The Big Black Mark - A. Bertram Chandler [39]
He ordered the navigator to reduce altitude. From too great a height it is almost impossible to get any idea of architectural details; any major center of habitation is no more than a pattern of streets and squares and parks. It was not long before the city appeared again on the screen—a huddle of towers, great and small, on the horizon, reflected by the gleaming straight edge of the canal. It was like an assemblage of child's building bricks—upended cylinders and rectangular blocks, crowned with hemispheres or broad-based cones. The sun came out from behind the clouds and the metropolis glowed with muted color—yellows and browns and russet reds. Without this accident of mellow light striking upon and reflected from surfaces of contrasting materials the town would have seemed formidable, ugly, even—but for these moments at least it displayed an alien beauty of its own.
There was traffic on the canal again, big barges like the one' of which the crew had been thrown into such a panic. There were three boats outbound from the city. These, sighting the thing in the sky, turned in a flurry of reversed screws and hard-over rudders, narrowly escaping ramming one another, scurried back to the protection of the high stone walls. The probe hovered and allowed them to make their escape unpursued.
And then, surging out from between the massive piers of a stone bridge, the Watergate, came a low black shape, a white bone in its teeth, trailing a dense streamer of gray smoke. It had a minimal funnel and a heavily armored wheelhouse aft, a domed turret forward. Through two parallel slits in the dome protruded twin barrels. There was little doubt as to what they were, even though there was a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned observatory. "Those sure as hell aren't telescopes!" muttered Brabham. The barrels lifted as the dome swiveled. "Get her upstairs, pilot!" ordered Grimes. "Fast!" Tangye stabbed in fumbling haste at his controls, keeping the probe's camera trained on the gunboat, which dwindled rapidly in the screen as the robot lifted. Yellow flame and dirty white smoke flashed from the two muzzles—but it was obvious that the result would not be even a near miss. Antiaircraft guns those cannon might well be, but their gunners were not used to firing at such a swift moving target.
"All right," said Grimes. "Hold her at that, Mr. Tangye. We can always take evasive action again if we have to. I doubt if those are very rapid-fire guns."
"I—I can't," mumbled the navigator. In the screen the picture of the city and its environs was dwindling fast. "You can't?"
Tangye, at his console, was giving an impersonation of an overly enthusiastic concert pianist. The lock of long fair hair that had flopped down over his forehead aided the illusion. He cried despairingly, "She—she won't answer."
"Their gunnery must have been better than we thought," remarked Brabham, with morose satisfaction.
"Rubbish!" snapped Swinton. "I watched for the shell bursts. They were right at the edge of the screen. Nowhere near the target."
"Mr. Brabham," asked Grimes coldly, "did you satisfy yourself that the probe was in good working order? A speck of dust in the wrong place, perhaps . . . a drop of moisture . . . a fleck of corrosion."
"Of course, sir," sneered Brabham, "all the equipment supplied to this ship is nothing but the best. I don't think!"
"It is your job, Number One," Grimes told him, "to bring it up to standard."
"I'm not a miracle worker. And I'd like to point out, sir, that this probe that we are—sorry, were—using—"
"I'm still using it!" objected Tangye.
"After a fashion." Then, to Grimes again: "This probe, Captain, has already seen service aboard Pathfinder, Wayfarer, and, just before we got it, Endeavor—all of them senior ships to this, with four ring captains."
"Are you insinuating," asked Grimes,