The general fixed his steel-gray stare on her. "But where? Out that airlock? Onto the rock of dayside Mercury? We'd fry in minutes. Or do you suggest we fly?"
He stopped in mid-sentence, bronze face frozen, then turned on Quarla Snow. "Those beasts of yours! What became of them? The spacelings, or whatever you called them."
But Quarla was shaking her head. "This near the Sun, Bella would never live," she said. "The radiation would destroy her—and us, too, if we were in her air capsule. And anyway, she's not here."
"Then how?" cried the general. "There must be a way! Both messages—the Starchild's and the Machine's—they both said this was the way."
Quarla said softly, "And so it is, General. That is why I came here, to fetch you to the Reefs. I don't know how. I only know it will happen."
The room seemed to lurch.
It caught all of them off guard. They turned to look at each other with varying expressions of surprise and fear.
"I think," said Boysie Gann grimly, "that we've found our gateway." He knew that sensation, had felt it before, knew that in the powers it involved the long climb outward to the orbits of the Reefs was only a matter of moments.
He was not afraid. In fact, there was almost relief in the knowledge that soon they would be facing the presence that had dislocated a solar system. Yet something was troubling him, some question of the last few moments, somethihg that had been asked but not answered.
He felt the room lurch again, and the lights grew distant and dim. Then he remembered.
"Why, Quarla?" he croaked hoarsely.
The girl of the Reefs looked at him affectionately. "Why what, Boysie?"
"Why were they afraid of you? You said the men here feared you. Why?"
The room seemed to shake and twist itself, as if viewed through a defective glass. The lights were leaving them—or they the lights, as if new quanta of space were being born between them, separating them without motion like the recession of fleeing galaxies.
And then Gann saw the answer. Quarla did not need to speak. His eyes told him what had terrified the three men in Terminator Station Seven.
In the dwindling light Quarla alone stood forth bright and clear—her face, her arms, her body shining brightly. . .
With a golden glow.
15
They tumbled through space endlessly and forever, and then they stopped.
They had arrived. They were all together in a wondrous new world.
All about them hung the slowly spinning worldlets of Reef Whirlpool, jewels of emerald and ruby, glowing gems of white light and blue. There was the slowly pulsing golden sphere that had captured Quarla Snow. And there the great battleship of the Plan, the Togethership.
Quarla Snow had described the ship, but she had not made them see its immensity. The vessel was huge.
Boysie Gann saw it, and saw too that they were not alone.
A ton of rushing mass hurtled toward them and stopped in midflight, squealing happily. A glowing red nose nuzzled Quarla Snow. "Bella!" cried the girl, and patted the tawny velvet fur. She murmured to Gann, "My spaceling. We're in her envelope of air, you see. Without it we'd not live a minute here."
General Wheeler rapped, "Get your sentimental reunion over with, woman! Can this beast take us to the Togethership?"
"We're going there now," said Quarla Snow. "See for yourself, General."
They were. Gann could see it now, the great battlecraft growing as they drew close. They were in free fall within the spaceling's vital capsule, all four of them in loose and tumbling attitudes, Quarla with one hand on the spaceling's coat, Sister Delta Four, proud and dignified even in the sprawl of zero-G, Machine General Wheeler, careless of everything around him but his goal, his steel-gray eyes fixed on the looming Togethership.
The battlecraft of the Plan was more distant and more immense even than Gann had realized. It grew into a long planetoid of sleek black metal, hanging suspended in the space between the glowing golden sphere that dominated Reef Whirlpool's core and the tumbling worldlets that brightened the sky about them. The four circled it and found the valves of a lock yawning open at its base, circled by the jutting black cylinders of the six great drive units that had thrust it up from Earth.
It did not seem to have been used in all those years. It had an abandoned and empty look.
The spaceling, without direction, seeming compelled by some outside force, took them straight into those valves, and halted.
The entry port of the Togethership was as big as a three-story house. As they entered, luminous rings around its walls sprang into soft gray light. The great valves moved silently, remorselessly shut behind them.
They were enclosed in a wall of steel.
All around them the walls were pitted and scarred, as if from some enormous battle of the past. There had been no such battle, Gann knew. What could have done it? Could it have been meteorites, over the decades that the locks had hung open?
General Wheeler saw his look and rapped, "Pyropods! They've been chewing at my ship! By the Plan, I'll root out every filthy one of them—"
The general was right, Gann realized. Not only right, but seething with anger. It had become his ship, containing his copy of the Planning Machine. And with it he intended to make all the worlds of the solar system his planets. . . .
Darkly, Boysie Gann realized that there were more dangerous things in this ship than pyropods.
He became aware of a sighing, rustling noise, and saw that the lock was filling with air. The spaceling's vital capsule no longer protected them from the void; they were in a breathable atmosphere. The spaceling realized it even before he did. She flicked her seal-like tail and darted away; raced back, her red nose glowing with joy, whimpering with pleasure. She played games with the bright-leafed vines she had carried in her air-envelope—the curious Reef plants that were part of the elaborate evolutionary device that enabled a warm-blooded oxygen-breather like herself to survive in naked space. She rolled the waxy, luminous tendrils into a huge ball, tossed it with her glowing nose, chased it across the lock, caught it with her broad velvet tail. . .
"Bella!" called Quarla Snow, affectionately stern. "Come back here! Behave yourself!"
But the spaceling was playfully obstinate. She flashed across the lock and back, racing toward them like the charge of a pyropod, missed them by inches, returned to the inner wall—and there, at the far end of the lock, discovered a crevice that had not been there seconds before. Mewing excitedly, the spaceling slid its supple body through the narrow opening and was gone.
A way was open into the rest of the ship. The same machinery that had turned on the lights and closed the outer valves had now opened a passage inside.
"Hah!" shouted General Wheeler. "At last! The Machine is waiting for me!" And he was gone almost as rapidly as the spaceling.
More slowly, the others followed—Quarla Snow, on the track of her pet, Boysie Gann, Sister Delta Four, a somber figure in black at the rear of the procession. A pseudo-gravity field of a tenth of a G or so gave them footing but spared them much of the effort of moving their bodies up the winding shafts from the lock. Even so, Gann was winded trying to keep up with the racing, driving general.
They were in a shaft seeming to extend endlessly upward. Then they passed a point of change-of-thrast of the pseudo-gravity and it became a dizzy abyss into which they were falling, until their protesting bodies oriented themselves to the new kinesthetic sensations and accepted it as a level hall. A cold current came along it, setting them to shivering, a breeze out of a cave, with a faintly unpleasant reek, dusty and bitter and dry.