BLOWIE!

Something tore through the upper hull! His diversion had not worked! Then he realized he had made a mistake: he had been behind the mountain and the black hole when he hit the button, and the activating radio beam had not been powerful enough to get through! Well, diversion or not, he had to keep going. Dropping mines, air about him streaked with blast-rifle charges, taking shots in his hull, he completed the circle. Smoke was rolling through the tug. More than one thing had been hit. Hoping against hope that he had completed the severance with mines, he ducked back of the mountain again. He couldn't even see his screens. "Sir," said the tug, "my Will-be Was engine room is on fire. Could I recommend a visit to the nearest repair yard?" The idiocy of it made Heller realize that the computer banks must also have been hit. He pressed a manual emergency fire-suppression button. It was sloppy under his thumb. He glanced down: hydraulic fluid was pooling on the floor of the flight deck. Praying that his controls would still work, he worked the tractor engines to seize the mountain once again. He felt them grip. He opened the throttles of his planetary drives. He felt the tug take the strain against the beams. Praying, he opened the throttles of the powerful Will-be Was time-converter drives. It stopped the tug with a backward yank. He still had power. Something struck the tug from below. He could not see in all the smoke but he hazarded that some of that infantry had made its way around the mountain shoulder. His absorbo-coat must be ripped to shreds. He was visible! He began to work the throttles. He was making the tug lunge again and again against the dead weight of the mountaintop. A shot struck the underside of the star-pilot chair beside him. It began to smoke and crackle. The controls were getting sloppier and sloppier. He pointed the nose of the tug upward at an angle of forty-five degrees. He once more slammed the throttles open. There was a sort of roar behind him. It began low and then rose up the scale like something wailing. The tug was moving. The shots which had been lacing the air suddenly halted. That infantry back there must be now contending with an earthquake under their very feet. Heller couldn't see. His screens were not working to be seen by. He could only guess what was happening. Was he going forward with the mountaintop towed behind or wasn't he?

Many a fellow officer had often teased Heller about his "built-in compass." Sometimes on a warship flight deck he would sense that the gyros were in error. Seniors would ignore him but he would persevere and they would, finally, to get some peace, order a technician check. An error was always found but sometimes it was as little as a thousandth of a degree.' And even though this would make a significant mistake in course travelling at septuple light speed, nobody ever believed he could have detected it. Any gyro, they had said, is liable to be out a thousandth of a degree. Right now, astonishingly, he was totally uncertain which way he was going. He should have been able to detect, despite smoke, the north and south magnetic poles of Voltar. But he couldn't. Then he realized he had never before tried to navigate inside a time/space warp and that was where he was now. The black hole he was or was not towing extended its influence sphere to encase the tug. He did not know how fast he was going or even if he was going. His object was to get this mountaintop several miles from Palace City. If he did that, the command area of Voltar would drop back those thirteen minutes and appear in the same time band as the planet itself. Then, unless something else happened, the rebel forces could launch an assault and, with luck, break the defense perimeters and seize the place. He did not at that time know of Hisst's plan to hit the rebels' rear with the Apparatus forces from the staging area. His whole purpose was to expose the palaces and parks so they could be targeted by direct frontal assault. The security net would be gone if he had removed the source of all the power used in Palace City. Right then he wasn't thinking of anything except Where the blazes am I? The tug was on fire. It might explode. If he dropped this load, it might fall right back on the remaining mountain if it had not moved at all. He got some sand goggles over his eyes so they would stop streaming. He got down and moved up close to a screen. Maybe he could see something on it. He twiddled knobs. The screen was blank. His electronics were gone. The tractor engines were raving with the strain of the pull. The Will-be Was drives were thundering, fire or no fire. The planetary motors were screeching. The smoke billowed. The broken windscreen didn't seem to be letting in any air so that was no indicator of forward progress: rather it would seem to say that they were not going anyplace at all. He had a beltgun. With a sudden idea, he pulled it. Without being able to see its levers, he set it to impact-explosion. He reached out through the broken windscreen and fired straight down. It would be hard to tell above all this shrieking machinery. But he listened hard. He was counting. When that handgun charge hit the ground, wherever the ground might be, it would explode with a cracking sound. The number of seconds times the distance sound travelled on Voltar in a second would give him his altitude. He heard nothing. He fired again and began to count. Once more, nothing! The weird idea hit him that he might be flying upside down: that could happen around anti-gravity coils. It was getting too hot in here. Tongues of flame were licking through the passageway. Maybe he had moved the mountain. Maybe he hadn't. "My Will-be Was starboard time-converter is melting," said the tug. "I sincerely recommend you land somewhere and look into it." This thing was going to blow up! Heller knew he'd have to simply take a chance that he had towed the mountaintop away. He shut down the Will-be Was drives. There was a sag. He cut off the traction engines. With a scream the planetary drives hurled the tug ahead like a streak of lightning! Heller was hit with the time-transition nausea! He shot through into planetary time! The desert sun glared! He hastily shut the planetary throttles. Instantly the tug began to fall. Then he saw what some of this was about. He had pulled the mountaintop fifty thousand feet into the air. The range of those shots was too extreme and they had also gone outside the space warp. His own built-in compass wasn't working yet. He had no idea where he was. He grabbed the tug controls to right it. They did not respond! Heller groped behind him. He had parked the space-trooper sled in the passageway. He had it. It was no time to be careful. He jumped on it and shot it through the shattered windscreen!

The sled was tumbling. His lungs were full of smoke. He coughed and it was a mistake. At fifty thousand feet there wasn't enough air to take a decent breath. Head spinning for lack of oxygen, he blindly fumbled with the spacetrooper sled controls. He was trying to make it head straight down at power to an altitude where there was some air. He could feel wind begin to twitch at him now. Still, he wasn't making the downward plunging speed he should. He had reached terminal velocity for a man for Voltar. Something was desperately wrong-he wasn't diving anywhere near as fast as he knew this sled could. His sand goggles had whipped down across his mouth, letting the smoke out of his eyes. He was staring at the power meter of the spacetrooper sled that was embedded in the shaft.

CHARGE ZERO!

Comets, thought Jet, I haven't switched this sled off since I used it in New York! Missy is right. I'm getting too old for this racket. Senile! The desert below was coming up in a huge cone: one spot in the middle was motionless, everything else was speeding away. That's where I splash, thought Jet. Then he thought, the blazes I do! He still had the hand blast-gun hanging on him by its lanyard. He recovered it. He could breathe now: the rush of passage was stacking up enough air to fill his lungs. He must be down to twenty thousand feet. His thumb flipped the levers of the gun. Ten thousand feet. Five thousand feet. Two thousand feet. Seven hundred feet. He pointed the handgun straight ahead at that motionless spot in the desert sand. Would it work? Two hundred feet.