of the rack and banged it down on the slot of the coin box. It bounced out of his fingers and fell to the deck. He pounced on it and scrabbled it wildly into his hand.
A luminescent pink cloud bloomed suddenly to his right, another just behind him. Its significance: stand by for questioning, or else.
His hull began to hum, and, impressed on this vibration as a signalon a carrier, his whole craft spoke hoarsely to him: “Halt in the name of Angels. Stand by for tow beam.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Deeming, and this time got the coin to the slot. He banged the button, and the scene through ports and video alike disappeared.
He switched off everything he didn’t need and lay back, sweating.
He wouldn’t even glance at the remote, wanly hopeful possibility that they had mistaken him for someone else. They knew who he was, all right. And how long had it taken them to draw a bead on him on a planet to which they could not possibly have known he was going? Thirty minutes?
He found himself staring out of the port, and became shockingly aware that he was still in hyperspace. He had never been in the grey so long before; where in time was this Revelo place anyway?
He began to sweat again. Was something wrong with the field generator? According to the tell tales on the control panel, no; it seemed all right.
Still the queasy, deeply frightening grey. He blanked out the ports and shivered in his seat, hugging himself.
What had made him pick Revelo anyhow?
Only an unconfirmed guess that one man had managed to stay alive there. The other Proscribed planets were death for humans in one form or another; he had no idea which. Revelo probably was too, for that matter, but Don Rockhard would hardly have chanced it if it was certain death.
And then maybe—just barely maybe—the new flicker coil really would work so well in the Revelo death-field that he could slip through without detection. Maybe, for a while, for a very little while, he could be in a sheltered place where he could think.
There was a shrill rushing sound from the hull. He stared at the ports but could see nothing. He switched on the detector and then remembered the port blanks. He opened them and let the light of Revelo flood in.
He had never seen a sky like this. Masses of color, blue, blue-green, pink, drifted above him. The dim zenith was alive with shooting sparks. A great soft purple flame reached from the eastern horizonand wavered to invisibility almost directly overhead. It pulsed hypnotically.
Deeming shuddered. He set the detector to the task of finding Don Rockhard’s boat and let it cruise. He started the exterior air analyzer and sat back to wait.
Since the missing boat was so small and the planet so large, he had to set his detector’s discriminator very wide and its sensitivity high. And it found all sorts of things for him—great shining lumps of metallic copper and molybdenum jutting from the ragged hills, a long wavering row of circular pools of molten lead, and even the Angel’s warning beacon and death-field generator. It was obviously untended, and understandably so; it was self-powered, foolproof, and set in a case that a hydrogen explosion wouldn’t nick.
He had to sleep after a while, so he set the buzzer to its loudest and lay back to sleep. It seemed that each time he slept he dreamed and each time he dreamed, no matter how it began, it always ended with his coming face to face with a smiling Angel, unarmed, pleasant, just sitting waiting for him. Each time the buzzer sounded, he leaped frantically to see what it was reporting. The need to spend a moment with someone else beside himself, someone else’s ideas besides his turgid miasmas of flight and dead smiles and kind relentless Angels became urgent, hysterical, frantic. Each time the buzzer sounded it was rich ore or a strange electrical fog between two iron crags, or nothing at all, and, at last, Donald Rockhard’s lifeboat.
By the time he found it he was in a numb and
A luminescent pink cloud bloomed suddenly to his right, another just behind him. Its significance: stand by for questioning, or else.
His hull began to hum, and, impressed on this vibration as a signalon a carrier, his whole craft spoke hoarsely to him: “Halt in the name of Angels. Stand by for tow beam.”
“Yeah, sure,” said Deeming, and this time got the coin to the slot. He banged the button, and the scene through ports and video alike disappeared.
He switched off everything he didn’t need and lay back, sweating.
He wouldn’t even glance at the remote, wanly hopeful possibility that they had mistaken him for someone else. They knew who he was, all right. And how long had it taken them to draw a bead on him on a planet to which they could not possibly have known he was going? Thirty minutes?
He found himself staring out of the port, and became shockingly aware that he was still in hyperspace. He had never been in the grey so long before; where in time was this Revelo place anyway?
He began to sweat again. Was something wrong with the field generator? According to the tell tales on the control panel, no; it seemed all right.
Still the queasy, deeply frightening grey. He blanked out the ports and shivered in his seat, hugging himself.
What had made him pick Revelo anyhow?
Only an unconfirmed guess that one man had managed to stay alive there. The other Proscribed planets were death for humans in one form or another; he had no idea which. Revelo probably was too, for that matter, but Don Rockhard would hardly have chanced it if it was certain death.
And then maybe—just barely maybe—the new flicker coil really would work so well in the Revelo death-field that he could slip through without detection. Maybe, for a while, for a very little while, he could be in a sheltered place where he could think.
There was a shrill rushing sound from the hull. He stared at the ports but could see nothing. He switched on the detector and then remembered the port blanks. He opened them and let the light of Revelo flood in.
He had never seen a sky like this. Masses of color, blue, blue-green, pink, drifted above him. The dim zenith was alive with shooting sparks. A great soft purple flame reached from the eastern horizonand wavered to invisibility almost directly overhead. It pulsed hypnotically.
Deeming shuddered. He set the detector to the task of finding Don Rockhard’s boat and let it cruise. He started the exterior air analyzer and sat back to wait.
Since the missing boat was so small and the planet so large, he had to set his detector’s discriminator very wide and its sensitivity high. And it found all sorts of things for him—great shining lumps of metallic copper and molybdenum jutting from the ragged hills, a long wavering row of circular pools of molten lead, and even the Angel’s warning beacon and death-field generator. It was obviously untended, and understandably so; it was self-powered, foolproof, and set in a case that a hydrogen explosion wouldn’t nick.
He had to sleep after a while, so he set the buzzer to its loudest and lay back to sleep. It seemed that each time he slept he dreamed and each time he dreamed, no matter how it began, it always ended with his coming face to face with a smiling Angel, unarmed, pleasant, just sitting waiting for him. Each time the buzzer sounded, he leaped frantically to see what it was reporting. The need to spend a moment with someone else beside himself, someone else’s ideas besides his turgid miasmas of flight and dead smiles and kind relentless Angels became urgent, hysterical, frantic. Each time the buzzer sounded it was rich ore or a strange electrical fog between two iron crags, or nothing at all, and, at last, Donald Rockhard’s lifeboat.
By the time he found it he was in a numb and
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