Roffrey flung the ship down through Roth's erratically tugging gravisphere, swinging down towards the unwelcoming surface which throbbed below like a sea of molten lava, changing and shifting like the seas of hell.
There seemed to be no consistent gravity. His instruments kept registering different findings. He fought to keep the descent as smooth as possible, concentrating on the operation, while Willow and Talfryn gasped and muttered, horrified by the vision.
He frowned, wondering what was familiar about the disturbing world. Then he remembered that the one time he had seen Renark and Asquiol they had possessed a similar quality, impossible to pin down, but as if their bodies had existed on different levels only just invisible to the human eye.
Yet this place was ominous. The men's images had been beautiful.
Ominous!
The word seethed around in his brain. Then, for one brief second, he passed through a warmth, a pleasure, a delight so exquisite yet so short-lived that it was as if he had lived and died in a moment.
He couldn't understand it. He had no time to try as the ship rocked in response to the weirdly unbalanced tug of Roth's gravity. He navigated with desperate skill, gliding low over the flame-mist boiling on the surface, trying without success to peer into the gaps, all his instruments operating on full power but few giving him any sensible readings, and lasers scanning the unstable surface.
Had Mary tried, perhaps like Renark, to find the Originators? Had something driven her back to the world that had turned her mad?
Then he spotted a ship on his screens, a ship surrounded by achingly disturbing light-mist. It was the Mark Seven Hauser. Mary's ship. And his energraph told him that the drive was active. That meant it had only recently landed or else was about to take off. He had to land fast!
He made planet-fall in a hurry, cursing the sudden grip of gravity for which he only just succeeded in compensating as he brought his ship close to the other vessel. His gauntleted fingers stabbed at buttons and he got into immediate contact with the Hauser on a tight laser beam.
'Anyone aboard?' There was no reply.
Both Willow and Talfryn were peering at the screen now, bending over his shoulder.
'This ship seems to have arrived only recently,' he said.
It meant nothing to them and he realised that it meant little to him, either. He was pinning his hopes on too thin a circumstance.
He operated the laser, scanning as best he could the surrounding territory. Strange images jumped upon the screen, fading as rapidly as they approached. Harsh, craggy, crazy Roth, with its sickness of rock and the horror of the misty, intangible, unnatural gaps.
That men could survive here was astounding. Yet evidently they could. Asquiol and Mary had been living evidence. But it was easy to see how they went mad, hard to understand how they kept sane. It was a gaping, raw, boiling, dreadful world, emanating, it seemed, stark malevolence and baleful anger in its constant and turbulent motion.
Mary could easily have disappeared into one of the gaps or perished in some nameless way. His lips tightened as he left the screen and opened the spacesuit locker.
'If I need help I'll call you in my suit-phone,' he said as he picked up his discarded helmet. 'If you need them - suits are here.' He went to the airlock's elevator. 'I'll keep my suit-phone receiver on. If you see anything - any trace of Mary - let me know. Have the scanners working full-time.'
'You're a fool to go out there!' Talfryn said heavily.
'You're a non-participant in this,' Roffrey said savagely as he clamped his faceplate. 'Don't interfere. If it's obvious that I'm dead, you've got the ship to do what you like with. I've got to see what's in the Hauser.'
Now he was in the outer lock. Now he was lowering his body from the ship into a pool of yellow liquid that suddenly changed to shiny rock as he stepped on to it. Something slid and itched beneath his feet.
His lips were dry, the skin of his face seemed cracked and brittle. His eyes kept focusing and unfocusing. But the most disturbing thing of all was the silence. All his instincts told him that the ghastly changes taking place on the surface should make noise. But they didn't. This heightened the dreamlike quality of his motion over the shifting surface.
Ina moment, his own ship could no longer be seen and he reached the Hauser, noting that the lock was wide open. Both locks were open when he got inside. Gas of some kind swirled through the ship. He went into the cabin and found traces of the pilot having been there recently. There were some figures scribbled on a pad beside the chart-viewer. The equations were incomprehensible - but they were in Mary's writing!
A quick search through the ship told him nothing more. Hastily he pulled himself through the cabin door and down the airlock shaft until he was again on the surface. He peered with difficulty through the shifting flame-mist. It was thoroughly unnerving. But he forced himself through it, blindly searching for a mad woman who could have gone anywhere.
Then two figures emerged out of the mist and, just as suddenly, merged back into it.
He was sure he recognised one of them. He called after them. They didn't reply. He began to follow but lost sight of them.
Then a piercing shout blasted into his suit-phone.
'Asquiol! Oh, Asquiol!'
He whirled around. It was the voice of Willow Kovacs. Was Asquiol looking for him? Had the fleet been defeated? If so, why had the two men ignored his shout?
'Asquiol! Come back! It's me, Willow!'
But Roffrey wanted to find Mary the Maze; he wasn't interested in Asquiol. He began to run, plunging through hallucinations, through shapes that formed silently around him as if to engulf him, through turquoise tunnels, up mauve mountains. In places, gravity was low and he bounded along; in others it became almost impossible to drag his bulk.
Now he entered another low gravity patch and bounded with bone-jarring suddenness into a heavy one. Painfully he lifted his booted feet, barely able to support his heavy body.
Then a voice - perhaps through his suit-phone, perhaps not. He recognised the voice. His heart leapt.
'It's warm, warm, warm… Where now? Here… but… Let me go back… Let me…'
It was Mary's voice.
For a moment he didn't respond to the shock. His mouth was dry, his features petrified. His body was frozen as he strained to hear the voice again.
'Mary - where are you?'
It was as if he were experiencing an awful dream where menace threatened but he was unable to escape, where every step seemed to take every ounce of energy and every scrap of time he possessed.
Again he croaked: 'Mary!'
But it was not for some minutes that heard the reply:
'Keep moving! Don't stop. Don't stop!'
He didn't know whether the words were addressed to him or not, but he thought it best to obey then.
He began to sway and fall down, but he kept moving. Then it was as if the whole planet were above him and he was like Atlas, slowly crumpling beneath its weight.
He screamed.
Then Willow's voice blasted through: 'Asquiol! Asquiol!'
What was happening? It was all too confusing. He couldn't grasp… He felt faint. He looked up and saw several small figures scurrying across the planet he held with his hands. Then he was growing, growing, growing…
Again he screamed. A hollow, echoing roar in his ears.
His heart beat a frantic rhythm against his rib cage until his ears became filled with the noise. He panted and struggled, crawling up over the curved surface of the planet, hanging on to it as if by his fingernails.
He was a great giant, larger than the tiny planet - but at the same time he was a flea, crawling through syrup and cotton wool.