Gauging the last possible instant of deceleration was a matter of trained reflex. When he Applied the brake force, Flandry heard abused frames groan, and he was almost thrown into his own windshield. He came to a halt just above the tossing jungle crowns. At once he shifted to a horizontal course. Faster than any man not trained in space would have dared-or been able-he flew, his landing gear centimeters from the uppermost leaves. Now and then he must veer, barely missing a higher than average tree. He plunged into the wild waterfall of the storm center, and saw lightning rive one such tree not ten meters away.
But up in the sky, his pursuer, having lost speed and course and object, must be casting about in an ever more desperate search for him.
Flandry continued skimming till he was on the other side of the rain. Only then, a good fifty kilometers from Biocontrol Central, did he venture to rise a little and use his own radar again. It registered nothing. Tropical stars bloomed in the violet night haze. The air alone had voice, as he slipped through it.
“We’re the one that got away,” he said.
He regained altitude and looked back into the main section. Kemul sagged in his chair. “You could have crashed us, you drunken amokker!” choked the big man. Luang unstrapped herself and took out a cigarette with fingers not quite steady. “I think Dominic knew what he did,” she answered.
Flandry locked the controls and went back to join them, flexing sore muscles. “I think so too,” he said. He flopped down beside Luang. “Hi, there.”
She gave him an unwavering look. The cabin light was lustrous on her dark hair and in the long eyes. He saw developing bruises where the violence of his maneuvers had thrown her against the safety belt. But still she regarded him, until at last he must shift uneasily and bum a cigarette, merely to break that silence.
“Best you pilot us now, Kemul,” she said.
The mugger snorted, but moved forward as she desired. “Where are we going?” Flandry asked.
“Ranau,” said Luang. She took her eyes from him and drew hard on her cigaret. “Where your friend Djuanda is.”
“Oh. I believe I see what happened. But tell me.”
“When you escaped from the inn, all those imbecilic Guards went whooping after you,” she said, unemotional as a history lesson. “Djuanda had been behind you when you entered, and had stayed in the corridor during the fight. No one noticed him. He was intelligent enough to come in as soon as they were all gone, and release us.”
“No wonder Warouw despises his own men,” said Flandry. “Must have been disconcerting, returning to find the cupboard bare like that. Though he coolly led me to believe you were still his prisoners. Go on, what did you do next?”
“We fled, of course. Kemul hot-wired a parked aircar. Djuanda begged us to save you. Kemul scoffed at the idea. It looked impossible to me too, at first. It was bad enough being fugitives, who would live only as long as we could contrive to get illicit pills. But three people, against the masters of a planet—?”
“You took them on, though.” Flandry brought his lips so close to her ear that they brushed her cheek. “I’ve no way to thank you for that, ever.”
Still she gazed straight before her, and the full red mouth shaped words like a robot: “Chiefly you should thank Djuanda. His life was a good investment of yours. He insisted we would not be three alone. He swore many of his own people would help, if there was any hope at all of getting rid of Biocontrol. So… we went to Ranau. We spoke to the boy’s father, and others. In the end, they provided this car, with plans and information and disguises such as we would need. Now we are bound back to them, to see what can be done next.”
Flandry looked hard at her in his turn. “You made the final decision, to rescue me, Luang.” he said. “Didn’t you?”
She stirred on the seat. “What of it?” Her voice was no longer under absolute control.
“I’d like to know why. It can’t be simple self-preservation. On the contrary. You got black market antitoxin before; you could have kept on doing so. When my knowledge was wrung out of me, Warouw would understand you were no danger to him. He wouldn’t have pressed the hunt for you. You could probably even snare some influential man and tease him into getting you pardoned. So-if we’re going to work together, Luang-I want to know why you chose it.”
She stubbed out her cigarette. “Not for any of your damned causes!” she snarled. “I don’t care about a hundred million clods, any more than I ever did. It was only… to rescue you, we must have help in Ranau, and those oafs would only help as part of a plot to overthrow Biocontrol. That’s all!”
Kemul hunched his great shoulders, turned around and rumbled, “If you don’t stop baiting her, Terran, Kemul will feed you your own guts.”
“Close your panel,” said Luang.
The giant averted his face again, sucked in a long breath, and slid shut the barrier between him and the others.
Wind lulled around the flyer. Flandry turned off the lights and saw stars on either side. It was almost as if he could reach out and pluck them.
“I’ll answer no more impertinent questions,” said Luang. “Is it not enough that you have gotten your own way?”
He caught her to him and her own question went unanswered.
XIII
Ranau lay on a northeasterly jut of the continent, with Kompong Timur a good thousand kilometers to the southwest. Intervening swamp and mountain, lack of navigable rivers, before all the standoffishness of its people, made it little frequented. A few traders flew in during the year, otherwise the airstrip was hardly used. It was still dark when Flandry’s car set down. Several impassive men with phosphorescent globes to light their way met him, and he was horrified to learn it was ten kilometers’ walk to the nearest dwelling.
“We make no roads under the Trees,” said Tembesi, Djuanda’s father. And that was that.
Dawn came while they were still afoot. As the spectacle grew before him, Flandry’s life added one more occasion of awe.
The ground was low, wet, thickly covered with a soft and intensely green moss-like turf. It sparkled with a million water drops. Fog rolled and streamed, slowly breaking up as the sun climbed. The air was cool, and filled the nostrils with dampness. His tread muffled and upborne by the springy growth, his companions unspeaking and half blurred in the mist, Flandry moved through silence like a dream.
Ahead of him, rising out of a fog bank into clear sky, were the Trees of Ranau.
There were over a thousand, but only a few could be seen at one time. They grew too far apart, a kilometer or more between boles. And they were too big.
Hearing Djuanda tell of them, mentioning an average height of two hundred meters and an estimated average age of ten thousand Terrestrial years, Flandry had imagined the redwoods he knew from home. But this was not Terra. The great Trees were several times as thick in proportion-incredibly massive, organic mountains with roots like foothills. They shot straight up for fifty meters or so, then began to branch, broadest at the bottom, tapering to a spire. The slim higher boughs would each have made a Terran oak; the lowest were forests in themselves, forking again and yet again, the five-pointed leaves (small, delicately serrated, green on top but with a golden underside of nearly mirror brightness) outnumbering the visible stars. Even given the lower gravity of Unan Besar, it was hard to imagine how branches so huge could support their own weight. But they had cores with a strength approximating steel, surrounded by a principal thickness of wood as light as balsa, the whole armored in tough gray bark. Tossing in the gentle winds which prevailed here, the upper leaves reflected sunlight downward off their shiny sides, so that the lower foliage was not shadowed to death.