The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  “Neither do I,” the mate agreed. “Climbing up that waterfall down the stream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping one over beside the one above.” He began zipping up his parka. “Let’s get the 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 Cesário and Tom and I were working, to see what we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midget screwdrivers and things Tom was making.

  “I’ll take that back, Ramón,” he said. “I can do a lot more good right here. 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 can be used. Let me in here, will you?”

  I got up. “You take over for me,” I said. “I’ll go on the wood-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 two lifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream.

  The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but not quite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to help us. 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 of hundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto the old lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights would shine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branches growing out of the tops.

  We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hanging branches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. We took turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around to keep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, even after the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of it with both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to wood as it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off in slabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we could get it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that into burnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn’t bother with the slashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuff here that the branches weren’t worth taking in.

  We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before we decided to knock off. We didn’t realize until then how tired and cold we were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heaved it over at the side as fast as the others got the trees down and cut up. If we only had another cutter and a couple more lifters, I thought. If we only had an airworthy boat.…

  When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn’t crippled and had enough clothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we got a fire started—there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to get the dense hardwood burning—and then we began building a hut against the boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abe and Cesário knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and the man with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By this time, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. We made snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke in use pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track of how 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 of the boat.

  We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too cold to work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woods and the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began to clear and we could see stars. That didn’t make us happy at all. As long as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heat that had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now it was all radiating away into space.

  The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In a way, that was a help; we could slide wood down over it, and some of the billets would slide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was getting to us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting—Cesário, and old Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and could wear bigger men’s parkas and overpants over our own. But as long as 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 in no time at all.

  Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job as ever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundred miles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think it was Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn’t have anything to do with the 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’t too optimistic about him.

  Cesário and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads of firewood—we weren’t bothering, now, with anything but the hard and slow-burning cores—and had just gotten two of them hooked onto the lifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and two of Fenris’s three moons were making everything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozen waterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful.

  I turned to Cesário. “See what all you’ll miss, if you take your next reincarnation off Fenris,” I said. “This, and the long sunsets and sunrises, and—”

  Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7-mm machine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, and then another, and another and another.

  13

  THE BEACON LIGHT

  We all said, “Shooting!” and, “The machine gun!” as though we had to tell each other what it was.

  “Something’s attacking them,” Cesário guessed.

  “Oh, there isn’t anything to attack them now,” Abe said. “All the critters are dug in for the winter. I’ll bet they’re just using it to chop wood with.”

  That could be; a few short bursts would knock off all the soft wood from one of those big billets and expose the hard core. Only why didn’t they use the cutter? It was at the boat now.

  “We better go see what it is,” Cesário insisted. “It might be trouble.”

  None of us was armed; we’d never thought we’d need weapons. There are quite a few Fenrisian land animals, all creepers or crawlers, that are dangerous, but they spend the extreme hot and cold periods in burrows, in almost cataleptic sleep. It occurred to me that something might have burrowed among the rocks near the camp and been roused by the heat of the fire.

  We hadn’t carried a floodlight with us—there was no need for one in the moonlight. Of the two at camp, one was pointed up the ravine toward us, and the other into the air. We began yelling as soon as we caught sight of them, not wanting to be dusted over lightly with 7-mm’s before anybody recognized us. As soon as the men at the camp heard us, the shooting stopped and they started shouting to us. Then we could distinguish words.

  “Come on in! We made contact!”

  We pushed into the hut, where everybody was crowded around the underhatch of the boat, which was now the side door. Abe shoved through, and I shoved in after him. Newsman’s conditioned reflex; get to where the story is. I even caught myself saying, “Press,” as I shoved past Abdullah Monnahan.

  “What happened?” I asked, as soon as I was inside. I saw Joe Kivelson getting up from the radio and making place for Abe. “Who did you contact?”

  “The Mahatma; Helldiver,” he said. “Signal’s faint, but plain; they’re trying to make a directional fix on us. There are about a dozen ships out looking for us: Helldiver, Pequod, Bulldog, Dirty Gertie…” He went on naming them.

  “How did they find out?” I wanted to know. “Somebody pick up our Mayday while we were cruising submerged?”

  Abe Clifford was swearing into the radio. “No, of cours
e not. We don’t know where in Nifflheim we are. All the instruments in the boat were smashed.”

  “Well, can’t you shoot the stars, Abe?” The voice—I thought it was Feinberg’s—was almost as inaudible as a cat’s sneeze.

  “Sure we can. If you’re in range of this makeshift set, the position we’d get would be practically the same as yours,” Abe told him. “Look, there’s a floodlight pointed straight up. Can you see that?”

  “In all this moonlight? We could be half a mile away and not see it.”

  “We’ve been firing with a 7-mm,” the navigator said.

  “I know; I heard it. On the radio. Have you got any rockets? Maybe if you shot one of them up we could see it.”

  “Hey, that’s an idea! Hans, have we another rocket with an explosive head?”

  Cronje said we had, and he and another man got it out and carried it from the boat. I repeated my question to Joe Kivelson.

  “No. Your Dad tried to call the Javelin by screen; that must have been after we abandoned ship. He didn’t get an answer, and put out a general call. Nip Spazoni was nearest, and he cruised around and picked up the locator signal and found the wreck, with the boat berth blown open and the boat gone. Then everybody started looking for us.”

  Feinberg was saying that he’d call the other ships and alert them. If the Helldiver was the only ship we could contact by radio, the odds were that if they couldn’t see the rocket from Feinberg’s ship, nobody else could. The same idea must have occurred to Abe Clifford.

  “You say you’re all along the coast. Are the other ships west or east of you?”

  “West, as far as I know.”

  “Then we must be way east of you. Where are you now?”

  “About five hundred miles east of Sancerre Bay.”

  That meant we must be at least a thousand miles east of the bay. I could see how that happened. Both times the boat had surfaced, it had gone straight up, lift and drive operating together. There is a constant wind away from the sunlight zone at high level, heated air that has been lifted, and there is a wind at a lower level out of the dark zone, coming in to replace it. We’d gotten completely above the latter and into the former.

  There was some yelling outside, and then I could hear Hans Cronje:

  “Rocket’s ready for vertical launching. Ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one; rocket off!”

  There was a whoosh outside. Clifford, at the radio, repeated: “Rocket off!” Then it banged, high overhead. “Did you see it? he asked.

  “Didn’t see a thing,” Feinberg told him.

  “Hey, I know what they would see!” Tom Kivelson burst out. “Say we go up and set the woods on fire?”

  “Hey, that’s an idea. Listen, Mahatma; we have a big forest of flowerpot trees up on a plateau above us. Say we set that on fire. Think you could see it?”

  “I don’t see why not, even in this moonlight. Wait a minute, till I call the other ships.”

  Tom was getting into warm outer garments. Cesário got out the arc torch, and he and Tom and I raced out through the hut and outdoors. We hastened up the path that had been tramped and dragged to the waterfall, got the lifters off the logs, and used them to help ourselves up over the rocks beside the waterfall.

  We hadn’t bothered doing anything with the slashings, except to get them out of our way, while we were working. Now we gathered them into piles among the trees, placing them to take advantage of what little wind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soon we had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer wood of the trunks. It actually began to get uncomfortably hot, although the temperature was now down around minus 90° Fahrenheit.

  Cesário was using the torch. After he got all the slashings on fire, he started setting fire to the trees themselves, going all around them and getting the soft outer wood burning. As soon as he had one tree lit, he would run on to another.

  “This guy’s a real pyromaniac,” Tom said to me, wiping his face on the sleeve of his father’s parka which he was wearing over his own.

  “Sure I am,” Cesário took time out to reply. “You know who I was about fifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome.” Theosophists never hesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they see it, a thing isn’t much good if it can’t stand being made fun of. “And look at the job I did on Moscow, a little later.”

  “Sure; I remember that. I was Napoleon then. What I’d have done to you if I’d caught you, too.”

  “Yes, and I know what he was in another reincarnation,” Tom added. “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow!”

  Whether or not Cesário really had had any past astral experience, he made a good job of firebugging on this forest. We waited around for a while, far enough back for the heat to be just comfortable and pleasant, until we were sure that it was burning well on both sides of the frozen stream. It even made the double moonlight dim, and it was sending up huge clouds of fire-reddened smoke, and where the fire didn’t light the smoke, it was black in the moonlight. There wouldn’t be any excuse for anybody not seeing that. Finally, we started back to camp.

  As soon as we got within earshot, we could hear the excitement. Everybody was jumping and yelling. “They see it! They see it!”

  The boat was full of voices, too, from the radio:

  “Pequod to Dirty Gertie, we see it, too, just off our port bow… Yes, Bulldog, we see your running lights; we’re right behind you… Slasher to Pequod: we can’t see you at all. Fire a flare, please…”

  I pushed in to the radio. “This is Walter Boyd, Times representative with the Javelin castaways,” I said. “Has anybody a portable audiovisual pickup that I can use to get some pictures in to my paper with?”

  That started general laughter among the operators on the ships that were coming in.

  “We have one, Walt,” Oscar Fujisawa’s voice told me. “I’m coming in ahead in the Pequod scout boat; I’ll bring it with me.”

  “Thanks, Oscar,” I said. Then I asked him: “Did you see Bish Ware before you left port?”

  “I should say I did!” Oscar told me. “You can thank Bish Ware that we’re out looking for you now. Tell you about it as soon as we get in.”

  14

  THE RESCUE

  The scout boat from the Pequod came in about thirty minutes later, from up the ravine where the forest fire was sending up flame and smoke. It passed over the boat and the hut beside it and the crowd of us outside, and I could see Oscar in the machine gunner’s seat aiming a portable audiovisual telecast camera. After he got a view of us, cheering and waving our arms, the boat came back and let down. We ran to it, all of us except the man with the broken leg and a couple who didn’t have enough clothes to leave the fire, and as the boat opened I could hear Oscar saying:

  “Now I am turning you over to Walter Boyd, the Times correspondent with the Javelin castaways.”

  He gave me the camera when he got out, followed by his gunner, and I got a view of them, and of the boat lifting and starting west to guide the ships in. Then I shut it off and said to him:

  “What’s this about Bish Ware? You said he was the one who started the search.”

  “That’s right,” Oscar said. “About thirty hours after you left port, he picked up some things that made him think the Javelin had been sabotaged. He went to your father, and he contacted me—Mohandas Feinberg and I still had our ships in port—and started calling the Javelin by screen. When he couldn’t get response, your father put out a general call to all hunter-ships. Nip Spazoni reported boarding the Javelin, and then went searching the area where he thought you’d been hunting, picked up your locator signal, and found the Javelin on the bottom with her bow blown out and the boat berth open and the boat gone. We all figured you’d head south with the boat, and that’s where we went to look.”

  “Well, Bish Ware; he was dead drunk, last I heard of him,” Joe Kivelson said.

  “Aah, just an act,” Oscar said. “That was to fool the
city cops, and anybody else who needed fooling. It worked so well that he was able to crash a party Steve Ravick was throwing at Hunters’ Hall, after the meeting. That was where he picked up some hints that Ravick had a spy in the Javelin crew. He spent the next twenty or so hours following that up, and heard about your man Devis straining his back. He found out what Devis did on the Javelin, and that gave him the idea that whatever the sabotage was, it would be something to the engines. What did happen, by the way?”

  A couple of us told him, interrupting one another. He nodded.

  “That was what Nip Spazoni thought when he looked at the ship. Well, after that he talked to your father and to me, and then your father began calling and we heard from Nip.”

  You could see that it absolutely hurt Joe Kivelson to have to owe his life to Bish Ware.

  “Well, it’s lucky anybody listened to him,” he grudged. “I wouldn’t have.”

  “No, I guess maybe you wouldn’t,” Oscar told him, not very cordially. “I think he did a mighty sharp piece of detective work, myself.”

  I nodded, and then, all of a sudden, another idea, under Bish Ware, Reformation of, hit me. Detective work; that was it. We could use a good private detective agency in Port Sandor. Maybe I could talk him into opening one. He could make a go of it. He had all kinds of contacts, he was handy with a gun, and if he recruited a couple of tough but honest citizens who were also handy with guns and built up a protective and investigative organization, it would fill a long-felt need and at the same time give him something beside Baldur honey-rum to take his mind off whatever he was drinking to keep from thinking about. If he only stayed sober half the time, that would be a fifty per cent success.

  Ramón Llewellyn was wanting to know whether anybody’d done anything about Al Devis.

  “We didn’t have time to bother with any Al Devises,” Oscar said. “As soon as Bish figured out what had happened aboard the Javelin, we knew you’d need help and need it fast. He’s keeping an eye on Al for us till we get back.”