Half an hour later, when he’d jumped down from a tree, the youth’s face simultaneously expressed concern and disappointment.
“I believed that we were closer to the river,” he said after he’d sat down next to Mafkona.
Then he added, “Many times during our hunting tours I compared the satellite navigation readings and my own estimate of the distance. The discrepancy never exceeded fifty steps, and now I seem to have lost my sense of distance…”
A lot of time passed after these words, until the girl said, “I can get up.”
Mafkona hung on to Ama’s left elbow. They walked slowly, while the day, on the contrary, quickly faded away. The pain eclipsed all of the girl’s other feelings.
She tried not to think about it. She distracted herself from it with her memories of the events of the last two days, when they’d found out that the colony hadn’t yet informed the Earth of its existence.
Especially clearly, she remembered the events that had occurred after they’d arrived at the river Warm. The loss of most of their property, the parting with Omis, the fight at the crossing, Ama’s departure, swimming in the lake, the siege of the predators, playing with the cub, Ama’s return and... Here she ceased to watch the video of her memories, because from this episode on it contained only pain.
The young man didn’t think about the past. How could they cover thirty kilometers from the river to the settlement, or before that, how would they climb the crag if no one was waiting for them on the shore? These questions bothered him particularly.
Soon he smelled water, but said nothing. A few difficult steps later, Mafkona also sensed it, and returned from her memory to reality. She stopped and looked at Ama. The young man answered her silent question with a nod.
They walked silently for about more fifty steps, after which, through the vegetation, the travelers heard the rustling of the current. A minute later, in spite of it all, they reached the river.
Mafkona looked around with a petrified face and muttered, “Omis must have gotten lost.” She sighed heavily and sank down on the stones.
Ama inspected their surroundings and said, “At least we have not lost our course. We arrived precisely at this stony glade, having passed forty-four kilometers through unfamiliar places.”
The girl nodded speechlessly, without expressing any emotion, and Ama sat next to her. After a while, when he had already rested, the youth got up and began to prepare the raft. Mafkona alternately cast a glance at his work, then at the cliff on the opposite bank. Now it seemed to her an insuperable obstacle.
“On the other bank, I can stay in the tent again and wait for the rescuers that you’ll send,” she said.
Naturally, had Ama thought about this too, but had come to a different conclusion.
“Omis should have sent rescuers, too. I would also have no landmarks. Therefore, departure alone does not guarantee that I will deliver the crystal on time and send rescuers. We must find another way out,” he declared resolutely.
There was nothing to do, and Mafkona continued to think. She lowered her head again and stared blankly at the scrap of dry leaf that she’d unconsciously taken from the stone, and now crumbled with her fingers.
Finally, when Ama had decided that she wouldn’t say anything, the girl suddenly uttered loudly, “You can march next to the rivers! First along the Warm, and then along the Quiet! And in this case, you definitely will not get lost,” she continued more calmly, “And, as I said, I will stay in the tent at the foot of the cliff. Why did we miss this opportunity for Omis?”
Ama stopped and looked at the girl. Then he said, “How could we have sent Omis in a completely unknown direction without a UD and maser, with only six arrows remaining in the quiver?” After pause he added, “It did not even come to my mind, then.”
Mafkona only shook her head in doubt.
“On the other hand,” the youth went on, “Who knows, maybe this is the only way out, in our situation?”
Hearing this question, the girl turned her gaze to the river, along which perhaps they might walk. First, they would have to march next to the Warm, to the place where it flowed into the Quiet. Then by following it they would reach the colony. How long would it take? Would they deliver the crystal on time? For them, time was of the utmost importance; it was a river which is never late. And in very this moment it seemed she saw their situation anew!
The girl felt great excitement. She looked away from the water and gazed steadily at Ama. “Is it difficult to measure the speed of this current?” She pointed to the river.
He turned to her and asked, a little surprised, “Why?”
“Instead of you going alone, we can both get to the colony on the raft, if the speed of these two rivers allows us to arrive on time.”
At first, Ama tensed, and then he frowned, saying, “Yesterday, the BRLC-1 nearly killed us in broad daylight, and over a short distance. What would happen to us on a long journey, especially at night?”
“Oh!” Mafkona sighed. “I completely forgot about the beast, and it was precisely what has put us in such a difficult situation.”
“Yes,” Ama spoke more confidently. “But, nevertheless, now we have a, perhaps unreliable, way to get to the settlement… and, as for being late, we will think about that later, when we have solved the problem of safety.”
The young people perked up; the dejection began to fade. Mafkona’s wound no longer seemed an insurmountable barrier. It remained to them to solve only one more problem: how to protect themselves from the attacks of a river beast.
“How can we get rid of the BRLC-1?” The girl asked, starting a brainstorming session. “The maser does not work in water, we do not have a bow and arrows… but what if we use a sharp pole? You could sharpen a long stick with an ax… or maybe we could—”
Suddenly the youth cut into her reasoning, “Mafkona, you have given me a great idea!”
The girl stopped talking and looked at him expectantly.
“The beast tried to throw down us into the water by pushing our air mattress, because it is soft and light, but if we assemble a raft out of logs, it would not attack us, because such a structure would be heavy and rigid. It would hurt the predator,” the young man raised his head and looked at the sky. “I think we have enough time to make it.”
“Are we so slow-witted? Why have we been looking around to find such a simple solution for so long?” Mafkona asked.
“We are not slow, but we are inexperienced in independent life,” Ama objected to her. “We are used to following our different schedules, but still, just a few minutes ago, we thought we were at a dead end, and now we have already found a way out.”
“Yes,” Mafkona uttered. “And now a great distance is not an obstacle to us, in spite of the fact that I cannot walk. But will we deliver the billet on time?”
She pondered on her question for a while, and then added, “Even if we measure the speed of this current, we do not know the total distance to the settlement, let alone can we measure the speed of the combined flow of the two rivers.”
In response the young man started to reason, “If we assume that the thirty-kilometer road that we walked from the colony to this place is the hypotenuse, then the sections of the rivers are the legs of a right-angle triangle. If we assume that they are equal to each other, then according to Pythagoras, the distance that we should overcome is…”
The scout counted in his mind for a while and then announced, “Forty or forty-five kilometers. We have a whole fourteen hours of night left to overcome this distance. I think an average speed of three kilometers per hour is quite real for these rivers.”
Mafkona listened to these calculations and remembered, “Well, where will you find logs for making a raft? Will you chop down trees? But working with an ax would take too much time; maybe you could cut them with the maser?”
“Neither the first nor the second,” said Ama confidently. “There are many fallen plants in the forest. I will tie them with a vine, and there
will be our raft.”
“But the fallen… maybe they are rotten or insect-eaten?” the girl doubted.
“It does not matter. We are not going to cross the ocean. Their hardness will be enough to protect us from the beast,” the youth reassured her.
Ama proceeded to search for fallen plants, and Mafkona followed him, jumping on one leg and with the weapons in her hands. They did not roam the coastal forest for long. The scout found eight slightly rotten logs about thirty centimeters across and about two and a half meters long. Then he took his ax and cleaned them of the remnants of branches. After that, he plucked many long pieces of vine from nearby plants.
When he’d finished preparing the logs, Ro already was half hiding behind the forest. Ama felt tremendously tired, and hunger was depriving him of his last strength. But he endured. He remembered that Mafkona had experienced no less of an ordeal, and, in addition her leg hurt her badly.
In the process, the young people took into account that if they assembled the entire raft on land, it would be difficult to lower it into the water. Therefore, Ama first tied the logs into pairs. Having finished this, the guy, after a short rest, dragged the four pairs into the river and tied them together, winding the logs with a thin vine. Mafkona went knee-deep into the water and watched the river with the activated maser in her hands.
Suddenly she noticed some movement on the shore, downstream, about fifty meters away. The girl took aim carefully but quickly and shot several times at this vague silhouette. A desperate hiss was heard, and the creature rushed back into the bushes.
“Who were you shooting at? Did you hit the mark?”Ama asked without even flinching in surprise. He just interrupted his work for a second.
“I did not recognize the animal, but, as you heard, I got it,” Mafkona answered.
“You are a good shooter, Mafkona,” the young man said. “But we do not have to care what happens here, we are ready for water travel.”
Then he helped his companion to get on the raft, handed her the backpack with the precious load, as well as the ax, several long poles, several sticks, and a coil of vines. After that, he put his hands on the edges of the logs, pushed them away from the ground stones, and when the raft was floating freely, the young man climbed on it and joined the girl.
Chapter 80
Omis spent a restless night. He awoke often, and once, when he heard a hiss somewhere above the roof of his shelter, the traveler determined that he would no longer sleep at all—what if he were attacked while sleeping? After all, now he wasn’t on top of an inaccessible rock, but hidden behind thin twigs. But actually, staying awake until dawn proved impossible to him. Omis sometimes dozed and sometimes goggled his eyes, in an attempt at preventing their closure.
At some point the rays of Ro, insistently penetrating his shelter, finally awakened the young man. At first he opened his eyes and, as far as possible, examined his vicinity through the leaves. Noticing nothing suspicious, Omis stretched himself and at the same time pushed back the branches that were covering him. He got up and waved his limbs a couple of times, after which he headed down to the rivulet.
Here he first quenched his thirst, and then tried to ascertain how far he had traveled the last night. The wayfarer went down to the ocean and looked to the west. To his disappointment, he saw the stone ridge pretty close.
At first, Omis was surprised—after all, he had been walking for such a long time, but it turned out that he had gone only a short distance from the mountains. Then he realized that the sand and the collision with the beast had greatly slowed him down. He looked again at the peaks of the cliffs, evaluating their apparent height. They seemed to be six or seven kilometers away. This meant that the way to the passage through the spikes lay almost the same distance. Having learned what he needed, he turned around and resumed his journey.
The higher Ro rose, naturally, the stronger the heat became. In the open, in the middle of the sandy shore, it burnt especially hard. But the traveler understood that he could no longer rely on his instincts, owing to fatigue, his constant hunger and his lack of sleep. Therefore, fearing the ambush of a predator, he didn’t dare to go into the forest and continue his journey in the shade of the trees. For the same reason, he avoided moving close in to the ocean.
The day trip looked monotonous: a pale yellow strip of sand stretched to his left, extending to the forest itself. On his right he was accompanied by a strip of the same width, descending into the ocean, with another edge. When the heat became especially unbearable, he carefully approached the waves and scooped up water with his palms to moisten his head.
After about an hour of walking, the young man noticed a change. The forest and undergrowth disappeared, giving way to the familiar bushes.
As soon as the he recognized these bushes, he immediately thought of Ama and Mafkona. Previously, he simply couldn’t think about them. Omis regretfully admitted that he hadn’t accomplished his task and had done nothing to help his comrades. He had no choice but to rely on the courage and strength of Ama, and the patience and acumen of Mafkona, which would help them cope with all their difficulties. And, most importantly—unlike him, they had landmarks and a maser with an untouched supply of energy for a thousand shots.
He tried to remember another thing, which he felt was of great importance, but he couldn’t pump it out of his memory. Because of its importance he even froze in place.
“Ah!” He remembered at last and sharply raised his head. There, in the sky, the luminary has already passed a third of its path from the horizon to the zenith.
The delivery time had expired; The crystal should have been in the colony an hour after dawn, and at least two hours had passed already, the young man thought, still standing still. Interestingly, had Memi already begun to make a lens? Who was his workmate?
The next moment, the traveler realized that he was just daydreaming. He shook his head and immediately resumed his hike. After about half an hour, his head reminded him that he had not cooled it for a long time. He headed towards the ocean and, entering the surf, scooped up water several times with his left palm and poured it onto his head, carefully peering into the waves.
After that, leaving wet footprints in the sand, the scout returned to the beach and soon saw a familiar mound, which towered right in front of the corridor through the thorny bushes.
Chapter 81
Shoving the bottom of the river with a long pole, Ama moved the raft seven or eight meters away from the shore. After that, he began to lengthen the handles of the plastic oars, to use them as rudders. To do this, he simply tied long poles to the oars with the help of a vine.
Then, with an ax, he made two V-shaped notches between the logs on both sides of the raft. They would act as oarlocks for the rudders.
Using these devices, he directed the raft into the middle of the river. Mafkona, with the maser activated, carefully watched the surface of the water faintly illuminated by the twilight. By a time when their transport was already on its course, the dusk finally morphed into the night.
“Now our only concern is the speed of our raft,” the girl remembered.
“Yes.” The extremely tired youth barely uttered the word.
Mafkona drew attention to this and proposed him rest. She volunteered to be the first on duty.
“Until my leg calms down, I still cannot fall asleep,” the girl explained her proposal.
Ama lay down on the bare logs and sprawled next to her. Mafkona put the weapon between her legs, took the steering levers and gradually figured out how to keep the raft in the middle of the stream.
Seler appeared in the sky to accompany the girl, brightly illuminating the surface of the Warm. She could even see something on the banks. Mafkona felt relieved, with such illumination, that not a single predator could sneak up on them. At least, so far the trip had gone quietly, and nothing had bothered them. Maybe the animals sleep at night, the girl suggested to herself.
From time to time, she looked at her sleeping compan
ion and felt that, as the pain in her thigh subsided, she was getting sleepy, too. To get rid of her growing drowsiness, she raised her head and looked at the part of the sky where Sol, the almost invisible star, flickered.
She began to speculate about the phenomenon of people flying that far from the planet where they’d originated, but, nevertheless, it was of no interest to anyone. She wondered why everything had been arranged that way. In such a vast universe there were so few living things, and so much indifferent substance.
Eventually, the girl found an answer that suited her. In Mafkona’s opinion everything was arranged in this way because every rational species needed no less than a whole universe to fully develop and reveal its abilities. In a smaller space it was impossible to realize such a mission.
As time went by, Seler neared the source of the river, and prepared to drown in the forest. Mafkona was observing the river when something disturbed its surface, as if stiffened, some vague shadow appearing to the left of the raft about three meters away. The girl momentarily rid herself of her dreaming. She instantly released the oars from her hands and took up the maser. Having removed the safety lock, she pressed the start button and sent several pulses toward the shadow. In accordance with their nature, bunches of electromagnetic energy silently and imperceptibly fluttered out of the emitter and pierced the target.
Immediately, in the silence of the night, feverish splashes sounded, followed by a strident hissing, which reminded the girl of the kitchen. Fat thrown into a hot pan hissed similarly. Finally, the girl remembered and turned on the flashlight. The next second, she saw a harmless amphibian, the RLH-1. The animal was twitching on the surface of the water.
The noise had woken Ama. He opened his eyes and in the rays of the flashlight he saw the beast, apparently heavily wounded.
He asked his companion in a sleepy voice, “You mistook it for a predator?”
“Yes, I shot first and then turned on the lantern.”
She discerned Ama’s nodding and then the youth asked, “How is your leg?”
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