Getting a ship's boat berthed inside the ship in the air is tricky
work under the best of conditions; the way the wind was blowing by
now, it would have been like trying to thread a needle inside a
concrete mixer. We submerged after the ship and went in underwater.
Then we had to wait in the boat until the ship rose above the surface
and emptied the water out of the boat berth. When that was done and
the boat berth was sealed again, the ship went down seventy fathoms
and came to rest on the bottom, and we unsealed the boat and got out.
There was still the job of packing the wax into skins, but that could
wait. Everybody was tired and dirty and hungry. We took turns washing
up, three at a time, in the little ship's latrine which, for some
reason going back to sailing-ship days on Terra, was called the
"head." Finally the whole sixteen of us gathered in the relatively
comfortable wardroom under the after gun turret.
Comfortable, that is, to the extent that everybody could find a place
to sit down, or could move about without tripping over somebody else.
There was a big pot of coffee, and everybody had a plate or bowl of
hot food. There's always plenty of hot food to hand on a hunter-ship;
no regular meal-times, and everybody eats, as he sleeps, when he has
time. This is the only time when a whole hunter crew gets together,
after a monster has been killed and cut up and the ship is resting on
the bottom and nobody has to stand watch.
Everybody was talking about the killing, of course, and the wax we had
in the hold, and counting the money they were going to get for it, at
the new eighty-centisol price.
"Well, I make it about fourteen tons," Ramón Llewellyn, who had been
checking the wax as it went into the hold, said. He figured mentally
for a moment, and added, "Call it twenty-two thousand sols." Then he
had to fall back on a pencil and paper to figure shares.
I was surprised to find that he was reckoning shares for both Murell
and myself.
"Hey, do we want to let them do that?" I whispered to Murell. "We just
came along for the ride."
"I don't want the money," he said. "These people need every cent they
can get."
So did I, for that matter, and I didn't have salary and expense
account from a big company on Terra. However, I hadn't come along in
the expectation of making anything out of it, and a newsman has to be
careful about the outside money he picks up. It wouldn't do any harm
in the present instance, but as a practice it can lead to all kinds of
things, like playing favorites, coloring news, killing stories that
shouldn't be killed. We do enough of that as it is, like playing down
the tread-snail business for Bish Ware and the spaceport people, and
never killing anybody except in a "local bar." It's hard to draw a
line on that sort of thing.
"We're just guests," I said. "We don't work here."
"The dickens you are," Joe Kivelson contradicted. "Maybe you came
aboard as guests, but you're both part of the crew now. I never saw a
prettier shot on a monster than Walt made--took that thing's head off
like a chicken on a chopping block--and he did a swell job of covering
for the cutting-up. And he couldn't have done that if Murell hadn't
handled the boat the way he did, and that was no easy job."
"Well, let's talk about that when we get to port," I said. "Are we
going right back, or are we going to try for another monster?"
"I don't know," Joe said. "We could stow the wax, if we didn't get too
much, but if we stay out, we'll have to wait out the wind and by then
it'll be pretty cold."
"The longer we stay out, the more the cruise'll cost," Abdullah
Monnahan, the engineer, said, "and the expenses'll cut into the
shares."
"Tell the truth, I'm sort of antsy to get back," Joe Kivelson said. "I
want to see what's going on in Port Sandor."
"So am I," Murell said. "I want to get some kind of office opened, and
get into business. What time will the _Cape Canaveral_ be getting in?
I want a big cargo, for the first time."
"Oh, not for four hundred hours, at the least," I said. "The
spaceships always try to miss the early-dark and early-daylight
storms. It's hard to get a big ship down in a high wind."
"That'll be plenty of time, I suppose," Murell said. "There's all that
wax you have stored, and what I can get out of the Co-operative stores
from crews that reclaim it. But I'm going to have a lot to do."
"Yes," I agreed. "Dodging bullets, for one."
"Oh, I don't expect any trouble," Murell said. "This fellow Ravick's
shot his round."
He was going to say something else, but before he could say it there
was a terrific roar forward. The whole ship bucked like a recoiling
gun, throwing everybody into a heap, and heeled over to starboard.
There were a lot of yells, particularly from those who had been
splashed with hot coffee, and somebody was shouting something about
the magazines.
"The magazines are aft, you dunderhead," Joe Kivelson told him,
shoving himself to his feet. "Stay put, everybody; I'll see what it
is."
He pulled open the door forward. An instant later, he had slammed it
shut and was dogging it fast.
"Hull must be ruptured forward; we're making water. It's spouting up
the hatch from the engine room like a geyser," he said. "Ramón, go see
what it's like in the boat berth. The rest of you, follow him, and
grab all the food and warm clothing you can. We're going to have to
abandon."
He stood by the doorway aft, shoving people through and keeping them
from jamming up, saying: "Take it easy, now; don't crowd. We'll all
get out." There wasn't any panic. A couple of men were in the doorway
of the little galley when I came past, handing out cases of food. As
nothing was coming out at the instant, I kept on, and on the way back
to the boat-berth hatch, I pulled down as many parkas and pairs of
overpants as I could carry, squeezing past Tom, who was collecting
fleece-lined hip boots. Each pair was buckled together at the tops; a
hunter always does that, even at home ashore.
Ramón had the hatch open, and had opened the top hatch of the boat,
below. I threw my double armload of clothing down through it and slid
down after, getting out of the way of the load of boots Tom dumped
ahead of him. Joe Kivelson came down last, carrying the ship's log and
some other stuff. A little water was trickling over the edge of the
hatch above.
"It's squirting up from below in a dozen places," he said, after he'd
sealed the boat. "The whole front of the ship must be blown out."
"Well, now we know what happened to Simon MacGregor's _Claymore_," I
said, more to myself than to anybody else.
Joe and Hans Cronje, the gunner, were getting a rocket out of the
locker, detaching the harpoon and fitting on an explosive warhead. He
stopped, while he and Cronje were loading it into the after launcher,
and nodded at me.
"That's what I think, too," he said. "Everybody grab onto something;
we're getting the door open."
I knew what was coming and started hugging a stanchion as though it
were a long-lost sweetheart, and Murell, who didn't but knew enough to
imitate those who did, hugged it from the other side. The rocket
whooshed out of the launcher and went off with a deafening bang
outside. For an instant, nothing happened, and I told Murell not to
let go. Then the lock burst in and the water, at seventy fathoms'
pressure, hit the boat. Abdullah had gotten the engines on and was
backing against it. After a little, the pressure equalized and we went
out the broken lock stern first.
We circled and passed over the _Javelin_, and then came back. She was
lying in the ooze, a quarter over on her side, and her whole bow was
blown out to port. Joe Kivelson got the square box he had brought down
from the ship along with the log, fussed a little with it, and then
launched it out the disposal port. It was a radio locator. Sometimes a
lucky ship will get more wax than the holds' capacity; they pack it in
skins and anchor it on the bottom, and drop one of those gadgets with
it. It would keep on sending a directional signal and the name of the
ship for a couple of years.
"Do you really think it was sabotage?" Murell was asking 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