"Forty-six thousand. All under control. Over, jerk."
"I'm going to head for----_Ah!_ Can you see the ship?"
It was possible to find the silver dot of _Argo_ above an S-shaped
expanse of blue. The blue, Paul understood, was not becoming larger,
simply nearer. The dot changed to a white flower, which swelled and
hung tranquilly over the blue, a brief memorial. The radio carried a
groan, and then: "Better maybe. The lake may be shallow enough for
salvage. If it'd hit ground there'd be nothing at all. Get nearer,
Paul. Keep me in sight--not too damn' near."
Time.... Delicately Paul asked the boat for a steeper glide. The
response was even. Was it? Some peevish sound. He flattened the glide
a thousand feet above Ed's boat. The red-green below--anything real
about it? Yes, if time was real, but one had to think that over....
Mild hills of dark red-green, in the--west? Yes, because now there was
a birth of sunset beyond them. Lighter green below, alongside the
lake: that would be meadow. Not one of the great lakes--no larger
than Lake Champlain, its outlet in the south blurred by marsh; only a
portion of its northwest shore adjoined the meadow--except in that
region the lake was a blue S written on red-green dark of jungle. A
winged brown thing slipped by, teasing the edge of vision. "Bird or
something...."
In the earphones was a dazed note, like shame. "Power was out of control,
Paul--port motor. Had to be a defect in the building--something that
couldn't take the strain of what happened eleven years ago. All the
way--God!--and then to be loused up by a builder's error!" To Spearman,
Paul knew, a mechanical defect was the gravest of indecencies, beyond any
forgiveness.
True sunset here. A world. And you don't climb out of gravity on
charlesite. Paul said, "Doc--parallel lines--I think."
But the speed of the glide allowed no certainty, only a glimpse of
three dark bars, perhaps half a mile long in the jungle area northwest
of the meadow, and a hint of other groups further north. They _should_
be there, according to a map Spearman had made in orbit from the final
photographs. And some fifty miles south of here was a great network of
them thirty miles long. The glide brought them out over meadow once
more.
A thing was riding with them. A grumbling moan. Paul told himself:
_With Model L-46 it cannot happen--it cannot--Dorothy--Doc_----
Dorothy cried, "Specks--in the open ground. Moving, hundreds of 'em.
Oh, look! _Smoke_, Paul--campfires. How high are we?"
"Under seven thousand. Check your compass by the sunset, Doc. See if
we have a magnetic north."
"We do...."