Theotormon said, “The mercury shower can’t be compared to a meteor shower. The drops are only traveling about a hundred miles an hour when they hit the atmosphere, and they are considerably slowed up and broken up before they reach the surface. Yet …”
He waved a flipper to indicate the damage.
Wolff looked out over the sea. The surviving nests were drifting slowly away. The winged men had enough problems of their own without resuming the attack. One nest was so overburdened with refugees from others that it was losing altitude.
Dugarnn was sad. He had lost so many people that it would be very difficult to maneuver the island and impossible to defend it against another attack. Now they would drift helplessly around and around the world. Not until the children had grown up would they become powerful again. It was unlikely that the island would be left alone long enough for the children to become adults.
“My people are doomed,” he said.
“Not as long as you keep fighting,” Wolff said. “After all, you can avoid battle with other abutal islands and with the surface islands. You told me that the only reason two abuta get together for a conflict is that both maneuver to approach each other. You can quit doing that. And the Nichiddor are rare. This is the first tune in fifteen years that you have met a cluster of nests.”
“What! Run away from a fight!” Dugarnn said. His mouth hung open. “That . . . that’s unthinkable. We would be cowards. Our names would be a scornword in the mouths of our enemies.”
“That’s a lot of nonsense,” Wolff said. “The other abutal can’t even get close enough to identify you unless you let them. But that’s up to you. Die because you can’t change your ways, if that’s what you want.”
Wolff was busy helping to clean up the island. The dead and wounded Nichiddor were dumped overboard. The dead abutal were given a long burial ceremony, officiated over by Dugarnn, since the wizard had had his head twisted off during the battle. Then the bodies were slipped over the side and received by the sea.
Days and nights drifted by as slowly as the wind-driven island. Wolff spent much time observing the great brown spheres of the other planets. Appirmatzum was only twenty thousand miles away. So near and yet so far. It might as well be a million miles. Or was it truly so impossible to get there? A plan began to form, a plan so fantastic that he almost abandoned it. But, if he could get the materials, he might, just might, carry it out.
The abuta passed over the polar area, the surface of which looked just like the others. Twice, they saw enemy islands at a distance. When these began to work their way towards Dugarnn’s island, Dugarnn sadly ordered his island to flee. The banks of gas-bladders on one side were operated to give the island a slow lateral thrust, and the distance between the two was kept equal. After a while, the enemy gave up, having used up as much gas in his bladders as he dared.
Dugarnn explained that the maneuvers which brought two abuta into battle-conflict sometimes took as much as five days.
“I’ve never seen people so anxious to die,” was Wolff’s only comment.
One day, when it seemed to all the Lords that they would drift above the featureless waters forever, a lookout gave a cry that brought them running.
“The Mother of All Islands!” he shouted. “Dead ahead! The Mother of Islands!”
If this was the mother of islands, then her babies must be small indeed. From three thousand feet, Wolff could span the floating mass from shore to shore with one sweep of the eye. It was not more than thirty miles wide at the broadest and twelve miles long. But most things are relative, and on this world it was a continent.
There were bays and inlets and even broken spaces that formed lakes of sea-water. At various times, some force, perhaps collision with other islands, had crumpled up parts of the island. These formed hills. And it was on top of one of the hills that Wolff saw the gates.