Joneny expected one of these two things to happen.
Neither of them did.
Instead, everything exploded.
Outside the door a wave of purple light rolled across the girders. The gravity of the cruiser went crazy; he got heavier and lighter in sickening waves. The figure of the boy erupted into a geyser of green sparks, which swept for the door of the cruiser and missed.
Every loudspeaker in the ship began to moan in different keys. As Joneny stumbled for the controls, something happened to his eyes. The room went double, quadruple, octuple, and his hand, searching for the switch to throw the ship back into normal time, was lost among infinite decisions and choices. Then his head twisted.
He was falling, orbiting great pulsing luminosities of thought. A white light glowed before him so beautifully he wanted to cry. He turned from it and was confronted by blindingly cool green, which was very funny. He slid toward it and was enveloped in sad heat. A face rolled toward him down a long hall, the face of a man with green eyes, dark hair, high cheekbones. The face rolled over him, and he reached out to push it away, but his hand kept going, for miles and miles, until it fell on the time margin switch.
And he was standing before the control board, slightly nauseated, but all right. He sank in the hammock and turned to face the door, just in time to see the boy step through.
“What happened?” Joneny asked.
“You — you called me in. But I couldn’t…”
“Couldn’t what?”
“I couldn’t hear you. So my…father…father?…you don’t have the words. My father told me you called.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Joneny.
“My…father…but not father. The Destroyer.”
“What’s the Destroyer?”
“He’s where — where I came from.”
“When I asked you where you came from before, you said from this starship, Sigma-9.”
“That’s right. That’s where my father is.”
“Whereabouts in the ship is he?”
The boy frowned. “All over it.”
Joneny closed the portal. “I’m going over to Beta-2,” he said. “Maybe I can find something there.” He tried to put off the paralysis that the last strange incident had pushed him toward, detached the cruiser, and aimed for the rent in the hull of the Sigma-9.
The iridium cell computer, which had been humming all this time, suddenly flashed its completion light. Joneny opened the tape case and ran the answer through his fingers. All that the computer had been able to come up with was that the Sigma-9 had been torn open — torn open from the outside, the way one might tear off the skin of an orange!
“Hey, stop,” the boy said. They were halfway between the two ships.
“Stop what?”
“Stop your ship.”
“For what?”
“You’ll see. Just stop it.”
Joneny turned the ship into a slowing spiral.
“Now put it in time stasis.”
Warily Joneny put the ship in stasis. Nothing happened.
“Now look back at Sigma-9 and you’ll see my father.”
Puzzled, Joneny turned the view screen back toward the wreck they had just left. As before, it glowed and shimmered in complete disregard for their chronological position.
“The flickering,” the boy said, pointing. “That’s it.”
“That’s what?”
“That’s the Destroyer.”
Chapter Seven
Beta-2 was silent. The locks opened without any address from the robot mechanism. Here the corridors, though filled with air, were without gravity. “I’m looking for records,” Joneny told his companion as they threaded the triangular halls.
“Here,” the boy said.
They turned into a room that must have been the ship’s library. “These are the rest of the records,” said the boy, going to one wall of books behind glass. Joneny opened the case door. Black tomes ranged along the shelves, logbooks for the duration of the crossing. Joneny took first one out, then another. There were records of the Market, food production; he had absolutely no idea where to begin when the boy picked one and handed it to him.
“This one was my mother’s.”
Before the thought sank and bloomed to meaning, the cover fell open and he read: “This is the Logbook of Beta-2 City, the sole property of Captain Leela RT-857.”
“Mother?” Joneny remembered his new interpretation of the lines:
Under her arms a green-eyed child.
The boy nodded. “Turn to when the first ship was attacked.” He reached over Joneny’s shoulder and flipped the pages. It was near the end:
The report came in this afternoon that we had left the sea and entered light sand. The count from the first half an hour was in the high thirties, which caused me that odd paralytic alarm I have been so subject to lately with all the nonsense over the One-Eyes. But it dropped to three and has been there for the last couple of hours. Any sand is dangerous, but as long as it stays down there, we can sustain it for a few years. The uncertainty of when it will increase or end is unsettling.
Earlier this evening I left the staff meeting and decided to visit the One-Eye quarter. Passing through the City Concourse, I met Judge Cartrite.
“What brings you to this part of the ship?” he asked.
“Just walking,” I said.
“Taking stock of all your charges, Lee?” He gestured to the people around us.
“Just walking, Judge.”
“Well, you seem to be going in my direction. We’ll go together a ways and give a picture of official solidarity.”
“I’m turning off shortly,” I told him. But he accompanied me across the walkway.
“Have you heard anything about the new ritual group they’ve started over in Quadrant Two? They’re evolving some elegant complexities on some of the rituals I initiated back ten years ago. It makes a man feel he’s accomplished something. You know”—and the tone of his voice dropped — “I hardly ever hear of any of the City’s officers attending the ritual groups. You ought to encourage them to go, Lee. Solidarity again.”
I smiled at him. “We’re a busy bunch, Judge. And let’s face it, the rituals are mostly time consumers.” I smiled — to avoid spitting, I think.
“They mean a great deal to a lot of people.”
“I’ll put up a notice,” I said. I’d like to paste it over his face.
Judge Cartrite grinned. “Can’t ask more than that.” As we reached the other side of the concourse, he stopped. “Do you turn off here?”
“I’m afraid I do.” I left him at the lift to the administrative sphere.
The tall corridor was empty. My feet echoed. Then the hall ended at the web, spreading out in front of me, dim and huge, run through with catwalks and free corridors. It’s such a tangle that you can’t really see more than a hundred yards into it. I remembered as I stood on the edge of that spreading gulf how as children we had played near the exit. We were always terrified of getting lost inside. But now I took a short breath and pushed off. Gravity left me and I was floating toward the tangle of beams that was the web. It takes skill to leap from normal gravity into free fall. A lot of people never learn to. More than one body has gone into the Death’s Head with its neck broken from a head-on crash with anything from a bus bar to a plate wall. I caught myself against a ground sheet and pulled around on the handholds. It’s pointedly obvious that this section of the ship was not intended to be lived in; certain repairs for the rest of the ship must be made here, but the hidden ways and mechanical caverns, niches and paths of the center are never used by people of the City. Nevertheless, it holds some six or seven hundred inhabitants. From the other side of the plate I could see the housing for the little detractor gyro, a riveted sphere of metal seventy-five feet in diameter. I launched for one of the guy cables. It sailed up to me. I caught it and pulled myself down to the surface. Just from playing at the very edges of the web with other children of the City, I had learned that one magnetic boot was useful. Two were a nuisance. So now I stood, anchored by one foot to the housing.