I reached the ship and I could see that it was covered with some stuff that looked like frosty glass and when I say covered, I mean covered-every inch of it. There was no metal showing. It looked unfunctional, like a model ship. Reduced in size, it could have passed for those little model ships sold in decorator shops to stick up on the mantle.
I put out my hand and touched it and it was slick and hard. There was no look of metal and there was no feel of metal, either. I rapped it with my gun stock and it rang like a bell, setting up a resonance that went bouncing across the field and came back as an echo from the city walls.
“What is it, captain?” Sara asked, her voice somewhat shaky. This was her ship, and there was no one who could mess around with it.
“A coating of something hard,” I said. “As if it had been sealed.”
“You mean we can’t get into it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe if we had a sledge hammer to crack it, we could peel it off.”
She made a sudden motion and the rifle was off her back and the butt against her shoulder. I’ll say this for her: crazy as that gun might be, she could handle it.
The sound of the shot was loud and flat and the hobbies reared in terror. But above the sound of the report itself was another sound, a wicked howling that almost screamed, the noise of a ricocheting bullet tumbling end for end, and pitched lower than the shrill howling of the slug was the booming resonance of the milk-white ship. But there was no indication of where the bullet might have struck. The whiteness of the ship still was smooth- uncracked, unblemished, unmarked. Two thousand foot-pounds of metal had slammed against it and had not made a dent.
I lifted the laser gun and Dobbin said to me, “There be no use, you foolish folk. There is nothing you can do.”
I whirled on him angrily. “I thought I told you...’ I yelled. “One more word out of you and right between the eyes.”
“Violence,” Dobbin told me, perkily, “will get you nowhere. But staying here, once the sun has set, spells very rapid death.”
“But the ship!” I shouted.
“The ship is sealed,” said Dobbin, “like all the others. Better sealed with you outside of it than with you still inside.”
And although I would not have admitted it, I knew that he was right in saying there was nothing we could do. For I recalled that the field had been unmarked by the laser beam and undoubtedly all this whiteness was the same-the field, the ships, the city, all coated, more than likely, with some substance so tightly bonded in its atomic structure that it was indestructible.
“I sorrow greatly for you,” said Dobbin, with no sorrow in his voice. “I know the shock of you. But once on this planet, no one ever leaves. Although there is no need of also dying, I plead with you compassionately to get into the saddle and let us head for safety.”
I looked up at Sara and she nodded quietly. She had figured it, I knew, about the way I had, although in my case most unwillingly. There was no use in staying out here. The ship was sealed, whatever that might mean or for whatever purpose, and when morning came we could come back to see what we could do. From the moment we had met him, Dobbin had been insistent about the danger. There might be danger or there might be none-there was no way, certainly, that we could determine if there were or weren’t. The only sensible thing, at the moment, was to go along with him.
I swung swiftly to the saddle and even before I found seat, Dobbin had whirled about, running even as he led.
“We have lost most valued time,” he told me. “We will try with valiance to make it up. We yet may reach the city.”
A good part of the landing field lay in shadow now and only the sky was bright. A faint, smokelike dusk was filtering through the city.
Once on this planet, Dobbin had said, no one ever leaves. But these were his words alone, and nothing else. Perhaps there was a real intent to keep us here, which would explain the sealing of the ship, but there would be ways, I told myself, that could be tried to get off the planet when the time to go should come. There were always ways.
The city was looming up as we drew closer, and now the buildings began to assume their separate shapes. Up till now they had been a simple mass that had the appearance of a solid cliff thrusting up from the flatness of the field. They had seemed tall from out in the center of the field; now they reared into the sky so far that, this close, it was impossible to follow with the eye up to their tops.
The city still stayed dead. There were no lights in any of the windows-if, indeed, the buildings did have windows. There was no sign of movement at the city’s base. There were no outlying buildings; the field ran up to the base of the buildings and the buildings then jutted straight into the sky.
The hobbies thundered cityward, their rockers pounding out a ringing clangor as they humped along like a herd of horses galloping wildly before a scudding storm front. Once you got the hang of riding them, it wasn’t bad at all. You just went sort of loose and let your body follow that undulating sine wave.
The city walls loomed directly in front of us, great slabs of masonry that went up and up, and now I saw that there were streets, or at least what I took for streets, narrow slits of empty blackness that looked like fractures in a monstrous cliff.
The hobbies plunged into one of the slits of emptiness and darkness closed upon us. There was no light here; except when the sun stood straight overhead, there never would be light. The walls seemed to rise all about us, the slit that was a street narrowing down to a vanishing point so that the walls seemed on every hand.
Ahead of us one building stood a little farther back, widening the street, and from the level of the street a wide ramp ran up to massive doors. The hobbies turned and flung themselves at the ramp and went humping up it and through one of the gaping doors.
We burst into a room where there was a little light and the light, I saw, came from great rectangular blocks set into the wall that faced us.
