Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

off the ground.”
    Together they lashed a cargo net over the remaining load. The top surface was fairly level; Bram could only hope that the different weights averaged out, too.
    He stayed outside while Jao squeezed back into the walker and jumped it to the top of the load. Bram tied down the walker’s legs while Jao crawled over obstacles to find the detonator.
    Then a dragonfly vehicle skittered up, hitting the edge of the wooden platform with a jolt. The impact swerved it around. Bram looked up and saw the overhanging end of the tubular chassis above him. A hatch popped open, and box-helmeted forms came pouring out. The first of them floated downward—not so high as to make it fall on its head, but just high enough to give it a lazy half turn in midair and enable it to land on all fours.
    More of the vehicles were crowding around, more hatches popping open, and then Jao set off the rockets.
    He must have given it almost everything he had, because the platform lifted with an abrupt acceleration that batted the overhanging dragonfly transport aside and slammed Bram down.
    The edge of the platform caught the helmet of one of the descending nymphs and shattered it. The mass of green jelly inside exploded sickeningly. Another nymph flailed for a clawhold, missed, and fell away under the rocket exhaust.
    But two of the nymphs were on the platform, scuttling toward him. Bram had just time enough to note that one of the nymphs was carrying a flanged, open-sided box as big as its helmet, and then they were on him.
    A pronged sleeve lashed out at him. He ducked and took it on his helmet. If it had ripped open his suit, he would have been done for.
    The flexible abdomen, tipped with claspers, whipped around at him. He caught the pincers and then, with his toes hooked into the cargo net, swung the insect like a sling while the upper body twisted around trying to get at him. The glass helmet smashed against the corner of a crate, and the claspers relaxed just on the point of crushing his gloved hand between them.
    But then the other nymph had him by two legs and its claspers and was trying to stuff him into the box. He struggled, but it was lifting him from behind, and he couldn’t reach it.
    Then he was in the box, staring through its open end into the cleft face of a tomato-eyed monster that was lifting him upward with blurring speed.
    He tried to get his legs under him, but crammed into the box as he was, he couldn’t untangle himself fast enough. The rockets had stopped firing. The pallet was coasting now, and free-fall turned him into the creature’s plaything.
    It held him at arm’s length for inspection. The blank green eyes loomed through the glass, and the facial legs within the helmet stirred restlessly on their shelf. There was a latch at the bottom of the faceplate, a simple catch meant to be operated from inside, and one of the facial limbs was reaching for it … .
    And then all of a sudden Jao was there with a wooden stake in his hand.
    Jao swung, driving the stake through the glass of the square helmet. The glass showered in fragments. The lobed face burst, and the hinged eating apparatus—unfolding limply from the smooth mask—lolled amid the jellied ruin.
    Jao helped him out of the box. “What are those flanges for? It looks like it’s made to fit on to something… it’s built sort of like a little air lock, isn’t it?”
    Bram looked over at the shattered helmet. He could see now that the front plate was made to slide up and down on grooves. His knees were suddenly weak from delayed reaction.
    “It’s an eating box,” he said.
     
    The tethered moon was far behind them, showing itself as pear-shaped with the wide end up. Even without Jao’s crude thumb-and-nose sightings, it was obvious by now that they were way off course. The cargo platform had gone sailing hundreds of miles past the edge of the disk’s rim, and they were looking down a ninety-million-mile cliff side.
    “Too wide and too high,” Jao said gloomily. “I had to fire all the rockets at once for a quick getaway. That jolt the nymphmobile gave us didn’t help any, either.”
    The three of them had been cooped up together inside the walker’s inflated bubble for an hour now, breathing by courtesy of the walker’s hydrogen-oxygen submetabolism. The curator had recovered somewhat and was getting snappish.
    “Does that mean it’s going to take longer?” he complained. “I’m getting hungry. And my eyes and throat are