The spacelings were growing uneasy. "And our friends here are tiring," Quiveras said soberly. "They need rest. Carrying all of us, and all of your equipment, Mr. Ryeland—even for two of them it is a great load. They cannot go faster, and so they are going to try to hide. There."
He pointed out through the glowing vines.
Ryeland looked. The brilliance of their little atmosphere was in his way. He kicked himself—very warily!—to the other end of their bubble and hung, clutching a vine and staring; but if there was something to see his untrained eyes could not make it out.
Quiveras followed. "It is a cluster of Reefs," he explained. "There, near those three blue-white stars."
Ryeland's Earth-adapted eyes were not equal to the task. But Chiquita and Adam slipped close to him and hung among the bright leaves, their sad eyes staring into the star-sprinkled space ahead. Ryeland shook his head. "I don't see anything at all."
"Nor did I," Quiveras agreed, "until the spacelings showed me. We are not equipped to find a pebble in the dark, countless miles away; but they are."
Ryeland said doubtfully, "Even if there are the Reefs there, and we get to them—can't the Plan rocket follow us?"
Quiveras shrugged. "Of course. But the Reefs are in a thicker cloud than this little bubble of Adam's, Mr. Ryeland. There are swarms of the little fireflies that you call fusorians; they'll fog his search screens. There are hunks of bigger stuff that will slow him down—perhaps even wreck him, Mr. Ryeland, if he should be careless! Still, he may get through and find us. Yes. It is a chance, but we have no choice but to take it."
They drove on for hours, there was no way of measuring just how long. As destination and pursuer were alike invisible to Ryeland, there were only the shrouded stars as reference points, and their great distance was not affected by the tiny crawl of the spacelings. Adam and Chiquita seemed hardly to be working, as they slipped supplely about through the vines, yet Quiveras assured Ryeland they were moving nearly as fast as the Plan cruiser, in spite of the trail of machines that followed them.
Then Quiveras said, "We are almost there!"
Ryeland sought among the stars for "there." What made it hardest was that there was neither bow nor stern to their tiny captive world, no sure way of knowing which way they were going. He could find nothing. The stars shone splendid and unobscured, as he hung at nearly the edge of their air capsule—red stars, blue-white giants, clouds of nebular matter . . .
Then he saw the Reef ahead.
16
It appeared first as a pale point of light that suddenly grew into a bulgfng, uneven sphere of splendor. It was a jeweled ball, floating in space, and the jewels were forests of crystal.
They came closer, like a comet, then slower. Ryeland saw spiked trees of crystal carbon—diamond!—glittering with their own inner light. There were strange bulging brain-shaped, masses of blue and violet, patches of ghostly white sand, a frozen forest with bright metal leaves.
It was an incredible fairyland to Ryeland and the girl, but Quiveras surveyed it with a shrewd professional eye and shook his head.
"Not a good place to hide," he said, peering at the glowing ball. "Still, that solid part might be useful. The Reefs are mostly hollow— because they're dead inside."
Ryeland nodded. "I suppose the surface organisms are the ones that pick up the free hydrogen and grow. The ones inside die of starvation."
Quiveras was not listening. He cried gleefully: "Yes! There is a cave! —If it is not already occupied."
Ryeland stared at him. Quiveras shrugged. "These Reefs do not have much gravitation; something must be holding the air there, as the space-lings do. It could be another spaceling. It could be small cells in the Reef itself—each Reef is its own world. I do not pretend that I know what to expect on this one. But it could be something quite bad." He raised a hand. "Wait. Let us see."
The jeweled ball swam closer. "Watch," ordered Quiveras. "See how Chiquita enters the air of this Reef. Adam is pulling us now; Chiquita is controlling our atmosphere. Do you see?"
The female spacelkig was darting about, while Adam hung motionless. "I did wonder about that," admitted Ryeland. "When the two spheres meet, air pressure will be forcing them apart."
Quiveras shook his head. "See, she airlocks the Reef in." Ryeland stared. They came closer to the Reef and closer. From the frightened movements of the little fishbirds, he saw that the shell was being contracted; yet there was no increase of pressure—"I see!" he cried suddenly. "She is setting up another shell, big enough for both us and the Reef! Then she'll collapse our inner shell, letting the air leak out as it contracts to keep the pressure steady!"
Quiveras nodded. There was a sudden vibration, as though the shock-front of a distant explosion had raced past them, and a clicking in their ears. The inner shell was finally gone.
Ryeland stared about his new world. The steady rain of starlight, even through their light-fogged atmosphere, gave him a view of a wonderland. The sun itself, hardly brighter than Sirius, made yellowish sparkles in the crystal branches of the—could he call it "vegetation"? But Quiveras gave him little time to admire the world.
"Now we must do our part, Mr. Ryeland," he grinned.
Ryeland saw that the two spacelings were hanging at a distance from the dark cave mouth, regarding it with huge wet eyes. Their red noses flickered swiftly. They whimpered, and a shudder ran along Chiquita's scarred flank. "What is our part?"
Quiveras said calmly: "The spacelings have natural enemies—clumsy, armored killers. Very slow—too slow to catch the spacelings out in space. But extremely deadly. They wait for them in places like these." He said politely, "So we must ferret into this burrow, Mr. Ryeland, if you will do me the honor to join me."
Quiveras propelled himself to the mouth of the cave, peered inside, looked at the others and shrugged. "We will see," was all he said. Calmly he unwrapped a bundle of rags and took out an old Plan Police handweapon. He was not very skillful with it; he worried at it until he had opened the clip, checked the number of charges it contained— Ryeland saw that it only held four; undoubtedly Quiveras had found it difficult to obtain them—snapped it closed and balanced it in his hand. Then with the heel of his worn boot he kicked at a stalagmite of greenish crystal until it broke free. It was eighteen inches long or more and quite sharp. It made a queer but serviceable sword, Ryeland thought, and then realized that it made an even better torch. The interior of the cave was dark. The crystal sword glowed with its trapped fusorian cells.
Quiveras scrambled into the cave and Ryeland followed, unable to look at the girl.
It was a strange dark lair of winding passages. The entrance was worn smooth—alarmingly—as though large bodies had been scraping in and out. Ryeland thought swiftly of the probable age of the Reef, and felt somewhat reassured. Time moved along different scales out here.
Change could be lightning fast, or ponderously slow; those ledges might have been worn smooth a hundred million years ago. The dark passages, smooth-worn rock walls made of the bodies of once-living fusorians had perhaps been dead when the Earth was still a boiling incandescent blob. There simply was no way to tell. Nor had Ryeland any idea of how long or deep the passages might be. They were as labyrinthine as the maze inside a head of sea-coral, where tiny crustaceans wait for tinier fish to blunder in.
Quiveras paused where the passage branched—and, within sight, both divisions inside a dozen yards branched again. He was staring at the wall. As Ryeland joined him, he saw what Quiveras had seen.
The worn sides of some of the passages bore curving parallel scars, as though they had been rasped by the claws of some incredible monster.