“I thought those sails were supposed to help us!” Arth grunted as he pulled on the little cart. From behind, Dennis pushed, “So maybe it doesn’t work! Not every good idea pans out. Sue me!”
They pushed the cart up a steep incline and finally reached a long, even stretch where they could rest. Dennis wiped perspiration from his brow and motioned Linnora to climb back aboard.
“I can walk some more, Dennis. Truly I can.” Linnora looked angry at being forced to ride and having to watch as the two men did all the work.
Dennis was impressed with her stoicism and courage. Surely her feet and ankles still caused her great pain. Yet it was she who seemed the most anxious to press on rather than find a place in the hills to hide and wait out the coming battles.
“Sure you can probably walk some more,” Dennis said firmly. “But pretty soon you may have to run. I want you to be able to do it when the time comes.”
Linnora looked as though she were about to become stubborn. Finally she sighed.
“Oh, all right! I shall practice the cart some more and work on your sails for you.”
She reached up, grabbed Dennis by the hair, and kissed him soundly. When she finished, she nodded “Hmmph!” as if by doing so she had established some important point. Then she climbed into the cart and took her accustomed seat, looking straight ahead.
Dennis blinked in confusion for a moment but decided not to question anything that felt so nice.
“Uh, Dennis?”
Dennis looked up. Arth was gesturing down the mountainside behind them.
Dennis was frankly getting a little sick of this habit of Arth’s of pointing out bad news. He turned around and looked where the little man indicated.
There, in the bottom of the little mountain pasturage, was a large column of swiftly moving shapes.
Galloping past the shack where they had spent the night swept a troop of cavalry at least two hundred strong. A detachment stopped to search the shepherd’s hut. The rest hurried on, their gray pennants flying as they swept up the trail after the fugitives.
It wouldn’t take them more than twenty minutes to get here.
Dennis shook his head. Looking at the rolling upland country ahead of them, he saw no place to hide for several miles, at least. The trail was constrained to the side of the slope, with rugged banks or drop-offs on either side.
Okay, he thought, what’s going to get us out of this one?
Arth and Linnora were looking at him expectantly. Dennis felt very tired.
I’m fresh out of ideas.
He was about to turn and tell them so when he caught sight of a small flurry of movement to the northeast, in the rough brush that covered the slopes in the direction that led, eventually, to the town of Zuslik. He peered at the strange phenomenon. The disturbance was moving toward them at high velocity.
“What the—?” Linnora and Arth turned and looked the way he indicated.
There was no way they could run from it if it turned out to be something dangerous. Whatever was shaking up the dry bushes, sending dust flying into the air, was moving their way at terrific speed.
Arth and Linnora looked as perplexed as he. “You know,” Dennis thought aloud, “I think maybe it just might—“
The disturbance stopped suddenly, twenty yards away. There was a brief pause, as if the thing below the bushes, whatever it was, were taking its bearings. Then the trail of havoc turned and sped directly toward them!
Arth backed away, lifting one of the swords Dennis had taken from the militiamen he had driven off yesterday. Dennis moved to put himself between whatever it was and Linnora, though he had begun to suspect. . .
A shrub by the road parted in a shower of flinders. The cloud of debris settled slowly, to finally reveal a mound of dust—a pile that advanced on them in a whir of spinning treads.
With a faint whine the Sahara Tech exploration robot’s turret opened. A pair of green eyes winked from the cupola within. Two rows of needle-sharp teeth grinned out from under the metal hood.
“Well,” Dennis said, “it sure took you two long enough to catch up with us.” Nevertheless, he smiled.
The robot beeped. The pixolet just grinned back at him through the cloud of floating dust. Then it shook its head vigorously and sneezed.
On the third fork of River Ruddik, the battle was not going particularly well for either side.
To Baron R’ketts and Count Feif-dei, the advance up the narrow canyon was a slow and dangerous undertaking, wasteful of both time and men. They watched from horseback atop a small hillock in the middle of the steep gorge as their forces trooped past in two columns.
The larger file headed westward, ever higher into the mountains, past heaps of rubble from the most recent of the many costly skirmishes in this hit-and-run war.
The very hill the barons stood on had been formed only this morning, when an avalanche of boulders had rained down upon this spot, trapping twenty soldiers beneath instant headstones.
The toll might have been far worse but for the prowess of the new King’s glider corps. Kremer’s crews had dived in, recklessly brave in the tricky air currents, and strafed the men of the L’Toff with hailstorms of deadly darts. They soon cleared the mountainside of defenders, allowing the lords’ armies to move on.
Baron R’ketts watched the advancing column with an air of grim satisfaction. Even Baron. . .make that King Kremer. . . couldn’t complain much over the pace they were making. At least not reasonably.
In spite of these early reverses Baron R’ketts still expected an easy victory and looked forward to the harvest of this campaign. He had heard wondrous stories of the wealth of the L’Toff. It was said that L’Toff men could practice tools and weapons to perfection in minutes, and the items would stay in that condition forever after! It was also said that L’Toff women had the gift of being able to practice men . . .restoring in their users the virility that had once been theirs.
Baron R’ketts’s spine hurt from all this time on horseback. But he kept telling himself it was worth it. Kremer had promised him wealth and pleasure beyond his fairest dreams.
He licked his lips in anticipation. He could dream of an awful lot!
Count Feif-dei watched the passing invasion with a more dour eye. Whereas his brother Lord gazed upon the stream of armed men climbing into the hills, Feif-dei could only watch the thinner trickle going the other way—farmers, yeomen, practicers, and even journeymen makers from the villages in his county—holding bandages to wounds, wincing on makeshift crutches, or leaning upon one another as they picked their way downslope to the aid stations.
Feif-dei knew that the best, most practiced bandages were saved for the nobility. Many, if not most, of these men would die—if not from blood loss, then from the wasting sickness that devoured the blood from within.
The troops seemed to have little of the bubbling enthusiasm with which they had begun this campaign. Mostly they were tired and hungry and getting just a bit frightened.
Still, there were a few here and there who spoke excitedly about the wealth they would win when they captured the enemy stronghold. Of his own blue-clad troops, he recognized some of the braggarts. They talked big, but unless they were watched closely they had an uncanny talent for being elsewhere when it came to any real fighting.
Count Feif-dei cursed softly, careful so his neighbor would not hear. War was hell, and Baron R’ketts was a fool to savor it. He, Feid-dei, had once visited the lands of the L’Toff and been hosted courteously by Prince Linsee. He had tried several times to explain to R’ketts that the L’Toff were not tremendously wealthy. This campaign had one purpose only, to protect Kremer’s rear for the real war to the east.
But R’ketts would listen to none of Feif-dei’s accounts of what lay ahead, preferring to believe his own fantasies.
Count Feif-dei sighed. Ah, well. At least this struggle would keep R’ketts off of his back for a time. His folk and his lands would probably be as safe under the new King as under the old.
Just let it be a clean victory, he prayed, with as few skilled farmers and guildsmen lost as possible.
From up ahead there came a trumpet sound—a shrill warning. The lords heard a loud clatter of falling rock.
“Oh, no. Not again!” Baron R’ketts moaned and covered his eyes. He sat immobile on his horse, shaking his head.
Feif-dei quickly turned to his aides. “Hurry back to the semaphore post. Inform them of the new ambush and have them call for air support.”
A messenger sped off. Baron R’ketts was still commiserating with himself, making no effort to investigate the situation. Count Feif-dei shook his head in disgust and spurred his horse toward the sounds of fighting.
“We strike and fall back, strike and fall back. . .” the courier explained hoarsely. “We have them stopped on all the other fronts, but in the Ruddik Valley the tide of lowlanders is endless! They just keep coming!”
Prince Proll thanked the exhausted messenger and ordered him taken away to find rest. He turned to his father.
“May I have leave, my Lord, to take forth with our reserves and crush the force in the Ruddik?
Prince Linsee looked tired. He sat beneath a camouflaged canopy, under the trees near the eastern front. Outside they could hear the sounds of messengers coming and going at a run or a gallop. In the outer pavilion the battle staff argued over the tactical disposition of the L’Toff forces with their sparse royal allies.
“No, my son.” The gray-haired Prince shook his head. “Your forces must remain in the north, with Demsen’s scouts. That is where the main attack will come—where Kremer’s full might will fall.”
He did not add that the northern road was probably where the rebellious Lord would reveal his hostage—Princess Linnora—at a moment well chosen to strike at the defenders’ morale.
When that moment came, they would need their best leaders to rally the men for the struggle of their lives. Old men, competent tacticians, could handle the delay along the eastern tributaries, especially when the balloon corps was ready to make its sally. But it would take sharp young fighters, such as Pro1l and Demsen, to give their soldiers heart, to adapt, to recover, and to continue harrying Kremer’s northmen.
For once, Proll seemed to understand. The young man did not complain. He merely nodded and resumed pacing near the doorway, awaiting news.
At last Linsee spoke again. “Send for Stivyung,” he told an aide. “I must know at last if his project is going to bear fruit in time.”
“Who the hell are you guys? Let go of me! What do you think you’re doing? Where are you taking me?”
The guards held the tall foreigner tightly and dragged him over to where the scholar Hoss’k waited in his red robes, sitting below the trees on a hundred-year-old portable chair.
The sandy-haired alien looked Hoss’k up and down. He straightened his shoulders. “Are you the grand high potentate around here? You’d better tell me what’s going on! Never mind what you did with Nuel. . .I want to know what you did to our zievatron!”
“Be silent,” Hoss’k said.
The foreigner blinked. He reared back. “Listen, fatso, I’m Dr. B. Brady, of the Sahara Institute of Technology. I am a representative of Dr. Marcel Flaster, who happens to be—“
There was a loud thump as the alien hit the ground, knocked flat by the burly backhand of one of the guards. “The scholar said to be silent!”
The fellow rolled over slowly and looked up, blearily. He did not open his mouth again.
Hoss’k smiled in satisfaction. This one would indeed turn out to be more tractable than Dennis Nuel had been. His bluster meant he had few internal reserves and would bend quickly once shown the way of things. He already showed the signs.
Apparently the guard had used too much force, though. The foreigner was slow to become lucid again.
No matter, Hoss’k thought. By the time we are on our way back again, the high passes will be filled with my Lord’s troops. I’d rather make a procession past them, with my new prize, than journey down that silent, eerily empty road one more time.
“Are they gone yet?”
Linnora turned and went “Sshhh!” at Arth, who ducked quickly back under the bushes and was quiet.
Dennis watched anxiously as the Princess peered through the underbrush at the side of the road. The dust of the last of the cavalrymen settled slowly.
She had insisted on being the lookout. Dennis wasn’t too happy about it, but he had to admit that she was right. The job didn’t put much strain on her feet, and she was less exhausted than the two men. Besides, Dennis had witnessed few things more remarkable than the girl’s eyesight.
He lay back on the dry sticks and needles beside the little cart. They had pushed the wagon into this thicket fifteen minutes before. It had been just in time, as the lead elements of Kremer’s cavalry pounded around the rim of the mountain only moments later.
He and Arth had fallen to the ground exhausted, hardly noticing the apparently endless procession of horsemen who galloped past. It was only in the past few moments that the roar in Dennis’s ears—and the laboring of his lungs—had quieted enough for him to hear anything at all.
Dennis felt a sharp tug on his sleeve. He turned his head and saw the robot standing only inches away. It had nudged him with one manipulator arm. Its red “attention” light flashed.
Dennis rose onto one elbow and looked at the small line of text that appeared on the machine’s little screen.
“Oh, hell. Not now!” he told it.
The thing still wanted to fulfill the very first function he had given it—to report what it had found out about the inhabitants of this world. No doubt it had discovered a lot, but now certainly wasn’t the time for a debriefing!
He patted the little robot on its turret. “Later, I promise, I’ll listen to everything you have to tell me.”
The machine’s lights winked in response.
“Okay,” Linnora said. She used the Earth term she had picked up from Arth. “The last of the horsemen are gone. From what we saw on high, they cannot be followed closer than an hour by any other forces, even more cavalry.”
“All right,” Dennis said, groaning as he sat up. “We chance the road again.”
It was the only way deeper into the mountains. And deeper to the south they had to go if they were to arrive in time to do the beleaguered L’Toff any good.
Dennis stood up and held out his arm. The pixolet swooped down from its vantage point on a branch overhead, from which it had watched the cavalcade of horsemen. Grinning, it seemed to think the episode a wonderful joke.
Of course, they never would have made it this far without Pix and the ‘bot.
This forest thicket in which they had hidden had been more than three miles away when they first caught sight of their pursuit. He and Arth could never have hauled the cart this far in time.
But the robot proved to be powerful when he ordered it to lend a hand—or claw. It was at least as good a tractor as the donkey had been. They covered those three miles quickly.
During the race for shelter, Dennis was certain that he had felt that queer resonance effect again between the humans and the Krenegee, directed at the tools they were using. It had been a mild version of the felthesh trance. He was sure the cart and robot had changed again even over that short stretch.
At his command, the ‘bot took its place under the wagon again. Two of its three arms clamped onto the undercarriage to hold on.
Already the arms were beginning to look suited to the task.
Linnora and he pushed the cart through a gap in the bushes, while Arth ran back up the road to keep watch. Once they were onto the highway, Linnora climbed aboard and reset the glider sails. Dennis almost stopped her, but then he shrugged and let her finish. Who could tell? The flapping things might frighten some party of troops they came upon.
Arth came hurrying back. “Th’ whole army’s headed this way, Dennizz! At th’ rate they’re comin’ we got no more’n an hour’s head start.”
“Okay. Let’s get going.”
Linnora belted herself into the cart, its sleek, almost streamlined sides glistening in the sunshine. Arth climbed aboard and took the brakes, whose friction bars and bindings had begun to look almost like machine-designed units.
Dennis remained on his feet to help push. He would hop in when they came to a downhill slope.
Linnora had already begun to enter her practice meditation. Maybe he was becoming more sensitive, or maybe it was the presence of the pixolet, but Dennis could already feel its traces begin to fill the space around him.
The pixolet, seeing a better place to position itself than his shoulder, abandoned him and launched itself to the top of the twin masts. The sails drooped under its weight, but the creature seemed happy enough. Its purring intensified the feeling that strange powers were already at work, helping mould the cart into something better.
Fine, Dennis thought, but I’d still rather have an armored personnel carrier, made from scratch by the Chatham Works in England.
With a sigh he nodded to his motley crew, and signaled the robot to commence pulling at top speed.
Dennis pushed on the upslopes, and ran alongside on the downhill sections while Arth applied the brakes and Linnora steered. The robot whirred and the sails flapped.
Above them all, the little Krenegee beast purred, amplifying the queer resonance that seemed to glow around them like an aura. The afternoon felt crystalline, like a faceted gem, and the use of the cart became like a complicated dance to music just beyond the edge of hearing.
Clearly they were getting better at working together to make the practice trance work.
It gave Dennis a strange sense of exhilaration. Through the pixolet, he could almost feel Linnora’s thoughts as she concentrated. It seemed to tie them together, somehow closer than they otherwise might have been. Arth, too, became part of the matrix, although the Krenegee did not focus upon the little thief quite as much.
Dennis caught occasional glimpses of Pix perched upon its drooping sails. The creature grinned, enjoying the flow of purpose that flooded through it into the machine their lives depended on.
And it was changing. Dennis pushed the cart until he found he had to run simply to hang on! At the top of a steep rise he ordered the robot to stop, and he climbed aboard up front to take the reins from Linnora. The straps, he found, had grown softer and easier to hold.
He was about to start off again when Arth nudged his shoulder and pointed. Dust rose from the trail behind them. Only a mile or so off, they could see another troop of horsemen, followed by a seemingly endless column of foot soldiers, winding along the mountainside.
Trapped! They couldn’t afford to go much faster, or they’d catch up with the units ahead of them. But to slow down would be disastrous!
“I’m going to take down these blasted sails,” Dennis said. “Look at how they’re drooping. They’ll just attract attention, and there never was much wind, anyway.”
Linnora stopped him. “Don’t, Dennis. I am certain they have helped us remain stable and have slowed us safely over a few of those steep downhill stretches, although I admit I don’t understand why. I am sure the cart is practiced for them by now. Removing them would only hurt.”
Dennis could only trust her fey second sense. He kissed her quickly, then turned forward and told the robot to proceed.
They sped off down the mountain road.
Less than a mile farther on, they rounded a corner to sweep by a squad of resting cavalrymen. There were at least ten surprised faces, caught in a blur as the cart fluttered past like some great running bird. Men dove to both sides to get out of the way, tumbling in the dusty slope. Shouts followed the fugitives and soon there were charging troopers after them.
Dennis concentrated on his steering. The cart was already screaming along faster than ever. This time, however, he felt he was in control. In the grip of the practicing trance, he felt lightheaded and powerful.
Let ‘em follow! They can eat our dust!
He heard Arth laugh from the back of the car, taunting their pursuers. Linnora was singing softly, an old warriors’ song, with a strong beat and tone of defiance. It wove itself into the trance they shared. Dennis shouted in exhilaration.
The road turned then, and they came into sight of a battle.
Just ahead, in a flat clearing between the hills, the first fighting was taking place.
It looked like the invaders had caught a party of L’Toff by surprise. About fifty of Kremer’s cavalrymen rode around a harried band of warriors dressed in faded green. The mountain men defended themselves in a disciplined manner with their pikes. No horseman dared approach too closely. But neither could the spearmen withdraw. And from their nervous glances to the north, it was clear they knew the rest of the invading army was not far away.
The defenders looked up in consternation as Dennis drove the car over the lip of the hill. A few cavalrymen, expecting nothing but help from that quarter, shouted in triumph.
The shouts turned to dismay as a great flapping juggernaut zoomed down on them. Dennis had no choice but to head into the thick of them. The ground on the right was too rocky, and on the left, only a dozen meters away, was a steep drop-off.
The cavalry horses were well trained, but not for anything like this whirring, flapping contraption! They screamed and bolted, carrying their hapless riders in every direction.
Dennis could sense Arth, standing up in the rear of the bouncing cart, striking out right and left with a staff and yelling with all his might. One knight who charged alongside seemed about to slash at the broad sails with his battle-ax, but just in time Arth’s swinging pole knocked him completely off his horse.
A glimpse behind told Dennis that more of Kremer’s soldiers were coming. And about a quarter mile ahead, a large contingent of green-clad fighters was approaching from the south, to the rescue of the beleaguered pikemen. A fair-sized battle was brewing.
He urged the robot to speed up. Their only chance was to get beyond the fighting, quickly!
Swerving hard to the left, Dennis struggled to avoid a collision, sending another pair of horses rearing in panic in their dusty wake.
If their sudden appearance had thrown off the invaders’ tempo and enabled a few defenders to escape, that was all to the good. But Dennis’s top priority was to get the cart to the other side of this little vale intact. Once beyond, they would be safely behind friendly lines. They could ride unopposed all the way to Linnora’s home!
He felt something move between his legs. He glanced down and saw the pixolet grin back at him from deep within the cart, out of harm’s way. The little Krenegee clearly knew how to take care of its own skin.
On looking up again, Dennis cursed quickly and slewed hard to the left. The wagon swept past a cluster of frightened pikemen, missing the stunned soldiers by the breadth of one of the sails.
“Dennizz!” Arth flailed. Dropping the quarterstaff, he plopped down into the cart. “Dennizz, where are you goin?”
“Where do you think I’m—Oh, no! Robot! Full reverse!”
The little machine tried to comply. Its treads screamed. Clouds of dust rose from below them.
The steep slope before them had been hidden by a thin hedge of shrubs beside the road. They plowed straight through the narrow barrier in a shower of branches. Then they were over, rushing pell-mell down a forty-degree embankment!
“Aaaaagh!” he heard Arth say.
“Hoooyyy!” Linnora contributed.
Dennis struggled to steer as the cart bounced and flew downslope, “Slow down!” he urged loudly. He practiced slowing the descent as hard as he could and could feel the others doing the same.
“Slow down!”
Ahead, less than a hundred meters away, was the edge of a precipice. And there didn’t seem to be any way to stop in time.
Et Two Toots
“Now, remember what I told you all!” Gath shouted at the other aeronauts. From the undercarriages of ten bobbing balloons came cries of assent.
Gath turned and gave thumbs up to Stivyung Sigel, riding the lead balloon of the south contingent. The big farmer nodded. He brought his hands to his mouth.
“Cast off!” There were two trumpet calls.
Axes split the tethers. Sandbags dropped. Hands spread fresh coals onto the smoldering fires beneath the open bags. One by one, the bright balloons rose past the tall trees and into the sky.
They had waited long for a favorable wind. At last one had come that blew the right way but that would not force them past the battle too soon.
Underneath rode a convoy of support troops ready to catch anchoring ropes when the time came to tether the lighter-than-air flotilla.
Gath was filled with excitement. To be aloft and in action was wonderful after all the waiting. It was a vindication of all the work he and Stivyung had put in with the L’Toff makers and practicers.
They drifted eastward with the wind. It felt like hours, but actually they were soon over the Ruddik heights, where the enemy had made their deepest penetration so far. Stivyung’s contingent floated over the south spur, rimming that side of the canyon. There his aeronauts dropped anchors to waiting men. The L’Toff soldiers below scampered over the rocks to seize the anchors and tie them down.
When Gath’s forces were over the north spur, they repeated the procedure.
The aeronauts had not had a chance to practice the technique. Fortunately, only one balloon from the south contingent drifted free, floating unanchored off to the east, rising rapidly.
That was a smaller loss than Gath had expected. They had planned to send one eastward anyway, with a report to the King of Coylia. Even Kremer’s gliders could not stop the message if the balloon gained enough altitude in time,
If the L’Toff on the ground cheered when the balloons hove into view, the enemy below stared up in dismay. Rumors had already spread of the great, round monster that had roared into Zuslik one night, months ago. And now here were ten of the behemoths, glaring down with fierce, painted faces. The attackers fell back nervously from the high redoubts and muttered nervously while their captains conferred over this new development.
Here, where the L’Toff had chosen to make their chief stand, the terrain was extremely rough. A series of deadly prearranged rockfalls would make any direct ground assault costly.
But all these defenses required that Kremer’s gliders be kept away so the L’Toff fighters on the heights could work unmolested.
That was the purpose for which the balloon detachment had been sent. The test was not long delayed.
“There!” One of the young bowmen in Gath’s gondola pointed.
Against the sunlit clouds, high in the noontime sky, at least two dozen black shapes were outlined. The gliders looked like hawks in the distance, and they stooped, suddenly, like great birds of prey.
“Get ready!” the captain of a neighboring gondola cried.
The enemy looked small and distant for what seemed the longest time. Then, in an instant, they were down upon them! All around Gath, his bowmen were shouting.
“There! Shoot!”
“They’re coming in too fast!”
“Quit complainin’, kid! Just stop em!”
The babble of voices was almost as unnerving as the wicked black wings that rushed amongst them.
“Yahoo! I got one!”
“Great! But don’t get cocky!”
“Watch out for those darts!”
There were screams of pain and cries of triumph, all in a matter of seconds. Then, almost as swiftly as they had come, the gliders were speeding away along the ridgetops toward carefully charted updrafts. They left behind three of their squadron, wrecked and scattered on the rubble below.
One more glider, unable to recover from a tear in its dragon wing, crashed directly into a cliff face as Gath watched. The defenders, both above and below, cheered.
“All right!” Gath yelled hoarsely as soon as he caught his breath. “They’ll be back, and it won’t be as easy to drive them off next time!
“Until they return, though, we concentrate on the enemy on the ground! Mark your targets, and make those arrows count!”
It would be difficult to get more ammunition. Resupply would be slow and chancy by bucket. And now the enemy’s ground commander would certainly throw everything he had at the points where the covering balloons were anchored. Already Gath could see the invaders marshaling their forces for an assault on the other slope of the crumbled canyon, where Stivyung Sigel’s four balloons were moored.
The attacks came, thereafter, at hourly intervals. The archers took a terrible toll of invaders on the ground: But each arrow lost was precious—in the making, in lost practice, and in the difficulty of hauling up supplies under fire.
And the defenders died in ones and twos as the battle went on. The L’Toff fighters on the surface fought to hold their ground and to defend the anchor points. The forces of the barons fought just as desperately to take those ridges.
The long afternoon passed like a slow agony, punctuated by moments of sheer terror Within a few hours, the tactical picture began to emerge.
Here on the northern spur, the defense was going well, for now. Gath’s archers took a heavy toll of attackers trying to climb the slopes and beat back three separate glider sorties.
But on the southern spur things had begun to go badly.
Before the sun passed beyond the highest peaks, two of Sigel’s southern balloons were lost, one when its bag was pierced. It settled slowly to the ground. The other one drifted off over the eastern plains when its anchor point was taken. It was too slow at ascending and finally fell under a rain of darts as Kremer’s gliders converged from all around, like wolves upon a wounded lamb.
Gath wondered if Stivyung could hold out until nightfall. The two remaining southern balloons couldn’t give each other much support.
Gath watched helplessly as enemy reinforcements arrived late in the afternoon. . .including a dozen fresh gliders. Kremer seemed to have an endless supply of them! Either that or his generals were stripping the other fronts of air support to handle this sticky spot in the center.
As the afternoon wore on, Gath watched as the entire flock of gliders swooped down on the two balloons on the lonely slope. And there was nothing he could do to help!
“Slow down! Slow down!”
Dennis realized that both Arth and Linnora had taken up his chant. The practice resonance was fully upon them.
Silvery fire seemed to dance around the body of the cart, and their acceleration down the tumbled slope did, in fact, seem to be slackening. But that didn’t keep them from moving inexorably toward the cliff. It loomed ahead ten meters, five meters, two meters away.
At the very last minute the robot’s whirling treads took hold and brought them to a stop in a boiling cloud of dust, teetering at the edge of the precipice.
Arth grabbed the narrow trunk of a shattered sapling that had partly broken the cart’s momentum. The little thief held on for dear life.
Dennis wiped floating grit from his eyes and purposely avoided looking down. He tried to clear his throat of dust so he could politely ask the robot to redouble its efforts to back them away from the cliff edge. But the cart chose that moment to settle forward a few more inches. It dropped with a thump, leaving the robot’s treads hanging out over open space.
“Okay,” Dennis sang, a little bit upset by this time. “Linnora? Arth? You folks all right? I’ve got an idea. Let’s all sidle backward, nice and easy.” He felt Linnora begin to loosen her strap. She obviously had the same notion. It was time to get the hell out of here.
Something whizzed past Dennis’s head. At first he thought it was some huge insect, but as he turned he glimpsed a second arrow passing through the space his ear had just occupied a second before.
“Hey!” Arth howled. An arrow quivered in the sapling’s trunk inches from his fingers.
Up the talus slope Dennis saw at least a dozen of Baron Kremer’s gray-clad archers working their way cautiously downward, getting into position to administer the coup de grace. Capture, apparently, was no longer an option at this point.
They didn’t really have to bother, Dennis realized. Arth was visibly weakening and soon would have to let go of either the tree or the glider. He and Linnora could never slide back quickly enough to make a difference.
Is this it? Dennis looked around for some way out—while arrows zinged past them or stuck, humming, to the sides of the cart,
Linnora was fumbling for her knife. Dennis wondered what she was trying to do. Then it hit him.
The glider! If we can only detach it from the cart in time, we might be able to escape on it!
But first the wings would have to be let down. They were being held up—vertically, like sails on a boat—by a stout length of rope. Linnora was going for it with her knife.
It took almost half a second for it to occur to him to remember the amount of tension that was in that cable. He cried out in dismay, “No! Linnora, don’t!”
It was too late. She sliced the rope. The wings snapped down violently, knocking two deadly arrows out of the air.
Perhaps it was a rational decision, but Arth was never able to explain why he let go of the tree and not the cart. But when the little wagon bucked suddenly, like a mad stallion, Arth tumbled into the back of the cart behind the great wings. Linnora and Dennis were whipped around to face forward as their strange vehicle teetered dangerously, rocking unstably on the edge.
The pixolet had hopped onto Dennis’s lap from the floor. The little creature had the expression of one who by this time had had quite enough. This trip was no longer fun.
About to abandon us again? Dennis thought at the thing, unable to do anything else.
The Krenegee shrugged, as if it understood. It flexed its wing membranes in preparation to depart. Then, for the first time, it took a good look over the rim of the cart into the canyon below.
“!!”’ it peeped out loud and shivered. Its little glider membranes were never meant for true flight. They wouldn’t keep it from being smashed to jelly after a fall like that! Dennis almost laughed as the smug little thing at last showed consternation.
All of this took about one second of telescoped time as the cart rocked, and then slid over the edge. A flight of arrows missed them by inches as their trusty machine toppled over the precipice. The pixolet wailed. Arth cried out. Dennis held on as the canyon opened up below them.
At that moment it was Linnora who saved them.
She started to sing.
The first, high note was of such startling clarity, that it seized their attention away from the hypnotizing view of the onrushing canyon floor. As a practice team, they had worked together for a long time. Her call served as a focus. Out of habit—quicker than volition—the felthesh trance snapped into being all around them.
Dennis felt Linnora’s mind touch brush against his own. Then he felt Arth, and even the Krenegee beast—taking this all seriously for the first time since he had known the smug little thing. Space around them seemed to flash and burn with energy. The power was there, and the desperate will to change reality.
Unfortunately, there was no focus. One had to be using something for the Practice Effect to operate!
Dennis’s conscious mind was in no condition to provide an answer. It was a good thing, then, when his unconscious stepped in and took over. In that instant, with the ground rushing up at them, Dennis seemed to feel time contract all around him. In a haze of chaotic energy that felt strangely like the field around a zievatron, he blinked once, twice, then closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, he found himself sitting next to a dark-haired young man with a thick, waxed moustache. The fellow wore a white leather coat that flapped in the stiff breeze, and a pair of old-fashioned flight goggles over his eyes.
They sat together in a strange contraption of white canvas and wooden struts, laced together by piano wire. Although air rushed past them, the hazy-edged reality that surrounded them seemed entirely gray and motionless.
“You know, we had the most bully awful time getting the proper approach to warping the wings,” the fellow explained over the rush and roar. He had to shout to be heard. “Langley never really understood, you see. He rushed ahead without testing his designs in a proper artificial wind tunnel, as Wilbur and I did. . . .”
Dennis blinked in “surprise. And in the time it took to close his eyes and open them, his surroundings changed.
“. . . so I had to test the X-10 personally, get it? The engine took up over half the damned thing’s length! Busted the first few props we tried to smithereens! They called it a flying bomb! Couldn’t ask anyone else to take it up, see?”
The man with the handlebars and goggles was gone, replaced by a fellow with a thin moustache, a sardonic expression, and a floppy fedora hat. He shook his head and laughed.
“Hard work is what it took. Sure, I had inherited money and got to stand on the shoulders of giants. I admit it! But I sweated blood straight into each of my designs.”
The space around them was still that hazy, half real shimmering, like the boundaries of a dream. But the flimsy array of wood and canvas had been replaced by a thrumming cocoon of riveted metal and glass, vibrating with the power of a thousand horses.
“And don’t think I don’t already feel the shoes of later inventors sometimes,” the pilot of the monoplane grinned, “right here.” He patted his own shoulder and laughed.
The fellow looked familiar, though he couldn’t place him—like someone he had read about in a history book somewhere. Dennis blinked again, and when he reopened his eyes the dreamlike scene had shifted again. The dark-haired man and the cramped cockpit were gone.
It was only a brief glimpse, this time. The engine roar had muted somewhat. There was the scent of chrysanthemums, and for the moment his eyes were open he saw a woman wearing a straw hat and a bright, pink scarf. She smiled at him from her controls, and winked. Through the cockpit window he saw water, all the way to the horizon. Then the transition happened again.
Now he was seated at the copilot’s station in a huge twin-engined airplane—a bomber, from the looks of it. There was the smell of gasoline and rubber. In his hands a wheel vibrated with a powerful rhythm. A balding man in a khaki uniform smiled at him from the other set of controls.
“Progress,” the gangly fellow grinned. “Boy, you sure are doing it the easy way, fella. It took us old-timers years and plenty of sweat to get this far, I’ll tell you!”
For the first time in this crazy dream, Dennis thought he understood what someone was talking about. He recognized this man’s face. “Uh, I know. I guess you really could have used the Practice Effect back in your day, Colonel.”
The officer shook his head. “Naw. It was a whole lot more fun doing it for ourselves, even if it was slower. I only ask that the universe be fair, not that it grant me any special favors.”
“I understand.”
The Colonel nodded. “Well, each of us does what we have to do. Say, do you want to hang around here for a little while? We just took off from the Hornet, and we’re on our way to have a little fun.”
“Uh, I think I’d better be getting back to my friends, sir. But thanks, anyway. It was a pleasure to meet you and the others.”
“Think nothing of it. It’s only a shame you couldn’t stick around to meet some of the jet jockeys and astronauts. Talk about pilots!” The Colonel whistled. “Ah, well. Just remember, my boy. Nothing substitutes for hard work!”
Dennis nodded. He closed his eyes once more as the wind roared and the dream unraveled around him like fog melting in the dawn.
Seconds that had seemed telescoped into years evaporated, and as the crystalline shimmer at last parted, Dennis found himself flying!
He wasn’t exactly sure how much time had passed, but a powerful lot of changes had been made in the cart-and-glider combination—as evidenced by the fact that they were still alive.
Even as he looked around, a pale, shimmering light was leaving the struts and fabric of the wings—now anchored firmly to the wagon-fuselage, sweeping rakishly outward and back like those of a swift. The cart itself seemed to have lengthened and grown a nubby tail. Its narrow nose aimed proudly upward, into the rising thermal in which they slowly climbed.
It must have been one of the most powerful felthesh trances in Tatir history. The pixolet slumped exhausted on his lap, breathing hard and staring about in disbelief. Dennis was still tentative enough in his control of the glider not to be willing to turn around, but he’d be willing to wager Arth and Linnora were in similar shape.
His dream still lingered at the fringes of Dennis’s mind. He could almost smell, again, the gasoline and oil, and feel humming metal.
If the dream had gone on, no doubt he would have met more of the heroes of aviation, called up by his unconscious to provide a focus for the intense practice trance. But it had lasted long enough, and it left him with a vague feeling of pride. Such men and women were the heritage of Earth. By pluck and ingenuity they had carved miracles out of reality— the hard way.
Dennis leaned out over the side to look. The updraft was petering out. It wouldn’t take them back to the level of the mountain road they had fallen from. He would have to find another place to land within gliding range.
There was a plateau nearby, a spur jutting eastward out from the mountains. Cautiously, Dennis leaned left and sent their craft into a gentle bank. He had seen a flat spot on the mesa. It would have to do. Beyond that was only a tumbled plain of boulders as far as the eye could see.
Still, they couldn’t stay up here forever
Dennis wished there was some way to get the robot up in the cockpit with them. He didn’t want it damaged in the landing. But it would just have to take its chances. He called down for the machine to prepare as best it could.
The precaution was probably unnecessary, he realized. The rugged little thing could well be the only one of them to survive their encounter with the ground,
He used up some height gliding far out over the plain. It took a while to reach a position along what he hoped was a gently appropriate glide path, then bank around and begin his approach. It had to be just right, because they weren’t going to get another chanced
While he got ready, he spared a moment to glance back at the others. Arth was soaked in sweat but gave the thumbs-up sign. Linnora simply looked exalted> as if she could ask no more than to have experienced what they had just gone through. She leaned forward slightly and pressed her cheek against his. Dennis smiled hopefully and turned back to make ready for the landing.
“All right, everybody. We’re going in!”
The “flat spot” that rushed up at them was actually a sandy bank with at least a ten-degree slope from left to right, only a dozen meters from the plateau’s northern rim. A crosswind came from twenty degrees left of the nose. Dennis steadied the balance so the wings compensated as well as possible. He felt Linnora’s hands grip rightly around his chest. At the last moment he brought up his knees and braced himself.
The fabric wings luffed slightly as the glider swooped in like an albatross and touched down gently on the soft sand. One wingtip briefly touched ground, slewing them around slightly as they jounced along the embankment. Gravel flew up behind them as Arth put all his weight into the brakes and the robot’s treads spun furiously.
Dust was everywhere! Blinded, Dennis steered entirely by instinct.
At last they rolled to a stop. When the sand had settled and tears had washed some of the dry powder from his eyes, Dennis looked out to see that the glider had halted close to the edge of the mesa. Another jumbled drop of about fifty meters lay only six feet away.
One by one—first Arth, then Linnora, and finally Dennis— they loosened their straps and stepped out. Barely able to keep to their feet, they stumbled to a thin patch of grass under the sparse trees.
Then Arth and Linnora fell to the ground, dizzily, and laughed. This time Dennis collapsed with them and joined in.
Several minutes later, the pixolet raised its head from the well of the craft. It still twitched and shook, from fright and from the power of the trance it had been forced to take part in. For a long while it simply stared at the crazy humans.
Finally, as the sun settled behind the western peaks, it sniffed disgustedly and dropped back down beside the gently humming robot to fall instantly to sleep.
In spite of their leisurely pace, Bernald Brady was saddle-sore well before the stout character in the red robes called a halt for the night.
It was the first time Brady had ever ridden a horse. If ever he got a chance to decline further invitations, he was certain it would also be his last. He dismounted clumsily. A guard came over arid loosened his bound hands, motioning him to hobble over and sit beneath a tall tree by the campsite.
Soon there was a fire, and the smell of trail cooking wafted through the air.
One of the soldiers scooped a thick dollop of stew and came over to hand Brady a beautiful, feather-light ceramic bowl. The Earthman ate as he marveled at the bowl. He had never seen anything like it before. It helped him justify the theory he had come up with.
Although his “captors” played a good game at this business of acting like primitives, they couldn’t hide their true nature. Things like this beautiful, high-tech bowl gave their game away.
These people clearly came from an advanced culture. One look at the road, and the wonderful self-lubricating sleds, told him that. There was only one explanation for what was going on here.
Obviously Nuel had spent the last three months living among the locals. And all that time he had been plotting, knowing that if he only waited long enough Flaster would surely send him, Brady, over to try one more time to fix the zievatron. In all that time Nuel had no doubt ingratiated himself with these people, perhaps promising them rich trading rights with Earth! In return, all they would have to do would be to help him pull one great big practical joke!
It sounded like Nuel’s way of setting up priorities!
No doubt members of an advanced civilization would have plenty of leisure time on their hands. Brady had witnessed “midaevalists” on Earth, who liked to ride horses and play with old-fashioned weapons. Nuel must have hired a troupe of history-nuts like those to help him pull a fast one on the next guy to come through the zievatron!
These fellows played pretty rough. They had really put a scare into him for a while, especially when the fat boy kept questioning him about every piece of his gear.
Brady sniffed. That had been carrying it too far! Imagine, people who could make swords out of gemstones being perplexed over his rifle and his porta-microwave!
Oh, these people knew Nuel, all right. Whenever he mentioned the fellow’s name the big “priest” got a funny look on his face. The “soldiers” clearly knew exactly who he meant, though they never admitted a word.
Yeah, Brady nodded, by now convinced, They were all in it together. Nuel was having his revenge on him for switching those chips on the replacement circuit boards.
Well enough was enough! It was going to stop here! The game had gotten altogether too rough. His hands were chafing and he had been battered and bruised. . .Brady decided it was time to stand up for his rights. With his jaw set he put down the now-empty bowl and started to get up.
At that moment one of the “soldiers” screamed.
Brady blinked as he saw one of the men stagger about the campsite with an arrow protruding through his throat. Suddenly, everyone else was diving for cover!
This was carrying realism just a bit too far! Brady watched the stricken soldier gurgle and die, choking on his own blood.
He swallowed and had the uneasy feeling that maybe his theory might need some amending.
He heard someone shout, “Guerillas! Sneakin’ aroun’ behind our lines!”
One of the “officers” barked an order. A detachment of men hurried off eastward into the trees beside the road. There was a long wait, followed by a series of loud noises— clangings and loud screams. Then, a little while later, a messenger came running back into camp.
The courier hurried over to the fat man in red, who was taking no chances, huddled beside a tree nearby.
Brady crawled to the edge of his own tree where he could listen.
“. ,. ambush coverin’ a turn in th’ road. I guess one of ‘em musta got impatient, waitin’ for us, and sprang th’ trap early. That was a lucky break for us. But we’re still stuck here until we can get word to our army.”
The fat man in red, the one called “Hoss’k,” licked his lips nervously.
“We used our last pigeon to inform my lord Kremer that we had captured another alien wizard! How shall we get a message through, then?”
The officer shrugged. “I’ll send a dozen men in different directions after dark. All we need is for just one to get past ‘em. .
Brady crawled back around his tree and sat there a long moment, blinking. His comfortable theories dissolved around him, and he was left with a confusing, dangerous reality.
I didn’t want to come here in the first place! he complained silently to the universe.
He sighed. I should never have let Gabbie talk me into volunteering!
“My Lord, we have received a message from Deacon Hoss’k. He is on his way to North Pass now. He claims to have found—“
Baron Kremer turned and snarled, “Not now! Send word to the fool to stay where he is and not to get in the way of the northern force!”
The messenger bowed quickly and ducked out of the tent. Kremer turned back to his officers. “Proceed. Tell me what is being done to clear Ruddik Valley of the floating monsters.”
Kremer had only just arrived, as the new day dawned, by three-man glider. His head throbbed and he felt just a little sick. His subordinates sensed that he had a short fuse, and they hurried to comply.
“My Lord, we were stopped yesterday by the coming of night. But Count Feif-dei’s forces are now closing in upon the two monsters remaining on the southern rim of the canyon. We are going to provide heavy air support, assisted by the reinforcements you ordered sent from the other fronts.
“As soon as the last two southern monsters are eliminated, well be able to assault the ridge beyond. It will be costly, but the L’Toff positions will then be untenable. They will have to fall back, and the remaining four monsters on the northern slope will then be surrounded. There will be nothing they can do.”
“And how many gliders will have been lost by then?” the Baron asked.
“Oh, not many, my Lord. Perhaps fifteen or twenty.”
Kremer slumped into a chair. “Not many. . .” He sighed. “My brave, lucky pilots.. . so many. A quarter, almost a third lost, and none at all left to support the northern force.”
“But your Majesty, the monsters will all be gone. And by now the L’Toff and the Scouts are fully engaged on all fronts. A breakthrough anywhere, and we shall have them! That is especially true here. If we cut through to the west today, it will split the enemy in half!”
Kremer looked up. He saw enthusiasm on the faces of his officers, and he began to feel it himself once again.
“Yes!” he said. “Have the reinforcements brought up. Let us go to the head of the Ruddik and watch this historic victory!”
When morning came, Dennis and Linnora lay side by side, wrapped in one of Surah Sigel’s blankets on the sandy bank, watching the sun rise over the bank of eastern clouds.
Dennis’s muscles felt like limp rags that had been all used up. Only here on Tatir a rag that was so thoroughly used wouldn’t be in as bad shape as he was. It would only be getting better at cleaning up.
Nearby he heard Arth doing his best to throw together a breakfast from the scraps left over from Surah’s larder.
Linnora sighed, resting her head on Dennis’s chest. He was content just to drift, semiconscious in the soft, sweet aroma of her hair. He knew they would have to start thinking about a way off of this plateau soon. But right now he was reluctant to break the peaceful feeling.
Arth coughed nearby. Dennis heard the fellow shuffle near the edge of the precipice, mutter unhappily for a moment, then walk back to the trees.
“Uh, Dennizz?”
Dennis did not lift the arm from over his face. “What is it, Arth?”
“Dennizz, I think you’d better have a look at somethin’.”
Dennis uncovered his eyes. He saw that Arth was pointing to the west.
“Will you stop doing that?” Dennis asked as he and Linnora sat up. He couldn’t quite quash a feeling of irritation toward Arth’s penchant for pointing out bad news.
Arth was gesturing toward the ridge they had fallen from as dusk fell yesterday, with arrows slicing through the air around them. According to Dennis’s wrist-comp, it had been less than ten summer hours since they had plunged over that cliff, straight into the heart of the Practice Effect.
Dennis could hear faint sounds of fighting from that direction. A dust plume of battle rose from the ridgeline above them. The cloud seemed to be moving slowly, inexorably southward.
The L’Toff were clearly being pushed back.
But that wasn’t what concerned Arth. He pointed to a place just behind and below the dust of battle. Dennis looked carefully at the ridge face, illuminated by the rising sun. Then he saw them.
A small detachment of men had dropped away from the fighting on the heights. They were working their way downslope along the slash in the cliff that a spring waterfall had gradually made. They were descending carefully, belaying each other with ropes over the steeper parts.
So Kremer’s troops weren’t letting go yet. They knew how badly their Lord wanted the fugitives and had sent a contingent to chase them, even to this lonely plateau.
Dennis estimated they would be here in a little more than two hours, perhaps three.
Linnora touched his shoulder. Dennis turned around, and winced when he saw that she was pointing now, as well!
You too? He looked at her accusingly before following her gesture.
Off in the south, where she indicated, something bright moved against the sky. Several somethings. He envied Linnora her prodigious eyesight.
“What. . .?”
Then he knew. The bigger object was a balloon, drifting in the morning light. Its great gas bag was aflame, and several dark, malign objects darted and swooped about it, closing in for the kill.
So. In spite of a brief, peaceful respite, the battle still raged around them on many fronts. It would be best to get off this mesa before Kremer’s rangers made it down here. It might also be desirable to see what their little band of adventurers could do to help the good guys.
And Dennis thought he just might have a way.
He drew out the sharp, hundred-year-old knife Surah Sigel had given him, and turned to Linnora and Arth.
“I want both of you to find me a big piece of sturdy wood, about so thick by so long.” He indicated with his hands.
When Arth started to ask questions, Dennis merely shrugged. “I want to do some carving,” was all he would say.
Linnora and Arth looked at each other. More magic, they thought, nodding. They turned without another word, and hurried into the brush to look for what the wizard wanted.
When they returned they found the Earthman deep in conversation. . .partly with himself and partly with his metal demon. He had pulled the glider to within a few feet of the edge of the cliff and installed the robot underneath it once again. A pile of gear lay on the sand beside the craft.
“We found a stick,” Arth announced.
“And it looks like what you asked for,” Linnora finished for him.
Dennis nodded. He took the five-foot branch and immediately started whittling it, chopping away loose bark and shaving slivers away in long, curved arcs. He mumbled to himself distractedly. Neither Linnora nor Arth dared interrupt him.
The pixolet arose out of its slumber within the cart/glider and clambered up onto the windshield to watch.
Linnora frowned in concentration. “I think he wants to take off again,” she whispered to Arth. She could tell, for instance, that he had already started emptying the craft to lighten it. “Come and help me,” she told the thief, and started tugging at the chair and bench to tear them out of the glider.
Only once in a while did they look up to see the progress Kremer’s rangers had made in moving steadily downslope. They were getting closer all the time,
Arth and Linnora had just about completed their task when Dennis finished his.
Linnora had thought herself long past surprise at anything the wizard would ever do. But then Dennis stopped carving, admired his handiwork for a second, then reached under the glider to give the stick to the robot!
“Here,” he told it. “Take it firmly in the middle with your center manipulator arm. Yeah. Now spin it clockwise. No, I want a rotary motion along the axis of that arm. That’s right!
“Don’t strain yourself at first, but spin it as fast as you can. Your purpose,” he emphasized, “is to cause a breeze to blow back toward us, and generate forward lift.”
He turned back to the others and smiled. When they only stared back at him, he tried to explain. But all they really were able to get down was the name of the new tool. . .a propeller, he called it.
The stick turned faster and faster. Soon it was only a blur, and they began to feel a stiff wind.
Dennis asked Arth to stay on the ground, holding onto the rear of the craft to keep it from moving. Linnora climbed aboard and took her accustomed position.
Dennis picked up the Krenegee, who whimpered slightly in exhaustion. “Come on, Pix. You’ve still got a job to do.” He climbed in front of Linnora and nodded for her to begin the practice trance.
“Propeller.” Linnora mouthed the new word to memorize it. She picked up her klasmodion and strummed.
On Tatir, sometimes even people benefited from practice. The four of them slipped into another felthesh trance as if they had been born to it. It was nowhere near as intense as the powerful storm of change they had wrought so desperately the day before. But soon there was a familiar shimmering to the air near the front of the glider, and they knew alterations were taking place.
Now it was a gamble against time.
The last of the balloons on the south spur floated away just after sunrise as the defenders of its anchor rope fell before the dawn onslaught. These aeronauts, at least, had learned from prior disasters. Immediately they dumped overboard all of their sandbags, weapons, clothes, anything that could be cast loose. The balloon shot up into the sky, past the waiting, vulturelike gliders. The ligher-than-air craft caught a fast air current to the east and relative safety.
Gath watched it happen and hoped that balloon was the one with his friend Stivyung aboard.
Well, at least they had managed to bold off the inevitable for an entire day. During the night the smoldering glow of the balloon maws had been a reminder to the troops below that Kremer wasn’t having everything his own way.
“The gliders will now be free to attack our forces on that ridge,” a L’Toff bowman in the gondola with him said. ‘They’ll sweep the southern spur, enabling invader troops to follow and enfilade our forces in the valley.”
Gath had to agree. “We need reinforcements!”
“Alas, our reserves have all been pulled back to stay the thrust from the northern front.”
Gath cursed. If only he had been able to come up with a way to drive balloons against the wind. Then they might have been of some use in the northern fight as well. Then they would not have been sitting ducks for those damned gliders!
“Here they come again!” one man shouted.
254 The Practice Effect
Gath looked up. Another stoop of the damned dragon-winged devils was on the way. Where had they all come from? Kremer must have brought in every one he owned to finish them off.
He picked up his bow and made ready.
Arth struggled to maintain his grip on the tail of the cart-glider. His heels skidded in the powdery sand. The blowing air was filled with floating grit.
“I can’t hold it back!”
“Just hold on a little longer!” Dennis urged over the backwash. The wind from the whirling stick was now a roar, blowing their hair about wildly. The cart kept bucking and heaving as the rushing air made the wings strain and hum.
Linnora leaned into the brakes, her long, blond hair whipping around her.
Arth shouted again, “I can feel it slippin’!”
Dennis yelled back, “I’ve got the robot running its treads in reverse. In just a minute you can hop aboard, Linnora can release the brakes, and I’ll tell the robot to take off!”
“You’ll tell the what to what?” Arth was straining as hard as he could.
“I said,” Dennis shouted, “I said I’ll tell the robot to let go! Then you can—“
He never finished his sentence. There was a sudden shift in the whine below them as the treads stopped whirling in reverse and immediately slammed into forward gear.
“No! I didn’t mean now!” Dennis was whipped back against Linnora as the craft bolted forward like a racehorse released at the gate.
Caught in a spray of sand, Arth let go just in time. He sprawled face first to the ground, inches from the cliff edge. “Hey!” He coughed and spat and sat up, complaining. “Hey! Wait for me!”
But the “cart” had already leaped out of earshot. It was out over the boulder canyon, doing cartwheels in the air.
Arth watched, enthralled, as the flying machine zoomed high, stalled, fell into a steep careen, then recovered into a series of powered loop-the-loops.
The maneuvers certainly were amazing, Arth thought. The wizard must be showing off for his sweetheart. And who could blame him? Arth’s heart soared with the wild, capering dance of the airplane.
Still, for one brief moment he thought he heard a loud, foul-tempered curse as the machine flew past the plateau.
He watched, amazed, until a noise reminded Arth about Kremer’s soldiers. A hurried look around a small bluff told him the party of rangers had finally arrived. Arth decided then that he had better go about finding himself a hiding place.
Linnora was laughing again. And once again, it was hardly a help.
Dennis’s pulse pounded and he gasped for breath. The Princess clung so tightly to him that it was hard to breathe!
He tugged at one of the strings he had attached to the robot so he could control the crude airplane by hand and not have to shout all of his commands. He pulled gently, so as not to overcompensate, having learned that lesson the hard way. Several times he had almost stalled the little craft, or sent it into uncontrollable spins.
Finally, the damned thing steadied down. The robot spun the propeller at an even rate, and Dennis got the contraption flying smoothly away from the vicinity of cliffs, rock walls, and downdrafts. He set the plane into a slow climb, then sagged back against Linnora’s soft, strong embrace, hoping he wasn’t about to be sick.
Linnora laughed richly, and hugged him out of sheer exhilaration.
“Oh, my Wizard,” she sighed. “That was marvelous! What a great lord you must be in your homeland. And what a land of wonders it must be!”
Dennis felt his breath returning. In spite of that period of panic and almost disaster, things had turned out pretty much as he had planned this time. It looked like he was getting the hang of the Practice Effect!
He couldn’t help feeling happy, sitting back as she rubbed the muscles of his neck and played happy nuzzle games with his ear. He controlled the plane with gentle nudges, letting it gain practice with use.
The pixolet peered over the side, bright-eyed with amazement as they cruised leisurely across the sky.
Although he was content to rest there in her arms for the moment, Dennis realized he would have to set Linnora straight about one thing quite soon. She had altogether too much confidence in him. No doubt about it. She frequently had the habit of assuming he knew what he was up to when all he was doing was improvising to survive!
The forests and plains of Coylia stretched out below them, a sea of ambers, greens, and blues. Soft white clouds arrayed in drifting columns as far as the eye could see.
Dennis ran his hand along the laminar smooth side of the craft they flew. . .handiwork he had created, helped by his comrades, in only two days’ time! He marveled at the wonderful adaptations that had converted a rickety little hand-carved cart into a sleek flying machine.
True, the thing would not normally have been possible, even here. It had taken a combination of his own inventiveness and the rare practice resonance—derived from the melding of man, L’Toff, and Krenegee. But still. . .
Pix hopped up onto his lap. Apparently it had decided to forgive him. The creature settled in for a long purr. Dennis stroked its soft fur. He looked up at Linnora, remembering her last remarks, and smiled.
“No, love. My world is no more wonderful than this one, where nature’s so kind. It’s usually been a hard life there. And if it’s become anything but brutal and futile in the past few generations, it’s thanks to the sweat and hard work of millions. Given the chance, any man or woman of Earth would choose to live here instead.”
He looked out over the plains and realized that he had made a surprising decision. He would remain here on Tatir.
Oh, he might return to Earth temporarily. He owed the land of his birth any help he could give it from what he had learned here. But Coylia would be his home. Here was where Linnora was, for one thing. And his friends. . .
“Arth!” He sat up suddenly. The plane rocked.
“Oh, my, yes!” Linnora cried. “We must go back!”
Dennis nodded as he gently turned the plane around.
And then there was the war, too. That madness had to be dealt with before he thought any more about settling down in this land and living happily forever after
From his hiding place under a fallen tree, Arth heard the cries of the soldiers. For a long time they stood out on the plateau while he listened to their amazed exclamations. They were clearly more than a little surprised by what they had seen. He heard superstitious mutterings and the Old Tongue word “dragon” repeated over and over.
The minutes passed. Then there came more excited shouting. Arth heard a terrifying roar, followed by sounds of panicked flight. The sequence was repeated several times. Each time the roar seemed louder and the frightened yells sounded farther away.
Finally, he crawled out of his hole and cautiously emerged to look around.
He saw Kremer’s rangers running for their ropes, trying desperately to escape the plateau as if the devil himself were after them.
Even he flinched at first as the large, roaring form swooped down toward him from the clouds. Then he saw two small shapes wave at him from the cockpit of the plane.
Arth could understand the soldiers’ flight. His own heartbeat sped as he watched the thing, and he knew what it was!
Arth understood that it would be dangerous to try another landing on the sloping, sandy embankment. The chance wasn’t worth taking while there was still a lost war to be won. He was only grateful Dennis and Linnora had taken the time to drive the rangers away before moving on to more important matters.
Arth waved farewell to his friends, and watched as the flying machine accelerated away to the south. He shaded his eyes and followed it as it headed toward the line of battle, far down the line of mountains.
Finally, when it had become a mere dot on the horizon, he went over to the pile of supplies Linnora had emptied onto the gravel bank. There he also found several backpacks, dropped in panic by the departing soldiers.
He sighed as he picked through the detritus. There was enough here to live off of for quite some time.
I’ll give them a couple days to win th’ war and come to get me, he thought. If they don’t come back by then, maybe I’ll try to build one of them flyin things myself!
He hummed softly as he fixed himself a meal and imagined soaring in the sky, no slave to the winds.
The battle was going badly. About noon, Gath ordered every spare implement cast overboard in preparation for a desperate bid at escape.
It did little good. The next flight of gliders to attack sent a hail of darts tearing through the canopy. Fewer arrows than ever rose to meet the black shapes. The great gas bag began to sag as heated air escaped.
Another of the bowmen was killed in the onslaught. The body had to be cast overboard without ceremony. There was no time to do otherwise.
Below, the men guarding the tethers were hard pressed. All knew that it was only a matter of time until the forces holding the south rim fell back under pressure from the air, leaving their flank unguarded,
Kremer had obviously seen the opportunity his salient up the Ruddik offered. He had drawn reinforcements away from the northern front, where Demsen’s Royal Scouts had been putting up stiff resistance. Gath had seen several contingents of mercenaries arrive, along with companies of Kremer’s gray-clad northmen, only minutes before the most recent glider sortie. The final assault on the salient would not be long delayed. And once they broke through here, the heartland of the L’Toff would lie open.
Their balloon was leaking steadily now. Gath couldn’t even estimate how long it would stay aloft, practice notwithstanding.
Then, as if all that weren’t enough, one of his men grabbed his shoulder and pointed, asking, “What’s that?”
Gath squinted. At first he thought it was another damned glider. In the bright afternoon light something new seemed to have entered the sky battle. . .a large winged thing, with a span greater than the biggest of Kremer’s aerodynes.
This thing growled, and it flew as no glider he had ever seen. There was something powerful about the way it prowled across the sky.
Gath’s men muttered fearfully. If Kremer had added another element to the fray...
But no! As they watched, the growling thing rose high, then dove into the updraft at the canyon mouth to attack the slowly rising column of gliders there!
Gath stared in amazement. The intruder swooped about the lumbering wings, disturbing the smooth air they depended upon. The turbulence of its passage sent them out of control. One after another, the black shapes shook, tumbled, and fell!
Most of the glidermen ultimately regained control of their bucking craft, but not in time to reach another updraft. The skilled pilots desperately sought flat areas and had to settle for crash landings on the rough slopes.
Angry airmen stumped or hobbled out of their wrecked flying machines to stare up at the buzzing thing that had brought them down like a hand swatting down flies.
A few of Kremer’s gliders managed to stay in the updraft. They escaped on the first pass of the growling monster, struggled for altitude, and then dove on the intruder.
But the hawk-winged shape easily maneuvered out of reach of the deadly darts. Then it turned nimbly and pursued its pursuers, hounding them out over the arid plain. Each time the inevitable result was another glider wrecked or stranded on the tumbled prairie.
In a matter of minutes, the sky was clear! The L’Toff stared, unable to believe what had happened. Then a cheer rose from the defenders’ lines. The attackers—even the gray-clad professionals—drew back in superstition and awe as the droning thing came around to fly high over the canyon.
As if that weren’t enough, at that moment there came a peal of horns that echoed resoundingly down the rocky vale. Emerging from the heights overlooking the canyon, a detachment of armored men appeared. As a breeze stiffened, they unfurled the royal pennant of Coylia. A great dragon, its broad, sweeping wings outlined in bright green piping, flapped in the wind and grinned down at the combatants.
Gath knew that a bare dozen Royal Scouts had been hiding on the slopes above, to make a big show at some appropriate time. The tacticians had been counting on the Scouts’ reputation to slow the enemy at some crucial moment.
The effect was magnified far beyond what Demsen and Prince Linsee had hoped for. The association between the unknown flying thing and the dragons of legend was unmistakable. In the armies below there were, doubtless, sudden foxhole conversions to the Old Belief.
That was when the great growling monster above chose to swoop upon the army of plainsmen,
No arrows rose to meet it, for although it dropped nothing lethal, its bass moaning struck terror in the invaders’ hearts. They dropped weapons and fled their positions” without looking back.
Gath breathed easily for the first time in days. He had very little doubt who the pilot of that noisy, dragon-like glider had to be.
“Your Majesty! All is lost!” The gray-cloaked rider swerved in front of his liege lord.
Kremer reined up his horse. “What? What are you talking about? I was told we had them in our grasp!”
Then he looked up and saw the rout in progress. Like a flash flood, the green, red, and gray uniforms cascaded unstoppably down the canyon, only a little way behind the-mounted messenger.
The warlord and his aides were caught in the flood of panicked troops. It quickly became apparent that shouting and bearing at the men with their swords would not rally them. It was all Kremer and his officers could do to spur their nervous animals over to high ground at the side of the canyon, out of the tide of fleeing soldiery.
Clearly something had gone desperately wrong. Kremer looked up, searching for his chief weapon, but not one of his gliders was in the sky!
Then he turned at a faint noise and saw an unfamiliar shape flying low down the canyon, chasing his men! From long experience, he knew that no glider could fly that way, ignoring the tricky little niceties of air rise and rate of fall. It screamed like a great, angry bird of prey, and around it shimmered the faint lambience of felthesh.
The troops that fled before it had clearly had enough of surprises this campaign. First those nasty, bobbing, floating “balloon” monsters—and now this!
The warlord muttered angrily. As the thing approached, Kremer touched the butt of the needler he wore on his hip. If only it would come close enough. If he could shoot it down, it might restore heart to his men!
But the monster did not cooperate. Its task apparently accomplished, it rose and turned about northward. Kremer had no doubt it was headed toward the battle in the northern passes.
In his mind’s eye he saw it all—the foreign wizard had done this, and there was no way to stop it.
He couldn’t fight this new thing—not now, at least. His battle plan had relied too heavily on his gliders, and they were no match for the monster.
Of course, once news of this disaster reached the east, the great lords would flock to King Hymiel. Within days there would be armies heading west, competing for a price on his head.
Kremer turned to his aides. “Hurry to the semaphore station. Order a complete retreat, both here and in the north. Have my hillmen gather in the Valley of the Tall Trees, in our ancestral highlands of Flemmig. The ancient redoubts there are strong. There we shall not have anything to fear from either armies or the wizard’s flying monsters.”
“Your Majesty?” The officers stared at him in disbelief. One moment ago they were serving the clear and certain future ruler of all the lands from the mountains to the sea. Now he was telling them that they were to live as their grandfathers had, in the northern wilds!
Kremer understood that few men could see the lay of things as quickly and clearly as he. He couldn’t blame them for being stunned. But neither would he countenance slowness to obey.
“Move!” he shouted. He touched the bolstered needler at his side and saw them quail.
“I want word to go out at once. When that is done we shall message our garrison in Zuslik. They will strip the town of wealth and food. . . .We will need it during the months and years ahead.”
It was late, even for a Tatir summer day, when the miracle “dragon” returned to the heartland of the L’Toff. The welcoming party on the ground had to follow in zigs and zags until both they and the pilot of the flying machine found a clearing large enough. By then, it seemed, half of the population— those not still harrying the retreating armies—had gathered to greet their saviors.
The craft swooped in low, a glistening shape that shone in the golden twilight. It touched down lightly and finally rolled, to a stop not far from a stand of tall oak trees.
The crowd virtually exploded in joy when they saw the slim form of their Princess stand from the body of the flying craft. They gathered around, cheering, and some even tried to lift her up and carry her off on their shoulders.
But she would have none of it. She motioned them all back and turned to help another person stand. A tall man for an outlander, he was dark-haired and bearded, and he looked very tired.
But the biggest surprise came when they saw the thing that sat upon the man’s shoulder—a little creature with two green eyes shining and an impish grin. The Krenegee purred as the people stepped back and fell into a hushed, reverent silence.
Then the L’Toff sighed, almost as one, as the foreign wizard took their Princess into his arms and kissed her for a very long time.
Semper Ubi Sub Ubi
When Dennis finally awakened he felt a bit strange, as if a lot of time had passed, as if he had dreamed a great deal. He sat up, rubbing his eyes.
Through a filmy curtain, sunlight streamed into the bright-canopied pavilion. He flung aside the silky bedspread and got up from the soft pallet on which he had slept. He found he was naked.
There were excited shouts coming from outside the gaudy tent, and the sound of galloping messengers coming and going. Dennis searched for something to wear and found a pair of soft buckskin breeches and a satiny green blouse laid out over a white-fringed chair. Black leather boots lay nearby . . . his size. Dennis didn’t bother with the underwear. He put the clothes on quickly and hurried outside.
Only a dozen meters away, Prince Linsee spoke animatedly with several of his officers. The lord of the L’Toff listened to a report from an out-of-breath messenger, then chuckled and clasped the courier on the shoulder in gratitude.
Dennis relaxed a little when he heard the Prince’s laughter. Dennis’s exhausted sleep had been disturbed by recurring guilty thoughts that he ought to be up and about, helping the L’Toff secure the victory he had brought them. Several times he had half awakened, intending to get busy devising new weapons, or to use his new aircraft to harry the enemy. But his exhausted body had refused to cooperate.
That wasn’t to say his sleep had been disturbed all the time. At intervals he had dreamed of Linnora, and that had been nice.
“Dennizz!”
One of the L’Toff officers grinned as he saw Dennis. Dennis had to stare for a moment. He had been introduced to so many faces in the blurry twilight. . . . Had it been last night, or the night before?
“Dennizz! It’s me. Gath!”
Dennis blinked. Why, so it was! The lad seemed to have grown in the past two months or so. Or perhaps it was the uniform.
“Gath! Has there been any word from Stivyung?”
The youth grinned. “We got a message only an hour ago. He’s okay. His balloon landed in a barony loyal to the crown, an’ he’s headed back with a column o’ troops to help chase Kremer!”
“Then Kremer—“
Dennis stopped in the middle of his question, because the Prince had turned and was walking over. Linsee was a tall, slender man, with a gray goatee. He smiled and took Dennis’s hand.
“Wizard Nuel. It is good to have you up at last. I trust you had a good rest?”
“Well, yes, your Highness. But I’m rather anxious to know about—“
“Yes,” Linsee said, laughing. “My daughter, and your betrothed, by my warrant. Linnora is communing in a nearby grove. She will be sent for.” At the Prince’s nod a young page hurried off with the message.
Dennis was glad. He wanted very badly to see Linnora again. On the night of their landing he had felt as nervous as any young suitor when the Prince arrived and she introduced him. He was greatly relieved when Linsee delightedly consented to their betrothal.
Still, it was the progress of the war that concerned him at the moment. From the air, on that tumultuous evening of battle, he had seen the tyrant’s gray-clad troops retreating on all fronts. Their multihued allies—the mercenaries and liege men of other barons—had melted away after the first pass of his flying machine, leaving the northmen to hurry their retreat, glancing up nervously over their shoulders.
But the retreating gray soldiers were not broken. In spite of their fear, they had pulled back in good order. They were excellent troops, who delayed the pursuing L’Toff fiercely so their fellows could escape.
When approaching darkness had forced him and Linnora finally to seek a landing in the L’Toff homeland, Dennis had worried that, come tomorrow, the enemy might reorganize and return.
“What about Kremer?” he asked.
“Not to worry,” Linsee grinned. “Kremer’s allies are all gone over to the King by now. And an army of volunteer militia is on its way from the populous east. Kremer has stripped Zuslik of everything movable and is even now on his way to his ancestral highlands.
“Sadly, I doubt even the armies of all the kingdom, aided by a flock of your buzzing and bobbing varieties of flying monsters, could pry him out of those craggy clefts.”
Dennis felt relieved. He had no doubt Kremer would cause more trouble someday. A man as brilliant and ruthless as he would find ways to pursue his ambitions, and regard this as only a temporary setback.
Still, for now the crisis was over.
Dennis was glad to have helped Linnora’s people. But most of all he was happy that no tyrant would force him to invent devices for which this world was simply unprepared.
He would have to watch that, in the future. Already he had unleashed on Tatir the wheel and lighter-than-air craft. And Gath had probably figured out the principle of the propeller by now, just by looking over the cart/airplane.
Dennis would have to see what the Practice Effect made of these innovations, once they were mass-produced, before unleashing any more wizardries on these innocents.
A page hurried up to Prince Linsee. Linsee bent to hear the message.
“My daughter asks that you meet her in the meadow where you landed the night before last.” He told Dennis. “She is there, by your miracle machine.
“No one has disturbed your craft since you arrived,” the prince assured him. “I let it be known that anyone who touched the great growling dragon-thing would be gobbled up alive!”
Dennis noticed from Linsee’s wry smile that he shared Linnora’s sharp wit. No doubt while he had slept the Princess had filled her father in on everything that had happened since her capture.
“Uh, that’s good, your Highness. Could you assign someone to show me the way?”
Linsee called forth a young girl page, who stepped forward and took Dennis’s hand.
Linnora awaited Dennis in the open meadow by the gleaming aircraft. She sat cross-legged in L’Toff leather and hose before the nose of the plane, while three of her gowned ladies whispered together at the edge of the glade.
From overheard snippets as he approached among the trees, Dennis could tell that the maids didn’t approve overmuch of their Princess dressing like a soldier, not to mention sitting on the turf in front of an alien machine.
The ladies gasped and turned quickly when Dennis said good morning. (Good afternoon, he corrected himself as he saw the lay of the sun.) The maids bowed and backed away. Their attitude was respectful, but it also nervously conveyed that they thought he was just a little likely to grow fangs or walk on air. Clearly the run-of-the-mill L’Toff weren’t all that much more sophisticated than the average Coylian.
That could change, though, Dennis reminded himself as he walked toward the plane.
Dennis frowned in puzzlement. Linnora was all scrunched over, her head poked under the front of the onetime cart. Although he admired the girl’s limberness, to twist about in such a contortion, he wondered what in the world she was doing.
“Linnora,” he called, “what are you—“
There was a sudden thud. “Ow!.. .” Her cry was muffled by the airplane’s undercarriage. Dennis blushed as there followed a quick chain of expletives Linnora could have learned from only one source. The words certainly weren’t in the Coylian dialect of the English language!
The Princess withdrew from under the craft and sat up rubbing her head. But her muttered invective stopped the instant she saw who it was. “Dennis!” she cried out. And then she was in his arms.
Finally, a bit breathless, he got a chance to ask her what she had been up to down there.
“Oh, that! Well, I hope it was all right. I mean, I hope I wasn’t fooling around dangerously with things I don’t understand well enough. But you were asleep for so long, and some busybody went and told Father I’d dressed for war, so he’s had me watched ever since to make sure I didn’t go ride off after Kremer’s ears or something. I was starting to get bored, so bored that I decided I wanted to see—“
She was clearly excited about something. But it was all coming just a bit too fast for Dennis. “Uh, Linnora, your ladies seemed a bit shocked seeing you burrowing under there like that.”
“Oh!” Linnora looked down at her muddy knees. She started trying to dust herself off, then stopped and shrugged. “Oh, well. They’ll just have to get used to it, won’t they? In addition to being your wife, I expect to be taught wizarding, you know. And that seems to be a dusty business, from what I’ve experienced so far.”
The twinkle in her eye told him that there were certain things she would expect from her lord husband. Clearly, he wouldn’t have to look far from home for an apprentice.
“Anyway,” she went on, “I came down here and found everything just as we left it when we landed. Your Krenegee was here, too. But he seems to have gone off, now. Perhaps he’s hunting. I’ve been under there a long time, and maybe I’ve lost track of time.”
Dennis despaired of his beloved ever getting to the point. “But what were you doing under there?” he insisted.
Linnora stopped for a moment, her torrent of words cut off as she traced her train of thought.
“The robot!” she declared suddenly. “I was bored, so- I decided to talk to that wonderful creature-and-tool you brought from your world!”
“You were talking to...” It was Dennis’s turn to blink. “Show me,” he asked at last.
The L’Toff ladies were shocked even more when they saw the wizard and their Princess crawl down together into the grass and dirt. The women made ready to turn modestly away if their worst fears proved true.
They gave out relieved sighs. Linnora hadn’t been so debased down in the lowlands. But then what were they doing squirming under there like that?
The ladies realized, with regret that things would never be the same as they once were.
They had not really needed to crawl under the plane to examine the robot. Dennis realized later that he could have ordered the little automaton to drop the propeller, and its grip on the undercarriage, and come out. But by now it looked so much a part of the craft that it never even occurred to him at the time. The series of powerful practice trances, amplified by the magic of the Krenegee beast, had transformed the machine until it looked inseparable from the gleaming wooden flyer.
When Linnora said she had been “talking” to the robot, she meant that she had done the actual speaking. The ‘bot had replied using its little display screen.
Dennis frowned as he looked at the rows of flowing Coylian script on the pearly rectangle. He couldn’t read the alien tongue as quickly as it sped past. Besides, he wondered, how had the robot learned to. . .
Of course, he realized quickly. Since almost his first moment on Tatir, the machine had been gathering information on the inhabitants, at his command. Naturally, that included learning the writing they used here.
“Split screen,” he commanded. “Coylian script on the left, Earth English translation on the right.”
The text parted into two versions of the same report. He and Linnora had to crawl in a little farther to read, then, but that only brought them closer together, and he couldn’t think of that as a disadvantage.
Immediately he noticed something interesting. Though Coylian letters were part of a syllabary, and English/Roman letters were a true alphabet, the two systems clearly shared a common style. The “th” sound in Coylian, for instance, looked like a mutated “t” and “h” melded together.
Dennis recalled some of the calculations he had played with during his imprisonment. With a growing sense of excitement, he began to suspect that one of the theories he had come up with back then just might be true.
He read the text for a while. It was a summary of early Coylian history, found on some ancient scrolls the ‘bot had pilfered temporarily from a temple in Zuslik. The scrolls had referred specifically to the Old Belief, once followed widely on Tatir, but now adhered to only by the L’Toff and a few others. It seemed to consist mostly of apparent myth and legend, but interspersed through the gaudy stories, Dennis thought he saw a pattern.
Dennis asked the robot to skim back to earlier entries, then ahead again. Linnora watched, fascinated, and from rime to time suggested passages she had read earlier. Occasionally she stopped to explain a meaning he had not come across before.
They spent a long time together under the cart, reading the correlated history of a world.
Dennis was starting to get a crick in his neck when he finally felt he had enough data. The conclusion seemed incontrovertible.
“This isn’t only another planet!” he declared. “It’s also the future !”
Linnora rolled over and looked at him.
“Yes, for you it is, my wizard from the past. Does this change things? Would you still marry with one who might be your distant descendant?”
Dennis moved closer and kissed her. “I had no strong ties to my time,” he told her. “And you can’t be my descendant. I never had any kids.”
Linnora sighed. “Well, that, too, can be remedied.”
Dennis was about to kiss her again, and the ladies at the edge of the grove might have been shocked even more. But there came a sudden shout from somewhere directly overhead.
“Dennizz! Princess!”
This time there were two thumps and two series of muttered oaths. Both Linnora and Dennis emerged rubbing their heads. But they grinned when they saw who awaited them. “Arth!”
It was, indeed, the diminutive thief. A crowd of L’Toff had gathered, and they watched in hushed admiration from the edge of the glade, for a Krenegee sat on Arth’s shoulder, purring.
Dennis clasped his friend. “So Proll’s men were able to find you! I was afraid our description of that plateau wouldn’t be good enough and we’d have to go after you in the plane. We were worried about you!”
Arth scratched the purring pixolet under the chin. “Oh, I was okay,” he said nonchalantly. “I spent th’ time bangin’ sticks together to make another flyin’ cart. Woulda tried it out, too, but th’ L’Toff an’ Demsen’s scouts came for me.”
Dennis shuddered at the thought. He would have to have a good talk with the fellow—and with Linnora and Gath and anyone else who suffered under the illusion that Earth technology could just be banged together. Practice Effect or no, some things had to work right the first time!
“Well, just as long as you’re all right.”
“Sure, I’m fine. Sent a message to Maggin with Demsen’s troops. Asked th’ little lady to come out here from Zuslik to join me here for a vacation—with your Highness’s permission, o’ course.” He bowed to Linnora. Linnora only laughed and hugged the little thief.
“Oh, by th’ way,” Arth went on, “I don’t know if you both have heard, but I guess you’d be interested. It seems Demsen’s boys caught up with a company of Kremer’s men out near North Pass. And guess who was with ‘em? None other than our old friend Hoss’k!”
“Hoss’k!”
“Yeah. Th’ deacon got away, worse luck. But th’ Scouts did capture a strange fellow who was with Hoss’k. A prisoner, it seems. They got him back at Linsee’s tent now.
“Funny thing, though. You know he talks a lot like you, Dennizz? All funny an’ open in th’ back of the throat, with that strange accent o’ yours.
“An’ some of th’ captured hillmen said he was another wizard!”
Dennis and Linnora looked at each other. “I think we had better look into this “ the Princess said.
“Well, Brady. So Flaster chose you to come after me. He sure took his time about it.”
The sandy-haired fellow sitting gloomily in the camp chair turned quickly about and stared.
“Nuel! It’s you? Oh, lord, it’s good to see a fellow Earthman!”
Bernald Brady looked harried and exhausted. He had a bruise on his forehead, and his typical snide expression had been replaced by apparently genuine delight and relief at the sight of Dennis.
Linnora and Arth followed Dennis into the tent. Brady’s eyes widened on seeing the creature riding Arth’s shoulder, and he backed away.
The pixolet apparently remembered Brady, too. It hissed unappreciatively and bared its teeth. Finally Arth had to take it outside.
When they were gone, Brady turned imploringly to Dennis. “Nuel, please! Can you tell me what is going on here? This place is crazy! First I find the zievatron in pieces, and your weird note. Then all my equipment shows signs of acting funny. Finally, I get conked on the head by some big slob who acts like Minister Calumny himself and has a bunch of thugs strip me of all my gear. . . .”
“They took your weapons? I was afraid of that.” Dennis grimaced. Kremer already had his needler, and there was no telling what other arms the ever-cautious Brady had brought along. No doubt Brady had not stinted quality in outfitting himself. With all that stuff, Kremer could still turn out to be a big pain down the road.
“They stole everything!” Brady groaned. “From my camp-stove right down to my wedding ring!”
“You’re married, now?” Dennis’s eyebrows rose. “To whom? Anybody I know?”
Brady suddenly looked anxious. Clearly he did not want to offend Dennis. “Uh, well, when you didn’t come back—“
Dennis stared. “You mean you and Gabbie?”
“Uh, yes. I mean, you were gone so long. And we discovered we had so much in common—well, you know.” He looked up sheepishly.
Linnora, too, was looking concerned.
Dennis laughed. “Never mind, Bernie. We never had anything going, anyway. I’m sure you’re better suited to her than I ever would have been. Congratulations. Sincerely.”
Brady shook Dennis’s hand uncertainly. He looked from Dennis to Linnora and back and seemed to understand the situation.
But that only appeared to make him more miserable. The fellow wasn’t merely afraid and homesick. He was in love.
“Well, we’ll see to getting you back to her as quickly as possible,” he told his erstwhile rival compassionately. I’ve got to visit Earth temporarily anyway. I’d like to trade a few local works of art for some items I can buy from N-Mart.”
Dennis had plans. For the sake of both worlds he would make sure Linsee kept a tight guard on the zievatron, restricting the flow between the worlds carefully. They certainly didn’t want to create any paradoxes in time!
But in a limited way trade could probably profit both realities.
Brady shook his head. “Even if we could put a new return mechanism together from those parts you buried, we’d never get it finished in time! Flaster gave me only a few days, and those are about used up!
“And when the airlock mechanism was wrecked, it destroyed the calibration settings. I don’t even know Earth’s reality coordinates!”
“Well, I remember them,” Dennis assured him.
“Oh, yeah?” A touch of Brady’s familiar sarcasm returned. “Well, have you figured out the coordinates for this crazy place yet? We never were too sure of them back in Lab One, We just sort of stumbled onto the settings. And now those, too, are ruined!”
“Don’t worry. I can calculate them as well. You see, I think I know not only where we are, but when as well.”
Brady stared. And Dennis started to explain.
“Think about the most important discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries,” Dennis suggested. “Clearly the most dramatic were bioengineering and zievatronics.
“Physics was a dead end by the year 2000. Oh, there were lots of abstract problems, but nothing that seemed to offer a way to bring other worlds within mankind’s grasp. The solar system was a pretty barren place, and the stars remained awfully far away.
“But with recombinant DNA, there appeared the possibility of creating almost any type of viable life-form, for whatever purpose. Work only beginning at Sahara Tech and at other institutions when we were there seemed to be leading to a world filled with wonders—giant chickens, cows that gave yogurt, even unicorns, dragons, and griffins!
“Then there was the zievatron, which promised to reopen the road to the stars relativity seemed to have closed off forever.
“Now imagine both of these trends,” Dennis asked, “taken into the future.
“When, in a hundred years or so, the ziev effect was finally perfected, bands of migrants would travel to other worlds, to colonize or find space for their own diverse ways of life.
“And by that time they wouldn’t take with them many tools, only the very minimum that could fit through the zievatron. After all, when you can tailor-make organisms for any function, why burden yourself with clumsy hunks of metal?
“Self-repairing, semi-intelligent robots made of living matter would drive you to work, toil in the fields, and clean your house. Walking brains would record your messages and recite any information verbatim at command. Fiercely loyal great flying “dragons” with laser eyes would protect your new colonies against any danger. All these specialized organisms would be “fueled” by food generated at special facilities.
“In the future, colonists would not go in star ships, nor would they carry cold metal with them. Why should they, when they could simply step through a gate to their new worlds and design creatures for any function?”
Brady scratched his head. “That’s a lot of speculation, Nuel. You can’t tell what’s going to happen in the future.”
“Oh, but I can,” Dennis said with a smile. “Because this is it! This is the future, Brady.” Brady stared.
“Imagine a group of colonists who belong to a fringe group with antimachine sentiments,” Dennis said. “Let’s say this group finds a beautiful world, accessible through the zievatron. They save up to pay transmission charges and then leave the complicated society of Earth for their paradise, shutting the door behind them.
“At first all goes well. Then, all of a sudden, the complicated bioengineered creatures they depend upon start dying!
“Their scientists finally find a cause. It is a plague, created by another race that plies the ziev space, one with whom man has by this time had skirmishes for several centuries. The enemy are called the Blecker, and they have chosen this isolated outpost of humanity to test their new weapon.
“The Blecker had released a disease on Tatir, which is what the world was named. The plague could not kill any life-form capable of independent existence—able to find its own way in the wild—but it destroyed the synthetic food supply. Without that food the delicate symbiotes upon which the colonists’ civilization depended were doomed.
“The scientists of Tatir discovered the attack too late to stop it. The dying was well under way, beginning with the huge but delicate dragons upon whom the planet’s defense relied.
“Desperate, they reopened the zievatron link to Earth, to beg for help.”
Brady sat on the edge of his seat, listening intently. “What happened then?” he asked.
Dennis shrugged. “Earth was anxious not to get contaminated. They sent through a powerful device that would scramble the zievways to Tatir for a thousand years, until a cure could be found. When the machine had done its work, neither Earth nor the invaders could get through to this world.
“But”—Dennis raised one finger—“before doing that, they sent through a gift!”
From outside they heard Arth’s voice call. “I think th’ critter’s settled down now. I’ll bring him in. You all sit still!”
The curtain parted and Arth entered again. The pixolet rode his shoulder. When it saw Brady it glared but was quiet. It spread its wing membranes and glided over to Linnora’s lap. She stroked the beast and soon it was purring again.
Linnora whispered, “We of the L’Toff never forgot the gift from Earth, did we, my little Krenegee?”
“No, you didn’t,” Dennis agreed. In the centuries of savagery that followed the inevitable fall of Tatir civilization, almost everything was lost. The few machines rusted away and were forgotten. Since most of the transports had been hovercraft, even the principle of the wheel was forgotten.
“Most of the specialized animals died off, leaving only the sturdiest Earth stock and local fauna. The language started to change as virtually all learning and lore were lost.
“The people were soon reduced almost to the level of beasts. It took a long time for the legends of written speech to inspire some genius to reinvent writing.
“Back on Earth they had known all this would happen. And yet they could not help without risking a spread of the infection to the home world,
“So they opened the portal just a crack, before sealing it for a millennium. They sent through the very latest product of their great research—the culmination of two converging fields, biology and reality physics.
“What they sent through was an animal “immune to the disease, for it could fend for itself, but one who carried with it a talent. That talent would pervade this world and give its people a chance.
“With time, the people of Tatir absorbed some of the talent for themselves. Those who lived closest to the creatures absorbed the most of it and became the L’Toff.”
Dennis finished, “The gift the Earth sent was a miracle, from our twenty-first-century perspective. It saved the people of this planet. And to think I once thought it useless.”
Brady followed Dennis’s look.
“That thing?” He pointed incredulously at the pixolet. The creature preened, and grinned back with a row of needle-sharp teeth.
“Yes, that,” Dennis said with a nod.
“Of course, I’m only going by pieced-together accounts from legends more than a thousand years old. But I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.
“We can only imagine what the Earth of the fortieth century is like, now that these Krenegee have been loose there for centuries. Perhaps the age of biologicals is past and the era of tools has returned there—magical tools beyond belief.
“I’d be glad of it, for the bioengineering did sound a bit questionable, ethically.”
Dennis stood next to Linnora. She and Pix looked up at him and he smiled. Dennis turned back to Brady and concluded, “Now, at last, the barriers to this world are dropping. For some reason a weird intertime path to twenty-first-century Earth was the first to open, perhaps because ours was the first zievatron of all.
“Soon other paths will open. And these people have got to be ready when they do. The Blecker are probably still out there, waiting for a chance to get in.
“That’s why I think I’ll hang around after we fix the return mechanism and send you back home.”
Linnora took his hand. “At least that’s one of the reasons,” he amended.
Brady looked perplexed. “That’s a pretty convincing story, Nuel. Except for one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“You still haven’t told me what this talent is you’re saying that nasty little thing has! What was this gift Earth supposedly sent through?”
Dennis looked surprised. “Oh! You mean nobody’s explained that part of it to you yet?”
“No! And I’ll tell you I can’t take it much longer! Something’s screwy about this world! Did you notice the strange juxtaposition of technologies these people have here? I can’t figure out what’s going on, and it’s driving me crazy!”
Dennis remembered how many times he had sworn vengeance on Brady during his months on Tatir. Right now he had the fellow in his power, but all the malice he had felt before was gone. He decided to satisfy himself with one little bit of revenge.
“Oh, I’ll let you figure it out for yourself, Brady. I’m sure a mind like yours can come up with the answer, if you practice it hard enough.”
Bernard Brady sat there. He had no choice but to fume silently while Dennis Nuel laughed. As the woman, the little man, the alien creature from the future, and his onetime rival all grinned at him, Brady had the uneasy feeling that he wasn’t going to enjoy the learning process much at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
david brin was born in 1950 in southern California. He has been an engineer with Hughes Aircraft Co., and attended Caltech and The University of California at San Diego, where he completed doctoral studies on comets and asteroids. He is presently a consultant with the California Space Institute, a unit of the University of California, San Diego, doing advanced studies concerning the Space Shuttle and space science. He also teaches university physics and occasionally creative writing.
A nominee for the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards, Brin is the author of two previous, highly praised novels, Sundiver and Startide Rising. He is currently secretary of the Science Fiction Writers of America and is at work on his next novel.