Whitbread’s voice reached Staley through the static. “I’m trying to think like a Brownie, and it isn’t easy. They knew about our suits. They’d know how much radiation they’d stop. How much do they think we can take? And heat?”
“I’ve changed my mind,” Staley heard Potter say. “I am not going down.”
Staley tried to ignore their laughter. He was in charge of three lives, and he took it seriously. He tried to relax his muscles as he waited for heat, turbulence, unfelt radiation, tumbling of the cone, discomfort and death.
Landscape streamed past him through plasma distortions. Circular seas and arcs of river. Vast stretches of city. Mountains cased in ice and cityscape, the continuous city engulfing the slopes to the snowy peaks. A long stretch of ocean; would the damn cones float? More land. The cones slowing, the features getting larger. Air whipping around them now. Boats on a lake, tiny specks, hordes of them. A stretch of green forest, sharply bounded, laced by roads.
The rim of Staley’s cone opened and a ring of parachute streamed back. Staley sagged deep into the contoured seat. For a minute he saw only blue sky. Then came a bone-jarring thump. He cursed in his mind. The cone teetered and toppled on its side.
Potter’s voice rang in Staley’s ears. “I hae found the hover controls! Look for a sliding knob near the center, if the beasties hae done the same to all. That is the thrust control, and moving the whole bloody control panel on its support tilts the rocket.”
Too bad he hadn’t found it sooner! Staley thought. He said, “Get near the ground and hover there. The fuel may burn out. Did you find a parachute release, Potter?”
“No. ‘Tis hanging under me. Yon rocket flame must hae burned it away by now. Where are you?”
“I’m down. Let me just get loose—” Staley opened the crash webbing and tumbled out on his back. The seat was 30 cm lower within the cone. He drew his weapon and burned out a hole to examine the space below. Compressible foam filled the compartment. “When you get down, make sure there are no Brownies aboard the lifeboat,” he ordered crisply.
“Damn! I nearly flipped over,” came Whitbread’s voice. “These things are tricky—”
“I see you, Jonathon!” Potter shouted. “Just hover and I’ll come to you.”
“Then look for my parachute,” Staley ordered.
“I don’t see you. We could be twenty kilometers apart. Your signal is none too strong,” Whitbread answered.
Staley struggled to his feet. “First things first,” he muttered. He looked the lifeboat over carefully. There was no place a miniature might have hidden and lived through reentry, but he looked again to be sure. Then he switched to hailing frequency and tried to call Lenin—expected no answer and got none. Suit radios operate on line of sight only and they are intentionally not very powerful, otherwise all of space would be filled with the chatter of suited men. The redesigned lifeboats had nothing resembling a radio. How did the Brownies intend for survivors to call for help?
Staley stood uncertainly, not yet adjusted to gravity. There were cultivated fields all around him, alternating rows of purple eggplant-looking bushes with chest-high crowns of dark leaves, and low bushes bright with grain. The rows went on forever in all directions.
“Still haven’t spotted you yet, Horst,” Whitbread reported. “This is getting us nowhere. Horst, do you see a big, low building that gleams like a mirror? It’s the only building in sight.”
Staley spotted it, a metal-gleaming thing beyond the horizon. It was a long walk away, but it was the only landmark in sight. “Got it.”
“We’ll make for that and meet you there,”
“Good. Wait for me.”
“Head that way, Gavin,” Whitbread’s voice said.
“Right,” came the reply. There was more chatter between the other two, and Horst Staley felt very much alone.
“Wup! My rocket’s out!” Potter shouted.
Whitbread watched Potter’s cone drop toward the ground. It hit point first, hesitated, and toppled into the plants. Whitbread shouted, “Gavin, are you all right?”
There were rustling sounds. Then Whitbread heard: “Oh, sometimes I get a twinge in my right elbow when the weather’s nasty… old football injury. Get as far as you can, Jonathon. I’ll meet you both at the building.”
“Aye aye.” Whitbread tilted the cone forward on his rocket The building was large ahead of him.
It was large. At first there had been nothing to give it scale; now he had been flying toward it for ten minutes or more.
It was a dome with straight sides blending into a low, rounded roof. There were no windows, and no other features except a rectangular break that might have been a door, ridiculously small in the enormous structure. The gleam of sunlight on the roof was more than metallic; it was mirror-bright.
Whitbread flew low, traveling quite slowly. There was something awesome about the building set in the endless croplands. That more than the fear that his motor might burn out checked his first impulse to rush to the structure.
The rocket held. The miniatures might have changed the chemicals in the solid motor; no two things built by Moties were ever quite identical. Whitbread landed just outside the rectangular doorway. This close the door loomed over him. It had been dwarfed by the building.
“I’m here,” he almost whispered, then laughed at himself. “There’s a doorway. It’s big and closed. Funny—there aren’t any roads leading here, and the crops grow right up to the edge of the dome.”
Staley’s voice: “Perhaps planes land on the roof.”
“I don’t think so, Horst. The roof is rounded; I don’t think there are ever many visitors. Must be some kind of storage. Or maybe there’s a machine inside that runs itself.”
“Best not fool with it. Gavin, are you all right too?”
“Aye, Horst. I’ll be at yon building in half an hour. See you there.”
Staley prepared for a longer hike. There were no emergency rations that he could see in the lifeboat. He thought for a while before removing his combat armor and the pressure suit under it. There weren’t any secrets there. He took the helmet and dogged it onto the neck seal, then rigged it as an air filter. Then he took the radio out of the suit and slung it on his belt, first making one last attempt to contact Lenin. There was no answer. What else? Radio, water bag, sidearm. It would have to do.
Staley looked carefully around the horizon. There was only the one building—no chance of walking toward the wrong one. He started out toward it, glad of the low gravity, and swung easily into stride.
A half-hour later he saw the first Motie. He was practically alongside before he noticed it: a creature different from any he’d seen before, and just the height of the plants. It was working between the rows, smoothing soil with its hands, pulling out weeds to lay between the careful furrows. It watched him approach. When he came alongside it turned back to work.
The Motie was not quite a Brown. The fur patches were thicker, and more thick fur encased all three arms and the legs. The left hand was about the same as a Brown’s but the right hands had five fingers each, plus a bud, and the fingers were square and short. The legs were thick and the feet large and flat. The head was a Brown’s with drastically back-sloping forehead.
If Sally Fowler was right, that meant that the parietal area was almost nil. “Hello,” Horst said anyway. The Motie looked back at him for a second, then pulled out a weed.
Afterwards he saw many of them. They watched him just long enough to be sure he wasn’t destroying plants; then they lost interest. Horst hiked on in the bright sunshine toward the mirror-bright building. It was much farther than he had thought.