The arrival of the Cecropians, bearing the news that around those bright points of light circled other worlds populated by other beings, had been received with tolerant disinterest by the burrow females. They had little interest in the surface, and even less in what lay beyond. Communication had been established at a leisurely pace. The Cecropians, it transpired, had no interest in conquering the planet, or in living there. They hated those cold, clear skies. And they did not want to exploit Lo’tfi. The Cecropian terms for peaceful coexistence were simple. All they sought were beings with the sense organs to understand human sonic and Cecropian pheromonal speech, and the intelligence to learn both forms of language.
The loss of a small number of surplus Lo’tfian males, as the only price for being left alone, was acceptable to the negotiators — and anyway, argued the burrow females making the deal, wasn’t anyone crazy enough to go of bad breeding stock, even if he stayed?
J’merlia had left Lo’tfi, to become servant and interpreter to Atvar H’sial. In Lo’tfian terms he was therefore demented already. Now he was contemplating an action that would put his previous insanities into the shade.
Six hours. Twelve hours. Twenty. And never a signal from Kallik, or anyone else. Never a reply to his own, increasingly frantic, messages.
The orbits of Dreyfus-27 and Glister had passed and re-passed. At first J’merlia had been able to force himself to set the unit into recording mode while he did a little work on the interior of Dreyfus-27. As the hours passed, the urge to remain near the communicator became stronger and stronger.
At thirty hours he had waited as long as he could stand. Hans Rebka had told him to remain on Dreyfus-27. Kallik had told him the same thing. But they and Darya Lang were in danger.
The Summer Dreamboat was already in remote-controlled status. He used the communicator to bring it on a maximum-velocity trajectory to Dreyfus-27.
The ship ran the gauntlet of the Phage belt and arrived with another dent in the hull from a glancing blow. J’merlia gave it one moment’s inspection to make sure the damage was superficial, then boarded the Dreamboat and set a least-time return course.
No messages came in during the flight back to Glister. In his preoccupation with the problem at hand, J’merlia did not think to send any record of his decision to abandon Dreyfus-27 in favor of a trip to the planetoid.
At two thousand kilometers Glister became visible. So did the matrix of pinpoint lights whirling in orbit around the little sphere. J’merlia gripped the controls himself, ready to override the collision avoidance system if he had to. The computer was ready for the free-fall trajectories of natural bodies, not the directed attack of energetic Phages; Kallik might have been able to devise alternative programs in the time available, but J’merlia certainly could not.
Two hundred kilometers. There was a jerk of violent acceleration. A close approach — near enough to stare down a Phage’s dark pentagonal maw as it whizzed past only forty meters away. Eighty kilometers. Another, closer, miss, and a second violent thrust to the left. Fifty. The Dreamboat began decelerating so hard that J’merlia’s front claws could not move on the controls. He sat rigid, staring out of the port as the ship corkscrewed its way through a sea of Phages. He counted scores of near misses.
When he was convinced that the ship was doomed, they were suddenly clear and in the final moments of descent. The whine of overstressed engines died to a high-pitched whisper. J’merlia, already in his suit, activated the display screens for an all-around look at the surface.
Nothing. No orange shimmer, no moving humans, no sign of the Have-It-All.
But from his position close to the surface he could see less than one percent of the surface of the planetoid, and during the flight down there had been no time for a visual search. Maybe Kallik and the other ship were just a few hundred meters away, hidden behind the curve of Glister. And Kallik had been wrong. That surface was not totally featureless. He could see something, a slate-gray mass peeping above the horizon.
According to Kallik and Hans Rebka, the atmosphere outside was breathable. But according to them, the whole place was safe. J’merlia put his suit to full opacity and stepped outside. He started to walk across the smooth surface toward the drab surface lumpiness.
Halfway there he paused. Was that thing what it seemed to be? He stared for a long time, then turned his lemon-colored compound eyes upward. Was it imagination, or were they moving still lower and faster than Darya Lang’s report had suggested?
He turned and went back to the Dreamboat, placing the ship into full self-protect mode.
On the surface once more, he again began to walk around the curve of Glister. That crumpled mass might have been there when the others arrived on the planetoid, hidden beyond the horizon. It might have been there for a million years. J’merlia certainly hoped so.
But it might be a very recent and ominous addition. Every few steps, he found himself pausing to scan the sky.
Was it? It certainly looked that way, although every Builder specialist swore one would never be found in a substantial gravity field.
The closer he came, the more the object he was approaching looked like the gray remnant of a shattered Phage.
CHAPTER 10
Where was she?
Darya’s first thought when the shimmering mist faded was huge relief. Nothing was changed. She was standing exactly where she had been when the cloud swept over them. Ahead of her was the same convex, gray, faintly luminous plain, barren of features, stretching away from her feet to a near horizon. The light that shone down upon it was the same cold, orange gloom.
But there was no sign of the Have-It-All, or of Kallik. And the strange light did not cast shadows.
Darya raised her eyes. Gargantua had vanished. The pinpoint brilliance of stars and orbiting fragments was gone. In their place was a smooth overhead illumination, as featureless as the floor beneath her feet.
She felt a touch on her arm.
“All right? No aftereffects?” Hans Rebka sounded as unruffled as she had ever heard him.
What was the old saying? If you’re calm now it means you just don’t understand the problem. “What happened to us? Where are we? How long were we unconscious?”
“I’ll pass on the first two. But I don’t think we were unconscious at all. We were held for less than five minutes.”
She grabbed his arm, needing the sheer feel of a human being. “It seemed like forever. How do you know how long it was?”
“I counted.” He was staring hard at the curved horizon, measuring it with his eye. “It’s something you learn on Teufel if you’re trapped outside during the Remouleur — that’s the dawn wind — and you have to go to earth. Count your heartbeats. It does two things: lets you estimate time intervals, and proves you’re still alive. I just counted to two hundred and thirty. If you’ll stand there for a minute, I think I’ll be able to answer your second question. I know where we are.”
He walked away fifty paces, turned, then called to Darya, “I’m going to hold my hand out and gradually lower it. Let me know when it goes below the horizon.”
When she called to him. “Now!” he nodded in satisfaction and came hurrying back to her. “I thought so from my first look; now I’m sure. The surface we are on is still a sphere, or very close to it — but the radius is less than before. You can see it in the way the surface curves away on each side.”