Back Aa

Four-Day Planet

Close

<h2>13</h2> <h3>THE BEACON LIGHT</h3> 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 course 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." <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2