“Hmm,” said Nick, obviously not convinced. “Anyway, it ain’t a ship.” He gestured towards the midships diver. “Steve ran into a mess of ropes and cloth—like thick nylon, he says. Sounds like some kind of parachute.” The old Greek stared in disgust at the soggy stump of his cigar, then flicked it overboard. “Soon as Billy’s up, we’ll go back and take a look. Might be worth something—remember what happened to Jo Chambers.”
Tibor remembered; the story was famous the length of the Great Barrier Reef. Jo had been a lone-wolf fisherman who, in the last months of the War, had spotted a DC—3 lying in shallow water a few miles off the Queensland coast. After prodigies of single-handed salvage, he had broken into the fuselage and started unloading boxes of taps and dies, perfectly protected by their greased wrappings. For a while he had run a flourishing import business, but when the police caught up with him he reluctantly revealed his source of supply. Australian cops can be very persuasive.
And it was then, after weeks and weeks of backbreaking underwater work, that Jo discovered what his DC—3 had been carrying besides the miserable few thousand dollars’ worth of tools he had been flogging to garages and workshops on the mainland.
The big wooden crates he’d never got round to opening held a week’s payroll for the U.S. Pacific Forces.
No such luck here, thought Tibor as he sank over the side again. But the aircraft—or whatever it was—might contain valuable instruments, and there could be a reward for its discovery. Besides, he owed it to himself. He wanted to see exactly what it was that had given him such a fright.
Ten minutes later, he knew it was no aircraft. It was the wrong shape, and it was much too small—only about twenty feet long and half that in width. Here and there on the gently-tapering body were access hatches and tiny ports through which unknown instruments peered at the world. It seemed unharmed, though one end had been fused as if by terrific heat. From the other sprouted a tangle of antennae, all of them broken or bent by the impact with the water. Even now, they bore an incredible resemblance to the legs of a giant insect.
Tibor was no fool. He guessed at once what the thing was.
Only one problem remained, and he solved that with little difficulty. Though they had been partly charred away by heat, stenciled words could still be read on some of the hatch-covers. The letters were Cyrillic, and Tibor knew enough Russian to pick out references to electrical supplies and pressurizing systems.
“So they’ve lost a sputnik,” he told himself with satisfaction.
He could imagine what had happened. The thing had come down too fast, and in the wrong place. Around one end were the tattered remnants of flotation bags; they had burst under the impact, and the vehicle had sunk like a stone.
The Arafura’s crew would have to apologize to Joey. He hadn’t been drinking grog. What he’d seen burning across the stars must have been the rocket carrier, separated from its payload and falling back unchecked into the Earth’s atmosphere.
For a long time Tibor hovered on the sea bed, knees bent in the diver’s crouch, as he regarded this space creature now trapped in an alien element. His mind was full of half-formed plans, but none had yet come clearly into focus.
He no longer cared about salvage money. Much more important were the prospects of revenge.
Here was one of the proudest creations of Soviet technology—and Szabo Tibor, late of Budapest, was the only man on earth who knew.
There must be some way of exploiting the situation—of doing harm to the country and the cause he now hated with such smoldering intensity. In his waking hours, he was seldom conscious of that hate. Still less did he ever stop to analyze its real cause. Here in this lonely world of sea and sky, of steaming mangrove swamps and dazzling coral strands, there was nothing to recall the past. Yet he could never escape it. And sometimes the demons in his mind would awake, lashing him into a fury of rage or vicious, wanton destructiveness. So far he had been lucky; he had not killed anyone. But some day . . .
An anxious jerk from Blanco interrupted his reveries of vengeance.
He gave a reassuring signal to his tender, and started a closer examination of the capsule. What did it weigh? Could it be hoisted easily? There were many things he had to discover, before he could settle on any definite plans.
He braced himself against the corrugated metal wall and pushed cautiously. There was a definite movement as the capsule rocked on the sea bed. Maybe it could be lifted, even with the few pieces of tackle that the Arafura could muster. It was probably lighter than it looked.
Tibor pressed his helmet against a flat section of the hull, and listened intently.
He had half expected to hear some mechanical noise, such as the whining of electric motors. Instead, there was utter silence. With the hilt of his knife, he rapped sharply on the metal, trying to gauge its thickness and to locate any weak spots. On the third try, he got results: but they were not what he had anticipated.
In a furious, desperate tattoo, the capsule rapped back at him.
Until this moment, Tibor had never dreamed that there might be someone inside. The Capsule had seemed far too small.
Then he realized that he had been thinking in terms of conventional aircraft. There was plenty of room here for a little pressure cabin in which a dedicated astronaut could spend a few cramped hours.
As a kaleidoscope can change its pattern completely in a single moment, so the half-formed plans in Tibor’s mind dissolved and then crystallized into a new shape. Behind the thick glass of his helmet, he ran his tongue lightly across his lips. If Nick could have seen him now, he would have wondered—as he had sometimes done before—whether his Number Two diver was wholly sane. Gone were all thoughts of a remote and impersonal vengeance against something as abstract as a nation or a machine.
Now it would be man to man.
III
“Took your time, didn’t you?” said Nick. “What did you find?”
“It’s Russian,” said Tibor. “Some kind of sputnik. If we get a rope around it, I think we can lift it off the bottom. But it’s too heavy to get aboard.”
Nick chewed thoughtfully on his eternal cigar.
The pearling master was worried about a point that had not occured to Tibor. If there were any salvage operations round here, everyone would know where the Arafura had been drifting. When the news got back to Thursday Island, his private patch of shell would be cleaned out in no time.
“They’d have to keep quiet about the whole affair, or else haul the damn thing up themselves and not say where they’d found it. Whatever happened, it looked like being more of a nuisance than it was worth. Nick, who shared most Australians’ profound suspicion of authority, had already decided that all he’d get for his trouble would be a nice letter of thanks.
“The boys won’t go down,” he said. “They think it’s a bomb. Want to leave it alone.”
“Tell ’em not to worry,” replied Tibor. “I’ll handle it.”
He tried to keep his voice normal and unemotional, but this was too good to be true. If the other divers heard the tapping from the capsule, his plans would have been frustrated.
He gestured to the island, green and lovely on the skyline.
“Only one thing we can do. If we can heave it a couple of feet off the bottom, we can run for the shore. Once we’re in shallow water, it won’t be too hard to haul it up on the beach. We can use the boats, and maybe get a block and tackle on one of those trees.”
Nick considered the idea without much enthusiasm. He doubted if they could get the sputnik through the reef, even on the leeward side of the island. But he was all in favor of lugging it away from this patch of shell. They could always dump it somewhere else, buoy the place and still get whatever credit was going.
“Okay,” he said. “Down you go. That two-inch rope’s the strongest we’ve got—better take that. Don’t be all bloody day; we’ve lost enough time already.”
Tibor had no intention of being all day. Six hours would be quite l
ong enough. That was one of the first things he had learned, from the signals through the wall.
It was a pity that he could not hear the Russian’s voice; but the Russian could hear him, and that was what really mattered. When he pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted, most of his words got through. So far, it had been a friendly conversation; Tibor had no intention of showing his hand until the right psychological moment.
The first move had been to establish a code—one knock for “Yes,” two for “No.” After that, it was merely a matter of framing suitable questions. Given time, there was no fact or idea that could not be communicated by means of these two signals.
It would have been a much tougher job if Tibor had been forced to use his indifferent Russian. He had been pleased, but not surprised, to find that the trapped pilot understood English perfectly.
There was air in the capsule for another five hours; the occupant was uninjured; yes, the Russians knew where it had come down.
That last reply gave Tibor pause. Perhaps the pilot was lying, but it might very well be true. Although something had obviously gone wrong with the planned return to Earth, the tracking ships out in the Pacific must have located the impact point—with what accuracy, he could not guess. Still, did that matter? It might take them days to get here, even if they came racing straight into Australian territorial waters without bothering to get permission from Canberra. He was master of the situation. The entire might of the U.S.S.R. could do nothing to interfere with his plans—until it was much too late.
The heavy rope fell in coils on the sea-bed, stirring up a cloud of silt that drifted like smoke down the slow current. Now that the sun was higher in the sky, the underwater world was no longer wrapped in a gray, twilight gloom. The sea-bed was colorless but bright, and the boundary of vision was now almost fifteen feet away.
For the first time, Tibor could see the space-capsule in its entirety. It was such a peculiar-looking object, being designed for conditions beyond all normal experience, that there was an eye-teasing wrongness about it. One searched in vain for a front or a rear. There was no way of telling in what direction it pointed as it sped along its orbit.
Tibor pressed his helmet against the metal and shouted.
“I’m back,” he called. “Can you hear me?”
Tap.
“I’ve got a rope, and I’m going to tie it on to the parachute cables. We’re about three kilometers from an island. As soon as we’ve made you fast we’ll head towards it. We can’t lift you out of the water with the gear on the lugger, so we’ll try to get you up on the beach. You understand?”
Tap.
It took only a few moments to secure the rope; now he had better get clear before the Arafura started to lift.
But there was something he had to do first.
“Hello!” he shouted. “I’ve fixed the rope. We’ll lift in a minute. D’you hear me?”
Tap.
“Then you can hear this too. You’ll never get there alive. I’ve fixed that as well.”
Tap, tap.
“You’ve got five hours to die. My brother took longer than that, when he ran into your mine field. You understand? I’m from Budapest! I hate you and your country and everything it stands for. You’ve taken my home, my family, made my people slaves. I wish I could see your face now! I wish I could watch you die, as I had to watch Theo. When you’re halfway to the island, this rope is going to break where I cut it. I’ll go down and fix another AND THAT’LL BREAK, TOO. You can sit in there and wait for the bumps.”
Tibor stopped abruptly, shaken and exhausted by the violence of his emotion.
There was no room for logic or reason in this orgasm of hate. He did not pause to think, for he dared not. Yet somewhere far down inside his mind the real truth was burning its way up towards the light of consciousness.
It was not the Russians he hated, for all that they had done. It was himself, for he had done more.
The blood of Theo, and of ten thousand countrymen, was upon his own hands. No one could have been a better communist than he was, or have more supinely believed the propaganda from Moscow. At school and college, he had been the first to hunt out and denounce “traitors” (how many had he sent to the labor camps or the AVO torture chambers?). When he had seen the truth, it was far, far too late. And even then he had not fought. He had run.
He had run across the world, trying to escape his guilt; and the two drugs of danger and dissipation had helped him to forget the past. The only pleasure life gave him now were the loveless embraces he sought so feverishly when he was on the mainland, and his present mode of existence was proof that these were not enough.
If he now had the power to deal out death, it was only because he had come here in search of it himself.
There was no sound from the capsule. Its silence seemed contemptuous, mocking. Angrily, Tibor banged against it with the hilt of his knife.
“Did you hear me?” he shouted. “Did you hear me?”
No answer.
“Damn you! I know you’re listening! If you don’t answer, I’ll hole you and let the water in!”
He was sure that he could, with the sharp point of his knife. But that was the list thing he wanted to do; that would be too quick, too easy an ending.
There was still no sound; maybe the Russian had fainted. Tibor hoped not, but there was no point in waiting any longer. He gave a vicious parting bang on the capsule, and signaled to his tender.
Nick had news for him when he broke the surface.
“T.I. radio’s been squawking,” he said. “The Ruskis are asking everyone to look out for one of their rockets. They say it should be floating somewhere off the Queensland coast. Sounds as if they want it badly.”
“Did they say anything else about it?” Tibor asked anxiously.
“Oh, yes. It’s been round the Moon a couple of times.”
“That all?”
“Nothing else that I remember. There was a lot of science stuff I didn’t get.”
That figured; it was just like the Russians to keep as quiet as they could about an experiment that had gone wrong.
“You tell T.I. that we’d found it?”
“Are you crazy? Anyway, the radio’s crook; couldn’t if we wanted to. Fixed that rope properly?”
“Yes—see if you can haul her off the bottom.”
The end of the rope had been wound round the mainmast, and in a few seconds it had been drawn taut. Although the sea was calm, there was a slight swell and the lugger was rolling ten or fifteen degrees. With each roll, the gunwales would rise a couple of feet, then drop again. There was a lift here of several tons, but one had to be careful in using it.
The rope twanged, the woodwork groaned and creaked, and for a moment Tibor was afraid that the weakened line would part too soon. But it held, and the load lifted.
They got a further hoist on the second roll—and on the third. Then the capsule was clear of the sea-bed, and the Arafura was listing slightly to port.
“Let’s go,” said Nick, taking the wheel. “Should be able to get her half a mile before she bumps again.”
The lugger began to move slowly towards the island, carrying its hidden burden beneath it.
As he leaned on the rails, letting the sun steam the moisture from his sodden clothing, Tibor felt at peace for the first time in—how many months? Even his hate had ceased to burn like fire in his brain. Perhaps, like love, it was a passion that could never be satisfied. But for the moment, at least, it was satiated.
There was no weakening of his resolve. He was implacably set upon the vengeance that had been so strangely—so miraculously—placed within his power. Blood called for blood, and now the ghosts that haunted him might rest at last.
IV
He began to worry when they were two-thirds of the way to the island, and the rope had not parted.
There were still four hours to go. That was much too long. For the first time it occurred to him that his entire plan might miscarry,
and might even recoil on his head. Suppose that, despite everything, Nick managed to get the capsule up on the beach before the deadline?
With a deep twang that set the whole ship vibrating, the rope came snaking out of the water, scattering spray in all directions.
“Might have guessed,” muttered Nick. “She was just starting to bump. You like to go down again, or shall I send one of the boys?”
“I’ll take it,” Tibor hastily answered. “I can do it quicker than they can.”
That was perfectly true, but it took him twenty minutes to locate the capsule. The Arafura had drifted well away from it before Nick could stop the engine, and there was a time when Tibor wondered if he would ever find it again.
He quartered the sea-bed in great arcs, and it was not until he had accidentally tangled in the trailing parachute that his search was ended. The shrouds lay pulsating slowly in the current like some weird and hideous marine monster—but there was nothing that Tibor feared now except frustration, and his pulse barely quickened as he saw the whitely looming mass ahead.
The capsule was scratched and stained with mud, but appeared undamaged. It was lying on its side now, looking rather like a giant milk-churn that had been tipped over. The passenger must have been bumped around. But if he’d fallen all the way back from the Moon he must have been well padded and was probably still in good shape. Tibor hoped so. It would be a pity if the remaining three hours were wasted.
Once again he rested the verdigrised copper of his helmet against the no-longer-quite-so-brightly-gleaming metal of the capsule.
“Hello!” he shouted. “Can you hear me?”
Perhaps the Russian would try to balk him by remaining silent—but that surely, was asking too much of any man’s self-control. Tibor was right. Almost at once there was the sharp knock of the reply.
“So glad you’re there,” he called back. “Things are working out just the way I said, though I guess I’ll have to cut the rope a little deeper.”
The capsule did not answer it. It never answered again, though Tibor banged and banged on the next dive—and on the next.
Tales From Planet Earth Page 8