Matt Keller would go through life knowing that he had passed up his chance to save them.
But, he reminded himself, it wasn’t really a chance. He had no way to reach Alpha Plateau without being shot. He’d have to cross two guarded bridges.
The noonday sun shone through clean air on a clean, ordered world—in contrast to the gutted coral shell behind him. Matt hesitated on the doorstep, then resolutely turned back to the jagged hole in Harry Kane’s living room. He must know that it was impossible. The basement was the heart of the rebel stronghold—a heart which had failed. If Implementation had overlooked a single weapon…
There were no weapons in the car, but he found an interesting assortment of scars. Ripped upholstery showed bolts attached to the exposed metal walls, but the bolts had been cut or torn out. Matt found six places which must have been gun mounts. A bin in back might have held makeshift hand grenades. Or sandwiches; Matt couldn’t tell. Implementation had taken anything that might have been a weapon, but they didn’t seem to have harmed the car. Presumably they would come back and dig it out someday if they thought it worth the effort.
He got in and looked at the dashboard, but it didn’t tell him anything. He’d never seen a car dashboard. There had been a cover over it, padlocked, but the padlock lay broken on the floor and the cover was loose. Harry’s padlock? Or the original owner’s?
He sat in the unfamiliar vehicle, unwilling to leave because leaving would mean giving up. When he noticed a button labeled Start, he pushed it. He never heard the purr of the motor starting.
The blast made him spasm like a galvanized frog. It came all in one burst, like the sound of a gunshot as heard by a fly sitting in the barrel. Harry must have set something to blow up the house! But no, he was still alive. And there was daylight pouring in on him.
Daylight.
Four feet of earth had disappeared from above him. A wall of the house was in his field of vision. It leaned. Harry Kane must have been a genius with shaped charge explosives. Or known one. Come to that, Matt could have done the job for him. The mining worms didn’t do all his work.
Daylight. And the motor was running. He could hear an almost soundless hum now that his ears had recovered from the blast. If he flew the car straight up…
He’d have had to cross two guarded bridges to reach Alpha Plateau. Now he could fly there—if he could learn to fly before the car killed him.
Or, he could go home. He wouldn’t be noticed, despite his ill-fitting clothes. Colonists tended to mind their own business, leaving it to the crew and Implementation to maintain order. He’d change clothes, burn these, and who would know or ask where he’d been over the weekend?
Matt sighed and examined the dashboard again. He couldn’t quit now. Later, maybe, when he crashed the car, or when they stopped him in the air. Not now. The blast that had freed his path was an omen one he couldn’t ignore.
Let’s see. Four levers set at zero. Fans: 1-2, 1-3, 2-4, 3-4. Why would those little levers be set to control the fans in pairs? He pulled one toward him. Nothing.
A small bar with three notches: Neutral. Ground. Air. Set on Neutral. He moved it to Ground. Nothing. If he’d had the Ground Altitude set for the number of inches he wanted, the fans would have started. But he didn’t know that. He tried Air.
The car tried to flop over on its back.
He was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he pulled all the fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma were tiny squares. Finally the car began to settle down.
Not that he could relax for a moment.
Fans numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 were left front, right front, left rear, right rear. Dropping lever 1-2 dropped the front of the car; 3-4, the back; 1-3, the left side; 2-4, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he had the knack of it.
But how to go forward?
There were Altitude and Rotation dials, but they didn’t do anything. He didn’t dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it. But…suppose he tilted the car forward? Depressed the 1-2 throttle.
He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could strike him in the face, he got the car righted, waited until his nerves stopped jumping, then…tried it again.
This time he pushed the 1-2 lever in a little, waited three seconds, pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move forward with its nose dipped.
Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to fly backwards, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn’t know how to turn around.
He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob labeled Slats. The car also started to drop. Matt remembered the venetian-blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were, leveled the car’s altitude. It must have been right because the car kept moving forward.
It was hardly wobbling at all.
And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.
The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and river terminated at the void edge to the left, and the murmur of the river’s fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance.
Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn’t know just what it looked like, but he was sure he’d recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn’t bother him. He hadn’t decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew.
It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.
But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the Gyroscope switch.
As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions.
“Did you get the prisoners put away all right?”
“Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn’t have room for them all.”
“And they’re in the organ banks?”
“Yes, Sir.”
Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. “Let’s hope they didn’t know anything important. What about the deadheads?”
“We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o’clock. That’s when the ear mikes evaporated.”
“Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?”
“Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues.”
“It’s not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources,” said Jesus Pietro.
After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know, “What about Keller?”
“Who, Sir?”
“The one that got away.”
And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, “No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody’s volunteered to turn him in. He hasn’t tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the p
olice in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him.”
More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee. Then, “See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out if anyone saw the landing yesterday.”
“One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens.”
“Oh?” For a moment Jesus Pietro’s thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out—“I don’t know why you couldn’t tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute,” he called as Jansen turned to the door. “One more thing. There may be basements that we don’t know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus.”
“Yes, sir. Priority?”
“No, no, no. The vivarium’s two deep already. Tell them to-take their time.”
The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then demanded, “Well, why call here? Hold on.” With a touch of derision he reported, “A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless manner. Naturally they had to call you personally.”
“Now why the—mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane’s basement?”
“I’ll ask.” He did. “It is, sir.”
“I should have known there’d be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down.”
Geologists (don’t give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet’s skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.
It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat’s atmosphere.
And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls, the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.
Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia.
The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one’s peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation.
So Alpha Plateau was crowded.
What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist’s home. Two or three were as large as Matt’s old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.
None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead.
Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size.
Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis. Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.
They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships’ hulls. Some would be power stations, others—he couldn’t guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.
All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees?
A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun-beam! For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake.
It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of Alpha Plateau.
The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn’t move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.
The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch. Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the desperate.
Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they’d lost him, but they wanted to see him fall.
How far down was the mist? He’d never known. Miles, certainly. Tens of miles? They’d hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn’t go back to the Plateau; they’d stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now.
Matt flipped the car over on its back.
The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.
“Hell of a way to go,” someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement.
The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dr
opping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.
Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air!
But that wouldn’t occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth’s strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn’t meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it.
He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the farther he’d leave them behind.
At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn’t know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose.