shaped like a broad arrowhead. A shining filament extended downward from the station toward Earth, finally to vanish from sight within the atmosphere.
Their final approach was compressed to an anxious few S-seconds of blurred motion, twisting a way in through a moving labyrinth of other spacecraft and connecting cables and tunnels. All at once they were docked, and the ship motionless. They were trying to release themselves from the cocoons when a man materialized in the cabin and stood looking down at them.
He was short, pudgy, gray-haired, and precisely dressed, with elaborate jewelled rings on most of his fingers. He wore a flower in his lapel — the first blossom of any kind that they had seen since they left Pentecost. The stern look on his face was contradicted by a pattern of laughter lines around his button-bright eyes and small mouth.
“Well,” he said briskly, after a thorough inspection of Peron and Elissa. “You look normal enough. I’ve been waiting for your arrival with some interest. Neither of you appears to be quite the degenerate monster that Sector reports suggest, and Olivia Ferranti speaks well of you. So let us proceed on the basis of that assumption. Command. Remove the cocoons.”
The restraining nets vanished, and the little man calmly extended a hand to help Elissa to her feet.
“My name is Jan de Vries,” he said. “It is my melancholy duty to approve — or veto — all trips to and from Earth by certain persons living in S-space. Do you still wish to visit Earth, as you had requested?”
“Of course we do,” said Elissa. “Will you be going down there with us?” De Vries looked pained. “Hardly. My dear young lady, my duties are various and sometimes odd, but they have not to date included the function of tour guide. I can, however, dispose of certain formalities for you that would normally be handled otherwise. When were you last in normal space?”
“Not since we were on the way to Sector Headquarters,” said Peron. He was becoming increasingly uneasy. He had been preparing himself for a great clash with the secret rulers of the Immortals, and instead here he was chatting with some apparent bureaucrat.
“Very good,” said de Vries. “Then you can be prepared at once for your visit to Earth. By the way, you will find that the robot services ignore your commands until we have your voice patterns keyed into the station’s computer. That is part of a larger data transfer. It will be complete upon your return here, and we will talk again then. But for the moment you will need my assistance. Command: prepare them for the standard Earth visit.”
“But we don’t — “ Peron stopped. De Vries had disappeared. Then the walls spun about Peron and he caught a glimpse of a long corridor. As the scene steadied again he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. Suddenly it was as though he were back on Whirlygig, experiencing that familiar and disquieting fall into blackness. His last thought was an angry one. It wouldn’t happen again, he had sworn — but it was happening now! Things were out of control. And he had no idea what came next.
Peron and Elissa emerged from the suspense tanks together, into a room filled with a noisy, excited crowd. They knew at once that they were again in normal space — S-space couldn’t offer the sharpness of vision or the bright colors. There was an exhilarating taste to the air, and a feeling of well-being running through their veins. They looked around them curiously.
A loud, metallic voice was booming out directions. “Single file into the cars, please. Take your seats, and don’t overload them — there will be another one along every ten minutes.”
The crowd took little notice, pushing and surging forward down a long broad hall toward a loading area.
“Peron!” Elissa reached out and grabbed hold of his arm. “Keep a grip. We don’t want to be separated now.”
It was like being in a river and swept along by the current. With no effort on their part, they found themselves carried forward into a semicircular chamber and seated on soft benches covered with a warm velvety material. On either side people were grinning at them and staring out of the half-circle of the ports. “Look down!” said a woman next to Elissa. Her accent had peculiar vowel sounds to it, but it was easy to understand. “It’ll give you the shivers. No wonder it’s called Skydown.”
Elissa followed the other’s gesture, and found that the floor beneath their feet was transparent. She was looking directly down toward Earth, following the line of a giant silvery cylinder. As she watched, the doors of the chamber closed and they began a smooth, accelerated descent, their car riding an invisible path along the side of the cylinder.
“Peron.” Elissa leaned close to him so that he could hear her above the clamor. “What’s going on here? Look at them. They’re like the mob at the end of Planetfest. And where are we going?”
Peron shook his head. “It’s our own fault. I realized it as soon as we came out of the tanks there — we should have known we’re no different from anyone else. Don’t you see? Everybody from the planetary colonies and arcologies has been told about Earth since they were small children. They all want to visit. No wonder de Vries was amazed when you asked if he was coming with us — I bet people who live in the Sol system get tired of explaining things to the simpleminded visitors. Better face it, love, we’re just part of the tourist crowd.” Elissa looked around her at the restless, exuberant travellers. “You’re right — but they’re all having fun. You know what? I feel wonderful. I’m going to postpone solving the mysteries of the universe until we get back into orbit.” She grabbed Peron’s arm and pulled him closer. “Come on, misery. Let’s get into the spirit of it. Remember, a week down on Earth will only be five minutes in S-space — they won’t even notice that we’ve gone.”
They bent forward to look down through the floor. Although the cylinder was rushing past them as one continuous blur of motion, Earth was not perceptibly closer. It hung beneath them, a glittering white ball blocking out over fifteen degrees of the sky.
“I wonder how long the journey will be,” Elissa said. She reached out to the miniature information outlet built into the arm of her seat, and switched it on. “Speed, please, and arrival time.”
“Present speed, forty-four hundred kilometers an hour,” said a cheerful voice. The vocal reply system had been chosen with as pleasant and soothing a tone as possible. “Arrival will be three hours and forty-one minutes from now. We are still in the acceleration phase. We have thirty-three thousand four hundred kilometers to go to touchdown.”
“Where will we land?”
“Half a degree south of the equator, on one of the major continents.” Peron was still staring down at the globe beneath them. “This doesn’t look the way I expected — it’s too bright. Why so much cloud cover?”
There was a silence for a split second, as the on-board computer called back up to the synchronous station above them for assistance with the answer. “There is less cloud cover than usual today. You are probably mistaking snow cover for cloud cover.”
“But that would mean there’s snow over two-thirds of the surface!” “Correct.” Again the machine hesitated. “That is not unusual.”
“Earth was not snow-covered in the old days — is this a consequence of the old war?”
“Not at all. It is a result of reduced solar activity.” The information system hesitated for a moment, then went on: “The amount of received radiation from the Sun has declined by a small fraction of a percent over the past fifteen thousand years. The increased glaciation is apparent even from this distance. It is predicted that this Ice Age will persist for at least ten thousand more years, to be followed by an unusually warm period. Within fifteen thousand years there will be partial melting of the polar ice caps, and submergence of most coastal lands.”
Elissa reached out and switched off the set. She looked at Peron. “You don’t mind, do you? I had the feeling it was just getting into its stride. I hate being burbled at — whoever programmed that sequence needs brevity lessons from Kallen.”
Peron nodded his agreement. The view below was enough for their full attention. From the poles almost to the tropics, blue-white shining glaciers coated the land areas. The old outline of the larger land masses was unchanged. Soon Peron could see where the Skyhook was tethered. It met the surface on the west coast of the continent that had been known as Africa. They were descending rapidly toward that touchdown point, a couple of hundred kilometers from the place where the region’s mightiest river flowed to the Atlantic Ocean.
“We ought to decide what we really want to see,” said Elissa. “If we have a choice, I don’t care to travel around in the middle of a mob of sightseers.” “So let’s find out what the options are. Can you stand to have the information service on again for a couple of minutes?”
