The Medusa Encounter Read Free Page B

cameras and microphones in the little copse, as there were everywhere on the grounds. Sparta knew they were there, although she thought Blake did not. Her eye sought one out where it glistened like a carbon crystal against the gray trunk of a tree. She stared at it over his shoulder.
She exposed herself to those who watched and listened partly to defy them, but mostly because she loved Blake and would have him this way if they would not let her have him any other.
    Later he lay touching her, close against her, flank to flank. His skin tingled and his face was flush with a happiness he had often imagined but now knew for the first time. Her head was on his arm; his other arm hovered over her skin, close enough to feel its radiant warmth. He trailed his middle finger down the faint pink line of the scar that ran from her sternum to her navel.
“It’s almost gone,” he said. “In another week . . .”
    “I’ll pass for a human being again,” she said. Her voice was flat. Her eyes stared past him, up at the colorful leaves overhead, and through them to the dark sky-vault beyond. “And then we’ll leave this place.”
“Ellen . . . do you understand what’s happening?” With practice it got easier to call her Ellen, although he would always think of her as Linda, the name she was born with.
    Only Sparta thought of herself as Sparta. No one else knew her secret name, any more than a human knows the secret name of an animal. “I think the commander’s keeping his word. This is the R & R he’s been promising me for so long.”
“R & R.” He smiled. “Very restful.” He leaned over her and kissed the corner of her swollen, perpetually parted lips. “Very recuperative. But why won’t he tell us where we are?”
     
“We both know where we are—the Hendrik Hudson nature preserve. We could pinpoint the coordinates on any map.”
    “Yes, but why won’t he name the place? And why not let us come and go? The night we arrived here, after you were asleep, he told me I could leave whenever I wanted, but if I did I couldn’t come back. Why the mystery? We’re on his side.”
“You’re sure of that,” she said—not quite a question.
     
But he took it as a question, and it surprised him. “It was you. . . .”
     
“I’m sure of one thing”—she pulled him down to cover her, to feel his warm weight hiding her from the sky—“that I love you.”

II
“The man who proposed Kon-Tiki is Howard Falcon,” said the commander. “He will personally pilot the Jupiter probe.”
    It was the same bright morning, but no one could have known it from the surroundings—a dim, quiet basement briefing room, its walls and ceiling carpeted with the same brown wool as its floor, its only illumination leaking from brass-shaded lamps on low tables beside the leather armchairs where Sparta, Blake, and the commander nestled.
“How did one man get that kind of power?” Blake asked.
    “Falcon is . . . an unusual specimen. This will explain.” The commander’s raw voice was without resonance in the slowly vanishing room . . . in the darkest center of which an image had begun to form, filling space with the moving landscape of Arizona’s high sagebrush plains, seen from a great altitude. “What we’ve pieced together here happened eight years ago.”
* * *
    The Queen Elizabeth was over five kilometers above the Grand Canyon, dawdling along at a comfortable 300 kilometers per hour, when from the liner’s bridge Howard Falcon spotted the camera platform closing in from the right. He had been expecting it—nothing else was cleared to fly at this altitude—but he was not too happy to have company. Although he welcomed any signs of public interest, he also wanted as much empty sky as he could get. After all, he was the first man in history to navigate a ship half a kilometer long.
    So far this first test flight had gone perfectly. Ironically enough, the only problem had been the fiftyyear-old aircraft carrier Chairman Mao ,