I tried to use the controls. Not that they would have worked; the ship was obviously stone dead. But I tried it anyway, and then the pain came. My hands had been outside the crash field, naturally; how else could I control the car? Half the joints had been dislocated in the crash.

The ground came up, rotating. I tried to pull my hands back, but deceleration pulled me hard against the crash web, and the crash field held. I was embedded in glass.

I hit.

The car was on its nose in high fern grass. All the plastic windows had become flying shards, including the windshield; they littered the car. The windshield frame was crushed and bent. I hung from the crash web, unable to unfasten it with my crippled hands, unable to move even if I were free.

And I watched the Drunkard’s Walk, its fusion drive off, floating down ahead of me on its gravity drag.

I didn’t notice the anomaly then. I was dazed, and I saw what I expected to see: a spaceship landing. Bellamy? He didn’t see it, either, but he would have if he’d looked to the side when he came down the landing ladder.

He came down the ladder with his eyes fixed on mine and Emil’s sonic in his hand. He stepped out into the fern grass, walked over to the car, and peered in through the bent windshield frame.

“Come on out.”

“I can’t use my hands.”

“So much the better.” Bellamy rested the sonic on the rim of the frame and pointed it at my face. With his other hand he reached in to unfasten the crash web and pull me out by the arm. “Walk,” he said. “Or be dragged.”

I could walk, barely. I could keep walking because he kept prodding the small of my back with the gun.

“You’ve helped me, you know. You had a car crash,” he said. “You and Jilson. Then some predators found you.”

It sounded reasonable. I kept walking.

We were halfway to the ship when I saw it. The anomaly. I said, “Bellamy, what’s holding your ship up?”

He prodded me. “Walk.”

“Your gyros. That’s what’s holding the ship up.”

He prodded me without answering. I walked. Any moment now he’d see…

“What the—” He’d seen it. He stared in pure amazement, and then he ran. I stuck out a foot to trip him, lost my balance, and fell on my face. Bellamy passed me without a glance.

One of the landing legs wasn’t down. I’d smashed it into the hull. He hadn’t seen it on the indicators, so I must have smashed the sensors, too. The odd thing was that we’d both missed it, though it was the leg facing us.

The Drunkard’s Walk stood on two legs, wildly unbalanced, like a ballet dancer halfway through a leap. Only her gyros held her monstrous mass against gravity. Somewhere in her belly they must be spinning faster and faster…I could hear the whine now, high-pitched, rising…