We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back,
I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off the
engine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at the
ruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, not
just relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was even
more crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsium
shielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piled
in the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at the
converters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in a
hopeless mess.
There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesário Vieira had
found a small portable radio that wasn't in too bad condition, and had
it apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work of
anybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he was
doing. It wasn't much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolute
limit of its range, at least for sending.
"Is this all we have?" I asked, looking at it. It was the same type as
the one I carried on the job, camouflaged in a camera case, except
that it wouldn't record.
"There's the regular boat radio, but it's smashed up pretty badly. I
was thinking we could do something about cannibalizing one radio out
of parts from both of them."
We use a lot of radio equipment on the _Times_, and I do a good bit of
work on it. I started taking the big set apart and then remembered the
receiver for the locator and got at that, too. The trouble was that
most of the stuff in all the sets had been miniaturized to a point
where watchmaker's tools would have been pretty large for working on
them, and all we had was a general-repair kit that was just about fine
enough for gunsmithing.
While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramón Llewellyn was
telling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. Joe
Kivelson shook his head over it.
"That's too far from the boat. We can't trudge back and forth to work
on the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up with
the lifters, and I think that's a good idea about using slabs of the
soft wood to build a hut. But let's build the hut right here."
"Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?" the mate
asked.
"Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream.
There may be something better up there."
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
"I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job.
We need parts, and we haven't anything to make them out of or with."
That was about what I'd thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-drive
engines than I'd ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion as
confirmation of my own.
"Tom, take a look at this mess," I said. "See if you can help us with
it."
He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, "You need a
magnifier for this. Wait till I see something." Then he went over to
one of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. He
came over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soon
as he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly good
magnifying glasses.
That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was one
thing, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kit
and a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers out
of needles.
After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returned
and made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe was
warmed a little, he said:
"There's a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn't too hard to
get up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a big
bowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom,
once. The wind isn't so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom or
whatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place to
make a camp, if it wasn't so far from the boat."
"How hard would it be to cut wood up there and bring it down?" Joe
asked, going on to explain what he had in mind.
"Why, easy. I don't think it would be nearly as hard as the place
Ramón found."
"Neither do I," the mate agreed. "Climbing up that waterfall down the
stream with a half tree trunk would be a lot harder than dropping one
over beside the one above." He began zipping up his parka. "Let's get
the cutter and the lifters and go up now."
"Wait till I warm up a little, and I'll go with you," Abe said.
Then he came over to where Cesário and Tom and I were working, to see
what we were doing. He chucked appreciatively at the midget
screwdrivers and things Tom was making.
"I'll take that back, Ramón," he said. "I can do a lot more good right
here. Have you taken any of the radio navigational equipment apart,
yet?" he asked us.
We hadn't. We didn't know anything about it.
"Well, I think we can get some stuff out of the astrocompass that can
be used. Let me in here, will you?"
I got up. "You take over for me," I said. "I'll go on the
wood-chopping detail."
Tom wanted to go, too; Abe told him to keep on with his toolmaking.
Piet Dumont said he'd guide us, and Glenn Murell said he'd go along.
There was some swapping around of clothes and we gathered up the two
lifters and the sonocutter and a floodlight and started upstream.
The waterfall above the boat was higher than the one below, but not
quite so hard to climb, especially as we had the two lifters to help
us. The worst difficulty, and the worst danger, was from the wind.
Once we were at the top, though, it wasn't so bad. We went a couple of
hundred yards through a narrow gorge, and then we came out onto the
old lake bottom Abe had spoken about. As far as our lights would
shine in the snow, we could see stubby trees with snaky branches
growing out of the tops.
We just started on the first one we came to, slicing the down-hanging
branches away to get at the trunk and then going to work on that. We
took turns using the sonocutter, and the rest of us stamped around to
keep warm. The first trunk must have weighed a ton and a half, even
after the branches were all off; we could barely lift one end of it
with both lifters. The spongy stuff, which changed from bark to wood
as it went in to the middle, was two feet thick. We cut that off in
slabs, to use for building the hut. The hardwood core, once we could
get it lit, would make a fine hot fire. We could cut that into
burnable pieces after we got it to camp. We didn't bother with the
slashings; just threw them out of the way. There was so much big stuff
here that the branches weren't worth taking in.
We had eight trees down and cut into slabs and billets before we
decided to knock off. We didn't realize until then how tired and cold
we were. A couple of us had taken the wood to the waterfall and heaved
it over at the side as fast as the others got the trees down and cut
up. If we only had another cutter and a couple more lifters, I
thought. If we only had an airworthy boat....
When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn't crippled and had enough
clothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we got
a fire started--there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to get
the dense hardwood burning--and then we began building a hut against
the boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abe
and Cesário knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and the
man with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By this
time, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. We
made snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke in
use pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track of
how long we worked, but finally we had a place we could all get into,
with a fireplace, and it was as warm and comfortable as the inside of
the boat.
We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too cold
to work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woods
and the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began to
clear and we could see stars. That didn't make us happy at all. As
long as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heat
that had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now it
was all radiating away into space.
The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In a way, that was a
help; we could slide wood down over it, and some of the billets would
slide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was getting
to us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting--Cesário, and old
Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and
could wear bigger men's parkas and overpants over our own. But as long
as any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut,
we didn't dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we'd all freeze stiff in
no time at all.
Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job as
ever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundred
miles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think it
was Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn't have anything to do with
the day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, _m'aidez_,
meaning "help me." I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn't
too optimistic about him.
Cesário and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads of
firewood--we weren't bothering, now, with anything but the hard and
slow-burning cores--and had just gotten two of them hooked onto the
lifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn't a
cloud in the sky, and two of Fenris's three moons were making
everything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozen
waterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful.
I turned to Cesário. "See what all you'll miss, if you take your next
reincarnation off Fenris," I said. "This, and the long sunsets and
sunrises, and--"
Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7-mm
machine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, and
then another, and another and another.
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