The Fugitive Worlds (9 page)

Glad of the break in the shipboard routine, Toller drew himself along a safety line to the midsection, to where
Lieutenant Correvalte was at the engine controls. Correvalte,
who was newly qualified, looked relieved when he heard that
he was not expected to handle the inversion. He relinquished
the controls and positioned himself a short distance away
as Toller began the delicate task. The ship had four slim
acceleration struts which joined the gondola to the balloon's
equatorial load tape, and which gave the whole assemblage the modest degree of stiffness required for flying in the jet
propulsion mode. Although the balloon itself was very light, a flimsy envelope of varnished linen, the gas within it had a
mass of many tons, with inertia to match, and had to be
coaxed with infinite care when any change of direction was called for. A pilot who was too enthusiastic in his use of the ship's lateral jets would soon And that he had driven the top
end of a strut through the envelope. While not necessarily serious in low-gravity conditions, that kind of damage was
difficult and time-consuming to put right—and the offender
was always given good cause to regret his error.

For what seemed a long time after Toller had begun firing
one of the tiny cross-mounted jets it seemed that its thrust
was having no effect, then with grudging slowness the great
disk of Overland made its way up the sky. As it showed itself above the ship's rail, hanging before the crew in all its painted
vastness, the immense convexity that was the Old World
emerged from behind the balloon and drifted downwards.
There was a moment during which, simply by turning his head from side to side, Toller could see two worlds laid out in their entirety for his inspection—the twin arenas in which his kind had fought all the battles of evolution and history.

Superimposed on each planet, and similarly lit from the side, were the other ships of the fleet. They were in varying attitudes—each pilot inverting at his own pace—arcs of white condensation from their lateral jets complementing the global cloud patterns thousands of miles below. And embracing the spectacle was the frozen luminous panoply of the universe—the circles and spirals and streamers of silver radiance, the fields of brilliant stars with blue and white predominant, the silent-hovering comets and the darting meteors.

It was a sight which both thrilled and chilled Toller, making
him proud of his people's courage in daring to cross the interplanetary void in frail constructs of cloth and wood, and at the same time reminding him that—for all their ambitions and dreams—men were little more than microbes laboring from one grain of sand to another.

He would not have cared to admit as much to any of his peers, but it was a comfort to him when the inversion maneuver had been completed and the ship was sinking back into humanity's natural domain. From now on the air would grow thicker and warmer, less inimical to life, and all his preoccupations would begin to resume their normal importance.

"That's how it's done," he said, returning control of the vessel to Correvalte. "Get the mechanic to convert the engine back to burner mode, and tell him to make sure that the heaters are working properly."

Toller emphasized the final point because, although the aerial environment would indeed grow less harsh as the ship lost height, the direction of the airflow over the ship would be reversed. The considerable amount of heat lost from the balloon's surface would be borne upwards and away in the
slipstream instead of bathing the gondola with an invisible balm which helped protect its occupants from the deadly
coldness of the mid-passage.

The engine had to be shut down while being converted
from a thrust creator to a producer of hot gas for conventional
aerostatic flight, and Toller took advantage of the period of
quietude to go into the forward cabin in search of nourish
ment. Nobody had ever explained the baffling sensation of
falling which men experienced in and close to the weightless
zone, but it had been spoiling his appetite for more than a day and as a result he was in the ambivalent position of
needing food while not actually wanting it. The selection of
fare he found in the provision nets—strips of dried meat and
fish, cereals and puckered fruit and berries—was less than seductive. He rummaged through what was available and finally settled for a slab of grain cake which he chewed upon
without enthusiasm.

"Don't despair, young Maraquine!" Commissioner Kettoran, who had wedged himself into a seat at the captain's
table, was feigning cheerfulness. "We'll soon be in Ro-Atabri, and once we're there I'll take you to some of the best eating places in the world. Mind you, they'll be in ruins—
but I'll take you to them anyway." Kettoran winked at his
secretary, Parlo Wotoorb—who was across the table from
him—and both old men hunched their thin shoulders in
amusement, looking strangely alike.

Still chewing, Toller nodded gravely to acknowledge the
witticism. Kettoran and Wotoorb had been contemporaries
of his grandfather. They had actually known him—a privilege
he envied—and both had survived to quite an advanced age
with no apparent erosion of their faculties. Toller doubted that he would reach his seventies with the same degree of fortitude and resilience. It had always seemed to him that there was a special quality about the men and women who
had lived through the great events of recent history—the
ptertha plague, the Migration, the conquest of Overland,
the war between the sister worlds. It was as though their
characters and spirits had been tempered in the crucible of
their times, whereas he was destined to live through a fallow
period, never knowing for sure if he had it within him to respond to, and as a consequence be ennobled by, a great
challenge. Try as he might, he could not imagine the tamed
and stable circumstances of his day yielding up adventures
which were in any way comparable with those which had
earned Toller the Kingslayer his place in legend. Even the
journey between the worlds, which had once been the
dangerous limit of men's experience, had become a routine
matter. . . .

A sudden brightness washed in through the portholes on the left side of the room—momentarily rivaling the prisms
of sunlight which slanted across the table from the opposite wall—and somebody outside on the open deck gave a howl
of fright.

"What was
that?"
Toller was starting for the door,
hindered by the lack of gravity, when there came an appalling
burst of sound, akin to the loudest thunderclap he had ever
heard. The room tilted and small objects chattered noisily in
their brackets.

Echoes of the thunder were still booming and surging when
Toller got the door open and was able to propel himself out
of the cabin. The ship was twisting in violent air currents
which drew groans and creaks from the rigging. Lieutenant Correvalte and the mechanic were clinging to lines by the
engine, their shocked faces turned towards the north-west.
Toller looked in the same direction and saw a restless,
swirling core of fiery brilliance which quickly dwindled into nothingness. All at once the sky was placid again, the silence
complete except for faint cries coming from men on other
ships.

"Was it a meteor?" Toller called out, aware of the ques
tion's superfluity.

Correvalte nodded. "A big one, sir. It missed us by about
a mile, perhaps more, but for a moment I thought our time had come. I never want to see anything like that again."

"You probably never will," Toller said reassuringly. "Get
the rigger to check the envelope for damage, particularly
around the strut attachments. What is the fellow's name?"

"Getchert, sir."

"Well, tell Getchert to look lively—it's time he did some
thing to earn his salt on this trip."

As Correvalte moved away towards the aft superstructure,
where the ordinary crew members were housed, Toller
gripped a transverse line and drew himself to the rail. Now
that the inversion had been carried out he could see only the
ships of his own echelon and, below him, the balloons of the
four leading vessels, but all seemed well with the fleet in
general. He had made many ascents to the weightless zone
and as a result had become inured to the thought of a meteor
actually striking a ship. It was one of the rare cases in
which he could draw comfort from thinking about man's insignificance in the scale of cosmic events. His ships were
so small and the universe so large that it would be quite
unreasonable for one of the blazing cosmic bullets to find a
human mark.

It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately
bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but
if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type
which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious
little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a
blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock
speeding through the void from. . . .

Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east,
to the part of the sky where the meteor must have originated,
and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a
tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brigh
tening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused,
unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky's
sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification
of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and
perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.

He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to
be heading directly towards the fleet!

His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming
to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially
like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of
vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles
across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the
ship's rail and watched the blazing entities fan ever outwards,
racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter
silence despite the awesome energies being expended.

I'm safe,
Toller told himself.
I'm safe for the simple reason
that I'm too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the
ships are too small.
.
. .

But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the
cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum
for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser me
dium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin
planets from cosmic intruders.