In the rear, the curator sat goggle-eyed. He clutched the portfolio with a death grip.
“When you get back to the tree,” Bram told the pilot, “tell Jun Davd to watch for us. If we miss, Lydis can try for a catch.”
“Yar,” Jao said. “It’s line of sight all the way. It’s not as if I have to compute it to the last decimal place.”
With a sob, the pilot said, “Good-bye, Year-Captain,” and cut off.
Jao started the walker up again. Bram peered through the transparent bubble at the lander. At its base, tube vehicles were jolting to a stop. Nymphs popped out of the ends of tubes and swarmed around it. Bram could see the sticklike figures clinging to the landing legs. Two of them were at the air lock door. One of them disappeared inside. It must have blown the inner door and been caught by the gust, because seconds later it came tumbling out. The big, box-shaped helmet made it top-heavy; by the time it hit the ground, it was falling head first. The transparent cage shattered.
“Glass,” Bram said. “Their helmets are made of glass.”
“So?” Jao, wrestling with the walker’s controls. “They must have a very strange industrial base.”
A brilliant puff of flame bloomed underneath the shuttle. She was using the main propulsion unit, after all—using it as a weapon. The flame spilled over the nearer dragonfly machines, swallowed the square-helmeted figures clamoring around the landing legs. Slowly the shuttle lifted, shedding dragonfly forms that twisted in the air and fell helmet-down. A few of them still clung to the air lock ladder and upper structures, to be carried like an infection to the tree. The humans would have to keep them outside somehow. Surely they couldn’t carry enough air in their suits to last the whole trip.
That raised another specter. “Jao, are there any spare air bottles loaded on the pallet?”
“No. It wasn’t intended to be manned. We’ll have to take the walker with us for our life support.”
Their four pursuers were closing in fast, along a broad front. Jao wrenched at the controls and spun the walker around. What made it scary was the fact that he was heading toward them at a slant, trying to beat them to the pallet. The other dragonfly vehicles—those which hadn’t been seared by the lander’s flame—abandoned the site where they had been deprived of their prey and decided to come after the walker.
“They’re coming at us from all sides,” Bram grimaced.
“Just hold on,” Jao said. He pulled up at the pallet and scrambled out of the walker. “Help me unload some of this junk!” Bram tumbled out after him, leaving the helmetless curator huddled within, clutching his precious portfolio.
The pallet was dangerously unbalanced. The last-minute effort to load it had been abandoned halfway through. Piles of crates surrounded it, and more crates and sacks were heaped indiscriminately on its edges, waiting to have their weight distributed evenly and to be tied down.
Bram started heaving cargo overboard. He did not care to imagine what priceless human artifacts were being jettisoned. Jao worked beside him with frantic haste.
“That’s good enough,” Jao panted. “Just pray that it doesn’t tip over when we get off the ground.”
Together they lashed a cargo net over the remaining load. The top surface was fairly level; Bram could only hope that the different weights averaged out, too.
He stayed outside while Jao squeezed back into the walker and jumped it to the top of the load. Bram tied down the walker’s legs while Jao crawled over obstacles to find the detonator.
Then a dragonfly vehicle skittered up, hitting the edge of the wooden platform with a jolt. The impact swerved it around. Bram looked up and saw the overhanging end of the tubular chassis above him. A hatch popped open, and box-helmeted forms came pouring out. The first of them floated downward—not so high as to make it fall on its head, but just high enough to give it a lazy half turn in midair and enable it to land on all fours.
More of the vehicles were crowding around, more hatches popping open, and then Jao set off the rockets.
He must have given it almost everything he had, because the platform lifted with an abrupt acceleration that batted the overhanging dragonfly transport aside and slammed Bram down.
The edge of the platform caught the helmet of one of the descending nymphs and shattered it. The mass of green jelly inside exploded sickeningly. Another nymph flailed for a clawhold, missed, and fell away under the rocket exhaust.
But two of the nymphs were on the platform, scuttling toward him. Bram had just time enough to note that one of the nymphs was carrying a flanged, open-sided box as big as its helmet, and then they were on him.
A pronged sleeve lashed out at him. He ducked and took it on his helmet. If it had ripped open his suit, he would have been done for.
The flexible abdomen, tipped with claspers, whipped around at him. He caught the pincers and then, with his toes hooked into the cargo net, swung the insect like a sling while the upper body twisted around trying to get at him. The glass helmet smashed against the corner of a crate, and the claspers relaxed just on the point of crushing his gloved hand between them.
But then the other nymph had him by two legs and its claspers and was trying to stuff him into the box. He struggled, but it was lifting him from behind, and he couldn’t reach it.
Then he was in the box, staring through its open end into the cleft face of a tomato-eyed monster that was lifting him upward with blurring speed.
He tried to get his legs under him, but crammed into the box as he was, he couldn’t untangle himself fast enough. The rockets had stopped firing. The pallet was coasting now, and free-fall turned him into the creature’s plaything.
It held him at arm’s length for inspection. The blank green eyes loomed through the glass, and the facial legs within the helmet stirred restlessly on their shelf. There was a latch at the bottom of the faceplate, a simple catch meant to be operated from inside, and one of the facial limbs was reaching for it…
And then all of a sudden Jao was there with a wooden stake in his hand.
Jao swung, driving the stake through the glass of the square helmet. The glass showered in fragments. The lobed face burst, and the hinged eating apparatus—unfolding limply from the smooth mask—lolled amid the jellied ruin.
Jao helped him out of the box. “What are those flanges for? It looks like it’s made to fit on to something … it’s built sort of like a little air lock, isn’t it?”
Bram looked over at the shattered helmet. He could see now that the front plate was made to slide up and down on grooves. His knees were suddenly weak from delayed reaction.
“It’s an eating box,” he said.
The tethered moon was far behind them, showing itself as pear-shaped with the wide end up. Even without Jao’s crude thumb-and-nose sightings, it was obvious by now that they were way off course. The cargo platform had gone sailing hundreds of miles past the edge of the disk’s rim, and they were looking down a ninety-million-mile cliff side.
“Too wide and too high,” Jao said gloomily. “I had to fire all the rockets at once for a quick getaway. That jolt the nymphmobile gave us didn’t help any, either.”
The three of them had been cooped up together inside the walker’s inflated bubble for an hour now, breathing by courtesy of the walker’s hydrogen-oxygen submetabolism. The curator had recovered somewhat and was getting snappish.
“Does that mean it’s going to take longer?” he complained. “I’m getting hungry. And my eyes and throat are burning from the atmosphere in here.”
“Be thankful you’re breathing at all,” Jao said. “We’re all going to be a little hungry after a while, but at least we won’t die of thirst.”
“See here,” the little man said. “I insist—”
Bram interrupted. “If we keep on this way much longer, by the time we overtake Yggdrasil, we’ll be thousands of miles off the rim. They won’t know where to look for us. And our suit radios don’t have that kind of range.”
“Yah, I guess we better have a little
course correction about now,” Jao said.
“With what? I thought you said you shot off all our rockets.”
“Oh, there were a couple of spares left over from when I rigged the pallet,” Jao said casually. “They were still in the corner where I stowed them, fortunately. Under a tarpaulin. The stevedores must’ve thought they were part of the cargo. I lugged them over here while that walking appetite was trying to package you for its dinner.”
He gestured negligently at the thousand square feet of lumpy cargo net on which the walker rested. Bram saw the two solid-propellant canisters lying several feet away.
“What good will those do?” he asked. “Two little booster rockets aren’t enough to nudge a mass like this after the kick it got.”
“Oh, we don’t have to push the whole mass,” Jao said.
“Even if we dumped everything—at least as much as we could manage in the next hour, working at top speed—the platform itself has too much mass. We’d never be able to kill enough momentum to come out with the right vector.” He gestured at the receding rimscape and shrugged. “And after another hour of this…”
“We’ll ride the walker in!” Jao said impatiently. “Use it as our lifeboat. It weighs practically nothing, and there’s just the combined mass of the three of us. There’s enough thrust in just one of those boosters to change our vector while conserving the useful momentum toward Yggdrasil!”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s all in the angles. I’ll retrofire the second rocket to slow us down at the other end enough to compensate for the extra momentum. Or most of it, anyway. We’ll hang in Yggdrasil’s space for hours—more than enough to zero in on our suit radios. And if we’re still out of range, I can rig up a hydrogen flare or something.”
They set to work with a will. There was more than enough cordage to lash the two canisters in position on the walker’s spindly frame. “Best to secure the retro-rocket now, while we have some footing underneath us,” Jao said. “I can align it precisely with the median axis. When it’s time to fire, we’ll aim the whole walker by squirting oxygen or something.”
“You going to clear the pallet the same way?”
“No … too many variables. I’m using the pallet as our launch platform. I know how it’s tumbling.”
Jao had done wonders with a few simple tools—the timer of his neck computer, a couple of wooden stakes marked off with measuring lines, a loop sight made of bent wire. “We can’t miss,” he said. “It’s a three-hundred-mile-wide target.”
Overcoming their distaste, they scavenged the dragonfly air tanks, then discovered that they were unusable. The air was thick with contaminants. One whiff set the curator coughing and wheezing.
“What’s the air of their world like if they can breathe that?” Bram wondered aloud.
“Never mind,” Jao said. “Take ’em along. We’ll use ’em for attitude jets.”
They were about to leave when they saw movement amid the jumbled cargo. “We’ve got a stowaway,” Jao said.
Bram tensed, but it was only a Cuddly. They coaxed the little fellow closer, then grabbed him. His fur was beginning to lose the trapped air that made it fluffy.
“We’d better take him with us,” Bram said. “He can’t last much longer here.”
The small creature went willingly with them into the walker’s inflated bubble, eagerly sniffing the air. He immediately made a nuisance of himself by attempting to curl up in the lap of the one person there who didn’t care for animals—the curator.
“Get him off me,” the curator yelled. “I don’t want him messing up these etchings.”
“Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, he’s not going to hurt anything,” Jao said. “You’ve got them in nitrogen envelopes, anyway.”
Bram lifted the little beast away. “He’s an old one,” he said. “Look at that grizzled fur.”
“Yar, he’s lived a long time, all right. His string almost ran out here, though. He would have gone spinning through vacuum for eternity. Lucky we saw him in time.”
“Smart of him to come out and show himself, you mean.”
Jao cocked his head. “Going to bring him home to Mim?”
The Cuddly settled contentedly in Bram’s lap. “I guess I’ve got myself another Cuddly,” he sighed. “I hope he gets along with Loki.”
The furry animal responded to Bram’s voice by lifting its gray muzzle and blinking at him with big trusting brown eyes.
“What are you going to name him?” Jao asked.
“Who was that character in King James who lived so long? Methuselah. I’ll call him Methuselah.”
“Hear that, Methuselah? I guess you’ve got yourself a new home.” Jao spoke absently, his eye on the changing chronograph display of his pendant computer. “Five more seconds, then we’ll be pointed just right. Hold on, here we go.”
He set off the solid fuel booster with the yank of a wire, and the walker flew like a cork into space. The square bulk of the pallet tumbled away from them and grew smaller against the disk-filled night.
“Hold tight,” the voice of Lydis crackled through the static. “I’m coming to pick you up.”
“Did everybody make it?” Bram asked.
“Yes, the last shuttle got here hours ago. Smeth’s into his countdown. We blast off within the fivehour.”
That explained why Yggdrasil had stopped spinning. The tree’s green hemispheres filled the sky ahead of them, a sandwich with the void of space for a filling. The trunk was a stubby bar in the middle, eclipsing stars, seemingly pierced by the long skewer of the probe behind it. They were still too far above the surface to make out any detail of branches or leaf-clothed roots, but scattered here and there across the greener dome were the pinpoint lights of human habitation.
Bram looked for the yellow wink of Lydis’s drive and found it to one side. There was a more ominous sight beyond it—the pearly motes of dragonfly bubbles floating among the stars.
“How far from Yggdrasil do you make them?” Bram asked.
“We’ll beat them,” she said shortly, and switched off.
The burn was a long one, lasting almost an hour. Bram watched the flame until it winked out. Ten minutes later it flared up again, many times brighter now that it was facing them.
“That daughter of yours doesn’t fool around,” Jao said admiringly. “Burn till turnover, and no corrections.” He glanced at the chronograph window of his display. “She’ll be here in less than nine decaminutes.”
Actually it took a full hour; Jao had forgotten to allow for the fact that Lydis would have to shut off her engine a little early to avoid cooking them and coast the last few miles. Even so, she was still killing momentum with her hydrazine maneuvering jets when she arrived.
They watched through the clear bubble as the rhombohedral bulk bore down on them. Lydis was flying a heavy-duty space tug—a comet chaser—instead of one of the lightweight interbranch shuttles.
“Come on, let’s go,” Jao said.
He picked up one of the scavenged dragonfly air tanks—a ribbed ovoid with a stopcock in the form of two levers meant to be squeezed together—and slipped one arm through its webbing. Bram screwed the curator’s helmet back on while the man fussed at him. After a moment’s thought, he replaced the curator’s depleted air bottle with his own half-full one; actually, any of them could breathe for about nine minutes on the cubic foot or so of oxygen-rich walker air trapped in their suits, but the curator wouldn’t know that, and Bram didn’t want the little man getting panicky and thrashing around.
Together, he and Jao grabbed the curator by the arms and hauled him bodily through the air flap. The Cuddly came tumbling out on the blast of released air and, making an agile recovery, landed on Bram’s shoulder.
The tug hovered a few hundred feet away, its nets spread like wings. Bram could see the mists of the hydrazine jets as Lydis nudged the behemoth toward them.
While the curator squirmed in their grasp, Jao aimed the nozzle of the dragonfly tank a
t a spot ahead of the tug and squirted polluted air into space. Lydis saw what he was doing and compensated her vector for lateral motion.
They sailed across the gap, with Methuselah riding happily on Bram’s shoulder, and slammed into a net with rather more force than was elegant. The curator’s mouth popped open as the breath was driven out of him. Methuselah went head over heels, caught a strand in his tiny paws, and scrambled back to Bram’s shoulder.
They hauled themselves and the curator’s wriggling form toward the open air lock door while Lydis positioned the tug for the return journey. She hardly looked up as they came squeezing through into the cabin.
“Strap yourselves down,” she said. “We’re going back in a hurry.”
The tug skimmed bare miles above Yggdrasil’s branches as Lydis followed the curve of the crown. Close—too close to the tree’s edges—was the vanguard of the dragonfly force. Bram saw the lead bubble, a whitish orb a half mile in diameter, floating to a landing in the treetop.
“Lydis,” came Jun Davd’s strained voice through the radio. “We’re about to start fusion. Smeth’s evacuated the probe, and all his technicians are aboard Yggdrasil. What are you doing?”
“Go ahead and start up,” she said through clenched jaws. “Don’t worry about us.”
“Get in to the trunk,” he said. “A docking crew’s waiting for you.”
“I can set down anywhere, even if we lose the tug. With no spin on the branches, I don’t need to rendezvous with the trunk. That’s the problem. Neither do those dragonfly hatcheries out there. How close is the first of them?”
Jun Davd hesitated. “We’ll be under way before it makes contact,” he admitted reluctantly, “but not by much of a fraction of a g.”
Lydis gave Bram an inquiring glance. He nodded.
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “If any of those … things … get inside Yggdrasil and start to breed…”
She shuddered, and Bram shuddered with her. The thought of a bubble alighting in the branches and disgorging thousands of voracious nymphs was too horrible to contemplate.
“Yes, the same thought had occurred to me,” Jun Davd admitted. “We have a number of armed groups waiting outside around the likeliest points of contact. But we’re no match for them.”
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