Ride the Star Winds (106 page)

Terrifyingly the city around the temple was coming to life—but it wasn’t the city that we had explored. The human colonists had laid out their streets in a rectangular plan; these streets were concentric circles connected by radial thoroughfares. And there were the tall, cylindrical towers, agleam with lights, each topped with a shining sphere. Unsubstantial they seemed at first, but as I watched they appeared to acquire solidity.

Grimes saw it too. He shouted to Taylor, to Terrigal, to anybody who was close enough to the fusion generator to do something about it, “You have to cut the power to the winch! We’re dredging up the Past—and we shall be in it!”

“Just show me how, Commodore!” cried the engineer. “Just show me how! I’ve done all that
I
can do—short of stopping the jenny!”

And if he did stop the generator we should fall like a stone.
If
he could stop it, that is.

An aircraft came slowly into view, circling us warily. It was huge, a cylindrical hull, rounded at the ends, with vanes sticking out at all sorts of odd angles. It was like nothing that I had ever seen and possessed a nightmarishly alien quality. There were tubes protruding from turrets that could have been, that almost certainly were guns, and they were trained upon us. What if the alien commander—I visualized him, or
it
, as being of the same species as the lobsterlike being whose body we had been attempting to recover—should open fire? What would happen to us?

Nothing pleasant, that was for sure.

* * *

But we had weapons of our own; we could, at least, defend ourselves if attacked. Sara, I was sure, would enjoy being able to play with her toys. And Sara, I suddenly realized, was beside me in the cramped little airlock, holding her sub-machine gun. I said to her, “What use do you think that will be? What’s wrong with the heavy armament?”

She replied obscurely, “I can’t bring it to bear.” I couldn’t see why she couldn’t. That blasted flying battleship was staying well within the arcs-of-fire of the laser cannon and the heavy machine gun, and a guided missile would home on her no matter where she was relative to us.

Sara opened fire. Bright tracer flashed out from the muzzle of the gun, but not towards the huge flying ship. It may have been the first round of the burst that hit the power cable, certainly it was one in the first half-dozen. There was an arcing sputter of blue flame and the boat, released from its tether, went up like a bat out of hell.

And below us the weird city out of Time flickered and vanished.

I turned to Grimes. “You said sir, that the things that happen or Kinsolving’s Planet shouldn’t happen to a dog. And they shouldn’t happen, either, to respectable employees of the Dog Star Line.”

He managed a grin, then went, “Arf, arf!”