A Meeting With Medusa Read Online Free PDF

hadn’t been drinking grog. What he’d seen burning across the stars must have been the rocket carrier, separated from its pay load and falling back unchecked into the Earth’s atmosphere.
    For a long time Tibor hovered on the sea bed, knees bent in the diver’s crouch, as he regarded this space creature now trapped in an alien element. His mind was full of half-formed plans, but none had yet come clearly into focus. He no longer cared about salvage money; much more important were the prospects of revenge. Here was one of the proudest creations of Soviet technology—and Szabo Tibor, late of Budapest, was the only man on earth who knew.
    There must be some way of exploiting the situation—of doing harm to the country and the cause he now hated with such smouldering intensity. In his waking hours, he was seldom conscious of that hate, and still less did he ever stop to analyse its real cause. Here in this lonely world of sea and sky, of steaming mangrove swamps and dazzling coral strands, there was nothing to recall the past. Yet he could never escape it, and sometimes the demons in his mind would awake, lashing him into a fury of rage or vicious, wanton destructiveness. So far he had been lucky; he had not killed anyone. But some day…
    An anxious jerk from Blanco interrupted his reveries of vengeance. He gave a reassuring signal to his tender, and started a closer examination of the capsule. What did it weigh? Could it be hoisted easily? There were many things he had to discover, before he could settle on any definite plans.
    He braced himself against the corrugated metal wall, and pushed cautiously. There was a definite movement as the capsule rocked on the sea bed. Maybe it could be lifted, even with the few pieces of tackle that the Arafura could muster. It was probably lighter than it looked.
    Tibor pressed his helmet against a flat section of the hull, and listened intently. He had half expected to hear some mechanical noise, such as the whirring of electric motors. Instead, there was utter silence. With the hilt of his knife, he rapped sharply on the metal, trying to gauge its thickness and to locate any weak spots. On the third try, he got results: but they were not what he had anticipated.
    In a furious, desperate tattoo, the capsule rapped back at him.
    Until this moment. Tibor had never dreamed that there might be someone inside; the capsule had seemed far too small. Then he realised that he had been thinking in terms of conventional aircraft; there was plenty of room here for a little pressure cabin in which a dedicated astronaut could spend a few cramped hours.
    As a kaleidoscope can change its pattern completely in a single moment, so the half-formed plans in Tibor’s mind dissolved and then crystallised into a new shape. Behind the thick glass of his helmet, he ran his tongue lightly across his lips. If Nick could have seen him now, he would have wondered—as he had sometimes done before—whether his Number Two diver was wholly sane. Gone were all thoughts of a remote and impersonal vengeance against something as abstract as a nation or a machine; now it would be man to man.
    ‘Took your time, didn’t you?’ said Nick. ‘What did you find?’
    ‘It’s Russian,’ said Tibor. ‘Some kind of sputnik. If we can get a rope around it, I think we can lift it off the bottom. But it’s too heavy to get aboard.’
    Nick chewed thoughtfully on his eternal cigar. The pearling master was worried about a point that had not occurred to Tibor. If there were any salvage operations around here, everyone would know where the Arafura had been drifting. When the news got back to Thursday Island, his private patch of shell would be cleaned out in no time.
    They’d have to keep quiet about the whole affair, or else haul the damn thing up themselves and not say where they’d found it. Whatever happened, it looked like being more of a nuisance than it was worth. Nick, who shared most Australians’ profound suspicion