Harry looked from Poole, to Miriam, and back to Poole; and he winked politely out of existence.
Michael looked beyond the village of Xeelee-material huts, toward the center of the earth-craft. Three burly Friends were running toward them. No, four. And they were carrying something. Weapons?
He turned back to Berg. 'You’ll never make it to the center of the craft,' he said. 'Come with us.'
Harry’s head popped out of space, close to Miriam’s ear. 'Sorry, folks,' he said, 'but you haven’t a lot of time for this.'
Miriam grinned briefly, ran her hand through her stubble of hair, and took a deep breath. 'But I’m not going to the center of the craft. Good-bye, Michael.' And she swiveled — away from Michael, away from the approaching Friends — and started to run, toward the edge of the world.
Michael Poole stood watching her for one second, mouth open.
Shira wriggled harder in his arms, kicking like a stranded fish.
There was no more time. Michael turned on his heel and ran for his boat, the ungainly burden of Shira flopping in his arms, the disembodied head of his father floating at his side.
The rim of the craft, ahead of her, was a fringe of grass, incongruous against the bruised-purple countenance of Jupiter.
Her mind raced.
From the circular village of the Friends of Wigner, Berg had about a hundred yards to run to the lip of the craft. Well, she could cover that distance in maybe ten seconds, on the flat. But the weakening of gravity as she approached the edge ought to let her speed up — as long as she didn’t fall flat on her face — but on the other hand she’d be climbing out of the earth-craft’s gravity well, so she’d feel as if she were running uphill…
Yes. Already the ground seemed to be tipping up beneath her.
She tried to work with the weakening gravity, gain whatever advantage she could: she consciously slowed her pace, letting her stride broaden and carry her farther.
She risked a glance backward. The posse of pursuing Friends had split, she saw; two of them had concentrated on Michael and the girl, and the other two were coming after her. They were fit and covered the grass fast.
They carried laser-guns, of the type that had turned her boat to slag. She imagined coherent photons surging from the weapons and arcing into her back, faster than thought.
She seemed to be climbing a one-in-three slope now. She didn’t dare look back again, for fear of seeing the earth-craft apparently tip behind her, of tumbling helplessly backward, her balance lost. And, damn it, her chest hurt. Her lungs were dragging at thinning air; coming this far out of the earth-craft’s tiny gravity well was like climbing the mountains of Mars.
She wondered why the Friends didn’t just open up. No need to aim; they could just hose her down, slicing her spine the way they’d cut open her boat. But they were hesitating. Thinking twice.
They wanted to stop her, not murder her, she realized; they were reluctant to use those weapons.
She didn’t have much time for the Friends, but at least they weren’t killers. Maybe it would be better if they were.
Perspective was starting to work on the approaching edge of the world, now. She could see individual blades of grass, rushing toward her.
Her lungs hurt like hell. She felt her tongue protrude from her mouth. Her whole chest ached, including the muscles of her back and her upper arms. And her legs, stiffening as they climbed the steepening hill, were shivering, as if they knew what they were approaching.
She ignored it all; her arms flailing at the thinned air, she drove her feet down at the grass, pushing the earth-craft below her.
The plane reached a crescendo of steepness; she was flying up a bowl-shaped Alp -
And then there was no more grass beneath her boots.
She tipped forward, stumbling over the edge of the world; her momentum carried her away from the earth-craft and into the pink light of Jovian space, arms and legs spread wide like some unlikely starfish. As she spilled slowly forward she saw her posse sprawl against the grass, weapons abandoned, the thin air drawing their mouths open in cartoon masks of amazement.
She was lost in space, her lungs empty. She hung, seemingly motionless, between the earth-craft and the bulk of Jupiter. Darkness crowded the edge of her vision.
Michael Poole, running around the rim of the earth-craft village toward his boat, arms aching with the weight of the semiconscious Shira, was exhausted already.
He saw Berg go flying over the edge of the world. He found time to wonder if she knew what she was doing.
He glanced over his shoulder; the twist of his muscles only added to the breathless ache across his chest. Two of the Friends were still chasing him. Even as he ran he stared with a strange fascination at the encroaching detail of the Friends: the mud spattered over their light pink coveralls, the set grimness of their hairless faces, the glinting plastic of their laser-rifles…
Harry hovered beside him, his legs whirling propeller style in a cartoon running motion. 'I hate to be the bringer of bad news,' he panted, 'but they’re gaining on us.'
Poole gasped between footfalls, 'Tell me something… I don’t know.'
Harry glanced easily over his shoulder. 'Actually I don’t know why they don’t just lase you down where you stand.'
'Save the… pep talk…' Michael gasped, his shoulders and arms encased in pain, 'and… do something!'
'Like what?'
'Use your… initiative, damn you,' Michael growled.
Harry frowned, rubbed his chin, and disappeared.
Suddenly there were wails from Poole’s pursuers, arcs of laser light above his head, the sizzle of ozone.
Legs still working, Michael risked another look back.
A ten-foot edition of Harry, a shimmering collage of semitransparent, fist-sized pixels, had materialized in front of the two Friends. Startled, they’d stumbled to a halt before the apparition and had let rip with the lasers. The pale pink beams lanced harmlessly through the grainy image, dipping slightly as they refracted out of the atmosphere.
But within seconds the Friends had dismissed the Virtual, Michael saw. Shouting to each other they shouldered their weapons and set off once more; Harry materialized before them again and again, the basic template of his Virtual body distorted into a variety of gross forms, but the Friends, their strides barely faltering, ran through the ineffectual clouds of pixels.
Poole tucked his head down and ran.
'Michael!'
Poole jerked his head up. The boat from the
Harry’s amplified voice echoed from the distant Xeelee-material buildings. 'Michael, you’re going to get approximately one chance at this… I hope your timing is better than your stamina.'
Michael pounded across the grass, the girl an ungainly bundle in his arms. His breath scraped through his throat. The boat swept toward him at fifty miles per hour, the open hatchway gaping like a mouth.
A flicker of pink-purple light above his head, a whiff of ozone, and there was a small hole in the gray-white carapace of the boat. Smoke wisped briefly; the boat seemed to falter, but kept coming.
It looked as if the Friends were shedding their scruples about using their weapons. Or maybe they were just trying to disable the boat…
The boat filled his world.
Poole jumped.
The door frame caught his right shin, his left foot; pain blazed and he felt the warm welling of blood. He fell hard on the metal floor of the airlock, landing heavily on top of Shira. The girl gasped under his weight, her eyes widening. They slid in a tangle of limbs across the floor, Poole’s damaged legs leaving a trail of blood; they were jammed against the back wall of the airlock, and for the second time the air was knocked out of Poole’s laboring lungs.
A laser bolt flickered at about waist height, a few inches above Poole’s head.
The boat surged away from the ground, the hatch sliding closed slowly; Poole, struggling to rise, was slammed to the floor again, this time away from the girl. His chest strained. He hadn’t been able to draw a single decent breath since his last desperate few strides across the grass of the earth-craft, and now he felt as if he were in vacuum.
He forced his head up and looked blearily to the closing port. He saw a splinter of salmon-pink Jupiter, a wedge of stars; already they were out of the toy atmosphere of the earth-world, above its scrap of blue sky, and their air was rushing into Jovian space.
Blackness welled up within him. The pain in his legs stabbed through his dimming senses.
The girl moaned, sounding very far away, and he thought he heard Harry’s voice. His lungs were empty. He was very cold. He closed his eyes.
Berg turned a half somersault before the thin air slowed her tumble. Then she was falling, upside down relative to the earth-craft, gravity tugging at her so feebly it seemed as if she were hanging in the sky.
Sucking at the cold air, her arms and legs spread wide, she stared back at the earth-craft. The biggest danger with all of this — the biggest in a whole zoo of dangers, she conceded — was that she might have run herself up to escape velocity. Would she continue to fly out into the Jovian light, her lungs straining to find the last few molecules of oxygen? She tried to taste the air, to sense if it were getting any thinner, but it was impossible to tell.
The earth-craft was laid out like a toy before her. She was suspended upside down below the craft, so that she was looking down at the flat, quarter-mile-wide dome of dove-gray Xeelee material that formed its base. The dome was breached by circular vents, each about a yard wide, which must be the mouths of the singularity cannon Poole had described. The dome reminded her incongruously of some old sports stadium, ripped from the Earth and hurled into orbit around Jupiter; but from the base of this stadium dangled a cluster of Xeelee-material buildings and the battered, ancient stones of a henge. Close to the edge of the inverted landscape she could make out her two pursuers; staring after her, they clung to their ceiling of grass like two pink-clad flies, their weapons pinned to the sward by the inverted gravity.
Beyond the earth-craft the Spline warship climbed across the sky, Jupiter casting long, mottled highlights onto its elephant hide. The Spline was like a bad dream surfacing into consciousness, Miriam thought.
Now there was the faintest whisper of a breeze past her ears as the earth-craft’s weak, complex gravity field stroked her back into the artificial sky. She felt a surge of relief. Well, at least she wasn’t to die of asphyxiation, suspended carelessly over Jupiter.
