by Perry Rhodan
"It's shrinking again!" Tompetch cried fearfully. "We won't be able to make it!"
Reginald Bell did not stir. From the side Tompetch could see his otherwise jovial face which was now earnest—and severe. This was a Reginald Bell different from any Tompetch could remember and the sight surprised him so much that he became quiet at once.
The visible section of Wanderer's surface shrunk further. His thoughts whirling, Tompetch calculated that the period of expansion had lasted about 70 seconds, from 08:57:34 to 08:58:44. Now it was 08:59:05. Now there were only 50 seconds before it would be too late to land.
The Gazelle staggered for a moment as it passed through an invisible barrier.
"That was the forcefield!" Bell said. "Now we're as good as there!"
The small circular portion of the surface lay immediately below them. Tompetch watched with disbelieving eyes as the circle shrank increasingly, as more and more details that he had seen just a moment before suddenly slid out of existence. Below them lay jungle terrain.
Reginald Bell made a rough landing. Braking jets firing and blasting trees out of the way, he set the spaceboat down in the jungle precisely in the center of the still-visible surface, which now had a diameter of barely two kilometers.
For Tompetch the impact came completely without warning. He felt a heavy blow that knocked him forward. A wave of blood rushed into his head. He closed his eyes and gave in to the feeling of sitting in a carousel gone mad. He was afraid he would get sick but before things got to that point the carousel stopped turning and as he opened his eyes he saw around him on the vidscreen the green walls of the jungle. And high above the treetops, an uncanny, black, threatening something coming toward him from all sides.
Reginald Bell unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, groaning. The Gazelle hung diagonally in the jungle underbrush.
"We're there," said Bell, somewhat uncertain. "There's no doubt about that. But how will things go from here?"
The black wall advanced closer over the trees. Tompetch was afraid of it. Without realizing it, he toyed with the safety belt buckle, opened it and shoved the belt to the side. Tompetch stood up and felt like running away. But Bell, who seemed to read his thoughts, laid his hand on Tompetch's shoulder. "Now, now, Tompetch. It can't be as bad as all that!"
Tompetch trembled. His eyes wide open, he watched as the black wall sucked up one tree after the other and came towards the spaceboat. "Look!" he cried, beside himself with fear. "It's going to—"
Then it was dark. The black wall had captured them. Nothing more was to be seen of the trees outside. Unbelieving, Tompetch stared at the small instrument lights on the control panel, shining as though nothing had ever happened. He looked down at himself, then looked at Reginald Bell who stood smiling next to him. He suddenly felt ashamed. He covered his face with his hand and closed his eyes. After awhile Bell heard him say lowly: "I'm sorry, sir. I've behaved like a small child."
Bell laid his hand on Tompetch's shoulder for the second time. "Don't take it so hard," he said. "I felt the same way you did—I was just as frightened as you were. And now shut off all the instruments. We need darkness if we want to see anything!"
Tompetch looked at him in astonishment. Then he climbed the inclined floor up to the control panel and reversed the main switch. The humming that had previously filled the control room died away and the instrument lamps went out. The darkness became complete.
Tompetch stayed where he was. He felt around for guidance, then sank down into the pilot's seat. He stared into the darkness. After awhile he saw the outline of the chair arms, then the dully shining surface of the vidscreen became visible and finally he saw Reginald Bell's blurred figure take shape four meters away. Tompetch rubbed his eyes, trying to rid himself of any hallucinations. In this dimension there could not be any light. It was semispace, as he had been told, impossible for any human being to imagine and devoid of any phenomena a man could sense like light, sound and warmth.
But the image remained. Here was the seat, there the vidscreen and back there the unmoving Reginald Bell.
"Do you see something?" Bell asked suddenly.
"Yes sir," Tompetch answered hesitantly. "I think I can make you out."
"That's great!" said Bell triumphantly. "It's the same for me, too, but I thought it was an illusion. So there's a trace of light in this semispace."
He climbed a bit farther upwards toward the front in order to get a better look at the panorama-vidscreen. Tompetch strained to see something on the screen and after a short time made out the outlines of the trees that the black wall had recently swallowed up. He attempted to identify the color of the sky showing over the treetops and decided that it was a dark red.
"Do you see the sky red like I do?" Bell asked at that moment.
Tompetch said yes.
"We'll have to compare all our impressions here," Bell explained as he sensed Tompetch's wonderment. "Here you can't be certain that two men will sense the same thing the same way. I don't want to run any risks. Say, you were watching the vidscreen—could you show me on a map where we are?"
Tompetch remembered the double curve of the river which he had seen and, further, that the Gazelle had at most put five kilometers between it and the riverbank before it landed.
"I believe so, sir," he answered. "Yes, I can."
"Then turn on the lights. We want to get ourselves oriented."
Tompetch manipulated the main switch again. As the equipment started to hum once more, he switched the light on. Reginald Bell slid across the slanting floor to a wall cabinet and drew out a packet of maps. "You know, of course," he said, climbing up to Tompetch, "that Wanderer is a world resembling the conception the ancients had of Earth: a flat disc whose sides one could fall over if it weren't for the forcefield. We've mapped the planet's surface and all measurements are exact, although we didn't have much time back then. It could be that many of the details aren't shown."
Tompetch nodded and took the packet. Impatient and curious he took out the map and laid it out on the table.
"The forcefield," Bell continued, "has a rather useful side effect, as we found out. It creates a magnetic field with whose help directions can be determined. The map is drawn in the usual way: north at the top and south at the bottom."
Meanwhile Tompetch had begun to slide his finger across the map. He found a number of rivers drawn in but none of them showed the particular double bend that he had seen. He searched along the seacoasts and at length found a river mouth whose size made it more of a bay. From the bay a narrow blue streak forced its way into the hinterlands and only 50 kilometers inland increased to the width that let Tompetch believe it was the same river he had seen.
"We were just as surprised about it as you are," Bell said. "A river 10 times broader close to the source than it is at the mouth. Do you know where It got the idea?"
Tompetch shook his head in puzzlement.
"Are you familiar with the Amazon River?" Bell asked.
"Yes, from the maps I've seen."
"Good, because then you must have heard of the narrows at Obidos. The Amazon, several kilometers wide up to that point, narrows at Obidos to less than one kilometer. I've seen the narrows myself and really there's nothing unusual to see. But you feel at that place the tremendous power of the river concentrated at that narrow place. It seemed to impress It , anyway. It created this river following the example of the Amazon. And from the river narrows at Obidos It made a 50-kilometer long stretch where the river races along at the speed of an airplane."
Tompetch's eyes went wide. "You mean, sir, that he ... or It ... saw that on the Earth?"
"Didn't you know that?" Bell asked, somewhat surprised. "This world is artificial. And not only the world but every riverbend, every mountain and every seashore is artificial. It has looked around in the Galaxy and recreated here on Wanderer what It liked best."
Struck dumb by amazement, Tompetch turned back to the map. He followed the Amazon-like river about 90 kilomete
rs inland and found the double bend he had seen before the landing. Tompetch drew a straight line from the double bend of the river to a point about five kilometers to the northwest. It was in the middle of an area whose color indicated it as 'tropical rainforest.'
"Here," said Tompetch. "We must have landed here."
Reginald Bell scratched his head. Then he traced a path with his finger from the point Tompetch had designated clear across the map, crossing two seas and an island continent on the way, and finally stopped on the southern coast of a large land mass far to the north.
"We couldn't have done worse if we'd tried," Bell muttered unhappily. "The entire disc has a diameter of 8,000 kilometers and it's 6,000 kilometers from here to the city where the physiotron is!"
He glanced mistrustfully at the vidscreen but now, since the lights were on, he could not make anything out. Sighing, he turned off the lights.
"We'll get started as soon as we can at least see something," he said to Tompetch from the darkness. "If the light-locator works, we'll be OK. If it doesn't..."
He left the matter of what would happen then, an open question. Tompetch heard him go to the pilot's seat and sit down.
"Sit down here next to me," Tompetch heard him say not much later. "Take the map and use the light-locator. Leaving a few control lights burning should give you enough light to make the necessary comparisons."
Tompetch obeyed. He stumbled over something that lay in his way as he went to his seat with the map but as he sat down he noticed that his eyes had already begun to accustom themselves to the darkness. On the vidscreen appeared the first outlines of trees.
Reginald Bell let a quarter of an hour go by. When he felt that he could see the outer world as well as he ever would, he switched on the motors. He waited until the usual singing noise sounded loud and clear, telling him that everything was in order, then he slowly pulled the throttle down.
In doing so, he kept his, eye on the vidscreen. He expected the tree outlines to drop out of sight as the spaceboat straightened itself out but nothing of the sort happened. He had pulled the large main switch, which regulated the function of the motors according to a series of preprogrammed figures, down more than half way, and under normal conditions that would have meant that the Gazelle would have shot up into the sky like a cannonball. Instead, it simply lay between the trees and did not move.
Reginald Bell pulled the switch a little farther down, stared again at the vidscreen and felt the sweat pour down as the trees stayed unmoving in place. What would happen if the engines gave out completely? They were caught in the middle of a vast forest probably swarming with unknown animals. The nearest open space, the river, was five kilometers away at least. And even had the river been only 100 meters away, Bell would have not dared to leave the spaceboat until he knew whether or not his weapons functioned the same on this triple-cursed world.
With an angry jerk he pulled the switch all the way down. He had not expected any success but the trees outside suddenly began to recede. With disbelieving, wide-open eyes Bell watched as other small branches came into view at the top of the screen, slid past and disappeared at the bottom. Finally nothing more could be seen on the opaque screen than the deep red of Wanderer's sky.
A welter of thoughts shot through his mind simultaneously. He heard the high-pitched singing of the motors, laboring under maximum power as called for by the position of the master switch. Bell had called for an average range of acceleration. Under normal circumstances the Gazelle should have risen at an acceleration 100-times normal. The fact it did not was not due to the motors. However, the antigravity generator, which created a shock-absorbing field, oriented itself to the motors. If it had operated according to its program, there should now have a 100-times normal counterfield in effect in the spaceboat's interior And since the Gazelle in reality was accelerating at a rate of hardly one meter per second, the counterfield should have smashed the Gazelle's two occupants within moments.
But there was no counterfield.
Bell went pale with the thought of what would have happened if not for two mysterious effects—the force preventing the spaceboat from rising at a rate of acceleration 100-times normal, and the disappearance of the counterfield—that appeared simultaneously and canceled each other out.
He threw a swift glance to the side to Tompetch but Tompetch seemed to have nothing to worry about. He had not recognized the threatening aspects of the situation and Bell decided not to make him aware of them.
His hands sweating, Bell directed the Gazelle in a northerly direction, attempting to make for the south coast of the great equatorial ocean.
Mike Tompetch busied himself with the light-locator. He checked over the instrument lights and was content to see that they were all aglow and that the device was ready for use. He made his first attempt. On a turn of a knob, a richly energized charge of light fanned out from the Gazelle, struck the surface of the planet three kilometers below and was reflected back, indicating on a TV screen the shape of the land below as they moved along above it. Tompetch stared entranced at the screen and the first thing he saw was the shape of the river as it flowed in a straight fine to the ocean. He saw the coastline become visible and, to the south, the irregular surface of the jungle.
The light-locator functioned. Tompetch reported it to Bell with a triumphant voice, switched the locator to automatic sensing and began to compare the picture on the screen with the map.
An hour ticked by thus—an hour in which Reginald Bell constantly wiped the sweat from his brow and Mike Tompetch saw nothing more than the never-changing surface of the ocean. He had determined that, according to the map, a long narrow island lay about 200 kilometers before the south coast and that the Gazelle would have to fly over it if it held to its course. Because of the slow speed at which they moved, the appearance of the island could not be expected before another hour had passed.
Tompetch leaned back and sank into his thoughts. By chance his glance fell on the light-locator screen. He gave a start and leaned forward with a small cry of astonishment. "The island, sir...!" he gasped.
"What island?" Bell demanded harshly.
"200 miles off the south coast there's a long, narrow island, sir. Since we're moving at only 100 kilometers per hour, we shouldn't have reached it for some time. But here... here it is, lying right below us!"
Bell looked suspiciously at the vidscreen. "Are you sure you looked at the map right?"
"Absolutely, sir," Tompetch answered.
"Then the light-locator isn't working right. It's got the wrong direction. It's picked up something lying 100 kilometers ahead of us."
Tompetch had begun to calculate. Bell saw him compare the island's outline on the map with its image on the vidscreen. He seemed to have been surprised by his results.
Mouth open and stammering, Tompetch looked at Bell. "The island... it should be 50 kilometers wide and 300 kilometers long, sir... The length is right but the width... according to the vidscreen is only 25 kilometers!"
Bell leaped up. He compared the size of the island as given by the map with Tompetch's figures and found, like Tompetch, that the width was 50 kilometers. Then he turned to the vidscreen and saw on his first glance that there the island was only 25 kilometers wide.
He began calculating both observations together. The island lay only 100 kilometers south of the coast, although the distance given on the map was 200 kilometers. The island was now 25 kilometers wide even though it should have been 50. There seemed to be only one explanation.
Wanderer had shrunk to half its former size!
4/ MINI-CONTINENT
At 09:15 on the morning of April 26, 2042 all preparations for the teletransmission of the Gazelle had been completed. On board the craft slowly gliding towards the hangar airlock were Perry Rhodan; Atlan the Arkonide; Dr. Ali el Jagat, chief mathematician of the Drusus , John Marshall and André Noir, two mutants from the ship's crew; and the motionless body of Nathan, the being from Solitude.
; As the inner airlock hatch opened and allowed the Gazelle entry to the vast interior of the lock itself, the time remaining was now down to 135 hours.
As was his custom, Perry Rhodan had taken over the piloting of the spaceboat himself. His impatience repressed only with difficulty, he waited until the airlock had been pumped empty and the outer hatch had opened sufficiently wide for the Gazelle to pass through. Slowly he let the craft glide out into space and he held his breath in anticipation of the shock that had to come as soon as the transport field of the teletransmitter had seized the Gazelle.
The transport field began outside the protective forcefield around the Drusus , extending about 150 meters beyond the ship's outer walls. One could not see the beginning of the field. On the vidscreens could be seen only the blackness of space and an occasional flickering emanating from pieces of cosmic dust striking the ship's forcefield and turning into energy.
