“Come loose,” she whispered.
The Planck pulled loose from the rock around it, rose several feet, and settled, mushily. The huge ship seemed to be bouncing, ponderously, on something soft. Polly twisted the water fuel valve to no effect. Water and pile were running at peak.
Polly snarled low in her throat. The pile must be nearly dead; it couldn’t even manage to lift the ship against Mount Lookitthat’s point eight gee. If it weren’t for the landing skirt guiding the blast for a ground effect, they wouldn’t be moving at all!
Polly reached far across to the seat on her right. A bar moved under her hand, and at the aft end of the Planck, two fins moved in response. The ship listed to the side and drifted back to nudge the Hospital, almost gently—once, twice.
Live flame roared through the Hospital. It was water vapor heated beyond incandescence, to the point where oxygen dissociated itself from hydrogen, and it cut where it hit. Like death’s hurricane it roared through the corridors, cutting its way through walls where there were no corridors. It killed men before they knew what was killing them, for the first touch of the superheated steam made them blind.
The drive flame spread its fiery death through a third of the ground floor.
To men inside and outside the Hospital, to men who had never met and never would, this was the night everything happened at once. Sane men locked their doors and found something to hide under while they waited for things to stop happening.
“Laney. It must be Laney,” said Jay Hood. “She got through.”
“Elaine Mattson?”
“Right. And she got to the Planck. Can you imagine?”
“She must have a wonderful sense of timing. Do you know what will happen when she blows the drive?”
“Oh, my God. What’ll we do?”
“Keep flying,” said Parlette. “We’d never get out of range now. We might just as well bull through with this and hope Miss Mattson realizes the colonists are winning.”
“More police cars,” said Harry Kane. “Left and right, both.”
Polly touched the bar again. The ship tilted to the other side and began to drift ponderously away from the Hospital.
She dared tilt the ship no farther. How much clearance did she have under the landing skirt? A foot? A yard? Ten? If the skirt touched the ground, the ship would go over on its side.
That was not part of Polly’s plan.
Behind her the door had turned red hot. Polly glanced back with bared teeth. She moved her hands over the board, but in the end left the settings just the way they were. She’d have to circle all the way around the Hospital, but then she’d have a gliding run at the Arthur Clarke.
And she’d hit it again and again until one ship failed.
She never noticed when the red spot on the door turned white and burned through.
The ship jumped three feet upward, and Matt’s head snapped down against the closet floor. When he looked up, the outer hull side of the room was tearing away like tissue paper, except for the agonized scream of old metal dying. And Matt was looking straight into Castro’s office.
He couldn’t think; he couldn’t move. The scene had a quality of nightmare; it was beyond the rational. Magic! he thought, and, Not again!
The Hospital was drifting away, dreamlike. His ears had gone dead, so that it all took place in an eerie silence. The ship was taking off…
And there was no air in his helmet. The tank had held only one last wheeze. He was suffocating. He pulled the clamps up with fingers gone limp and tingly, tossed the helmet away, and gulped air. Then he remembered the gas.
But it was clean hot air, air from outside, howling through the gaping hole in the outer hull. He sucked at it, pulling it to him. There were spots before his eyes.
The ship was going up and down in a seasick manner. Wavering in the drive, Matt thought, and tried to ignore it. But one thing he couldn’t ignore:
Polly had reached the controls. Apparently she was taking the ship up. No telling how high they were already; the lights of the Hospital had dwindled to the point where everything outside was uniformly black against the lighted room. They were going up, and the room was wide open to naked space, and Matt had no helmet.
The room seemed steadier. He jumped for the ladder. The suit was awkward, but he caught the ladder and made his way down, fighting the imbalance caused by his backpack. It wasn’t until he touched bottom that the backpack caught his conscious attention.
After all, if the Planck’s landing motors still worked, why not a spacesuit’s backpack?
He peered down at a control panel meant to be read by fingertips. With the helmet on, he couldn’t have done it. The backpack was studded with small rocket motors; he wanted the ones on the bottom, of course.
How high was he now?
He tried the two buttons on the bottom, and something exploded on his back. It felt about right, as if it were trying to lift him. There was only one throttle knob. Doubtless it controlled all the jets at once, or all that were turned on at a given time.
Well, what else did he need to know? How high was he?
He took one last deep breath and went out the hole in the wall. He saw blackness around him, and he twisted the throttle hard over. It didn’t move. It was already on full. Matt had something like one second to realize that the backpack was for use in space, that it probably wouldn’t have lifted its own weight against gravity.
He hit.
Moving carefully, so as not to interfere with the men using welding torches, Major Jansen peered up into the hole in the flight-control-room door.
They had pushed a platform into position under the door, so that two men could work at once. The platform rose and settled, rose and settled, so that the major had to brace himself with his hands flat on the ceiling. He could see raven hair over the top of a control chair, and one slender brown arm hanging down.
Jesus Pietro, standing below, called, “How long?”
“A few seconds,” said one of the men with cutting torches. “Unless she welded the hinge side too.”
“Do you know where we’re going?” called the Head. “I do.”
Major Jansen looked down, surprised. The Head sounded so odd! And he looked like an old man in poor health. He seemed unable to concentrate on what was going on. He’s ready for retirement, Major Jansen thought with compassion. If we live through this…
“I do,” Jesus Pietro repeated, and nodded to himself.
Major Jansen turned away. He had no time to feel sympathy for the Head, not while this was going on.
“She welded the hinge side,” said one of the cutters.
“How long?”
“Three minutes if we work from both ends.”
The ship continued to move, drifting along on its cushion of fire.
Fire swept along the edge of the trapped forest, leaving a line of licking red and orange flame, ignored by the embattled aircars above. Presently there were explosions among the trees, and then the whole tongue of forest was aflame.
Now the Planck had left the defense perimeter and moved into a place of shops and houses. The crew who lived in those houses were awake, of course; nobody could have slept through that continuous roar. Some stayed where they were; some made for the street and tried to run for it. The ones who reached their basements were the ones who lived. A block-wide path of exploded, burning houses was the wake of the Planck.
But now the houses were empty, and they didn’t burn. They were of architectural coral, and they had been deserted, most of them, for upwards of thirty years.
“We’re through, sir.” The words were hardly necessary. The cutters were pushing the door aside, their hands protected by thick gloves. Major Jansen shoved through and went up the ladder with panic at his back.
Polly’s control board bewildered him. Knowing that he knew as much about flying spacecraft as anyone behind him, he continued to search for the dial or wheel or lever that would change the Planck’s direction. Finally, puzzled, he looked
up; and that was his undoing.
The flight control room was long. It projected through the cargo section to where the outer and inner hulls met, and most of it was transparent. Major Jansen looked out through the outer hull, and he saw what was happening outside.
He saw the glow of the drive flames near the bottom of his view. To the right, a coral house exploding: the last house. Not far ahead, the black line of the void edge, coming closer.
And he froze.
“We’re going over,” said Jesus Pietro, standing under him on the ladder. He showed neither surprise nor fear.
Major Jansen screamed and buried his face in his arms.
Jesus Pietro squeezed past him and into the left-hand seat. His decision was based on logic alone. If Major Jansen had not found the right control, then he was looking at the wrong panel; and this was the only other control panel the colonist girl could reach from where she was sitting. He found the fin controls and tried them.
The ship tilted back and began to slow.
Still slowing, it drifted over the edge.
Jesus Pietro leaned back in his seat and watched. The Planck was no longer supported by the ground effect. Jesus Pietro felt a sensation like an elevator starting down. He watched the cliff go by, faster and faster, a black shadow. Presently it was half the sky, and the other half was stars.
Presently the stars went out.
The ship began to grow hot. It was hot and dark outside, and the ancient walls of the Planck creaked and groaned as the pressure rose. Jesus Pietro watched, waiting.
Waiting for Matthew Keller.
Balance of Power
XIVHe struggled half awake, desperate to escape the terror of sleep. What a wild nightmare that was!
Then he felt fingers probing him.
Agony! He braced and tried to draw away, putting his whole body into it. His whole body barely twitched, but he heard himself whimper. A cool hand touched his forehead, and a voice—Laney’s?—said, “Lie back, Matt.”
He remembered it later, the next time he woke. He woke slowly this time, with the images of his memory forming around him. Again he thought, What a nightmare. But the images came clearer, too clear for a dream, and:
His right leg and most of his right side were as numb as frozen pork. Parts of him were not numb; they ached and stung and throbbed. Again he tried to withdraw from the pain, but this time he was tied down. He opened his eyes to find himself surrounded.
Harry Kane, Mrs. Hancock, Laney, and several others he didn’t recognize all crowded around his strange bed. One was a big woman with red hands and somewhat crewish features, wearing a white smock. Matt disliked her at once. He’d seen such smocks in the organ banks.
“He’s awake.” The woman in white spoke with a throaty lilt. “Don’t try to move, Keller. You’re all splinted up. These people want to talk to you. If you get tired, tell me right away and I’ll get them out of here.”
“Who are you?”
Harry Kane stepped forward. “She’s your doctor, Keller. How do you feel?”
How did he feel? A moment ago he’d realized, too late, that his backpack wouldn’t lift him. But he couldn’t remember the mile-long fall. “Am I going to die?”
“No, you’ll live,” said the woman doctor. “You won’t even be crippled. The suit must have braced you against the fall. You broke a leg and some ribs, but they’ll heal if you follow orders.”
“All right,” said Matt. Nothing seemed to matter much. Was he doped? He saw that he was on his back, with one leg in the air and something bulky around his rib cage, interfering with his breathing. “Did they put transplants in me?”
“Never mind that now, Keller. You just rest and get well.”
“How’s Polly?”
“We couldn’t find her.”
“She was on the Planck. She must have reached the drive controls.”
“Oh!” Laney exclaimed. She started to say something, then changed her mind.
Harry said, “The Planck went over the edge.”
“I see.”
“You got her loose?”
“I got her loose once,” Matt said. The faces were growing hazy. “She was a fanatic. All of you, fanatics. She had all the rescuing I could give her.”
The room drifted away, dreamlike, and he knew the Planck was taking off. From a distance a woman’s authoritarian crew lilt ordered “Out, now, all of you.”
The doctor escorted them to the door, and Harry Kane put a hand on her elbow and took her with them into the corridor. There he asked, “How long before he’s well?”
“Let go, of me, Mr. Kane.”
Harry did. “How long?”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be no invalid. In a week we’ll put him in a walking cast. In a month we’ll see.”
“How long before he’s back at work?”
“Two months, with luck. Why so eager, Mr. Kane?”
“Top secret.”
The woman scowled. “Whatever you’re planning for him, you can bear in mind that he’s my patient. He won’t be ready for anything else until I tell you so.”
“All right. I suggest you don’t tell him about the transplants. He wouldn’t like that.”
“They’re in his records. I can’t do anything about that. I won’t tell him anything.”
When she had left them, Laney asked, “Why so eager?”
“I have an idea about Matt. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“Don’t you think we’ve used him enough?”
“No,” said Harry Kane. “I’d like to, but no.”
Millard Parlette was near exhaustion. He’d moved into Jesus Pietro Castro’s office on Sunday, night, even before the outer wall was replaced, and he’d lived there ever since. His meals were sent in, and he used Castro’s cot when he slept, which was rarely. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was at the end of his life, that he’d waited just long enough to meet this—the crisis he’d foreseen a hundred years ago.
The Planck had done terrible damage to the Hospital, but the work of rebuilding was well in progress. Parlette had hired a construction firm himself, paying them out of his personal fortune. Eventually he would push a bill through the Council to reimburse him. Now workmen were painting the outer wall of his office, which on Sunday night had been yawning space.
His immediate problem was that half of Implementation wanted to quit.
The events of the previous week had had a disastrous effect on Implementation morale. Having the Head accused of treason and deposed by force was only part of it. Elaine Mattson and Matthew Keller had done their part, castrating the Hospital with bombs and stealth. The vivarium prisoners had been freed to make slaughter in the Hospital corridors. The destruction of the Planck had affected not just Hospital personnel but all of Alpha Plateau, for the Planck was half of history.
Now Implementation was faced with a dreadful confusion. All raids on the colony plateaus had been canceled. Known rebels moved freely through the Hospital, and no one could touch them. Their attitude toward the police was rude and contemptuous. Rumor had it that Millard Parlette was drafting new laws to further restrict police power. It didn’t help that the rumors were true.
Parlette did what he could. He spoke to every man who wanted to resign. Some he persuaded to stay. As the ranks dwindled, he found new ways to use the men he had left.
At the same time he was dealing with the Plateau’s four power blocs.
The Council of the Crew had followed Parlette in the past. With luck and skill and work he would make them follow him again.
The crew as a whole would normally follow the Council. But a colonist revolt, in these days of a weakened, disheartened Implementation, might send them into a full panic; and then the Council would mean nothing.
The Sons of Earth would follow Harry Kane. But Kane was beyond Parlette’s control, and he didn’t trust Millard Parlette at all.
The nonrebellious majority of colonists would remain nonrebellious if Kane left them alone. But the Sons
of Earth, with their privileged knowledge of the ramrobot gifts, could stir them to killing wrath at any time. Would Harry Kane wait for the New Law?
Four power blocs, and Implementation too. Being Head meant an endless maze of details, minor complaints, delivery of reprimands, paperwork, petty internal politics—he could get lost in such a maze and never know it until a screaming colonist army came to storm the Hospital.
It was a wonder he ever got around to Matt Keller.
Matt lived on his back, with his right side encased in concrete and his right leg dangling in space. He was given pills that reduced the pains to permanent, aggravating aches.
The woman in the organ-bank smock examined him from time to time. Matt suspected she saw him as potential organ-bank material, of dubious value. On Wednesday he overheard someone calling her Dr. Bennet. He had never thought of asking her name, as she had never thought of giving it.
In the early morning hours, when the sleeping pills were wearing off, or during afternoon naps, he was plagued by nightmares. Again his elbow smashed a nose across a man’s face, and again there was the awful shock of terror and triumph. Again he asked the way to the vivarium, turned, and raised his arm to see the skin beaded with bright blood. Again he stood in the organ banks, unable to run, and he woke drenched in perspiration. Or, with a stolen sonic he dropped uniformed men until the remembered sonic backlash turned his arm to wood. He woke, and his right arm had gone to sleep under him.
He thought of his family with nostalgia. He saw Jeannie and her husband every few months; they lived not twenty miles from Gamma’s major mining area. But he hadn’t seen his mother and father in years. How good it would be to see them again!
Even the memory of mining worms filled him with nostalgia. They were unpredictable, yes, but compared to Hood or Polly or Laney…at least he could understand mining worms.
His curiosity had been as dead as his right leg. On Wednesday evening it returned with a rush.
Why was the Hospital treating him? If he had been captured, why hadn’t he been taken apart already? How had Laney and Kane been allowed to visit him?