much farther.
There it was! The immense mass of the animal hung overhead motionless against the murky sky. Bitter Shell cast his lance and it struck. The food-pod writhed, jetting oil, and then fell. He followed it into the depths with his sense and knew that he had won. He tried to dance upward, triumphantly, but failed. The methane was too thin to support his mass.
He wondered. Many Seedees had tried to fly upward, to find the source of life in the heavens, in a place where they could not go. Doubtless there was a reason for it all, but still, he wondered. Back in their camp, amid the floating fronds of a homeland bush, Bitter Shell lived with his tribe and feasted for many days on the bounty of the food-pod he had slain. He spoke with the shaman, Withered Senses, but there were no answers. He swore that he would find some, and spent his life in the quest, but there were none. The blind Seedees continued to live on as the God provided for them, unable to see the stars that shone down from above.
External voices came to him, generated who knew where. . . . He had seen the event many times before and so, now that he was within it, his mind supplied the external reality of what he was experiencing.
The GM155 stood alone on its barren field of hard gray ash, nose still pointing at a dim yellow sky. Its interior machinery, powered by a compact fusion reactor, was coming to life. The air intakes on the leading edges of the sharply swept wings had opened and powerful turbines were forming a flow of air through the constricted throats of coannular multiphase engines. Winds began to blow out from the tail of the ship, making it the center of a dusty maelstrom. When the jet pressure was high enough, a thin mist of liquid hydrogen sprayed into the engine's throat and ignited. A fleurette of yellow fire blossomed amid the triangle of tail fins, followed by a deep, hollow roar. GM155 lurched and came off the ground, seemed to teeter motionless for an instant, and then climbed into the sky atop the short, bright, smokeless spike of its exhaust flare.
The sky without began to turn bright blue, then darkened as the shallow arctic troposphere was left behind. As the rocket approached Mach 1 the turbines shut down, the engines becoming ramjets, force-fed on high-velocity air. They sped southeastward now, high across Europe in a sharp cross-ranging maneuver, curving toward the equatorial plane that they would meet below Indonesia and, as they climbed above thirty kilometers altitude, the pilots began to feed oxygen to the engines. Soon the intake nacelles would squeeze shut and rocket flight would begin in earnest. The sky darkened faster now, indigo, violet, then black, and the sounds of the outside were gone. Inside, inside . . .
Brendan Sealock was talking to an old man in the seat next to him. '. . . Look, I know hydrogen burned in oxygen
'Why, that's terrible! The GM ads say it's nothing but
They were distracted then by a thumping sound as the main engines shut down. Brennschluss. There was a moment of zero-g disorientation and then a muted hissing filled the cabin as the 'cruise motor' came on. Though essentially unnecessary, it would make the phasing maneuver up to Alpha-enclave-Kosmograd a continuum, boosting the cabin gravity to a steady 0.1g and preventing the chance of motion sickness until they reached the spinning wheel at Alpha in its two-hour orbit, some 1,076 miles high.
Endless generations passed.
Eight Guiding Cries came to float before God's Voice in the temple. It was now his turn to be invested in the priesthood and he was afraid. He knew that priests were privileged to speak with God, but he never thought that it would come to him. He also knew that the priests emerged from their first interview with the deity shaken and withdrawn. Most of them would never again consent to couple with another Seedee. It made them something of a breed apart. His time came.
He jetted up to the hard metal ovoid in the center of the empty chamber and waited. Presently a valve opened on its surface and he was sprayed with the oil of an unimaginably powerful soul. You are the initiate?
8cries shuddered. He
It is well. Go to the coordinates that I will tell you and retrieve the mass that you find there. It is a God substance, the project on which you shall spend the rest of your life. Go!
8cries went out from the temple shaken and withdrawn, like those who had gone before. He went out to find his lump of metal, to work on it, and study, and learn as the God directed. And he never coupled with his own kind again.
Sealock had moved to a different seat, intent on escaping from the blathering old man. He pinched the bridge of hisnose and tried to think. He turned his head, pillowing it against the soft seat back, and stared out the window. They were soaring two hundred and fifty kilometers above the equator, clearing Australia in the sunshine glare, having left night and the Indian Ocean far behind, and the island-speckled expanses of the Pacific lay ahead. It was strange how the turquoise sea glittered with thousands of lemony diamonds, as if each tiny wave were visible to the discerning eye, and he could swear a small space appeared between the white striations of cloud matter and the surface of the ocean. Was that a shadow on the water? It was hard to tell truth from illusion.
He sat meditating for a long time, almost without thought, watching the Earth turn beneath him, a source of never ending fascination. A man came bounding lightly down the aisle and drifted into the seat next to him. Brendan turned to look at him. He was a red-faced northern European type, with heavy eyebrows and a wrinkleless, soft complexion. The man smiled brightly and said, 'Hello! My name is Steven Niccoli.'
