“What was the first?”
“You were involved there too,” she said. “Rather often, in fact.”
Yasmin stirred. She sat huddled on the floor, chilled, exhausted, wretched, though nonetheless drawing Aran’s appreciative gaze. “Why do you grin at each other?” she wailed. “We’re hunted!”
“Tell me more,” Tom said.
“What can we do?”
“You can shut up, for the gods’ sake, and keep out o’ my way!” he snapped impatiently. She shrank from him and knuckled her eyes.
“Be gentle,” Dagny said. “She’s only a child.”
“She’ll be a dead child if we don’t get out o’ here,” Tom retorted. “We got time before dawn to slip across the Silvan border in yon airboat. After that, we’ll have to play ’er as she lies. But I been pumpin’ my—shall I say, my friend, about politics and geography and such. I think with luck we got a chance o’ staying free.”
“What chance of getting our ship back, and repaired?” Dagny asked.
“Well_that don’t look so good, but maybe somethin’ll come down the slot for us. Meanwhile let’s move.”
They went back to the courtyard. The inner moon was so bright that no supplement was needed for the job on hand. This was to unload the extra fuel tanks, which were racked aft of the cockpit. The plane would lose cruising range, would indeed be unable to go past the eastern slope of the Sawtooths. But it would gain room for two passengers.
“You stay behind, natural,” Tom told Aran. “You been a nice lad, and here’s where I prove I never aimed at any hurt for you. Have a horse on me, get a boat from the village to Weyer’s place, tell him what happened—and to tell him we want to be his camarados and ‘change with him.”
“I can say it.” Aran shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I think no large use comes from my word.”
“The prejudice against spacemen—”
“And the damage you worked. How shall you repay that? Since ’tis been ‘cided there’s no good in space-faring, I expect your ship’11 be stripped for its metal.”
“Try, though,” Tom urged.
“Should you leave now?” Aran wondered. “Weather looks twisty.”
“Aye, we’d better, But thanks for frettin”bout it.”
A storm, Tom thought, was the least of his problems. True, conditions did look fanged about the mountains. But he could sit down and wait them out, once over the border, which ought to remain in the bare fringes of the tempest. Who ever heard of weather moving very far west, on the western seacoast of a planet with rotation like this? What was urgent was to get beyond Weyer’s pursuit.
Yasmin and Dagny fitted themselves into the rear fuselage as best they could, which wasn’t very. Tom took the pilot’s seat again. He waved good-by to Yanos Aran and gunned the engine. Overburdened as well as battered, the plane lifted sluggishly and made no particular speed. But it flew, and could be out of Hanno before dawn. That sufficed.
Joy at reunion, vigilance against possible enemies, concentration on the difficult task of operating his cranky vessel, drove weariness out of him. He paid scant attention to the beauties of the landscape sliding below, though they were considerable—mist-magical delta, broad sweep of valley, river’s sinuous glow, all white under the moons. He must be one with the wind that blew across this sleeping land.
And blew.
Harder.
The plane bucked. The noise around it shrilled more and more clamorous. Though the cloud wall above the mountains must be a hundred kilometers distant, it was suddenly boiling zenithward with unbelievable speed.
It rolled over the peaks and hid them. Its murk swallowed the outer moon and reached tendrils forth for the inner one. Lightning blazed in its caverns. Then the first raindrops were hurled against the plane. Hail followed, and the snarl of a hurricane.
East wind! Couldn’t be! Tom had no further chance to think. He was too busy staying alive.
As if across parsecs, he heard Yasrnin’s scream, Dagny’s profane orders that she curb herself. Rain and hail made the cockpit a drum, himself a cockroach trapped, between the skins. The wind was the tuba of marching legions. Sheathing ripped loose from wings and tail. Now and then he could see through the night, when lightning burned. The thunder was like bombs, one after the, next, a line of them seeking him out. What followed was doomsday blackness.
His instrument panel went dark. His altitude control stick waggled loose in his hand. The airflaps must be gone, the vessel whirled leaf-fashion on the wind. Tom groped until his fingers closed on the gray-drive knobs. By modulating fields and thrust beams, he could keep a measure of command. Just a measure; the powerplant had everything it could do to lift this weight, without guiding it. But let him get sucked down to earth, that was the end!
He must land somehow, and survive the probably hard impact. How?
The river flashed lurid beneath him. He tried to follow its course. Something real, in this raving night—There was no more inner moon, there were no more stars.
The plane groaned, staggered, and tilted on its side. The starboard wing was torn off. Had the port one gone too, Tom might have operated the fuselage as a kind of gravity sled. But against forces as unbalanced as now fought him, he couldn’t last more than a few seconds. Minutes, if he was lucky.
Must be back above the rivermouths, thought the tiny part of him that stood aside and watched the struggle of the rest. Got to set down easy-like. And find some kind o’ shelter. Yasmin wouldn’t last out this night in the open.
Harshly: Will she last anyway? Is she anything but a dangerous drag on us? I can’t abandon her. I swore her an oath, but I almost wish.
The sky exploded anew with lightnings and showed him a wide vista of channels among forested, swampy islands. Trees tossed and roared in the wind, but the streams were too narrow for great waves to build up and—Hoy!
Suddenly, disastrously smitten, a barge train headed from Sea Gate to the upriver towns had broken apart. In the single blazing moment of vision that he had, Tom saw the tug itself reel toward safety on the northern side of the main channel. Its tow was scattered, some members sinking, some flung around, and one—yes, driven into a tributary creek, woods and waterplants closing behind it, screening it.
Tom made his decision.
He hoped for nothing more than a bellyflop in the drink, a scramble to escape from the plane and a swim to the barge. But lightning flamed again and again, enormous sheets of it that turned every raindrop and hailstone into brass. And once he was down near the surface of that natural canal, a wall of trees on either side, he got some relief. He was actually able to land on deck. The barge had ended on a sandbar and lay solid and stable. Tom led his women from the plane. He and Dagny found some rope and lashed their remnant of a vehicle into place. The cargo appeared to be casks of petroleum. A hatch led below, to a cabin where a watchman might rest. Tom’s flashlight picked out bunk, chair, a stump of candle.
“We’re playin’ a good hand,” he said.
“For how long?” Dagny mumbled.
“Till the weather slacks off.” Tom shrugged. “What comes after that, I’m too tired to care. I don’t s’pose… gods, yes!” he whooped. “Here, on the shelf! A bottle—lenune sniff—aye-ya, booze! Got to be booze!” And he danced upon the deckboards till he cracked his pate on the low overhead.
Yasmin regarded him with a dull kind of wonder. “What are you so happy about?” she asked in Anglic. When he had explained, she slumped. “You can laugh… at that… tonight? Lord Tom, I did not know how alien you are to me.”