“Right. I’ll do my best.”
“Anything else before we clear?” asked Lazarus. “Oh, yes-Zack, we’d better pick a place for me to land, or I may shorten a lot of lives with my blast.”
“Uh, yes. Make your approach from the west. I’ll rig a standard berth marker. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Not okay,” denied Ford. “We’ll have to give him a pilot beam to come in on.”
“Nonsense,” objected Lazarus. “I could set her down on top of the Washington Monument.”
“Not this time, you couldn’t. Don’t be surprised at the weather.”
As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili’s transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.
He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside, and took her down.
Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour’s leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather.
Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set-and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on.
Somewhere a pattern controlman was shouting at him; he switched it off and gave all his attention to his approach radar and the ghostly images in the infra-red rectifier while comparing what they told him with his inertial tracker. The ship passed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.
Then the thought was cut short by a squeal from his board; the ship had picked up the pilot beam.
He wheeled her in, cut his last jet as she scraped, and slapped a series of switches; the great cargo ports rumbled open and rain beat in.
Eleanor Johnson huddled into herself, half crouching against the storm, and tried to draw her cloak more tightly about the baby in the crook of her left arm. When the storm had first hit, the child had cried endlessly, stretching her nerves taut. Now it was quiet, but that seemed only new cause for alarm.
She herself had wept, although she had tried not to show it. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been exposed to weather like this; it seemed symbolic of the storm that had overturned her life, swept her away from her cherished first home of her own with its homey old-fashioned fireplace, its shiny service cell, its thermostat which she could set to the temperature she liked without consulting others-a tempest which had swept her away between two grim proctors, arrested like some poor psychotic, and landed her after terrifying indignities here in the cold sticky red clay of this Oklahoma field.
Was it true? Could it possibly be true? Or had she not yet borne her baby at all and this was another of the strange dreams she had while carrying it?
But the rain was too wetly cold, the thunder too loud; she could never have slept through such a dream. Then what the Senior Trustee had told them must be true, too-it had to be true; she had seen the ship ground with her own eyes, its blast bright against the black of the storm. She could no longer see it but the crowd around her moved slowly forward; it must in front of her. She was close to the outskirts of the crowd she would be one of the last to get aboard.