by Bob Shaw
"Have you lost something, young Maraquine?" The voice was that of Commissioner Trye Kettoran, official leader of the expedition, who had chosen to fly in one of the modified ships. He was subject to low-gravity sickness and had hoped that the comfort of an enclosed cabin would lessen the severity of his attacks. His expectations had been in vain, but he was enduring his illness with great fortitude in spite of his age. At seventy-one, he was by far the oldest member of the expedition. He had been appointed by Queen Daseene precisely because he had clear recollections of the old capital of Ro-Atabri and therefore was well qualified to report on present conditions there.
"I have orders to inspect the Inner Defense Group," Toller said. "The Service was hard pressed to loft twenty ships for this expedition, and as a result we are forced to omit a fifty-day inspection—but if I see anything going seriously wrong I am empowered to divert one of the expedition's ships for as long as it takes to put things right."
"Quite a burden of responsibility for a young captain," Kettoran said, his long pale face showing faint signs of animation. "But—even with the aid of those splendid glasses —what kind of inspection can you carry out at a range of several miles?"
"A superficial one," Toller admitted. "But in truth all we have to concern ourselves with at this early stage is the general alignment of the stations. If one is seen to have separated from the others, and to be drifting towards Overland or Land, it is simply a matter of nudging it back into the datum plane."
"If one begins to fall, won't they all follow suit?"
Toller shook his head. "We are not dealing with inert pieces of rock. The stations contain many kinds of chemicals —pikon, halvell, firesalt, and so on—and a slight change in conditions can lead to the production of gases which could leak through a hull if a seal weakens. The thrust produced may have no more force than a maiden's sigh, but let it go on for a long time—then augment it with the growing attraction of gravity—and, all at once, one is confronted with an unruly leviathan which is determined to dash itself upon one world or the other. In the Sky Service we consider it prudent to take corrective action long before that stage is reached."
"You have quite a way with words, young Maraquine," Kettoran said, his breath pluming whitely through the scarf which was protecting his face from the intense cold of the weightless zone. "Have you ever considered diplomacy as a career?"
"No, but I may have to if I fail to locate these accursed wooden sausage skins before long."
"I will help you—anything to take my mind off the fact that my stomach wants to rise into my mouth." Kettoran knuckled his watery eyes with a gloved hand, began surveying the sky and within a few seconds—to Toller's surprise—gave a satisfied exclamation.
"Is that what we're in search of?" he said, pointing horizontally to the east, past the three modified skyships. "That line of purple lights. . . ."
"Purple lights? Where?" Toller tried in vain to see something unusual in the indicated part of the sky.
"There! There! Why can't you. . . ?" Kettoran's words faded into a sigh of disappointment. "You're too late—they have gone now."
Toller gave a snort of combined amusement and exasperation. "Sir, there are no lights—purple or otherwise— on the stations. They have reflectors which shine with a steady white glow, if you happen to catch them at the right angle. Perhaps you saw a meteor."
"I know what a meteor looks like, so don't try to—" Kettoran broke off again and pointed at another part of the heavens. "There's your precious Defense Group over there. Don't try to tell me it isn't, because I can see a line of white specks. Am I right? I am right!"
"You're right," Toller agreed, training his binoculars on the stations and marveling at the speed with which luck had directed the old man's gaze to the correct portion of the sky. "Well done, sir!"
"Call yourself a pilot! Why, if it hadn't been for this unruly stomach of mine I would have. . . ." Kettoran gave a violent sneeze, retreated into the cabin and closed the door.
Toller smiled as he heard further sneezes punctuated by muffled swearing. In the five days of the ascent to the weightless zone he had grown to like the commissioner for his humorous grumpiness, and to respect him for his stoicism in the face of the severe discomforts of the flight. Most men of his age would have found some means of evading the responsibility thrust upon him by Queen Daseene, but Kettoran had accepted the charge with good grace and seemed determined to treat it as yet another in a lifetime of routine chores undertaken on behalf of the ruler.
Toller returned his attention to the defense stations and was relieved to see that they formed a perfectly straight line. When he had first qualified as a skyship pilot he had enjoyed the occasional maintenance ascents to the stations. Entering the dark and claustrophobic hulls had been a near-mystical experience which had seemed to conjure up the spirit of his grandfather and his heroic times, but the futility of the so-called Inner Defensive Group's very existence had quickly dominated his thoughts. If there was no threat from Farland the stations were unnecessary; if the enigmatic Farlanders ever were to invade their technological superiority would render the stations irrelevant. The wooden shells were merely a token defense which had in some measure eased the late King Chakkell's mind, and to Toller their principal value was that maintaining them was a way of preserving the nation's interplanetary capabilities.
Having satisfied himself that there was no need to make a diversion from the vertical course, he lowered the binoculars and gazed thoughtfully at the furthermost of the other three ships making up his echelon. It was the one commanded by Vantara. Ever since the foreday he had learned that the Countess was taking part in the expedition he had been undecided about which approach to use in future dealings with her. Would an air of aloofness and dignified reproval wring an apology from her and thus bring them together? Or would it be better to appear cheerful and unaffected, treating the incident of her report as the sort of boisterous skirmish which is bound to occur when two free spirits collide?
The fact that he, the injured party, was the one who planned reconciliation had occasioned him some unease, but all his scheming had proved redundant. Throughout the preparations for the flight Vantara had managed to keep her distance from him, and had done so with an effortless grace which denied him the consolation of feeling that he was important enough to be evaded.
One hour after the fleet had passed through the datum plane the group of defense stations had shrunk to virtual invisibility, and the pull of Land's gravity was imperceptibly adding to the ships' speed. A sunwriter message from General Ode, the fleet commander, was flashed back from the flagship instructing all pilots to carry out the inversion maneuver.
Glad of the break in the shipboard routine, Toller drew himself along a safety line to the midsection, to where Lieutenant Correvalte was at the engine controls. Correvalte, who was newly qualified, looked relieved when he heard that he was not expected to handle the inversion. He relinquished the controls and positioned himself a short distance away as Toller began the delicate task. The ship had four slim acceleration struts which joined the gondola to the balloon's equatorial load tape, and which gave the whole assemblage the modest degree of stiffness required for flying in the jet propulsion mode. Although the balloon itself was very light, a flimsy envelope of varnished linen, the gas within it had a mass of many tons, with inertia to match, and had to be coaxed with infinite care when any change of direction was called for. A pilot who was too enthusiastic in his use of the ship's lateral jets would soon And that he had driven the top end of a strut through the envelope. While not necessarily serious in low-gravity conditions, that kind of damage was difficult and time-consuming to put right—and the offender was always given good cause to regret his error.
For what seemed a long time after Toller had begun firing one of the tiny cross-mounted jets it seemed that its thrust was having no effect, then with grudging slowness the great disk of Overland made its way up the sky. As it showed itself above the ship's rail, h
anging before the crew in all its painted vastness, the immense convexity that was the Old World emerged from behind the balloon and drifted downwards. There was a moment during which, simply by turning his head from side to side, Toller could see two worlds laid out in their entirety for his inspection—the twin arenas in which his kind had fought all the battles of evolution and history.
Superimposed on each planet, and similarly lit from the side, were the other ships of the fleet. They were in varying attitudes—each pilot inverting at his own pace—arcs of white condensation from their lateral jets complementing the global cloud patterns thousands of miles below. And embracing the spectacle was the frozen luminous panoply of the universe—the circles and spirals and streamers of silver radiance, the fields of brilliant stars with blue and white predominant, the silent-hovering comets and the darting meteors.
It was a sight which both thrilled and chilled Toller, making him proud of his people's courage in daring to cross the interplanetary void in frail constructs of cloth and wood, and at the same time reminding him that—for all their ambitions and dreams—men were little more than microbes laboring from one grain of sand to another.
He would not have cared to admit as much to any of his peers, but it was a comfort to him when the inversion maneuver had been completed and the ship was sinking back into humanity's natural domain. From now on the air would grow thicker and warmer, less inimical to life, and all his preoccupations would begin to resume their normal importance.
"That's how it's done," he said, returning control of the vessel to Correvalte. "Get the mechanic to convert the engine back to burner mode, and tell him to make sure that the heaters are working properly."
Toller emphasized the final point because, although the aerial environment would indeed grow less harsh as the ship lost height, the direction of the airflow over the ship would be reversed. The considerable amount of heat lost from the balloon's surface would be borne upwards and away in the slipstream instead of bathing the gondola with an invisible balm which helped protect its occupants from the deadly coldness of the mid-passage.
The engine had to be shut down while being converted from a thrust creator to a producer of hot gas for conventional aerostatic flight, and Toller took advantage of the period of quietude to go into the forward cabin in search of nourishment. Nobody had ever explained the baffling sensation of falling which men experienced in and close to the weightless zone, but it had been spoiling his appetite for more than a day and as a result he was in the ambivalent position of needing food while not actually wanting it. The selection of fare he found in the provision nets—strips of dried meat and fish, cereals and puckered fruit and berries—was less than seductive. He rummaged through what was available and finally settled for a slab of grain cake which he chewed upon without enthusiasm.
"Don't despair, young Maraquine!" Commissioner Kettoran, who had wedged himself into a seat at the captain's table, was feigning cheerfulness. "We'll soon be in Ro-Atabri, and once we're there I'll take you to some of the best eating places in the world. Mind you, they'll be in ruins— but I'll take you to them anyway." Kettoran winked at his secretary, Parlo Wotoorb—who was across the table from him—and both old men hunched their thin shoulders in amusement, looking strangely alike.
Still chewing, Toller nodded gravely to acknowledge the witticism. Kettoran and Wotoorb had been contemporaries of his grandfather. They had actually known him—a privilege he envied—and both had survived to quite an advanced age with no apparent erosion of their faculties. Toller doubted that he would reach his seventies with the same degree of fortitude and resilience. It had always seemed to him that there was a special quality about the men and women who had lived through the great events of recent history—the ptertha plague, the Migration, the conquest of Overland, the war between the sister worlds. It was as though their characters and spirits had been tempered in the crucible of their times, whereas he was destined to live through a fallow period, never knowing for sure if he had it within him to respond to, and as a consequence be ennobled by, a great challenge. Try as he might, he could not imagine the tamed and stable circumstances of his day yielding up adventures which were in any way comparable with those which had earned Toller the Kingslayer his place in legend. Even the journey between the worlds, which had once been the dangerous limit of men's experience, had become a routine matter. . . .
A sudden brightness washed in through the portholes on the left side of the room—momentarily rivaling the prisms of sunlight which slanted across the table from the opposite wall—and somebody outside on the open deck gave a howl of fright.
"What was that?" Toller was starting for the door, hindered by the lack of gravity, when there came an appalling burst of sound, akin to the loudest thunderclap he had ever heard. The room tilted and small objects chattered noisily in their brackets.
Echoes of the thunder were still booming and surging when Toller got the door open and was able to propel himself out of the cabin. The ship was twisting in violent air currents which drew groans and creaks from the rigging. Lieutenant Correvalte and the mechanic were clinging to lines by the engine, their shocked faces turned towards the north-west. Toller looked in the same direction and saw a restless, swirling core of fiery brilliance which quickly dwindled into nothingness. All at once the sky was placid again, the silence complete except for faint cries coming from men on other ships.
"Was it a meteor?" Toller called out, aware of the question's superfluity.
Correvalte nodded. "A big one, sir. It missed us by about a mile, perhaps more, but for a moment I thought our time had come. I never want to see anything like that again."
"You probably never will," Toller said reassuringly. "Get the rigger to check the envelope for damage, particularly around the strut attachments. What is the fellow's name?"
"Getchert, sir."
"Well, tell Getchert to look lively—it's time he did something to earn his salt on this trip."
As Correvalte moved away towards the aft superstructure, where the ordinary crew members were housed, Toller gripped a transverse line and drew himself to the rail. Now that the inversion had been carried out he could see only the ships of his own echelon and, below him, the balloons of the four leading vessels, but all seemed well with the fleet in general. He had made many ascents to the weightless zone and as a result had become inured to the thought of a meteor actually striking a ship. It was one of the rare cases in which he could draw comfort from thinking about man's insignificance in the scale of cosmic events. His ships were so small and the universe so large that it would be quite unreasonable for one of the blazing cosmic bullets to find a human mark.
It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock speeding through the void from. . . .
Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east, to the part of the sky where the meteor must have originated, and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brightening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused, unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky's sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.
He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to be heading directly towards the fleet!
His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the ship's rail and watched the bl
azing entities fan ever outwards, racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter silence despite the awesome energies being expended.
I'm safe, Toller told himself. I'm safe for the simple reason that I'm too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the ships are too small. . . .
But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser medium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin planets from cosmic intruders.
Favorable though the encounter was for any creature living on the surface of Land or Overland, it boded ill for travelers taken by surprise at the narrowest point of the bridge of air between the two worlds. The meteors, racked by intolerable stresses, began to explode, and as they shattered into thousands of diverging splinters they were bound to become less discriminatory in their choice of targets.
Toller flinched as, with a wash of light and overlapping peals of thunder, the disintegrating meteors momentarily filled the whole sky. Suddenly they were behind him. He turned and saw the entire phenomenon in reverse, the great disk of radiance contracting as it raced into the remoteness of space. The main difference in its appearance was that there was less corpuscularity—the circle was a nearly uniform area of swirling flame. On leaving the last tenuous fringes of the twin worlds' atmosphere, the fiery bullets were deprived of fuel and quickly faded from sight. A numb silence engulfed the tower of ships.
