“No, this is something new to us,” Toller went on. “We know there are many other worlds circling distant stars, and we also know that on some of those worlds there are civilizations much further advanced than ours. Perhaps, my friend Baten, what we see above us is… is… but one of many far-flung palaces belonging to some unimaginable king of kings. Perhaps those reaches of ice are his hunting grounds … his deerparks…” Toller paused, lost for the moment in the exotic grandeur of his vision, but was recalled when Steenameert posed a crucial question.
“Sir, do we go on?”
“Of course!” Toller pulled his scarf down from over his nose and mouth so that his words could be heard with perfect clarity. “1 continue to assume that the Countess and her crew have taken refuge in one of our stations, but if we fail to find them there… Why, we now have one other place to look!”
“Yes, sir.”
Steenameert’s eyes, peering from the horizontal slit between his scarf and the edge of his hood, gave no indication that anything out of the ordinary was happening, but Toller was suddenly struck by the fantastic import of his own words. His hand dropped of its own accord to the hilt of his sword as he realized that his entire being was awash with dread.
Even as he was first hearing of Vantara’s disappearance there had been born in him the sickening fear that she was dead. He had refused to acknowledge that fear, driving it out of his mind with manufactured optimism and the demanding activities of the hurriedly-mounted rescue expedition. But new elements had been added to the situation—bizarre, monstrous and inexplicable new elements—and it was impossible to see how they could bode anything but ill.
The six wooden structures were known collectively as the Inner Defense Group—a name which had clung to them since the days of the interplanetary war although it had long since lost all relevance.
Toller and Steenameert had located the group on the Overland side of the ice barrier and about two miles out from the alien station. Taking his ship in a wide curve, Toller had approached the wooden cylinders very cautiously from an outer direction, keeping them between him and the mysterious angular outline. He had chosen the course with a tenuous hope of avoiding detection by alien eyes, although it was purely an assumption that the metallic construct housed living beings. It appeared to be embedded in the crystalline barrier, and when viewed through his powerful glasses had something of the look of a vast and lifeless machine—an incomprehensible engine which had been placed in the weightless zone to carry out some incomprehensible task on behalf of equally incomprehensible builders.
And now, as his ship nudged to within a furlong of the cylinders, Toller was developing the conviction that they were empty. They were nestling against the underside of the frozen sea, apparently held in place by slim girdles of crystal which had grown around them. Four of the cylinders were habitats and stores, and two longer versions were functional copies of the spaceship which had once flown to Farland, but they all had one thing in common—the appearance of lifelessness.
If Vantara and her crew had been waiting within any of the wooden shells they would surely have been maintaining a watch and by this time would have signaled to the approaching skyship. But there was no sign of activity. All the portholes remained uniformly dark, and the hulls obstinately remained what they had been since Toller first saw them—inert relics of years long gone.
“Are we going to go inside?” Steenameert said.
Toller nodded. “We have to—it is expected of us—but…” His throat closed up painfully, forcing him to pause for a moment. “You can see for yourself that nobody is there.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“Thanks.” Toller glanced at the strange alien edifice which projected from the icecap far to his left. “If that had been an aerial palace—as I so foolishly surmised—or even a fortress, I could have clung to some shred of hope that they had taken refuge in it. I would even have preferred to imagine them as the captives of invaders from another star—but the thing looks like nothing more than a great block of iron… an engine… Vantara could have seen no prospect of a haven there.”
“Except…”
“Goon, Baten.”
“Except in a case of the utmost desperation.” Steenameert had begun to speak quickly, as though fearful of having his ideas dismissed. “We don’t know how wide the ice barrier was when the Countess reached it, but if she did so in the hours of darkness—and there was a collision which disabled her ship—she would have been on the Land side of the barrier. The wrong side, sir. It would have been impossible to locate or reach our own vessels, and under those circumstances the… engine could have seemed a likely place to shelter. After all, sir, it is certainly large enough, and there may be hatches or doors leading to its interior, and—”
“That’s good!” Toller cut in as the darkness in his mind suddenly began to abate. “And I’ll tell you something else!
I have been treating this whole affair as though the Countess were an ordinary woman, but nothing could be further from the truth. We have been talking about an accidental collision, but there may not have been one. If Vantara had chanced to see the alien engine from afar she would have taken it upon herself to investigate it!
“She and her crew could be watching us through some vent at this very minute. Or… they might have spent some days exploring the machine and then have decided to return to Land. They could have passed us unseen as we were ascending with the commissioner—such things can easily happen. Don’t you agree that such things can easily happen?”
The tentative way in which Steenameert nodded in assent told Toller something he already knew—that he was allowing the pendulum of his emotions to swing too far—but the black despair he had begun to feel had to be staved off as long as possible, and by any means available. In the unexpected upsurge of hope it mattered little to him that his reactions were immature, that the real Toller Maraquine would have acted differently—he had been restored to the universe of light and was determined to remain in it as long as possible.
Now keyed up to a state in which he had to undertake some physical action, his system thrumming with emotional energy. Toller grinned fiercely at Steenameert. “Don’t just sit there fiddling with the controls—we have work to do!”
They fully inverted the ship and shut down the jet, letting the vessel coast to a gentle halt only fifty yards from the nearest of the wooden cylinders. The gondola’s landing legs actually came in contact with the barrier’s glowing surface, which at close range proved to be highly uneven—a haphazard mass of man-sized crystals. Most of them appeared to be hexagonal in cross-section, but others were circular or square, and many displayed feathery interior patterns of pale violet. The overall effect was visually stunning—a seemingly endless vista of unearthly beauty and brilliance.
Toller and Steenameert strapped on their personal propulsion units and made an inspection tour of the six cylinders. As expected, they were empty except for the provisions which had been stored against an emergency which had never come. The shells, with their varnished timbers and reinforcement bands of black iron, were colder and more silent than tombs. Toller was glad he had satisfied himself in advance that Vantara and her crew were elsewhere, otherwise the opening and investigating of each darkly brooding hull would have been an unbearable experience.
Towards the end of the tour he was struck by the fact that, although the crystals of the barrier had indeed extended themselves downwards to encompass the cylinders, they had done so in a very sparing fashion. Instead of completely engulfing the wooden hulls, as would have seemed natural to Toller, they had encircled each with only a narrow and spiky growth. It was something he might have puzzled over had his thoughts not been fully occupied with what lay ahead.