The Medusa Encounter by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online

built the mansion was evidently a fan of Sir Walter Scott’s, or had had dreams of Camelot.
“We think they had Falcon targeted before the wreck,” said the commander, setting down his plate.
    “ Targeted him?” Blake had gotten his greens down without choking, but he was still incredulous—not least because this Space Board officer, this old guy whom at first he’d taken for nothing more than Ellen’s fellow employee, was making sounds like he knew as much about the Free Spirit as Blake himself knew, information that Blake had risked his life to get.
“The best balloon pilot in the world,” Sparta said, as if it were self-evident. “Someone realized—even before Falcon did—that to live in the clouds of Jupiter, you need a balloon.”
     
“What’s Jupiter got to do with it?” Blake demanded.
     
“I don’t know,” said Sparta. “But it’s Jupiter that I keep going to in my dreams. . . .”
     
“Ellen.” The commander tried to warn her off the subject.
     
“Falling into the clouds. The wings overhead. The voices of the deep.”
     
Blake eyed the commander. “Her dreams?”
    “We’re working from the evidence,” the commander said. “Consider that even for the Board of Space Control it’s almost impossible to mount an operation of this technical and logistical and political complexity in two years. We think Webster must have known Falcon wanted to go to Jupiter before Falcon told him.”
“Exactly, Blake. Before he knew it himself,” Sparta said. She turned to the commander. “They sabotaged the Queen .”
     
His voice got gruff. “You were always quick to reach conclusions . . .”
     
“Nobody’s ever put a remote link through a satellite by accident, before or since.” “That’s crazy,” said Blake. “How did they know Falcon would survive the crash?”
     
“They have a habit of taking long chances.”
     
The commander said, “The camera platform started having trouble as soon as he was topside. Not until then.”
     
She nodded. “It should have been the safest place, if you were calculating the odds. Falcon himself thought so.”
     
“Then they really screwed up,” Blake protested. “He was back down at the controls before the Queen hit. He almost saved the ship.”
     
“The crash worked for them anyway,” Sparta said. “Maybe better than they hoped.”
     
“Unlike you,” the commander said, “with him there wasn’t much of a thinking human being left to get in their way later.”
    Blake, agitated, thrust back his chair and stood up. “All right, I asked this before. You —sitting there— you personally represent the high and mighty Space Board Investigations Branch? What do you want from Ellen? What can she do that the Board hasn’t already done?”
    Before he answered Blake, the commander signaled the stewards to clear the table and bring the next course. “There are some things that the Space Board doesn’t do well,” he said. “Investigating itself is one of them.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
     
“Don’t assume anything,” the commander said. “And don’t miss the tomato bisque.”
    He hesitated, then abruptly sat down. “If you want my cooperation, sir ”—the resort to sarcasm was childish, a measure of Blake’s complete frustration with the course of events—“I need to know that whatever you’re planning, you’re not going to expose her to any more danger than she’s in already.”
“Before we men make any deals for her, Blake, perhaps Ellen will tell us her own thinking.”
     
“I’m certainly curious. I’d like to find out more about Howard Falcon and the Kon-Tiki mission,” she said.
     
“Then you’re still on the team.” “No, I don’t think so,” she said thoughtfully. “I don’t think this is a team sport.”
    Blake spent the afternoon trying to talk her out of her curiosity about Falcon, which to him seemed founded upon the flimsiest of circumstantial evidence. Oh, he admitted that