Empire of Two Worlds

Even when wearing the goggles the light was unnaturally brilliant and enhanced the scene with an eerie, dream-like quality. Overhead, the sky was a vivid blue and was studded with clouds of white water-vapour.

I took a careful look at it all, then closed the shutter and removed the goggles. I turned to face the others. Bec was grinning.

“The panic’s over,” I said. “There’s nothing moving out there. We’re alone.”

“What’s it like?” Hassmann asked eagerly. “Is there food?”

“There’s food,” Bec announced proudly. “It’s like I said it would be. Organics growing underfoot.”

Grale began grumbling again. “That’s just fine. But how do we see to pick it up?”

Bec looked at Harmen. “Have you got any more of these goggles? Or can you make any?”

“I think so,” the alk said. “I believe we have the requisite materials.”

Reeth and myself helped Harmen make the light-filters. It didn’t take long. In the hold was a sheet of dark-coloured barely-transparent material which we cut into strips and fastened into rims of foam plastic, fastening on headbands. In an hour we had a set for everybody, even Tone the Taker.

The guys were all nervous and expectant as Bec let up the shutters.

For a long time they sat staring at the scenery.

Then Bec opened the sloop’s big door.

“Come on, you guys, you’re not paralysed,” he complained. “Get down and tread the new world.”

We were all reluctant to move. We felt safe inside the sloop. Exasperated, Bec started grabbing at us and shoving us through the door. Grale picked up a repeater before he would go. Breezes tugged at our skin as we climbed to the ground, and we felt awkward and uneasy in the newly-made goggles. In an instinctive gesture of protection we stood with our backs to the sloop and gazed about us.

“It’s weird,” Reeth murmured.

The Big Egg loomed faintly some distance off, the sloop having rolled nearly two miles before it stopped. I had to look hard to see it at all; it was much less noticeable than on Killibol and was no more than a patch of mist in the air. If you didn’t know where to look you’d never find it at all.

The green growth was spongy underfoot. Skywards, the sun, although it was much smaller than the big, pale Killibol sun, was still too bright to look at directly, even with the goggles. Also in the sky was another, much larger body: a huge yellow globe covered with various darker markings. Another planet, hanging close to Earth in space.

Tone the Taker had noticed it, too, and was staring upwards with rapt attention.

“Beautiful,” he murmured. “Like a pop dream.”

None of the others, Harmen possibly excepted, had the equipment to see anything artistic in the scene. To them it was just fact, as the streets and buttresses of Klittmann were facts. True, as I looked longer at the eerie, strangely living landscape I felt a yearning for that vast towering pile of stone, steel and concrete; for falling dust, for dives and joints and the incessant babble of clipped Klittmann speech. But I knew none of us were going to crack up over it. We’d already gone through all our traumas that day we fled through Klittmann’s portal.

Suddenly I jerked as Grale raised his repeater and yanked back the trigger. The gun juddered continuously until he had emptied a whole clip into thin air, sending it spraying out all over the empty landscape.

He turned back to us grinning, mouth slack, eyes hidden behind the dark goggles.

“Feel better?” Bec asked acidly.

“Sure. Just making myself at home. I like to feel I can lick this place.”

Bec grimaced and turned to the rest of us. “Well, boys, we made it. Here it is. No bare rock anywhere. Protein just waiting to be picked up. Food.”

Dumbly we stared at the ground. The green carpet of organics was the hardest thing to get used to. People from Killibol have a reverence for organics and we didn’t know where to put our feet.

Hassmann was the first to try it (sometimes it’s an advantage not to be hampered by an over-active imagination). Wonderingly he knelt on one knee and pulled up a handful of the green stuff that grew in long, thin blades. Later Harmen found from a book that the old Earth word for it was grass. Hassmann sniffed it, ran it between his fingers, then reluctantly put some of it in his mouth. He chewed for nearly a minute, making a sourer face all the while, until he finally spat it out.

“It don’t taste good, boss. We’ve got a bum steer.”

Bec cropped some of the grass himself, feeling it and tasting it. He looked questioningly at Harmen. The alchemist shook his head.

“I know nothing of Earth food.”

Doubtfully Bec looked towards the trees. “O.K.,” he decided after a while, “maybe you have to look around for the right stuff. But there’s food here all right. Everybody knows that.”

We were all glad to get back aboard the sloop. An air of indecision had suddenly come over the gang. We all felt reluctant to move away from the gateway. Bec realised he had to squash this feeling right away.