The Medusa Encounter by Paul Preuss Read Free Book Online Page B

inventiveness, no amount of friendly feeling, not all the goodwill in the world, will lift you to that plane where all seems good and all good things seem possible, without love.
    So he lay there between his fresh cotton sheets, grinning inanely at the stars visible through the narrow slit in the stone wall that was his window, dreaming of Linda . . . of Ellen. And renewing his determination to take her away from all this. He never noticed the moment when his daydreams turned to night dreams.
An hour later, when the house was dark and her body was immobile and her mind was sunk deep in its own undreaming depths, the locked door to Sparta’s room silently opened.
    The commander entered the room and shone the beam of a tiny bright flashlight into the corners, then gestured to the door. A technician came into the room and, while the commander held the spot of light steady on the side of Sparta’s neck, pressed an injector pistol against her skin. There was no sound of protest, no evidence of sensation as the drug entered her bloodstream.
Her nightmares resumed not long after.

IV
The moon was a fat caïque riding on cold, billowing seas of October cloud. Something was chasing the moon. He heard it coming long before he saw it, a black winged thing whose wings beat the night. . . .
     
This was no dream. Blake opened an eye and saw a black silhouette slipping silently down the sky, past his window.
    He tore aside the covers and rolled out of the bed, sprawling flat on the floor. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep—the pattern of moonlight on the carpet suggested that it was already after midnight— but he knew what the thing outside was—
—a Snark, an assault helicopter, its blades and turbines tuned to whisper mode, settling gently onto the wide lawn below his window.
     
One of ours or one of theirs? But who were they? Who were we?
    Whose side was Blake on anyway? He kept low and rolled across the moon-dappled carpet into the cover of his closet. Inside, he dressed as quickly as he could, slipping into dark polycanvas pants and a black wool pullover, snugging black sneakers onto his feet and pulling a roomy, many-pocketed black canvas windbreaker around his shoulders.
    After the escape from Mars, when Blake had been shown to his room here, he’d found all his things already neatly cleaned, pressed, and hung up or put away in drawers. Thoughtful of the troops. Only his toys had been missing, his wire-working tools, his oddments of integrated circuitry, his scrounged bits of plastique .
    He didn’t blame them; that stuff was dangerous. And anyway, in the days since he’d arrived he’d managed to replace most of it. Remarkable, the amount of deadly and destructive chemicals required to maintain even the average studio apartment—not to mention the average estate. That thick green lawn upon which the Snark had just come to rest, for example: that kind of lush plant growth doesn’t come without generous applications of nitrogen and phosphorus. Out in the gardener’s shed, high explosives were there for the taking. Fusing and timing circuitry were here and there for the taking, too, hidden in odd corners of the estate, in rarely used alarm and surveillance mechanisms.
    Blake knew where the cameras were. He knew where they were placed in his room, and in Ellen’s, even where they were scattered among the trees in the woods. Ellen wanted to pretend she didn’t know about some of those; fine with him. Meanwhile, he cannibalized whatever he thought the cameras couldn’t see him cannibalizing; he stole what his hosts wouldn’t miss and put it where he hoped they couldn’t find it.
    From behind loose strips of molding, from the undersides of shelves, he retrieved the fruits of his explorations and borrowings. He spent a long minute assembling disparate parts before shoving them into his pockets. Finally he took a roll of adhesive tape from the tie-rack where it hung beneath a handful of knit ties; he circled