The speck grew rapidly into the oval frontal view of a flying craft.
'Can we outrun them?' Paul asked.
'Not a chance. That flyer's a lot faster than this old scout. But we might be able to outsmart them. Brace yourself. They're going to—'
The blast threw Paul's head into the back of the seat. The scoutcraft veered as though slapped by a giant hand. Paul's ears roared. Ogram struggled with the controls, swearing.
'That was too damn close!' he said after the craft had steadied.
A quick glance at the readout screen told Paul they had lost five hundred meters. He twisted around to look into the passenger compartment. Dorland sat rigidly, his hands gripping the arms of the chair. His eyes were open.
'Are you okay?' Paul asked.
Dorland kept silent, but his head moved in a slight, affirmative gesture. Paul barely had time to make sure Doriand's safety straps were pulled tight when the craft jerked sideways under the force of another blast. Paul heard the whine of the stabilizer engines as they fought to keep it on course. Ogram pulled out the stream drive controls and keyed in a quick sequence. He muttered something, slapped a bar to cancel the sequence command and started over. On the aft screen, Paul could see the flyer 62 William Greenleaf
lining up for another shot. He braced himself again as light flared from the flyer's nose—
The scoutcraft lurched, leaving Paul's stomach somewhere behind. It took him a moment to
realize that they hadn't been hit. The scene on the vidscreen had changed. The other craft was gone. Paul stared at the screen, puzzled as much as relieved. 'Did you hit them with something?'
'Naw.' Ogram was grinning with undisguised pride. He folded the stream controls away and repositioned the flight wheel in front of him. The craft's nose turned down toward a wooded area below them. 'We just skipped over to the far side of the Peaks where they can't see us. I'll take 'er down low. We shouldn't have any more trouble.' Paul still didn't grasp Ogram's meaning until Dorland spoke up: 'We made a local skip.'
'Yeah, right!' Ogram exclaimed. 'Something they can't do in that flyer. My father used to do it all the time.'
Paul stared at the vidscreen. There was no sign of the ruins or the village of Fairhope.
Ogram leveled the craft at an altitude that was barely above the treetops. He glanced over at Paul.
'You look a little pale. Feeling okay?' Paul shook his head wonderingly. 'I've never seen anyone skip that close to a mass-plus before.'
'Mass-plus?'
'Clarion. The planet. The gravitational basis for the skip.'
Ogram shrugged and turned back to the
vidscreen. Paul realized with growing horror that Ogram didn't realize how close he had come to killing all of them. Even a navigation computer needed a few seconds to compute the maneuvers that were required to move a craft through the kohlmann stream using a local mass-plus. And with the mass-plus less than a thousand feet below them ...
CLARION 63
Slowly, Paul released the deathgrip he had taken on the arms of the seat. Ogram was guiding the streamer along the scar of an old riverbed, twisting through the connected bases of low, rolling hills. He reduced the craft's speed and left the riverbed to fly up the gentle slope of a hill that was covered with lush vegetation. His eyes searched the vidscreens that were now set on wide-angle. When the craft crested the hill, Paul could again see the valley, and scattered signs of the ruins of Chalcharuzzi.
'Ah, here we are.' Ogram swung the craft into a gentle turn and climbed the slope a few hundred meters. Then he brought the scoutship to a stop and hovered unsteadily above a grassy clearing that was sheltered all around by high trees.
As the craft dropped closer to the ground, a warning light winked amber on the console screen. Paul waited for Ogram to lower the landing struts and realized with a sudden surge of panic that Ogram hadn't even noticed the light. He tried to speak, but his mouth had gone suddenly dry. Frakes had said something about that other man from Clarion: He came down too fast. . . stasis engines blew. . . crispy by the time they got him out. . .
'The struts!' Paul yelled. 'Lord—' Ogram's head jerked around; then he reached forward and hit the four banded
