Alyssaunde returned to the doorway. “A slight problem,” she said.
“You couldn’t get the key,” Chester said.
Alyssaunde looked at him. “You should always dress like that,” she told him. “No, that’s not it. Here’s the key.” She passed it through the bars. “There’s a guard at the head of the stairs. I could get down, being who I am, but I can’t bring you back up if I didn’t go down with you. And I think he’s suspicious. But he can’t do anything about that till he’s relieved—he has to stay at that door.”
Chester unlocked the handcuffs and passed the key to O’Malley. “You’re doing fine,” he told Alyssaunde. “Let us take care of the guard.”
Alyssaunde pulled the bolt for the door, and it swung open. “It’s up to you,” she said.
“Let me,” O’Malley said.
Chester gave him a courtly bow. “My guest,” he said.
O’Malley staggered to the staircase and started up. “I’m having a bit o’ the whisky,” he wailed. “Ye’re having a touch o’ the a rye,/We’ll have us a smack o’ the brandy,/Then lay us both down and die!”
“What’s that?” the guard shouted from above. “What’s going on down there?”
“Aye, old friend,” O’Malley called. “Turn that light down a bit, will ye? It hurts my eyes.”
“What light?” the guard asked, trying to figure out where this drunk had come from. O’Malley had almost reached him now.
“It doesn’t matter,” O’Malley said. “I’m chugging a flask o’ the aquavit,/Yer glugging the absinthe straight down. . . .” He had reached the guard, and one massive arm shot out and grasped the guard’s throat, and the guard was down.
“Quick now,” Alyssaunde said. “Up to the roof. This way!”
Chapter Sixteen
Carl had never seen anything like Sanloo, nor imagined that anything like it existed. Sanloo was the outpost city of an interstellar civilization. Everything about it was chaotic, jumbled, and huge. Tall, slender pryoconcrete spires leaped up away from squat, hulking steel and stone fortresses. Great transparent domes with fairyland gardens of alien plants crowded against rows of squalid brownstone tenements. Narrow twisting streets led into broad boulevards. And everywhere a network of canals divided the city into island fragments, which developed individual characters of their own.
And outside the city, clearly visible from the high rooftop landing area on which Alyssaunde had set the flitter down, was the spaceport: acre after acre of flat gray pyroconcrete speckled with flat round buildings painted violent red, and dotted with symmetrical rows of landing pits. And in the pits, over half a hundred spacecraft of all the patterns and varieties then in use in the known galaxy: sleek private speedsters with stubby, knife-edge wings; bulbous freighters with their concentric circles of rocket nozzles sticking out from under the landing cowl; strange alien craft whose colors and angles were peculiar to human eyes.
“What do you think?” Alyssaunde asked.
Carl pulled his gaze away from the spaceport. “I would never have believed,” he said. “I never would have thought it possible. . . .”
“And we are a backward planet,” Chester said. “With a small tourist trade, and little commerce. Can you imagine what civilization must be like?”
“We have to take ground transportation into the spaceport,” Alyssaunde said. “They don’t allow flitterboats to fly over, for obvious reasons.”
“It seems so strange,” Carl said. “I mean, I knew intellectually that we weren’t all there was to the universe, and the Guests came from somewhere else. But to stand here staring at the ships that actually fly between these worlds. I mean, somehow I feel very small.”
“I know just what you mean,” Chester told him. “I, also, have a queasy and insignificant feeling at the sight of the ships that sail the stars.”
Alyssaunde put her hands on Carl’s face, cupping his cheeks. “Is it so terrible, Carl, learning that there’s so much more to the universe than you had thought?”
“Terrible?” Carl echoed. He sensed that Alyssaunde’s face was close to his own, felt the softness of her hands. “No, not terrible. It’s—I think it’s the most wonderful thing that’s ever happened to me, learning that there’s so much—so much—so much everything. It’s even greater than being made a knight-brevet by the king. But it’s kind of scary. I mean—all at once, you know.”
“Aye, ’tis a great thing to learn that the world isn’t just yer little sector,” Different O’Malley interjected, “and a greater thing to learn that the universe isn’t just yer own little world. But what are we goin’ to do about it, friends?”
Alyssaunde dropped her hands from Carl’s cheeks and whirled to face O’Malley. “We’re going to steal a spaceship. That’s what we’re going to do about it. And we’re going to escape from this phony Earth, the four of us, and make our way to the real Earth!”
“That sounds mighty good to me,” O’Malley responded. “Don’t stop now, though. Once we get to the real Earth, what do you propose that we do? Go into hiding? Start a revolution? Take over the government?”
“Let’s take that as we come to it,” Chester said. “The important thing now is to get started.”
“What ship do we take?” Carl asked. “Does any of us know how to manage a ship?”
“My father’s,” Alyssaunde said. “And I’m a rated pilot in it. It’s right over there.” She pointed to a tall, slender craft near the entrance to the spaceport.
Chester nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.
Nobody even gave them a second look as they went through the streets. The guard at the gate to the spaceport saluted Alyssaunde as they went by.
“This is so easy,” Chester said. “I’m afraid I must be dreaming.”
They climbed up the ladder to the ship, and O’Maley paused to look around. “It’s somehow hard to say good-bye, regardless,” he said.
“Don’t say good-bye,” Chester said. “We’ll be back.”
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