Of Man and Manta Omnibus
Page 23
The others allowed themselves to be bullied away from the barrier, and Veg came up. Circe retreated a little, so that he had an entire segment of the tunnel to himself. He braced, brought back his arm, and slammed his fist sidewise into the panel beside the dial.
It was that simple. The metal gave. Opposite the dial a semicircular section swung out, spraying flecks of dirt into his face, and cold water gushed forth.
'Oops!' Aquilon exclaimed as she got soaked.
But it was only the token backlash of inanimate perversity. Veg had won the round and the way was open. He blinked his eyes clear and caught the panel. It rotated around a vertical column, the dial set in its center, leaving a vent about a foot wide on either side. Wires trailed from the backside into the body of the borer.
'I must admit you have your uses,' Cal said, coming up. 'Now this should slide out -'
The borer chamber was about eight feet long, with a bank of dials on the far wall. Beyond it, Cal explained, was the motor, and beyond that the drill itself - now projecting harmlessly into the water. Along the sides of the compartment were indentations for the caterpillar housings, making the available space quite narrow.
'We'll have to haul our supplies to this point, then ferry them through the lock,' Cal said. 'The outside man will have to wear a diving suit. According to soundings and the record of the photographic rocket, we're only two hundred feet the surface of the water, so it shouldn't be too difficult. Still, it might be wise to climb to the top and take a sighting, before we commit ourselves too far.'
'Climb?' Aquilon inquired from behind the manta. 'Don't you mean swim to the top?'
'Swimming would be risky until we know more about the local currents,' Cal explained. 'And the suits are weighted. We'll send up a balloon and climb the ladder that anchors it to the borer. If we spot land, we'll walk to it - across the bottom.'
Aquilon was silent, and Veg appreciated the reason. On Nacre, Cal had been near death, and the other two had assumed the leadership and organized the trek from the wreck of their vehicle back to the camp. Now Cal was healthy, and it was evident that he was the natural leader of this trio. It simply took some getting used to.
There was a winch in the borer, powered electrically with cartridge capacitors. They removed it and got organised on an assembly-line basis. Cal connected the line to objects in the proper sequence, Aquilon ran the winch from a location just below the borer, and Veg was outside man. The line was actually doubled, passing through a pulley at the base of the tunnel so that it was not necessary to reset it by hand after each haul. But because of the narrowness and curvature of the passage, they had decided to run only one load at a time; a break or jam would be awkward to fix otherwise.
The diving suit was rather like a space suit, but built to resist pressure at key points rather than to contain it. It was quite heavy. He got it on, then had to squeeze himself into an uncomfortable knot inside the borer and push closed the panel. It sealed into place as Aquilon worked the knot control. Then water began to flow in through a vent in the floor. It entered with some force, splashing against him and collecting in a puddle beneath, as though he were lying in a filling bathtub. As the water rose up around his faceplate he began to feel that claustrophobia he thought he didn't suffer from. He knew he couldn't drown in the sealed suit, but the suggestion was powerful. He couldn't move, he couldn't escape; he had to lie here and let the liquid claim him! One leak...
Once the chamber was full the effect vanished. It was the sight of the advancing water line that did it, he decided. Now he was floating and felt comfortable.
He tried the side port. At first it wouldn't open, and he realized that the pressure hadn't equalized yet. He tried again after a short wait, and it yielded readily. It swung out, a blister of metal, and he peered into the darkness beyond.
He activated the suit's helmet light and looked again. The beam struck through cloudy water and faded in the distance. Like foggy Nacre, he thought; and this must be what the manta's vision was like: just a tunnel of light in the opacity. A manta could not see anything that wasn't directly in front of its eye. But it certainly saw everything that was in front. Even sound waves...
He pried himself out of the borer, feeling like old-time toothpaste inching from the tube. The borer manufacturer had not had a man of his dimensions in mind!
At last he stood beside the borer. The suit seemed light now, and he was glad for the weights that kept him gently anchored. He knew that without that ballast he would be borne helplessly to the surface by the buoyancy of the air encasing him in the suit. And without that shield of air he would be pretty cold in this water, not to mention squashed and suffocated. He had to admit that things had been pretty well planned.
He looked about. Cat had been right about the position of the borer: its gleaming blades projected into the water, reflecting the beam of his helmet in a spray of light. How much diamond had gone to coat that massive screw?
Beyond the borer was the floor of the ocean. He was surprised to discover that it was not level here, but hilly; somehow he had visualized the depths as similar to the surface - flat with small waves. The borer projected from a steeply slanting face of rock. Had the slant been the other way, the machine would have had to grind a long way farther before emerging. He saw some small fish, but could not identify their type; certainly they were not like the ones he knew. All in all, the unfamiliar detail made him uneasy; he expected oddities on some far planet, but here in the water he had no proper emotional framework.
He was startled by a knocking from within the-borer. Three taps: their joint human-manta code for question. Aquilon wanted to know how he was doing.
He tapped back once, affirmatively, and pushed closed the port. He heard the click as it locked in place. The evacuation pump started up, and he saw the seaweedlike growths wave as the water was spouted out of the bottom aperture.-
In a few minutes bubbles emerged, the current stopped, and assorted rumblings emanated from the interior of the unit. Then there came a banging, not a signal; Aquilon was pounding on the panel, trying to open it.
In a sudden mental illumination he understood the problem: the air forced into the chamber to evacuate the sea water had to be under high pressure. Once the water was out, that pressure remained; it had nowhere to go. And the bulkhead to the tunnel was designed to open only when the pressures were equalized, in and out, to prevent leakage.
There should be a valve to release the surplus pressure within the chamber, once the water was out. Probably it had gotten plugged. He had pounded open the panel by sheer force, but Aquilon did not have his strength.
Here he was with both the muscle and the insight - where neither could be applied to the problem. How were they going to get the supplies through?
A large, sleek fish nosed up to him. Veg cast about for some weapon, but had none. Anyway, he had no idea whether this creature was dangerous. It must weigh more than he did - or would weigh more, out of the water. What would he do if it attacked?
It did not attack. It merely continued to snuff him and the borer as though curious. He wished he could identify it, in case it were a shark. But he didn't want to be on the defensive if it turned out to be some entirely innocuous or even friendly prowler.
There was a deeper thunk and under his hand the metal shook. The fist jerked back, alarmed. What had happened? He tried to pry open the port, but it was tight, as of course it would be. Whatever had happened inside - had happened. There was nothing he could do.
'What's your opinion, Sam?' he asked the fish. He doubted that any sound left his helmet, however.
Then bubbles shot up from the top pipe, and he knew that it was all right. The water cycle was starting over.
This was too much for Sam, however. The big fish coursed away into the obscurity of the surrounding ocean.
Before long the bubbles stopped. He tried the port again, and it opened. He aimed his light within. There was a cylinder, a roll of nylon-cord ladder, and a balle
d balloon. He took them out, wondering how Aquilon had gotten around the pressure problem.
He tied one end of the cord to the borer, looping it around just below the bubble chimney. He threaded the other end through a gross needle eye in the base of the balloon and knotted it tight. Finally he hooked the nozzle of the tank into the balloon and fastened it in place. He turned the tank's cock.
Helium gas whistled coldly into the balloon. The ball unrolled as though it were a Halloween toy and inflated into a yard-long tongue, then became a long gourd, then a watermelon. It began to lift the tank, hauling up on the nozzle.
Hastily Veg flung another loop of the ladder around the borer and clung to it. The balloon dragged the tank up to the limit of its play, twelve feet above the borer, and held it there.
Stupid! He had forgotten that the thing would rise as soon as it was inflated, and he had made no preparations. As though a ball of helium, light enough to lift a dirigible in air, would sit still under water...
Expansion leveled off when the balloon was about a yard in diameter. Veg climbed up the ladder, now taut, and tied off the sphere, letting the tank drift down. He watched the flow of bubbles from the borer's chimney go by within a foot of him. Then he descended to die floor and wrestled with the segment of ladder he had tied to the borer. It was too rigid to move.
Meanwhile the next cycle had been completed. He gave up on the ladder and opened the port.
A head poked out, followed by a body that was feminine even through the crude folds of the suit. Aquilon had joined him.
She glanced around, shining her headlight, entranced as he had been by the scene. Then she saw the tangled ladder.
She could have spoken to him by touching her helmet to his - or maybe even directly through the water, since this was not a vacuum between them - but did not, to his relief. His stupidity was obvious. He'd had no idea the pull would be so strong with such a small balloon.
Together they worked the ladder over the body of the borer, seeking to pass it off the end. Suddenly Aquilon stopped, pointing to the diamond-edged drill. Of course! Friction against that could sever the rope, or at least damage it and make it unsafe.
Aquilon tried another ploy. She picked up the slack length of the ladder between the first and second loops and began pushing it under the borer. Veg saw what she was doing and assisted. The idea was to carry the slack around the borer, so that the second loop would in effect be brought adjacent to the first, allowing all the intervening ladder to ascend to the surface. The cord was very fine, and there appeared to be well over two hundred feet of it - more than enough.
They bunched it up and shoved - and abruptly the whole length of it was rasping through, and the balloon was rising out of sight. They stood back and watched it. Veg appreciated how narrowly they had missed making another mistake: had a hand been caught when the rope let go-
The motion stopped, and there was slack at last in the main line. Quickly they re-anchored it so that the ladder was vertical and firm; then Veg began to climb. Belatedly he realized that he could have had a free ride up, had he clung to a rising rung. Now he had the easy but tedious job of mounting it step by step.
By step. He lost count of die rungs somewhere between sixty and eighty, not certain whether he had skipped seventy or repeated it. The water around him was featureless; even Sam
the fish would have been welcome company. Was he really ascending, or just working a treadmill through nothing?
At last he reached the top. The balloon floated amid a choppy sea, and white clouds decorated the blue sky spreading overhead.
He looked out over the waves, standing with his feet hooked into the top rung of the ladder and his arm about the bobbing balloon. He saw - more waves.
He craned his head about.
Behind him, perhaps within a mile, perhaps much less, was a mountain.
Veg smiled, let go the balloon, and drifted down toward the floor of the ocean, mission accomplished.
V - ORN
It was a strange world he ranged. The familiar palms and cycads were rare, their places taken by burgeoning flat-leaved, flowering trees and bushes. He knew these newer plants, but here they thrived in unprecedented profusion, dominating the landscape rather than occupying their occasional nooks, and that was hard to accept readily. His reflexes were wrong for this, his expectations constantly in error, and that upset him. The mighty firs still stood in thick forests - but these forests were smaller than they had been. Ferns were still common, but stunted; if their form was little changed from those of his twenty-million-year memory, this was small comfort.
Orn did not speculate on the meaning of these changes. He was concerned with what had been and what existed now, not with what it might portend. Every object he saw evoked its peculiar history, clear with the vision of countless generations of his observant forebears. Change was in fact uncomfortable for him - but he had been forced by his orphan status and the pressure of invincible events to adapt more readily than had his ancestors. Perhaps his very isolation had facilitated his survival, for had he been trained in the usual fashion by careful parents he might not have had the initiative to escape the island when that became necessary.
He was familiar with the mainland as it had existed many millions of years before, and was hungry for fresh information. But this normally would have meant slight changes in geography, flora and fauna, instead of the catastrophic alterations in all three he actually discovered. These flowering plants - never had anything leaped into prominence so explosively before.
Orn was hungry physically, too. His appetite was un-specialized, omnivorous. Leaves, fruits, mams, arths, occasional gulps of water, pebbles to aid digestion - whatever had food value could be his meal, provided it was not poisonous. But he lacked the imagination to search actively for specific meals. He ate whatever was available.
He scratched away the dried, mottled leaves beneath his feet. His two front toes had long sharp claws, while the rear toes that bore much of his weight were stubby and solid, the claws more like hoofs.
Yes - the little arths were there, just as they had been on the island. The land had changed; the soil had not. Some flying aves fed exclusively on the tasty arths, and so could he if he could only find enough. But these vanished even as he uncovered them. He required more substantial food for his travels. And he had to travel, for he knew that the lull in die volcanic activity was temporary.
Orn's beak was not adapted to snare the fast scrambling I creatures, but he scratched again and ran out the sticky tip of his tongue to spear several before they found cover. They were delicious as they passed into his crop - but such a meager repast only intensified his hunger.
He straightened up, casting about for prey that would satisfy him for many hours. Hunting was difficult in this unfamiliar territory. He listened.
From far above came the cry of one of his primitive cousins, a flying bird. Orn looked up and saw it swoop over the trees, searching out the flying arths. He flapped his wings experimentally, momentarily wishing he could do likewise. Many hundreds of lines rode the air now, more than ever before. But this had been impossible for his own line for so long that he had only the dimmest specific memories of flying. His wings were mainly for display and defense now; the weight of his large head, with its burden of memories, prevented him from even jumping high, let alone flying.
Another, gender sound came to him. It was the trickle of water over naked stone. A stream!
Orn found it Immediately. He stood at its brink and studied the narrow channels as the bright liquid coursed between the rocks, then plunged his beak into it and drank. Unlike his cousins, he was able to suck in water without lifting his head to swallow. But he did not need the voluminous quantities that poured through the little systems of the mams. They survived by tanking up sufficient liquid to last them for a reasonable period in spite of copious urination; he survived by being efficient. That was one reason his line was superior to theirs, apart from the factor of memory.
Something moved nearby. Orn swiveled his neck to fix one eye on it, and spied the disappearing tail of a good-sized snake. This line of reps had recently dispensed with legs and became slithering creatures. He had eaten a few on the island, but this one was fatter and longer. He pounced on it, pinning its head with one foot while his beak cut through the neck.
The raw segments of it were cool and juicy and delightful as they collected inside him, assuaging his hunger.
Highlands existed where he remembered swamps, and the drainage of the landscape had changed. The nights inland were cool, the days hot. Orn, in the days of travel away from the treacherous volcanoes, was finally able to set aside his expectations and accept what he found, and his emotional distress diminished.