“It’s obvious Klystar made more than one world,” he said tonelessly. “We’ll wait till the station parks itself in orbit or whatever. Then I’ll have a go at the casing.”
But the station didn’t go into orbit. Laedo gave a hiss of indrawn breath as the planetoid’s globe shape swooped nearer.
They were going in—fast!
“Look out!” he yelled to the hidden controller. “There’s a planet ahead! We’re going to crash!”
“What’s happening?” Histrina shrieked.
“We’re out of control. Quick—get into this chair.” He pointed to the padded, braced seat next to his. It wasn’t much protection, but it was better than standing.
Histrina disregarded his advice. “I’ll fix that thing,” she snarled. She pulled the gun from her waistband and pointed it at the control board as the worldlet swelled and swelled on the screen, blotting out the ebony margin that had surrounded it.
“No!” Laedo jumped up and began wrestling with her, forcing the nozzle of the gun away from the control board. “That won’t help! Stop it!”
Again he felt the floor shift beneath his feet, then a slight pressure. He knew that these indications were leaks through the artificial gravity from much more powerful acceleration forces that would have crushed them both instantly. Either the station was changing course, or it was decelerating.
“It’s all right!” he shouted. “Put the gun away, Histrina!”
Dubiously she obeyed. The sunlit side of the planetoid was now so close that blurry surface features could be made out—fuzzy mottled colours, lavender, light green, daffodil yellow, swaying and sliding past. Then, abruptly, it all streaked aside and they were once more looking into space, with the point-source sun glaring out at them.
The station had turned itself over. It was coming down for a landing, right side up.
Laedo seated himself back at the control board. Experimentally he worked a set of slides whose use he had been unable to discover before. As he now guessed, they controlled the viewscreen. In moments he learned how to direct the scope downwards, so that he was able once more to survey the surface.
This definitely was not Erspia. The projector station was descending gently, with a lateral drift so that it appeared to skim over a landscape now clearly visible in all its features. It was a world of flamboyant jungle—though not a jungle of trees, but instead of what appeared to be gigantic blooms or orchids, riotous with colour. At first Laedo thought he had got the focus wrong and was scanning a tropical garden from an apparent height of a foot or two, but no, the viewpoint was their true one, hundreds or thousands of feet in the air. Interspersing the growths were clear patches carpeted with pale green grass or moss, and here and there, azure lakes.
He felt Histrina lean over him. “Isn’t it lovely?” she murmured. Her arm hung limply, the gun still clasped in her fingers.
Laedo wondered if the projector station could survive a planetary landing in Earth-normal gravity.
Presumably it was built for space, without much by way of internal bracing. Still, it was of sturdy construction otherwise…
Histrina was cooing and mooing as if at a fireworks display. They had begun to dip into the forest, brushing through the huge, fleshy orchids, tearing through titanic petals, ripping through tangles of sunlit vines, becoming engulfed in colour. There was a sudden jar as the station struck the ground. On the screen was nothing but a flurry. Something had gone wrong; they were tumbling over and over, rolling through the jungle, snapping and breaking the apparently unresisting growths—even though the artificial gravity within the control room kept Laedo and Histrina sitting and standing calmly, undisturbed by the violent motions.
Fascinated, they watched as the tumbling spectacle slowed and became still. They had come to a stop.
Once at rest, the scope showed an expanse of close-cropped, light green grass among which were patches of moss. Laedo worked the cursors again. The spherical station had settled on its side—if the location of the drive unit could be taken to represent its underneath—in a large clearing. Wide mossy trails seemed to wander into the jungle. There was a glimpse of blue water.
And that jungle…
Actually it was not, as he had first thought, close-packed. One could have strolled through it with ease.
The place was like some alien Eden, a flower forest whose trees were giant blooms, whose huge orchids replaced timber boles and trunks.
And the colours! Nowhere did they clash, nowhere were they even glaring, but the total effect was breathtaking. Pale colours, yellows, ochres, cyan, lavender, sometimes glowingly transparent, shot through with stronger tones—scarlet, saffron, mazarine. For long minutes Laedo and Histrina gazed entranced, while Laedo slowly panned the cursor.
“Come on,” Histrina said eagerly. “Let’s go outside!”
“We’ll have to check the atmosphere first.”
“We’ll have to do what?” Mystified, Histrina stared at him.
He sighed. “I suppose it’s bound to be all right, on second thought. This is one of Klystar’s productions, after all.”
“I’ve never seen this part of Erspia before.”
“This isn’t Erspia, Histrina,” Laedo said wearily. “I just tried to explain. It’s another world, something like Erspia, only different. Do you understand that?”
“I suppose so.” She frowned, then brightened. “I wonder if there are people here?”
“So do I.”
Getting out was easier than he had thought it would be. They walked the corridor to the hatch which was the only portal Laedo had found in the whole station so far. He opened it and poked his head out.
The sensation was peculiar. The hatch was about thirty feet off the ground, but it was on the under-curve of the station, facing downwards. The artificial gravity kept him standing on the floor of the corridor, but this was upside down to the ground, at an angle of about forty-five degrees, so that the landscape appeared to rear crazily over him. Once his head cleared the skin of the station, however, the planetoid’s gravity took over and his head and his body were tugged in different directions.
He was pondering the problem of how to reach the ground when Histrina casually solved it for him.
“What do you think this is for?” she said, and pulled a lever behind him. Something rattled out from a slot below the hatch. It was a folding stairway which flapped, swayed and dropped, until it offered a steep but negotiable route to the floor of the clearing, complete with handrail.
He stepped down carefully, holding on to the rail. He could feel Histrina’s tread behind him, urging him on.
On the ground they stopped to take in their surroundings. The air was delightfuclass="underline" light, invigorating, filled with delicate scents. Laedo saw that the glimpse of blue he had seen was a lake in a meadow or parkland, partly hidden by a fringe of the giant orchids. Only in that direction did the close horizon betray the small size of this world. Elsewhere, because of the way the jungle hid everything, they could have been on a full-sized planet.
Laedo looked up at the projector station, backing away to take it in. Evidently it was perfectly capable of coping with the stresses of normal gravity, though whether this was due to structural strength or help from the internal gravity field he did not know. It reared over the tops of the titanic flowers; but somehow, now that it was down on the ground, it seemed less bulky than it had in space. It was, in fact, about the size of a small passenger liner, or perhaps an interworld shuttle.
Large enough, he supposed, to be a miniature world in itself for the eight people who had staffed it.
It seemed to have suffered no harm from rolling through the jungle. His own ship, though, was missing. It had been torn off. No doubt it lay in the jungle somewhere.