As Correvalte moved away towards the aft superstructure, where the ordinary crew members were housed, Toller gripped a transverse line and drew himself to the rail. Now that the inversion had been carried out he could see only the ships of his own echelon and, below him, the balloons of the four leading vessels, but all seemed well with the fleet in general. He had made many ascents to the weightless zone and as a result had become inured to the thought of a meteor actually striking a ship. It was one of the rare cases in which he could draw comfort from thinking about man’s insignificance in the scale of cosmic events. His ships were so small and the universe so large that it would be quite unreasonable for one of the blazing cosmic bullets to find a human mark.
It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock speeding through the void from…
Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east, to the part of the sky where the meteor must have originated, and was intrigued when he picked out what looked like a tiny cloud of golden fireflies. The cloud was roughly circular and was expanding rapidly, its individual components brightening with each passing second. He stared at it, bemused, unable to recall having seen anything similar amid the sky’s sparkling treasures, and then—like the abrupt clarification of an image in an optical system—his sense of scale and perspective returned, and there came a terrible realization.
He was looking at a swarm of meteors which appeared to be heading directly towards the fleet!
His understanding of the spectacle transformed it, seeming to increase the tempo of events. The shower opened radially like a carnivorous blossom, silently encompassing his field of vision, and he knew then that it could be hundreds of miles across. Unable to move or even to cry out, he gripped the ship’s rail and watched the blazing entities fan ever outwards, racing towards the peripheries of his vision, still in utter silence despite the awesome energies being expended.
I’m safe, Toller told himself. I’m safe for the simple reason that I’m too small a prey for these fire-monsters. Even the ships are too small…
But something new was happening. A radical change was taking place. The obsidian horsemen from the far side of the cosmos, who had pursued their courses through total vacuum for millions of years, had at last encountered a denser medium, and they were destroying themselves against barriers of air, the gaseous fortifications which protected the twin planets from cosmic intruders.
Favorable though the encounter was for any creature living on the surface of Land or Overland, it boded ill for travelers taken by surprise at the narrowest point of the bridge of air between the two worlds. The meteors, racked by intolerable stresses, began to explode, and as they shattered into thousands of diverging splinters they were bound to become less discriminatory in their choice of targets.
Toller flinched as, with a wash of light and overlapping peals of thunder, the disintegrating meteors momentarily filled the whole sky. Suddenly they were behind him. He turned and saw the entire phenomenon in reverse, the great disk of radiance contracting as it raced into the remoteness of space. The main difference in its appearance was that there was less corpuscularity—the circle was a nearly uniform area of swirling flame. On leaving the last tenuous fringes of the twin worlds’ atmosphere, the fiery bullets were deprived of fuel and quickly faded from sight. A numb silence engulfed the tower of ships.
How did we survive? Toller thought. How in the name of…
He became aware of shouting from somewhere not far above him. There came a blurry explosion, typical of the pikon-halvell reaction, and he knew that at least one of the ships had been less fortunate than his own.
“Put us on our side,” he shouted to Lieutenant Correvalte, who was frozen at the control station. Toller clung to the rail, impatiently straining to see upwards past the curvatures of the balloon, while Correvalte began the regulated intermittent firing of one of the lateral jets.
A few seconds later Toller’s eyes were greeted by the bizarre spectacle of a bluehorn drifting downwards in the sunlit air, against the background of daytime stars. The explosion must have hurled it clear of the gondola in which it was being transported. It was barking in terror and lashing out with hoofed feet as it imperceptibly fell towards Land.
Toller turned his attention to the stricken ship, now coming into view. Its balloon had been reduced to a formless canopy of fabric panels. All four sides of the gondola had been blasted away from the base, and were still spinning slowly as part of an irregular ring which was made up of the figures of men, boxes of stores, coils of rope and general debris. Here and there among the floating confusion were flashes and fizzlings which emitted billows of white condensation as small quantities of pikon and halvell encountered each other and, not being confined, burned harmlessly against the pastel background of Overland.
Crew members from the other three ships of the same echelon were already launching themselves out from the sides of their vessels to begin rescue work. Toller scanned the struggling human figures which were part of the central chaos, and felt a pang of relief as he reached the unexpected conclusion that none of them was dead. He guessed that the gondola had received a glancing blow from a tiny meteor fragment and had turned on its side, thereby causing some of the green and purple power crystals to mingle and ignite, perhaps in the engine hoppers.
“Are we under attack? Are we to die?” The quavering words came from Commissioner Kettoran, his long pale face appearing at the door of the cabin.
Toller was about to explain what had happened when he noticed a movement at the rail of Vantara’s ship. She had come to the side, accompanied by the smaller and less impressive figure of the lieutenant who had been with her at the time of their inauspicious meeting. Even at a distance the sight of the princess was enough to disturb Toller’s composure. He saw that Vantara and her officer seemed to be concentrating their attention on the still-struggling bluehorn. The animal had lost all the momentum imparted to it by the explosion, and was apparently in a fixed position roughly midway between Vantara’s ship and Toller’s.
He knew, however, that the permanence of the spatial relationship was an illusion. The bluehorn and the ships were all in the grip of Land’s gravity, and all were falling towards the surface thousands of miles below. The all-important difference was that the ships were receiving some degree of support from their hot air balloons, whereas the bluehorn was falling freely. This close to the weightless zone the discrepancy in speeds was hard to detect, but it was there nevertheless, and in accordance with the laws of physics was steadily increasing. Unless corrective action was taken quite quickly the bluehorn—a valuable animal—would be condemned to that fatal plunge, lasting more than a day and a night, which every skyman had experienced in bad dreams.
Vantara and the lieutenant, whose name Toller had forgotten, were busy with their hands and within seconds he realized why. They propelled themselves over the rail with weightless ease, and he saw they had donned their personal flight packs. The units, powered by miglign gas, were a far cry from the old pneumatic systems hastily invented at the time of the interplanetary war, but in spite of their advanced design they were tricky enough for the unpracticed operator.
Evidence of that fact came almost immediately when Vantara, failing to keep the thrust in line with her center of gravity, went into a slow tumble and had to be righted and steadied by her companion. It occurred to Toller at once that the two women, obviously intent on retrieving the bluehorn, could be getting themselves into real danger. The terrified beast was still lashing out with its plate-sized hooves, one blow from which would be sufficient to pulp a human skull.