All along Scame had supposed that Dom was too clever to have been conned by some devious, alien means. Now he was not sure that Dom himself was not a victim of his own obsessions. They seemed to be walking into something arranged in a flimsy, transparent manner, without guarantees.
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Dom turned briefly to them. “We walk into the sunset. We will be met.”
Scarne’s doleful thoughts were suddenly interrupted by an outbreak of shouting and gunfire. The camp seemed to be erupting. Scarne swung round, trying to make sense of the chaos in the gloom. Two Wheel halftracks were approaching fast out of the semi-darkness from different directions. As they entered the camp’s illumination he saw that in fact much of the gunfire came from them. The men and women aboard were all wearing Legitimacy garb, and they were all armed and shooting wildly.
The halftracks ploughed into the ranked tents, coming to a stop just short of the pavilion. Scame glimpsed the burly figure of Caerman, the archeological team leader, picking off Wheel personnel with a gamma rifle, and be threw himself to the ground, raising his head to watch the engagement with a dazed detachment.
In the same dazed manner he saw Dom rushing back into the camp, his face blazing. He found time to realize that the Legitimacy team had been biding their time, hiding weapons and awaiting their opportunity to hit back. They must have overpowered the guards at the archeological camp and seized the halftracks.
And now the real reason for the raid became clear. Running between burning tents came Shane, bis expression one of terror. Dom sprang to meet him; the youth ran almost blindly into his arms.
Close behind him came his ward, the Legitimacy official Hakandra. When he saw Shane and Dom together he slowed his pace to a walk, but still he came on, his face set, a ray pistol in his hand.
“Hand the boy over, Dom. He’s mine, not yours!”
In his panic the youth seemed to be struggling in Dom’s arms even while he sought to escape Hakandra. Dom held him tight, his arms clasped around his chest. “Leave him be, you monster!” he cried out in an
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uncharacteristically strong voice. “Can’t you see he hates you? He ran from you!”
“He ran from the gunfire, not from me,” Hakandra replied, coming to a stop a few yards from the pay. “Let him go and you will see him return to me of his own accord.” His expression seemed to become desperate. “Come to me, Shane. Come back home!”
Getting no response, he holstered his pistol and rushed at them. Scame was amazed to see the two men tussle and fight for possession of the boy, who began squalling and bawling like a child.
Caerman and another Legitimacy man appeared from nowhere. Between the three of them they wrested Shane from Dom, who went staggering and almost lost his footing. By the tune he had recovered, Shane was being taken at a run towards one of the halftracks.
“Marguerite!” Scame suddenly shouted, using the Wheel Chariman’s personal name for the first time. “Look! Look!”
Dom’s eyes followed his outstretched arm. A few hundred yards out in the desert a faintly glowing transparent dome, or bubble, had appeared. “The galactic ship!” Scame shouted.
Dom glanced back and forth. Hakandra was helping Shane into the halftrack. Seconds later it roared out of the camp, not back to the Legitimacy site but off into the darkness of the desert.
The Wheel master rejoined Scame. “We mustn’t miss the appointment,” he said, frustration in his face. “We’ll get Shane back later.”
There was still sporadic fighting behind them as they hurried out into the desert. They heard the second halftrack start up and head back in the direction from which it had come.
The Legitimacy people had shown commendable enterprise, Scame thought, but he doubted that their rebellion would last very long. Only the element of surprise had enabled them to gain this much, even though the Disk of Hyke had departed. Not until they were able to summon help from outside would they be able
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to overthrow their captors, and they couldn’t do that while the space-tensor blanket was in operation.
The transport the galactics had sent, as Scarne guessed it was, looked like a glass ball fifty feet in diameter, with about a quarter of its bulk apparently passing into the ground. The Wheelmen paused on coming to it, staring up at its shimmering surface.
“What happens now?” someone asked.
A teamster named Muller ventured close to the sphere and touched it with his fingers.
His hand passed right through.
“I guess this is what happens,” he said. Boldly he stepped through the wall of the sphere and stood looking at them from inside.
Dom surveyed the gloom-darkened desert in all directions, as if searching for signs of the vanished Shane, before he too stepped inside the fragile-looking globe. Silently they all followed suit, passing through the pervious wall which swallowed them all without the slightest distortion in its perfect curvature.
The sensation was, literally, like passing through the wall of a soap bubble-except that the bubble didn’t burst. For some moments they all stood there in an apprehensive group, gazing up at the sheen curving over their heads, at the black sky, towards the invisible horizon.
Then, though there was no sensation of motion, it became evident that they were moving. The bubble had disengaged from the surface of the planet, taking with it that portion of the ground which it had enclosed and leaving a perfectly bowl-shaped depression where it had rested. The desert fell away. They shot into the sky, coming in view of the sun again, and in scant seconds had passed out of the atmosphere.
Shortly afterwards, Scame lost consciousness. When he came round again he was still on his feet, standing with the others on the dusty circle of ground the sphere had scooped out of the desert, but he had the impression that a considerable period of time had elapsed.
THE GRAND WHEEL
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“I passed out,” Dom said calmly. “Did everyone else?” He was answered with a chorus of nods.
Outside, there was no nearby sun and they were passing through the abyss of interstellar space. But now something glimmered out of that darkness. They were approaching their destination.
At first Scarne thought it was a planet, drifting through space free of any sun, but as they loomed closer he saw that it was in fact a planetoid, only a few hundred miles in diameter. And although it was lit by no sun, it was not dark. Its surface was covered in a calm, grey light by which certain features could be seen, though it was hard to say what they were. Dark and light patches; some structures, perhaps;
small towns, possibly?
It struck Scame that most asteroids, even largish ones, were not as regularly shaped as the one down below. He leaped to the conclusion that there was a significant artificial element in its make-up.
Steadily, gracefully, the transparent sphere swept down towards their rendezvous.
The halftrack raced at top speed across the nearly pitch-black landscape. The headlights were switched off; Hakandra was driving by gyro compass. Behind it, the vehicle was covering up its tracks with vibrating brushes as it went.
The only other occupant was Shane. He had said little since Hakandra had rescued him, but had resumed his former sullen compliance, sitting in the back of the open cab and feeling the wind rushing past his face.
“You haven’t been using the machine much lately,” he said once.
“Only minor tests,” Hakandra told him.
“I didn’t feel very much from it. Of course, I wasn’t so close to it.”
Hakandra made no reply. He was too busy checking his course on the instruments and worrying about
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possible pursuit. They had to get under cover quicky if they were to evade recapture.
After an hour’s drive he scanned the terrain anxiously until he saw a slight hump in the ground, outlined against the faint, almost absent starlight. Approaching it, he at length stopped the halftrack and clambered down from it carrying a spade. After stumbling about before a sudden rise in the ground, a bank of earth about ten feet high, he began digging away the dust. Finally he bent down and pulled at a metal ring.
A counterweighted canopy rose up, revealing a cavern in the bank. Hakandra ran back to the halftrack and drove it through the opening.
Only when he had again closed the door to the place did he switch on a hand-torch, and by its light then switch on some interior lighting. They were in a chamber either cut into the rock or else constructed out of some kind of concrete. At the rear were further passages.
“The natives built this,” Hakandra explained as Shane climbed down. “It’s an archeological dig we sealed off months ago to stop the dust getting in.” He led the way through one of the rear openings to a smaller room cozily furnished with beds, a table and chairs. Wall cupboards contained shelves of food.