Ride the Star Winds (104 page)

She brushed past us, unspeaking, ran into the alley, clouds of fine ash exploding about her ankles. Sara and I followed her. Clarisse hesitated briefly at the temple doorway, exchanging a few words with Grimes and Sonya, then hurried inside. When the rest of us joined her we found her standing by the altar, motionless, her face set and expressionless. In the dim light she looked like a priestess of some ancient religion.

Then she spoke, but not to any of us.

“Ken,” she whispered, obviously vocalising her thoughts. “Ken . . .” She smiled suddenly. She was getting through. “Yes . . . Here I am . . .”

“Where is he?” demanded Grimes urgently.

She ignored the question. Suddenly, walking as Mayhew had walked, she stepped into that luminous shape, that distorted geometrical, multidimensional diagram. We saw the outline of her body through her clothing, her shadowy bone structure through her translucent flesh, and . . .

Nothing.

Thorne broke the stunned silence. “Did you observe the meter while all this was happening?” he asked his wife.

You cold-blooded bastard!
I thought angrily, then realised that the scientists’ instruments might provide some clue as to what had happened.

“No,” she admitted, then stooped over the gravitometer, pressed a button. “But here’s the printout.”

We could all see the graph as she showed it to him. There were the slight, very slight irregularities that she had referred to as gravitational ripples. And there were two sharp and very definite dips. The first one must have registered when Mayhew disappeared, the second when Clarisse vanished.

So It, whatever
It
was, played around with gravity. A sentient planet, I reflected, ought to be able to do just that . . .

“Rose,” said Grimes, “watch your gravitometer, will you?”

She shot him a puzzled look, but obeyed. The commodore brought something small out of his pocket. It was, I saw, a box of matches. He tossed it towards the tesseract. Nobody was surprised when it, too, vanished.

“The field intensified,” reported the woman. “Briefly, slightly, but very definitely.”

“So . . .” murmured Grimes. “So what?” He turned to face us all. “We must get Ken and Clarisse out. But how?”

Nobody answered him.

Having waited in vain for a reply he continued. “Twice, while on this blasted planet, I’ve been shunted . . . elsewhere. Each time I got hack. I still don’t know how. But if I could, they can.” He gestured towards the altar. “That thing’s a gateway. A gateway to where—or
when
?” He addressed me directly. “You’ve an engineroom gantry aboard your ship, George. And there are drilling and cutting tools in the engineers’ workshop.”

“Yes,” I told him.

“I’d like them here. Mphm. But there’ll be only a few meters of wire on your gantry winches. We could want more, much more . . .”

I remembered, then, something which had been a source of puzzlement to me for a long time. “In the storeroom,” I told him, “are two funny little hand winches, with reels of very fine wire. There’s a lot of wire. Nobody knows what those winches are for. But . . .”

“But they might come in handy now,” said Grimes, suddenly and inexplicably cheerful. “I think I know what those winches are—although what they’re doing aboard a merchant spaceship is a mystery. In the Survey Service, of course, we had things like them, for oceanographical work . . .”

“Your’re losing me, sir,” I said.

“I could be wrong, of course,” he went on, “but I’ve a hunch that these will be just the things we need. I’d like one of them out here at once. The other one, I think, could be modified slightly. Your engineers can study the simple workings of it, and then fit it with a motor from your gantry . . .”

I suppose that he knew what he was talking about. Nobody else did.

We went outside the temple to use our transceivers to get in touch with Bindle, back aboard the ship. Grimes put him in the picture and then gave him detailed instructions. As well as the first of the odd little hand winches and the cutting tools he wanted a sound-powered telephone, with as much wire as could be found.

Then the commodore and myself went to the mouth of the alley to await the return of Taylor with the first installment of equipment. The boat came in at last and we boarded it at once and were promptly carried to the flat roof of the building. Under my watchful eye the Third Officer made a very cautious landing—but that rooftop, by the feel of it, could have supported the enormous weight of an Alpha Class liner. We unloaded the tools and the reel of wire, then Taylor lifted off and returned to the ship.

Grimes looked at the wire reel and laughed. He said, “And you really don’t know what this is, George?”

“No,” I told him.

“Was your ship ever on Atlantia?”

“A few times, I think, but never when I was in her.”

“And one of those times—probably the last time—she overcarried cargo,” went on Grimes. “And the good Dog Star Line Mate buried those leftover bones in the back garden, thinking that they might come in handy for something, some time. This is a sounding machine, such as the Atlanteans use in their big schooners, and such as we, in the Survey Service, use for charting the seas of a newly discovered world. But our machines have motors.”

“I thought that all sounding was done electronically,” I said.

“Most of it is,” the commodore told me, “but an echometer can’t bring up a sample of the bottom. . . Yes, this is a sounding machine, Armstrong Patent.”

“Is that the make of it?” Grimes laughed again, obviously, amused by my ignorance. I rather resented this. It was all very well for him; he was one of
the
experts, if not
the
expert, on Terran maritime history. And not only that, he holds a Master Mariner’s Certificate in addition to his qualifications as a Master Astronaut—he had actually sailed in command of a surface vessel on that watery world Aquarius.

“Armstrong Patent,” he said, “is the nickname given by seamen to any piece of machinery powered by human muscle. And they’re a weird mob, the Atlanteans, as you may know. They have a horror of automation even in its simplest forms. They pride themselves on having put the clock back to the good old days of wooden ships and iron men. But they do import some manufactured goods—such as this.” He looked at the dial set horizontally on top of the winch. “And then two hundred fathoms of piano wire here. That’s about three hundred and sixty five metres.” He pulled a cylinder of heavy metal from its clip on the winch frame. “And here’s the sinker. About ten kilograms of lead, by the feel of it.”

“Oh, I see,” I admitted. (Well, I did, after a fashion.)

“Mphm.” Grimes was studying the legs on which the machine stood, the feet of which were designed so that they could be bolted to a deck. “Mphm . . .” He straightened up, then walked to the edge of the flat roof. I followed him. There was no parapet. I stayed well back; I don’t suffer from acrophobia—I’d hardly be a spaceman if I did—but I always like to have something to hold on to. And it looked a long way down. The temple hadn’t looked all that high from the ground, but in its vicinity perspective seemed to be following a new set of rules.

Grimes was shouting down to his wife after a futile attempt to use his personal transceiver. Apparently the inhibitory field was as effective on the roof as inside the building. “Sonya, we want some timber. Yes, timber! Two good, strong logs, straight, each at lost two metres long and fifteen centimetres thick . . . Yes, use your laser to cut them!”

When she had gone, accompanied by the others, he determined the center of the flat roof by pacing out the diagonals. Where these intersected he put down his precious pipe as a marker. I brought him the laser cutter—one with a self-contained power pack. He held it like the oversized pistol that it resembled, directing the thin pencil of incandescence almost directly downward.

At first it seemed the surface of the roof was going to be impossible to cut; the beam flattened weirdly at the point of impact, spreading to a tiny puddle of intense light, dazzlingly bright even though it was in the full rays of the sun. And then, quite suddenly, without any pyrotechnics, without so much as a wisp of smoke, there was penetration.

After that it was easy. Grimes described a circle of about one-meter diameter but left a thirty-degree arc uncut. He switched off and put down the cutter, then retrieved his pipe. When it was safely back in his pocket he extended a cautious fingertip to the cut in the roof. He looked puzzled. “Cold, stone cold,” he whispered. “It shouldn’t be. But it saves time.”

I fetched the pinch bar and we got one end of it under the partially excised circle, then levered upwards. It came fairly easily, and did not spring back when the pressure was released. I took a firm hold on the smooth edge and held it while Grimes completed the cut.

When the disc was free it was amazingly light, even though it was all of four centimeters thick. I put it to one side and we looked down.

The altar—I may as well go on calling it that, although I was sure by now that it had no religious significance—was almost directly below us. Its alien geometry glimmered wanly. I’d been expecting, somehow, to find myself looking down into a hole, a very deep hole, but such was not the case. It was just as we had seen it from ground level, a distorted construct of slowly shifting planes of dim radiance. But we knew that if we fell into it we should keep on going.

Somebody was calling. It was Sonya, back from her wood-cutting expedition. We went to the edge of the roof. She and Sara were carrying one suitable looking log between them, the Thornes another. She shouted, “How do we get these up to you?”

Grimes did something to the winch handles of the sounding machine so that the wire ran off easily. He pulled as much as he needed off the reel, lowered the end of it over the edge of the roof to the ground. Sonya threw it around the first of the logs in a simple yet secure hitch. We pulled it up. It wasn’t all that heavy, but the thin wire bit painfully into the palms of our hands. Then we brought up the second one.

We used the laser cutter to trim the logs to square section, adjusting the beam setting carefully before starting work. We didn’t want to cut the roof from under our feet. Then we arranged the two baulks of timber so that they bridged the circular hole. We lifted the sounding machine and set so that it rested securely on the rough platform. Grimes shackled the heavy sinker to the end of the wire, left it dangling. “Mphm . . .” he grunted dubiously. He had found, clipped inside the frame of the winch, a small L-shaped rod of metal on a wooden handle. He asked, “Do you know how this works?”

I didn’t. I’m a spaceman, not seaman.

“This,” he told me, “is the feeler. Normally there’s a good lead from the sounding machine so the wire runs horizontally from the reel to a block on the taffrail or to the end of the sounding boom. Whoever’s working it holds the feeler in one hand, pressing down on the wire—and he knows when the sinker has hit bottom by the sudden slackening of tension. Then he brakes. Obviously we can’t do that here. So you, George, will have to exercise a lateral pull with the feeler. Yell out as soon as you feel the wire go slack.”

We took our positions, myself crouching and holding the feeler ready, he grasping both winch handles. He gave them a sharp half-turn forward and the sinker dropped, as the wire sang off the drum. It was plain that we hadn’t found bottom on the floor of the temple. Out ran the gleaming wire, out, out. . .

I heard Grimes mutter, “Fifty. One hundred . . . One fifty. . .” And what would happen when we came to the end of the wire?

It went slack suddenly. “Now!” I shouted as I went over backward! Somehow I was still watching Grimes and saw him sharply turn the handles in reverse, braking the winch. When I scrambled to my feet he was looking at the dial. “One hundred and seventy three fathoms,” he said slowly. “One hundred and seventy three fathoms straight down . . .” He grinned ruefully. “That was the easy part. Gravity was doing all the work. The hard part comes now!”

I didn’t know what he meant until we had to wind up all that length of wire by hand. We waited a little while, hoping that Mayhew and Clarisse would be able to attach a message of some kind to the sinker, and then we took a handle each and turned and turned and turned. The pointer moved anti-clockwise on the dial with agonizing slowness. We had both of us worked up a fine sweat and acquired blisters on the palms of our hands when, at long last, the plummet lifted slowly through the hole in the roof. There was more than just the sinker attached to the wire. There was a square of scarlet synthesilk that, I remembered, Clarisse had worn as a neckerchief at the throat of her khaki shirt. And knotted into it was the box of matches that Grimes had dropped into the altar.

There was something wrong with it. It took me a little time to realise what it was—and then I saw that in order to read the brand name—PROMETHEUS—one would require a mirror.

The Thornes had a pad and a stylus among their equipment. We used the sounding machine wire to bring these up to the roof, then attached them to the sinker and sent them down to wherever Mayhew and Clarisse were trapped. This time Grimes applied the brake when he had one hundred and sixty fathoms of wire down and walked out the rest by hand. Then we waited, Grimes smoking a pipe—his matches still worked in spite of the odd reversal—and myself a cigar. This would give the psionicists time to write their message and, in any case, we felt that we had earned a smoke.

We thought of asking Sonya to use the boat that we had left in the plaza to bring others of the party up to the roof to lend us a hand, then decided that, for the time being, it was better to have them standing by on the ground. To begin with, there was the problem of radio communication with the ship to be considered.

Our rest period over, we sweated again on what the commodore had so aptly called the Armstrong Patent machine. At last the sinker rose into view. Attached to it was a sheet torn from the pad. Grimes detached it carefully but eagerly, then grunted. Mayhew’s handwriting, at the best of times, was barely legible, and a mirror image of his vile calligraphy was impossible. And nobody had a mirror. I suggested that Grimes hold the sheet of plastic up against the sunlight. He did so, then muttered irritably, “Damn the man! If he can’t write, he should print!”