12
CASTAWAYS WORKING
We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back,I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off theengine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at theruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, notjust relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was evenmore crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsiumshielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piledin the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at theconverters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in ahopeless mess.
There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesario Vieira hadfound a small portable radio that wasn't in too bad condition, and hadit apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work ofanybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he wasdoing. It wasn't much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolutelimit of its range, at least for sending.
"Is this all we have?" I asked, looking at it. It was the same type asthe one I carried on the job, camouflaged in a camera case, exceptthat it wouldn't record.
"There's the regular boat radio, but it's smashed up pretty badly. Iwas thinking we could do something about cannibalizing one radio outof parts from both of them."
We use a lot of radio equipment on the _Times_, and I do a good bit ofwork on it. I started taking the big set apart and then remembered thereceiver for the locator and got at that, too. The trouble was thatmost of the stuff in all the sets had been miniaturized to a pointwhere watchmaker's tools would have been pretty large for working onthem, and all we had was a general-repair kit that was just about fineenough for gunsmithing.
While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramon Llewellyn wastelling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. JoeKivelson shook his head over it.
"That's too far from the boat. We can't trudge back and forth to workon the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up withthe lifters, and I think that's a good idea about using slabs of thesoft wood to build a hut. But let's build the hut right here."
"Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?" the mateasked.
"Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream.There may be something better up there."
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
"I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job.We need parts, and we haven't anything to make them out of or with."
That was about what I'd thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-driveengines than I'd ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion asconfirmation of my own.
"Tom, take a look at this mess," I said. "See if you can help us withit."
He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, "You need amagnifier for this. Wait till I see something." Then he went over toone of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. Hecame over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soonas he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly goodmagnifying glasses.
That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was onething, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kitand a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers outof needles.
After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returnedand made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe waswarmed a little, he said:
"There's a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn't too hard toget up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a bigbowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom,once. The wind isn't so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom orwhatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place tomake a camp, if it wasn't so far from the boat."
"How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?" Joeasked, going on to explain what he had in mind.
"Why, easy. I don't think it would be nearly as hard as the placeRamon found."
"Neither do I," the mate agreed. "Climbing up that waterfall down thestream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping oneover beside the one above." He began zipping up his parka. "Let's getthe cutter and the lifters and go up now."
"Wait till I warm up a little, and I'll go with you," Abe said.
Then he came over to where Cesario and Tom and I were working, to seewhat we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midgetscrewdrivers and things Tom was making.
"I'll take that back, Ramon," he said. "I can do a lot more good righthere. Have you taken any of the radio navigational equipment apart,yet?" he asked us.
We hadn't. We didn't know anything about it.
"Well, I think we can get some stuff out of the astrocompass that canbe used. Let me in here, will you?"
I got up. "You take over for me," I said. "I'll go on thewood-chopping detail."
Tom wanted to go, too; Abe told him to keep on with his toolmaking.Piet Dumont said he'd guide us, and Glenn Murell said he'd go along.There was some swapping around of clothes and we gathered up the twolifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream.
The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but notquite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to helpus. The worst difficulty, and the worst danger, was from the wind.
Once we were at the top, though, it wasn't so bad. We went a couple ofhundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto theold lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights wouldshine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branchesgrowing out of the tops.
We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hangingbranches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. Wetook turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around tokeep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, evenafter the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of itwith both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to woodas it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off inslabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we couldget it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that intoburnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn't bother with theslashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuffhere that the branches weren't worth taking in.
We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before wedecided to knock off. We didn't realize until then how tired and coldwe were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heavedit over at the side as fast as the others got the trees down and cutup. If we only had another cutter and a couple more lifters, Ithought. If we only had an airworthy boat....
When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn't crippled and had enoughclothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we gota fire started--there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to getthe dense hardwood burning--and then we began building a hut againstthe boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abeand Cesario knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and theman with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By thistime, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. Wemade snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke inuse pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track ofhow long we worked, but finally we had a place we could all get into,with a fireplace, and it was as warm and comfortable as the inside ofthe boat.
We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too coldto work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woodsand the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began toclear and we could see stars. That didn't make us happy at all. Aslong as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heatthat had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now itwas all radiating away into space.
The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In a way, that was ahelp; we could slide wood dow
n over it, and some of the billets wouldslide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was gettingto us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting--Cesario, and oldPiet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest andcould wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as longas any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut,we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff inno time at all.
Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job asever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundredmiles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think itwas Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn't have anything to do withthe day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, _m'aidez_,meaning "help me." I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn'ttoo optimistic about him.
Cesario and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads offirewood--we weren't bothering, now, with anything but the hard andslow-burning cores--and had just gotten two of them hooked onto thelifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn't acloud in the sky, and two of Fenris's three moons were makingeverything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozenwaterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful.
I turned to Cesario. "See what all you'll miss, if you take your nextreincarnation off Fenris," I said. "This, and the long sunsets andsunrises, and--"
Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7-mmmachine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, andthen another, and another and another.
Four-Day Planet Page 12
