“No leedle sticks, Fay,” the giant Swede Kerbeck had growled. “If we haf to eat somebody we yoost eat you.”
Kinross looked at Kerbeck now, sitting just to the left on the stern grating with one huge, bronzed arm draped over the useless tiller. He wore a white singlet and khaki pants and Kinross wondered if he was awake. There was no telling about Kruger just across from him either. The radioman had slept that way, with puffy, hairless hands clasped across the ample stomach under the white sweatshirt, for most of the four days. He had not joined in the restless moving about and talking of the others, stirring only to remoisten the handkerchief he kept on top of his almost hairless head.
“You won’t eat me!” Fay had squalled. “Nor draw lots, neither. Let’s have a volunteer, somebody that’s to blame for this fix.”
Fay had blamed Kerbeck because the boat was not provisioned. The Swede retorted angrily that he knew it had been so when they had left Mossamedes. Fay blamed Kinross because the launch engine was disabled. Kinross, skin crawling, pointed out mildly enough that the battery had been up and the diesel okay two days before the sinking. Then Fay turned on Kruger for failing to send out a distress signal. Kruger had insisted that the blast had cut him off from the radio shack and that if he had not started at once to swing out the launch possibly none of them would have survived.
Kinross looked forward now at Fay sleeping beside the engine. On the opposite side, also asleep, was Bo Bo, the huge Senegalese stoker, clad only in dungaree shorts. It had seemed to Kinross yesterday that Fay had some sort of understanding with the powerful Negro. Bo Bo had rumbled assent to Fay’s accusations and so had the three men in the forward compartment.
Kruger, surprisingly, had resolved the threat. Speaking without heat in his high-pitched, penetrating voice, he told them: touch one of us aft here and all three will fight. Kerbeck had nodded and unshipped the heavy brass tiller.
While they wavered, Kruger went over to the attack. “Single out only one man, why don’t you, Fay? Who’s had the most life already? Take the oldest.”
Silva, the wizened, popeyed Portygee in the bow, creaked an outraged protest. Beside him the thick-set Mexican Garcia laughed harshly.
“Okay, then who’s going to die soonest? Take the weakest,” said Kruger. “Take Whelan.”
The kid Whelan, also in the bow, found strength to whimper an agonized plea. Kinross, remembering yesterday, looked at the two men sprawled in the bow. He half thought the Mexican was looking back at him. His stocky, dungaree-clad body seemed braced against the pitch of the boat as it rode, the swells, unlike the flaccidity of the old Portygee.
It was Garcia who had said finally, “You lose, Fay. You’ll have to take your chance on drawing lots with the rest of us. I’ll line up with Kruger.”
The three men aft had voted against drawing lots but agreed to go along with the majority. Then Kruger found fault with every method suggested, pointing out how fraud could enter. The day wore out in wrangling. Kinross thought back to the curiously unstrained, liquid quality of Kruger’s light voice as contrasted with the harsh croaking of the others. He had seemed in better shape than the rest and somehow in control of things.
Just before sunset, when they had put it off until next day and while Silva was fingering his rosary and praying for rain, the kid Whelan had seen green fields off to port. He shouted his discovery, flailed his body across the gunwale and sank like a stone.
“There you go, Kruger!” Fay had husked bitterly. “Up to now that fat carcass of yours had one chance in eight.” Kinross remembered his own twinge of regret.
Kinross felt the rising sun sucking at his dry eyeballs and thirst flamed three-dimensionally through him, consuming sense and reason. He knew that today would be the day and that he wanted it so. He glanced forward again and the Mexican was really looking at him out of red-rimmed eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking, Kinross,” he called aft. His voice roused the others. They began sitting up.
* * * *
Little Fay led off, head bobbing and jerking, red eyes demanding agreement. “Draw lots,” he said. “No more palaver. Right now or none of us will see sunset.”
Kruger agreed. He clinked several shillings in his hand and passed them around to be looked at. Only one was a George V. Blindfold Bo Bo, the stupidest one, he proposed, and let him pick coins out of the bailing bucket one by one. Fay would sit back to back with him and as soon as Bo Bo had a coin up, but before anyone had seen it, Fay would call the name of the man who was to get it. Whoever got the beard would be the victim.
It was agreed. Silva asked for time to pray and Fay mocked at him. The little man perched on the engine housing, his back against Bo Bo, and looked around calculatingly. Kinross could feel the malice in his glance.
“Law of averages,” Kinross was thinking. “In the middle of the series. Number three or four. Nonsense, of course.”
Apparently Fay thought so too. When the Negro fumbled up the first coin and asked, “Who get this one?” Fay answered “I’ll take it.” It was a queen, and Kinross hated Fay.
The next one Fay awarded to Bo Bo and the giant black was safe. For the next, while Kinross held his breath, Fay named Kerbeck. Also safe. Each time a sigh went through the boat.
Then the fourth trial and Fay called out “Kinross.” The engineer blinked his dry eyes and strained to see the coin in the thick black fingers. He knew first from the relief on Silva’s face and then he saw it plainly himself. It was the beard.
No one would meet his eyes but Fay and Bo Bo. Kinross hardly knew what he felt. The thought came “an end of torment” and then “I’ll die clean.” But he still dully resented Fay’s nasty air of triumph.
Fay opened his clasp knife and slid the bailing bucket next to the engine. “Hold him across the engine housing, Bo Bo,” he ordered. “We can’t afford to lose any of the blood.”
“Damn you, Fay, I’m still alive,” Kinross said. His gaunt features worked painfully and his Adam’s apple twitched in a futile attempt at swallowing.
“Knock me in the head first, mates,” he pleaded. “You, Kerbeck, use the tiller.”
“Yah,” said the Swede, still not returning his glance. “Now yoost you wait a leedle, Fay.”
“All of you listen to me,” Kruger said. “I know a way we can get as much fresh water as we can drink, in just a few minutes, and nobody has to die.” His light voice was effortless, liquid, trickling the words into their startled ears.
* * * *
All hands looked at Kruger, suspicious, half hating him for his cool voice and lack of obvious suffering. Kinross felt a thrill of hope.
“I mean it,” Kruger said earnestly. “Cold, fresh water is all around us, waiting for us, if we only knew one little thing that we can’t quite remember. You felt it all day yesterday. You feel it now.”
They stared. Fay ran his thumb back and forth along the edge of the clasp knife. Then Garcia said angrily, “You’re nuts, Kruger. Your gyro’s tumbled.”
“No, Garcia,” Kruger said, “I was never saner. I knew this all the time, before the ship blew even, but I had to wait for the right moment. Sleep, not talk, not move, nothing to waste body water, so I could talk when the time came. Now it’s here. Now is the time. You feel it, don’t you? Listen to me now.” Kruger’s clear, light voice babbled like water running over stones. He stepped up on the stern grating and looked down at the six men frozen into a tableau around the engine. Kinross noted that his sparse white hair lay smooth and saw a hint of set muscles under the fat face.
“I’ll tell you a true story so you can understand easy,” Kruger continued. “Long time ago, long ago, in the Tibesti highlands of Africa, some soldiers were lost and dying of thirst, like us now. They went up a valley, a dry wash with bones on the ground, to two big rocks like pillars side by side. They did something there, and when they went between the two big rocks they were in a different world with green trees and running water. All of them lived and afterward some of them ca
me back.”
“I heard that story before, somewhere,” Kinross said.
Fay jerked toward him. “A lie, Kinross! You’re welshing! Kruger, it’s a stall!”
“I didn’t believe the story,” Kinross said mildly. “I don’t believe it now.”
“I do believe it,” Kruger said sharply. “I know it’s true. I’ve been there. I’ve looked into that world. We can do just what those soldiers did.”
“Bilge, Kruger!” Garcia growled. “How could there be such a world? How could you get in it?”
“I didn’t get in, Garcia. I could see and hear, but when I walked into it everything faded around me.”
“Then what good—”
“Wait. Let me finish. I lacked something we have here. I was alone, not half dead with thirst, and I couldn’t all the way believe what I saw and heard.”
“So what does—”
“Wait. Hear me out. Believe me, Garcia, all of you. There are seven of us here and no other humans in a thousand miles. Our need is more than we can stand. We can believe. We must believe or die. Trust me. I know.”
The Mexican scratched the black stubble along his heavy jaw. “Kruger, I think you’re crazy as Whelan,” he said slowly.
“Whelan wasn’t crazy,” Kruger said. “He was just a kid and couldn’t wait. He saw a green meadow. Believe me now, all of you, if we all had seen that meadow at the same time Whelan saw it we would be walking in it right this minute!”
“Yah, like Whelan now is walking,” Kerbeck put in.
“We killed Whelan, do you understand? We killed him because we couldn’t believe what he saw and so it wasn’t true.” The light, bubbling voice splashed with vehemence.
“I think I get you, Kruger,” Garcia said slowly.
“I don’t,” Kinross said, “unless you want us all to die in a mass hallucination.”
“I want us to live in a mass hallucination. We can. We must or die. Believe me. I know ‘this.”
“Then you mean go out in a happy dream, not knowing when the end comes?”
“Damn you, Kinross, you’ve got a little education. That’s why it’s so hard for you to understand. But let me tell you, this world, this Indian Ocean, is a hallucination, too. The whole human race has been a million years building it up, training itself to see and believe, making the world strong enough to stand any kind of shock. It’s like a dream we can’t wake up from. But believe me, Kinross, you can wake up from this nightmare. Trust me. I know the way.”
Kinross thought, “I’m a fool to argue. It’s a delay for me, in any case. But maybe . . . maybe . . .” Aloud he said, “What you say. . . Yes, I know the thought . . . but all anyone can do is talk about it. There’s no way to act on it.”
“The more word-juggling the less action, that’s why! But we can act, like the soldiers of Tibesti.”
“A myth. A romantic legend.”
“A true story. I’ve been there, seen, heard. I know. It was long ago, before the Romans, when the web of the world was not so closely woven as now. There were fewer men like you in the world then, Kinross.”
“Kruger,” Kerbeck broke in, “I hear that story one time myself. You been sure now, Kruger?”
“Yes, sure, sure, sure. Kerbeck, I know this.”
“I go along, Kruger,” the big Swede said firmly. Garcia said, “I’m trying, Kruger. Keep talking.”
The clear, light voice resumed its liquid cadence. “You, Kinross, you’re the obstacle. You’re the brain, the engineer with a slide rule on the log desk. You’re a symbol and you hold back the rest of us. You’ve got to believe or we’ll cut your throat and try with six men. I mean it, Kinross!”
“I want to believe, Kruger. Something in me knows better, but I can feel it slipping. Talk it up. Help me.”
“All right. You know all this already. You’re not learning something new but remembering something you were trained to forget. But listen. Reality cracks open sometimes. Indians on vision quest, saints in the Theban desert, martyrs in the flame. Always deprivation, pain long drawn out, like us here, like Whelan yesterday. But always the world heals itself, clanks back together, with the power of the people who will not see, will not believe, because they think they can’t believe. Like you helped to kill Whelan yesterday.
“You know something about electricity. Well, it’s like a field, strongest where the most people are. No miracles in cities. People hold the world together. They’re trained from the cradle up to hold it together. Our language is the skeleton of the world. The words we talk with are bricks and mortar to build a prison in which we turn cannibal and die of thirst. Kinross, do you follow me?”
“Yes, I follow you, but—”
“No buts. Listen. Here we are, 18 south 82 east, seven men in ten million square miles of emptiness. The reality field is weak here. It’s a thin spot in the world, Kinross, don’t you understand? We’re at the limit of endurance. We don’t care if the public world comes apart in a thousand places if only we can break out of it here, save our lives, drink cool, fresh water. . .”
Kinross felt a shiver of dread run over him. “Hold on,” he said. “I think I do care about the public world coming apart. . .”
“Hah! You begin to believe!” The clear, smooth voice fountained in triumph. “It soaks in, under the words and behind the thinking. It scares you. All right. Believe me now, Kinross. I’ve studied this for half my life. We will not harm the public world when we steal ourselves from it. We will leave a little opening, as in the Tibesti, but who will ever find it?”
The old Portygee waved his skinny arms and croaked. Then he found his voice and said, “I know the story of Tibesti, Kruger. My fathers have lived in Mogador for six hundred years. It is a Berber story and it is unholy.”
“But true, Silva,” Kruger said softly. “That’s all we care about. We all know it’s true.”
“You want a black miracle, Kruger. God will not let you do it. We will lose our souls.”
“We will take personal possession of our souls, Silva. That’s what I’ve been telling Kinross. God is spread pretty thin at 18 south 82 east.”
“No, no,” the old man wailed. “It is better we pray for a white miracle, a ship, rain to fall. . .”
“Whatever lets me live is a white miracle,” Garcia said explosively. “Kruger’s right, Silva. I been sabotaging every prayer you made the last four days just by being here. It’s the only way for us, Silva.”
“You hear, Kinross?” Kruger asked. “They believe. They’re ready. They can’t wait on you much longer.”
“I believe,” Kinross said, swallowing painfully, “but I have to know how. Okay, black magic, but what words, what thoughts, what acts?”
“No words. No thoughts. They are walls to break through. One only act. An unnameable, unthinkable act. I know what bothers you, Kinross. Listen now. I mean group hypnosis, a shared hallucination, something done every day somewhere in the world. But here there is a thin spot. Here there is no mass of people to keep the public world intact. Our hallucination will become the public world to us, with water and fruit and grass. We’ve been feeling it for days, all around us, waiting for us. . .”
The men around Kinross murmured and snuffled. An enormous excitement began to stir in him.
“I believe, Kruger. I feel it now. But how do you know what kind of world. . . ?”
“Damn it, Kinross, it’s not a preexistent world. It’s only there potentially. We’ll make it up as we go along, put in what we want ... a Fiddler’s Green.”
“Yah,” said Kerbeck. “Fiddler’s Green. I hear about that too. Hurry up, Kinross.”
“I’m ready,” Kinross said. “For sure, I’m ready.”
“All right,” Kruger said. “Now we cross over, to our own world and the fresh, cold water. All of you lie down, stretch out best way you can, like you wanted to rest.”
Kinross lay flat in the after compartment, beside Kerbeck. Kruger looked down at them with his moon face that now seemed hewn of granite. He s
wayed against the taffrail to the regular pitch and dip of the boat.
“Rest,” he said. “Don’t try, don’t strain, or you’ll miss it. You, Kinross, don’t try to watch yourself. Rest. Don’t think. Let your bellies sag and your fingers come apart. . .
“Your bodies are heavy, too heavy for you. You are sinking flat against the soft wood. You are letting go, sagging down. .
Kinross felt the languor and the heaviness. Kruger’s voice sounded more distant but still clear, liquid, never-stopping.
“. . . resting now. Pain is going. Fear is going . . . further away . . . happy . . . sure of things . . . you believe me because I know . . . you trust me because I know. .
Kinross felt a mouth twitch and it was his own. The inert, heavy body was somehow his own also. There was a singsong rise and fall, like the swells, in Kruger’s pattering, babbling voice.
Orbit 2 - Anthology Page 4
