The Man Who Lost the Sea (9 page)

The lowboy was positioned under the leg, and Deeming blinked at the pounding and screeching going on above him as his tomb was bolted to the landing jack and became a part of it. Then there was a quiet time as tools and ground hands got clear, ports and locks were battened, and the crew assumed coin-off stations. Somewhere a whistle was blowing; Deeming could hear it through his radio, picking it from the intercom, which in turn had it from an outside microphone in the hull. It stopped, and there was a rumbling purr as all six legs began to straighten, pushing the ship up off the ground so that most of the terrestrial matter included in its flicker-field would be air.

Then without warning the earth was gone, the vanished ship lightyears away already before the gut-bumping boom of its airimplosion could sound. Deeming’s stomach lurched, and then there was gravity again and a scene in his ’scope—a rolling grey-green landscape, with a few cylindrical buildings and a half-dozen docking pads.

That’s the trouble with space travel nowadays, he thought glumly. They’ve taken all the space out of it.

The ship hovered perhaps a thousand feet high, drawing anti-grav
power from the beam generator down below. It drifted slowly downwards, positioning itself over one of the empty pads.

Pad 4.

According to his briefing, the correct pad was number 6. With rising anxiety he saw that 6 was already occupied by a small sport flicker.

There was only one way he would ever get out of here, and that was in Pad 6. Nobody in the ship knew he was there. He was not even sure of the origin or destination of the ship, or on which planet they were now landing. If it set down in the wrong pad, he would stay right where he was, leave with the ship, and either starve or set up a howl with his radio and get dragged out at the wrong place at the wrong time by the wrong people.

He turned on his transmitter, fingered it to docking frequency, and said authoritatively, “Wear off, skipper. Pad 6 is ours.” He waited tensely. He hoped the ground control would think it was hearing a crewman speaking to the captain while the captain thought he was hearing ground control.

He heard murmurs in the intercom but could not pick them up clearly. The ship steadied, then began to sink again. He waited tensely, begging his brains to come up with something, anything, then literally sobbed with relief as a space-suited figure tumbled out of the blockhouse and sprinted for the sportster in Pad 6. The little ship lifted and slid into 4, and Deeming’s ship settled into its assigned berth.

For a moment Deeming lay trembling with reaction, and then grinned. He wondered if the captain and the control officer, sitting over a beer later, would think to ask each other who had called out to wear off. That, he said, is how fights start in bars.

He scanned once around him with the ’scope and thereafter ignored the scene. He grasped the metal ring in the center of the floor of his prison and turned it. Faintly, he felt the slight tapping of a relay sequence, and then the surface on which he lay began to descend. Down it went to ground level and still down. He snapped on his helmet light confidently; nothing would be seen from outside but the great round jack foot pressed solidly against the concrete pad. Who
could know that its sole pressed a matched disc of concrete down into the ground?

The movement stopped and Deeming saw the niche in the concrete wall to his right. He swiftly rolled into it, the surface which had carried him down already starting back up. Silently it slid by him—he had not realized it was so thick—until it formed a roof for the underground room which now was revealed. He dropped down to the floor. The space was tiny, just enough for himself and the tiny alien lifeboat which lay welcoming him with glitters of gold from its polished, dust-bloomed surface.

It was a sphere, at first sight far too small to be good for anything. The single bucket seat had been designed for a being considerably shorter than he, and narrower too, he realized, grunting, as he wedged himself into it. The controls were few and simple. The hull material was, from inside, totally transparent. The entire power plant must be under the seat.

He thumbed the sensors at his waist, and settled back to wait. In a moment he heard the hiss of air as his power suit flooded the tiny cabin, and then the sensors, having analyzed the atmosphere and pressure-checked the seals, tinkled cheerfully. With a sigh of relief he wrung his helmet off and unclamped his gauntlets. From his pouch he found the course-coin for Ybo, an osmium disc with irregular edges like a particularly complicated cam. He dropped it in the slot of the course box, and confidently thumbed the red button.

There was no sound. The boat seemed to settle a little, and there was a measurable flash of that indescribable, discomfiting greyness to be seen outside. Deeming was not worried about the sudden vacuum he had created in the hole. It would hardly be noticed amid the rumblings and scrapings of dockside, and the chances were that air would seep in slowly enough to make the whole thing unnoticed.

He looked around him with pleasure. Rockhard’s people had really set things up properly. Though a flickership could coin off from anywhere, on, over, or under the surface, planet falls were generally made high. Contact with anything on the ground from a child’s toy to an innocent bystander could be unpleasant. It wouldn’t hurt the
ship, which would flick out of existence and remove itself automatically at the slightest sign of coexistent matter, but the less resilient planet-bound object would not be so fortunate. One solution was a landing plate, and that was what had been supplied here. It beamed the ship in and brought it to contact unless there was enough heavy matter in the way to be dangerous, in which case the beam operated but the landing guide did not, and the craft would appear with good safe altitude. The device was no larger than a dinner plate, and buried under a sprinkling of topsoil it was undetectable.

The lifeboat nestled near the bottom of a deep narrow cut in hilly land. It was night. A brook burbled pleasantly somewhere close by. Weeds nodded and swayed all about; a searcher would have to fall over the ship before he could see it. Deeming unhesitatingly unbuttoned the canopy and swung it back. He had been on Ybo before and knew it as one of the few “perfect” Terran planets. He breathed the soft rich air with real pleasure, then rose and shucked out of his power suit and stowed it on the seat. He pulled the creases out of his trustworthy reversible jacket, checked his pockets to see that he had everything he needed, closed and locked the canopy, and climbed the steep side of the gully.

He found himself at the edge of a meadow. A beautiful planet, he told himself cheerfully. He stretched, for a moment capturing that open-sky fantasy of his. Then he saw moving lights and shrank down into the long grass, and his personal sky was tight down over him again.

It was only a ground car, and he certainly could not be seen. He watched it veer closer to him and then pass not thirty paces away. Good; a road was just what he was looking for.

He took careful bearings of the bank on which he stood, and then followed the crest of it down to the road. He was gratified to see a milepost by the coping of a stone bridge which carried the road over the brook he had heard. Finding this place again would not be difficult.

He strode cheerfully along the road towards the loom of city lights that limned the wooded hills close ahead. He was still in his
why me?
phase, and he had a moment of real regret that Rockhard
could not have shared this adventure with him, or even done it alone. Well … if he wanted to give away unlimited chunks of credit for work as pleasant as this, it was his hard luck.

He mounted the hill and suddenly the city was all around him. His landing spot wasn’t at the edge of town—it was in Astro City’s huge Median Park. Why, there was the Astro Center, not five minutes away!

It was an impressive building, one of those low, winged structures which seem to be so much larger on the inside than they are outside. Wide shallow steps led up to the multiple doors. It must have been early in their evening; the place was still busy, and ablaze with lights. Deeming knew it was open all night, but later the crowds of spacemen, shipping clerks, students of navigation, flicker techs and school children would thin out. Wonderful, he thought. If he needed crowds, here they were. If not, not.

At the top of the steps a slender girl in her mid-teens emerged from the door and stopped to answer his automatic smile radiantly. And to his intense astonishment she sank to one knee and bowed her head.

“Ah, don’t, my child—please don’t,” said a resonant voice behind him, and a tall Angel swept by him and lifted the girl to her feet. He touched her cheek playfully, smiled, and went into the building. The girl stood looking after him, her hand pressed to her cheek and her eyes bright. “Oh,” she murmured, “Oh, I wish …” Then she seemed to become aware of Deeming standing beside and behind her, and stepped to the side in confusion. “I’m so sorry. I’m in your way.”

In spite of the fact that he wore the brown uniform of mediocrity—his nondescript suit and pathetic crisp moustache—he said with the voice of Jimmy the Flick, “Finish your wish, pretty. You’ll never get a wish that you break in the middle.” And he smiled the glittering happy smile that never belonged with the small silly moustache and desk clerk Deeming’s invisible unnoticeable crowd’s face. Inwardly he seethed. He had been frightened by the sudden appearance of the Angel; captivated by the girl and the utter adoration which for a crazy moment he had thought was his; intoxicated by the nearness of this last barrier to his quest, hyperalert because of
it. And so for the very first time Jimmy the Flick smiled from the desk drudge’s face, creating a new person whose actions he could not quite predict. Like the swift glance he threw upwards. Why that? Why, the sky, of course: he had felt the shuttering sky move upwards a bit to give him room to move. Well,
sure
, he thought in a burst of astonishment,
there’s much more room to move when you don’t know what move you might make next
. A crazy moment, all this in a click of time, and the girl was taking from him his astonished smile in its mismatched face and giving it back to him hued with all the tints of herself, saying, “Breaking my wish …? Oh, I did, didn’t I?”

She put her hand to her hot throat and looked swiftly into the building where the Angel had disappeared. “I wish I were a boy.”

He laughed so abruptly and so loudly that everyone on the steps stopped to catch a piece of it and go on, smiling. “That’s a wish that deserves breaking,” he said, making no slightest attempt to hide his admiration of her. She was slender and tall and had one of those rare gentle faces which can move untouched through any violence.

“But who ever heard of a girl Angel?” she said.

“Oh, so that’s your trouble. Now why would you want to be an Angel?”

“To do what they do. I never yet saw an Angel do a thing I wouldn’t want to be doing. To help, to be kind and wise and strong for people who need something strong.”

“You don’t have to be one of them to learn all those things.”

“Oh yes, you do!” she said, in a tone that would accept no argument or discussion. He understood, and grudgingly agreed. Thinking like an Angel did not give one the sheer strength nor the resources to act like one. “Well, even if you could become a man, that wouldn’t make you an Angel.”

“But then I could get to be one,” she said, craning her neck to look far out over the plaza where there was a glimpse of gold from the cloak of another of the creatures. She glowed when she saw it, even so distantly, and brought the glow full on Deeming when she faced him again. It was unsettling as hyperspace.

“Are you sure of that? Were they just plain men before they were Angels?”

“Of course they were,” she said with that devoted positiveness. “They couldn’t be so much to humans without being human first of all.”

“And how do they get to be Angels?” he bantered.

“No one knows that,” she conceded. “But, you see, if a man can become one, and if I was a man, I’d find out and do it.”

He stood in the full radiation of her intense feeling and irrationally admitted that if she were a man and wanted to be an Angel, or wanted anything else that much, she’d probably make it.

“I’d like to think they were just men, at that,” he said.

“You can be sure of it. What’s your name?”

“What? Uh …” The strange first fusion of Deeming the Invisible with Jimmy the Flick had him disoriented, and he could not answer. He covered it with a cough, and said, “I’ve just come in from Bravado to this place I’ve heard so much about.”

If she noticed that he had avoided her question, or wondered about such a place as Bravado, she gave no sign. The worlds were full of slightly odd people these days and the sky full of names. She said, “Oh, may I show it to you? I work here. I’m just off duty, and I really have nothing else to do.”

He wished he knew what her name was. He soaked up this eagerness of hers, this total defenselessness, trust, earnest generosity, and felt a great choking wash of feeling of a kind quite alien to him. He cared suddenly, cared desperately about what might happen to her in the years to come, and wished he could spare her whatever would be wrong for her; wished he could run before her and remove anything over which she might stumble, kill anything which might sting her; guard her, warn her … He wanted to grip her shoulders and shake her and shout, look out for me, beware the stranger; trust no one, help no one, just look out for yourself! The feeling passed, and he did not touch her or speak of it. He glanced into the building and remembered that there was something he needed in there and must have, no matter what he had to use to get it. He would use this girl if he had to; he knew that too. He didn’t like knowing it, but know it he most painfully did. He said, “Well, thanks! It’s very kind of you.”

“No it isn’t,” she said, with that faithful ardor of hers. “I love this place. Thank
you
,” and she turned and went in. He followed humbly.

Hours later he had what he wanted. Or, at least, he knew where it was. Among a hundred sections, a hundred thousand file banks, dozens of vista rooms with their three-dimensional map of all corners of the known cosmos, among museum halls with their displays of artifacts of great, strange, dead, new, dangerous, utterly mysterious cultures of the past and present, there was a course-coin for Revelo—a little button of a thing which a man could hide in his hand, and which bore the skills to pilot him to the Proscribed planet, and through which, like light through a pinhole, all his being must now pass, to fan out on the other side and place him in a picture of wealth beyond imagining. He glanced at the girl walking so confidently beside him and knew again that whatever she was worth, she wasn’t important enough to turn him aside, precious enough to spare if she got in his way. And this made him inexpressibly sad.