Transcendental Read Free Page B

so that its legs could absorb the impact. The alien coffin seemed to have anchored itself against the far wall.
    Riley dodged Tordor as the other hurtled past, and into the wall beside him. The heavy-planet alien was too big and too dense to try to stop. But Tordor braced itself on its legs and tail, facing the wall.
    The violent motion began to slow as the pull from above dampened their gyrations.
    “Something wants to stop this pilgrimage,” Tordor grunted.
    “Something seems to have succeeded,” Riley replied.
    “Who’d want us dead?” Jon asked.
    “Yeah,” Jan said.
    “Maybe it’s one of us,” Riley said. “The alien in the box over there, the woman, Tordor here, me…”
    “The ribbon was cut below,” Tordor grunted.
    “A mistake?”
    “A miscalculation?”
    “Who is to say?” Riley responded. He did not tell Tordor about the change in the rate of the climber’s ascent before the explosion. If that had not happened, the ribbon would have parted ahead of them instead of beneath. Someone knew enough about the climber’s motor and how to change its speed, and about the explosive charge and when and where it would be set off.
    “What’s going to happen to us now?” Jan asked.
    “Yeah,” Jon said.
    From his feeling of weight, Riley judged that their speed was increasing. “We’re going to fly into space with enough velocity to leave this system. Of course that will take a millennium or so, and by then we all will be dead. In fact, even if we brought a lot of provisions, our food won’t last for more than seven days, and air and water not much more than that.”
    “Gee,” Jon said. “I never knew one of these strings to fail.”
    “Yeah,” Jan said.
    “It didn’t fail,” Riley said. “It was blown apart.”
    “Golly,” Jan said.
    “Yeah,” Jon said.
    “We’re going to go on a pilgrimage, all right,” Riley said, “but it wasn’t the one we intended.” He looked at the woman. He knew she had heard the conversation, but she didn’t say anything. She had straightened out her legs, though. Her feet were on the floor and her hands held the edge of the bench.
    Riley continued to look around the room, to take stock of the effects of the explosion. Two aliens had been killed in the gyrations of the climber, a third had broken a leg, and a fourth had lost a tentacle. The half-dozen informal self-protection groups combined efforts to treat injuries and ration supplies and protect individuals from predation. Clothing and other materials were shared with those who suffered from the increasing cold.
    Through all the mutual aid, Riley kept thinking it was all useless, like maintaining law and order when the wave front of a supernova was scheduled to arrive in a few days.
    Seventy-one hours of desperate fatigue and soreness later Riley felt a thump and the increased weight of deceleration. Creatures fought for a place at the windows, but only blackness, without stars, could be seen. An hour later, he heard more thumps, followed by the sound of the release of the airlock door beyond the privacy room. The fetid air inside the climber was invaded by the only slightly less fetid air of a spaceship.
    “Boys,” Riley said to Jon and Jan, “we’ve been saved.”
    They emerged, one by one, into the airlock of a ship. A party of space crew greeted them with food and drink and blankets, and received Jon and Jan with particular warmth.
    Riley recognized one of them. He wore the insignia of a spaceship captain.
    “Hello, Ham,” he said.
    “Up to your old tricks, Riley?” the captain said.
    “Thanks to you,” Riley said.

 
    CHAPTER TWO
    The Geoffrey accelerated as soon as the passengers in the elevator car had been retrieved and the car had been jettisoned to resume its interrupted journey into deep space. As he was directed down the narrow passageway into the decontamination chamber and the isolation of the passenger quarters, Riley asked a crew member what had happened to the carbon-fiber