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

“It’s squirting up from below in a dozen places,” he said, after he’d sealed the boat. “The whole front of the ship must be blown out.”

“Well, now we know what happened to Simon MacGregor’s Claymore,” I said, more to myself than to anybody else.

Joe and Hans Cronje, the gunner, were getting a rocket out of the locker, detaching the harpoon and fitting on an explosive warhead. He stopped, while he and Cronje were loading it into the after launcher, and nodded at me.

“That’s what I think, too,” he said. “Everybody grab onto something; we’re getting the door open.”

I knew what was coming and started hugging a stanchion as though it were a long-lost sweetheart, and Murell, who didn’t but knew enough to imitate those who did, hugged it from the other side. The rocket whooshed out of the launcher and went off with a deafening bang outside. For an instant, nothing happened, and I told Murell not to let go. Then the lock burst in and the water, at seventy fathoms’ pressure, hit the boat. Abdullah had gotten the engines on and was backing against it. After a little, the pressure equalized and we went out the broken lock stern first.

We circled and passed over the Javelin, and then came back. She was lying in the ooze, a quarter over on her side, and her whole bow was blown out to port. Joe Kivelson got the square box he had brought down from the ship along with the log, fussed a little with it, and then launched it out the disposal port. It was a radio locator. Sometimes a lucky ship will get more wax than the holds’ capacity; they pack it in skins and anchor it on the bottom, and drop one of those gadgets with it. It would keep on sending a directional signal and the name of the ship for a couple of years.

“Do you really think it was sabotage?” Murell was asking me. Blowing up a ship with sixteen men aboard must have seemed sort of extreme to him. Maybe that wasn’t according to Terran business ethics. “Mightn’t it have been a power unit?”

“No. Power units don’t blow, and if one did, it would vaporize the whole ship and a quarter of a cubic mile of water around her. No, that was old fashioned country-style chemical explosive. Cataclysmite, probably.”

“Ravick?” he asked, rather unnecessarily.

“You know how well he can get along without you and Joe Kivelson, and here’s a chance to get along without both of you together.” Everybody in the boat was listening, so I continued: “How much do you know about this fellow Devis, who strained his back at the last moment?”

“Engine room’s where he could have planted something,” Joe Kivelson said.

“He was in there by himself for a while, the morning after the meeting,” Abdullah Monnahan added.

“And he disappeared between the meeting room and the elevator, during the fight,” Tom mentioned. “And when he showed up, he hadn’t been marked up any. I’d have thought he’d have been pretty badly beaten⁠—unless they knew he was one of their own gang.”

“We’re going to look Devis up when we get back,” somebody said pleasantly.

“If we get back,” Ramón Llewellyn told him. “That’s going to take some doing.”

“We have the boat,” Hans Cronje said. “It’s a little crowded, but we can make it back to Port Sandor.”

“I hope we can,” Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. “Shall we take her up, Joe?”

“Yes, see what it’s like on top,” the skipper replied.

Going up, we passed a monster at about thirty fathoms. It stuck its neck out and started for us. Monnahan tilted the boat almost vertical and put on everything the engines had, lift and drive parallel. An instant later, we broke the surface and shot into the air.

The wind hit the boat as though it had been a ping-pong ball, and it was several seconds, and bad seconds at that, before Monnahan regained even a semblance of control. There was considerable bad language, and several of the crew had bloody noses. Monnahan tried to get the boat turned into the wind. A circuit breaker popped, and red lights blazed all over the instrument panel. He eased off and let the wind take over, and for a while we were flying in front of it like a rifle bullet. Gradually, he nosed down and submerged.

“Well, that’s that.” Joe Kivelson said, when we were back in the underwater calm again. “We’ll have to stay under till the wind’s over. Don’t anybody move around or breathe any deeper than you have to. We’ll have to conserve oxygen.”

“Isn’t the boat equipped with electrolytic gills?” Murell asked.

“Sure, to supply oxygen for a maximum of six men. We have sixteen in here.”

“How long will our air last, for sixteen of us?” I asked.

“About eight hours.”

It would take us fifty to get to Port Sandor, running submerged. The wind wouldn’t even begin to fall in less than twenty.

“We can go south, to the coast of Hermann Reuch’s Land,” Abe Clifford, the navigator, said. “Let me figure something out.”

He dug out a slide rule and a pencil and pad and sat down with his back to the back of the pilot’s seat, under the light. Everybody watched him in a silence which Joe Kivelson broke suddenly by bellowing:

“Dumont! You light that pipe and I’ll feed it to you!”

Old Piet Dumont grabbed the pipe out of his mouth with one hand and pocketed his lighter with the other.

“Gosh, Joe; I guess I just wasn’t thinking⁠ ⁠…” he began.

“Well, give me that pipe.” Joe put it in the drawer under the charts. “Now you won’t have it handy the next time you don’t think.”

After a while, Abe Clifford looked up. “Ship’s position I don’t have exactly; somewhere around East 25° Longitude, South 20° Latitude. I can’t work out our present position at all, except that we’re somewhere around South 30° Latitude. The locator signal is almost exactly north-by-northeast of us. If we keep it dead