When Giyt tried to strap himself in he had to agree. The space intended for eight Petty-Primes was, in fact, large enough to hold an adult human male, but only if the human squeezed himself into the fetal position, knees almost touching his chin. As the Slug pilot came by, checking everyone’s fastenings, he made a sound of reproach at Giyt. “Not proper stowage!” he slurped. “Can cause most grave discomfort in delta-vee conditions. Urgently you lie quite still in both ac- and deceleration modes, otherwise potential for snapping of structural members. Not ship’s, yours.”
Giyt prepared himself for the worst, his thoughts on this new development. What was he to do about the presence of Hagbarth and Tschopp on the suborbiter? They could have only one reason for this last-minute decision to come along. That was to keep an eye on him, and that he could not allow. He would have to lose them somehow.
Then there was no more time to think. The Slug pilot extruded himself to the front of the vessel—actually, in its erected takeoff position, to its top. In the surveillance mirror over the pilot station, Giyt could see the Slug taking his place at the controls. He didn’t have a seat, exactly. All the other passengers, except Giyt, had custom-tailored sitting (or perching) places. All the pilot had was a sort of rubbery bowl.
As it turned out, that made good sense. The pilot didn’t bother to warn the passengers when he. started the engines. He didn’t have to. Giyt heard the rolling thunder of the rockets beneath him. The craft began to shake. The noise grew louder until it was all but unbearable, and then the ship slowly began to lift. Then it picked up speed…
That was when Giyt saw the wisdom of the form-fitting chairs. He knew perfectly well what G-forces were supposed to be like, because everybody did. At least he had thought he did, but he had not anticipated how hard the platform he was resting on would become, or that his chest would be compressed until it was hard to breathe, or that the keycard in his hip pocket and the clasp of suspenders at the small of his back would suddenly feel like knives thrusting into his flesh. He could not see how the other passengers were faring, but in the overhead surveillance mirror he could catch glimpses of the Slug, now compressed into a sort of thick pudding in the bowl, his eye stalks pulled back into his body, a few tendrils stretched toward, but not quite reaching, the toggle controls.
Then the noise stopped.
The pressure was gone. The rocket was in the ballistic portion of its flight now, with no thrust at all and no weight. Giyt took a deep breath, savoring the pleasure of breathing freely again. He glanced toward the passengers next to him, the pair of male Delts who were already twisting their heads to check the condition of their mates behind a pair of similarly packed Kalkaboos. Everyone was chattering away—incomprehensibly to Giyt, because somewhere along the acceleration the translation button had been pulled out of his ear by the G-forces.
While he was hunting for it he heard peremptory gurgling from the Slug and looked up. The pilot, restored to three dimensions, had hoisted himself out of his cup and was growling at Hoak Hagbarth. Who had unstrapped himself and was floating free, coming toward Giyt, “I know, I know,” Hagbarth snapped at the pilot. I’ll get back when I have to.” And then to Giyt: “Damn that Tschopp! He always gets airsick, and he never gets to the bag in time. Look at me!”
He was dabbing at his knee, where there was a definite smear of something on his pants that smelled nasty. Giyt could hear the sounds of Wili Tschopp busily vomiting in the seat just above him.
Giyt didn’t answer him. He managed to stretch an arm to retrieve the translation button he had just spotted on the floor. He didn’t trust himself to speak. Hagbarth hesitated on his way to the toilet. “I guess you’re wondering why we’re here, with the six-planet meeting going on and all.”
“Actually,” Giyt said, “I’m not.” And replaced the button in his ear as he closed his eyes. And didn’t speak to Hagbarth again.
Corning back to the surface wasn’t worse than the takeoff, but it wasn’t appreciably better, either. If Giyt wasn’t having the breath squeezed out of him quite as much, there was instead a whole hell of a lot more shaking and bouncing about as they reentered the atmosphere. Then the ship danced around a bit on its rockets as the pilot finally did in fact do a little piloting, making sure it was centered on the polar factory pad before he let the craft drop onto its massive shock absorbers for the last half meter or two.
Then they were there. They had to wait, strapped in their seats—waiting, Giyt supposed, while people outside foamed the ground the landing rockets had broiled. Then everyone began getting into their cold-weather gear—those that had it, anyway, which is to say everybody but Evesham Giyt. A moment later, responding to some cue from outside, the Slug pilot slithered down past the passengers, bulky in his rubbery cocoon of electrically heated fabric. He wrenched the door open and, without saying a word, left the ship.
Giyt took that to be permission to do the same. So did everyone else, all at once. Even after Giyt got himself free of the restraining gear it took him a while to lever himself down through the tangle of other passengers and out into the shockingly frigid wind. The cold made him catch his breath, which actually hurt as it entered his lungs. It would have been even worse if it hadn’t been for the foamed, but still hot, ground underfoot—
No, he discovered. It wasn’t ground, and it wasn’t foamed, either. What was underfoot was mud, soaked by the melting snow and cooked to a slurry by the landing rockets. It was still steaming, and it was ruining his shoes. They were in a sort of well surrounded by snowbanks, and meltwater was still gurgling away through culverts.
Someone had gouged out a series of planked steps to get them to the top of the snow, where a duckboard path led them to the waiting hovers. Giyt ran toward them, but Hoak Hagbarth ran faster. He was there before Giyt, panting and irritable, no longer bothering to pretend to be friendly. “This one,” he ordered, pointing to one of the hovercraft. “Get in.”
Giyt did as told; this was not the time to try making a break. A Delt followed him; then Will Tschopp, morose and shaky from his airsickness. Giyt was shivering too, his teeth chattering, but at least the car was relatively warm. The bad part of the warmth was that both Tschopp and Hagbarth, though swaddled in their bulky parkas, definitely stank. The Delt took one look at them with both his wandering eyes, then conspicuously leaned away from them as the car began to move.
A few hundred meters away, the factory buildings were bathed in light. Giyt squinted at them, trying to reconcile the remembered schematics of the polar complex with what was before his eyes. Most of the buildings were the familiar golden domes of Delt architecture, linked by their mole-run connecting tunnels, but what the car was heading for was a chunky, square-edged block, ten meters high but dark and windowless. That, Giyt realized, would be the central facility, from which all the others branched off. The car didn’t stop outside, but went right through an air-curtain door without pausing.
Inside, they were in a bare room, corridors leading away from it in several directions. There was a sort of reception desk, untended except for a Delt technician, who roused himself from sleep to greet the Delt from the rocket. There was a distant thudding of heavy machinery in operation somewhere not too far away. At least in the building it was warm.
The two Delts disappeared in the direction of their dome while Tschopp and Hoak Hagbarth headed for toilet facilities—not the same ones, Giyt noticed—to clean up. “Wait here. Maury’ll come and show us around,” Hagbarth growled as he left.