Phil struck out wildly, with the instinctive hope that a man falling to
his death could warp space to his advantage if he tensed his muscles
sufficiently.
Then he wondered how long it would take a man to fall fifty floors, but
the mathematics were beyond anything he could do quickly enough in his
head.
Then he asked himself why the inky sack was falling with him.
Then he retched, but brought up only the ghosts of a yeast-spread
sandwich and a glass of soybean milk consumed a day ago.
He continued to fall.
Soft light sprang up around him. He was inside a sphere some eight feet
in diameter and his feet were near the center, while his cheek gently
brushed the sphere's soft lining. Swiveling his gaze past his feet, he
noticed Dytie da Silva sprawled negligently in the air and intently
studying a screen set in the lining of the sphere.
But he was still falling.
Phil knew little enough about space ships, but he knew they couldn't
safely go into free-fall without accelerating first to get some kind of
edge on earth's gravitational field.
But there had been no acceleration.
"Dytie!" he yelled, and in the confined space the noise was deafening.
"What's happening to me?"
Wincing a bit, she looked around at him. "Shh, Phil. You in free-fall
but not falling. I turn off grav'ty."
Still retching, Phil tried to comprehend that idea. "Turn off gravity?"
He was still falling, but no longer so sure he was going to hit
anything.
Dytie looked along his helplessly sprawled body at his face. "Sure,
Phil. Grav'ty go round this little boat just like light do. Grav'ty no
pull it, light no show it."
"That's why it was invisible?"
"Vis'ble? Nobody see it. Wait bit, Phil, got do things."
"But in a ship like this you could travel--" Phil began, his mind
suddenly full of dizzying speculations.
"This not ship, Phil, just dinghy. No talk now."
Phil's falling acquired a direction. He found himself drifting gently
toward Dytie. "Here 'side me, Phil," she instructed. A few moments
later he was comfortably stretched out on his stomach beside Dytie, his
head poised like hers above the screen.
And then the speed of his new directed fall increased, although the
sphere was no longer falling with him, until his body was comfortably
pressed against the soft lining. He deduced after a while that they
must be accelerating, although he got his chief clue from the screen.
At first he couldn't interpret the picture on the screen. It was in
shades of violet and showed a few large squares and oblongs with dark
ribbons between most of them. On the central square were a number of
dots, which slowly moved as he watched them--also three or four crosses
with blobs at their centers. Gradually the squares and rectangles
shrank, while more of the same came onto the screen from the edges. He
realized that he was looking down at the city and that the dots, which
he could hardly distinguish any more, were the men hunting them, while
the crosses were the copters.
For a bit his stomach chilled at the thought of being poised so high
above the city and going higher. But then he began to lose himself
in the wonder of the picture. Phil hadn't traveled a great deal by
air and had seen even less when he'd done so, and the growing picture
of the city was enthralling. He began to feel rather like a god and
to speculate how he'd mete out justice to mankind if he owned this
mysterious little dinghy. Visions of sudden descents on dictators
danced in his head.
"We soon high 'nough, Phil," she said. "Hold on hands, stick feet under
bar."
He obeyed her instructions, taking hold of two handles and thrusting
his legs under a large padded bar. A moment later he knew the reason,
for he began to be pulled away from the screen and had to hold on
tight. He deduced that they were decelerating. After a bit this
stopped too and he was once more "in free-fall but not falling."
Meanwhile, the picture in the screen had become one of the whole
city--a checkerboard of tiny squares not unlike a map.
Dytie produced and unfolded an ordinary street map and flattened it out
beside the screen.
"You say you know where find out pussycat is. You say in city. Show
Dytie."
Phil forced his mind to tackle this problem. His first realization was
just how flimsy the hope was on which he'd based his statement to Dytie
that he might be able to locate the green cat. It depended on Billig
having the green cat, on Jack Jones knowing where Billig had hidden
from the FBL, and on Jack being in hiding himself at the Akeleys'.
Still, it was the only way he knew of getting a line on Lucky.
And then it occurred to him that he didn't know where the Akeley house
was located. But a sudden memory of a huge show window full of marching
mannequins came to his rescue. The Akeley house was next to Monstro
Multi-Products, and everybody knew the address of that vast department
store. He located it for Dytie on the street map and then on the
screen. Soon they were accelerating downward, so that he had to cling
to the handles again, while the squares on the screen were growing
larger, with the large square that was Monstro Multi-Products moving
toward the center.
He started to ask Dytie to answer the questions he'd put to her in his
room, but she cut him off with, "Like say, very long story. No time
now. First find pussycat. Very 'portant."
The rectangle representing the roof of Monstro Multi-Products now
filled quite a bit of the screen, and the streets beside it were broad
ribbons. Their descent slowed. Dytie maneuvered the dinghy around the
department store until Phil spotted, at the base of the building next
to it, the tiny slot indicating the cubical pocket of space in which
the Akeley house stood, robbed of its air-rights.
As they dropped slowly into the canyon of the street past windowed and
windowless walls, Phil felt a witchery in the violet version of the
city. He could make out beetles and tinier bugs--cars and people.
Soon they were hovering only ten feet above the violet sidewalk and the
unsuspecting pedestrians.
Then Dytie slipped the dinghy between the rail of the sidewalk and the
"floor" of the tall building over the Akeley house. The violet picture
grew quite dark. They descended a little farther, past the top-level
street and the one next below it until they were a couple of feet above
the pile of bricks from the fallen chimney. Dytie moved some controls.
The screen went blank, the lights went out, and with breath-taking
suddenness Phil's body crunched into the soft lining as normal weight
returned.
"Got legs down for dinghy to stand on," Dytie told him. "Quiet now,
Phil."
A slit of lesser darkness appeared beyond Dytie and widened to a
rectangle through which, after a bit, he could make out a section of
the Akeley porch. Then the rectangle was obstructed as Dytie climbed
out through it. Phil followed her, feet first, moving them around until
they found the rungs, and carefully climbed down until he could step
off onto the Akeleys' gritty front yard. Then he looked up. As far as
he could see there was absolutely nothing above him except the two
upper-level streets and the dull black "ceiling" above the house. Not
only did light "go around" the dinghy, but it did so without getting
shuffled.
"All safe," Dytie assured him. "Nobody climb over rocks, bump in ladder
legs. This place, Phil?"
The Akeley house looked more ancient and dangerously dilapidated than
ever, canted forward at least a foot after the chimney's collapse. A
gaping wound had been left in the two upper stories and nothing had
been done to bandage it. However, a little light glowed through the
shutters of the living-room windows.
Stepping gingerly, with an eye cocked on the ominously slanting wall,
Phil led Dytie up onto the porch and around the corner of it. He
hesitated for a moment in front of the old door with the tiny cat door
cut in the bottom of it, then lifted his hand to the cat-headed knocker
and banged it twice. After a while there were footsteps, the old style
peephole was opened, and this time Phil immediately recognized the
watery gray eye as Sacheverell's.
"Greetings, Phil," the latter said. "Who's that with you?"
"A young lady named Dytie da Silva."
Sacheverell opened the door. "Come right in. Fate must be at work. Her
brother's here."