But the catalog of unfairness was too long. In all these last days and weeks, Jen Babylon had experienced almost nothing that was fair at all.
As they drove through they found the corridors filling with other beings all on the same errand, fast-flying delta- forms and slow, fumbling kitten-shaped creatures, robots and flesh, all together. By the time Doc Chimp and Babylon had caught up with the silver girl there was solid information. There had been an explosion, yes, and a particularly damaging one. Somehow someone—a fugitive Boaty- Bit swarm, no doubt—had jammed the tachyon-transport chamber so that incoming shipments rammed into matter already there, and the resulting blast had destroyed it. More than just itself. It had taken out the adjacent main power reserve and the farlink computer; it had shattered walls several tiers away, so that some of the reserved non- terrestrial habitats, with their queer atmospheres, were now open to the general oxygen-bearing air. "At least," Doc Chimp chattered, his shoe-button eyes darting back and forth at the devastation, "we've got one thing to be thankful for! The outer hull wasn't touched—we're not all trying to swallow vacuum now!"
"Yet," Ben Pertin snarled, and the chimpanzee's face became woebegone. For certainly the integrity of the hull meant only a reprieve—a short one at that. Without the constant shipments of food and replacements through the transport chamber, without the steady inflow of energy- dense transuranics for the power chamber, without any of the thousand things the orbiter needed to survive, its life span was short. The air would not circulate, and so in one place they would be gasping for breath, in others burning themselves out on excess oxygen. They could not even ask for help! And if they had, help was forty thousand light- years away . . .
Or a day or two.
Pertin's eyes widened suddenly, and he tugged at Babylon's arm, nodded to the others, and drew them all away to a more private part of the dim-lit, strange-smelling tunnels. "We're going to take a lander," he announced.
"We'll never get home in a lander," Doc Chimp moaned.
"Not back to the Galaxy, you fool! Down to Cuckoo."
"Oh, ofcouse, Ben!" cried the chimpanzee, nodding vigorously. "There's air there, and food—why, we could live a long time. Of course, there's no way to get back to our real home from there—"
"Shut up, Doc," Pertin ordered brutally. "We're not going home—not now, probably not ever. And we're not going to settle down and start a family, either. We're going to the temple to meet Zara and Org Rider—and then we're going inside!"
Doris stirred, and the faraway look in her eyes grew intense. "I concur," she said, "in that plan. What happened here is only a symptom; the cause of these events is within Cuckoo."
Babylon hesitated. "But Ben," he began, "somebody must try to repair things here—"
"Somebody will! And maybe they'll succeed—but I don't care whether they do or not." He was both angry and exalted, his long, untidy pigtails writhing as his head jerked in excitement. "I'm going to Cuckoo—if you want to come along, follow me. Otherwise stay here and rot!"
They drove through parts of the orbiter where Jen Babylon had never been before—where warm-blooded, oxygen- breathing mammals had never been, because the environment was death for them. But now it was not. The explosion had sundered the retaining doors, and the poison atmospheres had been blended with the predominant oxygen-nitrogen mix. Babylon's heart was wrenched with pity as they passed still forms of methane-breathers and other exotics—and some not so still, queer soft-bodied things like toads made of jelly, gasping piteously as the corrosive oxygen destroyed their lungs. "Come on!" Pertin yelled furiously. "You can't help them! And we've got to get to a lander before others think of it!"
In the event, they were not quite that lucky; the first lander berths they came to were empty, and at the nearest that was occupied there was a mob of Sheliaks and kitten- creatures fighting to get in. They passed it by—
And found one ready to go, with no one else near— Or so they thought.
But as Pertin, shouting with triumph, cast himself toward its opened lock a dense steel-blue smoke poured out of it, and arranged itself as a shimmering cloak of diamond-bright beings before the hatchway.
Pertin clutched frantically at the wingtip of the silvery girl beside him, swore as his fingers were lacerated, but managed to halt his plunge. "Get out of the way, damn you!" he bellowed.
The shimmering curtain stirred, and the whine of the Boaty-Bits translated itself through their Pmals: "We cannot allow you to enter. You must die with everyone else on the orbiter."
"Die?" Doc Chimp whimpered. "Die again? Oh, but I've died so many times before—please! Don't make me do it again!"
The curtain rippled gently, almost as if moved by pity. Then the voice came: "Some part of you will live. Some part of all of us will live."
Pertin hesitated, almost choking with rage, and Jen Babylon, clinging to the lander-chamber wall, wondered desperately if it would come to an attempt to brush through the shimmering cloak. Could such tiny beings really harm them? Was there any strength behind their commands?
He did not need to find out, for the silvery girl cast Pertin aside, spread her wings, and, hovering in midair, raised her hands toward the fugitive Boaty-Bit swarm. "Live if you can!" she cried. From her fingertips a flood of white-hot energy leaped out at the collective beings, cutting great swaths through the swarm; and again, and again, until only a few scattered individuals fled aimlessly away.
Babylon barely remembered hurling himself toward the lander after Pertin and the winged girl, thrust in by Doc Chimp, followed by the T'Worlie.
Then there was a gentle tremor, and they were free, out in space.
As the thrust of the lander's motors began to move them away and down toward the immense, glowing object beneath them Babylon struggled to a port to look back at the orbiter.
The great, strange creation was dead. The aura that usually hung about its communications antennae was absent; the lights from its ports were dark. All the visible signs of functioning had stopped.
But they were on their way.
Although Jen Babylon had never before seen the temple with his own eyes, he recognized it at once. What was different was the lake. There was no lake. There was only a shallow bed where once a lake had been, and, on the greensward between the caked orange mud and the jungle that embraced it all, half a dozen terrible and strange winged creatures, with tall, lean human figures moving among them. Zara Doy came running to the lander. "We were worried about you!" she called, peering anxiously at the figures as they came out. Pertin explained about the explosion and the fact that they had had to come by slow landing craft instead of the near-instant tachyon transport . . . but Babylon wasn't listening. He was staring at the great creatures that squatted placidly on the margin of the dry lake. Their bodies were glittering bronze, their tails and the tips of their stubby wings shading to silver, as they moved they opened huge red mouths with sharklike teeth.
They did not look like creatures he wanted to be so close to.
Org Rider, grinning, came over to reassure him. "They're perfectly trained," he boasted. "They won't hurt you—as long as their owners are around. This org is mine, Babe Junior; the little one off by itself is Zara's. We can each take one of you, but I brought some friends along—I hope there aren't more than seven of you," he added, peering anxiously toward the lander. "Because it's better if we don't put more than two on each org." Reassured, he introduced the other riders, every one as skinny and as immensely tall as Zara and Org Rider themselves. The names escaped Babylon; his attention was all on the orgs themselves. Ride those creatures? With those great savage teeth so near? Especially when, Org Rider pointed out, each steed was "tamed" only in respect to its own individual rider, and if anything happened to the rider it would have to be considered as ferocious and as wild as any leopard or grizzly bear.