Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail

you! We’ll change back soon enough if we get away from this!”

The others had similar reactions, but got talked up nonetheless.

I looked at them, and could see their skin begin to lose some of its shimmer and start to—well, ooze, as if our bodies were made of a puttylike substance that had a mind of its own. Strangely, I felt a little better about that—here was a stimulus with proof! If you placed yourself in an untenable environment, you changed. You changed into whatever would allow you to survive. This certainly explained the Wild Ones’ ability to escape from TMS, and probably accounted for the shape-change legends as well. The Wild Ones used the ability to hide and to survive.

If I could just get my hands on a psych machine and convince somebody he was in a different sort of environment, it would work—but still not under real control. You would become an improvised monster, whatever your Wardens required for your survival.

But how did the Wardens understand just what you needed in th’at instant you needed it? And from where did they get the incredibly sophisticated knowledge of biology to accomplish the change so quickly?

We waited another five minutes, and I checked the roll. Ching had made it, although she was terribly confused and terrified by the shape change. Morphy had come through and one other, whose name I still didn’t know. Our guide through the sewers, though, was not here.

We were becoming “human” again, and quickly, as the Wardens inside us sensed our changing environment. In fact, we were becoming our old selves, indicating that either the original pattern was always reverted to when the Wardens were “at rest” or that a strong sense of self-identity would reimpose it. The one thing that was not coming back was hair, I noted; and our skin remained that dark brown of the “monsters” we had briefly become.

It was fascinating to watch my own arms slowly flow, change, rearrange back into the more familiar patterns. When we were humanoid enough to have full upright muscle control, I took one last look for a fourth head in the pool. Nothing. “We have to get moving. I think I see a patrol over there on the far side.”

Morphy looked at me, then back at the pool. “But we’re still one short!”

“Can’t be helped. Either she couldn’t change or she got plugged or caught. Either way, we can’t help her by getting caught or shot ourselves. Let’s move!”

The one whose name I still didn’t know looked puzzled and confused. “Where? Where do we go now?”

I sighed. “Somewhere else, of course. Follow me!” Then I was off along the top of the plant. Coming on some steps on the other side, I started down as laser tracers started illuminating the night. Once we hit the rather shallow river below, I just ran into it. and waded across to the other side, not even checking to see if the others were following. I didn’t have the time, and if they weren’t there, I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. I was heading for the forest located just on the other side of the river, and I wasn’t going to stop for anything until I made the cover of those trees.

Suddenly I heard Morphy’s voice yell, “Drop!” and I didn’t wait to find out why. I dropped right into the water, which, by this time, was not deep enough to cover my body. After I was down, I raised my head a little and looked up, seeing what Morphy had seen. A small illuminated bubble with two TMS monitors in it was flying almost noiselessly down the river, shining a spotlight on the whole river course. I made a quick check to see that everybody was, indeed, down, then froze as the thing approached, passed right over us, and continued on. In this light, and with this shallow, rocky bed, we had to look like rocks to a copter going any speed at all. But I was pretty sure this wasn’t something TMS did every day; we were being pursued.

When the lights disappeared, I stood up again and we all made it to the far bank and the cover of the trees. I finally allowed myself to let up a bit and collapsed on the ground. The others did the same, and it was a little while before any of us could talk.

Finally I said, “Well, the age of miracles has returned. We got away with it sure enough.”

Morphy looked back at me with a grim expression, then at the other two. Except for our coloration and the total absence of any body hair, we all looked pretty much as we had, although the transformation or whatever it was had split our flimsy clothes as well. “Stark naked, in an unknown wilderness, hunted like wild animals, and without a hair to our name, and he thinks he’s winning!”

“Not to mention starving to death,” the strange woman put in.

I grinned. “I am. We are—will—win. We didn’t go through all this to lose now. And if that tumble in the sludge didn’t teach you that we are survival machines, I don’t know what wiU. But I think we’ll have to get as far from here as we can tonight. I don’t think they’ll hunt us very far or long—it just isn’t worth it, even though we’re all going to be pretty wanted by this group.”

“After those others tell about what you did back there when we were first captured, I’d say they’ll want you more than anybody,” Morphy replied. “What you did to those monitors wasn’t— human. I wonder if even you realize that you knocked over the armed monitor, grabbed her rifle, turned, killed four monitors, then whirled back to cover the others in something under five seconds?”

“Five sec—” I was struck speechless for a moment. No wonder the job had seemed so easy! Five seconds for the entire thing! In my original fine-tuned body, maybe, just maybe, I could have done it, but here and now… knowing what to do and making your body do it are two different things. Ask any fifty-year-old space pilot. And yet, the answer to it was obvious.

“I knew what to do,” I told her, “and the Wardens supplied the rest. I was under such tremendous tension, picking my position and mentally preparing for the moves, that the Wardens must have made the necessary survival adjustment—the same principle that turned us into whatever it was we had turned into briefly back there. If you had the knowledge and the will it would’ve worked for you, too. So you see, we’re not exactly helpless out here. We carry our protection with us. We were made for this planet—I almost said designed for it, and maybe that’s right—and this is Medusa, not those comfortable, sealed prisons we call cities here.”

“That was some… strange thing that happened to us, you can’t say it wasn’t,” our mystery woman put in. “I never heard of anybody changing into anything else before, except maybe sex.”

“That’s true,” I admitted, “but the system’s designed against it. We’re all kept in artificial, stable environments where that sort of thing just won’t happen. Even so, I’m sure it has, maybe when somebody’s gotten into an accident or was in danger of drowning or something. Transformations may occur every day. But if so, those people are rescued, hustled off to psychs, and put right. Even memories are sponged from the minds of people involved directly or of the people who observed it. And, by the way, I think we ought to know who you are. I’m Tarin Bul.”

“Angi Patma, Construction Guild,” she responded. We made introductions all around. I was particularly concerned with the usually outgoing Ching, who now seemed quiet and sullen, still in shock. I walked over to her. “Come on—we’re gonna be fine,” I soothed.

She looked up at me. “I know.”

I frowned. “What’s wrong, hon? I was proud of you!” She was silent for a moment. Finally she said, “You killed four people, Tarin. Killed. And you’re not even a little sorry about it.”

I sighed. “Listen, Ching—I had to do it. It was the only way. When someone is marching you off to your death, and happy to do it, he forfeits his own right to life. Those survivors—they’re still going to get those fifty-five or so who remained. None of them are going to be left alive, at least not without destroyed minds. That is a worse crime in my book. Remember, these people were picked for TMS for the same reason everybody else on Medusa is picked for his job. They like bullying, scaring, and even killing people.”

“Don’t you?”

That stopped me for a moment. The fact was, I really did love my job, of course. But there was a difference. At least, I hoped there was. “I’m not interested in bullying or scaring anybody, except for that kind of person. People who like to hurt other people is who I hunt and get. That’s not so bad,, is it?”

She didn’t seem sure, and the more I thought about it, neither was I. From birth I had been raised to believe in the Confederacy, in its perfection and its ideals. But, in that context, what was my job, anyway? The same as TMS here? To track down those who posed a threat to the Confederacy’s system—or who abused or perverted it—and send them to psychs, or to the Warden Diamond, or, on rare occasions, to their deaths. True, most of the Confederacy was a far better system than Ypsir’s Medusa, but the people here did in fact believe in that system, including those in TMS. In their minds they were no different from me. Did that make us different—or the same? Medusa was nothing if not a perversion—a distorted mirror image—of the