Charles Sheffield - The Spheres of Heaven

A mess inside, too. Chrissie imagined that she could see the room starting to sag and melt around her. She heard sounds — not the storm — from beyond the wall to the inner chamber. She closed her helmet and followed Tarbush. His head and torso had vanished, and his wriggling legs and kicking feet sent back prodigious clouds of disintegrated wall. The hole, barely wide enough for him, should have been easier for her. It wasn’t. Already it was starting to seal. She snaked through, fast as she could, and felt the closing wall begin to squeeze tighter. She gave a desperate kick and plunged headfirst forward. Her helmet cracked against a hard, slick surface.

“No time for acrobatics.” Tarbush was lifting her easily, setting her on her feet, shouting in her ear. “Can you stand up?”

Chrissie was about to shout back “Of course I can!” when the wind caught her. Inside the building she had never dreamed that it would be so strong. She felt herself sliding away sideways, down a wet and slippery incline. Only Tarbush’s invisible grip on her arm saved her from being blown away.

While she stood braced against him, the darkness was suddenly dispelled by strong light. She turned, and saw a green globe of luminescence drifting across the sky. Tarbush shouted, “They’ve got us,” and pulled her close. The globe lengthened to become a tall cylinder, a vortex column that stretched toward earth and sky. When it touched the ground it vanished. Chrissie felt her skin prickle.

“Not the aliens,” she screamed at Tarbush. “Some local sort of electrical activity caused by the storm. But the wind!” She could feel her feet slipping. “I can’t hold — it’s too strong.”

“Let yourself go. We can’t travel upwind, but if we can reach the forest—”

He released his hold. Chrissie went slithering and skating away into the darkness. She could see nothing. She felt nothing, too, until with a teeth-loosing jolt she hit the boundary fence. A moment later, Tarbush crashed into the mesh wall a few feet to her left.

“Damnation!” His howl of rage carried over the wind. “We have to try to drag ourselves around to the gate — but which way? I have no idea.”

“It may be guarded anyway.” Chrissie lay spreadeagled on the fence. “Can you shine your helmet light over here? I ought to have turned mine on before I started.”

“Wait a second.” After a moment’s silence, he shouted back. “The damn thing’s not working. I hit the fence face first. But if—”

Before he could finish, another ball of light began to form behind them. Tarbush turned, and saw every building of the Malacostracan encampment glowing with its own halo of electrical discharge. The area around the buildings was — thank God — deserted. While the globe was extending toward earth and sky, he turned back to Chrissie and realized what she was doing. Pinned in place by the wind, she had taken a short length of the monofilament thread and was stretching out to slice through the fence wires that she could reach. As she cut further, the section she lay against began to sag under her weight. In half a minute the left-hand side gaped open.

“Go on.” She inclined her head. “Through.”

“What about you?”

“Go!”

Tarbush obeyed her cry. As he passed through the hole in the fence he grabbed at the cut edge. It opened farther under his weight.

“You now!” he shouted, but she was already through and sailing past him. The bright circlet of the monofilament ring glittered with green light and spun away from her hand. He made an instinctive grab and missed. Good thing, too. The invisible thread could easily have severed his forearm. Forget it. Deb surely had more, and the little ring would be hard to find even in calm conditions.

As the wind caught him from behind and the green light vanished he ducked his head forward and followed Chrissie. He had little choice. Although it was no longer raining, trying to walk on the slick surface was like skating on ice. He managed to keep his feet, but he went wherever the wind pushed him.

Toward the forest, or away across many bare kilometers of rock? He could not tell where he was going, until something grabbed him at knee-level and tipped him over. He sprawled headlong forward into a tangle of tight-knit bushes. His visor was still open, and thorny twigs scratched his nose and mouth.

“Chrissie?” He shouted as loudly as he could.

“Right here.”

He could see nothing. He closed his helmet and began to crawl blindly in the direction of her voice. The suit protected his body, but the vegetation resisted his progress like something alive. While he was still struggling forward a faint light shone ahead. The lamp in Chrissie’s helmet? She had managed to get it working; but it was moving away from him.

“Stay there! I’m coming.”

“I can’t. I have to keep going. Follow me.”

As he came closer he understood why. Chrissie had been blown into a thin stand of stalky reeds, and they were not close-grown enough to provide shelter from the wind. She was tunneling on, deeper into a denser thicket. He flattened as low to the ground as he could and butted his way along until he was at her heels. He grabbed her legs and inched forward until his head was next to hers.

“What now?” For the first time since they left the building he didn’t have to shout.

“We have to find our way back to the camp. I’m sure Deb and Danny are wondering what happened to us.”

“We can’t go anywhere while this storm lasts. But neither can they. We’re all stuck until the wind dies down.”

“What about the Malacostracans?”

Tarbush sat up for a moment, felt the thresh of the wind across the top of the plants, and lay back down. “If they can move around and find us on such a bad night, they’re entitled to do what they like with us.”

Chrissie opened her visor. “At least it’s not raining. If we can’t go anywhere I’m going to try to sleep. I didn’t get any sleep earlier — not like some people.”

She was looking for a response, maybe an argument. But he said only, “You do that. You need your rest. I won’t talk any more, but I’ll stay awake and keep watch.”

Tarbush settled in at her side, one arm around Chrissie and his face close to hers. Within ten minutes she knew from his steady breathing that he was asleep. It was tempting to nudge him, but she didn’t.

She lay, listening to the wind. Was it her imagination, or had it eased, just a little? The canopy of plants above her head became faintly visible. Another ball of lightning must be drifting through the atmosphere of Limbo. This one was far off, and Chrissie watched and waited until the moment of its sudden extinction.

She closed her eyes. If Tarbush could sleep, why couldn’t she? She deliberately turned her mind back two months, to a time when the embargo against stellar travel seemed permanent, with no chance of ever meeting again the members of the old team; to the time when she and Tarbush had toured with her bag of magic tricks and his animal-talking act, to amaze the colonists of the wide-scattered mini-worlds of the Oort Cloud; to the time — God, why didn’t a person know when she was well off? — the time when a “bad night” meant only a poor audience for the second performance of your magic act, and not being pursued by malevolent aliens across the scarred surface of a lost world in an alternate universe.

Chrissie felt herself being shaken, and tried to curl into a ball.

“Sorry, love, but we can’t have that.” It was Tarbush, shaking her again. “The early bird catches the worm, and we don’t want the early Malacostracan catching us.”

Chrissie yawned, stretched, and sat up. Light, pale and yellow, streamed in horizontally through the leafy roof above her head. The broad fronds were moving, but gently. She heard no sound of wind.