The Fugitive Worlds by Bob Shaw Page B

actually known him—a privilege he envied—and both had survived to quite an advanced age with no apparent erosion of their faculties. Toller doubted that he would reach his seventies with the same degree of fortitude and resilience. It had always seemed to him that there was a special quality about the men and women who had lived through the great events of recent history—the ptertha plague, the Migration, the conquest of Overland, the war between the sister worlds. It was as though their characters and spirits had been tempered in the crucible of their times, whereas he was destined to live through a fallow period, never knowing for sure if he had it within him to respond to, and as a consequence be ennobled by, a great challenge. Try as he might, he could not imagine the tamed and stable circumstances of his day yielding up adventures which were in any way comparable with those which had earned Toller the Kingslayer his place in legend. Even the journey between the worlds, which had once been the dangerous limit of men's experience, had become a routine matter. . . .
    A sudden brightness washed in through the portholes on the left side of the room—momentarily rivaling the prisms of sunlight which slanted across the table from the opposite wall—and somebody outside on the open deck gave a howl of fright.
    "What was that?" Toller was starting for the door, hindered by the lack of gravity, when there came an appalling burst of sound, akin to the loudest thunderclap he had ever heard. The room tilted and small objects chattered noisily in their brackets.
    Echoes of the thunder were still booming and surging when Toller got the door open and was able to propel himself out of the cabin. The ship was twisting in violent air currents which drew groans and creaks from the rigging. Lieutenant Correvalte and the mechanic were clinging to lines by the engine, their shocked faces turned towards the north-west. Toller looked in the same direction and saw a restless, swirling core of fiery brilliance which quickly dwindled into nothingness. All at once the sky was placid again, the silence complete except for faint cries coming from men on other ships.
    "Was it a meteor?" Toller called out, aware of the ques tion's superfluity.
    Correvalte nodded. "A big one, sir. It missed us by about a mile, perhaps more, but for a moment I thought our time had come. I never want to see anything like that again."
    "You probably never will," Toller said reassuringly. "Get the rigger to check the envelope for damage, particularly around the strut attachments. What is the fellow's name?"
    "Getchert, sir."
    "Well, tell Getchert to look lively—it's time he did some thing to earn his salt on this trip."
    As Correvalte moved away towards the aft superstructure, where the ordinary crew members were housed, Toller gripped a transverse line and drew himself to the rail. Now that the inversion had been carried out he could see only the ships of his own echelon and, below him, the balloons of the four leading vessels, but all seemed well with the fleet in general. He had made many ascents to the weightless zone and as a result had become inured to the thought of a meteor actually striking a ship. It was one of the rare cases in which he could draw comfort from thinking about man's insignificance in the scale of cosmic events. His ships were so small and the universe so large that it would be quite unreasonable for one of the blazing cosmic bullets to find a human mark.
    It was ironic that only minutes earlier he had been privately bemoaning the humdrum nature of interplanetary flight, but if there were to be dangers he wanted them to be of a type which could be challenged and overcome. There was precious little glory to be wrung from casual extermination by a blind instrument of nature, a commonplace fragment of rock speeding through the void from. . . .
    Toller raised his head, directing his gaze to the south-east, to the part of the sky where the meteor