It had to be recent. Such a preposterous anomaly could not long resist the erosion of Mount Lookitthat's atmosphere.
And because it was recent, the surface was jagged. Generally the northern end was higher, high enough to hold a permanent sliding glacier, and too high and too cold for comfort. Generally rivers and streams ran forth, to join either the Muddy or the Long Fall, both of which had carved deep canyons for themselves through the Southland. Both canyons ended in spectacular waterfalls. the tallest in the known universe. Generally the rivers ran south; but there were exceptions, for the surface of Mount Lookitthat was striated, differentiated, a maze of plateaus divided by cliffs and chasms.
Some plateaus were flat; some of the cliffs were straight and vertical. Most of these were in the south. In the north the surface was all tilted blocks and strange lakes with deep, pointed bottoms, and the land would have been cruel to a mountain goat. Nonetheless these regions would be settled someday, just as the Rocky Mountains of Earth were now part of suburbia. The slowboats had landed in the south, on the highest plateau around. The colonists had been forced to settle lower down. Though they were the more numerous, they covered less territory, for the crew had cars, and flying cars can make a distant mountain-home satisfactory where bicycles will not. Yet Alpha Plateau was Crew Plateau, and for many it was better to live elbow to elbow with one's peers than out in the boondocks in splendid isolation. So Alpha Plateau was crowded. What Matt saw below him were all houses. They varied enormously in size, in color, in style, in building material. To Matt, who had lived out his life in architectural coral, the dwellings looked like sheer havoc, like debris from the explosion of a time machine. There was even a clump of deserted, crumbling coral bungalows, each far bigger than a colonist's home. Two or three were as large as Matt's old grade school. When architectural coral first came to the Plateau, the crew had reserved it for their own use. Later it had gone permanently out of style.
None of the nearby buildings seemed to be more than two stories tall. Someday there would be skyscrapers if the crew kept breeding. But in the distance two squat towers rose from a shapeless construction in stone and metal. The Hospital, without a doubt. And straight ahead. Matt was beginning to feel the strain of flying. He had to divide his attention between the dashboard, the ground, and the Hospital ahead. It was coming closer, and he was beginning to appreciate its size. Each of the empty slowboats had been built to house six crew in adequate comfort and fifty colonists in stasis.
Each slowboat also included a cargo hold, two water-fueled reaction motors and a water fuel tank. And all of this had to be fitted into a hollow double-walled cylinder the shape of a beer can from which the top and bottom have been removed with a can opener. The slowboats had been circular flying wings. In transit between worlds they had spun on their axes to provide centrifugal gravity; and the empty space inside the inner hull, now occupied only by two intersecting tailfins, had once held two throwaway hydrogen balloons.
They were big. Since Matt could not see the inner emptiness which the crew called the Attic, they looked far bigger. Yet they were swamped by the haphazard-looking stone construction of the Hospital. Most of it was two stories high, but there were towers which climbed halfway up the ships' hulls. Some would be power stations, others he couldn't guess. Flat, barren rock surrounded the Hospital in a half-mile circle, rock as naked as the Plateau had been before the slowboats brought a carefully selected ecology. From the edge of the perimeter a thin tongue of forest reached across the rock to touch the Hospital.
All else had been cleared away. Why, Matt wondered, had Implementation left that one stretch of trees? A wave of numbness hit him and passed, followed by a surge of panic. A sonic stun-beam For the first time he looked behind him. Twenty to thirty Implementation police cars were scattered in his wake. It hit him again, glancingly. Matt shoved the 1-3 throttle all the way in. The car dipped left, tilted forty-five degrees or more before he moved to steady it. He shot away to the left, gathering speed toward the void edge of Alpha Plateau. The numbness reached him and locked its teeth. They had been trying to force him to land; now they wanted him to crash before he could go over the edge. His sight blurred; he couldn't move. The car dropped, sliding across space toward the ground and toward the void.
The numbness ebbed. He tried to move his hands and got nothing but a twitch.
Then the sonic found him again, but with lessened intensity. He thought he knew why. He was outracing the police because they did not care to sacrifice altitude for speed, to risk striking the lip of the void edge. That was a game for the desperate. Through blurred eyes he saw the dark cliff-edge come up at him. He missed it by yards. He could move again, jerkily, and he turned his head to see the cars dropping after him. They must know they'd lost him, but they wanted to see him fall.
How far down was the mist? He'd never known. Miles, certainly. Tens of miles? They'd hover above him until he disappeared behind the mist. He couldn't go back to the Plateau; they'd stun him, wait, and scrape up what was left after the crash. There was only one direction he could go now. Matt flipped the car over on its back.
The police followed him down until their ears began to pop. Then they hovered, waiting. It was minutes before the fugitive car faded from sight, upside down all the way, a receding blurred dark mote trailing a hairline of shadow through the mist, flickering at the edge of human vision. Gone.
"Hell of a way to go," someone said. It went over the intercom, and there were grunts of agreement.
The police turned for home, which was now far above them. They knew perfectly well that their cars were not airtight. Almost, but not quite. Even in recent years men had taken their cars below the Plateau to prove their courage and to gauge what level they could reach before the air turned poisonous. That level was far above the mist. Someone named Greeley had even tried the daredevil stunt of dropping his car with the fans set to idle, falling as far as he could before the poison mist could leak into his cabin. He had dropped four miles, with the hot, noxious gasses whistling around the door, before he had had to stop. He had been lucky enough to get back up before he passed out. The Hospital had had to replace his lungs. On Alpha Plateau he was still a kind of hero.
Even Greeley would never have flipped his car over and bored for the bottom. Nobody would, not if he knew anything about cars. It might come apart in the air! But that wouldn't occur to Matt. He knew little about machinery. Earth's strange pets were necessities, but machinery was a luxury. Colonists needed cheap houses and hardy fruit trees and rugs that did not have to be made by hand. They did not need powered dishwashers, refrigerators, razors, or cars. Complex machinery had to be made by other machines, and the crew were wary of passing machines to colonists. Such machinery as they had was publicly owned. The most complex vehicle Matt knew was a bicycle. A car wasn't meant to fly without gyroscopes, but Matt had done it.
He had to get down to the mist to hide himself from the police. The faster he fell, the farther he'd leave them behind. At first the seat pressed against him with the full force of the fans; about one-and-a-half Mount Lookitthat gravities. The wind rose to a scream, even through the soundproofing. Air held him back, harder and harder, until it compensated for the work of the fans; and then he was in free fall. And still he fell faster! Now the air began to cancel gravity, and Matt tried to fall to the roof. He had suspected that he was making the car do something unusual, but he didn't know how unusual. When the wind resistance started to pull him out of his seat, he snatched at the arms and looked frantically for something to hold him down. He found the seat belts. Not only did they hold him down, once he managed to get them fastened; they reassured him. Obviously they were meant for just this purpose. It was getting dark. Even the sky beneath his feet was darkening, and the police cars were not to be seen. Very well. Matt pushed the fan throttles down to the Idle notches.