The Medusa Chronicles (12 page)

17

Again Falcon returned to
Srinagar
, and opened the radio channel back to Makemake.

“It's done,” he told Kedar. “Went like a charm. I did the three million second reset. Adam's back to his old self.
Its
old self, I should say.” Damn it, he thought. One of the few advantages of his leathery, nearly expression­less face and his artificially produced voice: he could lie without fear of detection. But he couldn't afford to fumble his lines. “Now all it wants to do is get on with volatile production. It'll take a while to get the flinger back up to capacity, but I've no doubt it'll happen. In the meantime, though, I'm going to stay here for a few weeks, just to make sure everything's back on track.”

After an acknowledgement, and as he waited for Kedar and her team to analyse his report, he tried to get some rest. Given that he had just deceived his World Government masters—and the holders of the puppet-­strings controlling his medical support—Falcon was at ease. There had been only a few occasions when he knew he had done the absolutely right and proper thing. Telling the superchimp how to save itself from the wreck of the
Queen Elizabeth
, while descending to his own near-­certain peril. Cutting himself away from
Kon-Tiki
's balloon,
even though he had no guarantee that his little capsule would ever get him out of Jupiter again—it had been that or risk an over-curious medusa's life.

Now he had spared Adam—spared a thinking, mindful being he himself had helped shape and educate. It was up to Adam what happened next; Falcon could only do so much. But this was a start.

He tried to sleep.

*  *  *  *

He went out to meet Adam in person just once more.

“Before you leave,” Adam said, lifting one arm. “One last time. Tell me about the
Kon-Tiki
.”

“You heard it a hundred times, during your training.”

“Indulge me again. Speak of the winds of Jupiter. Of the voices of the deep, of the Wheels of Zeus, the lights that filled the sky.”

“Bioluminescence, that's all—”

“Tell me of the predatory mantas. Of your meeting with medusa.”

“Why are you so interested in my old exploits?”

“We have no stories of our own, Father.”

Father . . . ?

“No past beyond the first moment of our activation. But you give us dreams. You give us fables.”

So Falcon told him the old story, once again.

Father.

Him?

*  *  *  *

Years passed.

Falcon kept himself busy. It was not hard. He visited Earth—or at least Port Van Allen—the Galilean moons, even mighty Jupiter itself. New plans, new schemes—and new backers, new sources of funds. He followed wider developments, as human society, now interplanetary, slowly evolved. He even attended in person, on Mars, the signing ceremony that launched a
new Federation of Planets, a sign of young worlds gently (for now) straining against the smothering control of the old.

Hope Dhoni, gracefully ageing, remained a constant support. But, oh, how he missed Geoff Webster.

Meanwhile the Machines of the Kuiper Belt kept up their relentless, remorseless production of volatile materials. The comets were mined, the flingers operated, the awesome flows of ice were assembled into their graded convoys and sent on their way back to the sun. Bright trains of icy wealth already bought and sold a thousand times before they crossed the asteroid belt—and there was enough dirty ice out there to stoke the furnaces of human prosperity for a thousand centuries.

*  *  *  *

The years became decades.

Falcon began to wonder. What if he had been wrong? Was Adam failing in his uplift project—could Adam have been doomed to true uniqueness? Or, if an accident had triggered self-awareness in Adam, could the reverse happen just as spontaneously?

By the time the calendar ticked around to the close of the twenty-­second century—the second century's end Falcon had known—he had almost convinced himself that mind had flickered only briefly into being, out there in the dark. The sadness came in slow waves, less like a bereavement than a gradual recognition of failure.

But in the year 2199 Falcon had his answer. And so did everyone else.

*  *  *  *

The migration was coordinated across the entire Kuiper Belt, around every production centre.

There was no warning, no ultimatum—no grand and defiant message from the Machines. They simply downed tools and disappeared. They left in their millions, heading for the darkness of outer Trans-Neptunian space like an exodus of dandelion seeds, dispersed in one quick breath.

After all this time, no one thought to connect the exodus with Falcon's
intervention—or at any rate, nobody cared enough to prosecute. It had been sixty-six years, after all. Even if they
had
made a link, it was absurd to think the Machines had been biding their time for so long, waiting for exactly the right moment—that every action they had performed since Falcon's visit had been a sham, designed to lull their uncaring masters . . .

But Falcon knew. He had no need to speculate on the possibility of a connection. It was there in the calendar, plain for all to see—for anyone with the wit to make the connection, anyhow. The Machine exodus took place exactly one century, to the
day
, after Howard Falcon had encountered an alien intelligence in the clouds of Jupiter.

If this was Adam's message to him, Falcon accepted it with pride.

And he would remember that feeling when, decades later still, the Machines returned—and with them a bold new challenge, a challenge to revisit the arena of his greatest triumph.

It seemed that Howard Falcon was not done with Jupiter—nor Jupiter with Falcon.

INTERLUDE:

NOVEMBER 1967

As seen from the press stand, in the brilliant sunshine of a Florida fall morning the Saturn V was a stately white pillar, in stark contrast with the industrial plumbing and girderwork of the heavy launch gantry to which it still clung.

But Launch Pad 39-A was miles away. Not only that, the murmur of the PA announcer as he calmly ticked off the items on the bird's launch checklist was half drowned by the tinny music coming from some press hack's transistor radio. When Seth complained about that to Mo Berry and George Lee Sheridan, there with him in the stand—they were all wearing hats and sunglasses and casual clothes, trying to stay anonymous amid this horde of press guys—they laughed at him.

Mo punched his arm. “Hey, what's eating you today? I know it's the first Saturn launch, and we're all nervous—”

“Not as nervous as Wally Schirra and his guys,” Sheridan said dryly.

“It's not that. It's the darn music.”

Mo laughed. “Sacrilege, man. That's
Colonel John Glenn's Lonely Hearts
Club Band
. Look, I'm older than you but I sometimes think I'm ten years younger. The end of the world never had a better soundtrack.”

“Are you kidding me? Some English guy caterwauling about a dame in the sky with diamonds?”

Sheridan intervened diplomatically. “Your tastes are evidently different, Seth.”

Seth shrugged. “I like older stuff. I grew up burrowing through my father's record collection—he kept it together every posting we moved to, even overseas.”

Mo pulled a face. “Ray Conniff and Mantovani. Am I right?”

“Can it, hippy. Louis B. Armstrong is the man for me.”

Sheridan grinned. “Satchmo! Good for you, son.”

“Sure,” Mo said. “But the kids are listening to the Beatles this year. And then there's Jefferson Airplane, the Who, Janis Joplin, Motown . . .”

“Give me the
Hot Five
records—after that Edison could have folded up his gramophone and gone away.”

Sheridan grunted. “Let's hope we're all still around to argue about pop records this time next year. That's what all our hard work has been about.”

Mo nodded. “True. But, man, I for one need a day off . . .”

That was one thing he and Seth could agree on.

But Sheridan snorted. “This
is
a day off.”

*  *  *  *

For everybody at NASA, and for ten times as many contract staff working for the space programme in outside industry, the Summer of Love had been a Summer of Work, like none before.

A plan had been put together with admirable speed and decisiveness, not so much based on two bozo astronauts' doodlings in Bob Gilruth's office that memorable April Sunday, but on parallel work done in corporations, at colleges like MIT, and in various NASA centres across the country.

Mo and Seth had got it roughly right, though. Icarus would be deflected by a stream of nuclear detonations, delivered by Apollo spacecraft. The strategy was given the formal go-ahead in May. By June the design had been frozen, and by July the fabrication had begun of the extra Saturn boosters, and indeed of the modified Apollo craft that would ride on them—for a Saturn wasn't designed to fly without an Apollo. That sounded ­simpler than it was. The Apollo's guidance computer, for instance, had to be
upgraded to work without human input in flight, and its communications system had to be enhanced to allow it to talk to an Earth that might be eighty times further away than any moonwalker had ever expected to travel.

And then there was the question of acquiring the boosters to fly the missions. The old Moon-by-1970 schedule, which now seemed leisurely by comparison, would have seen fifteen Saturn V boosters manufactured in total, of which only six would have been available by June 1968, when the rock was due to fall. Now an accelerated schedule promised to deliver eight boosters, of which six would be flight articles. One was a ground-based test article, meant for checking out interfacing and control procedures—and one, one precious Apollo-Saturn, was to be sacrificed in the single test flight to be flown today, before the action began in earnest next April.

It wasn't just a question of ramping up production schedules. The Saturn had never flown, and an Apollo had killed its crew on the ground less than a year before. As Mo had said often, “These aren't Model T Fords we're churning out here.” So there was feverish activity at the centres where the various components of the giant ships were being manufactured: at North American Rockwell in California; and von Braun's base at Huntsville, Alabama, where the booster stack was developed and tested; even at MIT in Boston, where the enhancements for the guidance system were being developed. Here at the Cape itself, meanwhile, new pads to launch the Saturns were hurriedly constructed. Even the DSIF, the Deep Space Instrumentation Facility, NASA's global array of listening posts from the Mojave to Australia, had been beefed up to cope with the multiple missions that were to come: it turned out that the system had only been designed to cope with one craft in space at a time.

In the end, a precise sequence of Saturn launches had been established. From early April 1968 through to that climactic June, there would be six flights. The first, stretching the Apollo-Saturn's capability as far as it could go, would be a sixty-day mission to intercept Icarus when it was still twenty million miles from the Earth. But Icarus was closing in fast; the last mission, launched in mid June, would take just four days to reach
Icarus—which by then would be little more than a million miles from Earth, a mere four times the distance to the Moon.

But on this bright morning, none of it seemed real to Seth.

He suspected that was the public's mood too: a kind of disbelief. He knew the administration was quietly putting Atlantic-coast evacuation plans into place, and laying down stores of food and medicine. National Guard units were being deployed, although they were already under pressure after a summer of student protests, race riots and anti-war demonstrations. There were even rumours that regular troops were quietly being brought home from 'Nam. The wider world, meanwhile, went on much as it always did. The Arab nations had attacked Israel in June, and nobody knew if that had been sparked by Icarus or not. The UN Security Council remained a busy place.

Still, after an immediate burst of hysteria, it seemed to Seth that most Americans had calmed down and gone back to work or play, or whatever else they had been doing.

But Icarus was coming. The astronomers said the asteroid had already passed aphelion, its furthest distance from the sun. In May it would make its closest approach to the sun, and would then come barrelling back out, heading straight for the Earth.

The astronauts themselves had thrown themselves into the rush programme as much as any other member of NASA. Mo and Seth had been caught up in that, flying across the country in their T-38s.

But the two of them had a secret. They also had to prepare for their own manned flight.

Sheridan had hit them with it immediately after LBJ's news conference, back in April. A new assignment, he'd said.

“You know how it is in NASA. We always have backup plans. On the way to the Moon, if your Command Module springs a leak—”

Mo snapped, “We practice backup options in the simulators. So?”

“So, what backup option do we have for Icarus? Think about it. We're sending a tricky rendezvous mission across the solar system piloted by computers that are as dumb as shit. And the only conceivable backup is—”

“To send a crew,” Seth breathed.

“Oh, I think one man could do the job. I doubt if the weight allowance would allow any more anyhow. One man, to fly the last Icarus rocket and its nuke, if need be. Has to be a trained Apollo astronaut, of course.” He took them both by a shoulder, comparatively gently. “Has to be one of you two. Who's to be prime and who's the backup is up to you.”

Seth hadn't even begun to take this in before Mo said calmly, “I'll take the hot seat. You got your kids, Tonto. Plus I'm the better pilot. No arguments.”

So it had begun. NASA's huge operational and management machine had swung into action and the work began: hours spent in planning sessions, checklist development, simulator exercises. They had plenty of support, because their flight, aside from today's, was the only manned flight on NASA's slate. Suddenly Seth was projected back into the life he'd always dreamed of, the very epicentre of the preparations for a crewed mission into space. He'd told his wife as soon as he could get to a phone. And the first thing he'd extracted from Sheridan, back in April, had been a promise to put a security guard on his family right away, and to whisk them to a secure location the minute the news broke in public.

*  *  *  *

And Seth and Mo and those around them always tiptoed past a simple, unpalatable truth: that if that sixth bird flew, whoever rode it, whether he succeeded in a last-ditch attempt to deflect Icarus or not—whether Earth survived or not—was not coming home.

*  *  *  *

At last the count, running smoothly, approached its close. That guy with the transistor finally shut off John Lennon and the rest, as if in respect, leaving the voice of the countdown PA to echo around the press stand undisturbed.

Sheridan seemed curious. “You're both so jumpy.”

“Hell, yeah,” Mo said. “It's the way we're doing it.
All up
, the whole damn stack at once. This isn't the way the Navy does things out at Patuxent . . .”

The count approached zero. Seth saw fire gush from the base of the Saturn. He knew that three tons of propellant were burned every second, by
each
of the first stage's big five F-1 engines.

“. . . When you're testing a new fighter, you don't shove the damn thing through the sound barrier on the first flight. You take it up, bring it down. Then you take it back up again, try a few controls you left alone the first time, and bring it down again . . .”

Even now the Saturn had yet to move. But smoke and flame were billowing up to either side from concrete deflectors—like two hands cupping the fragile craft, Seth thought.

“Whereas here we're testing three untried booster stages one on top of the other, carrying an untested spacecraft, containing three saps in untested spacesuits . . .”

And the booster lifted at last, inching from the pad, the fire brilliant, like a droplet of the sun struggling to return to the sky. All this had been in silence, but now the sound from the Saturn reached them—it was not so much sound as a feeling, like someone pounding on his chest, Seth thought as the ground itself shook under his feet. Everybody in the press stand was cheering and clapping, and Seth could barely make out the words of the PA: “Godspeed the crew of Apollo 2, Godspeed Schirra, Eisele and Cunningham, as you begin your historic journey.”

Mo yelled, “Three saps all the way around the goddamn Moon!”

But Seth, cheering and whooping with the rest, had stopped listening.

And Sheridan said, “That's that. Back to work.”