The coldest spot within the ring was the point where the fire had started.
The Golden Circle had gone straight up, ringing and shivering from the blast, with sheets of fire roaring past the wing and hull. Kzanol/Greenberg had the wind knocked out of him. Kzanol was just now recovering consciousness. The ship was not yet harmed. It certainly hadn't been harmed by the heat of combustion. The ship's underbelly was built to withstand fusion heat for weeks.
But the pilot was out of control. His reflexes had taken over at the instant the shock wave hit, and then his conscious mind… He found himself his own master for the first time in weeks, and he made his decision. He turned off the fuel feed. The drive couldn't possibly be started again. Kzanol raged and told him to die, and he did, but it was too late. The ship, deprived of power, bucked and swooped in the burning wind.
Kzanol/Greenberg cursed fluent and ancient English.
Below him a wall of fire tens of miles high retreated to-ward the horizon. The ship hadn't turned over; the gyros must still be working.
The buffeting from below eased as the firelight died. The ship began to fall.
Deliberately, reluctantly, Lew took his eyes off the screen and shook himself. Then he turned on the radio. "All ships," he said. "Drive to Pluto at max. We can watch the fireworks on the way. Tartov, program us a course to land us on the dawn side of whatever's left of Cott's Crescent. Hexter, you haven't done anything useful lately. Find Ceres with a maser so I can fill them in to date. Comments?"
"This is Tartov. Low, for Pete's sake! The planet's on fire! How can we land?"
"We've got four million miles to drive. The fire should be out when we get there. Oh, all right, get us into an orbit, but you're still gonna program our landing."
"I think we ought to leave a ship in orbit. Just in case."
"All right, Mabe. We'll gamble for who stays up. More comments?"
Three men and a woman pushed buttons that squirted. volatilized uranium into fusion tubes and followed it with hydrogen. A growing storm of neutrons produced fission which produced heat which produced fusion. Four blue-white stars formed, very long and very thin. The bright ends swung toward Pluto. They began to move.
"That's that," Masney said wearily. "And a good thing, too. Do you suppose there ever was a telepathy amplifier?"
"I'm sure there is. And it's not over yet." Luke was flexing his fingers and looking worried. Pluto showed on the screen before him, with the edge of the fire a straight line creeping west to east. "Lloyd, why do you think didn't want the Belt to beat us to Pluto? Why did we come after them, anyway? That amplifier is a new weapon! If the Belt takes it apart and makes one that humans can use, we could see the worst and most permanent dictatorship in history. It might never end at all."
Masney looked at the future Luke had painted and, judging by his expression, found it evil. Then he grinned.
"They can't land. It's all right, Luke. They can't get down to the helmet with that fire going."
"That fire isn't burning any more where the honeymooner came down."
Masney looked. "Right. Is Pluto still explosive?"
"I don't know. There might still be pockets of unburned material. But they can go down if they want, regardless. All they have to do is land on the day side, where there's no hydrogen, and land so fast they don't burn through the nitrogen layer. They'd sink into it, of course, from heat leakage through the hulls, so they'd eventually have to dig their way out. But that's nothing. What counts is the hydrogen. Miss that and you probably won't start a fire.
"Now, they'll almost certainly go down for the amplifier as soon as the fire stops. We've got to destroy it before they get it. Or after."
"Take a look," said Lloyd.
Four bright points formed in a cluster on the screen. In seconds they had grown into lines a mile long, all pointing in the same direction.
"We've got some time," said Masney. "They're millions of miles from Pluto."
"Not far enough." Luke reached to close the intership circuit. "Calling Heinlein. Anderson, the Belt fleet just took off for Pluto from four million miles away. How long?"
"They started from rest?"
"Close enough."-
"Lessee…five hours ten minutes, approx. No less, maybe more, depending on whether they're scared of the fire."
"How long for us?"
"Fifty-nine hours now."
"Thanks, Anderson." Luke turned off the radio. Strange, how Smoky had sat there without saying a word. In fact, he hadn't said much of anything lately.
With a chill, Luke realized that Smoky's thoughts must run very like his own. With the ET a dead issue, the question was: Who got the helmet? Belt or Earth? And Smoky wasn't about to trust Earth with it.
Larry Greenberg opened his eyes and saw darkness. It was cold. "The lights don't work," said a voice in his mind.
"Did we crash?"
"We did indeed. I can't imagine why we're still alive.
GET UP."
Larry Greenberg got up and marched down the aisle between the passengers' seats. His muscles, bruised and aching, seemed to be acting by themselves. He went to the pilot seat, removed the pilot and sat down. His hands strapped him, then folded themselves into his lap. There he sat. Kzanol stood beside him, barely in the range of his peripheral vision.
"Comfortable?"
"Not quite," Larry confessed. "Could you leave one arm free for smoking?"
"Certainly." Larry found his left arm would obey him. He still couldn't move his eyes, though he could blink. He pulled a cigarette and lit it, moving by touch.
He thought, "It's a good thing I'm one of those people who can shave without a mirror."
Kzanol asked, "What does that have to do with anything?"
"It means I don't get uncoordinated without my eyes."
Kzanol stood watching him, a blurred mass at the edge of sight. Larry knew what he wanted. He wouldn't do it; he wouldn't ask.
What did Kzanol look like? he wondered.
He looked like a thrint, of course. Larry could remember being Kzanol/Greenberg, and all he had seen was a smallish, handsome, somewhat undergroomed thrint. But when he'd walked past Kzanol on his way to the pilot room, his fleeting glimpse had found something terrifying, something one-eyed and scaly and iridescent green, with gray giant earthworms writhing at the corners of a mouth like a slash in a child's rubber ball, with sharply pointed metallic teeth, with oversized arms and huge three-fingered hands like mechanical grabs.
The Thrintun voice was chilly, by its own standards. "Are you wondering about my oath?"
"Oaths. Yes, now that you mention it."
"You can no longer claim to be a thrint in a human body. You are not the being I gave my oath to."
"Oaths."
"I still want you to help me manage Earth."
Larry had no trouble understanding even the inflections in overspeak, and Kzanol, of course, could now read his mind.
"But you'll manage me," said Larry.
"Yes, of course."
Larry raised his cigarette and tapped it with a forefinger. The ash fell slower than mist past his gaze and disappeared from sight. "There's something I should tell you," he said.
"Condense it. My time is short; I have to find something."
"I don't think you should own the Earth any more. I'll stop you if I can."
Kzanol's eating tendrils were doing something strange. Larry couldn't see what it was. "You think like a slave. Not a ptavv, a slave. You have no conceivable reason to warn me."
"That's my problem."