Ride the Star Winds
Page 84
I asked, “Can’t you go any faster?”
“No, Captain. I’m on the last notch now. And I don’t like it.”
“Better get people cleared away from here, George,” Grimes told me. “If that wire parts it’s going to spring back . . .”
“And what about me?” demanded Terrigal.
“If you’re scared . . .” I began.
“Yes, I am scared!” he growled. “And so would you be if you had any bloody sense. But I wouldn’t trust any of you on this winch!”
All right, all right—I was scared. And it was more than a fear of a lethally lashing end of broken wire. It was that primordial dread of the unknown that has afflicted man from his first beginnings, that afflicts, too, the lower orders of the animal kingdom. The darkness around the brilliantly lit rooftop was alive with shifting, whispering shadows. Most of our party, I noticed, had already taken refuge in the boat, a little cave of light and warmth that offered shelter, probably illusory, from the Ultimate Night that seemed to be closing around us. Only Grimes, Sonya, Sara and myself remained in the open—and, of course, Terrigal at the winch controls.
The winch was making an eerie whining noise. The smell of hot metal and scorching insulation was much stronger. And the wire itself was keening—and was . . . stretching. Surely it was stretching. Surely that shining filament was now so, thin as to be almost invisible.
“Enough!” ordered Grimes “Avast heaving!”
The engineer brought the control handle round anti-clockwise, but it had no effect. He cried, “She won’t stop!”
“Mr. Taylor!” shouted Grimes into the boat, “Switch off the power to the winch!”
“The switch is jammed!” came the reply.
“She won’t stop! She won’t stop!” yelled Terrigal, frantically jiggling his controls.
The light was dimming, sagging down the spectrum, and outlines were wavering, and frightened voices sounded as though they were coming from an echo chamber. The thin high keening of the overtaut wire was above and below and through all other noises. Sonya and Sara were wrestling with the power cable, tugging at it, worrying it like two dogs fighting over a bone, trying to drag it out of its socket in the boat’s hull. It resisted all their efforts.
“Let’s get out of here!” snapped Grimes. “Into the boat, all of you!”
Terrigal abandoned his winch, but not before aiming a vicious kick at the control box. He scurried into the little airlock. The two women followed. Grimes and I made it to the door in a dead heat; he pushed me inside then followed hard after me. As soon as we were all in, Taylor, forward at the controls, slammed the inertial drive into maximum lift, not bothering to close the airlock doors first. We started to rise, then stopped with a jerk, heeling alarmingly to port. The power cable to the winch was holding us down. But it would soon part, I thought. It must part. It was only a power cable, not a heavy-duty mooring wire.
It didn’t part. It . . . stretched. It shouldn’t have done, but it did. And we lifted again, slowly, with the inertial drive hammering like a mechanical riveter gone mad. I clung to the frame of the open door and looked down. I saw the sounding machine dragged up and clear from the circular hole in the roof, with the shining filament of wire still extending straight downwards.
Terrifyingly the city around the temple was coming to life—but it wasn’t the city that we had explored. The human colonists had laid out their streets in a rectangular plan; these streets were concentric circles connected by radial thoroughfares. And there were the tall, cylindrical towers, agleam with lights, each topped with a shining sphere. Unsubstantial they seemed at first, but as I watched they appeared to acquire solidity.
Grimes saw it too. He shouted to Taylor, to Terrigal, to anybody who was close enough to the fusion generator to do something about it, “You have to cut the power to the winch! We’re dredging up the Past—and we shall be in it!”
“Just show me how, Commodore!” cried the engineer. “Just show me how! I’ve done all that I can do—short of stopping the jenny!”
And if he did stop the generator we should fall like a stone. If he could stop it, that is.
An aircraft came slowly into view, circling us warily. It was huge, a cylindrical hull, rounded at the ends, with vanes sticking out at all sorts of odd angles. It was like nothing that I had ever seen and possessed a nightmarishly alien quality. There were tubes protruding from turrets that could have been, that almost certainly were guns, and they were trained upon us. What if the alien commander—I visualized him, or it, as being of the same species as the lobsterlike being whose body we had been attempting to recover—should open fire? What would happen to us?
Nothing pleasant, that was for sure.
* * *
But we had weapons of our own; we could, at least, defend ourselves if attacked. Sara, I was sure, would enjoy being able to play with her toys. And Sara, I suddenly realized, was beside me in the cramped little airlock, holding her sub-machine gun. I said to her, “What use do you think that will be? What’s wrong with the heavy armament?”
She replied obscurely, “I can’t bring it to bear.” I couldn’t see why she couldn’t. That blasted flying battleship was staying well within the arcs-of-fire of the laser cannon and the heavy machine gun, and a guided missile would home on her no matter where she was relative to us.
Sara opened fire. Bright tracer flashed out from the muzzle of the gun, but not towards the huge flying ship. It may have been the first round of the burst that hit the power cable, certainly it was one in the first half-dozen. There was an arcing sputter of blue flame and the boat, released from its tether, went up like a bat out of hell.
And below us the weird city out of Time flickered and vanished.
I turned to Grimes. “You said sir, that the things that happen or Kinsolving’s Planet shouldn’t happen to a dog. And they shouldn’t happen, either, to respectable employees of the Dog Star Line.”
He managed a grin, then went, “Arf, arf!”