Big chance, I thought. These boat radios were only used for communicating with the ship while scouting; they had a strain-everything range of about three hundred miles. Hunter-ships don’t crowd that close together when they’re working. Still, there was a chance that somebody else might be sitting it out on the bottom within hearing. So Abe took the controls and kept the signal from the wreck of the Javelin dead astern, and Joe Kivelson began speaking into the radio:
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Captain Kivelson, Javelin, calling. My ship was wrecked by an explosion; all hands now in scout boat, proceeding toward Sancerre Bay, on course south-by-southwest from the wreck. Locator signal is being broadcast from the Javelin. Other than that, we do not know our position. Calling all craft, calling Mayday.”
He stopped talking. The radio was silent except for an occasional frying-fat crackle of static. Then he began over again.
I curled up, trying to keep my feet out of anybody’s face and my face clear of anybody else’s feet. Somebody began praying, and somebody else told him to belay it, he was wasting oxygen. I tried to go to sleep, which was the only practical thing to do. I must have succeeded. When I woke again, Joe Kivelson was saying, exasperatedly:
“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday…”
11
DARKNESS AND COLD
The next time I woke, Tom Kivelson was reciting the Mayday, Mayday incantation into the radio, and his father was asleep. The man who had been praying had started again, and nobody seemed to care whether he wasted oxygen or not. It was a Theosophist prayer to the Spirit Guides, and I remembered that Cesário Vieira was a Theosophist. Well, maybe there really were Spirit Guides. If there were, we’d all be finding out before long. I found that I didn’t care one hoot which way, and I set that down to oxygen deficiency.
Then Glenn Murell broke in on the monotone call for help and the prayer.
“We’re done for if we stay down here another hour,” he said. “Any argument on that?”
There wasn’t any. Joe Kivelson opened his eyes and looked around.
“We haven’t raised anything at all on the radio,” Murell went on. “That means nobody’s within an hour of reaching us. Am I right?”
“I guess that’s about the size of it,” Joe Kivelson conceded.
“How close to land are we?”
“The radar isn’t getting anything but open water and schools of fish,” Abe Clifford said. “For all I know, we could be inside Sancerre Bay now.”
“Well, then, why don’t we surface?” Murell continued. “It’s a thousand to one against us, but if we stay here our chances are precisely one hundred per cent negative.”
“What do you think?” Joe asked generally. “I think Mr. Murell’s stated it correctly.”
“There is no death,” Cesário said. “Death is only a change, and then more of life. I don’t care what you do.”
“What have we got to lose?” somebody else asked. “We’re broke and gambling on credit now.”
“All right; we surface,” the skipper said. “Everybody grab onto something. We’ll take the Nifflheim of a slamming around as soon as we’re out of the water.”
We woke up everybody who was sleeping, except the three men who had completely lost consciousness. Those we wrapped up in blankets and tarpaulins, like mummies, and lashed them down. We gathered everything that was loose and made it fast, and checked the fastenings of everything else. Then Abdullah Monnahan pointed the nose of the boat straight up and gave her everything the engines could put out. Just as we were starting upward, I heard Cesário saying:
“If anybody wants to see me in the next reincarnation, I can tell you one thing; I won’t reincarnate again on Fenris!”
The headlights only penetrated fifty or sixty feet ahead of us. I could see slashers and clawbeaks and funnelmouths and gulpers and things like that getting out of our way in a hurry. Then we were out of the water and shooting straight up in the air.
It was the other time all over again, doubled in spades, only this time Abdullah didn’t try to fight it; he just kept the boat rising. Then it went end-over-end, again and again. I think most of us blacked out; I’m sure I did, for a while. Finally, more by good luck than good management, he got us turned around with the wind behind us. That lasted for a while, and then we started keyholing again. I could see the instrument panel from where I’d lashed myself fast; it was going completely bughouse. Once, out the window in front, I could see jagged mountains ahead. I just shut my eyes and waited for the Spirit Guides to come and pick up the pieces.
When they weren’t along, after a few seconds that seemed like half an hour, I opened my eyes again. There were more mountains ahead, and mountains to the right. This’ll do it, I thought, and I wondered how long it would take Dad to find out what had happened to us. Cesário had started praying again, and so had Abdullah Monnahan, who had just remembered that he had been brought up a Moslem. I hoped he wasn’t trying to pray in the direction of Mecca, even allowing that he knew which way Mecca was from Fenris generally. That made me laugh, and then I thought, This is a fine time to be laughing at anything. Then I realized that things were so bad that anything more that happened was funny.
I was still laughing when I discovered that the boat had slowed to a crawl and we were backing in between two high cliffs. Evidently Abdullah, who had now stopped praying, had gotten enough control of the boat to keep her into the wind and was keeping enough speed forward to yield to it gradually. That would be all right, I thought, if the force of the wind stayed constant, and as soon as I thought of that, it happened. We got into a relative calm, the boat went forward again, and then was tossed up and spun around. Then I saw a mountain slope directly behind us, out the rear window.
A moment later, I saw rocks and boulders sticking out of it in apparent defiance of gravitation, and then I realized that it was level ground and we were coming down at it backward. That lasted a few seconds, and then we hit stern-on, bounced and hit again. I was conscious up to the third time we hit.
The next thing I knew, I was hanging from my lashings from the side of the boat, which had become the top, and the headlights and the lights on the control panel were out, and Joe Kivelson was holding a flashlight while Abe Clifford and Glenn Murell were trying to get me untied and lower me. I also noticed that the air was fresh, and very cold.
“Hey, we’re down!” I said, as though I were telling anybody anything they didn’t know. “How many are still alive?”
“As far as I know, all of us,” Joe said. “I think I have a broken arm.” I noticed, then, that he was holding his left arm stiffly at his side. Murell had a big gash on top of his head, and he was mopping blood from his face with his sleeve while he worked.
When they got me down, I looked around. Somebody else was playing a flashlight around at the stern, which was completely smashed. It was a miracle the rocket locker hadn’t blown up, but the main miracle was that all, or even any, of us were still alive.
We found a couple of lights that could be put on, and we got all of us picked up and the unconscious revived. One man, Dominic Silverstein, had a broken leg. Joe Kivelson’s arm was, as he suspected, broken, another man had a fractured wrist, and Abdullah Monnahan thought a couple of ribs were broken. The rest of us were in one piece, but all of us were cut and bruised. I felt sore all over. We also found a nuclear-electric heater that would work, and got it on. Tom and I rigged some tarpaulins to screen off the ruptured stern and keep out the worst of the cold wind. After they got through setting and splinting the broken bones and taping up Abdullah’s ribs, Cesário and Murell got some water out of one of the butts and started boiling it for coffee. I noticed that Piet Dumont had recovered his pipe and was smoking it, and Joe Kivelson had his lit.
“Well, where are we?” somebody was asking Abe Clifford.
The navigator shook his head. “The radio’s smashed, so’s the receiver for the locator, and so’s the radio navigational equipment. I can state positively, however
, that we are on the north coast of Hermann Reuch’s Land.”
Everybody laughed at that except Murell. I had to explain to him that Hermann Reuch’s Land was the antarctic continent of Fenris, and hasn’t any other coast.
“I’d say we’re a good deal west of Sancerre Bay,” Cesário Vieira hazarded. “We can’t be east of it, the way we got blown west. I think we must be at least five hundred miles east of it.”
“Don’t fool yourself, Cesário,” Joe Kivelson told him. “We could have gotten into a turbulent updraft and been carried to the upper, eastward winds. The altimeter was trying to keep up with the boat and just couldn’t, half the time. We don’t know where we went. I’ll take Abe’s estimate and let it go at that.”
“Well, we’re up some kind of a fjord,” Tom said. “I think it branches like a Y, and we’re up the left branch, but I won’t make a point of that.”
“I can’t find anything like that on this map,” Abe Clifford said, after a while.
Joe Kivelson swore. “You ought to know better than that, Abe; you know how thoroughly this coast hasn’t been mapped.”
“How much good will it do us to know where we are, right now?” I asked. “If the radio’s smashed, we can’t give anybody our position.”
“We might be able to fix up the engines and get the boat in the air again, after the wind drops.” Monnahan said. “I’ll take a look at them and see how badly they’ve been banged up.”
“With the whole stern open?” Hans Cronje asked. “We’d freeze stiffer than a gun barrel before we went a hundred miles.”
“Then we can pack the stern full of wet snow and let it freeze, instead of us,” I suggested. “There’ll be plenty of snow before the wind goes down.”
Joe Kivelson looked at me for a moment. “That would work,” he said. “How soon can you get started on the engines, Abdullah?”
“Right away. I’ll need somebody to help me, though. I can’t do much the way you have me bandaged up.”
“I think we’d better send a couple of parties out,” Ramón Llewellyn said. “We’ll have to find a better place to stay than this boat. We don’t all have parkas or lined boots, and we have a couple of injured men. This heater won’t be enough; in about seventy hours we’d all freeze to death sitting around it.”
Somebody mentioned the possibility of finding a cave.
“I doubt it,” Llewellyn said. “I was on an exploring expedition down here, once. This is all igneous rock, mostly granite. There aren’t many caves. But there may be some sort of natural shelter, or something we can make into a shelter, not too far away. We have two half-ton lifters; we could use them to pile up rocks and build something. Let’s make up two parties. I’ll take one; Abe, you take the other. One of us can go up and the other can go down.”
We picked parties, trying to get men who had enough clothing and hadn’t been too badly banged around in the landing. Tom wanted to go along, but Abdullah insisted that he stay and help with the inspection of the boat’s engines. Finally six of us—Llewellyn, myself, Glenn Murell, Abe Clifford, old Piet Dumont, and another man—went out through the broken stern of the boat. We had two portable floodlights—a scout boat carries a lot of equipment—and Llewellyn took the one and Clifford the other. It had begun to snow already, and the wind was coming straight up the narrow ravine into which we had landed, driving it at us. There was a stream between the two walls of rock, swollen by the rains that had come just before the darkness, and the rocks in and beside it were coated with ice. We took one look at it and shook our heads. Any exploring we did would be done without trying to cross that. We stood for a few minutes trying to see through the driving snow, and then we separated, Abe Clifford, Dumont and the other man going up the stream and Ramón Llewellyn, Glenn Murell and I going down.
A few hundred yards below the boat, the stream went over a fifty-foot waterfall. We climbed down beside it, and found the ravine widening. It was a level beach, now, or what had been a beach thousands of years ago. The whole coast of Hermann Reuch’s land is sinking in the Eastern Hemisphere and rising in the Western. We turned away from the stream and found that the wind was increasing in strength and coming at us from the left instead of in front. The next thing we knew, we were at the point of the mountain on our right and we could hear the sea roaring ahead and on both sides of us. Tom had been right about that V-shaped fjord, I thought.
We began running into scattered trees now, and when we got around the point of the mountain we entered another valley.
Trees, like everything else on Fenris, are considerably different from anything analogous on normal planets. They aren’t tall, the biggest not more than fifteen feet high, but they are from six to eight feet thick, with all the branches at the top, sprouting out in all directions and reminding me of pictures of Medusa. The outside bark is a hard shell, which grows during the beginning of our four hot seasons a year. Under that will be more bark, soft and spongy, and this gets more and more dense toward the middle; and then comes the hardwood core, which may be as much as two feet thick.
“One thing, we have firewood,” Murell said, looking at them.
“What’ll we cut it with; our knives?” I wanted to know.
“Oh, we have a sonocutter on the boat,” Ramón Llewellyn said. “We can chop these things into thousand-pound chunks and float them to camp with the lifters. We could soak the spongy stuff on the outside with water and let it freeze, and build a hut out of it, too.” He looked around, as far as the light penetrated the driving snow. “This wouldn’t be a bad place to camp.”
Not if we’re going to try to work on the boat, I thought. And packing Dominic, with his broken leg, down over that waterfall was something I didn’t want to try, either. I didn’t say anything. Wait till we got back to the boat. It was too cold and windy here to argue, and besides, we didn’t know what Abe and his party might have found upstream.
12
CASTAWAYS WORKING
We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back, I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off the engine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at the ruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, not just relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was even more crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsium shielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piled in the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at the converters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in a hopeless mess.
There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesário Vieira had found a small portable radio that wasn’t in too bad condition, and had it apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work of anybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he was doing. It wasn’t much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolute limit of its range, at least for sending.
“Is this all we have?” I asked, looking at it. It was the same type as the one I carried on the job, camouflaged in a camera case, except that it wouldn’t record.
“There’s the regular boat radio, but it’s smashed up pretty badly. I was thinking we could do something about cannibalizing one radio out of parts from both of them.”
We use a lot of radio equipment on the Times, and I do a good bit of work on it. I started taking the big set apart and then remembered the receiver for the locator and got at that, too. The trouble was that most of the stuff in all the sets had been miniaturized to a point where watchmaker’s tools would have been pretty large for working on them, and all we had was a general-repair kit that was just about fine enough for gunsmithing.
While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramón Llewellyn was telling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. Joe Kivelson shook his head over it.
“That’s too far from the boat. We can’t trudge back and forth to work on the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up with the lifters, and I think that’s a good idea about using
slabs of the soft wood to build a hut. But let’s build the hut right here.”
“Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?” the mate asked.
“Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream. There may be something better up there.”
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
“I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job. We need parts, and we haven’t anything to make them out of or with.”
That was about what I’d thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-drive engines than I’d ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion as confirmation of my own.
“Tom, take a look at this mess,” I said. “See if you can help us with it.”
He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, “You need a magnifier for this. Wait till I see something.” Then he went over to one of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. He came over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soon as he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly good magnifying glasses.
That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was one thing, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kit and a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers out of needles.
After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returned and made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe was warmed a little, he said:
“There’s a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn’t too hard to get up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a big bowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom, once. The wind isn’t so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom or whatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place to make a camp, if it wasn’t so far from the boat.”
“How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?” Joe asked, going on to explain what he had in mind.
“Why, easy. I don’t think it would be nearly as hard as the place Ramón found.”
The H. Beam Piper Megapack Page 128