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Chapter 14

Bronson Star passed through Dunlevin's Van Allens, the natural screen of particles held about the planet by its magnetic field. The transit should have been made in nanoseconds of subjective time—but, with the Mannschenn Drive still in operation seemed to occupy an eternity. Grimes had read and had been told of the weird effects that might be expected, had warned the others—but reading about something in a book is altogether different from experiencing it in actuality.

There were the brush discharges from projections, crackling arcs between points. But a brush discharge should not look like a slowly burgeoning flower of multicolored flame; an arc, to a human observer in normal space-time, flares into instant existence, it is not a tendril of blinding incandescence slowly writhing from one terminal to the other. It crackles; it does not make a noise like a snake writhing with impossible slowness through dead leaves.

Grimes was surprised when his hand moved at quite normal speed. He stopped the Manhschenn Drive. The thin, high whine of the ever-precessing rotors deepened in tone to an almost inaudible hum, ceased. Ahead, as seen through the transparent dome of the control room, the writhing nebulosity that had been Dunlevin solidified to a great crescent, bright against the blackness of space. But Grimes's first concern was swinging the ship. He activated the directional gyroscopes, heard the initial rumble as they started, felt the tugs and pressures of centrifugal force.

He was aware that the transition to the normal continuum had not been without effects. There had been brief, intensely bright sparks in the air of the control room to tell of the forced matings of molecule with gaseous molecule. There was the acridity of ozone. An alarm buzzer was sounding. Grimes managed a hasty glance at the console, saw that the warning noise and the flashing red light signified the failure of nothing immediately important; for some reason one of the farm-deck pumps was malfunctioning. It would have to wait for attention.

Nothing—apart from a brief, burning pain in his right foot—seemed to be wrong with his own body. Had it been his heart, or his brain, the result could have been—would have been—disastrous. He watched the stern vision screen, saw the night hemisphere of Dunlevin swing into view.

The general—he, alone, had lived on the planet, had fought on the losing side in the civil war—gave Grimes his instructions. He said, "That major concentration of city lights is Dunrobin. The one to the right of it, the smaller one, is Dunrovin. . . . Below it, on your screen, is Dunsackin. . . ."

The piratical ancestors of the exiled royalty and aristocracy, thought Grimes, had displayed a rather juvenile sense of humor when they renamed the planet and its major cities. He knew, having studied the charts, that Dunrobin was now Freedonia, Dunrovin changed to Libertad and Dunsackin to Marxville. . . . A pile of shit by any name still stinks, he told himself sourly.

"Try to fall," ordered Mortdale, "midway between Dunrovin and Dunsackin. Before too long we shall pick up a laser beacon, like the one that you homed on when you landed on Porlock."

"If it is there," said Lania—for the benefit, thought Grimes, of the pale, trembling Paul. Then, just to show impartiality in her distribution of psychological discomfort, "You needn't be so fussy about avoiding the thing this time, Grimes. You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs—or a counterrevolution without breaking beacons."

Ha, thought Grimes. Ha, bloody ha! And we'll soon see who has the last laugh!

But he could no longer afford the luxury of indulging in sardonic thoughts. The ship was falling like a stone, a meteorite. Soon she would be leaving a trail in the night sky like one. As long as that was the only indication of her arrival she might be taken for a natural phenomenon but if the flaring descent were accompanied by the hammering of inertial drive it would be a dead giveaway. He must use the drive now while the vessel was still in a near vacuum, incapable of conducting sound.

He applied lateral thrust, brought the bull's eye of the stern vision screen exactly midway between the lights of the two cities, held it there. As on past occasions he was forgetting that he was a prisoner acting under duress, at gunpoint. He was beginning to enjoy himself. He had a job to do, one demanding all his skills.

Bronson Star fell.

Her skin was heating up but not—yet—dangerously so. She was maintaining her attitude—so far, but once she was in the denser atmospheric levels she would be liable to topple. In a properly manned ship Grimes would have had officers watching instruments such as the radar altimeter, the clinometer, external pressure gauge and all the rest of them while he concentrated on the actual pilotage. Now he was a one-man band. All that his companions in the control room were good for was pointing their pistols at him.

Bronson Star fell.

The air inside the ship was becoming uncomfortably warm and the viewports were increasingly obscured by upsweeping incandescence. But the stern vision screen was clear—and in it, quite suddenly, appeared a tiny, red-glowing spark, a little off-center.

Inertial drive again, lateral thrust, sustained, fighting inertia. . . . The ship responded sluggishly but she did respond, at last. Grimes was sweating but it was not only from psychological strain: It was no longer warm in the control room; it was hot and becoming hotter.

"You'll burn us all up!" screamed Paul.

"Be quiet, damn you!" snarled Lania.

Bronson Star fell.

The radar altimeter read-out on the stern vision screen was a flickering of numerals almost too rapid to follow. The beacon light was still only a spark but one of eye-searing intensity—or was the smarting of Grimes's eyes due only to the salt perspiration that was dripping into them?

Bronson Star started to topple.

Lateral thrust again. The ship groaned in every member as she slowly came back to the vertical relative to the planetary surface.

Grimes realized that somebody else had come into the control room.

"General!" shouted a voice—that of Major Briggs? "General! The men are roasting down there! They'll be in no state to fight even if they're still alive when we land!"

The troop decks, converted cargo holds, would not be as well insulated as was the accommodation, thought Grimes. They must be ovens. . . .

"General! You must stop before we're all incinerated!"

"Captain Grimes," ordered Mortdale at last, "you may put the brakes on."

Easier said than done, thought Grimes. But to slow down at this altitude would be safer than carrying out the original plan. He could apply vertical thrust gradually—but, even so, it must sound to those in the countryside below the ship as though all the hammers of hell were beating in the sky. And what of the planet's defenses? Were military technicians sitting tensely, their fingers poised over buttons?

Had they already pushed those buttons?

In the screen the figures presented by the radar altimeter were no longer an almost unreadable flicker. The rate of descent was slowing yet there was not—nor would there be for a long time—any appreciable drop in temperature. But the thermometer had ceased to rise and only an occasional veil of incandescent gases obscured the viewports.

Grimes increased vertical thrust. The ship complained, trembled. Loose fittings rattled loudly. Relative to the surface below her Bronson Star was now almost stationary.

"Drop her again!" ordered Mortdale.

That made sense. It might possibly fool a computer; it almost certainly would fool a human gunlayer.

The hammering of the inertial drive abruptly ceased. Again the ship fell—but there was no burgeoning flower or flame in the sky above her, where she had been.

A suspicion was growing in Grimes's mind. This landing—apart from the problems of ship handling—was all too easy. Intelligence works both ways, and there are double agents. But he said nothing. If the general knew his job—and what had he been in the old Royal Army? a second lieutenant?—he would be smelling a rat by now.

The altimeter was unwinding fast again and, in the screen, that solitary beacon was blindingly bright.

1,000 . . . 900 . . . 800 . . . 700 . . .

Vertical thrust again. No matter who else might want Bronson Star in one piece Grimes most certainly did.

600 . . . 550 . . .

Still too fast, thought Grimes.

500 . . . 450 . . .

He increased vertical thrust.

430 . . . 410 . . . 390 . . .

"Get us down!" snarled Lania. "Get us down, damn you!"

Free fall again, briefly. Then full vertical thrust. Again Bronson Star shook herself like a wet dog as the inertial drive hammered frenziedly.

10 . . . 5 . . . 3 . . . 1 . . .

It was not one of Grimes's better landings. The ship sat down hard and heavily with a bone-jarring jolt. Had the great vanes of her tripedal landing gear not been equal to the strain she would surely have toppled, become a wreck. The shock absorbers did not gently sigh; they screamed.

"Airlocks open!" ordered Mortdale. "Ramps out!" Then, to Paul, "You, Your Highness, will lead the invasion. A hovertank, in which you will ride, carries your personal standard."

"I should stay here, in headquarters," said Paul weakly.

"You must show your flag, Highness. And your face."

"It is just as well," said Lania, "that his flag doesn't match his face. We don't want to surrender before we've started."

"Somebody has to keep guard over Grimes to make sure that he doesn't try anything," persisted Paul.

"It won't be you," said Lania.

"Major Briggs has his orders," said the general.

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Framed