Four-Day Planet by H. Beam Piper
11
DARKNESS AND COLD
The next time I woke, Tom Kivelson was reciting the Mayday, Maydayincantation into the radio, and his father was asleep. The man who hadbeen praying had started again, and nobody seemed to care whether hewasted oxygen or not. It was a Theosophist prayer to the SpiritGuides, and I remembered that Cesario Vieira was a Theosophist. Well,maybe there really were Spirit Guides. If there were, we'd all befinding out before long. I found that I didn't care one hoot whichway, and I set that down to oxygen deficiency.
Then Glenn Murell broke in on the monotone call for help and theprayer.
"We're done for if we stay down here another hour," he said. "Anyargument on that?"
There wasn't any. Joe Kivelson opened his eyes and looked around.
"We haven't raised anything at all on the radio," Murell went on."That means nobody's within an hour of reaching us. Am I right?"
"I guess that's about the size of it," Joe Kivelson conceded.
"How close to land are we?"
"The radar isn't getting anything but open water and schools offish," Abe Clifford said. "For all I know, we could be inside SancerreBay now."
"Well, then, why don't we surface?" Murell continued. "It's a thousandto one against us, but if we stay here our chances are precisely onehundred per cent negative."
"What do you think?" Joe asked generally. "I think Mr. Murell's statedit correctly."
"There is no death," Cesario said. "Death is only a change, and thenmore of life. I don't care what you do."
"What have we got to lose?" somebody else asked. "We're broke andgambling on credit now."
"All right; we surface," the skipper said. "Everybody grab ontosomething. We'll take the Nifflheim of a slamming around as soon aswe're out of the water."
We woke up everybody who was sleeping, except the three men who hadcompletely lost consciousness. Those we wrapped up in blankets andtarpaulins, like mummies, and lashed them down. We gathered everythingthat was loose and made it fast, and checked the fastenings ofeverything else. Then Abdullah Monnahan pointed the nose of the boatstraight up and gave her everything the engines could put out. Just aswe were starting upward, I heard Cesario saying:
"If anybody wants to see me in the next reincarnation, I can tell youone thing; I won't reincarnate again on Fenris!"
The headlights only penetrated fifty or sixty feet ahead of us. Icould see slashers and clawbeaks and funnelmouths and gulpers andthings like that getting out of our way in a hurry. Then we were outof the water and shooting straight up in the air.
It was the other time all over again, doubled in spades, only thistime Abdullah didn't try to fight it; he just kept the boat rising.Then it went end-over-end, again and again. I think most of us blackedout; I'm sure I did, for a while. Finally, more by good luck than goodmanagement, he got us turned around with the wind behind us. Thatlasted for a while, and then we started keyholing again. I could seethe instrument panel from where I'd lashed myself fast; it was goingcompletely bughouse. Once, out the window in front, I could see jaggedmountains ahead. I just shut my eyes and waited for the Spirit Guidesto come and pick up the pieces.
When they weren't along, after a few seconds that seemed like half anhour, I opened my eyes again. There were more mountains ahead, andmountains to the right. This'll do it, I thought, and I wondered howlong it would take Dad to find out what had happened to us. Cesariohad started praying again, and so had Abdullah Monnahan, who had justremembered that he had been brought up a Moslem. I hoped he wasn'ttrying to pray in the direction of Mecca, even allowing that he knewwhich way Mecca was from Fenris generally. That made me laugh, andthen I thought, This is a fine time to be laughing at anything. Then Irealized that things were so bad that anything more that happened wasfunny.
I was still laughing when I discovered that the boat had slowed to acrawl and we were backing in between two high cliffs. EvidentlyAbdullah, who had now stopped praying, had gotten enough control ofthe boat to keep her into the wind and was keeping enough speedforward to yield to it gradually. That would be all right, I thought,if the force of the wind stayed constant, and as soon as I thought ofthat, it happened. We got into a relative calm, the boat went forwardagain, and then was tossed up and spun around. Then I saw a mountainslope directly behind us, out the rear window.
A moment later, I saw rocks and boulders sticking out of it inapparent defiance of gravitation, and then I realized that it waslevel ground and we were coming down at it backward. That lasted a fewseconds, and then we hit stern-on, bounced and hit again. I wasconscious up to the third time we hit.
The next thing I knew, I was hanging from my lashings from the side ofthe boat, which had become the top, and the headlights and the lightson the control panel were out, and Joe Kivelson was holding aflashlight while Abe Clifford and Glenn Murell were trying to get meuntied and lower me. I also noticed that the air was fresh, and verycold.
"Hey, we're down!" I said, as though I were telling anybody anythingthey didn't know. "How many are still alive?"
"As far as I know, all of us," Joe said. "I think I have a brokenarm." I noticed, then, that he was holding his left arm stiffly at hisside. Murell had a big gash on top of his head, and he was moppingblood from his face with his sleeve while he worked.
When they got me down, I looked around. Somebody else was playing aflashlight around at the stern, which was completely smashed. It wasa miracle the rocket locker hadn't blown up, but the main miracle wasthat all, or even any, of us were still alive.
We found a couple of lights that could be put on, and we got all of uspicked up and the unconscious revived. One man, Dominic Silverstein,had a broken leg. Joe Kivelson's arm was, as he suspected, broken,another man had a fractured wrist, and Abdullah Monnahan thought acouple of ribs were broken. The rest of us were in one piece, but allof us were cut and bruised. I felt sore all over. We also found anuclear-electric heater that would work, and got it on. Tom and Irigged some tarpaulins to screen off the ruptured stern and keep outthe worst of the cold wind. After they got through setting andsplinting the broken bones and taping up Abdullah's ribs, Cesario andMurell got some water out of one of the butts and started boiling itfor coffee. I noticed that Piet Dumont had recovered his pipe and wassmoking it, and Joe Kivelson had his lit.
"Well, where are we?" somebody was asking Abe Clifford.
The navigator shook his head. "The radio's smashed, so's the receiverfor the locator, and so's the radio navigational equipment. I canstate positively, however, that we are on the north coast of HermannReuch's Land."
Everybody laughed at that except Murell. I had to explain to him thatHermann Reuch's Land was the antarctic continent of Fenris, and hasn'tany other coast.
"I'd say we're a good deal west of Sancerre Bay," Cesario Vieirahazarded. "We can't be east of it, the way we got blown west. I thinkwe must be at least five hundred miles east of it."
"Don't fool yourself, Cesario," Joe Kivelson told him. "We could havegotten into a turbulent updraft and been carried to the upper,eastward winds. The altimeter was trying to keep up with the boat andjust couldn't, half the time. We don't know where we went. I'll takeAbe's estimate and let it go at that."
"Well, we're up some kind of a fjord," Tom said. "I think it brancheslike a Y, and we're up the left branch, but I won't make a point ofthat."
"I can't find anything like that on this map," Abe Clifford said,after a while.
Joe Kivelson swore. "You ought to know better than that, Abe; you knowhow thoroughly this coast hasn't been mapped."
"How much good will it do us to know where we are, right now?" Iasked. "If the radio's smashed, we can't give anybody our position."
"We might be able to fix up the engines and get the boat in the airagain, after the wind drops." Monnahan said. "I'll take a look at themand see how badly they've been banged up."
"With the whole stern open?" Hans Cronje asked. "We'd freeze stifferthan a gun barrel before we went a hundred miles."
"T
Joe Kivelson looked at me for a moment. "That would work," he said."How soon can you get started on the engines, Abdullah?"
"Right away. I'll need somebody to help me, though. I can't do muchthe way you have me bandaged up."
"I think we'd better send a couple of parties out," Ramon Llewellynsaid. "We'll have to find a better place to stay than this boat. Wedon't all have parkas or lined boots, and we have a couple of injuredmen. This heater won't be enough; in about seventy hours we'd allfreeze to death sitting around it."
Somebody mentioned the possibility of finding a cave.
"I doubt it," Llewellyn said. "I was on an exploring expedition downhere, once. This is all igneous rock, mostly granite. There aren'tmany caves. But there may be some sort of natural shelter, orsomething we can make into a shelter, not too far away. We have twohalf-ton lifters; we could use them to pile up rocks and buildsomething. Let's make up two parties. I'll take one; Abe, you take theother. One of us can go up and the other can go down."
We picked parties, trying to get men who had enough clothing andhadn't been too badly banged around in the landing. Tom wanted to goalong, but Abdullah insisted that he stay and help with the inspectionof the boat's engines. Finally six of us--Llewellyn, myself, GlennMurell, Abe Clifford, old Piet Dumont, and another man--went outthrough the broken stern of the boat. We had two portablefloodlights--a scout boat carries a lot of equipment--and Llewellyntook the one and Clifford the other. It had begun to snow already, andthe wind was coming straight up the narrow ravine into which we hadlanded, driving it at us. There was a stream between the two walls ofrock, swollen by the rains that had come just before the darkness, andthe rocks in and beside it were coated with ice. We took one look atit and shook our heads. Any exploring we did would be done withouttrying to cross that. We stood for a few minutes trying to see throughthe driving snow, and then we separated, Abe Clifford, Dumont and theother man going up the stream and Ramon Llewellyn, Glenn Murell and Igoing down.
A few hundred yards below the boat, the stream went over a fifty-footwaterfall. We climbed down beside it, and found the ravine widening.It was a level beach, now, or what had been a beach thousands of yearsago. The whole coast of Hermann Reuch's land is sinking in the EasternHemisphere and rising in the Western. We turned away from the streamand found that the wind was increasing in strength and coming at usfrom the left instead of in front. The next thing we knew, we were atthe point of the mountain on our right and we could hear the searoaring ahead and on both sides of us. Tom had been right about thatV-shaped fjord, I thought.
We began running into scattered trees now, and when we got around thepoint of the mountain we entered another valley.
Trees, like everything else on Fenris, are considerably different fromanything analogous on normal planets. They aren't tall, the biggestnot more than fifteen feet high, but they are from six to eight feetthick, with all the branches at the top, sprouting out in alldirections and reminding me of pictures of Medusa. The outside bark isa hard shell, which grows during the beginning of our four hotseasons a year. Under that will be more bark, soft and spongy, andthis gets more and more dense toward the middle; and then comes thehardwood core, which may be as much as two feet thick.
"One thing, we have firewood," Murell said, looking at them.
"What'll we cut it with; our knives?" I wanted to know.
"Oh, we have a sonocutter on the boat," Ramon Llewellyn said. "We canchop these things into thousand-pound chunks and float them to campwith the lifters. We could soak the spongy stuff on the outside withwater and let it freeze, and build a hut out of it, too." He lookedaround, as far as the light penetrated the driving snow. "Thiswouldn't be a bad place to camp."
Not if we're going to try to work on the boat, I thought. And packingDominic, with his broken leg, down over that waterfall was something Ididn't want to try, either. I didn't say anything. Wait till we gotback to the boat. It was too cold and windy here to argue, andbesides, we didn't know what Abe and his party might have foundupstream.