“Hold, there!” warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana, ten thousand leagues away. “I send your mind the message that if the King suspects this is Sir Kendrick of the Isles,=, he will raise a dragon against him, or spirit you off beyond any chance of rescue. Go back, Princess of Maranoa. Pretend’ you decide that it is only an eagle. I will cast a belief-spell on your words.”
“I stay far aloft,” Kendrick says. “Save he use a crying~ stone, the Elf King will not be aware this beast has a rider.. From here I’ll spy out city and castle.” And then-? He knows.
not. He knows simply that he must set her free or die in the quest. How long will it take him, how many more nights will she lie in the King’s embrace?
“I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus,” Mark Danzig interrupted.
His dry tone startled the three others into alertness. Jean Broberg flushed with embarrassment, Colin Scobie with irritation; Luis Garcilaso shrugged, grinned, and turned his gaze to the pilot console before which he sat harnessed. For a moment silence filled the cabin, and shadows, and radiance from the universe.
To help observation, all lights were out except a few dim glows from the instruments. The sunward ports were lidded. Elsewhere thronged stars, so many and so brilliant that they well-nigh drowned the blackness which held them. The Milky Way was a torrent of silver. One port framed Saturn at half phase, dayside pale gold and rich bands amidst the jewelry of its rings, night side wanly ashimmer with starlight upon clouds, as big to the sight as Earth over Luna.
Forward was Iapetus. The spacecraft rotated while orbiting the moon, to maintain a steady optical field. It had crossed the dawn line, presently at the middle of the inward-facing hemisphere. Thus it had left bare, crater-pocked land behind it in the dark, and was passing above sunlit glacier country. Whiteness dazzled, glittered in sparks and shards of color, reached fantastic shapes heavenward; cirques, crevasses, caverns brimmed with blue.
“1’m sorry,” Jean Broberg whispered. “It’s too beautiful, unbelievably beautiful, and … almost like the place where our game had brought us. Took us by surprise-”
“Huh!” Mark Danzig said. “You had a pretty good idea of what to expect, therefore you made your play go in the direction of something that resembled it. Don’t tell me any different. I’ve watched these acts for eight years.”
Colin Scobie made a savage gesture. Spin and gravity were too slight to give noticeable weight, and his movement
sent him flying through the air, across the crowded cabin. He checked himself by a handhold just short of the chemist. “Are you calling Jean a liar?” he growled.
Most times he was cheerful, in a bluff fashion. Perhaps because of that, he suddenly appeared menacing. He was a big, sandy-haired man in his mid-thirties; a coverall did not disguise the muscles beneath, and the scowl on his face brought forth its ruggedness.
“Please!” Broberg exclaimed. “Not a quarrel, Colin.”
The geologist glanced back at her. She was slender and fine-featured. At her age of forty-two, despite longevity treatment, the reddish-brown hair that fell to her shoulders was becoming streaked with white, and lines were engraved around large gray eyes.
“Mark is right,” she sighed. “We’re here to do science, not daydream.” She reached forth to touch Scobie’s arm, smiling shyly. “You’re still full of your Kendrick persona, aren’t you? Gallant, protective-” She stopped. Her voice had quickened with more than a hint of Ricia. She covered her lips and flushed again. A tear broke free and sparkled off on air currents. She forced a laugh. “But I’m just physicist Broberg, wife of astronomer Tom, mother of Johnnie and Billy.”
Her glance went Saturn ward, as if seeking the ship where her family waited. She might have spied it, too, as a star that moved among stars by the solar sail. However, that was now furled, and naked vision could not find even such huge hulls as Chronos possessed, across millions of kilometers.
Luis Garcilaso asked from his pilot’s chair: “What harm if we carry on our little commedia dell’ arte?” His Arizona drawl soothed the ear. “We won’t be landin’ for a while yet, and everything’s on automatic till then.” He was small, swarthy, and deft, still in his twenties.