The Caterpillars Question - txt

by Farmer, Phillip Jose

  That thought was conceived out of despair by panic. But it gave birth to relief. A limited relief, true, yet it was tinged with hope.

  Whatever they would do, they would not kill Tappy. Though desperate to catch her, they must avoid doing anything that might result in her death.

  Therefore, they would not shoot the plane down.

  What they would do, probably, would be to try to force their quarry to land. Unless... no use attempting to imagine what was in their bag of tricks. He would find out soon enough.

  The planes were slowly but steadily closing the gap between them and Jack's plane. One pigeon. Two falcons.

  Below, a forest spread out, dark green like an Earth woods except here and there were irregularly shaped areas of orange-colored trees. The crater was receding fast. Ahead was more forest. In the distance were the peaks of a mountain range. Now and then the sunlight flashed on a river. Or was there more than one? A large lake appeared on the right.

  A number of tiny boats with single masts and bright white and purple triangular sails scudded across the smooth green water. Jack was too high to make out the figures on the decks.

  He started as something touched his neck. It was Tappy's finger, of course.

  He was very jumpy. For a second, he had thought that an insect had landed on his neck.

  Her wondering and anxious expression showed him that he had been silent too long.

  "The plane on my left is now even with us," he said. "The other... here it comes! It's even with us now. Now they're rising. I think they plan to get above us and force us down."

  Jack shouted, "Oh, no, you don't!"

  Tappy gasped and jumped a little at his outburst.

  Savagely, he turned the wheel to the left, pushing in on it at the same time.

  The craft curved to the left and dropped swiftly.

  Jack, glancing at Tappy, saw that her eyes were wide open, and she had paled.

  "I'm trying to shake them!" he said. "Hang on! We may be in for a rough ride!"

  He was thinking, Why in hell didn't I grab the radiator and try to shoot them with it?

  He was doing better than he had thought he would in such a situation. So far, he had not done badly for one who considered himself to be an artist, not a man of action, ten thousand miles from being an Indiana Jones. But that had been on the ground. He had frozen for a while when in the air, and he still was not completely thawed out.

  The pilots of the Gaol machines had quick reflexes, though. They had not been caught with their mouths open. Their planes had curved and dropped, too, following his course by a split second or so. Now they were above him again, diving at the same angle and velocity. They were also jockeying so that each would be just above the end of one of the wings.

  He turned the wheel and pulled it back until the plane was on an even keel. At least, he thought that it was. By now, he assumed that one of the instruments on the panel was an angle indicator. It looked like the ones he had seen in movies showing an airplane's cockpit. It was round and in its center was a horizontal line. The line swung up at one end and down at the other, or vice versa, as one wing dropped and the other rose.

  At the moment, it was straight across, and the wings seemed to be level, too.

  Give him enough time, and he might figure out most of the functions of the instruments.

  But he was not going to be given that time.

  The bottoms of the fuselages, twelve or so feet above the tips of his wings, began lowering. He noted with a part of his mind that the wheels had withdrawn into the shell. He supposed that the wheels of his craft had also withdrawn. But he had heard no sound of machinery moving.

  Jack told Tappy about the situation. She lifted the radiator with both hands, holding it before her face.

  "Yes, I know," he said. "But wait a minute. I want to try something."

  By then, the fuselage bottoms were only six feet above the wingtips of Jack's machine. The gap between them constantly varied by a foot or so. The rough air bounced Jack's plane up and down and did the same to their pursuers. They would not be able to touch their bottoms against his wingtips. Otherwise, the wingtips might break. Or something else and worse might happen.

  They were betting that he would not try to call their bluff.

  "Let's see!" he said loudly.

  He released much of his grip on the wheel rim. At the same time, he pulled back hard on the wheel. The nose of the craft lifted sharply, and the wingtips almost struck the other planes. The pilots must have been startled, but they lifted their own planes quickly enough to avoid the collision. They did not slow down, however. They shot ahead of Jack's machine.

  Jack took his hands off the wheel. The nose dropped, and the craft headed downward at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees in relation to the horizon. He had expected it to stall and to fall like a stone. But it must have some sort of safety factor, a fool-compensator, in its program. In several seconds, it began to level out. The machines in front of him began climbing and turning at the same time. For certain, they would come back and attempt the same forcing-down.

  He had gained some time and distance, however. And the sky, which had been clear, was suddenly dark on the horizon. He hoped that the clouds would be heavy with rain. A lightning and thunder storm would be welcome, too. He just might be able to lose the Gaol in a storm.

  He said, "Tappy! Are we still going north? Headed directly toward whatever you want to get to?"

  She turned her head slightly to the left and to the right. Then she pointed a few degrees to her right. Jack turned the machine until she nodded, and he straightened out the course. He had seen that one of the indicators on the panel had swung its pointer, too. The needle tip now rested by a symbol which he supposed must indicate north.

  Soon, too soon for him, the Gaol had returned. One of them rode on his left, making no attempt to get above his wingtip. He stretched his neck to turn and look through the window in the top. At first, he saw only sky. Then abruptly and sinisterly, the nose of the second machine appeared. It was directly above Jack's machine and descending on a horizontal plane.

  He understood at once what its new position meant. It was going to lower itself on the top of Jack's plane. Then it would land, in a manner of speaking, on his plane. It would decrease its speed until Us quarry would have to support part of the weight of the Gaol craft.

  Its pilot must know what he was doing. He must be sure that Jack's machine could not sustain the added weight. And that it would be borne, however slowly, to the ground.

  A moment later, a grinding noise and a shudder running through the fuselage announced that Jack was right.

  The window was blocked by the blue bottom of the fuselage.

  Jack told Tappy what had happened. Her alarm and puzzlement vanished. She held the radiator out to him.

  He took it and said, "I'd rather not shoot through the sky-window."

  One of the panel dials had on its face a vertical tube like a thermometer. The "mercury" was a bright orange. Its top had gone down, passing symbols marking, he supposed, altitude. The machine was losing speed and height at a rate that upset him. But he was not going to panic. Not now, anyway.

  His mouth was very dry, and a low-burning pressure in him told him that he must urinate. Soon. Or the pressure would be intense, and the burning would not be low.

  "I want to open the window on the door in my side," he told Tappy. "There are two buttons. The forward one is orange. The one behind it is yellow with a blue stripe running across it."

  She had shown him how to unlock the operational program. Maybe she was familiar with the design of the cockpit.

  Tappy smiled and groped along the door to her right until she found the buttons. Then she rested a finger lightly on the yellow one.

  "Thanks," he said. He pushed in on the button on his door. The window began to lower, and cool air screamed into the cockpit.

  He reached out to take the radiator from her. At the same time, he thought, Wait a minute
! How did she learn so much about the design and operation of this airplane? She was six years old when she fled from here to Earth. How could she know all this? How many kids on Earth or here would be familiar with this complex stuff?

  The answers to this question, as to many, would have to wait. He hoped he would live long enough to hear them.

  The window was completely open now. He reached into his jacket, found one of the pencils in the leather holder in the inside pocket, and withdrew it. Then, leaning out of the window and twisted so that he could look back along the fuselage and upward, he extended the brace— the radiator— toward the wing of the Gaol craft. The air tore at him and caught the radiator, but he was gripping it hard. It was not easy to keep the weapon pointed at the wing while he pressed the pencil end against the orange button, the firing activator, the trigger.

  There was no visible radiance expelled from the end of the brace. He knew there would be none, but he had momentarily expected one. He was too conditioned by all the science-fiction movies he had seen and all the books he had read.

  The wing, cut in half, was whisked away, tumbling over and over.

  He should have expected the shadow. But he had not. He grunted when he saw the transparent but still visible plane attached to the sheared-off wing. Then the strange and unexplainable thing was out of his sight.

  The plane suddenly lifted as the solid and opaque Gaol craft on its back fell off.

  He swung the radiator to point at the other plane. For the first time, he could sea the pilot's face clearly. Previously, it had been a blank or, rather, a generic human face. Now it came into focus, and he saw the features of an individual. A woman's face. Since she was unhelmeted, her reddish hair was visible. It was coiled into a bun on top of her head. A Psyche knot. Her delicate and rather pretty face was frozen. Her mind must have gone blank when she saw the wingtip flutter away and her colleague's plane roll off the back of Jack's machine.

  The next moment, she had an even more puzzling and urgent matter to disturb her. Jack had pressed the radiator button. The tail of her plane got a quick divorce from the front part. It dropped, the shadow of the other part turning as it turned. And a shadow of the rear section projected from the still-flying part.

  For a few seconds, the winged half-plane struggled onward, though losing altitude swiftly and beginning to bank to the left. The propulsive-levitation engine must radiate from inside the wings, Jack thought. But the pilot could not steer her craft.

  Then the shorn plane nose-dived.

  Jack turned the plane to observe what would happen next to the Gaol machine. It sped straight downward. A half a minute later, the pilot dived out of the window. Something was strapped to her front. Presently, she managed to straighten out, and she flew at a steep angle toward the ground.

  She had put on some kind of parachute or emergency one-person mini-aircraft.

  He looked in the space behind the seat. It held two cylinders about fourteen inches high and with a radius of six inches. Three levers were sticking out halfway down a yellow vertical stripe. Attached to the cylinders were harnesses.

  The pilot's hands had been on the cylinder. Evidently, she had been using the levers to guide her flight.

  Jack turned back to the north. The compass needle indicated that he was headed toward the exact direction that Tappy had indicated. But, just to make sure, he asked her again if he was headed in the right direction. She nodded.

  It was strange that he trusted her more as a compass than he did an electromechanical device. Or was it? She knew the true direction better than any man-made compass. But the panel device could be malfunctioning or affected by aberrant magnetic fields.

  While he was going toward the black clouds, he looked at the instruments. One of those switches or buttons must be a cruise control. Another would put the plane on automatic navigation. And what was that blank screen that looked so much like that on a TV set?

  He decided that it was best not to monkey around with anything the exact function of which he did not know. So far, he was doing all right with his flying. But what about when he had to land? What activated the machinery to lower the wheels?

  Of course! Ask Tappy!

  He should have thought of that automatically. But his mind was still not completely thawed out. It contained ice, the ice of anxiety.

  No genuine hero, I, he thought.

  He had not volunteered for this perilous voyage. No one in his or her right mind would do that.

  Well, yes, he had entered the rock, and no one had forced him to do that. However, he just could not have allowed Tappy to pass through the gate, or whatever it was, alone. What he should have done, he should have kept her from going into it. Even if he had had to use force.

  No. Somehow, she would have found her way back if he had dragged her away. It was her destiny, and it was her will to follow her destiny.

  My destiny, too, he thought. If I had refused to go with her, I would have loathed myself until I died. And am I not really living, vibrating, keenly aware, alive in every atom of my mind and body? Wasn't I a sort of walking dead before I passed through the gate?

  I didn't know it. I had to come here to find that out. All those people on Earth— well, most of them, anyway— are semizombies.

  The clouds and the mountains ahead swelled. After a while, the black roiling mass, shot with lightning streaks, covered the mountains. It would be raining inside that mass. That reminded him that his mouth was still very dry. His bladder pained him again. During the dogfight, as he thought of it, he had forgotten about the urgency within him.

  Where could he land to get much-needed relief? There was forest below him as far as he could see. Could this plane alight without a long runway? Come straight down like a helicopter? It certainly had used a short takeoff space. But there were very few open areas, and these looked as if they were small.

  That reminded him that he had meant to ask Tappy about the panel instruments. Urged by him, she ran her fingers over the switches, buttons, and dials. When he told her to stop at a certain instrument, she did so. But she could not tell him what they were for unless he ran down a list of questions and she would nod if he was right. This took too much time and required too much patience for him to learn what every instrument did.

  However, he did make a lucky guess about the screen. It showed the view from the rear of the plane if you pressed one of two buttons below it. He activated it. Then he said, "Just what I was hoping wouldn't happen!"

  Three large black dots were in the sky, flying in formation. They were at the same altitude as his plane.

  "We're being followed," he said. "They've sent at least three pursuits after us."

  He looked through the windows to each side and through the window in the ceiling. He could not see any other craft. Then it occurred to him that there could be Gaol machines below him. But his eye-sweeps saw nothing.

  The chasers seemed to be in faster aircraft than the two he had disposed of. The dots had grown larger. It was highly likely that the downed pilots had radioed their experiences to their HQ. These newcomers would be much more cautious.

  The radio blared, startling him and the girl.

  Malva's voice filled the cockpit.

  "You will turn back! You will turn back! Return to the place from which you took off! Return to the place from which you took off! You will be escorted back! You will be escorted back!"

  Jack said, "For God's sake!"

  Though his mind threatened to rupture from the strain of its resistance to the commands, it was making him turn the plane.

  If his mind could have teeth, it would be gritting them so hard it would break them off.

  "Tappy! Order me to disobey Malva!"

  But how could she do that? She could not speak.

  He was desperately trying to think of an idea. His mind was running around like a squirrel looking for nuts it had buried during the summer. It knew they were somewhere in this area. But exactly where?

  The plane
was by now going in the direction from which it had come.

  "Tappy!" he said loudly. "Can you write?"

  She nodded.

  He released the pressure on the wheel rim. Let the plane slow down. He was in no hurry to get back. A few seconds later, he handed her a pencil and the small notebook he carried in the leather holder in the inner jacket pocket.

  "Write down your order to me to disobey anybody but you. Then show it to me. I don't know if it'll work, but we've got to try everything!"

  Why didn't I do that long ago? he thought.

  Then, Well, things've been happening too fast. I can't think of everything.