The beam touched the man at the control board; it caught him above the right ear. At the same time, Seth Morley swiveled the gun barrel; he shot the man tumbling vainly over him. At such close range the impact of the beam was enormous; the man convulsed, fell backward, tumbled with a loud crash into a complex of instrumentation mounted against the far wall of the squib.
Morley slammed the hatch, turned it to lock, then sank down onto the floor. Blood seeped through the bandage on his shoulder, befouling the area adjacent to him. His head hummed and he knew that he would, in a moment or two, pass entirely out.
A speaker mounted above the control board clicked on. “Mr. Morley,” it said, “we know that you have taken control of the squib. We know that both our men are unconscious. Please do not take off. Your shoulder was not operated on properly; the junction of torn pieces of artery was unsuccessful. If you do not open the hatch of the squib and let us render you major and immediate medical assistance, then you probably will not live another hour.”
The hell with you, Seth Morley thought. He crept toward the control board, reached one of its two seats; with his good arm he hoisted himself up, groped to steady himself and, gradually, pulled himself into place.
“You are not trained to pilot a high-speed squib,” the speaker said. Evidently monitors of some sort, within the squib, were telling them what he was doing.
“I can fly it,” he said, snorting for breath; his chest seemed weighted down and he had immense difficulty inhaling. On the dashboard a group of switches were marked as being tape-programmed flight patterns. Eight in all. He selected one at random, pressed the switch shut.
Nothing happened.
It’s still on the incoming beam, he realized. I have to release the beam lock.
He found the lock, clicked it off. The squib quivered and then, by degrees, rose up into the night sky.
Something is wrong, he said to himself. The squib isn’t handling right. The flaps must still be in a landing position.
By now he could barely see. The cab of the vehicle had begun to dim around him; he shut his eyes, shuddered, opened his eyes once more. Christ, he thought; I’m passing out. Will this thing crash without me? Or will it go somewhere, and if so, where?
He fell, then, toppling from the seat and onto the floor of the squib. Blackness collected around him and included him within itself.
As he lay on the floor unconscious the squib flew on and on.
Baleful white light dinned into his face; he felt the scorching brilliance, squeezed his eyes shut again–but he could not suppress it. “Stop,” he said; he tried to put up his arms, but they did not move. At that, he managed to open his eyes; he gazed around, trembling with weakness.
The two men in black leather uniforms lay quietly, exactly as he had last seen them. He did not have to examine them to know that they were dead. _Belsnor, then, was dead_; the weapon did not stun–it killed.
Where am I now? he wondered.
The viewscreen of the squib was still on, but its lens fed directly into an obstruction of some sort; on it he saw only a flat, white surface.
Rotating the ball which controlled the sweep of the viewscreen he said to himself, _A lot of time has passed_. He touched his injured shoulder cautiously. The bleeding had stopped. Perhaps they had lied to him; perhaps Babble had done an adequate job after all.
Now the viewscreen showed–.
A great dead city. Under him. The squib had come to rest at a field up in the higher spires of the city’s building-web.
No movement. No life. No one lived in the city; he saw in the viewscreen decay and absolute, endless collapse. As if, he thought, this is the city of the Form Destroyer.
The speaker mounted above the control board made no sound. He would get no help from _them_.
Where the hell can I be? he asked himself. Where in the galaxy is there a city of this size which has been abandoned, allowed to die? Left to erode and rot away. It has been dead for a century! he said to himself, appalled.
Rising unsteadily to his feet he crept to the hatch of the squib. Opening it electrically–he did not have enough strength to operate the quicker manual crank–he peered out.
The air smelled stale and cold. He listened. No sound.
Summoning his strength he lurched haltingly out of the squib, onto the roof top.
There is no one here, he said to himself.
_Am I still on Delmak-O?_ he wondered.
He thought. _There is no place like this on Delmak-O_. Because Delmak-O is a new world to us; we never colonized it. Except for our one small settlement of fourteen people.
And this is old!
He clambered unstably back into the squib, stumbled to the control board and awkwardly reseated himself. There he sat for a time, meditating. What should I do? he asked himself. I’ve got to find my way back to Delmak-O, he decided. He examined his watch. Fifteen hours had passed– roughly–since the two men in black leather uniforms had kidnapped him. Are the others in the group still alive? he wondered. Or did _they_ get all of them?
The automatic pilot; it had a voice-control box.
He snapped it on and said into the microphone, “Take me to Delmak-O. At once.” He shut the microphone off, leaned back to rest himself, waited.
The ship did nothing.
“Do you know where Delmak-O is?” he said into the microphone. “Can you take me there? You were there fifteen hours ago; you remember, don’t you?” Nothing. No response, no movement. No sound of its ion-propulsion engine cackling into activity. There is no Delmak-O flight pattern engrammed into it, he realized. The two leather-clad men had taken the squib there on manual, evidently. Or else he was operating the equipment incorrectly.
Gathering his faculties, he inspected the control board. He read everything printed on its switches, dials, knobs, controlball . . . every written declaration. No clue. He could learn nothing from it–least of all how to operate it manually. I can’t go anywhere, he said to himself, because I don’t know where I am. All I could do would be fly at random. Which presupposes that I figure out how to operate this thing manually.
One switch caught his eye; he had missed it the first time around. REFERENCE, the switch read. He snapped it on. For a time nothing happened. And then the speaker above the control board squawked into life.
“Your query.”
He said, “Can you tell me my location?”
“You want FLIGHT INFO.”
“I don’t see anything on the panel marked FLIGHT INFO,” he said.
“It is not on the panel. It is mounted above the panel to your right.”
He looked. There it was.
Snapping the FLIGHT INFO unit into operating position, he said, “Can you tell me where I am?”
Static, the semblance of something at work. . . he heard a faint zzzzzzz sound; almost a whir. A mechanical device had slid into activity. And then, from the speaker, a vodor voice, an electronic matching of human vocal sound. “Yezzz sirrr. Euuuu arrrr in London.”
“‘London’!” he echoed, dazed. “How can that be?”
“Euuuu fluuuu there.”
He struggled with that but could make nothing out of it.
“You mean the city of London, England, on Terra?” he asked.
“Yezzz sirrr.”
After a time he managed to pull himself together enough to put another question to it. “Can I fly to Delmak-O in this squib?”
“That izzz a six-year flightttt. Euuuur squib is not equipped for such a flighttt. Forrr example it doesss not possess enough thrust to breakkk euuuu freeeee from the planet.”
“Terra,” he said thickly. Well, it explained the deserted city. All the big cities on Terra were–he had heard–deserted. They no longer served any purpose. There was no population to house itself in them because everyone, except the ostriches, had emigrated.
“My squib, then,” he said, “is a local high-velocity shuttle vessel, for homoplanetery flight only?”
“Yesss sirrr.”
“Then I could fly here to London only from another locus on the planet.”
“Yesss sirrr.”
Morley, his head ringing, his face damp with grease-like drops of perspiration, said, “Can you retroplot my previous course? Can you determine where I came here from?”
“Certainly.” A protracted wheeze from the mechanism. “Yezz. Euuuu flewww here from the following origination: #3R68-222B. And before thattt–”
“The ident notation is incomprehensible to me,” Morley said. “Can you translate that into words?”
“Nooo. There are nooo wordzzz to describe it.”
“Can you program my squib to returnfly there?”
“Yezzz. I can feed the coordinates into euuuur flightcontrol assembly. I am also equipped to accident-arrest monitor the flighttt; shall I do thattt?”