The Lavalite World

Its rear parts were covered with blood.

Kickaha rode back to where Anana and McKay stood. They were wounded, too, mainly in the back. Blood welled from a score of little objects half-buried in the skin. Now he became aware that blood was coming from just behind and above his right elbow.

He grabbed the thing stuck in his skin and pulled it out. Rubbing the blood from its surface, he looked at it. It was a six-pointed crystalline star.

"Craziest shrapnel I ever saw," he said. No one heard him.

The plants, which he had at once named ca

Apparently McKay's dead animal was too far away to be observed.

Anana and McKay spent the next ten minutes painfully pulling the "shrapnel" from their skins. Pieces of grass were applied to the wounds to stop the bleeding.

"I'd sure like to stuff Urthona down the muzzle of one of those," Kickaha said. "It'd be a pleasure to see him riding its shell. He must have had a lot of sadistic pleasure out of designing those things."

He didn't know how the creature could covert its food into black gunpowder. It took charcoal, sodium or potassium nitrate, and sulfur to make the explosive. That was one mystery. Another was how the things "grew" shell-casings. A third was how they ignited the charge that propelled the shells.

There was no time to investigate. A half-hour had been lost in the chase, and McKay had no steed.

"Now, you two, don't argue with me," he said. He got off the hikwu. "Anana, you ride like hell after the palace. You can go faster if I'm not on it, and you're the lightest one so you'll be the least burden for the hikwu. I was thinking for a minute that maybe McKay and I could run alongside you, hanging onto the saddle. But we'd start bleeding again, so that's out.

"You take off now. If you catch up with the palace, you might be able to get inside and stop it. It's a slim chance, but it's all we got.

"We'll be moseying along."

Anana said, "That makes sense. Wish me luck."

She said, "Heekhyul", the Wendow word for "Giddap!", and the moosoid trotted off. Presently, under Anana's lashings, it was galloping.

McKay and Kickaha started walking. The flies settled on their wounds. Behind them explosions sounded as the ca

An hour passed. They were trotting now, but their leaden legs and heavy breathing had convinced them they couldn't keep up the pace. Still, the palace was bigger. They were gaining on it. The tiny figures of Anana and her beast had merged into the rusty grass of what seemed a never-ending plain.

They stopped to drink bad-tasting water from the bag McKay had taken off of his dead hikwu. McKay said, "Man, if she don't catch that palace, we'll be stranded here for the rest of our life."

"Maybe it'll reverse its course," Kickaha said. He didn't sound very optimistic.

Just as he was lifting the bag to pour water into his open mouth, he felt the earth shaking. Refusing to be interrupted, he quenched his thirst. But as he put the bag down he realized that this was no ordinary tremor caused by shape-shifting. It was a genuine earthquake. The ground was lifting up and down, and he felt as if he were standing on a plate in an enormous bowl of jelly being shaken by a giant. The effect was scarey and nauseating.

McKay had thrown himself down on the earth. Kickaha decided he might as well do so, too. There was no use wasting energy trying to stand up. He faced toward the palace, however, so he could see what was happening in that direction. This was really rotten luck. While this big temblor was going on, Anana would not be able to ride after the palace.

The shaking up-and-down movement continued. The animals had fled for the mountains, the worst place for them if the quake continued. The birds were taking off, millions salt-and-peppering the sky, then coalescing to form one great cloud. They were all heading toward the direction of the palace.

Presently, he saw a dot coming toward him. In a few minutes it became a microscopic Anana and hikwu. Then the two separated, both rolling on the ground. Only Anana got up. She ran toward him or tried to do so, rather. The waves of grass-covered earth were like swells in the sea. They rose beneath her and propelled her forward down their slope, casting her on her face. She got up and ran some more, and, once, she disappeared behind a big roller, just like a small boat in a heavy sea.

"I'm going to get sick," McKay said. He did. Up to then Kickaha had been able to manage his own nausea, but the sound of the black man's heavings and retchings sparked off his own vomit.

Now, above the sounds he was making, he heard a noise that was as loud as if the world were cracking apart. He was more frightened then he'd ever been in his life. Nevertheless, he got to his hands and knees and stared out toward where Anana had been. He couldn't see her, but he could see just beyond where she'd been.

The earth was curling up like a scroll about to be rolled. Its edges were somewhat beyond where he'd last seen Anana. But she could have fallen into the gigantic fissure.

He got to his feet and cried, "Anana! Anana!" He tried to run toward her, but he was pitched up so violently that he rose a foot into the air. When he came down he slid on his face down the slope of a roller.

He struggled up again. For a moment he was even more confused and bewildered, his sense of unreality increasing. The mountains in the far distance seemed to be sliding downward as if the planet had opened to swallow them.

Then he realized that they were not falling down.

The ground on which he stood was rising.

He was on a mass being torn away to make a temporary satellite for the main body of the planet.

The palace was out of sight now, but he had seen that it was still on the main body. The fissure had missed by a mile or so marooning it with its pursuers.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

THE SPLITOFF NOW was one hundred miles above the primary and in a stable, if temporary, orbit. It would take about four hundred days before the lesser mass started to fall into the greater. And that descent would be a slow one.

The air seemed no less thick than that on the surface of the planet. The atmosphere had the same pressure at an altitude of 528,000 feet as it had at ground zero. Urthona had never explained the physical principles of this phenomenon. This was probably because he didn't know them. Though he had made the specifications for the pocket universe, he had left it up to a team of scientists to make his world work. The scientists were dead millenia ago, and the knowledge long lost. But their manufactures survived and apparently would until all the universes ran down.

The earthquakes had not ceased once the splitoff had torn itself away. It had started readjusting, shaping from a wedgeform into a globe. This cataclysmic process had taken twelve days, during which its marooned life had had to move around much and swiftly to keep from being buried. Much of it had not succeeded. The heat of energy released during the transformation had been terrible, but it had been alleviated by one rainstorm after another. For almost a fortnight, Kickaha and his companions had been living in a Turkish bath. All they wanted to do was to lie down and pant. But they had been forced to keep moving, sometimes vigorously.