Eight Against Utopia

by Douglas R. Mason

  Swarbrick and Goda had already got the clumsy raft moving back. At ten meters the current added its thrust in a whirlpool sweep of debris. Lee said, “Now it is,” and sprayed the facing wall in a slow dropping line from the roof to the surface of the water.

  After the silence the noise was suddenly stupefying. Water boiled into an erupting column, pressure surged up. Heat was intense, even when submerged. He held on as long as he could with a second burst. Then he was shooting into another incoming deluge. Steam forced its way out through the falling water. Chaos was come again.

  Now the level was going up like a filling lock. The raft bucked in a crazy jig and began to spin. One by one they heaved themselves aboard. Wanda said, unheard, “If it doesn’t pack in, I shall be sick.”

  Then the upward movement stopped with the level stabilized on both sides and they were paddling towards the gap, just able to sit below the roof with a half-meter jagged rent becoming visible in the clearing steam.

  Jane Welland beat the raft to the hole and was through, without a pause, in a racing crawl. She reached Kalmar, who was floating on the surface of the inner pool, two seconds before Goda, whose horizontal performances were her justifiable pride. Between them they towed him to the nearest shore, which was a low quayside, and when Swarbrick and Shultz arrived, they had pumped some of the Mediterranean out of him. Jane started mouth-to-mouth respiration.

  It was a long chore. When he finally opened his eyes, screened from dim light by fine red gold filaments, he thought he was still leaving the raft. Then he remembered the wire. The strands had been weakened by corrosion, but were still too solid to be prised apart by hand. He had strained until the links cut deep into his flesh and had realized, in bitter truth, that they would never break. Then he had gone on, hand over hand, looking up at the surface, driving himself, when there was no longer any reasonable hope left, until he could move no more. A long gash, from throat to navel, showed that the gap he had finally found had been jagged with broken strands. But he remembered nothing of that.

  When his eyes opened, she stopped and remained kneeling with an arm on either side of him. He had a foreshortened view of pale brown skin, sweeping away in planes and curves, and with a sure grasp of engineering principles he moved his arms sideways so that her hands were pushed apart on the wet stone. She fell forward onto him—a pneumatic bonus for any drowned Phoenician sailor—and only Goda’s pleased exclamation checked a very basic reunion. She said unnecessarily, “He’s alive.” A good biology student, she recalled the maxim that concern to reproduce was an a priori requisite of that state.

  He allowed Jane to pull free. Golden brown eyes held all the acknowledgment he could want of what was between them. It was a reluctant postponement on both sides.

  Looking at Goda, Jane realized that she had literally nothing to wear. She looked around to bring herself up to date with the rest of the action. The quayside they were on, ran from the breached wall for a hundred meters in a gentle curve which was matched, on the far side, so that the basin was funneled to a massive lock gate. Light came from two disks in the high vaulted roof. As in the main cavern, many others had finally burned out.

  On a slipway, angled to launch into the basin, was a lean, gray, sea-going launch with flared bows and a square transom. Peter Swarbrick was on its deck forward of the bridge housing, swiveling himself round in the gunner’s seat of a small lethal-looking cannon.

  Wanda appeared, head and shoulders, from the after companion with a bundle of electric-blue zipper suits. She was wearing one herself, and as she turned her back to climb down to the slipway, she made a shapely presentation of the legend AIR SEA RESCUE in yellow lettering set over an emblem in white. It looked like a map of the world imposed on concentric rings of latitude with radius lines, flanked by two olive branches. Whatever its message it was welcome. She appeared to go through a mime of opening a door and Jane realized that she was seeing the whole thing through some kind of transparent screen. The boat was in an oval cocoon.

  Clothed again, and in a mind suited to the busy times, Gaul Kalmar joined the party on the slipway. He was moving stiffly, feeling as if a massive bruise covered his entire body. Before climbing up into the launch, he looked at the name elaborately figured in gold leaf and mint fresh under the preserving carapace. Vijaya Pandit. It was an unusual name. No doubt it meant something at the time.

  Lee was coming up out of a double-leaf hatch. “So. They finally got you baled out. Welcome and that. This you should see.”

  The craft was prepared as if for inspection. At every point where a crewman would be, a model figure had been substituted. Similar in ethnic type to the Carthaginians, but smaller in general build. The air inside the mothball cowl was dry. Even the colors were well preserved.

  In the small saloon, four figures, representing the off-duty watch, sat facing each other in blank patience. Stiffness caused Gaul to blunder against the nearest and it crumpled over the table as if at long last it had had enough.

  “Why is this the only boat left?” Goda was back in the interrogative role.

  Gaul said, “The question is, will it still move? What about it, Lee?”

  “Not a doubt. It’s a beautiful museum piece; but if we could find any of its fuel it would move. It’s a surface boat. Blower fans. Pushes itself along. Probably rises fairly well out of the water. Definitely not a flier.”

  “What fuel?”

  “Liquid. Clumsy drill. Burns it for gas and feeds the gas into blowers. Very wasteful.”

  “Look about then. There would be a storage system. If it’s well sealed there might be something left.”

  Back on deck, he joined Swarbrick. “What do you make of that, Pete?”

  “It sends out a projectile. An extension of the bow and arrow. Stone Age stuff.”

  “Will it work?”

  “Could be. I’ll look around for whatever fits into it.”

  “Don’t experiment inside here. You never know what these weapons did. They were not too particular by all accounts.”

  “Like now?”

  “True, but the evil you know is less than the evil you don’t know. One thing’s for sure, we’re not out of the wood. Even if this still moves, Gruber could blast it out of the water with his Strikecraft. Unless that swivel gun can keep them away.”

  In the event, it was Cheryl Bentham who struck oil. She found a small squarish console recessed in the clock wall which trundled protestingly backwards, revealing that it was the securing terminal point for a thick, green flexible hose, labeled FUEL LINE.

  It pulled out with the scream of a dust-dry axle, rotating somewhere in the depth of the wall. At one time it had been powered to carry the line wherever it was needed. Now it would have to be manhandled into place. She pulled a flexible coupling out of the front panel and cautiously spun a dial which read GRAVITY FEED.

  Thick, black, viscous liquid began to spill down the slipway. They had transport again.

  The launch had definitely been set up as a demonstration piece. It was everywhere labeled with explanatory legends. Long out of date, even when the lock was in its last operational phase, it had held some interest for the people of that time. Strangely there was no record of what had survived it. But fuel oil must have had a continued use.

  Swarbrick, working methodically with a thermal lance, cleared all the transparent cowl from the seaward end. Sections of it tipped into the dock, floated like thin ice. The dummy figures stripped of any useful clothing, were set up in a macabre procession along the quay. It looked like a Chaldean death pit.

  They manhandled the small console to a port graphically signposted with a stylized symbol of a fuel hose union and found it a fit. Cheryl said, “That’s interesting. Perhaps, at the last, there was such a mixture of races that signs were used to clarify language.”

  Dials, on the instrument spread below the panoramic windscreen, began to register in an archaic measure of GALS. But FULL would be FULL in any measure.

  In their timel
ess world of half light, Gaul checked his time disk and found that they had worked through to another night. The boat was fueled and seemingly ready to move. He said, “That’s it, for now.”

  The set-up was for a crew of twelve with bunks in double cubicles and a small saloon. They were instantly asleep in a return of tomb silence, which their arrival had broken. Short single watches of one hour each seemed a pointless drudge, but Gaul was insistent. He spent his own spell in a detailed tour from the engine room to the small magazine abaft the swivel gun. Here a neat device for passing up the ammunition took his eye and he spent time checking it out and testing it for operational readiness.

  Then he sat at the chart spread and made out a crew list for action stations, if he had to fight the ship. Lee in the engine room was a priority. Peter with his phenomenal reflexes on the gun. Cheryl below him in the magazine. He hesitated about Jane. It would be no help to have her with him on the bridge. Shultz would be better there in the command slot. He made a first-class lieutenant. Wanda and Goda, medical personnel—the saloon, to bale out or amputate as the need arose. Jane then. He came back to it. He wanted her somewhere safe. After all, she was a trained engineer and a good one. With Lee then in the engine room. It looked as good a set up as they could get.

  A piece of equipment which had so far evaded their efforts at re-establishment, took up the rest of his time. It was some kind of visual aid. There was a screen and a small console. Probably power would get to it when the motors ran. He went down below and started them. Lee had already given them a trial run. They set up a vibration in the craft, and seemed very much more a source of primitive power than the refined packs he was used to.

  Leaving them at the lowest possible setting, he went back to the command cockpit and tried again. Antennae, bulb-tipped, sprouted slowly like a snail’s horns from a point just forward of the gun mounting. A picture began to form on the screen. Hazy at first, it responded to a tuning device labeled in YDS. It was soon apparent that vision was extended in concentric circles with a maximum range of 3000 YDS.

  He advanced the setting in 50 YD units. First, he saw the quayside with its lay figures, and he found a control to run this scan in a circular sweep at that radius. Next, he hit the blank wall of the outer gates, with the rest of the circle cutting into the operations room they had left and mainly falling within solid rock. Then he was deeper in the limestone with ravines showing up until the sea beyond the gates came into view. This time he scored a bull’s-eye on a Strikecraft which was sitting in the bay with its blunt bows pointing to the center of the closed doors.

  It was the end of his stint. He woke Frank Shultz and gave him the score.

  “There’s a bastard outside to watch. I’ll need persuading that he’s there by coincidence.”

  “There’s nothing accidental about that. With five craft in the area, they’re bound to have worked a directional fix with several sets of monitoring gear. They’ll have picked up the message from eight busy brains even deep in this rock.”

  “Watch it then. Call us out if you think there’s even a suggestion of a development. And brief the relief.”

  “Check.”

  In the event, there was no alarm. When Lee Wayne ended the last duty spell with general reveille, the single craft was still keeping its vigil. A widening check of the rock showed the other four drawn up in line beside the wrecked shuttle. There was a smugly complacent look about them. Gruber was waiting for full light to move in.

  In fact, he waited until halfway through the morning. Four craft moved unhurriedly round to join the sentinel. Then all five moved in towards the rock face. They deployed in a shallow arc, fifty meters out, with ten-meter intervals. Guards climbed through the hatches and went forward to straddle the blunt cones. It was impossible to say what they were looking at; perhaps, at close quarters, the camouflage broke down and it was clear that the cliff face was in reality an opening gate.

  Without haste, they did a methodical job of setting up thermal hoses on tripod stands for accurate directional use and then the screen became an unnecessary refinement because the end product of this deliberate labor became visible to the naked eye. They had it all planned. The center man was cutting a lintel; port and starboard worked on vertical incisions. A huge oblong was defined.

  As soon as the rest of the flotilla arrived, Gaul got the Vijaya Pandit into the dock. Then he went slowly astern until they were backed up against the breached rear wall. Gusts of superheated steam came in as rock and metal fused and ran. He said, “Action Stations,” and the others moved reluctantly off the bridge. Last to go, Jane said, “I want to stay here with you.”

  The approaching showdown had triggered off the atavistic berserker in Gaul Kalmar. He had been pushed back far enough. A cold murderous fury possessed his mind. He looked at her, without recognition, for a long moment. It was as if the Victory’s cook had appeared on the bridge to argue the toss with Nelson at Trafalgar.

  “Below. Now.”

  “Suppose I say no.”

  The visual impact of Jane Welland as a person finally made its mark. He looked genuinely puzzled as if it ought to be as clear to her as it was to him.

  “If you were here I couldn’t give my mind to what there is to do.”

  Briefly, warm brown eyes held his own, as if assessing the value and truth of it. Then she turned away and went with unexceptionable nautical precision down the companion. It did momentarily occur to her that she could have said, “You prefer me to be in danger out of sight,” but she wisely recognized that it was not the time.

  Heat was building up. Steam jetted through breaking gaps. The great section began to sag inwards. Swarbrick fired an experimental shot into its center and saw that marksmanship was going to be helped by the glowing trajectory of the tracer shells. He braced back in the bucket seat, hands lightly on the pistol grips, ready to swing any way.

  For a full minute there was no great change. Then the block fell.

  Gaul Kalmar, working like a detached, calculating machine had assessed the line of fall to a meter. He had a mark on the steam-wreathed surface where the ragged tip would strike and he knew to a centimeter what length he had in hand. When it hit, the Vijaya Pandit was already moving forward at maximum thrust. She stormed through the rising wall of tormented water, so that it engulfed the decks and broke in white wings against Swarbrick’s shield.

  They went out blind. When the screen ran partially clear, they were bearing down, like a charging whale, on the center of the line. Gaul heaved them round into the gap, with under a meter to spare. The wash from their passing rocked the center craft onto its beam ends. Guards spilled off its deck.

  Peter Swarbrick, straining to get maximum depression from his mounting, got the heeling Strikecraft in his sights and pumped a line of shells into its exposed undercarriage and spun dizzily to take its neighbor.

  Then they were through and Gaul took them out into the bay in a fast-turning run to come in again for another salvo. The two center craft were settled in the water, and a line of heads marked swimmers making for the shore. Shells, making decorative streamer lines, weaved round the other three. A single figure, on the far right wing, was braced half out of the hatch pumping a thermal hose. Explosive steam threshed up from the sea in a white line, falling short of their racing bows. Gaul took them out again and this last working Strikecraft began to move.

  It picked up speed, in a burst of frantic acceleration, which took it almost head on into the cliff. Then it was coming out. Gruber himself had the thermal hose. He was holding his fire until he was nearer. His pilot picked up the wake of Vijaya Pandit and began to overtake as if the launch had been standing still.

  Gruber opened up again, shooting meticulously down the center of the wake, as he came up, with the clear intention of bisecting the surface craft.

  Peter Swarbrick was shooting into the sun and at the most awkward angle. Gaul held on to his course, until a second longer would have been too long. Then he took them round in a tu
rn which put the starboard rail awash. Boiling water gushed over the stern and they ran out of a cloud of steam.

  The Strikecraft pilot, navigating by direct vision through his transparent deck, was fractionally late in following round. As the Vijaya Pandit came onto an even keel, Swarbrick made a 180-degree turn and had a plumb target to port. Shells ripped into the craft above and virtually cut off its bottom third. It hit the sea in two diverging tangles of wreckage.

  Gaul picked up the intercom and gave the “Stand Down.” At reduced speed, the Vijaya Pandit circled the bay. Some men had reached the shore and were looking out. Shultz took the wheel and the rest went out on open deck. Goda said, “There’s Fred.”

  Homo habilis was making a lonely appearance on the cliff top above the bay. Jane said, “He might make friends with Gruber.”

  A new thought struck Gaul. He went back into the closed bridge. “Take us round to where we left the shuttle. It’s just possible there’s something useful to pick up. Then we’ll get away.”

  On a rough calculation of fuel consumption, Jane Welland, as navigator, gave them a choice of objectives. She had drawn a circle on the chart showing where they could go for their money. Since ninety-nine percent of the terminal points lay bleakly in mid-ocean, the choice was not so extensive as all that.

  The circle centered on their position at noon, where they lay hove to on a calm sea. Evocative place names gave it an inland interest, which was not as evident in its coastwise possibilities. They had reached N450 E100 with half the fuel gone. With the distance back to Gibraltar as a radius, the circle hit land at Sligo in Ireland, then at Dundalk; across a narrow sea to Chester, overland to Coventry and London; coast again just below Dover, then over the sea once more; Amiens, Paris, Moulins, Narbonne, Barcelona, and back to Gibraltar. Names only on an ancient map.

  Jane said, “I make no very special argument for it, but I like Chester. Western coast, sheltered possibly. Looks interesting.”

  “Any advance on Chester?” Gaul waited a full minute, while the map passed from hand to hand. “Chester it is then. Give Frank a course and we’ll get under way. With luck we could make it in the last of the daylight.”