13
THE BEACON LIGHT
We all said, "Shooting!" and, "The machine gun!" as though we had totell each other what it was.
"Something's attacking them," Cesario guessed.
"Oh, there isn't anything to attack them now," Abe said. "All thecritters are dug in for the winter. I'll bet they're just using it tochop wood with."
That could be; a few short bursts would knock off all the soft woodfrom one of those big billets and expose the hard core. Only whydidn't they use the cutter? It was at the boat now.
"We better go see what it is," Cesario insisted. "It might betrouble."
None of us was armed; we'd never thought we'd need weapons. There arequite a few Fenrisian land animals, all creepers or crawlers, that aredangerous, but they spend the extreme hot and cold periods in burrows,in almost cataleptic sleep. It occurred to me that something mighthave burrowed among the rocks near the camp and been roused by theheat of the fire.
We hadn't carried a floodlight with us--there was no need for one inthe moonlight. Of the two at camp, one was pointed up the ravinetoward us, and the other into the air. We began yelling as soon as wecaught sight of them, not wanting to be dusted over lightly with7-mm's before anybody recognized us. As soon as the men at the campheard us, the shooting stopped and they started shouting to us. Thenwe could distinguish words.
"Come on in! We made contact!"
We pushed into the hut, where everybody was crowded around theunderhatch of the boat, which was now the side door. Abe shovedthrough, and I shoved in after him. Newsman's conditioned reflex; getto where the story is. I even caught myself saying, "Press," as Ishoved past Abdullah Monnahan.
"What happened?" I asked, as soon as I was inside. I saw Joe Kivelsongetting up from the radio and making place for Abe. "Who did youcontact?"
"The Mahatma; _Helldiver_," he said. "Signal's faint, but plain;they're trying to make a directional fix on us. There are about adozen 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 ourMayday while we were cruising submerged?"
Abe Clifford was swearing into the radio. "No, of course not. We don'tknow where in Nifflheim we are. All the instruments in the boat weresmashed."
"Well, can't you shoot the stars, Abe?" The voice--I thought it wasFeinberg's--was almost as inaudible as a cat's sneeze.
"Sure we can. If you're in range of this makeshift set, the positionwe'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 ifyou shot one of them up we could see it."
"Hey, that's an idea! Hans, have we another rocket with an explosivehead?"
Cronje said we had, and he and another man got it out and carried itfrom the boat. I repeated my question to Joe Kivelson.
"No. Your Dad tried to call the _Javelin_ by screen; that must havebeen after we abandoned ship. He didn't get an answer, and put out ageneral call. Nip Spazoni was nearest, and he cruised around andpicked up the locator signal and found the wreck, with the boat berthblown open and the boat gone. Then everybody started looking for us."
Feinberg was saying that he'd call the other ships and alert them. Ifthe _Helldiver_ was the only ship we could contact by radio, the oddswere that if they couldn't see the rocket from Feinberg's ship, nobodyelse could. The same idea must have occurred to Abe Clifford.
"You say you're all along the coast. Are the other ships west or eastof 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. Icould see how that happened. Both times the boat had surfaced, it hadgone straight up, lift and drive operating together. There is aconstant wind away from the sunlight zone at high level, heated airthat has been lifted, and there is a wind at a lower level out of thedark zone, coming in to replace it. We'd gotten completely above thelatter 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: "Rocketoff!" 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 goup and set the woods on fire?"
"Hey, that's an idea. Listen, Mahatma; we have a big forest offlowerpot 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 Icall the other ships."
Tom was getting into warm outer garments. Cesario got out the arctorch, 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 thewaterfall, got the lifters off the logs, and used them to helpourselves up over the rocks beside the waterfall.
We hadn't bothered doing anything with the slashings, except to getthem out of our way, while we were working. Now we gathered them intopiles among the trees, placing them to take advantage of what littlewind was still blowing, and touched them off with the arc torch. Soonwe had the branches of the trees burning, and then the soft outer woodof the trunks. It actually began to get uncomfortably hot, althoughthe temperature was now down around minus 90 deg. 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 themand getting the soft outer wood burning. As soon as he had one treelit, he would run on to another.
"This guy's a real pyromaniac," Tom said to me, wiping his face on thesleeve 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 aboutfifty reincarnations ago? Nero, burning Rome." Theosophists neverhesitated to make fun of their religion, that way. The way they seeit, a thing isn't much good if it can't stand being made fun of. "Andlook at the job I did on Moscow, a little later."
"Sure; I remember that. I was Napoleon then. What I'd have done to youif I'd caught you, too."
"Yes, and I know what he was in another reincarnation," Tom added."Mrs. O'Leary's cow!"
Whether or not Cesario really had had any past astral experience, hemade a good job of firebugging on this forest. We waited around for awhile, far enough back for the heat to be just comfortable andpleasant, until we were sure that it was burning well on both sides ofthe frozen stream. It even made the double moonlight dim, and it wassending up huge clouds of fire-reddened smoke, and where the firedidn't light the smoke, it was black in the moonlight. There wouldn'tbe any excuse for anybody not seeing that. Finally, we started back tocamp.
As soon as we got within earshot, we could hear the excitement.Everybody was jumping and yelling. "They see it! They see it!"
The boat was full of voices, too, from the radio:
"_Pequod_ to _Dirty Gertie_, we see it, too, just off our port bow...Yes, _Bulldog_, we see your running lights; we're right behind you..._Slasher_ to _Pequod_: we can't see you at all. Fire a flare,please..."
I pushed in to the radio. "This is Walter Boyd, _Times_ representativewith the _Javelin_ castaways," I said. "Has anybody a portableaudiovisual pickup that I can use to get some pictures in to my paperwith?"
That started general laughter among the operators on the ships thatwere coming in.
"We have one, Walt," Oscar Fujisawa's voice told me. "I'm coming inahead in the _Pequod_ scout boat; I'll bring it with me."
"Thanks, Osca
r," I said. Then I asked him: "Did you see Bish Warebefore you left port?"
"I should say I did!" Oscar told me. "You can thank Bish Ware thatwe're out looking for you now. Tell you about it as soon as we getin."