Dodds, contact astrogation on Vespasian and arrange a rendezvous. Power Room,
stand by.”
The rest of the crewmen’s conversation was ignored as the medical team crowded
around the Casualty Deck’s repeater screen. One look was enough to tell them
that their preparations to receive large numbers of casualties from the expected
emergence accident had been wasted effort, but they did not care because it was
immediately obvious that the concerted Jump had been completely successful.
Centered on the repeater screen was a small, sharp image of the coilship with
its three Monitor Corps vessels spaced along its axis, looking like an exercise
in alien three-dimensional geometry. Vespasian, the stern component, was
already applying thrust, and the three linked ships were beginning to turn
around their longitudinal axes in order to reproduce the original rate of
rotation and centrifugal force conditions ofthe coilship before its accident.
Gradually a voice from Control made itself heard above the sound of the medics’
human and extraterrestrial jubilation.
“. . . Rendezvous in four hours thirteen minutes,” Haslam was saying. “No
preliminary orbital maneuvering, sir. They intend going straight in.”
Rhabwar, in its hypersonic glider configuration, circled the descending coilship
at a distance of three kilometers using its thrusters only when necessary to
maintain the same rate of descent. Rotating slowly and illuminated to near-
incandescent brightness by the system’s sun and noontime reflection from the
planet’s cloud blanket, it seemed to Conway as if it were boring its way into
the lower reaches of the atmosphere like some gigantic, alien drill. Inside the
enormous, dazzling coil the three Federation ships in their drab service
liveries were virtually invisible except for the flare of Vespasian’s thrusters,
which were supporting the weight not only of the coilship but the two vessels
stacked above it. The great alien and Monitor Corps composite continued its
descent until, three kilometers from the surface, tangential thrust was applied
to begin killing its spin.
Vespasian’s flare lengthened suddenly and brightened, slowing the descent until
the ship was hovering a meter above the ground. Then simultaneously the
coilship’s rotation ceased, Vespasian’s stabilizers came to rest on the fused
and blackened soil, and the sternmost segment of the coilship touched down.
For perhaps five seconds nothing happened, then, reacting to the cessation of
spin and the presence of a suitable atmosphere, the sensor-actuators on every
hibernation cylinder performed their function. The endplates which kept the
individual CRLTs apart were ejected to fall like a shower of giant coins to the
ground, and resuscitation of the group entity was initiated. Conway could
imagine the individual CRLTs awakening, stretching, and linking up, the
occupants of close on nine hundred hibernation compartments which had survived
the eighty-seven years past collision. Then he began to worry in case some of
them could not link up and there was an organic log-jam somewhere inside the
coil trapping CRLTs above it…
But within a surprisingly short time the great group entity was leaving its
ship, the leading head segments walking carefully around the fused earth under
Vespasian’s stern and toward the vegetation on the edge of the clearing. And,
like an endless, leathery caterpillar the younger segments emerged carrying
equipment and stores and following the tracks of their elders.
When at last the tail was clear of the coilship, the power to the supporting
tractor and pressor beams was gradually reduced so that the towering, open
spiral collapsed slowly onto itself to lie like a great, loose coil of metal
rope on the ground. A few minutes later Vespasian, Claudius, and Descartes took
off and separated, the two capital ships to go into orbit and Descartes to land
again a few kilometers along the shoreline to await formal contact with the CRLT
group entity. Contact would occur, they knew, because the individual CRLTs who
had undergone surgery knew that the beings inside the Federation ships wished
them well and, since the CRLT life-form had shared mentation, the whole group
would be aware of these good intentions.
By this time Rhabwar’s lander had also touched down and its medics were on the
surface standing as close as they possibly could to the being who was marching
endlessly past them. Ostensibly they were there to furnish any medical