“A dozen each.”
“Good. That’s seventy-two — seventy-one without the one I dropped. That’s more than enough.”
“In that case, we may as well have something to eat. I’m ravenous.”
Manetho let go of the rope, and sat down on the floor of the balloon. A few moments later there was a faint jerk as the rope reached its limit.
Once again Manetho used the tinder box, and ignited the tiny oil lamp; he held on to it tightly as Niall seated himself on the floor. Manetho was at least fifty pounds heavier than Niall, so that the floor was inclined to tilt beneath his weight. With some difficulty and infinite caution, they rearranged themselves in relation to the baggage, until the weight was evenly spread. Then Manetho handed Niall the lamp, while he untied the top of one of the canvas bags. From this he took a wickerwork hamper of food. It proved to contain flat cakes of bread, honey, cooked game, goat’s cheese, apples and a carafe of golden wine. They sat cross-legged to eat; the walls of the undercarriage had never been intended as support for the human back, and yielded alarmingly to any pressure.
If he closed his eyes, Niall could almost imagine himself back in the burrow. The wine and food induced a pleasant sense of security and optimism; it no longer mattered that he was swinging in empty space, a thousand feet above the ocean. Yet it also made him aware how much he had changed; the child who had lived in the burrow seemed to belong to a remote epoch of his life.
A dazzling flash of light startled him into wakefulness. Doggins had dropped another fire-bomb. It revealed exactly the same prospect as before: the black sea, flecked with white, stretching endlessly around them. They emptied the wine bottle, and Manetho tossed the empty bottle overboard; it gave Niall an odd feeling of satisfaction to imagine it plummeting down through the blackness. Manetho once again extinguished the light.
It was soon after this that it began to rain. Niall pulled up the hood of the fur-lined garment, and used the drawstring to tie it tight. The garment was made of cured animal skin, and was completely waterproof. But the pattering of the rain on the hood aroused Niall from his somnolence. This in turn made him aware of the danger of allowing himself to drift into a sense of false security. If they were now on course, they should be at least half-way to the Delta. According to Simeon, the junction of the two rivers was about a mile inland from the coast. Travelling at the present speed, it would be easy to overshoot the mark, and perhaps land in the desert on the far side of the Delta.
To control the nagging sense of anxiety, he fumbled inside his tunic, and turned the thought mirror. The drowsiness vanished immediately. At first, this seemed to be of no particular advantage; he merely became more aware of the sound of the rain and the swaying of the balloon. Then his thoughts turned to the porifid, a few inches above his head, and he immediately became clearly aware of its presence. It seemed to be a point of dim light, surrounded by long threads of energy that reached out into the blackness. At the centre of the light, where all these threads joined, there was a steady pulse like a beating heart. As he concentrated on this pulse, he seemed to become a part of it; there was a curious sense that it was trying to communicate with him. Then he himself became the pulse. His own body seemed somehow remote and alien, as if it belonged to someone else.
And now, suddenly, it was no longer dark. He knew his eyes were closed; yet they seemed to be open. He was drifting through a red haze, and when he strained his senses, he could see as clearly as if by daylight. He could see the thick blanket of dark cloud above him, and the three-quarter moon that drifted above them. Far below, he could see the breaking waves. A further effort even allowed him to penetrate below the surface of the sea, and to become aware of the bottom, almost as far below as he was above it.
He was also conscious of the porifids in the other two balloons; his own energy threads mingled with theirs, and their perceptions mingled with his. Now Niall understood why the balloons stayed at the same height, and why they never collided; the porifids were aware of one another, and maintained roughly the same distance between them. Niall had the curious impression that they were able to regulate not only the height of the balloon by the quantity of gas they exuded or absorbed, but also — to some extent — its direction.
Now his consciousness had become identified with that of the porifids, he ceased to feel even a remnant of anxiety about his position. His impatience also dissolved; it seemed to make no difference whether he was in the air or on the ground; he felt that he could be content to drift along between the clouds and the sea forever. His human consciousness, with its eternal vigilance and tension, seemed only a distant memory; instead he was suspended in an awareness that was closer to sleep, yet was also fully conscious.
In this state, he became aware that the “energy threads” emitted by the porifid were, in fact, short bursts of some low frequency energy, and that these were being reflected back from every object they encountered, enabling him to “see” it. He was also surprised to realise that he himself possessed this same capacity, but to a much lower degree. Unlike the porifids, he had never needed to develop it, because he had always preferred to rely on the senses of sight and hearing. The same was true of Manetho, who was now staring sleepily into the darkness. Because he was now rather bored, he had allowed his will to collapse; the result was that his brain had almost ceased to emit the “energy threads.”
And this, Niall suddenly realised, was the basic problem of all human beings. As soon as they became bored, they allowed the will to collapse. The spiders had never made that elementary mistake. That was why they were masters of the world. They were incapable of being bored. . .
Doggins was taking another fire-bomb out of his bag; Niall watched him twist the timing device on the side and toss it overboard. He watched it fall down through the red air, until it suddenly disintegrated — this time he could see its fragments flying apart. His human eyelids were aware of the explosion as a bright flash of yellow light, but his porifid-senses saw only a disturbing release of energy that spread outward like a sound, vibrating and echoing out into the universe.
For Niall, the fire-bomb was unnecessary; his extended senses showed him that the coast-line was roughly twenty miles away to the south. Beyond it lay the desert. On their present course, they would cross the coast-line about six miles east of the Delta. Even from this distance Niall could see that the coast they were approaching was bleak and inhospitable, with swampy mud-flats that merged a few miles inland into a rocky desert. But a dozen miles further west there was a long sandy beach, protected by a natural harbour bar of coral and limestone. This was the area Simeon had described as the most suitable place to land.
It was unnecessary for Niall to transmit the mental command to the porifid, for its mind and nervous system were an extension of his own. And with the naturalness of a swimmer changing direction, the porifid turned in a long, slow arc until it was heading directly towards the sandy beach. Niall was baffled by the mechanics of the process, for the porifid seemed to be defying the natural forces of the wind; yet, in another sense, it was making use of these forces. As far as Niall could tell, the secret lay in its failure to realise that it was violating a law of nature.
Niall opened his eyes, and was surprised to find that it was no longer dark. Now the rain had ceased, the moon had emerged from behind the clouds. He leaned forward and shook Manetho’s arm; Manetho woke up with a start. Niall said: “We’re near the coast.”
Manetho jumped clumsily to his feet, and peered over the side. “I can’t see it.”
“That’s because it’s still twenty miles away.” Manetho stood as motionless as a statue, staring at the horizon. Five minutes later, he raised his cupped hands to his mouth and roared: “Coast ahead!” He turned to Niall, smiling with satisfaction. “We’re right on course.”
When they could distinguish the palm trees against the white sand, Niall ordered the porifid into a slow descent. For the greater part of the descent the moon remained hidden behind white clouds. When it emerged again, they were within a mile of the beach, and could hear the sound of waves, then the crash of breaking surf. Spray blew into the undercarriage. Niall licked his lips and they tasted of salt. Moments later, the undercarriage rocked under the impact of a large wave; it gained height for a moment, sped across the beach, then scraped to a halt within a dozen yards of the row of palms. The balloon immediately began to collapse on top of them. Niall pushed his way out from underneath it, tangled for a moment with Manetho’s muscular legs, then found himself on his hands and knees in the yielding sand.