To Marry Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9780671653705
Google: TGoiAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1433275414
Barnesnoble: 1433275414
Goodreads: 2844784
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1958-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 25

There she stands the water beading her bright body her head to one side the water sparking off her hair, she smiles, says All Right Handsome What Are You Going To Do About It?

Crash!

A soft rumble and a glare of light: sky. Crash! A brighter, unbearable flash of light on light, a sharp smell of burning chemicals, a choking cloud of dust and smoke and the patter-patter of falling debris. Confusion, bewilderment, disorientation and growing anger at the deprivation of a dream.

The sharp command to every sentience, mechanical or not, on the entire hilltop: Get Gurlick out of here!

A flash of silver overhead, then a strange overall sticky, pore-choking sensation, like being coated with warm oil, and underneath, the torn hill dwindles away. There are still hundreds of projectors left, row on row of them, but from the size of the terraces where they are parked, there must have been hundreds of thousands more. Crash! A half dozen of the projectors bulge skyward and fall back in shatters and shards. Look there, a flight of jets. See, two silver spheres, dodging, dancing: then the long curve of a seeking missile points one out, and the trail and the burst make a bright ball on a smoky string, painted across the sky. Crash! Crash! Even as the scarred hill disappears in swift distance, the parked projectors can be seen bursting skyward, a dozen and a dozen and a score of them, pressing upward through the rain of pieces from those blasted a breath or a blink ago; and cra—

No, not crash this time, but a point, a porthole, a bay-window looking in to the core of hell, all the colors and all too bright, growing, too, too big to be growing so fast, taking the hilltop, the hillside, the whole hill lost in the ball of brilliance.

And for minutes afterward, hanging stickily by something invisible, frighteningly in midair under the silver sphere, but not feeling wind or acceleration or any of the impossible turns as the sphere whizzes along low, hedge-hopping, ground-hugging, back-tracking and hovering to hide; for minutes and minutes afterward, through the drifting speckles of overdazzled eyeballs, the pastel column can be seen rising and rising flat-headed over the land, thousands and thousands of feet, building a roof with eaves, the eaves curling and curling out and down, or are they the grasping fingers of rows and rows of what devils who have climbed up the inside of the spout, about to put up what hellish faces?

“Bastits,” Gurlick whimpered, “tryin to atom-bomb me. You tell ‘em who I am?”

No response. The Medusa was calculating, for once, to capacity—even to its immense, infinitely varied capacity. It had expected to succeed in unifying the mind of humanity—it had correctly predicted its certainty of success and the impossibility of failure. But success like this?

Like this: In the first forty minutes humanity destroyed seventy-one percent of the projectors and forty-three percent of the spheres. To do this it used everything and anything

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