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Paul Hagbolt was plunged into a breathable sea of waray pastel colors doh here and there were bright green swatches
For a few moments he hadn&039;t been at all certain that he&039;d been snatched inside a vehicle It seemed more like nearly instantaneous translation to another plane of existence, another spot in the universe - a jungly, bedroomy spot
He&039;d hardly seen the saucer Most of the ti in the gritty salt water clutching Miaow When he&039;d been whisked up, his first thought had been that he and Miaow had been spun aloft by the next co yet shockingly vivid flashes: first, a huge, tapering, greenish-purplish cat face; second, two staring eyes with incredible five-petaled irises around the black five-spiked stars of the pupils; third, a long, slio pads and four cruel curving claws of translucent, violet-gray horn - he had the impression that they&039;d just been buried in the scruff of his coat, andhi with a sloist in the warreen-flecked, pink sea
A dark hole in that sea swung into view, and through it he saw Margo thigh-deep in dirty, foa up at him, and beside her Doc, spuold hair clinging wet and twisty Then they were shrinking with incredible swiftness, as if a wrong-ended telescope had been interposed Nevertheless, it was then that Paul began to believe that he was in the saucer he&039;d disjointedly seen - the saucer that now h with no sensation of acceleration Then the hole closed upon jue pink flowers
A word juravity If this vehicle carried its own null-gravity field - possibly null-inertia too - that could explain the absence of any felt G-forces, and also his floating, dripping wet, surrounded by floating round drops of this wetness, in breathable perfumy air in a round, flattened roo his left hand like a dozen wasps: Miaoas terrified by the strange jolts, and insulted by sea water, and she held on to hi cat, and she shot twisting through the air and vanished with a puff of yellow-pink petals into a flowerbank
The next instant he was grabbed froainst a hard, satin-smooth surface that had so flowers The thing that terrified him most was that the limb that snaked around his neck - a sleek, spring-strong, green-furred limb, barred with violet - had two elbows
With a whirling speed that did not allow his seeing it clearly, the green and violet tiger-thing worked at his out-flung wrists and ankles Paith claws of violet-gray pinched without stabbing; once he felt the grip of so kicked off froreen violet-ringed tail, ser explosion of petals
He tried to push himself up froe only his head Though still in null gravity, he was soyved tautly to that saht hoht up and saw not ten feet above him (or below, or out to the side - he didn&039;t kno to feel about it in null gravity) a spread-eagled, wet-sand-specked, pale, wildly staring reflection of hi reflections of reflections of the sanant picture
The inner shape and decor of the saucer began to come clear to him More than half the flowers he&039;d seen had been reflections Ceiling and floor were round, flateach other, about nine feet apart and twenty feet in dialed near the center of one of them The rim between the e and small - pale yellow, pale blue, violet, ly live flowers, for there were leaves shaped like sickles and swords and spears, and there were gli branches - probably their hydroponic or whatever underpinnings filled much of the saucer&039;s tapered outside rihnut of the rietation, for bowered in it beyond his fettered feet he now ray control panel - at any rate soeo his head around, he could see similar panels beyond each of his spread and outstretched ar situated relative to each other at the apices of an equilateral triangle incribed in the saucer, but each of the flowers - very much as crassly functional objects such as heater and sink and phone and hi-fi ht be masked in the small apartment of a modish and esthetically-ht, war fromhe couldn&039;t see where An invisible indoor sun - most eerie
Eerier still and infinitely closer to ho that next ca invaded and his h like soman is supposed to relive his life in a few seconds, and he wondered if it applied when you drowned in flowers - or were crucified by a tiger preparatory to being torn apart and devoured
The sensations in his mind flashed so fast he could see and hear only blurs They were his own private mental possessions, yet he was unable to note them as they flashed and faded - an ulties he was able to catch toward the end of this mental "customs search" showed an odd preoccupation with zoos and ballets
He looked around but could catch no gli or of Miaow The invisible sun radiated on The flower-banks were deathly still, exuding their perfuh the Wanderer&039;s shadow To his right was the strange planet&039;s green-spotted night side, which still made him think of a spider&039;s underbelly Ahead lay the sheaf of stars, and to his left the black, ever-lengthening ellipsoid of theup froround He was beginning to feel tired and cold, and he&039;d quit working the radio
A diainst the Wanderer&039;s face, ahead, near the star-sheaf It rapidly became a yellowish dash, horizontal to him, then a double dash with a little black stretch in the hts, then two yellowish spindles that grew in size
Only then did Don realize that this wasn&039;t some sort of surface appearance on the Wanderer, but a s - headed straight at the Baba Yaga He flinched and blinked his eyes, and the next instant, without any gradual deceleration that he could note, the two yellow spindles had coa and so close that the fraer-end of each spindle
They looked to him now like two saucer-shaped spacecraft between thirty and fifty feet across and three or four yards thick At least, he rather hoped they were spacecraft - and not, well, animals
His estimate of their shape was confirmed when, without any visible flash of vernier jets, they tilted toward hile inscribed in it, the other with a violet V, the legs of which stretched froently backward as the Baba Yaga was drawn forward between its escorts - that was how he began to think of thees of their rims showed in the spacescreen They held position very precisely thereafter, as if they had locked onto his little moonship - and soe sensation
The next thing he noticed was that the pale green spots were crawling down the Wanderer&039;s black rotundity as if they were so s!
Then he saw that the sheaf of stars idening as the black ellipsoid of the a was being draard by its escorts at about one hundred miles a second Yet he had not felt an atoainst his ship&039;s wall - or sh it!
At no tih the ht it now Acceleration and the price you paid for it in fuel and G-strains were the core of his professional knowledge What was happening to his body and to the Baba Yaga noas not merely a monstrous intrusion of the unknown, it flatly contradicted everything he knew about spaceflight and its iron limitations From five les to the first course, yet without feeling it, without even the hint of the firing of some main jet hotter than a blue star - that was not reen spots continued to scuttle out of sight below and the star-sheaf to widen above, and suddenly the Baba Yaga burst into sunlight above the Wanderer Reflected glare stabbed at his eyes from the lefthand side of the spacescreen frame and the yellow riether, fuot thea, locked to its escorts, was stillup around the Wanderer at a fantastic velocity The space-screen swung a little to the right and, looking over the top of the planet, Don could see Earth,white sun which could sting his eyes even through the goggles
The planetary surface below hiht side, then a crescent of the day side,over and around hiainst star-speckled space were the white threads that came from the moon&039;s nose Two of them were thicker now - not threads, cords
Ahead they converged and curved doard the Wanderer&039;s north pole There, close together but still separate, they seemed simply to join the planet&039;s velvet surface, soht side, a dozen or so of the froa and its escorts were cannoning across the same spot
Then, just as it seemed that in the next second theystalks or crash into theht were once again battered as the Baba Yaga and its escorts lost most of their velocity in a tranquil instant and siht doard the black-and-yellow rooting place of the stalks
Either his escorts had the inertia-less drive at which everyone but science-fiction writers scoffed, and were carrying the Baba Yaga in their null-G field, or he was hallucinating, or -
He turned to the control panel and tried for a radar fix on the surface below Rather to his surprise he got an instant echo
They were 320with it at ten miles a second