Chapter 7

They began knocking scales loose with the jackhammer and cutting into the leathery skin underneath with sonocutters. The sea was getting heavy, and the ship and the attached monster had begun to roll.

"That's pretty dangerous work," Murell said. "If a man using one of those cutters slipped...."

"It's happened," I told him. "You met our peg-legged compositor, Julio. That was how he lost his leg."

"I don't blame them for wanting all they can get for tallow-wax."

They had the monster opened down the belly, and were beginning to cut loose big chunks of the yellow tallow-wax and throw them into cargo nets and swing them aboard with lifters, to be chucked down the cargo hatches. I was only able to watch that for a minute or so and tell Murell what was going on, and then the first halberd fish, with a spearlike nose and sharp ridges of the nearest thing to bone you find on Fenris, came swimming up. I swung the gun on the leader and gave him a second of fire, and then a two-second burst on the ones behind. Then I waited for a few seconds until the survivors converged on their dead and injured companions and gave them another burst, which wiped out the lot of them.

It was only a couple of seconds after that that the first slasher came in, shiny as heat-blued steel and waving four clawed tentacles that grew around its neck. It took me a second or so to get the sights on him. He stopped slashing immediately. Slashers are smart; you kill them and they find it out right away.

Before long, the water around the ship and the monster was polluted with things like that. I had to keep them away from the men, now working up to their knees in water, and at the same time avoid massacring the crew I was trying to protect, and Murell had to keep the boat in position, in spite of a steadily rising wind, and every time I had to change belts, there'd be a new rush of things that had to be shot in a hurry. The ammunition bill for covering a cutting-up operation is one of the things that runs up expenses for a hunter-ship. The ocean bottom around here must be carpeted with machine-gun brass.

Finally, they got the job done, and everybody went below and sealed ship. We sealed the boat and went down after her. The last I saw, the remains of the monster, now stripped of wax, had been cast off, and the water around it was rioting with slashers and clawbeaks and halberd fish and similar marine unpleasantnesses.

10

MAYDAY, MAYDAY

Getting a ship's boat berthed inside the ship in the air is tricky work under the best of conditions; the way the wind was blowing by now, it would have been like trying to thread a needle inside a concrete mixer. We submerged after the ship and went in underwater. Then we had to wait in the boat until the ship rose above the surface and emptied the water out of the boat berth. When that was done and the boat berth was sealed again, the ship went down seventy fathoms and came to rest on the bottom, and we unsealed the boat and got out.

There was still the job of packing the wax into skins, but that could wait. Everybody was tired and dirty and hungry. We took turns washing up, three at a time, in the little ship's latrine which, for some reason going back to sailing-ship days on Terra, was called the "head." Finally the whole sixteen of us gathered in the relatively comfortable wardroom under the after gun turret.

Comfortable, that is, to the extent that everybody could find a place to sit down, or could move about without tripping over somebody else. There was a big pot of coffee, and everybody had a plate or bowl of hot food. There's always plenty of hot food to hand on a hunter-ship; no regular meal-times, and everybody eats, as he sleeps, when he has time. This is the only time when a whole hunter crew gets together, after a monster has been killed and cut up and the ship is resting on the bottom and nobody has to stand watch.

Everybody was talking about the killing, of course, and the wax we had in the hold, and counting the money they were going to get for it, at the new eighty-centisol price.

"Well, I make it about fourteen tons," Ramón Llewellyn, who had been checking the wax as it went into the hold, said. He figured mentally for a moment, and added, "Call it twenty-two thousand sols." Then he had to fall back on a pencil and paper to figure shares.

I was surprised to find that he was reckoning shares for both Murell and myself.

"Hey, do we want to let them do that?" I whispered to Murell. "We just came along for the ride."

"I don't want the money," he said. "These people need every cent they can get."

So did I, for that matter, and I didn't have salary and expense account from a big company on Terra. However, I hadn't come along in the expectation of making anything out of it, and a newsman has to be careful about the outside money he picks up. It wouldn't do any harm in the present instance, but as a practice it can lead to all kinds of things, like playing favorites, coloring news, killing stories that shouldn't be killed. We do enough of that as it is, like playing down the tread-snail business for Bish Ware and the spaceport people, and never killing anybody except in a "local bar." It's hard to draw a line on that sort of thing.

"We're just guests," I said. "We don't work here."

"The dickens you are," Joe Kivelson contradicted. "Maybe you came aboard as guests, but you're both part of the crew now. I never saw a prettier shot on a monster than Walt made--took that thing's head off like a chicken on a chopping block--and he did a swell job of covering for the cutting-up. And he couldn't have done that if Murell hadn't handled the boat the way he did, and that was no easy job."

"Well, let's talk about that when we get to port," I said. "Are we going right back, or are we going to try for another monster?"

"I don't know," Joe said. "We could stow the wax, if we didn't get too much, but if we stay out, we'll have to wait out the wind and by then it'll be pretty cold."

"The longer we stay out, the more the cruise'll cost," Abdullah Monnahan, the engineer, said, "and the expenses'll cut into the shares."

"Tell the truth, I'm sort of antsy to get back," Joe Kivelson said. "I want to see what's going on in Port Sandor."

"So am I," Murell said. "I want to get some kind of office opened, and get into business. What time will the _Cape Canaveral_ be getting in? I want a big cargo, for the first time."

"Oh, not for four hundred hours, at the least," I said. "The spaceships always try to miss the early-dark and early-daylight storms. It's hard to get a big ship down in a high wind."

"That'll be plenty of time, I suppose," Murell said. "There's all that wax you have stored, and what I can get out of the Co-operative stores from crews that reclaim it. But I'm going to have a lot to do."

"Yes," I agreed. "Dodging bullets, for one."

"Oh, I don't expect any trouble," Murell said. "This fellow Ravick's shot his round."

He was going to say something else, but before he could say it there was a terrific roar forward. The whole ship bucked like a recoiling gun, throwing everybody into a heap, and heeled over to starboard. There were a lot of yells, particularly from those who had been splashed with hot coffee, and somebody was shouting something about the magazines.

"The magazines are aft, you dunderhead," Joe Kivelson told him, shoving himself to his feet. "Stay put, everybody; I'll see what it is."

He pulled open the door forward. An instant later, he had slammed it shut and was dogging it fast.

"Hull must be ruptured forward; we're making water. It's spouting up the hatch from the engine room like a geyser," he said. "Ramón, go see what it's like in the boat berth. The rest of you, follow him, and grab all the food and warm clothing you can. We're going to have to abandon."

He stood by the doorway aft, shoving people through and keeping them from jamming up, saying: "Take it easy, now; don't crowd. We'll all get out." There wasn't any panic. A couple of men were in the doorway of the little galley when I came past, handing out cases of food. As nothing was coming out at the instant, I kept on, and on the way back to the boat-berth hatch, I pulled down as many parkas and pairs of overpants as I could carry, squeezing past Tom, who was collecting fleece-lined hip boots. Each pair was buckled together at the tops; a hunter always does that, even at home ashore.

Ramón had the hatch open, and had opened the top hatch of the boat, below. I threw my double armload of clothing down through it and slid down after, getting out of the way of the load of boots Tom dumped ahead of him. Joe Kivelson came down last, carrying the ship's log and some other stuff. A little water was trickling over the edge of the hatch above.

"It's squirting up from below in a dozen places," he said, after he'd sealed the boat. "The whole front of the ship must be blown out."

"Well, now we know what happened to Simon MacGregor's _Claymore_," I said, more to myself than to anybody else.

Joe and Hans Cronje, the gunner, were getting a rocket out of the locker, detaching the harpoon and fitting on an explosive warhead. He stopped, while he and Cronje were loading it into the after launcher, and nodded at me.

"That's what I think, too," he said. "Everybody grab onto something; we're getting the door open."

I knew what was coming and started hugging a stanchion as though it were a long-lost sweetheart, and Murell, who didn't but knew enough to imitate those who did, hugged it from the other side. The rocket whooshed out of the launcher and went off with a deafening bang outside. For an instant, nothing happened, and I told Murell not to let go. Then the lock burst in and the water, at seventy fathoms' pressure, hit the boat. Abdullah had gotten the engines on and was backing against it. After a little, the pressure equalized and we went out the broken lock stern first.

We circled and passed over the _Javelin_, and then came back. She was lying in the ooze, a quarter over on her side, and her whole bow was blown out to port. Joe Kivelson got the square box he had brought down from the ship along with the log, fussed a little with it, and then launched it out the disposal port. It was a radio locator. Sometimes a lucky ship will get more wax than the holds' capacity; they pack it in skins and anchor it on the bottom, and drop one of those gadgets with it. It would keep on sending a directional signal and the name of the ship for a couple of years.

"Do you really think it was sabotage?" Murell was asking me. Blowing up a ship with sixteen men aboard must have seemed sort of extreme to him. Maybe that wasn't according to Terran business ethics. "Mightn't it have been a power unit?"

"No. Power units don't blow, and if one did, it would vaporize the whole ship and a quarter of a cubic mile of water around her. No, that was old fashioned country-style chemical explosive. Cataclysmite, probably."

"Ravick?" he asked, rather unnecessarily.

"You know how well he can get along without you and Joe Kivelson, and here's a chance to get along without both of you together." Everybody in the boat was listening, so I continued: "How much do you know about this fellow Devis, who strained his back at the last moment?"

"Engine room's where he could have planted something," Joe Kivelson said.

"He was in there by himself for a while, the morning after the meeting," Abdullah Monnahan added.

"And he disappeared between the meeting room and the elevator, during the fight," Tom mentioned. "And when he showed up, he hadn't been marked up any. I'd have thought he'd have been pretty badly beaten--unless they knew he was one of their own gang."

"We're going to look Devis up when we get back," somebody said pleasantly.

"If we get back," Ramón Llewellyn told him. "That's going to take some doing."

"We have the boat," Hans Cronje said. "It's a little crowded, but we can make it back to Port Sandor."

"I hope we can," Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Shall we take her up, Joe?"

"Yes, see what it's like on top," the skipper replied.

Going up, we passed a monster at about thirty fathoms. It stuck its neck out and started for us. Monnahan tilted the boat almost vertical and put on everything the engines had, lift and drive parallel. An instant later, we broke the surface and shot into the air.

The wind hit the boat as though it had been a ping-pong ball, and it was several seconds, and bad seconds at that, before Monnahan regained even a semblance of control. There was considerable bad language, and several of the crew had bloody noses. Monnahan tried to get the boat turned into the wind. A circuit breaker popped, and red lights blazed all over the instrument panel. He eased off and let the wind take over, and for a while we were flying in front of it like a rifle bullet. Gradually, he nosed down and submerged.

"Well, that's that." Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in the underwater calm again. "We'll have to stay under till the wind's over. Don't anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We'll have to conserve oxygen."

"Isn't the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?" Murell asked.

"Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen in here."

"How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?" I asked.

"About eight hours."

It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. The wind wouldn't even begin to fall in less than twenty.

"We can go south, to the coast of Hermann Reuch's Land," Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Let me figure something out."

He dug out a slide rule and a pencil and pad and sat down with his back to the back of the pilot's seat, under the light. Everybody watched him in a silence which Joe Kivelson broke suddenly by bellowing:

"Dumont! You light that pipe and I'll feed it to you!"

Old Piet Dumont grabbed the pipe out of his mouth with one hand and pocketed his lighter with the other.

"Gosh, Joe; I guess I just wasn't thinking..." he began.

"Well, give me that pipe." Joe put it in the drawer under the charts. "Now you won't have it handy the next time you don't think."

After a while, Abe Clifford looked up. "Ship's position I don't have exactly; somewhere around East 25 Longitude, South 20 Latitude. I can't work out our present position at all, except that we're somewhere around South 30 Latitude. The locator signal is almost exactly north-by-northeast of us. If we keep it dead astern, we'll come out in Sancerre Bay, on Hermann Reuch's Land. If we make that, we're all right. We'll be in the lee of the Hacksaw Mountains, and we can surface from time to time to change air, and as soon as the wind falls we can start for home."

Then he and Abdullah and Joe went into a huddle, arguing about cruising speed submerged. The results weren't so heartening.

"It looks like a ten-hour trip, submerged," Joe said. "That's two hours too long, and there's no way of getting more oxygen out of the gills than we're getting now. We'll just have to use less. Everybody lie down and breathe as shallowly as possible, and don't do anything to use energy. I'm going to get on the radio and see what I can raise."

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."