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

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

       Table of Contents

      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