Futures Past (41 page)

  
The gray mist on his visor became the gray of clouds whipping past close below him-—very close below him.

  
Through gaps he saw ground that wasn't particularly flat, but ahead there seemed to be few if any gaps to see through at all. They'd have to land. Now.

  
"Height about three miles. Velocity Mach One point Five. Start pulling her up!"

  
Slowly, heavily, the great ship pointed her nose up in a climb. The climb steepened, became vertical. Speed fell away to nothing as the ship stalled. It began to drop tail first—still held vertical by straining gyros—toward the cloud blanket below.

  
One gap in the clouds showed a flat, grayish-blue something that could be anything, another the dull brown of sand, and "yet another showed a section of jagged and rock-strewn mountainside. But there were a few houses clinging to that mountainside; they helped him judge his height and rate of fall with more accuracy than was possible with clouds.

  
"Thirty-five thousand feet. Fire motors!" Gregg kept calling altitude figures as the now pink-tinged clouds rushed up at them. But they were falling too fast.

  
"Increase to six G's for five seconds, then back to three!"

  
Deceleration jammed him down into his suit, almost bringing his eyes too low for his visor. There really couldn't have been anything wrong with his insides after all, or this sort of treatment would have killed him long ago. But that was small comfort now. One gap in the clouds showed flat, sandy ground, the other a mountainside that was even more forbidding at close range. The clouds directly below them, he hoped, concealed sand.

  
At this latitude—if his guess on that was good—cumulus during early morning floated at a height of, let's see . . . Gregg cursed. A low cloud base, practically hugging the ground. No time for corrections after passing through it. Gregg rapidly recited figures. Allerton, because he could do nothing else, treated them as being accurate and worked the ship from them.

  
In the instant before the clouds engulfed them, a blur of white that exploded into red on the edge of a stabilizer caught the tail of his eye, and for one wild second he felt almost hopeful. Then they hit and a mighty blow tore him free of the chains and flung him into a seething white cauldron that went down forever. Frantically he kicked out with his feet and forced his cracking arm muscles to aid them in impelling him away from the twisted wreckage of his observation post. About twenty feet away from the Wallaby's hull the water was actually cool. Gregg turned over and relaxed, floating slowly upward in the cool, green ocean. He still felt like a half-boiled lobster, but he hadn't any doubt at all that he was going to live. He looked around.

  
The ship was at rest on the sandy bottom of what looked like a shallow bay somewhere in Morocco. All but thirty feet of her was submerged and the outraged denizens of the sea were fleeing from the bubbles made as the high hull temperature transferred itself to the surrounding water. The cargo hatch, which was below water level, opened and two figures clad in space suits stared downwards. At the sight of Gregg floating slowly toward the surface one raised an arm in greeting—or perhaps in silent farewell, thinking him dead. But he had no intention of dying now. He raised one arm in acknowledgment.

  
As he broke surface and floated on his back, the tiny waves washing over his cooling suit and rocking him gently in their embrace, he saw a naval cutter flying the tricolor of France come forging around the rocky, cloud-wrapped headland he had mistaken for a mountain. There must be a seaport nearby, he thought. That would be handy; the day after tomorrow he had to see a man about a job, on Titan.

JAMES WHITE was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and resides there, though he spent his early years in Canada. His first story was printed in 1953. He has since published well-received short stories, novellas and novels, but he is best known for the Sector General series, which deals with the difficulties involved in running a hospital that caters to many radically different life-forms.