Jack Chalker: Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

I realized then, as they had undoubtedly figured, that I had no choice but to carry out the mission. As long as I was doing what they wanted I would be safe from them while still in that vulnerable stage. After—well, we’d see.

The thrill of the challenge took over, as it always did: the puzzle to be solved; the objectives to be accomplished. I liked to win, and it was even easier if you felt nothing about the cause—then it was just the challenge of the problem and the opponent and the physical and intellectual effort needed to meet that challenge. Find out about the alien menace. The outcome no longer concerned me either way—I was trapped on a Warden world from now on anyway. If the aliens won the coming confrontation, the Wardens would survive as allies. If they lost—well, it wouldn’t make a damned bit of difference, only continue the current situation. Thus, the alien problem was purely an intellectual challenge and that made it perfect.

The other problem created a similar situation. Seek out the Lord of the particular Diamond world and kill him if I could. In a sense doing so would be more difficult, for I’d be operating on totally unfamiliar ground and would, therefore, require time and, perhaps, allies. Another challenge. And, if I got him, it could only increase my own power and position in the long run. If he got me instead, of course, that would solve everybody’s problem—but the thought of losing is abhorrent to me. That set the contest in the best terms, from my point of view. Trackdown assassination was the ultimate game, since you won or you died and did not have to live with the thought that you lost.

It suddenly occurred to me that the only real difference that probably existed between me and a Lord of the Diamond was that I was working for the law and he—or she—against it. But, no, that wasn’t right, either. On his world he was the law and I would be working against that.’ Fine. Dead heat on moral grounds.

The only thing wrong at this point, I reflected, was that they were starting me at a tremendous disadvantage and I disliked having more than necessary. The normal procedure was to program all pertinent information into my brain before they sent me off on a mission—but they hadn’t done it this time. Probably, I thought, because they had me on the table once for four separate missions—and the transfer process, to a new body, was hard enough without trying to add anything afterward. Still, knowing this put me in a deep pit. I thought sourly that somebody should have thought of that.

Somebody did, but it was a while before I discovered how. About an hour after I had awakened a little bell clanged near the food port and I walked over to it. Almost instantly a hot tray appeared, along with a thin plastic fork and knife that I recognized as the dissolving type. They’d melt into a sticky puddle in an hour or less, then dry up and become a dry powder shortly after that. Standard for prisoners.

The food was lousy but I hadn’t expected better. The vitamin-enriched fruit drink with it, though, was pretty good, and I made the most of it. I kept the thin, clear container, which was not the dissolving type, in case I wanted water later. The rest I put back in the port, and it vaporized neatly. All nice and sealed. You couldn’t even draw more than a thimble full of water at a time from the tap.

About the only thing they couldn’t control was my bodily functions, and a half-hour or so after eating my first meal as what you might call a new man, I just had to go. I tugged on the toilet pull ring on the far wall, the unit came down—and damned if there wasn’t a small, paper-thin probe in the recess behind it. And so, I sat down on the John, leaned back against the panel, and got a brief and relief at the same time.

The thing worked by skin contact—don’t ask me how. I’m not one of the tech brains. It was not as good as a programming, but it allowed them to talk to me, even send me pictures that only I could see and hear.

“By now I hope you’re over the shock of discovering who and what you are,” Krega’s voice came to me, seemingly forming in 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° 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° 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° latitude, give or take a few degrees, and in that subtropical zone at midwinter a brisk -80° C. Some climate 11 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 amount of forest, all of which seemed to be various evergreen types. Nothing familiar, of course, but familiar types in any cold climate.