"But she's had time to heal, Steven!" cried Donna Creery. "Don't forget we've been aspace for over four months!"
Quiveras looked suddenly worried. Ignoring the girl, he dropped to one knee and crooned to the spaceling. Chiquita frolicked over and hung before him, purring faintly as he stroked the scars. At last Quiveras looked up, his gnarled face concerned. "These were bad wounds, Miss Creery. I did not think you would treat her like that."
"It wasn't I!"
Quiveras shook his head. Obstinately, he said, "They are bad. I do not know if she will ever altogether heal."
Ryeland said stonily, "Are you telling us that we can't get away by spaceling, then?"
"Oh, no!" The little man was upset. "I did not mean to frighten you. My Adam can hold enough air for us all, I promise. We must go quickly."
"No," said Ryeland.
The girl and Quiveras paused, staring at him.
"Not like that," he said. "This rocket was equipped for me, to work out some of the problems of the jetless drive. I need that equipment— for, if it is as important as you say, we must have it. The spacelings will have to tow it—No," he said, not letting Quiveras object, "I know it will be difficult. But I must have it. And one other thing."
Quiveras looked at him coldly, then at last smiled. "Very well. If you are willing to go slowly, Adam and Chiquita can pull along whatever it is you want. What is the other thing?"
Ryeland said: "I want to set a fuse on this ship's fuel compartment. I don't want them poking around in it after we go; I want to blow it up."
In ten minutes they had locked out some tons of computers, electronic instruments, a power source and a handful of other gear; Ryeland took another five to wire contacts to a time-lock and set them to explode the ship's fuel, and then they were ready to leave the spaceship.
It was like making up one's mind to leap off a building. They stood in the open airlock, and there outside was the universe of stars. Ryeland felt more helpless and small than ever before in his life; how could human flesh survive that great cold barrage of light?
But Quiveras assured them that the spaceling's bubble of gas had remained about the ship, held there by the spaceling even through the ship's hull. And in fact, they could see strange shapes and colors, hardly visible, with their eyes still used to the bright ship's interior and dazzled by the distant display of multitudinous suns.
Ryeland and the girl joined hands and leaped, and they floated into the world of the spaceling.
They felt nothing, but they began to move away. The two spacelings swam among them, apparently unheeding, but the jetless drive their bodies produced was moving them all at a tangent to the rocket's line of flight, diverging from it slowly. As they drew off from the ship, the captive air the spaceling carried with it detached itself from its resting places along the hull of the ship. The bubble condensed. The air became denser. Scraps of solid material drifted into place.
Behind them, in a long string pointing toward the rocket ship they had left, an occasional glint of starshine showed the trail of instruments Ryeland had demanded they take with them. But they saw them only briefly, and then the spaceling's world was coalescing about them, and it was a fairyland.
It was incredible! Donna and Ryeland stared about, unbelieving. As the bits and pieces sorted themselves into their accustomed relationships they became a cool green cloud, so bright that Ryeland could hardly see the stars outside. Strangeleafed vines twined through the cloud, laden with clusters of unfamiliar fruit. Small creatures that were half fish and half bird flitted through the vines.
They were at the center, and as the air reached earth-normal density the invisible small creatures that gave it light and life were thickly packed about them. They could move. Ryeland roamed restlessly around the mad little bubble of fife they inhabited, with naked space only yards away, staring, thinking, asking quick questions of Quiveras. The little man had apologetically few answers for him, but the facts spoke for themselves. "Incredible!" he muttered. "Fantastic!" He caught himself on a tendril of vine eighteen inches from the faint veil that marked the end of the bubble and stared out at the stars. He could recognize no constellations; great Orion and the mighty Southern Cross alike were out there, but buried in a swarm of thousands of lesser lights, invisible on earth but here a snow-sprinkling of radiance. One great blue-white needle lanced him, and he knew that he had found one star at least. That could only be Sirius, many magnitudes brighter than from Earth's surface, painful to look at directly.
Behind him Donna said hesitantly, "Steven, what is all this?"
Ryeland turned at last to confront her. "It's remarkable! I think I understand it, though . . . The drive field holds this little cloud of air. Moving through space, it picks up dust and hydrogen gas. These vines have fusorian cells, that fuse the hydrogen into oxygen, carbon and all the other elements—and also release light and heat enough for the space-ling's metabolism, or for ours. I'd guess," he said thoughtfully, "that there's a fair proportion of heavy elements in those plants. Conservation of energy. Fusion liberates nuclear energy at the light end of the scale; if the fusorians made only light elements there would be too much release of energy, we'd all be dead in a moment, one way or another. But up past silver fusion takes energy . . . ." He shook his head. "Sorry. But I can't help running on about it. This is a complete little world, with its own complete economy."
Donna asked simply, "What about food?"
Quiveras interrupted. "Ah, food!" he cried. He launched himself through the air like a swimmer in water, the vines like a strange seaweed. He gathered his hands full of the bright fruits and came soaring back. He begged: "Try them! They are good. Platinum? Gold? I do not know about heavy elements, Mr. Ryeland. But I know about flavor!"
At that moment a great soundless flower of fire unfolded behind them. They all whirled to look.
Ryeland said soberly: "There goes our rocket. I hope we're going to like this place, Donna. It's all we've got now."
They gathered close to the film at the very rim of the bubble, peering out. "Not too close," warned Quiveras. "You must not stick even your little finger through it. You will be blown out, you see."
Ryeland looked startled, then, after a moment, nodded. "Of course. Anything much larger than a molecule is not reflected, eh? And once the field was penetrated, it would be forced out by the pressure differential." Very cautiously they settled themselves to peer out at the ship they had left behind. The flame was gone, but even in its microseconds it had heated metal to red incandescence and they could see a ruddy skeleton that was all that was left of the craft's main supporting beams. The hull and fitting were scattered by the blast; but near the dark red glow they could make out faint points of light. The war rocket, Quiveras declared positively. The lights they saw were the flare of its auxiliary rockets as it matched position with the abandoned hulk.
The spacelings hung looking out through the tangle of glowing vines, searching the dark outward sky. They made soft murmuring and whimpering sounds. Quiveras listened to them, stroking their sleek fur, crooning to them gently.
"They are watching the Plan rocket," he told the others. "The ship radiates its own infrared. They can see it well, now that it is coming closer."
"Closer?" Ryeland was startled.
"Of course, Mr. Ryeland. The Plan is not stupid."
"But—they must think we are dead! And even if not, they have no way of tracing the spacelings' jetless drive—"
"Nor have they," Quiveras told him solemnly. "The Plan is merely thorough. I can understand what they are saying in that cruiser. 'Did they have an escape vessel? If so, where would they be going?' To the Reefs. And the Plan knows where the Reefs must be."