"Dobbin," I asked, "what is all this danger business? What are we supposed to be afraid of?"
"I cannot inform you," Dobbin said, "since I, myself, fail to understand, but I can assure you . . ."
"OK, let it go," I told him.
Tuck was puffing and panting, trying to boost Smith onto one of the hobbies, Sara already was on one of them, sitting straight and prim, the perfect picture of a gal on the threshold of a very great adventure, and that, of course, was all it was to her—another great adventure. Sitting there, proud, astride her mount, with that ridiculous ancient rifle slung across her shoulder, nattily attired in an adventure-going costume.
I glanced quickly about the bowl that was the landing field, rimmed in by the city, and there was nothing stirring. Shadows ran out from the city's western wall as the sun went inching down behind the buildings and some of those western buildings had turned from white to black, but there were no lights.
Where was everyone? Where were the city's residents and all those visitors who'd come down on the spaceships standing like ghostly tombstones on the field? And why were the ships all white?
"Honored sir," Dobbin said to me, "if you please, would you get into my saddle. Our time is running short."
A chill was in the air and I don't mind admitting that I felt a twinge of fright. I don't know why. Perhaps just the place itself, perhaps the feeling of being trapped on the landing field rimmed in by the city, perhaps the fact that there seemed no living thing in sight except the hobbies—if you could call them living and I suppose you could.
I reached up and lifted the strap of my laser gun off my shoulder and, grasping it in hand, swung into Dobbin's saddle.
"You need no weapon here," Dobbin said, disapprovingly. I didn't answer him. It was my own damn business.
Dobbin wheeled and we started out across the field, heading toward the city. It was a crazy kind of ride—smooth enough, no jerking, but going up and down as much, it seemed, as one was moving forward. It wasn't rocking; it was like skating on a sine wave.
The city seemed not to grow much larger, nor to gain in detail. We bad been much farther from it, I realized, than it bad appeared; the landing field was larger, too, than it had appeared. Behind me, Tuck let out a yell.
"Captain!"
I twisted in the saddle.
"The ship!" yelled Tuck. "The ship! They're doing something to it."
And they were, indeed—whoever they might be.
A long-necked mechanism stood beside the ship. It looked like a bug with a squat and massive body and a long and slender neck with a tiny head atop it. From the mouth of it sprayed out a mist directed at the ship. Where it struck the ship, the ship was turning white, just like those other tombstone ships that stood upon the, field.
I let out an angry yelp, reaching for a rein and yanking hard. But I might as well have yanked upon a rock. Dobbin kept straight on.
"Turn around," I yelled. "Go back!"
"There is no turning back, most honored sir," said Dobbin, conversationally, not even panting with his running. "There is no time. We must reach the safety of the city."
"There is time, by God," I yelled, jerking up the gun and aiming it at the ground in front of us, between Dobbin's ears.
"Shut your eyes," I yelled to the others, and pulled the trigger one notch back. Even through my eyelids, I sensed the flaring of the laser-light as it bounced back from the ground. Under me Dobbin reared and spun, almost swapping end for end, and when I opened my eyes we were heading back toward the ship.
"You'll be the death of us, crazy being," Dobbin moaned. "All of us will die."
I looked behind me and the hobbies all were following. Dobbin, it appeared, was leader and where he went they were content to follow. But farther back there was no sign of where the laser bolt had struck. Even at first notch capacity it should have made a mark; there should have been a smoking crater back there where it struck.
Sara was riding with one arm up across her eyes.
"You all right?" I asked.
"You crazy fool!" she cried.
"I yelled for you to close your eyes," I said. "There was bound to be reflection."
"You yelled, then fired," she said. "You didn't give us time."
She took her arm down and her eyes blinked at me and, hell, she was all right. Just something else to bitch about; she never missed a chance.
Ahead of us the bug that had been spraying the ship was scurrying off across the field. It must have had wheels or treads underneath it, for it was spinning along at a headlong clip, its long neck stretched out in front of it in its eagerness to get away from there.
"Please, sir," Dobbin pleaded, "we are simply wasting time. There is nothing that can be done."
"One more word out of you," I said, "and this time right between the ears."
We reached the ship and Dobbin skidded to a halt, but I didn't wait for him to stop. I hit the ground and was running toward the ship while he still was moving. Although what I intended to do I had no idea.
I reached the ship and I could see that it was covered with some stuff that looked like frosty glass and when I say covered, I mean covered—every inch of it. There was no metal showing. It looked unfunctional, like a model ship. Reduced in size, it could have passed for those little model ships sold in decorator shops to stick up on the mantle.
I put out my hand and touched it and it was slick and hard. There was no look of metal and there was no feel of metal, either. I rapped it with my gun stock and it rang like a bell, setting up a resonance that went bouncing across the field and came back as an echo from the city walls.
"What is it, captain?" Sara asked, her voice somewhat shaky. This was her ship, and there was no one who could mess around with it.
"A coating of something hard," I said. "As if it had been sealed."
"You mean we can't get into it?"
"I don't know. Maybe if we had a sledge hammer to crack it, we could peel it off."
She made a sudden motion and the rifle was off her back and the butt against her shoulder. I'll say this for her: crazy as that gun might be, she could handle it.
The sound of the shot was loud and flat and the hobbies reared in terror. But above the sound of the report itself was another sound, a wicked howling that almost screamed, the noise of a ricocheting bullet tumbling end for end, and pitched lower than the shrill howling of the slug was the booming resonance of the milk-white ship. But there was no indication of where the bullet might have struck. The whiteness of the ship still was smooth—uncracked, unblemished, unmarked. Two thousand foot-pounds of metal had slammed against it and had not made a dent.
I lifted the laser gun and Dobbin said to me, "There be no use, you foolish folk. There is nothing you can do."
I whirled on him angrily. "I thought I told you . . .' I yelled. "One more word out of you and right between the eyes."
"Violence," Dobbin told me, perkily, "will get you nowhere. But staying here, once the sun has set, spells very rapid death."
"But the ship!" I shouted.
"The ship is sealed," said Dobbin, "like all the others. Better sealed with you outside of it than with you still inside."
And although I would not have admitted it, I knew that he was right in saying there was nothing we could do. For I recalled that the field had been unmarked by the laser beam and undoubtedly all this whiteness was the same—the field, the ships, the city, all coated, more than likely, with some substance so tightly bonded in its atomic structure that it was indestructible.
"I sorrow greatly for you," said Dobbin, with no sorrow in his voice. "I know the shock of you. But once on this planet, no one ever leaves. Although there is no need of also dying, I plead with you compassionately to get into the saddle and let us head for safety."
I looked up at Sara and she nodded quietly. She had figured it, I knew, about the way I had, although in my case most unwillingly. There was no use in staying out here. The ship was sealed, whatever that might me
an or for whatever purpose, and when morning came we could come back to see what we could do. From the moment we had met him, Dobbin had been insistent about the danger. There might be danger or there might be none—there was no way, certainly, that we could determine if there were or weren't. The only sensible thing, at the moment, was to go along with him.
I swung swiftly to the saddle and even before I found seat, Dobbin had whirled about, running even as he led.
"We have lost most valued time," he told me. "We will try with valiance to make it up. We yet may reach the city."
A good part of the landing field lay in shadow now and only the sky was bright. A faint, smokelike dusk was filtering through the city.
Once on this planet, Dobbin had said, no one ever leaves. But these were his words alone, and nothing else. Perhaps there was a real intent to keep us here, which would explain the sealing of the ship, but there would be ways, I told myself, that could be tried to get off the planet when the time to go should come. There were always ways.
The city was looming up as we drew closer, and now the buildings began to assume their separate shapes. Up till now they had been a simple mass that had the appearance of a solid cliff thrusting up from the flatness of the field. They had seemed tall from out in the center of the field; now they reared into the sky so far that, this close, it was impossible to follow with the eye up to their tops.
The city still stayed dead. There were no lights in any of the windows—if, indeed, the buildings did have windows. There was no sign of movement at the city's base. There were no outlying buildings; the field ran up to the base of the buildings and the buildings then jutted straight into the sky.
The hobbies thundered cityward, their rockers pounding out a ringing clangor as they humped along like a herd of horses galloping wildly before a scudding storm front. Once you got the hang of riding them, it wasn't bad at all. You just went sort of loose and let your body follow that undulating sine wave.
The city walls loomed directly in front of us, great slabs of masonry that went up and up, and now I saw that there were streets, or at least what I took for streets, narrow slits of empty blackness that looked like fractures in a monstrous cliff.
The hobbies plunged into one of the slits of emptiness and darkness closed upon us. There was no light here; except when the sun stood straight overhead, there never would be light. The walls seemed to rise all about us, the slit that was a street narrowing down to a vanishing point so that the walls seemed on every hand.
Ahead of us one building stood a little farther back, widening the street, and from the level of the street a wide ramp ran up to massive doors. The hobbies turned and flung themselves at the ramp and went humping up it and through one of the gaping doors.
We burst into a room where there was a little light and the light, I saw, came from great rectangular blocks set into the wall that faced us.
The hobbies rocked swiftly toward one of the blocks and came to a halt before it. To one side I saw a gnome, or what appeared to be a gnome, a small, humpbacked, faintly humanoid creature that spun a dial set into the wall beside the slab of glowing stone.
"Captain, look!" cried Sara.
There was no need for her to cry out to me—and I had seen it almost as soon as she had. Upon the glowing stone appeared a scene—a faint and shadowed scene, as if it might be a place at the bottom of a clear and crystal sea, its colors subdued by the depth of water, its outlines shifting with the little wind ripples that ran on the water's surface.
A raw and bleeding landscape, with red lands stretching to a mauve, storm-torn horizon, broken by crimson buttes, and in the foreground a clump of savage yellow flowers. But even as I tried to grasp all this, to relate it to the kind of world it might have been, it changed, and in its place was a jungle world, drowned in the green and purple of overwhelming vegetation, spotted by the flecks of screaming color that I knew were tropic flowers, and back of it all a sense of lurking bestiality that made my hide crawl even as I looked at it.
Then it, too, was gone—a glimpse and it was gone—and in its place was a yellow desert lighted by a moon and by a flare of stars that turned the sky to silver, with the lips of the marching sand dunes catching and fracturing the moon and starlight so that the dunes appeared to be foaming waves of water charging in upon the land.
The desert did not fade as the other places had. It came in a rush upon us and exploded in my face.
Beneath me I felt the violent plunging of a bucking Dobbin and made a frantic grab at the cantle of the saddle which seemed to have no cantle and then felt myself pitched forward and turning in the air.
I struck on one shoulder and skidded in the sand and finally came to rest, the breath knocked out of me. I struggled up, cursing—or trying to curse and failing, because I had no breath to curse with—and once on my feet, saw that we were alone in that land we had seen upon the glowing block.
Sara sprawled to one side of me and not far off Tuck was struggling to his feet, hampered by the cassock that had become entangled about his legs, and a little beyond Tuck, George was crawling on his hands and knees, whimpering like a pup that had been booted out of doors into a friendless. frigid night.
All about us lay the desert, desiccated, without a shred of vegetation, flooded by the great white moon and the thousand glowing stars, all shining like lamps in a cloudless sky.
"He's gone!" George was whimpering as he crawled about. "I can't hear him anymore. I have lost my friend."
And that was not all that was lost. The city was lost and the planet on which the city stood. We were in another place. This was one trip, I told myself, that I never should have made. I had known it all along. I'd not believed in it, even from the start. And to make a go of it, you had to believe in everything you did. You had to have a reason for everything you did.
Although, I recalled, I had really no choice.
I had been committed from the moment I had seen that beauty of a spaceship standing on the field of Earth.
TWO
I had come sneaking back to Earth. Not back really, for I never had been there to start with. But Earth was where my money was and Earth was sanctuary and out in space I was fair game to anyone who found me. Not that what I had done had been actually so bad, nor was I to blame entirely, but there were a lot of people who had lost their shirts on it and, they were out to get me and eventually would get me if I failed to reach Earth's sanctuary.
The ship that I was driving was a poor excuse—a fugitive from a junkyard (and that was exactly what it was), patched up and stuck together with binder twine and bailing wire, but I didn't need it long. All I wanted of it was to get me to Earth. Once I stepped out of it, it could fall into a heap for all it mattered to me. Once I got to Earth, I'd be staying there.
I knew that Earth Patrol would be on watch for me—not that Earth cared; so far as Earth was concerned, the more the merrier. Rather a patrol to keep undesirable characters like myself from fleeing back to Earth.
So I came into the solar system with the Sun between myself and Earth and I hoped that my slide rule hadn't slipped a notch and that I had it figured right. I piled on all the normal-space speed I could nurse out of the heap and the Sun's gravity helped considerably and when I passed the Sun that ship was traveling like a hell-singed bat. There was an anxious hour when it seemed I might have sliced it just a bit too close. But the radiation screens held and I lost only half my speed and there was Earth ahead.
With all engines turned off and every circuit cut, I coasted on past Venus, no more than five million miles off to my left, and headed in for Earth.
The patrol didn't spot me and it was sheer luck, of course, but there wasn't much to spot. I had no energy output and all the electronics were doused and all they could have picked up was a mass of metal and fairly small, at that. And I came in, too, with the Sun behind me, and the solar radiations, no matter how good the equipment you may have, help louse up reception.
It was insane to try it,
of course, and there were a dozen very nasty ways in which I could have failed, but on many a planet-hunting venture I had taken chances that were no less insane. The thing was that I made it.
There is just one spaceport on Earth. They don't need any more. The traffic isn't heavy. There are few people left on Earth; they all are out in space. The ones who are left are the hopeless sentimentalists who think there is status attached to living on the planet where the human race arose. They, and the ones like myself, are the only residents. The sentimentalists, I had heard, were a fairly snooty crowd of self-styled aristocrats, but that didn't bother me. I wasn't planning on having too much to do with them. Occasionally excursion ships dropped in with a load of pilgrims, back to visit the cradle of the race, and a few freighters bringing in assorted cargo, but that was all there was.
I brought in the ship and set it down and walked away from it, carrying my two bags, the only possessions I had been able to get away with before the vultures had come flocking in. The ship didn't fall into a heap; it just stood there, its slab-sided self, the sorriest-looking vessel you ever clapped your eyes on.
Just two berths away from it stood this beauty of a ship. It gleamed with smart efficiency, slim and sleek, a space yacht that seemed straining toward the sky, impatient at its leash.
There was no way of knowing, of course, just by looking at it, what it had inside, but there is something about a ship that one simply cannot miss. Just looking at this one, there was no doubt that no money had been spared to make it the best that could be built. Standing there and looking at it, I found my hands itching to get hold of it.
I suppose they itched the worse because I knew I'd never go into space again. I was all washed up. I'd spend the rest of my life on Earth the best way that I could. If I ever left it, I'd be gobbled up.
I walked off the field and went through customs—if you could call it customs. They just went through the motions. They had nothing against me or anyone; they weren't sore at me, or anyone. That, it seemed to me, was the nicest thing one could say of Earth.