by John Rickham
“Thou art black but comely,” I told her, and it was the truth, that dust, with sweat to give it body, covered us all with an oily gleam, but I doubt if it flattered Carson and myself as much as it did her. Lowloo let out a yowl of dismay when she saw us, but that was quickly taken care of by our smiles and reassurances. Carson warned her off.
“Don’t touch, my dear. Lord knows, we worked hard enough to get it on. You stay here until we get back.” He led us to the entrance, and that was when the idea came to me. I called Lowloo close and whispered to her what I wanted her to do. After a moment or two she nodded understandingly and went scurrying away, leaving me to hurry and catch up with the other two.
“Of course it’s a gamble,” Carson was saying as I caught up with them. “But the whole shooting match is a gamble, isn’t it. I hope we won’t have to take too many chances, but it’s worth some risk, just to know the other man’s game. Against Zeb, we need all the data we can get. Now then”.
—as we assembled within sight of the outside blow—”no complicated rules, just use your heads. Don’t, whatever you do, smile! If you have to stare hard, put your hand up in front of your eyes. In any doubt, keep dead still. That’s about it. Watch for my signals. Ready? Let’s go!”
It must be recorded here that those two had my heart in my mouth a score of times within the first twenty minutes, by which time I was too far gone to react at all. For just one thing, when a man says “signals” to me, I have in mind that he will stop, turn, and wave—and then wait until he has my answering wave before going on. Not those two. She was following him, and I had to take most of my cues secondhand from her as a consequence. I soon discovered that it was her blithe assumption that when I saw her freeze as still as an ebony carving, I would automatically do the same. A sketchy and grudging stab with one finger meant “going that way” and a cheese-paring scoop-motion with a palm meant “come on.” And never once did she look back to see if I was there, or had got the word. She just assumed I was paying attention all the tune. And I wish to point out that I literally couldn’t see her about half the time. Black on jet black, glitter against sheen. After a while my eyes learned to differentiate between angular lines and her outrageous curves, but, to this day, I don’t know why they didn’t lose me completely scores of times.
As it happened, Zeb’s unwholesome crew was far too preoccupied with grief to be paying much attention, and we were able to gain a vantage point far enough from the spout so as not to threaten our camouflage, close enough to each other to whisper, and above the spot they had selected to build something. We could even overhear part of their talk. The Oriental babble meant nothing to us, but we heard Hovac. Everyone heard Hovac. He had a voice to match his Herculean frame, no patience at all, and the temper of a gorilla with a toothache. He was obviously in charge, and, just as obviously, the rest hated his guts, but dared not challenge his overhearing manner.
“Looks like some quick-assembly dwelling-unit,” Carson murmured to us. as the unwilling men trudged back and forth bearing alloy spars and sheets of plastic board. “For Zeb, you can bet. And there’s a weakness. He won’t do anything for himself; he would lose face. So he has to rely on staff. But, as you see, he intends to be right on the spot to see that they work.”
My attention was drawn to Hovac, himself, at that moment. He came stalking from the yacht only slightly stooped under the burden of a self-contained air-conditioning unit that must have weighed in the neighborhood of three hundred pounds. The exhibition of sheer brute strength was not lost on the crew, either. And now, with his dwelling completed for him, Zeb himself came, pacing slowly over the gangplank and along the uneven rocks like some old-time prince. I felt distinct relief as he disappeared into his shelter, and Carson must have heard my sigh.
“He has presence, doesn’t he? Now you know why I would rather not meet him head on. But wait, this looks interesting!”
There was to be no rest for the gang. Now they came toiling into sight with more spars—but then I corrected myself as I saw that these were metal tubes, the kind construction men assemble against the front of a building when performing repair work. Sturdy metal, and massive clamps to bind the poles together. Carson hissed thoughtfully between his teeth as they laid out the poles in the form of a tick-tack-toe diagram and got busy locking them rigid.
“What do you make of that?” Fiona demanded, and he scowled.
“Obvious. And it might just work. Watch. They assemble the grid. They lash cables to it and they wait for the spout to pass, and then launch the grid across the hole and lash it down.”
They did exactly that. Two men ran to the far side of the hole and held cables ready to pull. Hovac made it obvious that the idea was his, and stood by this side, ready to shove. The spout came and went. With rough coordination there was pushing and shoving, and then the framework rested and was securely roped directly over the hole. Fiona’s hand gripped my arm.
“Will it work?” she asked Carson.
“We’ll have to wait and see.”
“They still have to put a man down,” I growled.
“If the frame holds, they can. In a real deep-sea suit!” It was a bad moment. Fiona was so on edge that she seized my hand and pressed it to her breast. Carson stared like some black tribal demon. Then the water came again, bellowing and raving, smashing into the bore and leaping savagely high into the air, obscuring the scene. I thought I heard screams over the din. The spout hung like a monstrous mushroom, then fell, the spray rattling like hail. And we stared.
The frame was gone as if it had never been, leaving just one buckled and forlorn tube dangling from the cable that had been held by one man on our side. He, like the two on the far side, had been prudent enough to wrap three turns of cable around a handy rock. The fourth man had been less wise and was now dead. Definitely. No body could be crushed that way and live.
“Scratch one!” Carson sighed. “Poor devil. Hovac underestimated that waterspout, just as I did, but Zeb won’t like it. And they won’t try that again. Come on, we’ve seen enough.”
We went back just as fast and as carefully, although it was a safe bet the discomfited opposition was too busy to watch for anything. Back in our living room, Carson got busy working out an alarm system for the entrance.
“Should have done this sooner,” he declared. “It won’t take long. You two better start cuffing. We can work out shifts later.”
“Toss you for it!” Fiona smiled dazzlingly.
“What with?” I retorted. “Anyway, you go first.”
“And what will you be doing?”
“Resting my flab. I need it.”
She chuckled. “All in black you don’t look flabby at all. Sort of sinister. I like it. Go on. Relieve me in about an hour, right?”
As soon as she was gone, I signaled to Lowloo, who hissed and nodded excitedly as she came up to me. She had obviously found what I had asked for.
“It is this way.” She pointed past the cutting, toward the opposite approach from our room. “Not far. I will wait.”
I got the paint pot, and an empty container—one of many that Carson had laid in, with foresight—that would hold a quart. She led me a straight way, not nearly as twisted as the track we had taken to the top. I carefully marked Vee-arrows on the roof at regular intervals, until I could smell the water ahead. Before that moment I had not realized that water had a smell at all. It was in a small side gallery, a waist-thick rustling column that slid down an almost vertical gully from a hole in the roof, ran deeply for about six or seven feet, and then overflowed a ledge and plunged away into darkness once more. And it was cold! I fell into it, wallowed in it, caught my breath and ducked in it, and only then did I realize just how hot, and sticky and filthy I had been. It was a sheer delight to lean against the wall under the stunning flow of that water and feel really clean.
Then, looking up, I saw the fugitive glow of daylight, and it dawned on me that this must be that same stream we had passed on our way down, on the
surface. The light looked close, so I tried, holding my breath, to struggle up the gully against the rushing water, but there was nothing I could grip on, so I had to abandon the idea. In any case, I couldn’t bear to hoard the good news any longer, so I filled the container and hurried back, Lowloo frisking around me as happy as I was. I knew when I was near the cutting by the diffused glow of light. In another moment I was close enough to hear the fizzle of the cuffing beam, and the pop as it cut off. As I turned the corner, I heard a familiar crack and a grunt of effort.
“Ho there, my Bonny Black Bess,” I said, coming up behind her back. “Fancy a drink of something?”
“About time!” she cried, clearing her throat. “I had begun to think you had left the country. Lord, what I couldn’t do to a long cool soda, now!”
“Your wish is my command, oh Queen of the Night. How about this?” and I put the container up against her naked back.
“Hey!” she shrieked, cringing away and turning. She saw me for the first time. Her eyes opened wide and furious blue. “You!” She choked. “You—you dog! How come you’re so lovely and clean? And me all thick—oh! Where did you get like that?” Without waiting for an answer she raised her voice in a yell. “Neil! Neil! Come and see.—”
“I heard,” he said, from my shoulder. “And I see. Where’d you find it?”
“Such a fuss about a drop of ordinary plain cold water,” I said, and handed the container to her again. She grabbed and tilted it greedily at her mouth. “Not me,” I told him. “Lowloo found it. I asked her if she could find water, and she did. It’s not far. If you allow for bathing time, about an hour for the round trip.”
“Bathing time,” he said, very quietly, and shook himself. “By God, Alan, you’ve helped us a lot with this. And as for you, my dear, I’m too dirty to hug you. Bless you. I wish there was some way to repay you. If ever there is, just you say. Hey, Fiona, damn it. leave some!”
Within ten minutes we were all on our way back to the fall. I carried one of our heavy lines, Fiona had two quart containers, and Carson was carrying a spare heavy-duty power-pack that be had stowed in a plastic specimen bag for ease of carrying. As always, he didn’t explain why. It was a delight just to watch them plunge in, all black and shiny, and see them emerge pink-bronze clean, shivering and radiant with relief. Then I showed Carson the sky-glow.
“We might make it,” I suggested, “if you stand on my shoulders and then Fiona goes up on both of us.”
“Taking the line with me,” she agreed. “But why bother?”
“Lots of reasons,” Carson declared. “Good thinking, Alan. A spell of fresh air and daylight is going to be worth much, to us. And it will give us a back door, an escape hatch, should we ever need it. And there’s a third point that I’ll confirm in a moment. But let’s get out first.”
I helped secure the line about Fiona’s waist. “I think I prefer you as a dark and shiny statue,” I told her, as I knotted the line.
“Then you are Out of luck, aren’t you?” she retorted. “I’d rather be clean and pale, thank you.”
It was no trick at all to get out. Once Carson was on my shoulders, with our backs to the slide, Fiona was up over the pair of us and away. In a matter of moments we felt the line come hard up, knew it was secure, and the rest of us followed her, Lowloo first, yelping and spluttering, then me—and the line made it simple—and then Carson. He hauled carefully until we saw him pull up the heavy-duty battery and lay it aside, removing it from the plastic bag. He stood, cautiously, looked around, and nodded to himself.
“Now,” he said, “we can work things out a bit. The light here is good enough to charge one of these, slowly. And we have three. So we have a drill. Like this. I cut until my pack is dead. I call my relief and he takes over with a fresh pack. I come here with the dead one, climb up, put it on charge, get the fresh one that has been here eight hours. I clean up, rest, fill up with water, and proceed back to the works, have a bite, and then sleep. And we all do the same. Follow?”
I pondered it and suggested a small refinement. “Eight hours rest is all we need. Why can’t the second man help the cutter by moving out the blocks? It will speed the work—and it will mean there’s always two of us awake.”
“Okay, we’ll do it that way. I’ll cut first, Fiona clears for me. And so on. First, though, we secure this end of the line where it can’t be seen. And we knot it every eighteen inches, to make climbing easier.”
We had just done that and dropped the line back into the water when Fiona came scrambling down from a spy-point; her face was grave.
“You’re a good guesser,” she said to Carson. “I’ve just been watching them uncrate and set up a deep-sea suit. A real armored job.”
He nodded, then set his jaw grimly. “That’s all right. What I’m scared of now is that Zeb will see the obvious thing that has been right under his nose all this time. That he already has a way of lowering a man down there. Come on, we haven’t that much time to spare, after all.”
We were almost back to the cutting again before I got a glimmer of what he was hinting at. “You’re thinking of those special ropes?” I asked.
“That’s right. He’s using the same type that we have, that thick fleecy stuff that is as tough as the devil. Remember, I told you we couldn’t even start to stress that stuff? And we didn’t. Everything else parted, but not the ropes. And as soon as Zeb notices that, he’ll have a man down there in that suit.”
“And the bars?”
“I can solve that one, so I have to assume that he can, too. It only needs intelligence.”
That’s possibly so, I thought, but it’s beyond mine. However, we had all we needed to worry about without dreaming up bogeymen. And, now that we were clean and refreshed, we got right at it. We made one small change in the original shift schedule. Fiona started the first cut, continuing where she had stopped when I surprised her with the water, and I carried rock-slabs for her. Carson had other plans in mind, and we found out what they were just as her pack began to fail. The warning was the sound of rapid popping explosions from the cut as the beam lost its intensity. She drew back, and I disconnected her pack, to hook on a fresh one. Carson came, ready to back me and explain.
“The booby trap at the entrance,” he said, “is now not just a buzzer tip-off. I hooked it into a circuit linked to our second beamer, and that is set up at the inside end of the straight run, about ten feet from the opening. It’s set for medium, and anyone who treads in our front gate gets knocked cold right away and triggers the alarm, which I moved closer to us here. It is just a precaution. I do not look forward to getting caught at the far end of a thirty foot trap. The third beamer stays by the buzzer at all times. All right? Off you go then, Fiona, and get cleaned up.”
And so, we worked. Slaved would be a better word, although we didn’t think of it like that at the time. Fiona had added seven feet to the first break, making eight. For my cut, going as hard as I could and with Carson cracking and hauling away as fast as I could cut, we added another eight, and that put us ahead of our schedule. But by the time it was his turn again, we knew that we were not going to be able to keep up that infernal pace. For one thing, the deeper we went, the further we had to haul back the slabs. And the heat grew steadily worse because we were in a narrow dead end. We dripped as we moved. But worst of all was the dust. We never did solve that problem properly. Regular bathing and plentiful supplies of water helped a lot, but only to alleviate. We tried—Carson used up a lot of his rest period on it—making a mask with an air tube, but the thing was a nuisance to wear and got fogged within minutes. The best we could do, and we kept it, was to bind a wet tissue across our faces and breathe through that. It helped. But that dust flew, drifted, stuck and gritted, and grew on us.
Lowloo helped enormously, arranging the blocks neatly, after we dropped them. And she was always ready to run back and forth with precious mouthfuls of cool water for the cutting-man, forever sneezing at the dust but enduring it. She even learned
how to make very good coffee for us, and her command of English grew rapidly. But the one thing she liked best, and which we couldn’t grudge her because she had earned it, was to go along to the water-slide with whoever it was in turn to go for rest. Her sleek pelt must have made the dust even less pleasant for her than it was for us in our bare skins. Carson laid down the law on that rest-period very firmly.
“Let’s have no silly dodging over it. When it’s my turn, I intend to soak, and wallow and rest, and make the very most of it. And you two are to do the same. You need that spell, so take it.”
And we did. We sneezed and sweated, we cut and cracked and dragged, and ached, and the shaft grew. Not quite as fast as that first mad rush, but it grew. Fiona had taken it to eight feet. By the time she had dragged herself away from it a third time it was all of twenty-nine feet and right on target. Carson checked that every time he came on, just to make sure. It was fabulous progress, but it hurt me to see how she plodded, almost asleep from the choking dust, the heat, and the constant strain of handling that cutting beam with delicate precision. But then, I consoled myself, she would soon be fresh again, once the cool water and rest had done its work, and I pressed on with my turn at cutting, visualizing her, with Lowloo, taking her power-pack and water cans, and wallowing in the coolness and ease. It was the one thing we all looked forward to with fierce delight.
I continued my cut, spurred by the knowledge that we had only some eight or nine feet to go, possibly less. Carson was just as tense as I was. The heat was a dreadful thing now, with the two of us shoulder to shoulder for the most part, and the air thick with dust, sweat literally streaming off us. I think I was a little light-headed, only automatism keeping my hand moving steadily, enduring that fierce glare and the spouting sparks. And then, in my daze, I halted and knew something was amiss. I heard Lowloo crying out.
“Fiona, gone! Men come. Catch. Take!”
