hazards were involved in a second try, starting with the difficulty of
convincing his fellows that breakdowns had delayed him twice in a row.
And what harm could an utterly lifeless ball of rock do him?
Strangely, the enigmatic things he had seen from orbit increased his
determination to go down. Or perhaps that wasn’t so strange. He was
starved for action. Besides, at his age he dared not admit to any girl
that he could be scared.
His whetted senses perceived that she shivered. It was for the first
time in their voyage. But then, she was a creature of cities and
machinery, not of the Big Deep.
And it was a mystery toward which they descended: where a complex of
robots ought to have been at work, or at least passively waiting out the
centuries, an inexplicable crisscross of lines drawn over a hundred
square kilometers in front of the old buildings, and a traffic of
objects like nothing ever seen before except in bad dreams. Daunting,
yes. On a legitimate errand, Flandry would have gone back for
reinforcements. But that was impractical under present circumstances.
Briefly, he felt a touch of pity for Djana. He knew she was as gentle,
loving, and compassionate as a cryogenic drill. But she was beautiful
(small, fine-boned, exquisite features, great blue eyes, honey-gold
hair), which he considered a moral virtue. Apart from insisting that he
prepare meals–and he was undoubtedly far the superior cook–she had
accepted the cramped austerity of the boat with wry good humor. During
their three weeks of travel she had given him freely of her talents,
which commanded top price at home. While her formal education in other
fields was scanty, between bouts she had proved an entertaining
talkmate. Half enemy she might be, but Flandry had allowed himself the
imprudent luxury of falling slightly in love with her, and felt he was a
little in her debt. No other scouting sweep had been as pleasant!
Now she faced the spacefarer’s truth, that the one thing we know for
certain about this universe is that it is implacable. He wanted to reach
across and console her.
But the vessel was entering atmosphere. A howl began to penetrate the
hull, which bucked.
“Come on, Jake,” Flandry said. “Be a good girl.”
“Why do you always call the boat Jake?” the companion asked, obviously
trying to get her mind off the crags lancing toward her.
“Giacobini-Zinner is ridiculous,” he answered, “and the code letters
can’t be fitted into anything bawdy.” I refrain from inquiring what you
were called as a child, he thought. I prefer not to believe in, say, an
Errriintrude Bugglethwaite who invested in a, ah, house name and a
total-body biosculp job … “Quiet, please. This is tricky work. Thin
air means high-velocity winds.”
The engine growled. Interior counter-acceleration force did not
altogether compensate for lurching; the deck seemed to stagger.
Flandry’s hands flew, his feet shoved pedals, occasionally he spoke an
order to the idiot-grade central computer that the boat did possess. But
he’d done this sort of thing before, often under more difficult
conditions. He’d make planetfall without real trouble–
The flyers came.
He had scarcely a minute’s warning of them. Djana screamed as they
whipped from a veil of driving gray cloud. They were metal, bright in
the light of Mimir and of Regin’s horizon-scraping dayside crescent.
Wide, ribbed wings upbore sticklike torsos, grotesque empennage, beaks
and claws. They were much smaller than the spacecraft, but they numbered
a score or worse.
They attacked. They could do no real harm directly. Their hammering and
scraping resounded wild in the hull. But however frail by the standards
of a real ship, a Comet was built to resist heavier bufferings.
They did, though, rock it. Wheeling and soaring, they darkened vision.
More terribly, they interfered with radar, sonic beams, every probing of
every instrument. Suddenly, except for glimpses when they flashed aside,
Flandry was piloting blind. The wind sent his craft reeling.
He stabbed forth flame out of the single spitgun in the nose. A flyer
exploded in smoke and fragments. Another, wing sheared across, spun
downward to destruction. The rest were too many, too quickly reacting.