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Chapter 4
Badly as it had started, Jo
He was lost in the huge copilot seat and the belt that was supposed to keep him in would not contract enough to do so. But he braced himself with a grip on a handhold and watched the Earth race away from him.
He felt awe. Was this how it was to be an eagle? Is that how the world looked from the sky?
The panorama of the mountains to the west began to open in relief. And in a few moments he realized they were now higher than Highpeak, seen whitely in the cold clear air.
For fifteen minutes he was enthralled. They were at a height of about four miles. He had never realized there was so much world! Or that one could feel so thrilled.
Then Terl said, “You can operate any of the mine machines, can't you, animal? Now this is no different except that it goes in three dimensions, not just two. Those controls in front of you duplicate these. Fly it!”
Terl's paws came off the controls. The plane immediately flopped over.
Jo
Jo
The plane went crazy. It soared, it swooped. The ground rushed up and sped away.
Terl's laughter cut above the roar. Jo
With a steadying concentration, Jo
button alongside every button familiar in mining machinery. He grasped that the third set was for the third dimension.
The main thing, he instinctively knew, was not to get too close to that ground! He found a button for altitude and punched it. Although the plane was staggering, the ground began to fall away.
This was too close to a win for Terl. "I’ll take over,” he said. “I got high honors as a pilot at the school. Watch me land on that cloud!”
A ragged top puff of cloud was ahead of them. Terl punched some buttons and stopped the plane on a flat place in the mist. “Trouble is, rat brain, you didn't watch what I was doing. You were too busy gawking at the scenery. But I guess if rats had been meant to fly, they'd be birds!” He laughed at his own joke, reached behind his seat, and unstrapped a sealed container of kerbango. He took a chomp on it and put it back. “First lesson. Don't ever leave anything adrift in a plane. It will fly around and bat your brains out. Not,” he added with more laughter, “that rats have brains!”
He took off and made Jo
Jo
“Not while I’m with you,” growled Terl, his mood changed.
“Why not over the mountains?” asked Jo
Terl scowled. “Whenever you fly over those mountains, just make very sure you got no breathe-gas loose anyplace. Understand?”
Jo
“Why are you teaching me to fly?” asked Jo
“Any miner has to know how to fly,” said Terl. Jo
It was midafternoon when they landed the battle plane at the end of the row. Jo
“Don't get any ideas that you can start one of these things,” said Terl. “They require a special key to unlock the computers.” He dangled a key in front of Jo
Jo
Pattie yelped to see him. He realized they had been worried by the horse showing up without him.
“Got an antelope and a deer!” Jo
Chrissie was very pleased. “We can strip and smoke the meat,” she called across the two barriers. “There's plenty of ashes here and we can tan the hides.”
Jo
Pattie called, "Jo
Yes, Jo
Later that evening when Terl came to let him, supervised, into the cage, he gave the girls the ski
When he came out and Terl had locked up and turned the juice back on, Terl said, "I’m just an animal attendant. But I don't wire dummy wires!”
He threw a stack of books at Jo
Jo
The books were: Begi
Chapter 5
Jo
The machinery freighter plane was parked with doors agape and ramps let down in the open field near the battle planes.
A remarkably cowed Zzt checked off a drilling machine as it was run up the ramp by Ker. He raised the ramps and closed the doors.
Jo
Jo
His headache, however, came from the text Teleportation in Relation to Ma
The mathematics of the text were quite beyond him. They were Psychlo mathematics a long way in advance of what he had studied. The symbols made his head spin.
The history section at the start of the book was perfunctory. It simply stated that a hundred thousand years ago a Psychlo physicist named En had untangled the riddle. Prior to this, it was thought that teleportation consisted of converting energy and matter to space and then reconverting it in another place so it would assume its natural form. But this had never been proven. En had apparently found that space could exist entirely independent of time, energy, or mass and that all these things were actually separate items. Only when combined did they make up a universe.