"Thanks," Babylon muttered; because the joke was almost true. For many hours—he had lost count of how many—Pertin and the chimp had been talking endlessly, often both at once. In one ear Doc Chimp whispering fearfully of strange cabals among the alien creatures on the orbiter; in the other Ben Line Pertin, alternately sobbing about his loneliness and his lost love, and boasting of how much they would accomplish now that Jen Babylon was here. Both kept a wary eye on the Scorpian, but if the robot paid any attention it was hard to detect. It hovered in the middle of the control cabin when the thrusters were off, occasionally darting to the instrument panel or to the ports with jets of hot-oil-smelling steam.
It was all too much to take in, but the central facts were certain. Fact one: Something strange was going on in the orbiter. Fact two: Something stranger still waited for them on the ground, a wrecked spaceship of unimaginable age, still capable of defending itself against intruders. And fact three: This was the end of the road for Jen Babylon. Whatever else happened, Jen Babylon—or some Jen Babylon— would live out his life on and around that peculiar body called Cuckoo; and from that verdict there was no appeal.
"Let's hear what's happening," Pertin muttered, and moved a switch. At once the sweet electronic voice of the pilot program spoke to them from the instrument paneclass="underline"
"Approaching entry point. Prepare for deceleration, increasing to twenty-eight meters per second squared, plus or minus three. Warning! Ten seconds. Five. Two. One—"
The safety rack squirmed behind Babylon's body, dragging him with it. Outside, the black sky turned gray, then blazed into a sudden flare of orange as the thrusters hurled forth their vapor. He felt crushing pressure for a moment—three full gravities!—then slightly less.
"Sorry about that," Doc Chimp giggled in his ear. "Ben Line warned you this lander was a rough one."
Babylon didn't answer. He was staring at the spectacle outside the port. There they were, the layered clouds of Cuckoo: steel dust in the highest reaches, from crystals of frozen oxygen; lower down, luminous seas of rose, gold, green.
These were not the ragged, diffuse clouds of Earth. Their edges were sharp as knives. They were swarms of tiny airborne creatures, collective beings like the aliens from a world in the constellation Bootes, called Boaty-Bits. Each was a separate entity, but together they made a superindividual, a flock or school or herd that moved together through the air. Lower still were real clouds . . . and below that, sinister and dark, the rough surface of Cuckoo itself.
"Prepare for landing," trilled the sweet voice of the pilot program.
Another sudden surge of thrust; a twisting moment of vertigo; and they were stopped. Actually, the landing was surprisingly gentle. The surface gravity of Cuckoo was so insignificant that landing was only a matter of slowing the speed at the proper time. There was no clutch of gravity to cause a real crash, only the possibility of flying into the unyielding surface.
As Babylon struggled with the straps of his restraining cocoon there was a sudden stillness. Only a moment; felt more in the brain than perceived in any sensory organ. And then an immense sharp crash, like a pistol shot beside the ear. Babylon shouted in surprise and sudden shock. To his wonderment his fellow travelers seemed to take it as a matter of course. Even Ben Line Pertin only nodded, and offered a weak laugh.
"Worse than ever," he crowed. "Why, they missed us by several minutes!"
"What in God's name was it?" Babylon demanded.
Pertin sobered. "I told you the ship tried to repel invaders," he said, busying himself with his own harness. "But it's very old, Jen, and its reflexes are slow. And getting slower. Why, the first time I landed here it only missed us by a fraction of a second! Of course," he added soberly, "its aim's bound to get better as we get closer in."
"Pertin," blazed Jen Babylon, "I've had a bellyful of you! This is the last time I let you get me into something I can't get out of!"
Pertin shrugged morosely. "Better get your gear on," he suggested, strapping a slim cylinder to his own shoulders. "You want me to apologize? The hell I will. I didn't ask for this job, either—and you might as well know there's a good chance that this will be the last time for anything at all, for either of us!"
There was not much gear to put on, but none of it was familiar to Babylon. The Pmal translator was the easiest part, and the least strange: it was a simple language processor, but good enough for most galactic tongues, and Babylon had worked with far more complex versions of it back in the linguistics labs. A thruster was strapped between his shoulders—"Walking's much too slow here," Doc Chimp chattered as he helped Babylon on with it. "Believe me, you've got to move briskly if you want to make it past the defenses!" And there were a dozen tools and implements and weapons, none of which Babylon had ever seen before: getting into the ship was evidently not going to be easy!
The lander lay in a small declivity, with only the mottled sky of Cuckoo overhead. There was not much light; only what the distant clouds gave, no more than starlight on Earth. Babylon had hoped that on Cuckoo he would weigh some normal amount again, but the soap-bubble object was so tenuous that he seemed to weigh no more than a kilogram. Underfoot was a waste of sand, velvet-black, trackless, untroubled by any wind. But it was not featureless. Blue sparks of light flashed from random points within it, like the glow of a tropic surf with its luminescent organisms. Babylon could see the outline of his feet against the diamond sparkles of the sand more clearly than he could see the rest of him, or the others.
"Better get started," said Pertin, his voice queerly strained as he peered over the gentle rise toward their objective. "Go easy with your thruster, Jen. Take time to practice; stay behind the rest of us, you can catch up later."
Doc Chimp showed him the little lever that turned on the gentle steam jet, all the energy needed to move about in the insignificant gravity of Cuckoo. But even that was a lot! At first thrust he soared into the ebony sky, suddenly meters up in the air.
Doc Chimp, giggling, jetted after and caught him. "That way, Dr. Babylon," he said, pointing. "No sense trying to get back to the orbiter this way—you'd never make it." Then he sobered as they leveled off. "Question is," he muttered, "will we make it at all?"
They were in the heart of an immense dark plain, and throughout it were scattered vast dark shapes. They looked like buildings, though Babylon knew that they were not But they were not natural, surely? He could not see the tops, could not even guess how high they stood. But far up he could see a section of a distant, pale cloud, cut off where a corner of one of the structures intersected it. It was at least two hundred meters over his head. "Doc, what are these things?" he demanded, staring about. "It looks like a city I"
"Heaven knows, Dr. Babylon. The T'Worlie say they're natural—maybe living organisms. But, oh, don't they look like a good old Earthly city skyline? Not as nice, though." The chimpanzee was staring about worriedly. "We'd best move along—look, Ben Line and the Scorpian are halfway there."
"Where's 'there'?" Babylon demanded.
"Right where those structures are thickest," sighed the chimp. "You'll see. Oh, never fear. You'll see." He twisted his spidery body in midair, activated his thruster, and soared away, Babylon following clumsily. The gentle Cuckoo gravity was forgiving and in a few moments he was able to control the direction of thrust well enough to keep a course. Below and behind him the lander had started its automatic scoops, shoveling the diamond-sparkly dust into hoppers for transport back to the orbiter, to be turned into plasma mass for the tachyon receiver. Directly under him was a cluster of jet-black prisms, then a tetrahedron of dull copper, then to one side half a dozen tall tapering cones that glowed pale gold. There were cubes like blocks of blue ice, glassy cylinders, spidery shapes that could not have existed on a denser world—they stretched for endless kilometers across the sparkling sand, and ahead of them, past the forms of Ben Line Pertin and the robot, they seemed to cluster around a darker and less regular shape.