cigarette amid the ruins of others.

“Balls to tomorrow morning,” she said brusquely. “There’s an Admiralty plane on the way right now. Make up your mind what you’re going to do, Hal—if you’re going you’ll have to blast off in less than three hours.”