He asked her again why the Planner had had to hide from the Machine, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steven, but he was worried. And it's your equations that are the key to it." And that, of course, drove Ryeland out to stare at the banked machines he had brought with him from the rocket, but all he could do was stare. They needed space and order, and on this little reefiing there was neither.
They lived like primitive islanders, catching the tiny flying things with nets made of vines, feasting on the shining fruits. Ryeland's mind was queasy at the thought of the radiation they were absorbing with every luscious bite, but his stomach was delighted. And, he thought, they were not the first to eat them and live. Perhaps the radiation was purely photonic; perhaps a sort of bioluminescence, like the green glow of a firefly.
Ryeland asked the girl again how Fleemer and his allies had got the better of her father, and got the same answer he had been given before. It was no answer. "I don't know, Steve. Except that it is all about the jetless drive. Father told me that he approved the search for an interstellar drive as part of the original Plan, built into the Machine. When he first learned about the spacelings, from Donderevo, he knew that a reactionless drive was possible. He began to organize an effort to learn how to build it. Immediately, he ran into fanatical opposition from men like Fleemer. I don't know the reason for their opposition. It must have been something more than just the desire to grab Father's place. Somehow, they were able to manipulate the Machine. They have got it under their own control. But I still believe that we could rescue the Machine and Father and the Plan of Man—if we knew the secret of the spacelings."
That, of course, drove Ryeland to begin assembling and testing the computers he had brought from the rocket. But the crawling fog was thicker in his mind. He sat staring at the banked computers, but he could think of no approach more promising than those he had tried when he was still on Fleemer's team. He couldn't be sure that the failure of the team attack was altogether due to Fleemer's sabotage.
Anyhow, he reflected, there wasn't much that he could do in his cave on this reeflet. Even if he had been given the blueprints for a perfected reactionless drive, he had no shop equipment.
Hopelessly, he gave up the effort.
Days passed. Weeks passed. The spaceling roamed sadly around their little world, still worried. They could not read its ways as Quiveras had, but its worry was plain. Was it the Plan cruiser, still skulking about? Or a nearer menace?. They simply could not tell. Donna grew sulky and unhappy, until they had a brief, brittle quarrel of words one day and it exploded into weeping. She clung to him. "I'm sorry. It's just that I always had so much. Servants, clean clothes, cooked food. Power, too. And now—"
She smiled up at him. Queerly, Ryeland thrust her away then. He was churned up inside with feelings he could neither analyze nor handle. It was his turn to be sulky and irritable, because, though he did not know it, his inner self was becoming a battle ground—the site of a struggle between his common sense, on one hand, and on the other a growing, potent love for the Planner's daughter. . .
Even his dreams were haunted.
He slept restlessly, and felt that he was choking ... He was in his office, miles under the surface of the Earth in the hidden complex of air-conditioned tunnels that held the Machine and its attendants. He heard the knocking on the locked door, and got up to open it for Angela.
But it wasn't Angela.
It was Donna Creery, white-smocked like the nurses at the stock-pile. She had brought the coffee and sandwiches on a plastic tray, but she screamed and threw them on the floor when she saw his face.
"It's Donderevo!" she was screaming. "It was Ron Donderevo—"
He wanted to tell her who he was, but suddenly he was strapped to the therapy couch in the recreation center, with shocks of paralyzing agony stabbing from the electrodes on his body. She was coming toward him again, in the white smock with a stitched red heart on her perfect breast, reaching for him with a long hooked scalpel.
"You might as well tell us now." She was wheezing at him with Dr. Thrale's apologetic, asthmatic voice. "Tell us how to build a jetless drive."
He wanted to tell her. The specifications were clear in his mind, amazingly simple; he couldn't understand why there had to be so much fuss about such a simple thing. But his voice was paralyzed with the shocks that made waves of dazing pain from the collar around his neck. And Donna wouldn't let him talk.
Now she wore a horned radar helmet. She was taunting him, with Fleemer's ugly voice. One touch, Ryeland. Only one little touch on the detonation button, and your precious secret will die with you!
Now she had Angela's face.
But she still had hands, like Donna. He saw her touch the deadly little button. The collar about his neck blossomed and swelled—
He awoke strangling.
"I was dreaming!" He tugged frantically at the collar. No! It was no dream. The collar was there, and surely it was about to explode. His exacerbated imagination felt it pulsing against his rasped throat. He thought he heard a sound from it, a tick, a whine, a purring of faint unstoppable engines. "No!" he shouted and leaped up out of the little nest of leaves where he slept. It was exploding! Not in a year, not in a minute—now. He flung himself wildly about in the no-gravity, shouting.
Donna Creery came swiftly to him, and the terror in her face woke him, drowning his imaginary terrors.
"What's the matter?" he demanded harshly.
"Steven! It's Chiquita. She—she was wandering about the lower passages, where we've never been, and—" She stopped, unable to speak on. Behind her the spaceling came, slowly, painfully, mewing tragically.
Chiquita's flank was a horror, raw flesh and golden ichor, with the mark of a great sharp claw.
17
There were four cartridges in the clip. Ryeland checked them, blessed Quiveras for having left the gun and started down the passages. He didn't say anything to Donna Creery; he didn't know what to say.
Then there was a pyropod on their Reef . . .
Ryeland's throat was raw and dry. Pyropods. "Flamefeet." Outer-space animals which, Ryeland thought, sounded vaguely like Earthly squids. Ryeland tried to picture one, and failed; but Quiveras had said there was a possibility that the caverns in their Reef might house one. And Chiquita's terrible wounds had converted that possibility into something far stronger.
Ryeland paused at the end of the passages they had explored, and picked up the discarded crystal sword Quiveras had left there. It was still bright; it was all the light he had. Then he drove into the first of the great convoluted burrows.
In five minutes he was at an end; the tunnel narrowed sharply, so that he could hardly move, and poised bits of rubble showed that nothing of any size had passed that way in finite time.
He went back again. Another tunnel, a much longer one this time, but again a dead end. It was difficult to maneuver; in no-gravity, he could not walk, and the shape and constriction of the tunnel made it hard to leap.
He came to another branch and stopped.
There were two tunnels, both enormous, both dark and soundless. The air was the air the spaceling had brought, but it had a sharp strange odor, like burning gunpowder.
And one of the tunnels was scarred with the enormous claws that had left their sign near the surface.
Ryeland plunged in without giving himself time to think.
He came almost at once to a chamber. He paused and hung in its entrance, peering about in the faint light his crystal sword gave. It was roughly spherical, so vast that its farther walls were dim; and in a niche at one side of it was a clutter of tangled objects.