The act of moving quickly, without overbalancing or acquiring a broken leg, left little capacity to spare for thinking; but stray thoughts occasionally leaped into the forefront of his mind and hovered there, dancing, like targets supported on a spray of water. Why am I this? Where is Melissa right now? What am I doing, anyway? Where is Melissa right now? Can my brother survive this? Where is Melissa?
The second major ripple almost took Stirling unawares.
He was less than two miles from the power station and sinking deeper into his maelstrom of repetitious thoughts, when the channel in which he was moving suddenly glinted with daylight far ahead, like the surface mirages on a sun-baked road. The patch of brilliance raced towards him like a pool of quicksilver speeding down an incline; then he realized it was being carried along a massive wave front. Daylight was spilling up between the soil beds as the structural distortions associated with the wave pulled them apart. Stirling looked blankly down at his feet. There was one on each track, and in a matter of seconds there was going to be nothing except thin air right where he was standing.
He hurled the rifle up onto the soil bed on his right and tried to vault up after it, but his foot slipped on the dewy metal. Instead of rolling easily into the green-gold wall of winter wheat, he scrabbled ineffectually at the edge of the huge pan and slid back down onto the tracks. The vast groaning sound he had heard once before caught up with him, and the rails beneath his body began to stir like live creatures. He leaped upwards just as the surface between the rails opened up into a broad highway of light and space. His hands caught two slim bundles of wheat stalks which promptly uprooted themselves and allowed him to slide backwards into the lethal fountain of brilliance. The edge of the pan raked across his wrists; he gripped it and hung on while hell’s legions battled around him. He was lifted upwards so violently he was almost separated from his metal life line, and at the same time a fierce rush of air blasted downwards past him into the low pressure zone outside the He’s shell field.
Stirling clung on, at the center of the inhuman power contest, while the steel forests of the substructure shrieked in torment. As abruptly as it had arrived, the wave passed by on its journey to the rim; and the adjoining strips dropped back together again with a sound like two moons colliding. Stirling was driven down onto the tracks with a blow that paralyzed his solar plexus and shut off his breath. He lay on his back between the rails. He was aware that a secondary ripple might part them at any second, but was completely unable to do anything about it. No breath, no movement, he thought with a sense of having been relieved of an irksome duty. It was not until the ability to gulp air had returned fully that he felt any compulsion to get to his feet and retrieve the rifle.
A low, whistling noise accompanied him as he moved off. He discovered that the previously invisible joint between the strips could now be seen as a hair-crack in the surface, and the He’s air was escaping through it. The structure had withstood its punishment remarkably well, but it was nearing the limits of the redundancy which had been designed into it. Stirling put his head down and tried to move faster, anxious for the ground not to drop away beneath his feet.
The power station’s single door, above the He’s surface, was on the north side. Stirling began cutting diagonally across strips to approach it from the rear. He was checking the mechanism of the rad-rifle as he went. The air was noticeably colder and thinner; and smoke from the guttering perma-flares was drifting low across the soil in insubstantial black ribbons and creating the atmosphere of a winter battlefield. He got into the station’s shadow, activated the rifle, and slowly moved towards the entrance. It occurred to him that he had gotten there very easily— which was faintly surprising, considering how careful Johnny had been about posting look-outs earlier.. Ignoring the flickerings of unease, he stepped around the corner and saw the blunt nose of a machine gun projected from the central doorway. Noting the silvery bullet splashes on the metal, Stirling kept his back against the wall and moved towards the door until he could hear voices inside the building.
“… last time, Jaycee, there’s not enough control. Unless we take a month and go for a system with infinite resolution—and I mean infinite—we’re going to rip this plant right out of the raft.”
“We haven’t got a month, and we don’t need a month.” Johnny’s voice was shrill, rapid, like a speeded-up recording.
“Well, I don’t see how it’s going to work, that’s all.” The voice was both surly and dubious. Stirling recognized it as belonging to Theo.
“I’m not asking you to see anything. Just do what we agreed we could do.”
“The original plan gave me a couple of months or more. You know, Jaycee, you’d fall too—just like the rest of us.”
“Meaning what, Theo? Meaning what?” Johnny’s voice was like glass shattering.
“Meaning, Mr. Jesus Christ, that you really can’t walk on water, or on air.”
Don’t say things like that, Stirling thought, don’t ever … A man sobbed with pain, and the sound was followed by a series of sickening, meaty thuds. Stirling put the muzzle of the rad-rifle through the doorway and looked inside. Theo was lying on the cable-strewn floor; Johnny was standing over him and staring reprovingly at his own fists. Four other villagers were looking on with carefully expressionless faces.
“Now what made me do that?” Johnny smiled sadly and was stooping to lift Theo when he saw Stirling. He shook his head disbelievingly. “Do you know what made me do that?”
“You had to do it, Johnny.” Stirling stepped inside, past the unattended machine gun. “You couldn’t overlook a case of lese-majeste. Or was it blasphemy?”
“You shouldn’t have come back, Victor.”
“Let’s not go through all that again,” Stirling said with a weariness he really felt. He looked at the other men in the gloomy, stinking room. “You’re all going down below, and you’ve a choice of two ways. Run for the elevator, or stay here and shake the He to bits. Which is it to be?”
One of the villagers, a red-haired man named Hewitt, stepped forward immediately. “All we needed was time. It would have worked, you know. We could have flown this thing anywhere.”
“Perhaps,” Stirling said. “Take Theo with you when you leave.”
Hewitt shrugged, then nodded to the others; and they began to gather the unconscious man off the floor.
“You fools,” Johnny squawked. “He’s the one who robbed you of that time.” In his anger he overloaded the prosthetic in his throat, and some of the words were almost lost in a querulous whine. “Our own city on the Moon. There’s nothing to stop us.”
Stirling ignored him and addressed himself to Hewitt. “The He has been evacuated, so you have no hostages. If you move it an inch—especially if anyone gets the idea you would like to get it over a city—Raddall won’t hesitate to vaporize the lot. As well as that, the He’s leaking air at every joint… .”
“Come on you guys,” Hewitt interrupted. “What are we waiting for?” They raised Theo clear of the floor and carried him out.
The last man hesitated at the door. “Jaycee, I …”
Johnny silenced him with one shrill obscenity, turned his back, and swaggered further into the room.
“You too, Johnny,” Stirling said curtly. “We’re all going down together. You’re the main reason I came back.”
“I’ll say.” Johnny kept walking; and Stirling, following behind him, saw he was heading for the master circuit breakers, the ones from which he had burned the locks On his first day in the power station.