* * * *
It might be, Raven bethought himself, that he was become accustomed to the uncanny. Else, it might likewise be that this aircar, as it was, rode higher and more smoothly than the groundcar at Earth, and thus removed from him the worst of the sensations.
He watched the bare sands that flashed beneath, and listened warily to the mutterings of Captain Cahn, in the forward right-hand seat, as he spoke, seemingly to some familiar spirit. The driver of the vehicle said naught, but paid all his heed to his craft—and that as it should be, minding the speed at which they flew.
Beside him, the man called Ted Deranian, the advocate for hire, dozed fitfully, twitching occasionally. Raven glanced at him.
That poor fool still thought the waking world to be a dream; did he then take his dreams for truth? Was he now, perhaps, back in his home, his strange and frightening life untroubled by the common affairs of empires?
Raven smiled to himself at the thought.
* * * *
Pel only realized he had dozed off when he woke up; the whine of the aircar’s engine had changed.
They were descending, sinking down into a sort of open-topped box, comprised of four concrete walls painted battleship gray. Pel could see two doors in the wall directly ahead. They were already below the tops of the walls by the time he was awake enough to understand what was happening, so he saw nothing of the surrounding structures except a quick glimpse of black and gray rooftops.
“Welcome to town, folks!” the driver called back over his shoulder.
“What do you call this place?” Pel called back.
“Town,” the driver replied, a bit embarrassed. “It’s the only one on the planet, so we haven’t bothered to give it a real name.”
“The only one on the planet?” Nancy asked, as she roused Rachel.
“’Fraid so.” With a bump, the aircar was down, and the engine’s whine died away suddenly.
Hesitantly, Pel pulled at the door-handle.
The door opened and he stepped out, then turned to take Rachel from her mother. When the three of them were out, he took a look around.
They were in a bare, featureless enclosure perhaps fifty feet by eighty, standing on coarse gravel near one corner, surrounded by blank gray walls. The two doors at one end were the only way in or out; the only colors anywhere were the blue aircar, resting in the opposite corner, and the various running lights. The dark hues were in sharp contrast to the bright, pale sky overhead.
The third aircar was in a third corner, but even as Pel first spotted it its engines came on, and it rose upward, into the brightness above.
A car door slammed; Pel started, and turned to see that Lampert was standing nearby, one hand on the door as he looked around.
“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said.
“No,” Pel agreed.
The driver slammed his own door, on the other side of the aircar, and called, “Okay, folks, right on in, through the door on the left, please!”
The passengers obeyed, shuffling across the gravel and through the door; a man in a purple uniform, not quite the same as those worn by the crew of the Ruthless, held it open for them. He said nothing as they trudged past.
Inside they found themselves in a large, windowless and mostly-bare room, concrete walls painted a dull peach color, the floor grey tile, the ceiling off-white. The only furnishings were two rows of white stone benches, and some red-print-on-white posters on the walls. There were four doors, counting the one they had just entered through, one centered in each wall. Light came from white glass globes that hung from the ceiling, looking very much like ordinary electric lights.
Pel would have expected fluorescent fixtures instead, but there were none, only the globes.
People were sitting on the benches—Stoddard, Ted, Smith, Soorn, and Mervyn. They had obviously not yet had a chance to clean themselves up; scabbed-over scratches were still in evidence, sand in their hair, uniforms wrinkled and frayed. Ted’s suit would probably never recover.
Stoddard looked up and smiled as the others trailed in; Soorn waved, and Smith called, “Hello! What kept you?”
Ted grinned foolishly and said nothing.
Mervyn ignored them all; he was leaning back against a wall with his eyes closed, and did not stir. Pel was unsure whether he was asleep or awake.
“Slow old bus,” Lampert replied. “How long have you guys been here?”
Smith shrugged. “Maybe ten minutes. They called in the captain and the nut in the velvet just before you people came in. The two of them, and that one—“ He pointed to Ted, who waved in reply. “—were here before we were. Don’t know how long.”
“The nut in the velvet” was obviously Raven. Pel hadn’t thought of him in those terms.
If that was how they saw Raven, Pel wondered how the crewmen saw him—the nut with the kid? It was probably something just that impersonal and unflattering.
The man in the purple uniform closed the door and stood silently against the wall. Nancy and Rachel settled cautiously onto an empty bench.
“Oh, I guess I got here about ten minutes before you,” Ted said to Smith. “I must say, this is the longest and most complicated dream I can ever remember having. I wonder if I have a lot of dreams like this, and I just don’t remember them when I’m awake?”
Smith grimaced, and turned slightly away from Ted. Pel felt his own stomach shift uneasily.
That sandwich had been some time ago, and he never had gotten enough to drink, but still, Pel knew that his discomfort wasn’t merely physical. It was Ted making him nervous. Ted was acting crazy—literally insane.
Well, Pel told himself, if they could just get him safely back home to Germantown, Maryland, it wouldn’t matter if he thought he had dreamed the whole thing.
Pel wished he could think of it as when instead of if.
Chapter Sixteen
Raven listened with approval as Captain Cahn conversed with the local lordling, the so-called Governor. This Cahn had the makings of a good commander, and such was recognized even in so dismal a place as this. Put him in armor and a sword in his hand, and he’d be fit for the service of Stormcrack, fit even to lead a hundred men.
Ah, but to get him there...
Best to say nothing and leave it all to Cahn. These misbegotten fools doubtless thought Raven mad; were he to speak it would serve no good. Leave it, then, in terms of the Empire’s good, the Empire’s authority, and say nothing of the need to fight Shadow.
* * * *
Prossie watched in admiration as Captain Cahn told the Governor what to do. It was really quite educational; he didn’t shout, didn’t argue, didn’t ask anything. He used a sort of tight, determined anger to drive his thoughts and words, but Prossie doubted a non-telepath would sense any of that—the Captain was calm and efficient, simply taking his authority as a given.
And of course, it was quite real. The Empire had given its emissary pretty much a free hand, and the legal power to go with it.
The Governor couldn’t really know that, though. He had no telepath to verify anything—Prossie worked for Cahn, and the Governor didn’t know enough about telepaths to realize that that meant Cahn had the Empire’s full blessing. His orders had always come by ship, prior to this.
For all he could prove, Cahn could be a rebel, a mutineer, a lunatic—but when Cahn spoke the Governor never doubted for a moment that he was just what he claimed to be.
Prossie could see the theory of how to do it, of course, but she couldn’t possibly have done it herself; quite aside from the near-universal antipathy to telepaths, and aside from her sex, she just didn’t have the knack. Watching Cahn was like listening to a first-rate musician. Prossie might read the same notes, might pick them out, but she didn’t have the talent to make the same music.
Cahn was magnificent. Prossie had been relaying messages to the Governor, had been telling him much the same thing that Cahn was now saying, and had been virtually ignored, because she simply didn’t
have Cahn’s presence and aura of authority; the Governor had made a few tentative gestures, but no more than that. Now that the Captain was here in person, though, he was getting instant compliance.
It took less than fifteen minutes to establish martial law, with Cahn himself in charge, and to commandeer much of what they needed.
* * * *
The stay in the waiting room hadn’t been long—twelve minutes, according to Godwin, whose analog watch seemed to have survived better than Pel’s digital one. Half a dozen of the purple-uniformed men had then appeared and escorted the party out.
The next stop was a crowded men’s room—at least, for everyone except Nancy and Rachel, who had a ladies’ room to themselves. Soap, towels, and various brushes were provided, and Pel emerged feeling much better than he had entered. Clothes were still torn and wrinkled, faces unshaven, but at least the worst of the dirt had been cleared away.
The facilities were indistinguishable from what Pel would have expected in a men’s room back on Earth, in, say, a bus station or a rest station on an interstate—white tile, bare bulbs in wire cages overhead, green-painted steel partitions, white porcelain fixtures.
It was only when he ran water in the sink, and found himself bothered by something about how it flowed, that Pel was reminded that this was not Earth.
The difference wasn’t really very great at all, he decided, watching the water, but any change in how water flowed was enough to make him uneasy.
It was slower, he realized. In the lighter gravity of Psi Cassiopeia Two, objects—including water—fell more slowly.
He had more or less adjusted to how the air and gravity felt, but he had had few opportunities to see anything fall. He stared.
Then he shrugged, and went on washing.
After clean-up came food—cafeteria food, served in a more or less standard-issue cafeteria, but that was quite good enough for the Browns at this point. Rachel gobbled two hot dogs—which were labeled “hot reds”—along with several dozen sugared french fries and large quantities of canned milk; Nancy tried the macaroni salad, frowned, and then settled on ham slices, green salad, and cold tea.
Pel took a “Homburg shrewsbury,” which looked like a cheeseburger, and discovered that there was cornmeal and chopped onion in the meat, which appeared to be a blend of pork and beef, rather than pure beef.
Another quirk in the local cuisine, obviously, like the confectioner’s sugar on Rachel’s fries, or for that matter, the word “shrewsbury” replacing “sandwich.”
It was edible, though, and he ate it, washing it down with watery root beer.
“Everything tastes funny,” Rachel said, staring at her empty plate.
“Well, we’re on another planet,” Nancy said, throwing an uneasy glance at the smear of potato salad on the edge of her plate.
Pel said nothing; he had sampled a french fry and decided against eating any more. Rachel was quite right; everything did taste funny.
Well, why shouldn’t it? This wasn’t their own land. Foreign food was always strange at first.
He hoped that the stuff would nourish them. This was not only another planet, as Nancy had pointed out, but another universe. The molecules in the food could well be arranged differently—he vaguely recalled reading something about right-handed and left-handed proteins.
Well, the crew of the Ruthless hadn’t had any visible problems with the pizza.
He wondered about the people from Shadow’s universe—was this food strange to them, too?
What about the little people? Were they all right?
The later arrivals had not seen anyone from the first carload since arriving in Town, nor had Cahn and Raven rejoined them. The purple uniforms had denied knowing anything at all except where the group was to go next.
Pel stared down at the table, which was topped with black glass.
The cafeteria wasn’t quite standard issue, really. The tables were steel and glass, the chair seats made of something like fibreglass on steel frames. It struck Pel suddenly that except for some trim in the aircar, he hadn’t seen any wood in this entire place—none of the rooms had any woodwork, the chairs and benches and tables were all stone or steel or glass. Plastics and paper products were present, but scarce—the men’s room had been equipped with fluffy white terrycloth towels, rather than paper towels. The cafeteria plates were ceramic, the napkins cloth, the flatware steel.
He hadn’t seen any trees, anywhere, on this planet. There was nothing to make paper or wood out of. And most plastics were made from petroleum, weren’t they? Petroleum came from dead dinosaurs—well, maybe not dinosaurs, but dead things from millions of years ago. A planet as lifeless as this probably had no oil deposits. For all Pel knew, there was no native life here at all.
“Okay, folks,” someone called, “let’s clean up and move on.”
“Hell,” Pel muttered. “Let them clean it up themselves.” He did not find himself exactly brimming over with gratitude for the treatment he and his family had received here; while it was true they had been cleaned up and fed, they had hardly been pampered. After waiting around without any explanation, or any contact except the silent guards, Pel was hardly in a mood to show his hosts much consideration. He stood up and headed for the door, leaving his tray where it was.
Nancy and Rachel followed.
In a moment, the full dozen—the Browns, Valadrakul, Stoddard, Donald, Ted, Godwin, Smith, Soorn, Mervyn, and Lampert—were marching down another bare concrete corridor, with purple-clad guards ahead and behind.
Double doors swung open, and while two guards held them, others indicated that the visitors were to turn right into another corridor—but this one was not entirely empty. Captain Cahn and Raven of Stormcrack Keep were waiting there.
Smiles broke out, but after a few quick words of greeting there was no conversation.
Fourteen strong, the party continued down this new corridor, and through another set of doors—glass doors, this time—into a large glassed-in vestibule.
Pel scarcely had time to look out through the glass at the vast expanse of flat gray before he was swept on through another set of doors, out onto the gravel pavement.
Gravel—the tar in asphalt is another petroleum by-product, Pel realized.
For the first time he saw the exterior of the building he and the others had been in—a blank white concrete facade, only two stories, few windows. (Well, who needed windows? What was worth seeing on this bleak little world?) It extended several hundred yards in a gentle concave arc; the glass vestibule was the rightmost one of three, spaced well apart along the curve.
Red letters were painted above each of the vestibules, reading, “Welcome to Psi Cassiopeia II.” The lettering had clearly been done by hand, and the letters were shaped a bit oddly.
That was to his left; to his right the gravel pavement ran for perhaps a hundred feet, and then gave way to white concrete.
The broad strip of gravel ran the full length of the building, however, and in fact continued on past each end of the arc; it appeared to Pel that it formed a full circle, around the circular concrete.
And on the concrete—
There were three of them.
The smallest and farthest away, almost directly across the circle from them, was about the size of a tractor-trailor combination, back on Pel’s Earth; it had once been painted white, with red trim, but the paint had worn away in several places, exposing dull grey metal. A small bubble cockpit protruded from the top; two huge, swept-back fins adorned the sides. It rested on three legs; a hatch in its belly was open, and a ladder descended from the hatch to the pavement. Its lines were graceful, but it had obviously seen better days.
Flash Gordon, twenty years after, Pel thought.
He had never seen the Ruthless; had it looked something like that?
The largest, its bullet-shaped nose near the middle of the circle, was gigantic—the size of an ocean liner, perhaps, its tail assembly projecting well out over the gravel ring on the f
ar side. It was also squat and ugly, its gray paint obviously several layers thick, its surface dented here and there. Three glass-and-steel observation blisters, reminding Pel of the gun turrets of a B-17, protruded near the nose. There were no fins or foils or trim, simply the immense cylinder, rounded at one end, flaring slightly at the other. Two support struts kept the thing from rolling over on its side in one direction; Pel assumed there were similar struts on the opposite side. He could see the outlines of three hatches in the behemoth’s side, any one of them large enough for the smallest ship to fit through sideways, but all three were closed.
A freighter, probably, Pel guessed.
They were headed toward the third and closest spaceship—the three craft had to be spaceships. This one was midway between the others in size, and apparently newer, with green and gold paint that had not yet begun to flake or peel. The stern was adorned with a profusion of gracefully-swept-back fins. A door in the side was open, and a boarding stair in place.
“The others are already aboard,” someone said.
It suddenly struck Pel that they were being herded aboard a spaceship—they were going to leave Psi Cassiopeia Two.
“Hey,” he said, “we’re leaving?”
Captain Cahn heard him, and turned to reply, “Yes, Mr. Brown—they’re giving us a ride back to Base One, just as we wanted. Nine days, I’m told, and we should be back there, ready to send you and your family home to, uh... to Earth.”
“But I thought... didn’t your telepath Thorpe say there weren’t any ships available, when we were out on the desert?”
Cahn nodded. “They weren’t available—that freighter just got in this morning, they couldn’t find the owner of that little one back there, and the liner here was just down, hadn’t cleared quarantine yet. And none of these are Imperial property, you know; we’ve had to invoke martial law to get the use of the liner. Don’t worry, Mr. Brown, we’re doing the best we can to get you home just as fast as possible.”
“But we haven’t seen anything here yet!”
Someone snorted; someone else chuckled.
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