"We'd better not go too far, though," Panglor said, glancing back. "No telling what'll happen to these guys if we wander out of sight. Let's keep in view of the ships."
Though he said nothing to the others about it, Panglor was feeling rather strange. He was almost comfortable on this world, at least by comparison with the Vikken men. And yet, he hated the thought of being trapped here, a prisoner of some bizarre twists of nature. It rankled to be a victim of sleazy maneuvering by Grakoff-Garikoff—who must be quite delighted now, with both Deerfield and the Cur gone. And he felt bad for the Vikken crew, if not for the Vikken company. Jeebering was a decent fellow, and probably not the only one. So Panglor wanted to leave, or at least to have the choice. Not as desperately as the others, certainly, and not that he had anything wonderful to go back to—probably just more trouble—but he wanted to go nevertheless. Maybe for Tal Jeebering, or even for Alo—or for himself, to take back the news of their discovery.
"What're you thinking?" asked Alo.
"Nothing much," he answered. But his mind filled with images of this strange world they were inhabiting. It occurred to him that perhaps, even as peculiar as things were here, they might not now be at the true heart of the discontinuity. Suppose they were simply near it, wedged in the splitting weave somewhere near the actual hole in the space-time fabric. No telling what might lie in the center, or what would happen to them if they ended up there. Perhaps that was where those who disappeared went—into the hole, perhaps into another reality altogether. Would anything remain as they knew it, there? Would events there be more influenced by mental state, or less?
The thought intrigued, and worried, him. He didn't want to go there. Maybe next trip. Things were quite difficult enough as they were, right here, right now.
His thoughts returned to the present. How to get out of here was the problem. He nudged Alo. "Were you stringing a line back there, talking about how you knew the foreshortening systems?"
Alo didn't answer at once, and he looked up to see that she was grinning too hard to speak.
"Oh, surely, no," said Tiki.
"More or less," she admitted, chuckling. "But you know they're just borrowing trouble. The systems could be okay, and between you and me we ought to be able to get just about anything working, don't you think?"
Panglor arched his eyebrows. He shrugged and surveyed the land. The Fighting Cur stood solitary against a line of ridges, and behind them on the other side sat Deerfield. The sky was lemon yellow, and the sun was still a green circlet of fire; charcoal clouds drifted in gentle motion across the sky. Ahead, the grass ended in a beautifully eroded rocky bank, and beyond that a lake of misty water gleamed. LePiep was already at the bank, sniffing and whistling tentatively. A number of airfish approached from one direction, and from another a small cluster of aerial crystals, singing faintly like jeweled chimes. "Taking off is the problem," Panglor said.
"Hey," said Alo, "one of those crystals is the same one we saw at first—the one that broke."
Panglor followed the direction of her finger. A rose-quartzlike crystal drifted by that indeed looked just like that first one they had seen. Could it be the same one, brought back to life?
"Ho-la-ruuu!" cried LePiep. She radiated joy at the approach of the airfish. She fluttered her wings and stepped to the very edge of the bank. Two of the airfish nosed down to her.
"Careful, Peep," warned Panglor—but he watched in fascination. The airfish in themselves fascinated him; there was something about them that nagged at his mind, that made him think that he should be noticing something but wasn't. "Where do they come from, Tiki?" he asked.
"The crystals?"
"The airfish."
"Ah, I don't know for certain. They have given me several versions of how they came to be here, and I don't know which is the real one. But I suspect they were aboard a ship that crashed long ago—perhaps they were specimens, cargo, or just friendly companions like your LePiep, to some other travelers. These may be descendants of the originals." Tiki fluttered his hands in the air uncertainly.
Panglor fingered his lips and thought about it. "You suppose they come from a place where they really lived in water, like most fish?"
"Do most fish live in water?" queried Tiki.
"Have you seen fish anywhere else that didn't?"
Tiki skewed his eyes momentarily. "No. I've never seen fish before. How would they stay in the air in normal places? What would hold them up?"
"Right," said Panglor—but now he was talking to himself. He worried his tongue around inside his mouth and watched LePiep. She was pacing the bank, following the direction of the airfish, which had retreated a few meters. "Right. They wouldn't stay up. But they do here." He scratched his neck. "Of course, all kinds of things happen here that shouldn't. But I was just wondering—"
He stopped talking and sat in the grass with his legs sticking out over the bank. Alo sat down beside him and peered at him questioningly.
Airfish . . .
"Well," he said, "it's just that I thought—how do they know they can swim in the air here? Do they think it's water, or do they know it's air but they don't concern themselves about it?"
Alo peered at him closely.
He forced the thought to continue. It resisted; something in his mind was ridiculing it even before it was fully formed, but he snagged the thought and dragged it upward, to the surface. "Well, what I was thinking was, maybe the airfish stay in the air because they think they can stay there. Tiki, you said that conditions here are sensitive to what people think, or at least to their states of mind, right? Isn't that what you said?"
"So you think—" interrupted Alo.
Panglor raised a finger to silence her.
"Indeed," said Tiki. "The people who couldn't feel at home have always had more trouble and disappeared sooner than the others."
"And we found our way back to the ship without any trouble last time, right?" Panglor looked at Alo. She nodded, her mouth open. "And these airfish—they stay in the air, and look like they love it. Maybe they do think it's water, or maybe they know it's not but they don't care because they want to float in the air. They want to float in the air."
He rose and stared at the Cur, standing silent against the sky. "Maybe we can do that. Maybe we can fly if we just think like airfish. Maybe if we want to get off this planet, we can."
Tiki clicked his lips thoughtfully. Alo stood beside him. "But, Pangly, why did we come here in the first place? We didn't want to," she said. "And those crewmen want to leave, but they haven't."
Panglor nodded. "Right." He looked around to see where LePiep had gotten to. She was at his feet, peering up at him in response to his growing excitement. "Right," he repeated, picking her up. "They haven't. But they don't know how to. They don't know how to think around here at all. Look at them—it's pathetic. They're breaking down." A grin twitched to his lips. It was a perversely good feeling to be the sane one, watching the others break down. Except for Jeeb, who had treated him well when nobody else had.
"Look, you two," he said.
"Alo," supplied Alo. "And Tiki."
"Yeh," he said impatiently. "I think we can get the old bucket off this planet, even if it is a real planet, which I don't think it is. We could go check out the foreshortening station and then, maybe, go . . . home." He ended on a funny note. Well, they'd go back to D3, anyway, whether or not they chose to call it home.
"Why?" said Alo. She put both hands on her hips and tilted her head back, peering at him through several clinging locks of hair. "Why do you want to?" Her eyes probed his.
Panglor stroked LePiep, who was muttering reassuringly. He opened his mouth. Finally he forced words out. "We don't want to stay trapped here, do we?" He shook his head and tried again. "We should help the others get off, I think." His voice quivered. "It's partly my fault they're here." He blinked and shook his head again.
"Boy," said Alo quietly, brushing the hair from her face. "Never thought I'd see the day." Her voice w
as strained, and it was difficult to tell whether she was approving or disapproving. "You'll be in big trouble if you go back."
Panglor cleared his throat. Was the little-girl Alo talking or the not-so-little girl? "Well," he said, considering the possibilities. "We'll be bringing a live Kili with us—Tiki, you'll come, won't you? And we'll bring important information back. About the zone here, and the foreshortening hazard. After all—" He stopped and clucked his tongue.
"What?" said Alo.
"I would be delighted to go with you," Tiki piped up in a grave voice.
"We're in the middle of something important here," Panglor said, his voice stretched tight. "I don't know how it happened, but here we are. Who knows what could come of it? Suppose we can fly in this zone, this field. Tiki, you said you went to other worlds like this one. Suppose we could do that in our ships, and control it somehow. Like flying by a daydream. Only it'd be real." He puckered his lips and for a moment was lost in thought, aware only of LePiep's gentle empathic touch.
A touch of another kind brought him back to the present. Alo kissed him on the cheek and said, "Let's go try, then."
"Hoop," LePiep said approvingly. Tiki moved forward to join them. Panglor looked from one to another, not quite believing that he had convinced them. Then he nodded, and they moved off quickly.
* * *
The distance to The Fighting Cur was short, and they crossed it without attracting attention from Deerfield. Panglor didn't want to have to explain what they were doing—he would certainly be thought crazy, and be restrained—so he was hoping that they could at least make a start without being observed. They strolled close to the ship and Panglor noted that a promontory once more ran up to the ship's entry port. They hurried up the incline. There were shouts from across the plain, and several Deerfield crewmen raced after them, brandishing weapons.
"Inside!" Panglor shouted. He pushed LePiep into Alo's arms and shoved her toward the airlock with Tiki. He waited at the port to see what the crewmen would do. "Stay back!" he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth. "We're going—to try—to take off! We're not—trying—to escape!" He looked back to be sure that Alo and Tiki were safe inside, and found them standing right behind him. "What are you doing?" he exploded. "Get inside—"
"Halt there, you!" The men were racing up the promontory now. One of them knelt to the side and took aim.
"Hold it!" Panglor yelled, waving. "Take a message to Jeeb! Tell him—"
"He sent us to make sure you didn't try anything," the other crewman called.
"Tell him, please," said Panglor, lowering his voice, "that we think we know how to lift off, but we don't want to risk anyone else until we've tried it. If it works, we'll come back for all of you. Tell him that." He backed toward the airlock.
"Jeeb said—"
"If it works, we'll be back! Now stand clear!"
The leading man squinted, toying with his weapon. "Jeeb told us not to—"
Panglor slammed the hatch and locked it from the inside. "Let's go," he grunted, herding Alo and Tiki through the inner airlock door. They hurried to the control bay.
LePiep leaped high onto the console, while Panglor tried to figure out where everyone should sit. There were only two real couches, and he needed to be in one of them. "Alo. No—Tiki. Ah—" He looked around. He started pushing boxes and loose clothes beside the second pilot's couch, then let Alo finish, since she was doing a better job of it, anyway. "Here. Make a comfortable place to sit. If the grav control works, it won't matter. And if it doesn't work—well, we'll all be squashed flat."
"Indeed," said Tiki. "I should sit here, since I'll be of little help in operating the craft."
Panglor hesitated. Tiki was probably the frailest of them, physically—but Alo should be at the controls, too. "Okay," he said. "Peeps, you're with Tiki." The ou-ralot whistled and hopped into the Kili's arms.
Finally Panglor started powering up the ship. The viewscreen produced an outside view. The Vikken crewmen were huddled at some distance from the ship, but not at what Panglor would have called a clear distance. He cursed mildly, but there was nothing he could do except hope that the planet with its bag of tricks would protect them.
When the ship's console was clear, he sank back and sighed. He looked at the viewscreen and looked back at the console. He twiddled the viewscreen to show the sky, now a pastel green. He looked at the console.
"What are you going to do?" asked Alo.
"I'm going to think," he replied.
For some minutes, he did exactly that and nothing else. Alo and Tiki waited silently, as he worked at clearing extraneous thoughts, so that he could concentrate on those he wanted. The thoughts returned relentlessly, however, so he stopped trying actively to rid himself of them. He simply ignored them and concentrated on his mood, on twisting the general flow of his thoughts to the frame he wanted. LePiep's silent empathy relaxed him, coaxed him. Thoughts of Alo and Tiki, beside him, went by; memory of Alo undressed in his cabin (No—let that one go!); the insertion under fire from Grakoff-Garikoff. No—none of that was going to help. Wasn't what he wanted. He wanted to think of the airfish: the quiet, musing creatures drifting at will across the surface of the ponds. Perhaps something existed beneath the surface of those ponds that they didn't wish to see (but no, that's not important, not interesting now, let it slide); he thought of the airfish, fat ones and skinny ones, with funny-looking fins, with their certainty that they could not fall. Perhaps if they knew they should fall they would, and so would die. But they did not know they should; they knew they were at home drifting in the air, communing with the floating aerial crystals, or simply hovering and exploring.
The airfish were at home in the air, as The Fighting Cur was at home in space. Their world, their existence was to drift above a vaporous surface, and so was the Cur's proper existence above the clouds and vapors of the planetary atmosphere. The Cur should always remain above the atmosphere, no closer than a wide black interval. Black space, carrying in its vastness both the bulging mass of the planet and the trivial mass of the orbiting ship. The ship could reach space. Of course; that was where it belonged, where it lived. He had only to turn on the drivers, here, and they would be lofted into space.
He didn't touch the driver control, though. There was a feeling of discontinuity . . .
. . . and the viewscreen was black, except for the stars. He blinked, and touched the viewer controls—and there, turning slowly beneath them, was the partially misted orange ball that was the planet. They were in orbit. In space. "Ulg—" he said. He cleared his throat. His vocal cords refused to work. Finally he gestured to Alo, who was gasping beside him, to check things in the sensor-fringe. "Find out where we are," he whispered.
With Alo moving around checking instruments, Panglor squinting at the screen and readying the driver-controls, LePiep whistling and hooting and radiating pleasure, and Tiki peering gravely over everyone's shoulders, things were confusing for a while. Then Alo said, "Looks like we're in orbit, Pinglo, but we won't be for long, if you don't give us some velocity."
Panglor's voice returned. "Want to be more specific?" Alo grunted and did some things at her board, then fed the results directly to his. "Right," he said, and started the sequencer. The ship yawed a little and pitched up, and the drivers kicked on, jarring, until the grav control caught up.
He grinned in satisfaction. Then a thought occurred, and he frowned. "How reliable were those figures you gave me?"
Alo looked down her nose. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I mean, how consistent were the different readings? Were they in agreement, or did you tinker an average?"
"Oh. Well, actually—" she said, and then she got up and left the control room.
Panglor roared, "Where the hell are you going?" He jumped up—but realized he couldn't leave the console. "What are you doing?" he shouted. He turned to Tiki. "What is she doing?" Tiki looked mystified.
Alo came back a minute later, carrying three meal-packs and t
hree brew-packets. "Anybody hungry?" She seemed to notice just then that Panglor was choking on his tongue, and she added, "They were all on the beam. The readings, I mean. Seems like we're in the clear, instruments-wise." With a grin, she settled between them and snapped her brew-packet.
Panglor made exasperated sucking noises against his teeth, then hmphed and opened his meal-pack. The first bite he gave to LePiep. She beamed and gulped it. "First thing we got to do," he said with his mouth full, "is find that station." He glanced over the board and nodded. The drivers were running hot and smooth, and the Cur already had a stable orbit—contingent, presumably, on the states of mind of the Cur's inhabitants. "Wonder how far out this thing's influence reaches," he mused. He choked, suddenly, with food in his windpipe.
Alo thumped him on the back. "Leave it to me. I'll have that course for you in a couple of minutes."
Tiki said something, which Panglor understood as, "Borka drig limits . . . ulu zone thesla . . . others blik."
He frowned. "Tiki, what's wrong?"
"We must be at the limits of the influence right now," Alo said thoughtfully. "We won't be able to understand him at all when we're outside of it—not unless we learn his language."
"Gah," muttered Panglor. "You any good with languages?"
Alo shrugged and patted Tiki on the arm. The Kili's eyes were sharply crossed. "We'll be okay, I guess. Maybe Tiki will be able to figure out ours."
Well, Panglor thought, at least we have a handy warning system. "Let's get that fix on the station, hah?" he said to Alo.
They worked for thirty-five minutes, then spotted the station emerging from the nightside limb of the planet, a bright gleam that stood out among the stars. Alo got a passive-sensor track on it, then double checked on active. "It's out over a hundred thousand," she said, puckering and blowing through her lips. She squinted at Panglor, and at Tiki. "You want to go back now for your friends? You did promise, if we made it off all right."
"Huh? Go back?" Panglor said. "Oh." He mulled. He didn't much want to turn right around—not yet, at least. He switched on the com and tried to contact Deerfield. No success. "Well, hell," he said, switching the com off, "what's the point in going back till we've checked out the foreshortening system? What good would it do?" Alo shrugged; Tiki just bowed in puzzlement. "Okay, then—let's get a course to the station."
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