Four-Day Planet - H. Beam Piper (i wanna iguana read aloud TXT) 📗

as the contragravity field dropped below the specific gravity of the ship, she began submerging. I got up into the conning tower in time to see the water of the boat pool come up over the armor-glass windows and the outside lights come on. For a few minutes, the Javelin swung slowly and moved forward, feeling her way with fingers of radar out of the pool and down the channel behind the breakwater and under the overhang of the city roof. Then the water line went slowly down across the windows as she surfaced. A moment later she was on full contragravity, and the ship which had been a submarine was now an aircraft.

Murell, who was accustomed to the relatively drab sunsets of Terra, simply couldn’t take his eyes from the spectacle that covered the whole western half of the sky⁠—high clouds streaming away from the daylight zone to the west and lighted from below by the sun. There were more clouds coming in at a lower level from the east. By the time the Javelin returned to Port Sandor, it would be full dark and rain, which would soon turn to snow, would be falling. Then we’d be in for it again for another thousand hours.

Ramón Llewellyn was saying to Joe Kivelson: “We’re one man short; Devis, Abdullah’s helper. Hospital.”

“Get hurt in the fight, last night? He was right with us till we got out to the elevators, and then I missed him.”

“No. He made it back to the ship about the same time we did, and he was all right then. Didn’t even have a scratch. Strained his back at work, this morning, trying to lift a power-unit cartridge by hand.”

I could believe that. Those things weighed a couple of hundred pounds. Joe Kivelson swore.

“What’s he think this is, the First Century Pre-Atomic? Aren’t there any lifters on the ship?”

Llewellyn shrugged. “Probably didn’t want to bother taking a couple of steps to get one. The doctor told him to take treatment and observation for a day or so.”

“That’s Al Devis?” I asked. “What hospital?” Al Devis’s strained back would be good for a two-line item; he’d feel hurt if we didn’t mention it.

“Coop hospital.”

That was all right. They always sent in their patient lists to the Times. Tom was griping because he’d have to do Devis’s work and his own.

“You know anything about engines, Walt?” he asked me.

“I know they generate a magnetic current and convert rotary magnetic current into one-directional repulsion fields, and violate the daylights out of all the old Newtonian laws of motion and attraction,” I said. “I read that in a book. That was as far as I got. The math got a little complicated after that, and I started reading another book.”

“You’d be a big help. Think you could hit anything with a 50 mm?” Tom asked. “I know you’re pretty sharp with a pistol or a chopper, but a cannon’s different.”

“I could try. If you want to heave over an empty packing case or something, I could waste a few rounds seeing if I could come anywhere close to it.”

“We’ll do that,” he said. “Ordinarily, I handle the after gun when we sight a monster, but somebody’ll have to help Abdullah with the engines.”

He spoke to his father about it. Joe Kivelson nodded.

“Walt’s made some awful lucky shots with that target pistol of his, I know that,” he said, “and I saw him make hamburger out of a slasher, once, with a chopper. Have somebody blow a couple of wax skins full of air for targets, and when we get a little farther southeast, we’ll go down to the surface and have some shooting.”

I convinced Murell that the sunset would still be there in a couple of hours, and we took our luggage down and found the cubbyhole he and I would share with Tom for sleeping quarters. A hunter-ship looks big on the outside, but there’s very little room for the crew. The engines are much bigger than would be needed on an ordinary contragravity craft, because a hunter-ship operates under water as well as in the air. Then, there’s a lot of cargo space for the wax, and the boat berth aft for the scout boat, so they’re not exactly built for comfort. They don’t really need to be; a ship’s rarely out more than a hundred and fifty hours on any cruise.

Murell had done a lot of reading about every phase of the wax business, and he wanted to learn everything he could by actual observation. He said that Argentine Exotic Organics was going to keep him here on Fenris as a resident buyer and his job was going to be to deal with the hunters, either individually or through their cooperative organization, if they could get rid of Ravick and set up something he could do business with, and he wanted to be able to talk the hunters’ language and understand their problems.

So I took him around over the boat, showing him everything and conscripting any crew members I came across to explain what I couldn’t. I showed him the scout boat in its berth, and we climbed into it and looked around. I showed him the machine that packed the wax into skins, and the cargo holds, and the electrolytic gills that extracted oxygen from sea water while we were submerged, and the ship’s armament. Finally, we got to the engine room, forward. He whistled when he saw the engines.

“Why, those things are big enough for a five-thousand-ton freighter,” he said.

“They have to be,” I said. “Running submerged isn’t the same as running in atmosphere. You ever done any swimming?”

He shook his head. “I was born in Antarctica, on Terra. The water’s a little too cold to do much swimming there. And I’ve spent most of my time since then in central Argentine, in the pampas country. The sports there are horseback riding and polo and things like that.”

Well, whattaya know! Here was a man