Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail Read Online Free PDF

my brain. It was a shock to realize that not even my jailers could hear or see a thing.
    “We have to brief you this way simply because the transfer process is delicate enough as it is. Oh, don’t worry about it—it’s permanent. But we prefer to allow as much time as possible for your brain patterns to fit in and adapt without subjecting the brain to further shock and we haven’t the time to allow you to ‘set in’ completely, as it were. This method will have to do, and I profoundly regret it, for I feel that you have a difficult enough assignment as is, perhaps impossible.”
    I felt the excitement rising within me. The challenge, the challenge …
    “Your objective world is Medusa, farthest out from the sun of the Diamond colonies,” the Commander’s voice continued. “If there is a single place in the universe where man can live but wouldn’t want to, it’s Medusa. Old Warden, who discovered the system, said he named the place after the mythological creature that turned men to stone because anybody who’d want to live there had to have rocks in his head. That’s pretty close to the truth.
    “The imprint ability of this device is limited,” he continued, “but we can send you one basic thing that may—or may not—be of use to you on Medusa. It is a physical-political map of the entire planet as complete and up-to-date as we could make it.”
    That puzzled me. Why would such ‘a map not be of use? Before I could consider the matter further, and curse my inability to ask Krega questions, I felt a sharp back pain, then a short wave of dizziness and nausea. When the haze cleared, I found that I had the complete map clearly and indelibly etched in my mind.
    There followed a stream of facts about the place. The planet was roughly 46,000 kilometers both around the equator—and in polar circumference, allowing for topographic differences. Like all four Diamond worlds, it was basically a ball—highly unusual as planets go, even though everybody, including me, thinks of all major planets as spherical..
    The gravity was roughly 1.2 norm, so I would have to adjust to being a bit slower and heavier than usual. That would take a slight adjustment in timing, and I made a note to work on that first thing. Its atmosphere was within a few hundredths of a percentage point of human standard—far too little difference to be noticeable, since nobody I know ever actually experienced that human standard in real life.
    Medusa’s axial tilt of roughly 22°eg gave the world strong seasonal changes under normal circumstances, but at over three hundred million kilometers from its F-type sun it was, at best, a tad chilly. In point of fact, something like seventy percent of Medusa was so glaciated that it consisted of just two large polar caps with a sandwich of real planet in between on both sides of the equator. Its day was a bit long, but not more than an hour off the standard and hardly a matter of concern. What was a concern was that those wonderful tropic temperatures were something around 10°eg C at the equator or at midsummer, and that could drop to-20 at the tropic extremes in midwinter. But the life zone did extend for some distance beyond that—up and down to a jagged glacial line at roughly 35°g latitude, give or take a few degrees, and in that subtropical zone at midwinter a brisk -80°g C. Some climate! I sincerely hoped that they provided free insulated gear from the moment of arrival, particularly since that map in my head said that a’ number of cities were located in the coldest areas.
    Continents were pretty much irrelevant, since the seas were frozen down to the habitable zones all the time and down to almost the tropic lines half the year. There were three distinct habitable land masses that I could see from the map, though, so you might as well say three very wide and very thin continents. Throughout the habitable latitudes there was a lot of mountain that didn’t help the climate much, and a huge