The Green Millennium

XVII

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.”