Free The Deadly Sky by Doris Piserchia Page B

home. One instant I walked in light and mist, the next I moved along the metal tunnel.
    Sargoth was waiting for me. “You weren’t supposed to go past the entrance. Good grief, man, you haven’t even been prepped!”
    I didn’t respond or look at him. Walking on by, I entered the machine room and went out into the hall. I didn’t look back. I hated the sight of him.

Chapter 7
    My roommate’s name was Spencer. He had been on Timbrini three days.
    “Been up here off and on since I was five years old and first rode the jinga,” he said to me. “Probably I would have stayed the first time if I could have gotten a little love and affection from the drells. They’re hard sorts in more ways than one.”
    I felt left out because most of the occupants of this wing had been acquainted with jinga since childhood while I had never straddled one until a few weeks ago. I liked Spencer, though he was several years older than I.
    “I ran for eight years,” he said. “After they recruited me. Rode a bird back home and became a bum. Lived in out-of-the-way holes so Falloway couldn’t find me. The man’s a hound. Knew where I was all the time.”
    “He didn’t drag you?” I said.
    “What good would that have done? They couldn’t make me work if I didn’t want to.”
    “Did you tell anyone?”
    “A few, but they didn’t believe me.”
    The drells were everywhere but I paid no attention to them except for Jolanne who came to our room to fill Spencer and me in.
    “It won’t do any good to try and tell you how to move across the weapon. It’s a hit or miss proposition.”
    “You haven’t got very far in three centuries,” said Spencer.
    “The safety path changes without warning. One minute it’s where we’ve got it marked, and in the next it’s elsewhere.”
    Spencer fidgeted nervously, took a quick look at me from the corner of his eye. He was a pink-skinned man with light hair and a million freckles. He wasn’t very big but he looked fit enough. “Right while someone’s on it, I’ll bet,” he said. “Has to be. How else can you know if it’s changed?”
    “Why does it change?” I asked.
    Jolanne didn’t answer. I had already become accustomed to that. It meant she didn’t know.
    “We’re going to blow it up,” she said after a minute. “There’s a platform on the far side that has a panel of controls. We can see it through our scopes.”
    After she went away Spencer and I watched TV. I don’t know what he was thinking about but my thoughts were on the grid. Nothing worked the right way on or in it because of the warped space. Maybe it wasn’t even part of true space but was a kind of crossover where the laws of physics didn’t totally apply. Sargoth and his crew could plant an explosive device on one of the girders, but they couldn’t make it go off. It wouldn’t explode. Beyond the tiers where the platform and the panels were situated was space that seemed to be more normal, or so it appeared through the scopes. There were no distorted areas, no warps or ripples. And if they did succeed in exploding a bomb? Sargoth said it would work without damaging anything on our side. It was only a weapon made of metal, the said. One the enemy had constructed in order to force an opening into our side. It would be blasted to pieces and that would be the end of it.
    “It’s so stupid!” I believed I merely thought the sentiment but I must have said it aloud since Spencer responded.
    “Sure it is, but it’s the only thing to do, take my word for it. To try, that’s the idea. Believe me, I’ve had eight years to think it all over. Blow that thing to kingdom come and tell those buzzards over there that we’re not all that easy to take.”
    He turned green the next morning when Sargoth came knocking on the door to tell him it was time to go to work. I tried to follow but was turned back.
    “What do you want to do?” said the glass man to me. “Stay in the control room and follow him every step of