The Medusa Encounter Read Free

pierced with stained-glass windows. The old freebooter who’d had the place built had made his loot in a different age; he would have been startled but not necessarily disapproving of the uses to which his estate had been put in the two centuries since.
    Clipped green lawns, damp in the October sunshine, sloped away from the house, ending at cliff’s edge and the neat border of the woods. In front, a long gravel drive meandered through the trees and looped around before the main entrance.
Behind the stone wall that surrounded the place, hidden among the thickly clustered tree trunks and autumn foliage, were lasers, covered trenches, antiaircraft railguns. . . .
    The gray robot limousine moved slowly up the drive, the crunch of its tires in the gravel louder than the whisper of its turbines. As it stopped, the mansion’s big doors swung open and the commander came out. When he saw the much smaller man who got out of the back seat of the car, his face wrinkled into a smile, thin but warm. “Jozsef!” He strode down the steps, hand outstretched.
Jozsef met him halfway up the steps. “How very good to see you.” Their handshake was prelude to a quick, firm embrace.
    The two men were the same age but in every other way different. Jozsef’s tweedy suit was elbowpatched and baggy at the knees; it and his middle-European accent suggested that he was a displaced intellectual, an academic, a denizen of the classroom and the library stacks. The commander wore a plaid shirt and faded jeans that said he was most comfortable out of doors.
“Surprised to see you in person,” said the commander. He had a faint Canadian accent, and his voice had the texture of beach stones rattling in receding surf. “But damn glad.”
     
“After I analyzed the material you sent, I thought it would be good to share some of my thoughts with you personally. And I . . . I’ve brought a new drug.”
     
“Come in.”
     
“Is she inside?”
     
“No, they’re both on the grounds. You want to see her?”
     
“I . . . not yet. It would be best if she did not see the car,” Jozsef added.
     
The commander spoke gruffly into his wrist unit and the robot limousine rolled off toward the garage. The men walked up the steps into the house.
     
They walked down an echoing paneled hall toward the library. White-uniformed staff people nodded deferentially and moved out of their way.
     
“Already three weeks since you rescued her from Mars,” said Jozsef. “Astonishing how time slips past us.”
     
“Rescued?” The commander smiled. “Kidnapped is a better word. And ‘persuaded’ Redfield to come along.”
     
“You didn’t bother persuading her physicians,” Jozsef remarked.
     
“I didn’t much like the chief surgeon.”
     
“Yes, well . . . however arrogant, he seems to have done a good job on her,” said Jozsef. “She seems well.”
     
“In her body.”
     
“Her dreams are not symptoms of illness. They are the key to all that confronts us.”
     
“So you’ve explained.”
     
“Once we understand what she knows—but does not know she knows—we will triumph at last.”
     
“Then maybe you’ll let her know about you,” the commander suggested.
     
“I look forward to that day.”
     
“You know I’m with you, Jozsef.” The commander fixed the older man with a cold blue stare. “Whatever the cost.”
    Beyond the wall overlooking the river the trees grew to the cliff top. Unseen, screened by the woods below, a magneplane whistled past on the riverside track. A falcon settled in the top of a ruddy oak, carefully folding its angled wings, oblivious to the man and woman who walked a few meters away, at eye level.
“What did you say when he asked you to join the force?”
     
“What I told you. I said no.”
     
“You could never resist explanations.”
    “Oh, I made explanations.” He smiled. “I was born rich, I said, and it ruined me. I told him I was insubordinate by nature and disinclined to accept arbitrary