by Jerry
Splat!
Another poisonous, explosive little bullet flew by his helmet and drove him back to his main interest: flight. Casting frantically about for the shot’s source, Jothen saw Fongavaro rowelling his autocrutch, riding tail-up and sidewise, out of the mouth of a ventilator shaft about half a mile away. The Madagascan’s expression was unreadable at this distance, but his whole posture telegraphed black murder in any language.
There had to be some way out of this cul-de-sac. It was ridiculous that Fongavaro should be able to make better time through the pores and doors of Gitler than Jothen himself could. The technies’ access shaft to the flyport control tower had to be on this level. If only he could bull his way off these damn stairs—
Like a scuba diver, Jothen rolled over the moving handrail of the stairs and dropped to the floor of the village. Fongavaro banked around the stairs and swooped down over the heads of his scampering cousins; but he was having a hard time with the lurching autocrutch, which had not been designed for aerobatics. He overshot Jothen so fast that he nearly rammed into the far side of the square.
While he was still fighting to regain control of his clumsy metal broomstick, more than half of the lights dimmed and went out, to a groan of dismay from the Joneses. The computer, restricted now to battery power, was economizing.
The sudden gloom was just what Jothen needed. By the time Fongavaro was in condition to look for his quarry again, Jothen was already in the lift.
IV
“Has anybody got a gun?”
In the control tower, heads turned blindly toward Jothen, with the tense impatience of men distracted from serious work by nonsense. Then one of the crew recognized him.
“I think there are some signal pistols up here, Mr. Kent. If they’re still operative. We don’t expect to need them.”
“Won’t do. I mean a gun I can kill somebody with.”
“Kill somebody—? No, sir, nothing of that sort?” the tower man said stiffly, and went back to work. Only one other operator had been listening to the brief exchange with less than half of his attention. His expression clearly showed that he thought he had probably missed a key word somewhere.
Jothen sighed and looked out over the flyport. From here he could see no trace of the explosion, unless he counted a small but rapidly rising column of white smoke from a ventilator head about a mile away. The rest was silence. Beginning right at the edge of the flyport, the Monterrey pines, hybrid poplars, bamboo and giant sugar-cane—the food of the world—covered the whole of Gitler, marching solemnly down the terraces and Chinese Avails and joining the rest of the World Forest so smoothly that the city’s edges were impossible to define from the air. From here, the world was in a pastoral sleep.
Overhead, the autumn dusk was deepening, soft and clear.
There was no moon, but already the night gave promise of a blaze of stars with, of course, no sky-glare to mock them. Among one constellation’s scatter of suns—he could not tell which—Jothen could make out several distant moving lights: probably the first planes of the ferry fleet. Transcorp had moved fast, as usual.
Evidently McGee had also moved fast. A growing murmur of many voices, like a distant sea, told Jothen that a surf of Joneses was already out on the roof of that city. He could see several amoeboid batches of them, dim and sad in their drooping finery, clumping together like slime-molds on the flyport’s staging apron; but most of them were invisible, masked by the trees. That accounted in part for the uneasy edge to the susurrus. Ordinarily, nobody was allowed in the World Forest but Rangers and repairmen of the Pipeline Corps, and the Joneses doubtless were finding the open air and the towering silent woods disquieting.
“Let’s stick together, friends and clansmen!” McGee’s voice bellowed suddenly. He was using a bullhorn, but even so his voice was tinny with the distance. “Don’t wander, don’t wander! There’s grandfathers in them trees! Stay by the flyport—don’t get left behind!”
“Up your Jones!” a much tinier voice shouted. A ragged chorus returned the cheer.
“That’s it! Up Joneses! Stay close!”
McGee seemed to be managing—so far, so good. But what had happened to Fongavaro? And why was it so dark? The Joneses should find it easier to stick close to the flyport if they could see its lights, but those were steadily going out. Even the beacons were mostly dead. Jothen pulled his cheek-mike into place to reassume direction of his city and found that that, too, was dead.
The computer’s economy measures were becoming drastic. It could not be faulted for that; battery power does not last very long. But the power failure was damn dangerous and would complicate the evacuation; even if the motorstairs continued to work, for instance, the ferries would have to land blind, by PPI radar.
And no wonder McGee was using a bullhorn instead of the public address system. The man was resourceful, that had to be granted.
It got slowly darker, despite the emerging stars. The Forest whimpered, as if remembering the ghosts of long-extinct animals. Underfoot, something thumped—a secondary explosion?—and the murmuring of the Joneses grew louder. They were already confused by the conflicting orders, angry at having had their fun cut off and probably still making everything worse with the undertow of rumor. And now, also, they were becoming afraid of the strange noises and the deepening night.
Something like a bat—or what Jothen imagined might be like a bat—swooped suddenly in front of his face. It took him a moment to realize that the thing was actually some distance away; and then, that it was Fongavaro on his autocrutch. He was flying very badly. That was not surprising, for the fan-driven prosthetic machines had never been designed for the open air; but the wild way he was lurching around the sky could not be entirely the fault of the crutch. He was fighting not only the machine, but himself: terror fugatis.
Jothen looked away. There was nothing he could do now; he had gone as far as he could go. He switched his headset to the emergency channel; it responded with a gratifying hum.
“McGee?”
It would not have surprised him had the putative Mayor never heard of the emergency channel; but McGee responded at once.
“Hello, Jothen—where the hell have you been? Never mind, noisy down here. Have to talk to you later.”
“Hold on—”
“Sorry. Got my hands full of Joneses. Are the ferries coming?”
“Yes, on the way. Are you—”
“Good. Hold fast. Out.”
While Jothen spluttered, the bullhorn began to sound again. Torches began to light, too, some of them among the trees. “Fire in the Forest?” Jothen bawled into his cheek-mike, but there was no answer.
More Joneses poured out onto the flyport and into the woods. The tower deck rumbled under Jothen’s feet.
Then, there was light.
First the tops of the trees turned silvery. Then, on the roofs, the blackness became stippled with tiler’s dots, as hundreds of thousands of white faces turned skyward. A long moan rolled through the Joneses like a comber. Jothen too looked up.
A falling star, so immense that it might have been a falling sun, was streaking with preternatural slowness over the city, lighting the whole landscape with a garish blue-white glare. The side of a nearby ferry, just settling in for a landing, gleamed in the glow as though a searchlight were playing upon it.
The light seemed to be what Fogavaro had been waiting for. Either he had dropped the gun or had forgotten it in his fear of the open sky and the mechanical besom he was a-stride of. Instead, he swerved toward the immobile giant of the control tower and came bulleting directly at the broad windows.
The noise of the meteor’s passage had already reached the ground, a loud rumbling like the thunder of distance artillery. Cries of awe and fright rose from the Forest to meet it. For a wild instant, Jothen wondered if this were the monster Flavia herself, ahead of schedule and far too far to the south; but in the same second he realized that it was probably only one of the fragments Biond Smith’s crew had chi
pped off the asteroid—a small one, probably no more than a hundred tons.
Two thirds of the way across the sky, the meteor exploded, blindingly. Fiery streaks rayed away, nearly to die horizon. Fongavaro, almost close enough now for Jothen to see his features, jerked his craft upward, half-rolled, and ran side-on into a descending ferry.
The ferry, only dented, lurched and righted itself, but the auto-crutch disintegrated. Its bright fragments and the sprawling black figure of Fongavaro Jones rained down from Heaven together toward Chaos and Dis, in a blast of sound from the exploded bolide that made the explosion in the shunt room seem like it had been only a warning slap.
Fongavaro’s long nightmare of falling had come true and now was ended.
The cries of the Joneses grew louder, edged with hysteria. On the flyport apron, a woman’s voice was screaming, “The end of the world! Grandfather is Fallen! The end of the world!”
Jothen, shaking, tried again to call McGee and then Piscetti; but if either replied, their voices were drowned out in an enormous waterfall that seemed to have gotten started in his earphones. When he got his sight back, he saw why: the passage of the meteor had left a broad trail of glowing white vapor stretched across the sky like an infernal rainbow. The ionized wake had completely wiped out radio reception, probably all across the spectrum.
Below, the torches began to swirl. The crowd noise was rising to a roar. The dented ferry, rocking on its fans, was settling to the apron, and another was coming in.
Too late, Jothen thought numbly. They’re going to panic.
And there was exactly nothing that he could do about it, even had he had any idea of how to proceed. The shadowy figures of the tower stand-by crew, mustered to replace the out-of-action computer, were already bustling in the gloom around him, ready to assist the ferry landings the moment radio contact should be established—or perhaps they were using FM and had never lost contact in the first place. He would have to give them whatever helping hand he could—
Another meteor bloomed in the night sky, rumbling like a thunderhead. It was not as big as the first, but the Joneses were by now in no mood to be discriminating.
Then Jothen heard McGee’s voice cutting across the din, his bullhorn turned up to full amplification—a gargantuan bellow that must have been audible even in the still airborne ferries. Astonishingly, the Mayor was singing. Had he gone mad too?
Raise the totems, Gott soil Hue ten,
Fa-la-fa-de-rol and cordon bleu!
Jericho immune to tootin’,
Mighty Mothe, we love you!
Or so Jothen heard it—surely these couldn’t really be the words. But the Joneses seemed to recognize them: a family hymn? Scattered voices took up the song, and then, many more.
“That’s it, Joneses! All together now!”
The second meteor blew up. Under the light and noise, and that of the ferries’ fans, the singing became defiantly louder.
Hubbard’s husband, Hubba’s wife,
Smith’s disaster, Brown’s dismay,
Guard of Uncle UNOC’s life,
Faithful shepherd, A-OK!
Jothen heard himself emit a nervous giggle and suppressed it angrily. Dammit, that surely wasn’t how the words went! He tried to pay attention to something that mattered. Six or seven ferries were on the ground now, and Joneses were pouring out of the Forest toward them, led by a tiny, frenetically waving figure. McGee seemed to be leading some kind of a snake dance onto the tarmac.
A third and a fourth meteor arched across the sky together, roaring. The crowd howled back its challenge. The first ferry was loaded and taking off again. Near several of the others, Joneses about to board were ceremonially snuffing out torches in upended metal drums that seemed to have materialized by magic for just this purpose.
Another ferry buzzed off, then another.
“All right, neighbors! Everybody now! Hit it!”
The piper’s charges raised their voices in a deafening chorus. Nothing else in the world could have been heard above such a choir, not even a major earthquake—by now there must have been nearly half a million people involved, spread out all over the roofs; it was as though Hell itself were singing. Distance muddled the hymn into a shapeless, tuneless thunder, but Jothen could still hear McGee:
Con Ed cons us, UNOC bombs us,
Devils hearstle at our bones—
Still the jolly heartside chorus:
Love us all, and up your Jones!
The sky was full of planes. And then, suddenly, the flyport lights went on. Whether or not Piscetti had gotten the floods under control, the master computer had reached the end of its allotted clock-time and had restored power to the city.
The evacuation of the Jones Convention would keep right on going, for many days—but the crisis was over. Useless, tubby McGee had piped his rats aboard.
Jothen had stopped shaking by the time he had gotten back to his office, but he could not honestly have described himself as unshaken. He was glad—God knew—that it was all essentially over, but there were still major questions that he could not begin to answer for himself. He sat down at his disordered console and thought about them conscientiously, but not to much purpose.
He still had no notion of how he was going to cope—both practically and emotionally—with the Chicago influx, after having spent most of his adult life virtually alone in so heavily populated a world. He had not done very well this time; indeed, he had damn near gotten himself killed, and the city was in terrible shape. He felt both incompetent and oppressed.
It seemed that there was no such thing as a single crisis. Every one was a fall of dominoes. It took a lot of footwork just to stay abreast of them.
He noticed with a start that the line to Prime Center was blinking at him. Numbly, he opened it.
“Jothen?” Biond Smith’s voice said.
“Here. Hullo, Biond.”
“How did it go? KC tells me you’re having a terrible scramble. Did you get the Joneses moving?”
“They’re on their way,” Jothen said. He was surprised to hear that Biond, too, sounded oppressed. Evidently World Directors also had their troubles.
“Good. Was McGee of any use? He’s fairly good with paper, I’ve found.”
“He was invaluable,” Jothen said. “Especially during the meteor shower.”
“Meteor shower?” Blond said, his voice cracking slightly. “Did those fragments come down as far south as Gitler? Obviously they did. Damn, somebody’s miscalculated; I’ll have to get on that. And now we get to the meat of the matter—Flavia, and the real evacuations. You’d better keep McGee there, as long as he was helpful. He doesn’t know a dyne from a dinosaur, of course, but all the same these ward-heeler types have their uses. I’m one myself. Glad you’re all right, Jothen. Bye.”
The line went dead.
Taking a deep breath, Jothen set his face and his soul in order and went out to meet his world—or his doom. Maybe by now there wasn’t any difference.
But somehow he felt that he would be more on top of things, if only he could figure out what a “ward-heeler” was.
SEVENTY LIGHT-YEARS FROM SOL
Stephen Tall
The natives of Cyrene’s planet weren’t human; they weren’t even animate—but they were friends!
I
If the sky hadn’t been such a perfect shade of Terran blue, if the warm sunshine hadn’t been so perfectly like it is on a May morning in Virginia, maybe we wouldn’t have been so all-fired homesick. But they were, and we were.
The sun wasn’t Sol. We were seventy light-years from the Lincoln Memorial and the Statue of Liberty. Still, I caught myself wondering if the Orioles would finally make it in the American League this year. They had been trying for a hundred and fifty, and the best they had been able to do was a couple of seconds.
“Hey, Roscoe! Look alive!” Pegleg Williams was driving the jeep, and because the terrain looked good, he had wheels on it. Usually he explored with the tracks, but this was cowp
asture as far as binoculars could reach. No cows, of course. And, come to think of it, no grass either. There was a nice ground-cover, and it was green, but it sure wasn’t grass. It looked more like green cellophane than anything else, sheets of it as big as sheets of writing paper overlapping each other in all directions. It was juicy and crisp, like lettuce, and crunched under foot when you walked.
“Would you like to join us?” Pegleg inquired politely, “or would you just like to lie under a tree in the shade and goof off in comfort?”
“I see no trees,” I said, “so I’ll join you. But I’ll be frank with you. I have long since become bored with your company. Even Lindy looks less luscious than usual this morning. I’d trade you both for a hot dog and a seat in even Yankee Stadium.”
“It’s the Terran feel,” Lindy Peterson said soothingly. “It’s got us all sobby. Who’d believe that a view with nothing earthly in it could feel so much like home?”
Pegleg had got his plastic leg courtesy of a plesiosaurlike critter in a little lagoon on Sirius VI. Lindy Peterson had sampled the bacteria and viruses of twenty worlds. As for me—well, I’ve been around, myself. There are papers in the Central Galactic Library on Betelgeuse III that describe three different evolutionary systems, and two of them would be completely incomprehensible to the shade of old Charlie Darwin. Author, Roscoe Kissinger. Me.
I climbed into the jeep beside Pegleg, cuddling my camera and binoculars on my thighs. I almost said lap, but when you’re just wearing shorts you don’t have a lap. Lindy held down the back seat, along with her packsack and extra culture bottles and plates. She was wearing a short brown skirt, so she had a lap; one you’d like to rest your head in and have her stroke your hair forever. As I said, Lindy had explored twenty worlds, and she was the prettiest thing on any of them.