lest he tear her apart altogether, he pulled out of his tumble. A prop, jet or rocket would never have made it, but you could do special things with grays if you had the knack in your fingers. Or whatever part of the anatomy it was.
Finally the plane whispered a few meters above the bay. Its riding lights were doused, and the-air here was too warm for engine vapor to condense. Tom believed his passage had a fair chance of going unnoticed.
Hills shouldered black around the water. Here and there among them twinkled house lamps. One cluster bespoke a village on the shore. Tom’s convoluted contrail was breaking up, but slowly. It glowed huge and mysterious, doubtless frightening peasants and worrying the military.
Aran stared at it likewise, as panic and misery left him. “I thought you wrote a message to your camarados,” tie said. “That’s no writing.”
“Couldn’t use your alphabet, son, seein’ I had to give ’em directions to a place with a local name. Could I, now? Even Karken’s letters look too much like yours. But those’re Momotaroan phonograms. Dagny can read ’em. I hope none o’ Weyer’s folk’ll even guess it is a note. Maybe they’ll think I went out o’ control tryin’ to escape and, after staggerin’ around a while, crashed… Now, which way is this rendezvous?”
“Rendez—oh. The togethering I advised. Follow the north shore eastward a few more kilos. At the end of a headland stands Orgino’s Cave.”
“You absolutely sure nobody’ll be there?”
“As sure as may be; and you have me for hostage. Orgino was a war chief of three hundred years agone. They said he was so wicked he must be in pact with the Wanderer, and to this day the commons think he walks the ruins of his cave. But it’s a landmark. Let your camarados ask shrewdly, and they can find how to get there with none suspecting that for their wish.”
The plane sneaked onward. Twilight was short in this thin air. Stars twinkled splendidly forth, around the coalsack of the Nebula. The outer moon rose, gradually from the eastern cloudbanks, almost full but its disk tiny and corroded-bronze dark. An auroral glow flickered. This far south? Well, Nike had a, fairly strong magnetic field— which, with the mean density, showed that it possessed the ferrous core it wasn’t supposed to—but not so much that charged solar particles couldn’t strike along its sharp curvature clear to the equator.
If they were highly energetic particles, anyhow. And they must be. Tom had identified enormous spots as well as flares on that ruddy sun disk. Which oughtn’t to be there! Not even when output was rising. A young star, its outer layers cool and reddish because they were still contracting shouldn’t have such intensity. Should it?
Regardless, Nike’s sun did.
Well, Tom didn’t pretend to know every kind of star. His travels had really not been so extensive, covering a single corner of the old Imperium, which itself had been insignificant compared to the whole galaxy. And his attention had naturally always been focused on more or less Sol-type stars. He didn’t know what a very young or very old or very large or very small sun was like in detail.
Most certainly he didn’t know what the effects of abnormal chemical composition might be. And the distribution of elements in this system was unlike that of any other Tom had ever heard about. Conditions on Nike bore out what spectroanalysis had indicated in space: impoverishment with respect to heavy elements. Since it had formed recently, the sun and its planets must therefore have wandered here from some different region. Its velocity didn’t suggest that. However, Tom hadn’t determined the galactic orbit with any precision. Besides, it might have been radically changed by a close encounter with another orb. Improbable as the deuce, yes, but then the whole crazy situation was very weird.
The headland loomed before him, and battlements against the Milky Way. Tom made a vertical landing in a courtyard. “All right.” His voice sounded jarringly loud.
“Now we got nothin’ much to do but wait.”
“What if they come not?” Aran asked.
“I’ll give ’em a day or two,” Tom said. “After that, we’ll see.” He didn’t care to dwell on the possibility. His unsentimental soul was rather astonished to discover how big a part of it Dagny had become. And Yasmin was a good kid, he wished her well.
He left the crumbling flagstones for a walk around the walls. Pseudo-moss grew damp and slippery on the parapet. Once mail-clad spearmen had tramped their rounds here, and the same starlight sheened on their helmets as tonight, or as in the still more ancient, vanished glory of the Empire, or the League before it, or—And what of the nights yet to come? Tom shied from the thought and loaded his pipe.
Several hours later, the nearer moon rose from the hidden sea; its apparent path was retrograde and slow. Although at half phase, with an angular diameter of a full degree it bridged the bay with mercury.
Rising at the half—local midnight, more or less—would the girls never show? He ought to get some sleep. His eyelids were sandy. Aran had long since gone to rest in the tumbledown keep. He must be secured, of course, before Tom dozed off . No. I couldn’t manage a snooze even if I tried. Where are you, Dagny?
The cold wind lulled, the cold waves lapped, a winged creature fluttered and whistled. Tom sat down where a portcullis had been and stared into the woods beyond.
There came a noise. And another. Branches rustled. Hoofbeats clopped. Tom drew his blaster and slid into the shadow of a tower. Two riders on horseback emerged from the trees. For a moment they were unrecognizable, unreal. Then the moon’s light struck Dagny’s tawny mane. Tom shouted.
Dagny snatched her own gun forth. But when she saw who lumbered toward her, it fell into the rime-frosted grass.
Afterward, in what had been a feasting hall, with a flashlight from the aircraft to pick faces out of night, they conferred. “No, we had no trouble,” Dagny said. “The _ farmers sold us those animals without any fuss.”
“If you gave him a thirty-gram gold piece, on this planet, I reckon so,” Tom said. “You could probly’ve gotten hiss house thrown into the deal. He’s bound to gossip about you, though.”
“That can’t be helped,” Dagny said. “Our idea was to keep traveling east and hide in the woods when anyone happened by. But we’d no strong hope, especially with that wide cultivated valley to get across. Tom, dear, when I saw your sky writing, it was the second best moment of my life.”
“What was the first?”
“You were involved there too,” she said. “Rather often, in fact.”
Yasmin stirred. She sat huddled on the floor, chilled, exhausted, wretched, though nonetheless drawing Aran’s appreciative gaze. “Why do you grin at each other?” she wailed. “We’re hunted!”
“Tell me more,” Tom said.
“What can we do?”
“You can shut up, for the gods’ sake, and keep out o’ my way!” he snapped impatiently. She shrank from him and knuckled her eyes.
“Be gentle,” Dagny said. “She’s only a child.”
“She’ll be a dead child if we don’t get out o’ here,” Tom retorted. “We got time before dawn to slip across the Silvan border in yon airboat. After that, we’ll have to play ’er as she lies. But I been pumpin’ my—shall I say, my friend, about politics and geography and such. I think with luck we got a chance o’ staying free.”
“What chance of getting our ship back, and repaired?” Dagny asked.
“Well_that don’t look so good, but maybe somethin’ll come down the slot for us. Meanwhile let’s move.”
They went back to the courtyard. The inner moon was so bright that no supplement was needed for the job on hand. This was to unload the extra fuel tanks, which were racked aft of the cockpit. The plane would lose cruising range, would indeed be unable to go past the eastern slope of the Sawtooths. But it would gain room for two passengers.
“You stay behind, natural,” Tom told Aran. “You been a nice lad, and here’s where I prove I never aimed at any hurt for you. Have a horse on me, get a boat from the village to Weyer’s place, tell him what happened—and to tell him we want to be his camarados and ‘change with him.”
“I can say it.” Aran shifted awkwardly from foot to foot. “I think no large use comes from my word.”
“The prejudice against spacemen—”
“And the damage you worked. How shall you repay that? Since ’tis been ‘cided there’s no good in space- faring, I expect your ship’11 be stripped for its metal.”
“Try, though,” Tom urged.
“Should you leave now?” Aran wondered. “Weather looks twisty.”
“Aye, we’d better, But thanks for frettin”bout it.”
