scented air, bellowed a chilling, spine-cracking scream.
The portal slid open, and the alien rushed in, waving its pistol. It saw Saisbury too late. The chair connected with its scaly scalp; it crumpled under the blow like a paper cup under the heel of a young boy trying to make it pop.
Salsbury put the chair down, took his own gas pellet pistol from the vacii, and went out into the starship without a single damned idea about what he was going to do next
The ship was a maze of passageways and rooms. He crept through alcoves and empty chambers, leaving the corridors whenever the sound of approaching vacii feet grew too loud for comfort. Ten minutes after he left the room where he had been imprisoned, there was a soft moaning noise through the ship communications network. It sounded very much like a siren. Then a vacii announcer began hissing, screeching.
Ahead, doors began to open in the hallway. It was a search alert.
They had discovered he was missing.
He pressed into a recession in the wall where a window-a circular port, really-gave view to the Earth of One Line. He saw white, irregular humps of buildings. He had never seen the exterior of a vacii construction, but there was no doubt in his mind that that was exactly what these shapes were. This meant the starship was the center of a sprawling complex; even if he did manage to get outside, there was going to be a great deal more ground to cover before he was safe.
Leave the ship
He was startled by what he was thinking. His only chance of returning to his own probability line, to Lynda, was to remain in the ship and find that room with the teleportation cart. Yet even as he considered that, he realized how impossible it was. With a full-fledged search now begun, he had no chance whatsoever of reaching the teleportation chamber, of crossing the probability lines. He had no choice but to get out of there.
Quickly
A vacii charged by, wide feet pounding the deck, skidded as it caught sight of Salsbury from the corner of its eye. Salsbury brought up the needle pistol which he had also secured from the guard, filled the alien full of narcotics. It went down, rolling over and over until it came to rest against the wall twenty feet farther along.
Behind, there was shouting, excited keening. They knew exactly where he was.
He looked at the window, trying to decide if he could get through it. But it was much too small. Then he became aware that the port was actually set into a pressure door; the seam split the metal, a thin, darker crack against the uniform gray. He searched for a handle and found a set of three studs. The first made nothing visible happen. The second started a humming sound and made the deck tremble underfoot. The third stopped the humming and swung the door outward, noiselessly.
A spray of needles clattered against the wall next to him, making angry bee noises. One ricocheted into his hand. He plucked it out before much of the yellow fluid could seep into him, threw it away, fired a few shots down the corridor to force the vacii to take cover. Then, turning, he leaped out of the starship onto bare ground, ran for the shadows between two humped white buildings. A city of the things towered on all sides.
He slid against a rough wall, breathing hard, and wished he could shrink to mouse size or smaller. The alarm would spread from the ship throughout the entire connected complex. In moments, vacii would be pouring out of these buildings just as they had come out of the rooms of the ship in search of him.
Looking back to the starship, he saw the long curve of its flank for the first time, a dully gleaming mass of metal quite huge and formidable. There were vacii at the portal now, looking out to be certain he was not waiting nearby to ambush them. He fired a round of narcodarts. The first alien, leaning out, took the full charge and kicked outward, unconscious before it hit the earth.
Slipping on the now wet ground, Salsbury moved back along the building, staying with the shadows like a cockroach again, slithering, holding the narcotics pistol out to his side. Behind him were the sounds of heated pursuit.
He turned a corner, hurried across a stone-floored courtyard where his shoes made agonizingly loud sounds, and darted into the gaping mouth of another dark alleyway. He rested there, looking the way he had come, then the way he had chosen to go. Neither looked promising. The pursuers were surely gaining. If he listened, he could hear them shouting questions to one another. But the way ahead was uncertain. He might be heading for a dead end, or circling back to the ship. The last possibility sunk into his chest like an arrow. Frantically, he tried to remember how the alleys had turned, how he had come across the courtyard. Would he bumble into the search party, fall into their arms through his own stupidity?
It was a distinct possibility.
For the first time, he fervently wished he were iron Victor, moving according to program without a worry in the world.
Furious with himself for his confusion, he continued down the backstreet, his feet sucking wetly on soggy earth. There was a shout to his left as he passed another alley mouth feeding into the one through which he was running. Surprised, he tried to increase his speed, succeeded only in slipping on a patch of mud. He went down hard on his hip, cracking his head against the side of a building. He saw stars a moment, then decided he had no time for astronomy. He pushed to his feet just as the vacii who had shouted came up behind him, still hollering. He rolled to avoid being shot, pumped a dozen needles into the alien. The thing went down gagging.
Salsbury went on, trying to move in a straight line, away from those chasing him.
Five minutes later, he came to another courtyard, ran into it before he saw the detachment of vacii guards exiting from a side street on the other side. There was a fountain between him and the aliens, spouting dark water. The noise of it covered the sound of his pounding feet, but they saw him anyway, as he was the only other moving object in the plaza. He tried to wheel around, made the turn too sharply, and fell again. He came to his feet as he finished the roll, his left arm numb from the impact with the pavement. He ran back into the passageway from which he had come, went half a block and turned into an alley.
Behind and in front, there were the sounds of pursuit. They were closing in from all sides; he had only minutes left.
He came to another intersection of byways, made the wise decision not to cross it until he knew whether there were vacii on the crossing street. He leaned against the wall and looked cautiously around the corner. He was immediately glad he had not acted hastily. There were half a dozen vacii to his left, waving lights over the dark walls and in various nooks and clefts in the strange construction material that formed the compound.
Behind there was the sound of vacii drawing nearer. Then, far down the alley from the direction in which he had come, there was a play of other torches. The even, warm light cast irregular shadows off jutting sections of compound walls. Salsbury was trapped. He could not go forward without being seen; to go back meant facing an even larger squad than the one ahead. He had not expected it to end like this.
In fact, he refused to let it end like this. He looked up the irregular wall of the building across the narrow street and made up his mind what to do. Dropping the needle gun, the other weapon in his holster, the rucksack on his back (also recovered from the dead vacii guard) he ran across the alley, reached up and groped until he found an indentation deep enough to crook fingers in. Painstakingly, he moved up the wall, for once worrying more about speed than quiet.
When he hooked his fingers over the flat roof of the two story building, the search party that had been following him was directly below. The vacii stood talking with members of the other search party that had been scouring the connecting alleyway. They whined and wheezed and cackled, finally split up again, each continuing down its own corridor. When Salsbury could no longer hear the slapping of their feet and only an occasional screech of their conversation, he risked kicking up over the rest of the wall and rolling onto the roof.
He stretched out, catching his breath, and looked at the stars which shown so brightly overhead. After a moment, there was a nagging in his mind that something was terribly wrong. In an instant, he saw what it was.
There were two moons.
One of them was the size and color of the moon as he had been used to it, the moon of the Earth he had come from. The second, hanging close to it was about half as large and of a shimmering greenish tint much darker than the regular moon. He watched them for a long time, fascinated. This was, of course, an alternate probability and would have differences-like the two moons. That was a strange and somehow delightful difference. But he wondered what the other deviations would be like. Perhaps, even if he escaped the vacii compound, he would find this Earth uninhabitable, a desert, a no-man's-land. Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed it yet.
