Reentry was no faster than on Earth; all of a sudden they had plenty of time. There was time, thought Delilah, to power-up the main engines, blow every drop of fuel, break free from this steel-clawed bedbug—
But where would they go?
There was time, at least, to try to make sense of where they were and what was happening, although it did not seem that all the time in the world would suffice for that. The sensors read out data on the planet they were spiraling in on. It was a fatter and flimsier planet than the Earth, with a surprisingly dense atmosphere—thus the lifting body instead of wings on the shuttle. It was warm where the continent lay, Hainan temperatures or better, and hardly cold enough to matter even at the poles.
It was inhabited.
Well, of course it was inhabited! Delilah snapped at herself—where else would the shuttle come from? But all the same it was a startlement to see the crystalline lights on the dark side and the glitter of what could only have been cities on the bright. What cities! Beijing was a mud-hut village by comparison.
And the other way they knew it was inhabited was that the planet reached out and told them so.
"Look at this!" squawked Castor, playing with his communications equipment, and it was something indeed to look at.
Pictures were coming in, and sounds.
None of them were clear, of course, and none of them lasted. The photons in a slice of electromagnetic radiation are the same on the Earth and out past the farthest quasar. But the way technologists count and measure and decode them depends on chance and the accident of somebody's handy piece of equipment when the first vacuum tube is built. The aliens did not use the same bandwidths or screenline parameters or even the basic choices out of the electromagnetic spectrum that were doctrinal on Earth. The comm equipment in Delilah's ship was marvelously resourceful. It could seek patterned transmission anywhere and then puzzle over the patterns until it congealed them into data. But it could not do it easily, and sometimes its solutions failed.
So what they got were snatches and glimpses and glitches. Some were patterns of meaningless color; most were not even patterns. But now and then, for a moment at a time—
Pictures. What pictures!
There was a city—maybe the city, or one of the cities, that popped into glittering life below them as they spun around the planet. Bright green and shockingly brilliant pink, all colors, all intense.
There was a machine that pumped out thick, syrupy goo—why and how and for what they could not guess.
There was a cluster of creatures—buglike? molelike? there were no real standards to judge by—tumbling over each other and pausing to move their lips; but the sound channel did not go with the picture, and what sounds they made were lost.
There was another creature—a statue of a creature, perhaps?—in a sort of niche of glowing gold, more like an ostrich than anything else, but with arms instead of wings.
There was their own ship, blipped onto the screen, flashed away.
There was a planet, and the planet was Earth.
There were a thousand other things; and there were sounds on the audio frequency—chatters of facsimile and code and telemetry; whispers of, almost, voices, but whose and saying what they could not tell.
The sounds were as bad as the pictures, in fact. Every now and then there was a sound that seemed almost to make a sort of sense, a whisper of an English phrase ("—rescue you"—was that one?) or a name: Was "A-Belinka" a name? And Castor would capture all those fleeting bits and pour them back through the secondary screens and speakers so that Delilah and Miranda could puzzle over them while he hunted for more...
And all the time, all the time, they were swirling down to whatever was kidnapping them.
All the time in the world would not have been enough to try to understand, or to feel terror, or to scheme what steps they might take against whatever might befall. That didn't matter. They didn't have all the time in the world. Suddenly reentry began, and there was no time at all.
Reentry was no gentler than on Earth, either. Fortunately they'd managed to strap their battered bodies in again. Whether that would be enough to save them, Delilah could only guess; there was a lot of danger here. The claws on the alien shuttle had grasped their ship any which way. The ablative surfaces were no longer where they could do any good.
But their captors had thought of that. The thermal shock was minimal. The bug-tug blasted, blasted continuous retrofire. There was no time for their ship's skin to soften and burn away before they were down to a crawl— Mach 4 or less—and then it was a long, gentle glide to the surface.
They bounced—but not hard, and surprisingly slowly— and stopped.
When they realized they were down and safe—momentarily safe—they scrambled out of belts and harnesses. Castor was quickest. Before she could stop him— before she had quite realized that it might be a fatal act— he was at the door, opening it to their new world. All their reflexes were like molasses. The pull of gravity was distinctly less, and their heads unhinged. Delilah had only time to scream, "Be careful!"
The air did not kill them.
It smelled—strange all right, but good. A little like distant frying mushrooms. A little like the sea. It was raining, slow fat drops like peppermint jelly, and the breeze was gentle and quite hot. The astronauts clustered around the port, staring out at a maroon paved plain. The port, unfortunately, was facing away from the city they had seen, but out at its farther edge were lesser buildings, a cluster like crystals grown in a saturated sea, green and blue prisms, golden needles, ruby columns.
And it sounded as though they were being met.
"Put it away," snarled Miranda, and Delilah realized her hand had reached inside the waistband of her suit for the weapon Tchai had given her.
"Yes, please, Delilah," said Castor nervously. "Let's not start a fight."
She didn't answer. She put the gun back, and that was answer enough. She jumped down bravely from the port to the maroon paving—how strangely slowly one fell here!—and began to shuck out of her suit. They would look less threatening out of the suits, she reasoned. Besides, she was sweating terribly inside it.
The sounds of Someone Coming got louder. By the time Delilah had struggled out of her bottoms and stepped out of her jonny-drawers the sounds were just around the other side of the rocket, and then they were whirling around toward the three half-naked people.
There was a hoverplatform. It slipped and skidded in its turn, and more slowly came toward them—two or three others were following after, and the whine and screech of their air pumps was deafening.
They all carried passengers. What passengers! Alien passengers, as alien as you could ever wish! with their buggy, feelered faces and the ridge of glossy spines along their backs. Monsters from space! Deadly creatures that made childhood nightmares seem tame!
But Delilah had expected monsters, and besides, these monsters were no bigger than cats. Some of them wore clothing and ornaments of one kind or another—fabric ruffs around the places where their necks should have been, cloaks, jewelry, as well as what Delilah thought might be the equivalents of wristwatches, communications pendants, and so on. Most didn't. The naked ones were the ones who seemed to be hanging onto the floats any way they could and sometimes falling—children, perhaps?
Some one of them did something, and as the three hovervans dropped to their knees around the Earth spaceship, a great glowing hologram sprang into the sky—on one edge one of those ostrich-things; on the other what Delilah recognized as a bird clutching lightnings and leaves; in the middle a globe that might well have been meant to be the planet Earth.