by John Rickham
We circled the heap of living fire in the center of the floor and came close to the transparent stuff, shining our lights on it. He tapped it, felt it, and frowned in indecision.
“We’ll have to try the energy beam on it. Shall we wait for Lowloo, or would you mind going down for the gear, Fiona? I mean, Alan takes some lifting!”
“That’s all right.” She grinned at me. “I like strong silent men. I’ll go. Give me your hand, Man.”
I was down on one knee, lowering her weight, when the whole cavern shook violently. We cringed at the sound of a vast explosion that seemed big enough to rock the mountain itself. I was pitched flat on my face, and barely saved myself from diving headlong down the hole we had cut. Fiona had slipped from my grip. I put on my headlight frantically, peered down, and heard a great shuddering and rumbling coming from down there, together with a devil’s breath blast of hot air and blinding dust.
“Carson!” I choked. “The whole damned passage has caved in!"
XI
THICK BELCHING DUST blinded me for a moment. Carson flung himself down beside me and roared, “Fiona! Can you hear me?”
Moments later she appeared, all eyes and teeth, with Lowloo by her side, ears flattened and thoroughly scared, just as I was. “Come the bags!” she choked, and pitched them up, one at a time. She grabbed my arm and I swung her, and then Lowloo, up. We didn’t need the beamer. When we looked again at the transparent shield over the treasure, it was shattered and broken into shards.
“So much for that,” Carson said, and shook his head. “Ahead of us are the bars, the spout, and Zeb and his men— and we can’t go back at all now. But we have the treasure. Ironic, isn’t it?” Fantastically, be still had the beamer in his hand as he stalked bitterly around the rainbow-glowing gems. “There might even be something here,” he said, “that would help us, if only we—” and he choked the words off abruptly, brought his hand up and fired, seemingly just over my shoulder. I leaped aside. In that moment, the chamber was full of the shrill song of beamers. I saw him throw himself aside as he fired, with his hand out to break his fall. Where he had been standing, the black wall glowed incandescent red. He went down, his hand plunging among the gems. He stiffened rigidly—and I felt sick. I knew that something had knocked him unconscious before he had hit the ground.
When I got up and shambled stupidly over to touch him, something put a nerve-knotting tingle into my outstretched fingers, made me pull back. Fiona came, wide-eyed, had the same shock and snatched her hand away.
“My God!” she breathed. “Alan, what are we going to do now?”
Inside my head, the wheels ground to a halt and froze. I looked at her and something came out of my chaos. “Break contact. Touching something!”
She stared blankly a moment, then scrambled away, grabbed a plastic bag, mashed it over her hand, another— and she had mittens of a kind. She put a band on him. Nothing happened. She grabbed, heaved, and I saw something in Lambert blue fire clutched in his rigid hand. My wits creaked into action. I copied her with a bag, struck the evil thing from his grasp and watched him sag limp as a wet sack. She crouched by him and put her ear to his chest.
“Feeble, but regular,” she muttered. “Still alive!”
My brain was looping like a one-winged moth at a candle until it found a question. “‘What was it he shot at?”
We turned, all three, to peer past the shards of glassy stuff into the gloom and then went to look. Half-way out of that rippling water was a body, a black body, the natural kind of black that didn’t rinse off. Hovac was dead of a beamer blast, the first I’d ever seen. The hideous hole, crisp-edged but full of butchery red stuff, caught at my stomach. Fiona looked sick too.
“How the blue blazes did be get here?” she cried. “Past the bars, and the spout? How?” I shook my head at her in futility for what seemed a long time. Time? I peered at my watch, while an idea struggled to make itself known.
“What spout?” I demanded, hardly recognizing my own voice. “It’s gone. That explosion! Zeb has blown the channel. No spout!”
“You’re tight!” Her blue eyes blazed with sudden fire. “That’s a help. That’s it! Alan, stay here, keep the beamer ready!”
“What are you going to do?”
“Dive down there and find out how he got past those bars.”
I didn’t like it, but I never got the chance to argue. She was away before I could find words. I have never felt so alone in all my life, and no disrespect to Lowloo meant by that. She was as scared as I was, what with the silence, the weird glowing of the gems, Carson’s entranced stillness, and the slow lick-lapping of the water. And Hovac’s leering death-grin. After an impossible age there came a pink wriggling thing in the water, and Fiona emerged, hauling on a line.
“Don’t just stand there!” she puffed. “Give me a hand!”
“What the devil are we pulling in?” I wondered, as the load grew heavy and Lowloo clapped on to help. Fiona grinned fiercely, but didn’t reply. I saw, soon enough, as silvery metal showed in the water and then broke clear. It was the deep-sea suit, too heavy to haul out of the water, but we managed to raise it far enough for it to stand up on its own lead-weighted feet. By that time we’d seen enough, through the face-plate, to be sure that the man inside would offer us no trouble at all. Then Fiona gave her guesswork account, which I can’t improve on.
“Hovac lowered him. He lashed himself to the bars, and started working with the cutting beamer that is part of the suit. And no go, as we know. So he was stuck. The spout probably shook him a bit, and snatched the rope away from Hovac. So think like Hovac. The suit’s lost, and so is the man. Zeb thinks likewise, and plays his last card, blows the channel to cut the spout—and in doing that, he kills this poor devil with the blast. Next, Zeb, in desperation, sends Hovac down with a weapon.
“And he got through to here. How?”
“Because this chap solved the problem. He couldn’t cut the bars, but he could do what we did—cut the rock around them. That’s what I found. The three middle bars are cut right out. That’s how Hovac got in, and how we can get out. The light is fading out there, but enough for me to see that there is still an opening to the sea. Not a funnel, but a hole big enough to pass through.”
“You, maybe,” I muttered. “Or Lowloo. But not me. I'm no swimmer. And what about Carson? Whatever else, he certainly can’t swim anywhere!”
She glared at me, but she was really looking at the facts. They had me stopped, but not her. I could almost see the wheels spinning in her head.
“This way!” she snapped. “You in the suit. No swimming, all you have to do is walk. And follow the line. Lowloo and I will take that, to lead you along. You carry Neil in your arms. A bag over his head, will trap enough air to keep him going for a while. Like a captive balloon. It will work!”
It sounded crazy to me, but the devil was driving, and we had no choice. Just getting the dead Oriental out of that suit and me into it was a miserable job, and never mind the fact that his dead body still carried the marks of my fist on his face. Once I was in the suit I was helpless and had to stand there while the two girls did the rest. One scene I shall never forget was that of Fiona scooping up awkward handfuls of nightmare jewels and piling them into a bag that Lowloo held for her—two bags of untold wealth, to be strapped to my cumbersome suit. I watched her struggle with a sliver of the glassy stuff to cut off a length of line with which to bind Carson’s limp body securely to me. Then a final check over to make sure nothing had been forgotten— Fiona, ferociously intent.
“Remember now. Count up to twenty, slowly, then start down the slope. The rope will be at the bars. Follow it from there. Just walk!”
Then on with my face-plate, on with the bag over Carson’s bead, and away they went, plunging down into the water and out of my sight, trailing the rope after them, leaving me to start counting. Surely the craziest venture ever conceived by the human brain, I thought, recalling Fiona’s confident assessment of balances and
counterweights. The jewels would weight me down, but Carson and his air-bubble would offset that the other way. I would be heavy, but I wouldn’t drop like a stone, at all. I would just settle gently down to the bottom, she said, She had better be right.
With the sense of being a player in some obscene dream, I counted to the score, added ten more for good measure, and then started out. I tried to start out. I couldn’t move. With Carson strapped to my chest and only far enough aside so that I could see, the bags weighing me down, I had to learn all over again how to walk—to deliberately lean over to the left before I could get my right foot up and swing it, and then lean to the right, and step. By painful degrees, I waded further and further into the water. And it got easier. It got easier so quickly that I had to restrain myself by the time the heaving water was up to my shoulders, and when I finally went right under, Fiona was vindicated. A pity she wasn’t there to see it. I was having some difficulty keeping my weighted feet on the ground, a most uneasy sensation. With an effort, I remembered where the switch was to put on my headlight, and stared at two shimmering white things that seemed to project before me, until I saw that they were Carson’s feet, lifting at his knees and floating.
That shocked me a little way out of my fatigue-stupor and I concentrated on what I was doing, aware that time was valuable. I came to the bars, gray horizontals with a gap across the middle and jagged dark holes in the rock at either side where the Oriental had burned away their rock bedding. I wondered whether I would have had the sense to think of that, as I strained and grunted to get myself through the gap. The line was there all right, securely knotted to the lower bar. I waved my awkward arm until it trapped the line against my body, and then kicked away
forward, reasoning that I might as well move ahead while falling. I had forgotten entirely about the wreck of Hovac’s staging. For a few crazy moments it seemed that the whole of the glass-smooth bottom of the pit was littered with metal poles deliberately arranged to trip me, and by the time I was free of them I barely knew which way was up.
I was glad of the line. My head ached and banged, my arms were solid lead, and the sweat dribbled into my eyes unceasingly, although I was given to understand that the suit was air-conditioned. I clung to that line, followed it, and came to a pile of scattered slabby rocks. I knew, dimly, that I had to climb them. My recollection is blurred here, full of balloon-like drifting sensations and scrabblings to get footholds with those damned large boots. And then I caught the to-and-fro rush of water, and the jagged walls came close, and there was a squirming pink body diving at me, gesturing, struggling with the bonds that held Carson’s limp body secure to my outside. Answers came like bubbles through syrup in my mind. She—Fiona---was trying to get him free. But why? I think I would have struggled with her had there been any spring in my arms at all, but before I could get them to move she had released him and borne him away, out of range of my light.
But the line was still there, a pale yellow shimmering streak in the water, leading onward and upward. Excelsior! I shambled on, my lightness of foot matching the condition of my mind. And then, so that I stopped and stared stupidly at it, that life line stood up on end. Was I expected to climb it? I actually tried, which will give some index of the ebb of my intelligence at that moment. I tried to grasp it in my armor-gloved hand, and, after a swipe or two, I trapped it between both, and carefully maneuvered it into one fist. I put weight into my grasp, and it came down as I pulled. As I stood there, rocked by the surge of sea waves, and pulled stupidly on the line, another squirming swimmer came near, wriggling through the water like a slow motion eel. It was Lowloo, and she had a trailing bight of the line in her teeth. She stood in the water, raised her palms toward me, and then slid to grope at the loops on my suit. Then she darted away again, and now the line led away at a slant. I followed, over a floor that was all uneven shelving and surging water to push and pull me into crazy drifting steps.
That part, again, is blurred to memory. Looking back, it seems that I stumbled and drifted drunkenly about on the sea-bed for hours, more like a sleepwalker than a sane man. From time to time, a mermaid with black locks came down into my headlights and waved—came close to peer into my window, so that I had to cry out, foolishly, “I’m still in here!”—and then slipped away with an entreating gesture to “Come on!” As I say, it seemed that this unreal dream sequence went on for hours, until, startling me into something close to rationality, I blundered headlong into a solid object and halted. And opened my eyes. It took a long time to get through my head that this was a boat. Then, there was Fiona. smacking my helmet with her bare hand and waving me to climb on the deck, which was some seven feet above where I stood.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I told her patiently. “I can’t climb that!”
She went right on waving, then shot away up into the dark, leaving me to start dozing off again. But she came back, hurting my ears with her slapping on the helmet. She began pantomiming something, bobbing up and down. Then she got down by my feet and was doing something there, and I canted suddenly sideways on my right foot. The edge of the deck came down, slid past my window, and I laid hold of the handrail with both hands. She went bubbling past me, and I was in the most ludicrous fix, holding on tightly while my left leg seemed to want to lift me up while my right foot dragged—and it got through to me that she had released one of my weights! Before I could think why, the surface was slapping at my face-plate, and weight came on all over me. I barely had time to heave myself onto the deck before it rose, shedding water in cascades.
“Talk about gray hair!” Fiona puffed, as she snapped open my face-plate and then backed away fast. “Wow! No wonder you were acting stupid!”
That air was wonderful stuff. Invisible energy and sanity surged into me like nectar and ambrosia laced with vodka. By the time Fiona had overcome her distaste, and got my helmet free, I was fit enough to help with the shedding of the rest of the suit. She took a moment to study the meters inside the breast-plate panel, and nodded. “You were almost out of oxygen, lad. I don’t know about nitrogen narcosis at that pressure, but you were certainly blue about the nose. Have we had a time with you!”
“I’m sorry,” I began, but she stopped me.
“No, don’t apologize. How you managed to walk this far I shall never know. And that was not the plan, at all. Look, Lowloo and I got through to the sea fine, with the rope, but we couldn’t find anything to fasten it to. The rocks just there couldn’t be smoother, and we were being washed against them all the time anyway. So we had to swim a little way clear and just hang on. And when you didn’t show—”
“I got all tangled up in those scaffold tubes!”
Her eyes widened. “I’d forgotten all about them. Anyway, when you were so long, I had to leave Lowloo holding the line and swim down to try and find you. And I had to get Neil up for air, of course.
“How is he?”
“All right. Still unconscious, but otherwise fine. How are you?”
“I’ve felt better, but I’m not grumbling. I take it we are afloat? Then let’s leave. Please?”
“Yes,” she said, and there was something wrong with her tone. “The only snag is—that we can’t. Not get far, anyway. When you pinched all the spare parts, you didn’t touch the main engines, so they’re all right. But we have no auxiliaries. No lights. No water. No food, either.”
“We’ll go hungry,” I declared. “And thirsty. And what do we need lights for? It’s night now, but we can see enough to get moving, that’s all that matters. Fiona, we’ve got to. I don’t profess to know what’s wrong with Carson, but unless we get him to a doctor—well, the longer he’s like this the worse it will be!”
“But we can’t!” she cried. “What’s the point of going, when we’ve no idea which way to go?”
She had a good point there, but the answer came to me in a moment. “We have someone who can point us the way. Lowloo! Look, if she knows the way home from here—and what will you bet she does?—then she al
so knows the other way.
“All right. I hope you’re right. But I’d feel a lot happier if he would only come around, show some signs of life. I doubt if any doctor can handle what he’s got.”
Half an hour later, with the boat purring along and surging steadily over the running sea, with Fiona at the wheel and me feeling better after a splash and a rest, I stood in the cabin and stared down at Carson, where he lay quite limp and still on his bunk—and I agreed with her. I suppose I have as much faith in medicine men as anyone, but I felt uneasily sure that this was something outside their field. It was the mental echo of “medicine man” which started me thinking about old Uhumeelee. Would he, with his magic touching-stone, have been able to cure this? After all, it had been a different sample of the same magic that had done the damage in the first place. An idea struggled to break through in my mind, and I went to the wheelhouse with it.
“Can you spare Lowloo for a little while?” I asked.
“Don’t see why not. The gyro will hold us on course for a while. What do you want her for?”
“I intend to try something. You’d better come, too.”
Back in the cabin, I hoisted up the three bags of baubles and shook them.
“These all look pretty much alike to me,” I said to Lowloo, “but you’ve seen Uhumeelee’s touching-stone many times. Do you think you’d recognize another one, exactly like it?”
“Alan! You can’t risk it!”
“I can’t risk Carson being like that any longer than necessary, Fiona. Look, we know that one of those things is a healer. If Lowloo can pick it out, I can cure him.”
Poor Lowloo looked stricken. Her lovely young bosom heaved with her agitation as she stared at me. “I could not be sure, Alan!”
“That’s all right. You just do your best.”
It took me a moment to start assorting the things, using a plastic gripper that went with the auto-chef fittings. Then Fiona held the empty bag while I lifted samples out, one at a time, for Lowloo to stare at. She was uncertain, and dubious, and shook her head—and then, all at once, she said, “That one!”