we’ll make better progress for a while on the belly tread.”
“Good enough,” Lavon said with relief. “Hello below
haul up the wheels.”
“For a long while,” Shar said, “I couldn’t understand the
reference of thi history plate to ‘retractable landing gear,’ but
it finally occurred to me that the tension along a space-mud
interface would hold any large object pretty tightly. That’s
why I insisted on our building the ship so that we could lift
the wheels.”
“Evidently the ancients knew their business after all, Shar.”
Quite a few minutes laterfor shifting power to the belly
treads involved another setting of the gear boxthe ship
was crawling along the shore toward the tumbled roc5. Anx-
iously, Lavon scanned the jagged, threatening wall for a
break. There was a sort of rivulet off toward the teft which
might offer a route, though a dubious one, to the next world.
After some thought, Lavon ordered his ship turned toward it.
“Do you suppose that thing in the sky is a ‘star’?” he asked.
“But there were supposed to be lots of them. Only one is up
.thereand one’s plenty for my taste.”
“I don’t know,” Shar admitted. “But I’m beginning to get
a picture of the way the universe is made, I think. Evidefttly
our world is a sort of cup in the Bottom of this huge one.
This one has a sky of its own; perhaps it, too, is only a cup
in the Bottom of a still huger world, and so on and on with-
out end. It’s a hard concept to grasp, I’ll admit. Maybe it
would be more sensible to assume that all the worlds are cups
in this one common surface, and that the great light shines