Terry Pratchett: Tama Princes of Mercury

But my shot never reached its intended mark.

From my adversary the blue-green beam came again. By chance it must have met my bullet. A puff of fire showed in mid-air as the steel-tipped missile melted into burning gas and ashes.

The figure disappeared. We were all three running forward, but we got not more than thirty feet.

"Jack-look!" We stood amazed, transfixed, cold with horror. From the forest a shape rose up. A huge silver ball, thirty feet or so in diameter. It mounted over the trees with a hiss, like a rocket, with a faint stream of light-fire beneath it.

We stood stricken, watching as it sailed up and dwindled.

The moon came out. The moonlight caught the sphere, bathed it with glistening silver. The tiny dark windows and doorway were visible.

It shrank to a dot amid the stars. A gloaming speck.

Twinkling... . Gone! The rest of the night was a turmoil of confusion to me. With the approaching nearness of Mercury, the silver ball had comeand was already gone. And Tama and Rowena were on it; we could not doubt that.

By telephone we summoned help. Local flyers came. We called Grenfell. Headquarters of the Interstate Patrol were seeking Jimmy.

In the midst of it allour orders from Grenfell giving us so much to do, so quickly1 moved as though in a dream.

Rowena gone! My bride of two months stolen by these marauders from another planetl Goneand Tama gone! Already speeding out there into the starry depths of space! Guy rushed at me as I stood in the cabin living room groping with my confusion of thoughts.

"Hurry, Jack!" he said. "Bring the rifles! Youll need those coats." Toh came in. "A report from Boston. A man outside told me-" There were tramping figures about the cabin, lights and figures and voices searching the nearby forest, planes landing on the lake. Confusion.

Our door and two of our window shutters were found burned loose. Marks in the sn~w showed where a struggle had taken place. Long red feathers from Tama's wings lay ill the snow. In the forest were marks where the space-vehicle had rested.

Toh was saying, "Jimmy Turk is reported missing!" Half an hour later came Grenfell's plane. We gathered our belongings, our equipment, and boarded it. The flight down to South Jersey through the glistening, frosty moonlight was like a dream.

The plant of the Bolton Metal Industries was another turmoil of confusion. The Bolton Flying Cube resounded with hasty, last-minute preparations.

From the Mount Wyndam Observatory, near Summit, New Jersey, came constant reports. The night was ideal for observation. The ascending silver ball was still plainly visible with the giant electro-telescope. The ball was swiftly but cautiously mounting. Too rapid a flight would have burned it from atmospheric friction-heat.

By 4 A.M. it was in the rarer, upper strata, a hundred miles up. Then two hundred. Swiftly, steadily accelerating its velocity. Clinging to the shortest, straight-upward path.

And then swinging eastward toward the Sun. Heading for Mercury.

Guy, Toh and I sat together near the doorway of the Cube. It loomed above us, a great fifty-foot sugar lump, with an observatory dome on top like a little conical hat, and the bulging balcony-deck girding its middle. There was nothing we three could do to speed our departure.

Dr. Grenfell came up to us. "Got your personal things all insider "Yes." Grenfell, commander of the expedition, was a middle-aged, thickset man with wide, deep chest and thick, hunched shoulders. He gazed down at us.

"Better get aboard. Well be starting in a few minutes." It had seemed an interminable delayevery lost moment an eternity vv?th that Mercurian vehicle fading into the unknown.

Grenfell smiled gently, l can imagine the shock of it to you three." The scientist hastened away and boarded the Cube, mounting to the second of its three interior tiers, to stand at one of the bulls-eye windows of its narrow, corridor-like enclosed deck.

And Guy burst out, "If they'd only let us help them-l Do something. God, this delay" The dawn was just coming when we left the Earth, pursuing the silver ball into space.

II AN UNKNOWN VOICE FBOM WHAT Jimmy afterward told me, I can construct a picture of what happened to him from the time he left us that noon of March 15. From our secluded camp he flew his dragon directly back to Boston. His little monoplane the fleetest, most agile type of flyer of its daymounted high into the clouds. Jimmy was taking no chances that a newscaster's plane might be on the lockout for him, guess that he bad been visiting us, and thus reveal our vicinity.

The dragon had its own insignia in chameleon letters on its underwing surface, but Jimmy could light the wings to show other official insignia.

When he left our cottage his wings bore a naval device.

His plane, constructed for instant camouflage, dangled a false landing gear, and wore wide, spreading false upper wings. No observer at a distance could have guessed it was Jimmy's dragon.

He mounted to high altitudes, changed the angles of incidence of his wing surfaces, switched the pressure air into bis carburator for rarified flying, and kept mounting. At sixty thousand feet he swung southeast toward Boston.

"Coming," he told the chief over the ether-phone. "Be there in an hour." Over Boston he nosed down. The false plane-shape ribs were folded. The camouflaged landing gear had been drawn "~ up. His wing surfaces carried his own familiar device.

He landed on the Commonwealth Building; descended to his office, dispatched his routine work.

At about two o'clock his televisor phone puzzed.

"James Turk speaking. Interstate Patrol, New England, Division Four. Who wants me?" The call-sorter's voice answered him. "Someone wants you through the Bangor Broadcasting Studio. Do you accept the call, please?"

"Plug 'em in," said Jimmy.

"I would speak to Jimmy Turk," came a soft, low-spoken man's voice.

"I'm Turk. Who are you? Where's your image?" The sorter cut in. "I can't get his image, Mr. Turk."

"Let him come through without it." The soft voice sounded: "Iyou do not know me. I am a friend of Rowena."

"Rowena?" Was this some hoax? Some newscaster trying to work a game on him? "Rowena"the voice barely whispered"is in dangergreat danger. And Tamayou know Tama"

"Who in the devil are you?" Jimmy bent at his sending grid with tense vehemence.

"A friend." The voice now spoke with furtive swiftness.

"Rowena and Tamathey are together? Both in the same place?"

"None of your damned business!"

"They are in danger. I do not ask you to go to them. Come to me." Jimmy still thought it was a hoax; but in spite of himself his heart was thumping.

"I'm not going to them. You want me to come to you? Why? Where-"

"I will tell you of the danger if you will meet me. It must be secret."

"Where will I meet you?"

"Moosehead Lake, in Maine." The voice was intensely earnest. "There is a landing fieldM 56and another landing fieldM 57. From the air a line connecting them would cross a north arm of that lake. I will be where it crosses the lakeshore." -When?"

"In an hour."

"I'll come," Jimmy agreed. "And look here, if this is some damned newscaster's joke, I'll slam you into pulp."

"Danger is no joke. You will come alone? If you do not, you will never find me."

"Don't worryI'll come alone." They broke connection. Jimmy left orders to trace the call, and in five minutes had his dragon in the air. Jimmy Turk was afraid of nothing. His worst fault was that he was too hasty, heedless. There was a chance that one of the many criminals with whom he constantly dealt was using this method of luring him to a lonely spot. But a landing on Moosehead Lake in broad daylight was nothing in Jimmy's life; and his dragon was nimble as a flea and a veritable arsenal of weapons.