Free The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon Page B

behold, it was only the next morning after all.
    He switched on his penetroscope and waited impatiently while the pseudo-hard radiation fumbled its way through the beryl hull metal and the image cleared. His prison was being lifted by a crane onto a lowboy trailer, which began to move as soon as it had its load. It tumbled out to the apron where the ship waited, belly down like some wingless insect, with its six jointed jacks, one of which was footless and supported by a tall gantry which had thrust out a boom to hold up the limb, like a groom holding up a horse’s split hoof while the stableboy runs for the liniment.
    The lowboy was positioned under the leg, and Deeming blinked at the pounding and screeching going on above him as his tomb was bolted to the landing jack and became a part of it. Then there was a quiet time as tools and ground hands got clear, ports and locks were battened, and the crew assumed coin-off stations. Somewhere a whistle was blowing; Deeming could hear it through his radio, picking it from the intercom, which in turn had it from an outside microphone in the hull. It stopped, and there was a rumbling purr as all six legs began to straighten, pushing the ship up off the ground so that most of the terrestrial matter included in its flicker-field would be air.
    Then without warning the earth was gone, the vanished ship lightyears away already before the gut-bumping boom of its airimplosion could sound. Deeming’s stomach lurched, and then there was gravity again and a scene in his ’scope—a rolling grey-green landscape, with a few cylindrical buildings and a half-dozen docking pads.
    That’s the trouble with space travel nowadays, he thought glumly. They’ve taken all the space out of it.
    The ship hovered perhaps a thousand feet high, drawing anti-gravpower from the beam generator down below. It drifted slowly downwards, positioning itself over one of the empty pads.
    Pad 4.
    According to his briefing, the correct pad was number 6. With rising anxiety he saw that 6 was already occupied by a small sport flicker.
    There was only one way he would ever get out of here, and that was in Pad 6. Nobody in the ship knew he was there. He was not even sure of the origin or destination of the ship, or on which planet they were now landing. If it set down in the wrong pad, he would stay right where he was, leave with the ship, and either starve or set up a howl with his radio and get dragged out at the wrong place at the wrong time by the wrong people.
    He turned on his transmitter, fingered it to docking frequency, and said authoritatively, “Wear off, skipper. Pad 6 is ours.” He waited tensely. He hoped the ground control would think it was hearing a crewman speaking to the captain while the captain thought he was hearing ground control.
    He heard murmurs in the intercom but could not pick them up clearly. The ship steadied, then began to sink again. He waited tensely, begging his brains to come up with something, anything, then literally sobbed with relief as a space-suited figure tumbled out of the blockhouse and sprinted for the sportster in Pad 6. The little ship lifted and slid into 4, and Deeming’s ship settled into its assigned berth.
    For a moment Deeming lay trembling with reaction, and then grinned. He wondered if the captain and the control officer, sitting over a beer later, would think to ask each other who had called out to wear off. That, he said, is how fights start in bars.
    He scanned once around him with the ’scope and thereafter ignored the scene. He grasped the metal ring in the center of the floor of his prison and turned it. Faintly, he felt the slight tapping of a relay sequence, and then the surface on which he lay began to descend. Down it went to ground level and still down. He snapped on his helmet light confidently; nothing would be seen from outside but the great round jack foot pressed solidly against the concrete pad. Whocould know that its sole pressed a matched disc