The car tried to flop over on its back.
He was in the air before he had it quite figured out. In desperation he pulled all the fan throttles full out and tried to keep the car from rolling over by pushing each one in a little at a time. The ground dwindled until the sheep of Beta Plateau were white flecks and the houses of Gamma were tiny squares. Finally the car began to settle down. Not that he could relax for a moment. Fans numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 were left front, right front, left rear, right rear. Dropping lever 1-2 dropped the front of the car; 3-4, the back; 1-3, the left side; 2-4, the right side. He had the car upright, and he began to think he had the knack of it. But how to go forward? There were Altitude and Rotation dials, but they didn't do anything. He didn't dare touch the switch with the complicated three-syllable word on it. But ... suppose he tilted the car forward? Depress the 1-2 throttle. He did, just a little. The car rotated slowly forward. Then faster! He pulled the lever out hard. The rotation slowed and stopped when the Plateau stood before his face like a vertical wall. Before the wall could strike him in the face, he got the car righted, waited until his nerves stopped jumping, then ... tried it again. This time he pushed the 1-2 lever in a little, waited three seconds, pulled it out hard. It worked, after a fashion. The car began to move forward with its nose dipped. Luckily he was facing Alpha Plateau. Otherwise he would have had to fly backwards, and that would have made him conspicuous. He didn't know how to turn around. He was going pretty fast. He went even faster when he found a knob labeled Slats. The car also started to drop. Matt Temembered the venetian-blind arrangements under the four fans. He left the slats where they were, leveled the car's altitude. It must have been right because the car kept moving forward.
It was hardly wobbling at all.
And Matt was faced with the most spectacular view he had ever known.
The fields and woods-orchards of Beta rolled beneath. Alpha Plateau was quite visible at this height. The Alpha-Beta cliff was a crooked line with a wide river following the bottom. The Long Fall. The river showed flashes of blue within the steep channel it had carved for itself. Cliff and river terminated at the void edge to the left, and the murmur of the river's fall came through the cockpit plastic. To the right was a land of endless jagged, tilted plains, softening and blurring in the blue distance.
Soon he would cross the cliff and turn toward the Hospital. Matt didn't know just what it looked like, but he was sure he'd recognize the huge hollow cylinders of the spacecraft. A few cars hovered over Beta, none very close, and a great many more showed like black midges over Alpha. They wouldn't bother him. He hadn't decided how close he would get to the Hospital before landing; even crew might not be permitted within a certain distance. Other than that he should be fairly safe from recognition. A car was a car, and only crew flew cars. Anyone who saw him would assume he was a crew.
It was a natural mistake. Matt never did realize just where he went wrong. He had fine judgment and good balance, and be was flying the car as well as was humanly possible. If someone had told him a ten-year-old crew child could do it better, he would have been hurt.
But a ten-year-old crew child would never have lifted a car without flipping the Gyroscope switch.
As usual, but much later than usual, Jesus Pietro had breakfast in bed. As usual, Major Jansen sat nearby, drinking coffee, ready to run errands and answer questions.
"Did you get the prisoners put away all right?"
"Yes, sir, in the vivarium. All but three. We didn't have room for them all."
"And they're in the organ banks?'
"Yes, Sir."
Jesus Pietro swallowed a grapefruit slice. "Let's hope they didn't know anything important. What about the deadheads?"
"We separated out the ones without ear mikes and turned them loose. Fortunately we finished before six o'clock. That's when the ear mikes evaporated."
"Evaporated, forsooth! Nothing left?"
"Doctor Gospin took samples of the air. He may find residues."
"It's not important. A nice trick, though, considering their resources," said Jesus Pietro.
After five minutes of uninterrupted munching and sipping sounds, he abruptly wanted to know, "What about Keller?"
"Who, Sir?"
"The one that got away."
And after three phone calls Major Jansen was able to say, "No reports from the colonist areas. Nobody's volunteered to turn him in. He hasn't tried to go home, or to contact any relative or anyone he knows professionally. None of the police in on the raid recognize his face. None will admit that someone got past him."
More silence, while Jesus Pietro finished his coffee., Then, "See to it that the prisoners are brought to my office one at a time. I want to find out if anyone saw the landing yesterday."
"One of the girls was carrying photos, Sir. Of package number three. They must have been taken with a scopic lens."
"Oh?" For a moment Jesus Pietro's thoughts showed clear behind a glass skull. Millard Parlette! If he found out--"I don't know why you couldn't tell me that before. Treat it as confidential. Now get on with it. No, wait a minute," he called as Jansen turned to the door. "One more thing. There may be basements that we don't know about. Detail a couple of echo-sounder teams for a house-to-house search on Delta and Eta Plateaus."
"Yes, sir. Priority?"
"No, no, no. The vivarium's two deep already. Tell them to-take their time."
The phone stopped Major Jansen from leaving. He picked it up, listened, then demanded, "Well, why 'call here? Hold on." With a touch of derision he reported, "A car approaching, sir, being flown in a reckless manner. Naturally they had to call you personally."
"Now why the--mph. Could it be the same make as the car in Kane's basement?"
"I'll ask." He did. "It is, sir."
"I should have known there'd be a way to get it out of the basement. Tell them to bring it down."
Geologists (don't give me a hard time about that word) believed that Mount Lookitthat was geologically recent. A few hundreds of thousands of years ago, part of the planet's skin had turned molten. Possibly a convection current in the interior had carried more than ordinarily hot magma up to melt the surface; possibly an asteroid had died a violent, fiery death. A slow extrusion had followed, with, viscous magma rising and cooling and rising and cooling until a plateau with fluted sides and an approximately flat top stood forty miles above the surface.