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burst, and then another, and another and another.
Chapter Thirteen
THE BEACON LIGHT
WE ALL SAID. "Shooting!" and, "The machine gun!" as though we had to tell each
other what it was.
"Something's attacking them" Cesario 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
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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," Cesario 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."
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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. Cesario 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 9Cf Fahrenheit.
Cesario 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," Cesario 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."
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