The men grunted, standing. The leader pounded a tent peg into the ground. Another. Yet another.
Tohm fumbled in his pockets and removed his gas pellet pistol. Floating into the clearing, he said, “That's far enough.”
The fat nomad, despite his ponderous weight, moved quickly, heaving a throwing knife from the orange sash about his waist. Tohm dove like a swimmer, floated up above head level, dodged a second knife, and blasted the man. The pellet flashed away, sunk a few inches into the flesh before suddenly expanding, exploding the nomad's stomach from the inside out.
The leader shouted orders. Tohm swung on him, pulled the trigger, saw the face blast open from the nose, spilling brains.
The others were running now, terrified, leaving all of their belongings. He turned to the boy, but the boy was gone. He searched the land about and saw that the boy was running with the four men — without being forced to!
“Wait,” he called, “I'll help you. I won't hurt you, boy!”
But the boy was gone. He had been terribly fast for a weak, weary youngster. Tohm turned to the two bodies. He was confused. Why hadn't the boy come to him! He had stopped the nomads from killing him. Wasn't that grounds enough for friendship? And had these killings been in vain? Had he misinterpreted things?
He floated back to the highway, clouds of uneasiness and doubt drifting through his mind. He knew little of the world, coming from a prim village. Triggy was right; he could not grasp the concepts. Even the people seemed to act strangely. Paralleling the roadway, he set out at once for the city, trying to arrange the incidents at the campfire into a sensible order. He did not feel terribly guilty about the killing, for these were Romaghins. Perhaps they were not the ruling class, but they were as ruthless and cunning as their chiefs. And somewhere in the capital, they held his Tarnilee.
When he reached the tip of the peninsula, the city had vanished.
V
But that was impossible! A city simply did not disappear. He realized now that the glow of light had been gone when he left the nomad camp, but it had not struck him. Now it did. He searched over every hillock, oddly expecting an entire city to leap up from behind rocks and shout surprise. But there were no rocks large enough behind which to hide a city. He cut the power on the belt and settled to the ground. The earth was virgin, undisturbed. There was no sign that a city had ever been there — no foundations, pipelines, sewers. There were not even footprints.
Dawn was breaking rapidly across the mountains, flashing up golden and orange fingers, testing the sky for conditions before setting out on the long day's journey to the opposite horizon. There were few clouds, and those were the fluffy yellow-white mists at high elevation, chunks of diluted whipped cream that had gone sour. The blue sky was much like that of his home world, as constant in its shade as a dyed cloth, marred in its bland perfection only by the sun as it yawned to begin its day, tinting the blue with amber.
Scrub grass tangled across the earth, a brown and shaggy carpet. It abruptly choked off the road at its precious entry point to the once-city. Now there was grass — undisturbed. Tohm stood, looked about. He walked to the bluffs that overlooked the sea, choosing not to fly, in this hour of unexplainable defeat, like a giddy bird. He had lived next to the sea all of his life and looked to it as a living thing, not merely a dead, soulless pond. One spoke to the sea, and the sea spoke back. Not in precise syllables, mind you, not in grammatic clarity, but it spoke just the same. Its voice was the keening of the wind whipping the surface waves. Its tongue was the white-foamed wavelets that licked at the sky by the thousands, babbling to one another, talking at night to the stars. Splashing, bubbling, chuckling, the sea spoke. If you knew what the sound meant, if you understood the language of the waters in all its detail with its many connotations and denotations, it might make you laugh. Or it might make you cry, depending on your nature.
Tohm sat on the bluff, legs dangling over the chopped off edge where it dropped straight down to the beach. Below, the sands were yellow-white like the sea, steaming hot, slightly acrid. He wrinkled his nose and sighed. There was little use for ranting and raving. He felt more like being gloomy, indulging in self-pity. The sea was quiet today, and thus would he be. He looked along the beach, searching for some rock formations where the babbling could be heard, where the ocean would have lips, and he saw the wharf.
It was large. Piers of wood and stone jutted out into the water like lances plunged at the heart of the sea. They crisscrossed and paralleled. There were two levels to it, the bottom having bars and hotels for sailors. It was a facility to service a major city, though there was no longer a major city to be serviced. A dozen ships, mostly freighters, were tied to. Three large fishing trawlers stood, barnacle-covered, rusted, next to the dirty but cared for cargo vessels. Here and there, little specks that were people moved about. One of the boats, deck swarming with dots, began drifting away from the wharf, motors churning the stale waters into foam. He watched it from his great height, his knees drawn up under his chin. It was like a great automatic whale, he thought. Then the thought abruptly struck him that they might all be leaving. He looked for a way down. A thousand yards ahead, the cliff began to fade into the beach, sloping gently, navigable by a man on foot. He stood and ran.
“Hey!” he shouted at the dots. “Hey!”
At first they didn't hear him.
“Hey! Hey, up there!”
The dots were resolving into something more human. “Ho!” one of them called back, waving an arm to show they had seen him.
Panting, he doubled his speed. He could not very well use the flybelt without stirring up suspicion. And if they were as curious and perplexed by the disappearance of the city as he was, they would be suspicious of anyone to begin with. Kicking up a column of powdered sand behind, he raced down the slope and pounded on the finer sands, gained the steps to the main pier.
When he reached the dock below the giant freighter where the waving man stood, there was no air left in his lungs. He stood there, leaning against a mooring post, staring up at the deck, his chest jumping up and down like a caged animal. A number of crewmen had come to the rail to look at him.
“Who are ye?” the man in the captain's hat asked.
“Tohm,” he said.
“Ye live here, Tohm?” The man had a bushy white beard, ruddy cheeks, and a nose like a beacon.
“Aye,” he said, reverting to the speech pattern he knew was Basa II's own.
“Where were ye when the town itself vanished?”
“Coming home. Aye, coming home I was. I got here and seen there was nothing.” He hoped they didn't ask where it was he had been coming from.
The captain ordered the entry ramp lowered, smiled down at him. In a moment, it clanked upon the dock, sending a booming echo the length of the wharf. “C'mon aboard, then.”
He walked up to the gangplank, still exhausted, and stepped onto the deck. The captain was standing there with the crew behind as if seeking protection. He had no legs. A single limb of metal welded the stumps of his legs together well above the knee and ended in a floating ball which rolled about, taking him where-ever he wished. He rolled over to Tohm, conscious of the appearance he made, and liking it. “Ye look o' the upper class.”
He thought quickly. “My father deals in concubines.”
“Really now,” the captain said, his eyes twinkling.