The Medusa Encounter by Paul Preuss & Arthur C. Clarke

Author:Paul Preuss & Arthur C. Clarke [Preuss, Paul & Clarke, Arthur C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780743412858
Google: UiFv6BSKTfIC
Amazon: 0743412850
Barnesnoble: 0743412850
Goodreads: 778373
Publisher: iBooks
Published: 1991-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Something in Sparta was not reassured. Was it really Singh in the helicopter? And where was she going in the middle of the night?

Sparta expelled her breath in a short sigh, an angry spasm almost like a snarl, and abruptly she sprang to her feet. For a moment she was exposed to anyone who might be watching her window, but she was defiant. She crossed to the closet where she’d hung her few clothes and slipped on a closefitting black polycanvas jump suit, then pulled soft black hightops onto her small feet. She returned to the window, this time silently, invisibly.

She disarmed the telltale she’d set on the glass. In the night air the wooden sash had contracted; it came up easily, scraping softly against the frame.

She slipped outside and closed the window behind her. She scampered across the gently sloping roof. At the corner of the veranda she tested the strength of the gutter, then hooked her hands into it, rolled forward and hung from the roof, her feet a meter from the ground. She dropped silently into a bed of decorative Irish moss.

The moonlight through the trees created a blue and black mosaic, but to Sparta’s infrared-sensitive eye the ground itself glowed in shades of dull red, the grass and bushes and bare earth giving back the sun’s heat in varying degree. She walked quickly along the paths that led to the sanatorium.

She paused once, at the sight of a ghostly white shape moving in the dark cedar branches, but it was only an egret that had sought safety for the night aboveground.

She came to the sanatorium. Four low brick buildings with wide metal roofs formed a compound; in the center of the courtyard stood a gnarled old chestnut. Two of the buildings, facing each other, were dormitories, their individual rooms opening onto verandas. A third building housed the laundry, kitchen, and dining hall.

She listened to the deep, drugged breathing of men and women in the dormitories, but passed them by.

The fourth structure, the clinic, was her objective.

Except for dim yellow lights illuminating the verandas, none of the buildings showed lights. Sparta circled the clinic slowly, keeping to the shadows. Her close-focused eye traveled along the roofline, around each window and door frame, seeking monitoring cameras and telltales.

It seemed that the building’s security was simple, almost primitive. No cameras watched the compound.

The windows and doors were wired with conducting strips. She picked a window half hidden by a rhododendron bush and pushed back its shutters. From the thigh pocket of her jumpsuit she removed a slender steel tool; with precisely measured strength she incised a circle in the glass near the latch, tapped it, and let the glass disk fall outward into her hand. She reached through the hole and was about to affix a

slack loop of wire to the alarm’s conducting strip when she sensed, through her PIN spines, that no current was running in the alarm.

She thought about that for a millisecond, then set the loop anyway, tacking down both ends with aluminized putty.

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