Stirling wrenched his eyes away from the aerial immensities, and concentrated on the knotted rope which snaked down the outer side of the wall. Johnny had gone down first, while the rope was swinging free at the bottom end, and had tied it to the He’s substructure. Heedless of how ungainly he might look to the men behind, Stirling rolled carefully over the metallic parapet and began working his way down the rope. The cold sliced into him immediately, in spite of the extra layers of clothing. At the bottom end he found himself looking into an incredible, upside-down landscape of massive, ice-incrusted lattice girders. Their multiple triangulations spanned the bays between the beams of the He’s main grid, which carried in its boxy thickness the stolid, patient negative-gravity units. Johnny was straddling the broad back of the outer main tie, his hard body masked by heavy clothing, straps, and coils of rope. And, three miles under his feet, the gray Atlantic Still waited implacably.
Transferring his weight from the rope to the main tie gave Stirling one bad moment; then he was sitting behind Johnny, listening to the lowing of the wind. He soon discovered that normal consciousness was impossible under the hideously alien circumstances. As the other eight members of the party came down the rope, Stirling concentrated on shrinking his radius of perception until the only real things in the universe were his own body and the narrow highway of icy metal underneath.
Johnny gave a signal and, still straddling the main tie, began pulling himself along towards the intersection of the nearest longitudinal lattice girder. Stirling and the others jockeyed along behind him like children playing a dangerous game. At the juncture it was necessary to stand up and edge round a massive vertical member to get onto the new tie. While trusting his life to the grip of numbed fingers on glassy metal, Stirling vowed to be deliriously happy twenty-four hours a day when he got back into the Compression. Johnny kept moving on ahead, tirelessly dragging himself along by his arms. In the line behind him, Stirling heard Dix swearing monotonously as the physical strain built up. Dix had survived his fall from the robot’s turret—apparently without injury—but on learning that Stirling had been accepted as an equal member of the raiding party, he had relapsed into a watchful silence. The group’s painful progress was slowed down even further when they encountered huge nodes, where structural members intersected in three planes. It had taken them over an hour to travel a fourth of a mile when Johnny signaled the others to catch up. He moved a little way along a lateral tie, and the villagers formed a silent audience on the nightmarish crossroads.
“It’s getting warmer. There’s less ice this far in from the edge.” The wind noises made it difficult to hear the ventriloquist’s falsetto to which Johnny’s voice had been reduced. “At this rate it’ll take us a couple of days to reach the power plant, and we’ll be finished when we do make it.”
“So what do we. do?”
“We walk. Just like we’d do up top. That way we can reach the plant before dark.”
Before anybody had time to protest, Johnny stood up, stepped confidently across onto the longitudinal tie, and walked along it by leaning slightly into the north wind.
Feeling gray and old, Stirling followed him, while he told himself that the slowly shifting masses far below might seem like clouds. But that was impossible because everybody knew the sky was always above your head, not ever licking around your heels. Somehow he managed to keep putting one foot past the other, until the act of leaning on the wind—at an unconsciously computed angle which balanced the lateral pressure of air streams against the lethal yearnings of Mother Earth—became an automatic process. And, even at the faster rate of travel, it was dusk when they neared the downward-projecting hulk of the He’s central power house.
They had a light supper of wheat cakes and water, then lashed themselves in sitting positions against vertical struts to wait out the long night. Stirling finally went to sleep, with his eyes fixed on the softly flickering lights of Newburyport glimmering through the indigo haze that lay to the west.
The power station had one door which could be reached from the underside. It was there for the benefit of the human maintenance crew who took a trip up to the He once every ten years to renew the fuel cartridges in its closed-system reactor. The trouble was that the crew always arrived in a twenty-foot-square raft which fitted snugly into a docking area adjoining the door. A space had been left for it in the He’s structure—which meant the villagers found themselves staring at the rectangular door across a dismaying void filled with ocean-reflected light. The door was fitted with a conventional handle and lock which had a ghastly incongruity, when three miles of nothing waited at the threshold.
Johnny worked his way around the docking bay to the power station’s streaming wall, tied a rope to a vertical strut, and went right round the opening again to the opposite side. When he also tied the rope there, it spanned the gap about a foot out from the wall and on a level a few feet from the top of the door. He repeated the operation again, working lower down, creating what might have been regarded as a bridge by a very desperate man.
“Neat,” Stirling shouted. “But what about the lock?”
“My job,” said a small man called Borges, who was sitting close to Stirling. “That one’s a pushover—I can tell from here. I don’t know why they bothered in the first place. I mean, nobody’s likely to break into a place like … Well, it isn’t much of a lock.”
“That’s the way I lose most of my arguments too,” Stirling said sympathetically. “Good luck.”
“I got it already. I don’t weigh much; so that rope isn’t likely to snap under my feet.” Borges edged his way around the docking bay to where Johnny was standing. He hesitated for a moment, whispered something to himself, then raised his arms while Johnny tied a third rope around his chest to act as a lifeline. With a final and strangely shamefaced grin at the other villagers, Borges got into the plastic ropes, slid his feet along the lower, and held onto the higher one by twining both arms around it. The ropes bore his weight with very little sagging; but Stirling had learned they were woven from the high-tensile plastic used in the agricultural robots’ control lines. At the door Borges took some fine tools from his pouch and went to work on the lock. Two minutes later he cautiously tried the handle, nodded, and came back along the ropes. Pearly morning light poured upwards around him.
“I told you I was lucky,” he said as he found his place beside Stirling again.
Four of the party were equipped with pistols—which apparently had been brought to the lie many years earlier by rebels, who were taking no chances about what they would find. The weapons had been absorbed into a communal armory and were being carried on the raid by Johnny, Dix, and two other Council members: a narrow-shouldered, balding man called Forsythe, and a muscular Chinese known as Theodore. These four were to go in first, followed by the other villagers armed with knives and stubby spears. Stirling, who had not been given a weapon, was to be last into the station.
Johnny edged his way along the ropes, tried the door handle, pulled it open, and vanished into the darkness inside.
Dix followed, then Forsythe and Theodore.
Stirling listened intently, wondering if Lomax had any men right in the station and not merely camped out on the roof. There was a delay while the advance party sized up their immediate surroundings; then the door opened and Theodore signaled the others to come on. Four men went along the ropes one at a time and scrambled in through the door. Only Borges and Stirling remained behind. If I were Lomax, Stirling thought uneasily, I would put my men inside.