He screamed in horror for some time. But thanks to Coriolis effect, he was smashed to death against the shaft long before he struck bottom.
The Bozog climbed up and over the bridge and down onto it, the pale-red cloak of the Ghiskind following.
Wooley saw what happened and applauded. There was more rumbling, booming, and flickering, and she grew suddenly businesslike.
“Vistaru, Zinder, go with the Bozog and the Ghiskind! Get both elevator cars open and ready! Com’on, Star! Let’s help Renard get the others!” They ran back to the open, dark doorway.
“Renard!” Wooley screamed.
“Here!” he yelled. “Damn it! Come and help! I can’t see a blasted thing!”
They could, and Vistaru gently herded the confused and blank other women up the stairs and out the door.
“Come on!” she yelled.
“Mavra! We’ve got to find Mavra!” Renard screamed.
Wooley looked around with her exceptional night vision. “I don’t see her! Mavra!” she screamed. “Mavra!”
Suddenly the whole control room shook with a thunderous wrenching, and part of the far balcony collapsed.
Wooley grabbed Renard. “Come on! Get out of here!” she yelled at him. “We need you to get the others out!”
He looked desperate, tragic. “But—Mavra!” he screamed back.
“She’s got to be dead, or unconscious, or something!” Wooley snapped back. Another spasm shook them and the shaft lights stayed out. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here or we’ll all die!”
With her deceptive strength she picked him up and raced up the stairs. At the top, she looked back, and there seemed to be tears in her eyes.
“Forgive me once more, dear Mavra,” she whispered, more to herself than to Renard, although he heard.
Then she was off across the bridge.
Both cars were packed with bodies, and they stopped and started several times and moved jerkily. Despite moments when they seemed stuck, doomed to die of asphyxiation, both made it to the surface.
Renard, though still in shock, realized it was now his show. “To the ship!” he yelled. Time for mourning later.
Aboard the Shuttle
The shuttle had originally been designed for humans. The Bozog engineers had adapted it for the flight from the Well World to New Pompeii—and though there were now eleven humans and only three nonhumans aboard, they managed. The shuttle had been designed for up to thirty people, and the rear area still had its seats—with two to spare.
The Bozog and the Ghiskind remained with Renard on the bridge. The Agitar struggled to get ahold of himself. “Ghiskind, look in back and make sure everybody’s seated and strapped down,” he snapped. The red specter drifted back, looked, came back, and its hollow-hooded head nodded.
“E-release,” Renard muttered. “Now—oh, yeah. Hold tight!” He checked his own straps and reached over to a keyboard, punching the code in.
Nothing happened.
He cursed, then thought a bit, trying to figure out what he had done wrong. Suddenly, he had it.
“E-lift,” he punched.
The ship broke free and rose at near maximum power.
“Code please,” a pleasant, mechanical voice came at them over the ship’s radio, startling him. “Correct code within sixty seconds or we will destroy your ship.”
“The robot sentinels!” he cried. “We forgot about them!”
But Mavra hadn’t. She’d had him program the entire sequence.
“The Decline and Fall of Pompeii,” came her recorded voice over the radio. It was, Renard thought with some relief, a truly appropriate title.
Now the ship slowed, came almost to a standstill. Before him, the screens showed a meaningless series of figures and lots of circles, dots, and other shapes.
The shuttle began to move forward again.
He sighed and relaxed. “That’s that for now,” he told the others. “She said it would be a day or two before we’d be in range of anybody, unless we run into someone coming our way first.”
He walked back to the passenger compartment.
“Goddamned bushy horse’s tail!” one of the women swore. “Feels like you’re sitting on a rock, and it’s so long you sweep the floor with it!”
Another laughed. “I guess we got off lucky,” she said cheerfully. “He hadn’t thought of the tails until he got the people in from the forest.”
Renard was confused. Except for slight differences in coloration, and the occasional tail, they all looked alike.
“Who’s who?” he moaned.
One laughed. “I’m Wooley, Renard, so relax. This is Star—ah, Vistaru, that is. And these two over here are Nikki Zinder and her daughter, Mavra.” She choked up, but recovered quickly.
He didn’t. “Nikki Zinder…” he mumbled. “Her daughter…”
The girl stared at him unbelievingly. “Are you really my father?” she asked.
He shook his head slowly. “No, somebody else was, somebody human. I have his memories, and his personality, but I’m something else now.”
That seemed to satisfy her, and Nikki, who’d tensed at the question, visibly relaxed.
Renard looked at the others, anxious to change the subject. “What about them?” he asked, looking at the seven other girls.
Wooley undid her straps and walked to him. She was taller than he and her tail trailed like a bird’s plume.
“We’ve explained to them that they have all lost their memories for good,” she whispered to him, “because of the machine. They’ll be okay.”
That relieved him, and his body reminded him of a different need. “We’ve got at least a couple of days on this tub,” he pointed out, “and very little to eat.”
She shrugged. “We can hold out if we have to. Actually, there’s enough organic stuff in the padding and old packs. We can all have something, I think. You’re the one that will probably have the most problem.”
He chuckled and looked at his passengers. “Live on love, huh?” he cracked.
By the time contact was made two and a half days out, they had all practiced what was to be said—and what was not to be said—and their courses of action.
“This is the Com police,” a stern male voice came over the radio. “Identify yourself by number and destination.”
Renard sighed. “This is a refugee ship from New Pompeii, a planetoid formerly owned by New Harmony,” he replied. “I am not a pilot and there is not one aboard.”
That seemed to disturb the police a bit. There was some anxious checking against police computer files.
“Stand by, we will match you and board,” the police ship stated.
“It’s in your hands,” he responded. “However, first I think I better warn you about a few things.”
He proceeded to tell them of Antor Trelig’s party, of Obie, the Well World, everything. The only details omitted concerned how to reach the Well World.
The police didn’t believe, of course, but they recorded the information anyway; then they matched the ships, locked, and two armored cops boarded.
One look at the passengers and they had less reason to doubt.
Com police were an odd group: the wild ones, the undomesticated, the lovers of freedom and the restless. They were carefully recruited in midlife, usually after having been caught red-handed at something nasty.
In exchange for voluntarily undergoing some loyalty conditioning, they were paroled—to police the rest, to protect the Com and the frontier from others just like them.
They generally knew a hot potato when they grabbed it. The taped conversations were coded, sealed, and sent directly to the eleven-member Council Presidium, which made decisions when the full Council could not be summoned—or when it shouldn’t be.
Three Council members were out to the ship in less than fourteen additional hours. They were Com, all right, yet each maintained his own strong character. One, a woman apparently approaching middle age, had an especially regal bearing.