Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

burning from the atmosphere in here.”
    “Be thankful you’re breathing at all,” Jao said. “We’re all going to be a little hungry after a while, but at least we won’t die of thirst.”
    “See here,” the little man said. “I insist—”
    Bram interrupted. “If we keep on this way much longer, by the time we overtake Yggdrasil, we’ll be thousands of miles off the rim. They won’t know where to look for us. And our suit radios don’t have that kind of range.”
    “Yah, I guess we better have a little course correction about now,” Jao said.
    “With what? I thought you said you shot off all our rockets.”
    “Oh, there were a couple of spares left over from when I rigged the pallet,” Jao said casually. “They were still in the corner where I stowed them, fortunately. Under a tarpaulin. The stevedores must’ve thought they were part of the cargo. I lugged them over here while that walking appetite was trying to package you for its dinner.”
    He gestured negligently at the thousand square feet of lumpy cargo net on which the walker rested. Bram saw the two solid-propellant canisters lying several feet away.
    “What good will those do?” he asked. “Two little booster rockets aren’t enough to nudge a mass like this after the kick it got.”
    “Oh, we don’t have to push the whole mass,” Jao said.
    “Even if we dumped everything—at least as much as we could manage in the next hour, working at top speed— the platform itself has too much mass. We’d never be able to kill enough momentum to come out with the right vector.” He gestured at the receding rimscape and shrugged. “And after another hour of this …”
    “We’ll ride the walker in!” Jao said impatiently. “Use it as our lifeboat. It weighs practically nothing, and there’s just the combined mass of the three of us. There’s enough thrust in just one of those boosters to change our vector while conserving the useful momentum toward Yggdrasil!”
    “Yes, but—”
    “It’s all in the angles. I’ll retrofire the second rocket to slow us down at the other end enough to compensate for the extra momentum. Or most of it, anyway. We’ll hang in Yggdrasil’s space for hours—more than enough to zero in on our suit radios. And if we’re still out of range, I can rig up a hydrogen flare or something.”
    They set to work with a will. There was more than enough cordage to lash the two canisters in position on the walker’s spindly frame. “Best to secure the retrorocket now, while we have some footing underneath us,” Jao said. “I can align it precisely with the median axis. When it’s time to fire, we’ll aim the whole walker by squirting oxygen or something.”
    “You going to clear the pallet the same way?”
    “No … too many variables. I’m using the pallet as our launch platform. I know how it’s tumbling.”
    Jao had done wonders with a few simple tools—the timer of his neck computer, a couple of wooden stakes marked off with measuring lines, a loop sight made of bent wire. “We can’t miss,” he said. “It’s a three-hundred-mile-wide target.”
    Overcoming their distaste, they scavenged the dragonfly air tanks, then discovered that they were unusable. The air was thick with contaminants. One whiff set the curator coughing and wheezing.
    “What’s the air of their world like if they can breathe that ?” Bram wondered aloud.
    “Never mind,” Jao said. “Take ‘em along. We’ll use ‘em for attitude jets.”
    They were about to leave when they saw movement amid the jumbled cargo. “We’ve got a stowaway,” Jao said.
    Bram tensed, but it was only a Cuddly. They coaxed the little fellow closer, then grabbed him. His fur was beginning to lose the trapped air that made it fluffy.
    “We’d better take him with us,” Bram said. “He can’t last much longer here.”
    The small creature went willingly with them into the walker’s inflated bubble, eagerly sniffing the air. He immediately made a nuisance of himself by attempting to curl up in the lap of the one person there who didn’t care for animals—the curator.
    “Get him off me,” the curator yelled. “I don’t want him messing up these etchings.”
    “Oh, for Fatherbeing’s sake, he’s not going to hurt anything,” Jao said. “You’ve got them in nitrogen envelopes, anyway.”
    Bram lifted the little beast away. “He’s an old one,” he said. “Look at that grizzled fur.”
    “Yar, he’s lived a long time, all