Collected Stories Of Arthur C. Clarke (186 page)

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-capsizing 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, no 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. ‘It’s 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 his 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 a 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 while 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 it’s no more fantastic than the human eye.’

‘Then we have to play safe and assume intelligence. For the present, therefore, 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.

7. Prime Directive

It was growing darker, but Falcon scarcely noticed as he strained his eyes toward that living cloud in the field of the telescope. The wind that was steadily sweeping
Kon-Tiki
around the funnel of the great whirlpool had now brought him within twelve miles of the creature. If he got much closer than six, he would take evasive action. Though he felt certain that the medusa’s electric weapons were short ranged, he did not wish to put the matter to the test. That would be a problem for future explorers, and he wished them luck.

Now it was quite dark in the capsule. That was strange, because sunset was still hours away. Automatically, he glanced at the horizontally scanning radar, as he had done every few minutes. Apart from the medusa he was studying, there was no other object within about sixty miles of him.

Suddenly, with startling power, he heard the sound that had come booming out of the Jovian night – the throbbing beat that grew more and more rapid, then stopped in mid-crescendo. The whole capsule vibrated with it like a pea in a kettledrum.

Falcon realised two things almost simultaneously during the sudden, aching silence.
This
time the sound was not coming from thousands of miles away, over a radio circuit. It was in the very atmosphere around him.

The second thought was even more disturbing. He had quite forgotten – it was inexcusable, but there had been other apparently more important things on his mind – that most of the sky above him was completely blanked out by
Kon-Tiki
’s gasbag. Being lightly silvered to conserve its heat, the great balloon was an effective shield both to radar and to vision.

He had known this, of course; it had been a minor defect of the design, tolerated because it did not appear important. It seemed very important to Howard Falcon now – as he saw that fence of gigantic tentacles, thicker than the trunks of any tree, descending all around the capsule.

He heard Brenner yelling: ‘Remember the Prime directive! Don’t alarm it!’ Before he could make an appropriate answer that overwhelming drumbeat started again and drowned all other sounds.

The sign of a really skilled test pilot is how he reacts not to foreseeable emergencies, but to ones that nobody could have anticipated. Falcon did not hesitate for more than a second to analyse the situation. In a lightning-swift movement, he pulled the rip cord.

That word was an archaic survival from the days of the first hydrogen balloons; on
Kon-Tiki
, the rip cord did not tear open the gasbag, but merely operated a set of louvres around the upper curve of the envelope. At once the hot gas started to rush out;
Kon-Tiki
, deprived of her lift, began to fall swiftly in this gravity field two and a half times as strong as Earth’s.

Falcon had a momentary glimpse of great tentacles whipping upward and away. He had just time to note that they were studded with large bladders or sacs, presumably to give them buoyancy, and that they ended in multitudes of thin feelers like the roots of a plant. He half expected a bolt of lightning – but nothing happened.

His precipitous rate of descent was slackening as the atmosphere thickened and the deflated envelope acted as a parachute. When
Kon-Tiki
had dropped about two miles, he felt that it was safe to close the louvres again. By the time he had restored buoyancy and was in equilibrium once more, he had lost another mile of altitude and was getting dangerously near his safety limit.

He peered anxiously through the overhead windows, though he did not expect to see anything except the obscuring bulk of the balloon. But he had sideslipped during his descent, and part of the medusa was just visible a couple of miles above him. It was much closer than he expected – and it was still coming down, faster than he would have believed possible.

Mission Control was calling anxiously. He shouted: ‘I’m OK – but it’s still coming after me. I can’t go any deeper.’

That was not quite true. He could go a lot deeper – about one hundred and eighty miles. But it would be a one-way trip, and most of the journey would be of little interest to him.

Then, to his great relief, he saw that the medusa was levelling off, not quite a mile above him. Perhaps it had decided to approach this strange intruder with caution; or perhaps it, too, found this deeper layer uncomfortably hot. The temperature was over fifty degrees centigrade, and Falcon wondered how much longer his life-support system could handle matters.

Dr Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the Prime directive.

‘Remember – it may only be inquisitive!’ he cried, without much conviction. ‘Try not to frighten it!’

Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer and an astronaut. After the full implications of the Prime directive had been carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: ‘Then if there was no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?’ The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: ‘That’s an
excellent
summing up.’

It had seemed funny at the time; it was not at all amusing now.

And then Falcon saw something that made him even more unhappy. The medusa was still hovering about a mile above him – but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated, and was stretching down toward
Kon-Tiki
, thinning out at the same time. As a boy he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from a storm cloud over the Kansas plains. The thing coming toward him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the sky.

‘I’m rapidly running out of options,’ he reported to Mission Control. ‘I now have only a choice between frightening it – and giving it a bad stomach-ache. I don’t think it will find
Kon-Tiki
very digestible, if that’s what it has in mind.’

He waited for comments from Brenner, but the biologist remained silent.

‘Very well. It’s twenty-seven minutes ahead of time, but I’m starting the ignition sequencer. I hope I’ll have enough reserve to correct my orbit later.’

He could no longer see the medusa; once more it was directly overhead. But he knew that the descending tentacle must now be very close to the balloon. It would take almost five minutes to bring the reactor up to full thrust …