Terro-Human Future History (Complete SF Omnibus). H. Beam Piper

me. Blowing up a ship with sixteen men aboard must have seemed sort of extreme to him. Maybe that wasn't according to Terran business ethics. "Mightn't it have been a power unit?"

      "No. Power units don't blow, and if one did, it would vaporize the whole ship and a quarter of a cubic mile of water around her. No, that was old fashioned country-style chemical explosive. Cataclysmite, probably."

      "Ravick?" he asked, rather unnecessarily.

      "You know how well he can get along without you and Joe Kivelson, and here's a chance to get along without both of you together." Everybody in the boat was listening, so I continued: "How much do you know about this fellow Devis, who strained his back at the last moment?"

      "Engine room's where he could have planted something," Joe Kivelson said.

      "He was in there by himself for a while, the morning after the meeting," Abdullah Monnahan added.

      "And he disappeared between the meeting room and the elevator, during the fight," Tom mentioned. "And when he showed up, he hadn't been marked up any. I'd have thought he'd have been pretty badly beaten—unless they knew he was one of their own gang."

      "We're going to look Devis up when we get back," somebody said pleasantly.

      "If we get back," Ramón Llewellyn told him. "That's going to take some doing."

      "We have the boat," Hans Cronje said. "It's a little crowded, but we can make it back to Port Sandor."

      "I hope we can," Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Shall we take her up, Joe?"

      "Yes, see what it's like on top," the skipper replied.

      Going up, we passed a monster at about thirty fathoms. It stuck its neck out and started for us. Monnahan tilted the boat almost vertical and put on everything the engines had, lift and drive parallel. An instant later, we broke the surface and shot into the air.

      The wind hit the boat as though it had been a ping-pong ball, and it was several seconds, and bad seconds at that, before Monnahan regained even a semblance of control. There was considerable bad language, and several of the crew had bloody noses. Monnahan tried to get the boat turned into the wind. A circuit breaker popped, and red lights blazed all over the instrument panel. He eased off and let the wind take over, and for a while we were flying in front of it like a rifle bullet. Gradually, he nosed down and submerged.

      "Well, that's that." Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in the underwater calm again. "We'll have to stay under till the wind's over. Don't anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We'll have to conserve oxygen."

      "Isn't the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?" Murell asked.

      "Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen in here."

      "How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?" I asked.

      "About eight hours."

      It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. The wind wouldn't even begin to fall in less than twenty.

      "We can go south, to the coast of Hermann Reuch's Land," Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. "Let me figure something out."

      He dug out a slide rule and a pencil and pad and sat down with his back to the back of the pilot's seat, under the light. Everybody watched him in a silence which Joe Kivelson broke suddenly by bellowing:

      "Dumont! You light that pipe and I'll feed it to you!"

      Old Piet Dumont grabbed the pipe out of his mouth with one hand and pocketed his lighter with the other.

      "Gosh, Joe; I guess I just wasn't thinking..." he began.

      "Well, give me that pipe." Joe put it in the drawer under the charts. "Now you won't have it handy the next time you don't think."

      After a while, Abe Clifford looked up. "Ship's position I don't have exactly; somewhere around East 25 Longitude, South 20 Latitude. I can't work out our present position at all, except that we're somewhere around South 30 Latitude. The locator signal is almost exactly north-by-northeast of us. If we keep it dead astern, we'll come out in Sancerre Bay, on Hermann Reuch's Land. If we make that, we're all right. We'll be in the lee of the Hacksaw Mountains, and we can surface from time to time to change air, and as soon as the wind falls we can start for home."

      Then he and Abdullah and Joe went into a huddle, arguing about cruising speed submerged. The results weren't so heartening.

      "It looks like a ten-hour trip, submerged," Joe said. "That's two hours too long, and there's no way of getting more oxygen out of the gills than we're getting now. We'll just have to use less. Everybody lie down and breathe as shallowly as possible, and don't do anything to use energy. I'm going to get on the radio and see what I can raise."

      Big chance, I thought. These boat radios were only used for communicating with the ship while scouting; they had a strain-everything range of about three hundred miles. Hunter-ships don't crowd that close together when they're working. Still, there was a chance that somebody else might be sitting it out on the bottom within hearing. So Abe took the controls and kept the signal from the wreck of the Javelin dead astern, and Joe Kivelson began speaking into the radio:

      "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. Captain Kivelson, Javelin, calling. My ship was wrecked by an explosion; all hands now in scout boat, proceeding toward Sancerre Bay, on course south-by-southwest from the wreck. Locator signal is being broadcast from the Javelin. Other than that, we do not know our position. Calling all craft, calling Mayday."

      He stopped talking. The radio was silent except for an occasional frying-fat crackle of static. Then he began over again.

      I curled up, trying to keep my feet out of anybody's face and my face clear of anybody else's feet. Somebody began praying, and somebody else told him to belay it, he was wasting oxygen. I tried to go to sleep, which was the only practical thing to do. I must have succeeded. When I woke again, Joe Kivelson was saying, exasperatedly:

      "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, Mayday..."

      11.

       Darkness and Cold

       Table of Contents

      The next time I woke, Tom Kivelson was reciting the Mayday, Mayday incantation into the radio, and his father was asleep. The man who had been praying had started again, and nobody seemed to care whether he wasted oxygen or not. It was a Theosophist prayer to the Spirit Guides, and I remembered that Cesário Vieira was a Theosophist. Well, maybe there really were Spirit Guides. If there were, we'd all be finding out before long. I found that I didn't care one hoot which way, and I set that down to oxygen deficiency.

      Then Glenn Murell broke in on the monotone call for help and the prayer.

      "We're done for if we stay down here another hour," he said. "Any argument on that?"

      There wasn't any. Joe Kivelson opened his eyes and looked around.

      "We haven't raised anything at all on the radio," Murell went on. "That means nobody's within an hour of reaching us. Am I right?"

      "I guess that's about the size of it," Joe Kivelson conceded.

      "How close to land are we?"

      "The radar isn't getting anything but open water and schools of fish," Abe Clifford said. "For all I know, we could be inside Sancerre Bay now."

      "Well, then, why don't we surface?" Murell continued. "It's a thousand to one against us, but if we stay here our chances are precisely one hundred per cent negative."

      "What do you think?" Joe asked generally. "I think Mr. Murell's stated it correctly."

      "There is no death," Cesário said. "Death is only a change, and then more of life. I don't care what you do."

      "What have we got to lose?" somebody else asked. "We're broke and gambling on credit