He must have given it almost everything he had, because the platform lifted with an abrupt acceleration that batted the overhanging dragonfly transport aside and slammed Bram down.
The edge of the platform caught the helmet of one of the descending nymphs and shattered it. The mass of green jelly inside exploded sickeningly. Another nymph flailed for a clawhold, missed, and fell away under the rocket exhaust.
But two of the nymphs were on the platform, scuttling toward him. Bram had just time enough to note that one of the nymphs was carrying a flanged, open-sided box as big as its helmet, and then they were on him.
A pronged sleeve lashed out at him. He ducked and took it on his helmet. If it had ripped open his suit, he would have been done for.
The flexible abdomen, tipped with claspers, whipped around at him. He caught the pincers and then, with his toes hooked into the cargo net, swung the insect like a sling while the upper body twisted around trying to get at him. The glass helmet smashed against the corner of a crate, and the claspers relaxed just on the point of crushing his gloved hand between them.
But then the other nymph had him by two legs and its claspers and was trying to stuff him into the box. He struggled, but it was lifting him from behind, and he couldn’t reach it.
Then he was in the box, staring through its open end into the cleft face of a tomato-eyed monster that was lifting him upward with blurring speed.
He tried to get his legs under him, but crammed into the box as he was, he couldn’t untangle himself fast enough. The rockets had stopped firing. The pallet was coasting now, and free-fall turned him into the creature’s plaything.
It held him at arm’s length for inspection. The blank green eyes loomed through the glass, and the facial legs within the helmet stirred restlessly on their shelf. There was a latch at the bottom of the faceplate, a simple catch meant to be operated from inside, and one of the facial limbs was reaching for it…
And then all of a sudden Jao was there with a wooden stake in his hand.
Jao swung, driving the stake through the glass of the square helmet. The glass showered in fragments. The lobed face burst, and the hinged eating apparatus—unfolding limply from the smooth mask—lolled amid the jellied ruin.
Jao helped him out of the box. “What are those flanges for? It looks like it’s made to fit on to something … it’s built sort of like a little air lock, isn’t it?”
Bram looked over at the shattered helmet. He could see now that the front plate was made to slide up and down on grooves. His knees were suddenly weak from delayed reaction.
“It’s an eating box,” he said.
The tethered moon was far behind them, showing itself as pear-shaped with the wide end up. Even without Jao’s crude thumb-and-nose sightings, it was obvious by now that they were way off course. The cargo platform had gone sailing hundreds of miles past the edge of the disk’s rim, and they were looking down a ninety-million-mile cliff side.
“Too wide and too high,” Jao said gloomily. “I had to fire all the rockets at once for a quick getaway. That jolt the nymphmobile gave us didn’t help any, either.”
The three of them had been cooped up together inside the walker’s inflated bubble for an hour now, breathing by courtesy of the walker’s hydrogen-oxygen submetabolism. The curator had recovered somewhat and was getting snappish.
“Does that mean it’s going to take longer?” he complained. “I’m getting hungry. And my eyes and throat are burning from the atmosphere in here.”
“Be thankful you’re breathing at all,” Jao said. “We’re all going to be a little hungry after a while, but at least we won’t die of thirst.”
“See here,” the little man said. “I insist—”
Bram interrupted. “If we keep on this way much longer, by the time we overtake Yggdrasil, we’ll be thousands of miles off the rim. They won’t know where to look for us. And our suit radios don’t have that kind of range.”
“Yah, I guess we better have a little course correction about now,” Jao said.
“With what? I thought you said you shot off all our rockets.”
“Oh, there were a couple of spares left over from when I rigged the pallet,” Jao said casually. “They were still in the corner where I stowed them, fortunately. Under a tarpaulin. The stevedores must’ve thought they were part of the cargo. I lugged them over here while that walking appetite was trying to package you for its dinner.”
He gestured negligently at the thousand square feet of lumpy cargo net on which the walker rested. Bram saw the two solid-propellant canisters lying several feet away.
“What good will those do?” he asked. “Two little booster rockets aren’t enough to nudge a mass like this after the kick it got.”
“Oh, we don’t have to push the whole mass,” Jao said.
“Even if we dumped everything—at least as much as we could manage in the next hour, working at top speed—the platform itself has too much mass. We’d never be able to kill enough momentum to come out with the right vector.” He gestured at the receding rimscape and shrugged. “And after another hour of this…”
“We’ll ride the walker in!” Jao said impatiently. “Use it as our lifeboat. It weighs practically nothing, and there’s just the combined mass of the three of us. There’s enough thrust in just one of those boosters to change our vector while conserving the useful momentum toward Yggdrasil!”
“Yes, but—”
“It’s all in the angles. I’ll retrofire the second rocket to slow us down at the other end enough to compensate for the extra momentum. Or most of it, anyway. We’ll hang in Yggdrasil’s space for hours—more than enough to zero in on our suit radios. And if we’re still out of range, I can rig up a hydrogen flare or something.”
They set to work with a will. There was more than enough cordage to lash the two canisters in position on the walker’s spindly frame. “Best to secure the retro-rocket now, while we have some footing underneath us,” Jao said. “I can align it precisely with the median axis. When it’s time to fire, we’ll aim the whole walker by squirting oxygen or something.”
“You going to clear the pallet the same way?”
“No … too many variables. I’m using the pallet as our launch platform. I know how it’s tumbling.”
Jao had done wonders with a few simple tools—the timer of his neck computer, a couple of wooden stakes marked off with measuring lines, a loop sight made of bent wire. “We can’t miss,” he said. “It’s a three-hundred-mile-wide target.”
Overcoming their distaste, they scavenged the dragonfly air tanks, then discovered that they were unusable. The air was thick with contaminants. One whiff set the curator coughing and wheezing.
“What’s the air of their world like if they can breathe that?” Bram wondered aloud.
“Never mind,” Jao said. “Take ’em along. We’ll use ’em for attitude jets.”
They were about to leave when they saw movement amid the jumbled cargo. “We’ve got a stowaway,” Jao said.
Bram tensed, but it was only a Cuddly. They coaxed the little fellow closer, then grabbed him. His fur was beginning to lose the trapped air that made it fluffy.
“We’d better take him with us,” Bram said. “He can’t last much longer here.”
The small creature went willingly with them into the walker’s inflated bubble, eagerly sniffing the air. He immediately made a nuisance of himself by attempting to curl up in the lap of the one person there who didn’t care for animals—the curator.
“Get him off me,” the curator yelled. “I don’t want him messing up these etchings.”