He became aware that Martha was awake and watching him, but she said nothing, and he had nothing he wished to say, so he passed her some water with the remainder of the dextrose in it, and turned back to his task.
The day grew hot and he lost track of time. He could look at his chronometer, but his mind refused to draw any conclusions from five coloured hands and a set of numerals. In any case, one hour was as much like another as to render even the concept of time untenable. He simply lay and stared at the orange-tinted sky and dreamed featureless dreams to match his mood and his wretchedness.
A spear of light crossed his consciousness, but it took him several seconds to realize that the phenomenon was being perceived by his eyes rather than his imagination. Then his analytical faculties came back into play, and suddenly he was looking at the great sodium-ion trail of a spacecraft making a planetary touchdown, and probably not more than thirty kilometres away.
Hope lashed him out of his reverie. A spacecraft could mean only one thing: a rescue contingent from Delta Five had landed. The only possible place for such a landing was Lamedah, and to judge from the distance and the direction, help was not impossibly far away. Certainly a cushion-craft or skimmer would have been brought crated ready for assembly, and it would take some time, but with a reasonable search pattern they still had a slight chance of locating one small boat amid the rocky, flower-strewn drift. He regretted now having used all the dye too early, for it was becoming dispersed though still at the moment giving a reasonably wide and clear indication of their position. He watched the ion trail slowly fading in the upper atmosphere, and wished bitterly that he had some means of propelling the craft in its direction, or at least halting its motion with the drift, although cold reason assured him the fragile hull could never stand against any relative motion between it and the floating rocks in which it was immersed. He could only sit and hope.
Whether Martha had followed these developments or not was uncertain, for she had drawn in on herself and had become quite still and rarely spoke. Her face was full of a passive resignation born of a strength of character which would not allow her to bend or break. Whether she was suffering for herself or for him, he could not tell, but the agony in her eyes was something more than physical. There was no comfort left that he could offer her, save to hold her hand occasionally and to smile when he could manage.
Several times he thought he heard the drone of engines, but he finally convinced himself that these were a delusion, and with the slowly drawing curtains of another night he lay back with her and forgot even to hope. By morning the dye in the water and on the rocks would be too far disposed to attract attention from any distance, and they would certainly be well into the drift towards the equatorial stream and beyond all thought of rescue.
* * * *
When the shock came in the darkness, he was all but helpless. Dazed, disorientated and incredibly weak, he almost plunged over the side while attempting to ascertain the situation. The boat was grinding dangerously against something solid, perhaps caught between two points, since its position did not seem to change. The same uncertain anchorage lifted the bows slightly out of the water and formed an unstable pivot, causing the craft to rock wildly with his movements. The darkness was impenetrable, affording him no opportunity of seeing the impossible obstruction.
He carefully worked his way forward to explore the object against which they were so dangerously halted. What he felt with his hands provided a considerable psychological shock, for he found himself grasping a Terran-made girder rising above a sunken float. This was almost certainly part of the wreckage from the break; perhaps a section broken off and isolated, or perhaps connected to a continuing section of the railway. There was no answer as to which was true, nor any obvious course of action. If it was isolated wreckage he had encountered, it would be futile to mount it, since it would offer precisely no advantage over their present predicament. But if this was the Base end of the break which he thought they had passed ... then this was the way to salvation.
In an agony of indecision he attempted to climb up the girder-work a couple of steps in the hope of clarifying the situation. He had scarcely started when he realized what a difficult and dangerous exploit this was in the darkness, and how unfit he was for the task. He stepped down again, and froze with horror as he did so, for the boat containing Martha had slipped from its niche and had gone drifting off alone into the absolute of night.
Perhaps he cried, perhaps he blacked-out with the shock and the reaction, while still maintaining a precarious hold on the girder. He was never afterwards certain of his actions at that moment. He remembered shouting Martha’s name until his voice gave out, and somehow restraining himself from plunging into the murderously abrasive drift in an insane attempt to regain the vessel. Somehow, at some time, he must have climbed upwards to the decking and then miraculously fallen down unconscious within half a metre of a new break in the staging, which would certainly have killed him had he continued. But the thing that he did remember was waking and seeing lights hurrying towards him and the sound of running feet. Then the sound of the voice of Max Colindale at his shoulder, saying: “Hell, Blick, what took you so long?” and “What about Martha?”
“She’s in the boat,” said Blick painfully, indicating the general direction of the ocean. “Out there somewhere. I brought her with me.”
“I’d have staked my life on that,” said Colindale. He went away and shortly the scream of skimmer engines beat the air, and the night was bewilderingly filled with patterns of searchlights and flares which moved off slowly into a curious firefly ritual dance across the tides of darkness.
They made Blick comfortable on a stretcher and gave him a little warm, thin soup, but made no attempt to move him until morning. When it was light he could see the reason why. He was on the Base side of the break, and even here the decking of the railway was dangerously torn and twisted by the wrench that had torn away thirteen stations and forty-five kilometres of rail in one of the mightiest surges that had ever been observed in the enigmatic ocean which covered the planet. Only by day was it possible to manoeuvre anything like a stretcher the four last kilometres to the sounder part of the railway.
“Did we lose many people?” asked Blick of one of his bearers.
The man was grave. “So far Martha Sorenson and yourself are the only known survivors out of seventy-eight missing. Now the skimmers are here, there’s hope for a few more, but if we see another thirty alive, I’ll be very much surprised. What beats me is how the hell Colindale knew that you and Martha would come through. You were in the worst position of all, but he’s been like a cat on hot bricks for days just waiting for you to come in.”
“Did he have any money on it?” asked Blick.
The bearer looked straight ahead. “Some,” he said. “Some of nearly everybody’s,” he added as an afterthought.
* * * *
“What’s the latest news on Martha?” asked Blick.
“She’s going to be all right,” said Colindale. “She was in a bad way when they picked her up, and, frankly, it was a near thing, Blick. If you hadn’t fetched her in I doubt if we’d have been able to get to her in time.”
Blick nodded. “I saw it coming. She didn’t have reserves enough to stand that for long. I suspect she’d been dieting pretty heavily. I’d have fetched her in before if I could have seen just how it could be done. That was one hell of a problem. Tell me, Max, why were you so damn certain that Martha and I would come through?”
Colindale pursed his lips. “Experience. Nothing conquers adversity like perversity—and you two are the most perverse individuals I’ve had the misfortune to encounter. I was unlikely to be lucky enough to lose the two of you simultaneously.”
“But seriously, Max ...”
“Seriously, Blick, you have a reputation for resolving problems from the wrong end. Logically, you didn’t stand a chance in Hell, but, with Martha there too, I was certain that, if there was a way out, you’d find i
t. Petroni on the Rescue Squad is going quietly crazy trying to work out how you made that boat.”
“We electroformed it,” said Blick. “Out of copper sulphate solution.”
“I guessed something like that,” said Colindale. “But how? I’ll admit I’m an engineer and not a chemist, but I still don’t see how you can electroform something without having any available power.”
“It’s a little complicated,” said Blick, “but I’ll try to explain. Up at the station, I’d installed a few devices of my own in the plant to allow me more time on the research projects. One device depended on the fact that a metal in a solution of its own ions develops an electrical potential, and this potential is dependent on the concentration of ions with which it is in contact.”
“I’m not quite sure that I follow that,” said Colindale.
“No, but it’s simple electrochemistry. Imagine a tube filled with dilute acid in which a crystal of copper sulphate is dissolving at the bottom. If copper electrodes are inserted one at the top and one at the bottom of the tube, connected to a circuit, a current will flow in the circuit which will tend to try to equalize the concentration of copper ions in the tube by depositing copper on the lower electrode and dissolving it from the upper. When the concentration of copper ions is the same throughout the tube, the current will cease.”
“I’m with you that far,” said Colindale.
“Good. Now put the same electrodes at the top and bottom of an ion exchange column and pour in copper sulphate and you have a similar state of affairs. The concentration of copper ions at the top of the column will be very high and, until the resin all the way to the bottom of the column has exhausted its capacity to take up copper ions, the concentration at the bottom of the column will be very low. Thus a current will flow all the time a column is doing useful work. This current I used to control the automatic recycling equipment. As a bonus, when you regenerate the column by adding acid at the top and taking your concentrate from the bottom, a current also flows, but on opposite polarity. This was made to complete the control cycle.”
“Ingenious!” said Colindale.
“It has possibilities,” said Blick. “By observing the polarity of the current you know on what part of the cycle the column is engaged. When the current ceases, it indicates the column is fully exhausted or regenerated, as the case may be, and variations from the standard current value give the first indication of when the pickup pumps begin to bring up a contaminated stream. And all this for the price of a few pieces of copper and some wire.”
“And you managed to use this current to electroform the boat?”
Blick nodded. “Yes, and I had to rewire nearly every damn column in the place to get enough potential. Fortunately, I was able to use the current from both the running and the regeneration parts of the cycle, so we kept up a fairly continuous process. By a combination of God and guesswork, we made it.”
Colindale leaned back in his chair. “We’re still looking for someone to head the research team, Blick. I know you’ve refused before, but I still think you’re the man for the job.”
“Thanks, Max, but the answer’s still the same.”
“Very well! Then let’s come to the next point of this interview.”
Colindale brought out a file and laid it on the table. “These are your letters in which you warned me in some detail that the catastrophe which has occurred was likely to occur. In defence, I can only say that it was the balance of the reasoned arguments of a whole army of professional planetary oceanographers, engineers and similar authorities against your unsupported opinion which decided me to do nothing. But hindsight is a lot clearer than foresight. I realize now that my decision was incorrect—but it was a rational judgment in the light of the evidence then available. I must ask you now if you want this file put before the Space Commission when they set up a Court of Enquiry into all this?”
Blick took the file and tore it across. “As you say. Max, it was only my unsupported opinion. I see no point in confusing the Commission with unfounded speculation, even if it was correct. Besides, it’d look bad in the Press.”
“Thanks, Blick! I shan’t forget that in a hurry.”
“And I don’t want any favours,” said Blick. “Not from you, anyway.”
“Hmm! And that’s another thing,” said Colindale. “Your wife’s on her way from Delta Five on the Auxiliary due tomorrow. She asked for special Company dispensation for the trip when you were listed missing. I was so damn sure you’d come through that I granted it. I suggest you go straight back with her and take some leave on Delta.”
“Thanks,” said Blick. “I’ll be sure to remember you in my prayers.” He got up to go, but Colindale called him back.
“Blick, it’s none of my business, but what the hell is there between Martha and you, anyway?”
“I’ll write you a report on it some day,” said Blick obtusely. “But it’s the one type of relationship which has all the ingredients of permanency. Remember that, Max. It gives us something rather unique.”
* * * *
When the Auxiliary landed, Blick was waiting for his wife in the lounge of the spaceport sheds, thankful that the deep-space transmitter had been able to contact the craft and give her the news of his survival. The re-union was a flood of tears, concern and kindliness, a flood which washed against him, moving him outwardly, but leaving a little hard core of pain untouched. Some fibre of anguish stayed unwetted by compassion and rebelled against the cloying warm joys that familiarity had made a habit. He fought against the insurgent streak and conquered it so that it showed as nothing more than a quiet and lingering misery m the corners of his eyes.
As the welcoming was done and they turned to go. Max Colindale entered and came over to them.
“Ah, Blick, I’ve just been examining that boat of yours. We’re still not quite sure how you made it, but it’s dama clever! But what intrigues me is why the Hell call it that name?”
“Name?” Blick looked suddenly fazed and lost. No name had been included in the mould form. Not unless Martha ...
Colindale chuckled and slapped him on the arm. “You’re a great joker, Blick! Fancy calling a boat: ‘One day I just might change my mind.’ “
Blick controlled himself rigidly. “Just a private cynicism,” he said.
“Sure, Blick, sure! But some time you’ll have to explain it to me.”
“You’re big enough and old enough to work it out for yourself,” said Blick.
Colindale swallowed some inner amusement and turned to Blick’s wife. “That’s a clever husband you have there, Jean. One of the most original thinkers that Transgalactic Mining’s ever had. I’d say he could have gone a long way farther if he’d learned not to waste his opportunities.”
“And just what did he mean by that?” asked Jean, as they finally walked the corridor.
“It would take too long to explain,” said Blick, “and you’d be none the happier for knowing. Now bring me up to date on what’s happening to the kids.”
<
* * * *
THE COUNTRY OF THE STRONG
Dennis Etchison
Following up our discovery of young American writer, Dennis Etchison (he appeared in New Writings In S-F 2) we found that he had had a prize-winning short story published in Seventeen, America’s foremost teenage magazine, and managed to obtain permission to reprint it here.
* * * *
Marber’s renovated Isetta cut the corner sharply, humming smoothly on its miniature wheels.
Veering right, he bypassed a jagged-lightning crack that split the entire length of what would otherwise have been one of a half-dozen usable streets in town. When would the SS Teams begin suburb reconstruction ?
Marber again scanned the illogical destruction spreading from the sixth or seventh Spanish-American style home down to the end of the block. Spider houses stood between, stick frames that cast long-shadow fingers over charred earth and heaped concrete at each day’s death. A phantas
ma, he thought, like some desolate surrealist landscape I saw in a painting once —
A white flash bobbing up and down, up and down in front of the second house from the end caught and held his gaze.
But you know what? I’m getting used to it. That’s the grotesque part.
He recognized Darla, an SS man’s four-year-old, if he remembered correctly. The swelling four o’clock sun cast a halo of backlight on the little girl’s hair, spinning her a crown of angel-floss as she faced the car.
She strode into the street, hands curled on hips. Her tiny pale chin thrust out to meet the Isetta.
Marber pulled up. .
“Hi-ya, you!” cried Darla as he swung open the front of the squat vehicle and stood, like some metamorphosed creature emerging from a cocoon.
New Writings in SF 4 - [Anthology] Page 9