He felt the difference beneath his feet, a vague rise, a gentle bulbousness. He stopped short, teetering on his toes, unbalanced by the violent ending of his racing flight. Carefully, he felt his way back to the beginning of the bulbous section. That would be the edge of the runway. Swiftly, he tore his father's atomic gun from his pocket. Its disintegrating fire flamed downward.
He peered through the four-foot diameter hole into a tunnel that sloped to depths at an angle that must have been a tight sixty degrees. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards of glittering metallic wall, and then the ship gradually took on outline as Jommy's eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. He saw a torpedo-pointed nose, with forward blast tubes distorting the smooth, streamlined effect. It seemed a deadly thing, silent and motionless now, yet menacing. He had the illusion of staring down the barrel of a vast gun, at the shell that was about to be fired. The comparison struck him so sharply that for a long moment his mind refused to hold the thought of what he must do. Doubt came. Did he dare slide down that glass-smooth slipway when any second a rocketship would come smashing up toward the sky?
His body felt cold. With an effort, he lifted his gaze from the paralyzing depth of a tunnel and fixed his eyes, at first unseeing, then with gathering fascination, on the distant, looming splendor of the palace. His thought paused abruptly; slowly his body lost its tension. For long seconds he just stood there, drinking in the glory of the immense, exquisite jewel that was the palace by night.
It was plainly visible from this height between and beyond two great skyscrapers; and it glowed brilliantly. There was no mind-staggering, eye-dazzling glare to it. It glowed with a soft, living, wonderful flame that was never the same color for more than an instant: glorious, lambent fire that flickered and flashed a thousand combinations, and each combination was subtly, sometimes startlingly, different Not once was there an exact repetition.
On and on it sparkled, and lived! Once, for a long moment, chance turned the tower, that translucent five-hundred-foot fairy tower, a glowing turquoise blue. And for that instant the visible part of the palace below was nearly all a deeply glowing ruby red. For one moment – and then the combination shattered into a million bursting fragments of color: blue, red, green, yellow. No color, no possible shade of color, was missing from that silent, flaming explosion.
A thousand nights he had fed his soul on its beauty, and now he felt again the wonder of it. Strength poured from it into him. His courage came back like the unbreakable, indestructible force it was. His teeth clenched, grimly he stared down into the depths so sharply angled, so smooth in the promise of madly swift passage to the distant, steel-hard bottom.
The danger of it was like a symbol of his future. Blank future, less predictable now than it had ever been. It was only good sense to believe that the tendrilless slans were aware that he was here on this roof. There must be alarm systems – there must be.
"What do you keep staring down that hole for?" Granny whined. "Where's the door we want? Time is – "
"Time!" said Jommy Cross. His watch said four minutes to ten, and that seemed to shock every nerve in his body. Eight minutes actually gone, four minutes left in which to conquer a fortress. He caught Granny's thought then, her abrupt awareness of his intention. Just in time his hand slapped at her mouth, and her shriek of dismay was stifled against his palm. The next second they were falling, committed irrevocably.
They struck the tunnel surface almost gently, as if they had suddenly entered a world of slow motion. The slipway felt, not hard, but yielding beneath his body, and there was only the vaguest sense of motion. But his eyes and mind were not fooled. The blunt nose of the spaceship plunged up at them. The illusion of the ship roaring toward them in full blast was so real that he had to fight a wild impulse to panic.
"Quick!" he hissed at Granny. "Use the flat of your hands – slow down!"
The old woman needed no urging. Of all the instincts in her misused body, that of survival was strongest. She couldn't have screamed now to save her soul, but her lips blubbered with fear even as she fought for life. Her beadlike eyes glistened with a moist terror – but she fought! She clung at the gleaming metal, bony hands spread out flat and hard, her legs squeezed against the metal surface; and pitiful though the result was, it helped.
Abruptly, the nose of the ship loomed above Jommy Cross, higher than he had expected. With a desperate strength, he reached up at the first thick ring of rocket chambers. His fingers touched the corded, seared metal, skidded – and instantly lost their hold.
He fell back, and only then did he realize that he had risen to the full stretched-out height of his body. He fell hard, almost stunningly, but instantly, with the special strength of slan muscles, he was up again. His fingers caught one of the big tubes of the second ring of fire chambers with such unbreakable hold that the uncontrollable part of the journey ended. Sick from the strain of over-effort, he let go, and it was as he half sat there shaking the dizziness out of his head that he grew aware of the patch of light farther under the immense body of the machine.
The ship was curving so sharply now toward the tunnel floor on which it rested that he had to bend double as he made his way painfully toward it. He was thinking: An open door, here, now, a few short seconds before the great ship is due to leave. It is a door! An opening, two feet in diameter, in a foot-thick metal hull, with the hinged door leaning inward. He pushed up into the opening unhesitatingly, his terrible gun alert for the slightest movement. But there was no one.
In that first glance he saw that this was the control room. There were some chairs, an intricate-looking instrument board, and some great, curved, glowing plates on either side of it. And there was an open door leading to the second section of the ship. It took but a moment to leap inside and pull the panicky old woman after him. And then, lightly, he jumped for the connecting door.
At the threshold he paused cautiously and peered in. This second room was partly furnished with chairs, the same deep, comfortable chairs as were in the control room. But more than half the space was filled with chained-down packing cases. There were two doors. One led to what was obviously a third section of the long ship. It was partly open, with more packing cases visible beyond and, vaguely, a door leading into a fourth compartment. But it was the second door in the second room that made Jommy Cross freeze motionless where he was.
It was on the side beyond the chairs and led outside. A blaze of light poured from the great room there into the ship, and there were figures of men. He opened his mind wide. Instantly a thought wash from many brains came to him, so many of them that the combined leakage from behind their defective shields brought dozens of half thoughts, menacingly alert thoughts, as if scores of tendrilless slans out there were waiting for something. He cut the thought off, whirled toward the instrument board that dominated the whole front part of the control room. The board itself was about a yard wide, two yards long, a metal-mounted bank of glowing tubes and shining mechanisms. There were more than a dozen control levers of various kinds, all within reach of the finely built chair facing them.
On either side of the instrument board were the great, curved, glossy, semi-metallic plates he had already noticed. The concave surface of each towering section glowed with a subdued light of its own. It would be impossible to solve the alien control system in the few moments at his disposal. Tight-lipped, he sprang forward into the control chair. With swift, deliberately crude purpose, he activated every switch and lever on the panel. A door clanged metallically. There was an abrupt, wonderful sense of lightness; swift, almost body-crushing forward movement, and then a faint, throbbing bass roar. Instantly the purpose of the great curved plates became apparent. On the one to the right appeared a picture of the sky ahead. Jommy could see lights and land far below, but the ship was mounting too steeply for the Earth to be more than a distortion at the bottom of the plate.