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Raeker duly relayed this information to Nick; but when questions were asked
such as whether Swift planned to follow the suggestion he must by now have
received via Nick's ex-prisoner, or how he had been able to find the
bathyscaphe so quickly, no satisfactory answer was forthcoming. Raeker
couldn't decide whether the trouble was Easy's incomplete mastery of the
language, her lack of interest in the questions themselves, or a deliberate
vagueness on Swift's part. The whole situation was irritating to a man who had
exercised fairly adequate control over affairs on Tenebra for some years past;
at the moment a majority of his agents were out of contact, what might be
called the forces of rebellion were operating freely, and the only human being
on the planet was neglecting work for gossip. Of course, his viewpoint may
have been slightly narrow.
Things looked up toward the middle of the Tenebran afternoon. Jim and Jane
returned, long before they had been expected, to increase the strength of the
shipbuilding crew. They reported unusually easy travel
and high speed, so they had reached their first search area on the initial
day's travel, examined it, and been able to cover the other and return in
something like half the expected time. They had found nothing in their own
areas. They had seen a light to the south, but judged that John and Nancy
would cover it, and had decided to stick to their own itinerary and get the
desired report in. It was quite impossible, of course, for them to read any
expression
Comprehension; Construction; Inundation
153
from the robot, and Raeker managed to keep his feelings out of his voice, so
they never suspected that their report was hi any way unsatisfactory. For a
short tune, Raeker toyed with the thought of sending them out again to check
the light; but then he reflected that in the first place John and Nancy would,
as
Jim said, have done so, and in the second place the 'scaphe had effectively
been located, and he decided the pair were of more use getting leather. The
lack of initiative they had displayed tended to support this conclusion. He
spoke accordingly, and the two promptly took their spears up again and went
hunting.
"One point may have struck you, Nick," Raeker said after they had gone.
"What is that, Teacher?"
"They saw the light to the south of their search area. That suggests strongly
that the shore of this sea bends westward as it is followed south; and since
the caves of Swift lie in the same direction, it is fairly likely that they
are closer to the shore than we realized. This may account for Swift's finding
the ship so quickly."
"It may," admitted Nick.
"You sound dubious. Where is the hole hi the reasoning?"
"It's just that I hunted with Swift's people for a good many days, and covered
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a lot of territory around his caves in the process, without either
encountering the sea myself or hearing it mentioned by any of his people. It
seems hard to believe that the lights of your missing ship could be seen a
hundred miles, and something like that would be necessary to reconcile both
sets of facts."
"Hmph. That's a point I should have considered. That light may call for more
investigation, after all. Well, we'll know more when John and Nancy come hi."
"We should," agreed Nick. "Whether we actually will remains to be seen. I'm
going to get back to fastening this float we've just glued onto the frame. I'm
a lot surer that something constructive will come from that." He went
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off to do as he had said, and Raeker devoted himself to listening. Thinking
seemed unprofitable at the moment.
With two more hunters, the raft progressed more rapidly than anyone had
expected. The region of the new camp was not, of course, as badly hunted out
as had been the neighborhood of the old village, and skins came in about as
fast as they could be processed. Float after float was fastened in place, each
corner being supplied in turn to keep the balance Nick and Betsey were very
careful about that. By the late afternoon so many had been attached that it
was less a matter of keeping track of which corner came next than of finding a
spot not already occupied the frame was virtually paved with the things. No
one attempted to calculate the result of its stability. If anyone thought of
such a problem, he undoubtedly postponed it as something more easily
determined empirically.
The work was not, of course, completely uninterrupted. People had to eat,
there was the need to gather firewood for the night, and the herd to be
guarded. This last, of course, frequently helped in the "shipyard" by
providing leather without the need of hunting, but sometimes the fighting
involved was less profitable. Several times the creatures attacking the herd
were floaters, to everyone's surprise.
These creatures were reasonably intelligent, or at least learned rapidly as a
rule to avoid dangerous situations.
They were also rather slow-flying things resembling, as Easy had said, the
medusae of her home world in their manner of motion so that after a fairly
short time in any one spot, when a reasonable number of them had been killed,
the survivors learned to leave the herd alone. Nick and his friends had
believed this end accomplished for the present camp; but in the late afternoon
no less than four of the creatures had to be faced by the herders in not much
over an hour. The situation was both unusual and quite painful: while a
competent spearsman could count surely enough on grounding such a-creature, it
was
Comprehension; Construction; Inundation
155
nearly impossible to do so without suffering from its tentacles, whose length
and poisonous nature went
far to offset their owner's slow flight.
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The attention of all four members of the group was naturally drawn to this
peculiar state of affairs, and even the work on the raft was suspended while
the problem was discussed. It was natural enough that an occasional floater
should drift into the area from elsewhere, but four in an hour was stretching
coincidence. The group's crests scanned the heavens in an effort to find an
explanation, but the gentle air current toward the southwest was still too
feeble at this distance from the volcano even to be felt, much less seen. The
sky of Tenebra during the daytime is much too featureless to permit easy
detection of something like a slow, general movement of the floaters; and the
individual movement of the creatures didn't help. Consequently, the existence
of the wind was not discovered until rainfall.
By this time, the raft seemed to be done, in that it was hard to see where any
more floats could be attached. No one knew, of course, how many people it
would support; it was planned to carry it to the ocean when the others
returned, and determined this by experiment.
When the evening fires were lighted, however, it was quickly seen that the
rain was not coming straight down. It was the same phenomenon that John and
Nancy had observed the night before, complicated by the lack of an obvious
cause. After some discussion, Nick decided to light three extra fires on the
northeast side of the usual defenses, compensating for the extra fuel
consumption by letting an equal number on the opposite side of the outer ring
burn out. A little later he let go even more on the southwest, since no drops
at all came from that direction even after the convection currents of the camp
were well established. He reported the matter to Fagin.
"I know," replied the Teacher. "The same thing is happening where the ship is
down, according to Easy.
The
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CLOSE TO CRITICAL
drops are slanting very noticeably inland. I wish she had some means of
telling direction; we could find out whether the coast is actually sloping
east where she is, or the rain actually moving in a slightly different
direction. Either fact, if we know it, could be useful."
"I suppose she can't feel any wind?" asked Nick.
"Not inside the ship. Can you?" [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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