Bob Shaw - The Fugitive Worlds

Divivvidiv had scarcely left his restraint net since the ship had been turned over at the midpoint of the flight, his time being spent in hushed meditation and the issuing of numerous demands for course and speed adjustments. Toller had formed the opinion that the alien, even with his awesome talents, had found it much more taxing to guide the ship while it was travelling “backwards” and he was referring to marker stars which were opposed to the direction of flight.

Now, however, with the ship in orbit at the fringes of Dussarra’s atmosphere Divivvidiv was in a much more relaxed and accessible mood. It was obvious that he feared the descent through the planet’s atmosphere, but—for some reason peculiar to his kind—the fact that it involved no hand-to-hand killing enabled him to face the ordeal with much the same fortitude as a reasonably courageous human.

He had already donned his silver skysuit in preparation for quitting the ship—an event due in less than one hour—and was concerning himself with his food supplies. When told that Kolcorronian rations consisted largely of strips of desiccated beef and fish, augmented by disks of compressed grain and dried fruit, he had insisted on bringing provisions of his own. The alien food seemed to consist mainly of varicolored cubes of tough jelly which had been wrapped in gold foil. Divivvidiv had taken a number of them from a pocket and was carefully scrutinizing the gleaming blocks, possibly in search of a tidbit.

Toller was again struck by his composure and, doing his utmost to foresee adverse factors, wondered if Divivvidiv was in possession of whole realms of knowledge of a kind which had not even been hinted at in all their telepathic exchanges. As an exercise in practical strategics, Toller tried to project his mind thousands of years into the future of the Kolcorronian civilization, with emphasis on the technology of warfare, and on the instant an alarming vision blossomed behind his eyes.

“Tell me something, greyface,” he said. “That thing you call the Xa… It is a mere machine, isn’t it?”

Basically — yes.

“And you have endowed it with the ability to see, with utmost clarity, objects which are thousands of miles away?”

Yes.

“It therefore seems eminently logical to me that your home world, the cradle of your civilization, would be plentifully provided with similar machines.” Toller paused to let his words have effect and the alien was able to follow his line of thought unaided by speech.

You are quite wrong! Divivvidiv injected amusement into his reply. There are no devices detecting this ship and giving warning of its presence. We do not keep a watch on our skies. Why should we?

“To warn you of invading armies… enemy forces.”

But where would such invaders come from? And why should another culture act in a hostile manner towards Dussarra?

“Conquest,” Toller said, beginning to wish he had never started the exchange. “The desire to conquer and rule…”

That is tribal thinking, Toller Maraquine — it has no place among civilized communities. Divivvidiv returned his attention to the sorting of his food cubes.

“Complacency is the enemy of…” Toller, to his annoyance, found himself unable to complete what he had hoped would be an aphorism. Becoming restless, he operated the handle of the air machine, mixing a fresh charge of firesalt with the water in its wire mesh reservoir. Divivvidiv had shown an interest in the device at the start of the flight, and had explained that air was made up of a mixture of gases, one of which—oxygen—supported life, fed fires and led to the rusting of iron. When firesalt came into contact with water it gave off copious quantities of oxygen, thus enabling the ship’s crew to survive long journeys through interplanetary vacuum. Toller had made a written note of the new scientific knowledge for the benefit of interested parties back in Prad, even though he did not care to speculate on their chances of receiving it.

It would have been a simple matter to bring the ship down to a level where the surrounding air was breathable, shut down the main engine and bail out. That way they would have been quitting a vessel which appeared to be at rest, and the whole business of getting into the fallbags and linking them together would have been comparatively easy. However, Divivvidiv had objected that the inert ship would then follow roughly the same path down through the atmosphere as the three parachutists, arriving at the surface like a bomb which could possibly claim Dussarran lives.

Toller had not been unduly alarmed at that prospect—he regarded the entire alien population as sworn enemies—but he had accepted the argument that his bargaining position could be compromised by the unnecessary loss of life. There was also the consideration that he wanted to land stealthily, and not to the accompaniment of a huge explosion.

For those reasons the ship had been turned on its side after being brought into the atmosphere and had been aimed in a direction which, according to Divivvidiv, would allow it to fall harmlessly into the sea. The main engine was still firing, with the controls lashed at the minimum thrust setting, and now Toller and Steenameert were faced with the problem of keeping hold of their prisoner while abandoning a ship which was building up a respectable speed. Divivvidiv, being much lighter than the other two, would fall through the air at a lesser rate. He had only to get free once and the laws of physics would see to it that his escape was made good as the vertical separation between him and the humans increased.

Toller had been very much aware of the problem and had insisted on all three being connected by a single strong line before emerging from the ship. There was only one exit, which was located in the middle section, and it had been kept as small as possible to preserve the structural integrity of the hull. In consequence, the three had been forced to cling to one another in a kind of distasteful intimacy while Toller pulled back the greased bolts. The door was a truncated cone, so that interior pressure would force it tighter into the seals of the frame, and it took all the power of his free arm to wrench the crafted wooden disk backwards into the ship.

A howling blast of icy air battered at Toller’s skysuit. Tightening his grip on Divivvidiv’s slight figure and Steenameert’s encircling arm, he launched all of them out into cold white sunlight. They tumbled in the ship’s slipstream. An instant later their ears were assailed by a stuttering roar and the universe turned a blinding white as they were engulfed in the choking gases of the condensation trail.

The roiling dazzlement went on for a matter of seconds, and then they were adrift in the sterile sunlit air, hundreds of miles above the surface of Dussarra. All about them was a panoply of stars, galaxies and frozen comets in which the ship’s exhaust formed a glowing cloud as, holding to a freakishly steady course, the vessel dwindled from their perceptions. The only way now in which Toller could return to his home world was by using the alien magic of a matter transmitter, but he had little time at that stage to ruminate over the situation.

Being adrift in a planet’s upper atmosphere, with nothing but thousands of miles of empty air yawning below, was a harrowing experience even for a veteran Kolcorronian skyman, and Toller knew it had to be correspondingly worse for Divivvidiv. The alien was not quaking, but the movements of his arms and legs seemed aimless, and there were no wisps of mental communication from him.

“Let’s get him into his fallbag before we all freeze to death,” Toller said. Steenameert nodded and they drew themselves close to Divivvidiv on the common line. The alien’s bulky parachute hampered them in the task of drawing the fleece-lined sack up over his head and adjusting the various closures and ventilation ring.