“Tanya asked me same question,” Sandy replied, already at the door level. “Get out of my way, will you?” He pushed Bottom aside. When Marguery was safely inside, he said, “You can hear for yourself. Listen!” he commanded.
Demetrius appeared behind Bottom just as Boyle’s people, hiding under the landing craft, started the tape Boyle had provided. From outside came the recorded pleading, broken voice, sobbing in Hakh’hli, “Please! Please help me!” over and over.
“That’s Polly’s voice!” Demmy shouted, leaping toward the door. “Come on, Bottom, let’s see what’s wrong!”
Marguery leaned out the door. “They’re down,” she reported. “They got them both with the sleep darts. Well, Sandy, I guess we’ve done what we had to—”
“Get out of the way of the door,” he ordered.
“What? What do you mean?” She blinked at him. Then, as he toggled the hatch switch and the door slid shut, she jumped away. “Sandy, what the hell are you doing?”
“I’m strapping myself into this seat,” he said calmly. “You can take the one over there.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t,” he said logically, “you’ll get hurt when we take off.” He turned on the preheater, knowing that almost at once the first faint wisps of hot gas would begin to come out of the thrust jets. He moved uneasily in the pilot seat, hoping the crush wouldn’t be too bad in the acceleration when they took off. The seat had fit Polly perfectly. It was, of course, big enough for two or three like him.
It couldn’t be helped.
He touched the ignitor and opened the fuel throttle the smallest crack he could manage. He heard the hoarse white-noise hiss of the escaping flame, but the ship didn’t even shudder at that low setting. He didn’t expect it to. He only wanted to warn Boyle and the others that the main jets would be on in a moment, and hoped they would have the sense to get out of the way—and would drag the anesthetized Hakh’hli out of the way—before he applied power.
“Sandy! Turn that off!” Marguery shouted.
He said, “I told you to strap yourself in.”
“Stop it! Do you think I’m going to let you do this? I won’t permit it!”
He balanced the flat, heavy gun across his knee. It was pointing in her general direction, and his hand was on the trigger, the safety off.
“You can’t help it,” he pointed out.
She stared at him in horror. “Would you shoot me, then?” she gasped.
He said, “Not seriously. Only in your pretty, pretty leg, if I had to. Just to keep you from coming at me. But I’m not a very good shot, Marguery, and I might easily miss.”
Chapter 23
Although there are more than ninety thousand trackable objects in Low Earth Orbit, the space doesn’t look crowded. Low Earth Orbit, after all, includes a vast volume of space. It is a shell perhaps twenty miles thick, completely surrounding the Earth. The probability that any given orbiting object that is big enough to be detected—say, an expended nuclear pop-up laser—is within a mile of any other—say, an ascending Hakh’hli landing vessel—is very low at any given time. However, the orbital velocities are huge. The pop-up travels that mile in a quarter of a second. And the objects that are too small to be detected move just as fast . . . and there are many more of them . . . and hundreds of thousands of them are just as deadly.
Flying the Hakh’hli simulator was not at all like flying the landing vessel itself. Lysander’s inadequate piloting skills were taxed to the utmost. The only thing that saved them from disaster was that there was nothing very hard to do. Taking off was easier than landing. It was the easiest thing in the world: You didn’t have to go any place in particular, you only had to go up.
Compressed back into the huge kneeling-seat, Lysander could barely reach the Hakh’hli-designed controls. He knew what he had to do. It was just so very difficult to do it. Once they were off the ground he had to release his straps and lever himself forward against the enclosing arms of the seat—forcing every muscle to do more work than it had ever done before—in order to engage the magnetic repellers. Then he let himself drop back, panting.
Behind him Marguery gasped, “What are you doing, Sandy?”
“I am flying this Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he said proudly. “Please don’t get out of your seat.”
“As if I could!”
“Of course you cannot do that now,” he agreed, “but once we are at orbital velocity I will cut the thrust. Then you must remain where you are.”
“Or you’ll shoot me.”
“Oh, no, Marguery. It’s too late for you to keep me from taking off, isn’t it? But if you interfere you may very well crash and kill us both.”
She was silent for a moment, panting. Then she called over the distant thunder of the engines, “Would you really have shot me?” He didn’t answer. He just smiled at her over his shoulder. She tried a different tack. “What if I have to go to the bathroom?”
“There is no bathroom on a Hakh’hli landing vessel,” he told her. “In the cabinet behind you and to the right are waste sacks and sponge materials that can be used for that purpose, if absolutely necessary. But for now I think—ow,” he cried, as the lander made a sudden sidewise thrust. He rubbed a bruised shoulder. “We must’ve just dodged a big one! That means we’re getting into the garbage orbit, so hold tight!”
It took more than an hour to dodge and bounce their way through the garbage belt. They were continuously on drive, keeping both of them anchored to their seats. Because they were using the north polar sector of the sky the density of dangerous objects were markedly lower than anywhere else over the Earth. It was still hazardous enough, and definitely a bumpy ride. From time to time alarming noises made Marguery bite her lip, as some microartifact too tiny to dodge splatted against the foil shield and its instant plasma cone clanged against the hull. Some of the clangs were scarily loud . . . but none were followed by the blue-light pressure alarm on the board, or by the hiss of escaping gas.
The little ship’s evasive action threw them about mercilessly. By the time they were clear of the worst of the damage even Lysander was nursing bruises, and Marguery was grunting with pain. Lysander calculated the vectors for converting their circumpolar orbit into the equatorial one of the interstellar ship and applied corrections. “I’m reducing thrust,” he called, squinting with interest at a familiar face that was silently shouting on the pilot’s screen. “You can go relieve yourself now if you need to.”
“Thanks for nothing,” Marguery snarled. “Who’s that looking at us?”
Lysander studied the face. “It’s ChinTekki-tho. He isn’t looking at us, though. At least, he can’t see us, because I’m not transmitting yet. He looks angry, doesn’t he?”
“What a surprise!” she snapped. “What are you going to do now?”
Lysander leaned back against the kneeling-seat, rubbing his bruises. “I’ll answer him pretty soon,” he told her.
“Then what, damn it?”
He looked at her thoughtfully. “Then,” he said, “I’m going to do what I want to do. That’ll be a novelty, won’t it? I haven’t had much practice at that. First I did what the Hakh’hli wanted me to do for most of my life. Then I did what you wanted me to do. So this is a new experience, and there’s a good chance I’ll screw up. But we’re going to try it anyway.”
“Damn you, Lysander!” she began, and then, in a different tone, she said, “Please, Lysander. What are your plans?”