Carlin snapped orders in her own language. The airship pilot replied briefly.
Carlin said to Linda and Falsen, “A party will be set down on the northern shore. I would like you to be among them.”
“In this rain?” he demanded.
“There are spare cloaks. Small, perhaps, but they will keep the upper parts of you dry.”
A crew woman found two of the scarlet, hooded garments, handed them to the Terrans. Falsen shrugged into his. He could not fasten it in front, and its hem came to upper-thigh level. But it would be better than nothing.
The dirigible lost altitude, driving down at a shallow angle. Pumps throbbed as expanding ballonets compressed helium cells, reducing buoyancy. The airship passed over the northern shore at a height of about fifty meters, stopped, her momentum killed by reverse pitch. There was almost no wind and she drifted very slowly over the soggy surface. The engines started again, the four screws swiveling on their outriggers to push her down. There was a soft jar as the skids under the gondola made contact.
“Out!” ordered Carlin.
A sliding door at the after end of the control car was opened. Carlin jumped out and down, her cloak billowing behind her, landed with an audible squelch. Black mud spattered her chubby bare legs. Falsen followed her, then Linda, then six more Doralans. They stood there, sheltered from the rain by the huge but flimsy hull above them. Then the airscrews swiveled again in their mountings and the dirigible lifted, headed back out over the lake.
The downpour was not cold, luckily. Neither was the ooze that filled his low shoes, that soaked his ankles. The air was filled with the sweet-sour scent of rotting vegetation.
They stood there, Terrans and Doralans, staring out over the expanse of dark water. The scene was dreary, the low, dark hills in the near distance half obscured by the drifting veils of gray rain, the miserable, stunted trees and shrubs, all of which looked like the barely living survivors of some forest fire. But there could never be a forest fire on this world. Everything was always too damp to burn.
Carlin said, pointing, “There is something there!”
The waters were disturbed by more than the heavy rain; concentric ripples were spreading out from a central point. The Doralans twittered among themselves in their own language, their little-girl voices. Carl in spoke into her wrist transceiver. Falsen could hear, faintly, the pilot’s reply.
Over the lake the airship, a great, silver cigar, dull-gleaming through the murk, was moving slowly. It was almost over the center of the disturbance when a small, dark object dropped from the car, plunged down into the water. It hit the surface with a small splash and vanished. Almost immediately there was a yellow subaqueous effulgence and a pillar of spray that climbed high before collapsing around itself. There was a muffled boom. A muddy wave surged inland, washing around the calves of the beach party before it subsided.
The explosion had done no good at all to whatever it was that had briefly broken surface. Falsen had a confused impression of long tentacles — tentacles? — flailing in a death flurry, of something big and gray and glistening, lashing out madly at the enemy that had dealt it a mortal blow. Even these first glimpses told him that it was nothing at all like the predatory beast that Linda had described. Then it was still. It floated there, almost submerged. It could have been no more than a big, slimy log.
Carlin snapped orders.
Reluctantly two of her people removed their scarlet cloaks, dropped them to the wet ground, shed their tunics and their brief underwear. They buckled belts about their slim waists, above their surprisingly full hips and buttocks. Among the gear landed from the ship were grappling irons and coils of light line. The women each attached grappling irons to their belts. They walked slowly, with an obvious lack of enthusiasm, to the waterline while others paid out the line behind them. Falsen felt very sorry for them as he watched the trembling of their pale, naked bodies. Carl in snarled at them and they quickened their pace. They waded out into the lake.
“Do you have to do it this way?” Falsen asked Carlin.
“How else? Besides, they are safe enough.” She gestured with the laser pistol that she had pulled from its holster. “I’m a good shot. If anything attacks them I’ll get it before it touches them.”
“If,” said Falsen, “you can see it in time. Apart from reflection, refraction and this blasted rain, that water is muddy.”
She shrugged, then said, “They are keeping a lookout from the airship too, you know. They have their instruments.”
The two Doralans were swimming now, moving sinuously out into the murky lake, making very little disturbance. Their bodies shimmered pallidly just below the surface. Line from the two coils was running out quite rapidly. The swimmers were getting close to the barely floating hulk. Then one of them was treading water while she detached the three-pronged grapnel from her belt. Briefly her body lifted clear of the surface as she plunged the barbed points into the gray flesh. Her companion stayed close to render assistance if it should be needed — or if it were possible to give it. Carlin already had her pistol aimed at where the head of the animal should be, might be. But she is only guessing, thought Falsen.
Yet there was no movement, save for that imparted by the grapnel, of the inert mass. The second swimmer plunged her iron home, and then the two of them were striking out for the beach, making far faster progress than they had done on their outward passage. They stumbled ashore, their hairless bodies dripping and glistening, their mouths open as they gasped for breath.
Carlin ignored them. She holstered her pistol and barked orders at the other members of her crew. They tailed on to the lines, two of them to each. Hand over hand they dragged the big, floating body into the shallows. It grounded at last. They dropped the lines and, joined by the swimmers, waded out. They had to go just over knee-deep. Then they were rolling the thing up on to the muddy beach.
There were no tentacles. Falsen’s first impression, gained when the thing had been threshing in its death flurry, had been erroneous. There was a big, barrellike body tapering to a long tail at one end and to a long … tail? neck? at the other. There were no limbs or fins or easily discernible sense organs.
The Terrans and Doralans stood around, looking at it.
It could only be, thought Falsen, some sort of giant leech, capable of ingesting — and excreting? — from either end. Each “neck” terminated in a puckered orifice.
“Obviously,” said Carlin, “this … thing is quite incapable of clawing or biting.”
She did not sound surprised.
“But it could give you a nasty suck,” said Falsen facetiously.
Carlin glared at him.
“But what does it eat?” asked Linda. “Its prey must be something big.”
“Not necessarily,” Falsen told her. “There used to be whales, enormous brutes, in Earth’s seas that fed on tiny crustaceans.”
“We will leave such discussions,” said Carlin coldly, “to those best qualified to engage in them. No doubt the Lady Dimilin will be able to inform us.” She spoke into her wrist transceiver, received replies from the airship. She said, “There’s nothing at all showing now on the bio-sensitive radar. The explosion must have scared everything into the underwater caves and tunnels. So, I think that we should return to the ship. I do not like this weather.”
Neither do I, thought Falsen. Unlike seamen and airmen, spacemen are not meteorologists — but some sense, some instinct was making him increasingly uneasy.
The airship drifted in, losing altitude. There was no wind to interfere with the maneuvers. This time grapnels were dropped, their spade-tipped arms taking a finn grip on the soft soil. The ship was winched down until the skids under the car touched the mossy, spongy ground. Abaft the car a hatch opened in the envelope, and through this a big wire net was lowered. Falsen and Linda helped the crewwomen to roll the carcass of the giant leech onto it, getting gray slime all over themselves. Carlin just stood there, watching. A winch hummed and the net was lift
ed into the cargo compartment. The hatch closed.
They boarded the airship, Carlin last of all after inspecting the grapnels to make sure that they would come free with the first jerk. She exchanged words with the pilot, who seemed to be objecting to something.
She said, “You will go aft into the passenger space with the others. The Lady Pansir says that you … stink.”
She was right, Falsen admitted. That slime did smell, although he himself did not consider the odor all that offensive. But he did not argue. He followed Linda up the short ladder to the main keel. They made their way aft to a cabin, the walls of which were bulging gas cells. They sat at one end of it, on the deck, while the six slime-besmeared Doralans sat at the other, looking at them with ill-concealed dislike.
Faintly, from outside, came the splashing of dumped water ballast. When the motors started, the drumming of the rain on the envelope was no longer audible. The ship was lifting, swaying gently.
And then, suddenly, it was as though she had run into something at full speed — or something had run into her, from the starboard beam, pushing her over, wrenching and shaking her.
And she was lifting, lifting fast, going up like an archaic rocket.
CHAPTER 17
Falsen reacted instinctively. This was an emergency; his place was in the control room. He jumped to his feet, but a violent lurch threw him against the wall, the side of one of the gas cells. He rebounded, fell over Linda who was still seated.
She looked up at him, her eyes wide in her pale, terrified face.
“Nick! What’s happening?”
“I’m going to find out.”
He scrambled up, steadied himself against the resilient skin of a cell. He could hear the Doralans screaming softly, a low, eerie keening. There were other noises — the groaning of tortured metal, sharp twangs as, somewhere inside the structure of the airship, wires parted. A shrill alarm bell was sounding somewhere aft. The lights flickered, went out. They came on again, but with greatly reduced intensity.
Falsen stumbled forward along the keel catwalk which was tilted up at a sharp angle, was bucking under his feet. He ducked just in time to avoid a broken strut that swung viciously at his head like a club wielded by a giant. Abruptly there was a shift of the airship’s attitude, and he found himself running downhill towards the nose, caught a guide wire to stop himself.
The ship leveled, although she was still rolling from side to side. He completed his journey in a staggering run, reached the hatch over the enclosed ladder down to the control car. He clambered down to the gondola, was momentarily blinded as lightning flared all around the airship, the harsh, blue glare beating in through the big windows like a physical blow.
Then he could see again through smarting eyes.
The pilot, Pansir, was wrestling with her wheel, endeavoring to keep the ship on course. On the starboard side the altitude coxswain, assisted by Carlin, was engaged in an even harder struggle to maintain an even keel. Two other Doralans were working feverishly at the transceiver, had its casing open and were removing what looked like burned-out components. The Lady Dimilin was huddled in a chair, looking both thoroughly terrified and quite useless.
He looked out through a window into a hell of swirling, ruddily luminous vapor masses, toppling pinnacles, yawning chasms, writhing dragon shapes that fought and merged, that fissioned into the semblance of a galloping squadron of demon cavalry, charging the ship with upraised sabers. There was more lightning, but distant. Through a deep rift before it closed Falsen could see the ground. It was close, too close, with jagged white outcroppings.
The pilot screamed an order.
Carlin and the altitude coxswain strained at their wheel, turning it slowly and jerkily clockwise. The airship’s nose lifted, only slightly at first, then steeply. There was a clatter from the vicinity of the transceiver as replacement printed circuit trays were spilled to the deck. From somewhere aft came a sharp crack, loud, like the report of a gun.
The ship … groaned.
Falsen could feel the weight on her, like a giant hand trying to press her down onto the waiting rocks. She groaned, but there was fight left in her. She clawed her way upwards with an odd pitching motion, yawing from port to starboard, starboard to port. Huge hailstones hurtled at her, scarring the tough transparency of the control-car windows.
The huge hand was lifted, and briefly, very briefly, there was a feeling of relief in the control car, a diminishment of the acrid scent of fear. And then the ship was grabbed, grabbed and wrenched, tossed upwards. Again Carl in and the altitude coxswain were wrestling with their wheel, trying to bring the ship’s nose down.
Lightning flared again, close but not dazzling; the windows were thickly coated with ice.
But the pilot knew her job. She would bring the ship through, juggling buoyancy and ballast. And, thought Falsen, there would be plenty to jettison should the need arise. Equipment, weapons, the carcass of that huge beast from the lake. He would be able to help in such work, would no longer be a passenger, a mere looker-on. His Terran strength would be useful.
Something nudged his shoulder.
Linda, he thought. She must have followed him.
But he knew that it was not Linda.
The stink was sour in his nostrils, the touch through his thin shirt was cold and clammy. He cried out as he pulled away from the strong suction, heard a patch tear from the back of his shirt.
Like the trunk of a Terran elephant, like a gray, questing, sightless worm the thing slid over his shoulder. It was gashed in several places, oozing a stinking, green-yellow ichor. Dimilin saw it coming at her and screamed, tried to scramble out of the chair in which she had been cowering. The puckered orifice at the end of the neck fastened on her at the base of her throat. Again she screamed.
Falsen caught hold of the slimy trunk, tried to pull it away from the struggling Doralan. It squirmed in his grasp and undulations ran along its length. From the end of it, where the sucker had attached to the ecologista throat, came a horrid sucking noise, a loud slurping.
Still Falsen struggled, although he knew that it was too late to save the Doralan woman. The undulations became more violent, a whipping motion. He lost his grip on the ichor slippery hide, was flung forward and to starboard, knocking Carlin and the coxswain away from the altitude control wheel. They had been fighting to slow the ship’s rate of descent, battling downdraft and the weight of accumulated ice. With their hands no longer gripping its spokes, the wheel spun uselessly. To those in the control car it was like being in the cage of a too rapidly descending elevator.
Carlin had her laser pistol out, was firing at the giant leech. The slashing beam missed at first, took out the port after window of the car. Cold air gusted in, bringing with it a flurry of sleet. The pilot was screaming something, orders that only the coxswain heeded. She got to her feet from where Falsen had knocked her, staggered to the wheel and took hold of it. The two radio technicians were scrabbling on the deck, trying to save the transceiver components from being trampled on.
Suddenly there was the stink of burning meat. Carlin had hit something organic. Falsen couldn’t see what it was; he had joined the coxswain in her struggle to get the ship’s nose up. Together they strained at the wheel, trying to force the spokes clockwise. It gave suddenly, too suddenly. Terran and Doralan fell sideways to the deck, the woman on top of Falsen.
He felt the control car hit, heard the rending of metal. He rolled from under the body of the coxswain, tried to get to his feet, just as the airship rebounded from the surface, lurching wildly. He was flung to port, straight for the gap where the window had been, fell through it. It was a drop of only about two meters and he fell into a deep drift of slushy snow. He lay there, dazed, while the crippled airship passed over him, rising at first and then falling again. He thought that it would clear the rounded peak towards which it was heading, but it did not. The gondola hit, its skids jamming on something. But it was not the skids that broke away; it was the ladder
into the hull and its enclosing tube.
The ship was turning as she rose, the screws on their outriggers still revolving. Her skin was torn in several places, and from the rents protruded the broken ends of girders. Her rudder was only a metal skeleton from which streamed tatters of fabric.
But she was making headway against the screaming wind, flying as steadily as though the pilot’s hands were still at her controls. She was lifting as she flew, would pass directly over the snow-filled hollow in which Falsen was crouched.
A hatch was open in her belly. From it something dropped, a pale object that seemed to be struggling during its descent, that extended arms in a swimming motion. Its fall occupied only seconds, but it seemed to Falsen to last for a very long time; he knew what this piece of jetsam was.
It fell only two metres from where he was standing, thigh-deep in the wet snow.
Then Linda was struggling to her feet, was wading through the drift towards him. She was naked and her skin was blue with cold, but she seemed to be uninjured. She fell into his arms, pressed herself against him.
She whispered, “So you got out too … you would, just as I did … .”
He said nothing, just held her tightly.
She went on, “So we’re back where we started, only worse off. We must be the only survivors … .”
He said, “There will be others. The control car is over on that hill.”
Slowly they ploughed their way out of the drift and walked toward the gondola, the icy wind on their backs.
CHAPTER 18
The control car had suffered remarkably little damage.
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