Authors: Avram Davidson
He felt the pain of his cramped leg; maybe if he went back to sleep again … Somewhere he heard a bird singing and somehow he knew it wasn’t a bird and that he was right because how could a bird be out here —
Out
where?
The cramp surged up — once — then vanished. And he knew that was because he was on his feet, knew it before he even opened his eyes to see that he was on his feet.
• • •
“I said it before, but I’ll say it once again … I wouldn’t wonder if some of you were too confused to remember. I appreciate the choice you made.” Captain Rond was speaking. Jory Cane felt a touch of vertigo, sat down, abruptly. His head hurt him, terribly. The hatchway of the pettyboat was open and the air coming in was clear and sweet, but the old air was not yet altogether gone. Whenever he caught a breath of it, stale and foul and evil, he felt the muscles of his chin tighten and the muscles of his stomach knot.
“Although it was, naturally, the only choice any decent man had to make. The Guild won’t forget it.” Marrus Rond’s voice was as calm as it always was.
Calmly he went on.
“Am I not to have another weapon, gentlemen of the junta?”
Not,
Can’t I have —
that would be pleading. Not,
I must have
— that would be lording it. No … just the right note, the absolutely correct choice, neither diminishing what position he still had by belittling himself nor imperiling it by a pretense to power he no longer held.
“Having capitulated, custom calls for me to retain my side arm. And a weapon is part of the invariable emergency stores of a pettyboat.”
So Jory remembered Rond in those last few moments before the eight of them were packed off into the pettyboat. And Blaise …
Blaise said,
“Well, huh!”
And then,
“Oh, what the hell, give the old poke another iron.”
And Aysil Stone said,
“I see no objection, I suppose.”
“Second the motion,”
said one of the others on the junta. And so it had gone. What started out a rout, with the possibility of becoming a massacre, had become a dignified departure, with three times the amount of stores originally allotted. Jory, who had never once heard his C.O. mention the words “Free Ship” or “Mutiny” before, listened and wondered as Rond calmly quoted chapter and verse.
The Free Ship
Polydore
allowed its pettyboat special surgical supplies, I believe you will find … In the case of the
Narwhal VI —
correct me, Bosun, if I’m wrong — didn’t her junta install a reserve engine as well …?
And he suggested that they engage the services of appraisers and not grab the first offer made for the ship, because it would be felt offensive by the Guild if one of its vessels went for less than its full worth.
All that, Jory remembered. But …
“Captain, where are we now?” he asked.
The thin, calm face looked at him a trifle reproachfully. “I had not intended to conceal that from you, Mr. First,” he said. He turned his head and tilted his chin toward the open hatchway, toward the clean, sweet air, and the curious not-quite-birdsong. “We are on an island a very short distance off the coast of the rather small continent which forms the chief land mass of the northern hemisphere of Valentine’s Planet.
“So far as I know, we are the first of any Technic civilization to set down here. I trust we will not be here long. We must replenish our fuel — well, other stores, too, I suppose, but fuel is the must — and then we will continue until contact is established with another T-world. Preferably one with a Guild installation.”
The pettyboat lay on her long side. She had evidently made a long slow landing in deep sand, and it wasn’t even necessary to drop a ladder. Jory walked out the open hatchway. Captain Rond followed, at his leisure, after the other six men had done the same, and called them by name. “Lockharn, Levvis, Storm, Mars, Duston, Crammer … don’t try to do too much at once…. You and I must have a gam, Mister First, when you are feeling better.”
The setting sun was red and large. A surf beat, somewhere far out of sight. The men walked unsteadily, sat down one by one on the sand dunes. He could hear them breathing deeply, noisily; he followed their example. The air was more than clean and sweet — it was, well it was exciting. There seemed more ozone in it, for one thing, than he was used to. And the salt-water smell had an extra overtone, which he thought might be seaweed. There were vegetation smells — trees and leaf-mold and flowers — a touch of smoke, perhaps, and a lightning-struck tree. Lightning would account for the ozone, too. The air rose and fell and pushed softly but firmly against him, like the body of a young woman, cool and clean and somewhat wet from the water.
“What the fuel possibilities are here, I confess I have no idea.” Captain Rond had joined Jory on the log he’d picked for his seat. “With the special equipment I was able to obtain from our captors, we should be able to refine any petroleum we find. Alcohol will be no problem, almost anything that grows can be distilled, one way or another, I suppose. But if there’s no petroleum, well, then we’ll have to look around for an exotic. Which might take us longer, but it can’t be helped.”
He made no mention of the narrow strait before them, or the opposite wooded shore. The air evidently did not smell exciting to him, it just smelled like air.
“This is a nice place, Captain,” Jory said.
“Why, yes. I suppose it is.” Rond seemed mildly surprised. “But don’t get too fond of it. We won’t be here long.”
Mars, who had been a steward, had something in his hand — a tube of paste food. They each took a squeeze. Jory’s stomach sprang to life again, but this time with hunger instead of nausea. He looked around, but there was nothing resembling fruit on any of the trees. The bark was curiously marked, with round swellings embossed with tinier ones. There was a blue tint to the leaves.
“I wonder if there’s fish, or anything else edible, in that water.”
“Duston’s taking care of that now, First. I gave him the equipment from the emergency stores … Well, you
do
want to know what we are doing here on Valentine’s Planet which is in G-27, instead of our being back in C-3, don’t you?”
Jory licked the last drop of paste food from his palate. “Why, yes, sir. I do. But I didn’t suppose that you intended to conceal it from me.”
Rond drew in the sand with a stick. “You’re a saucy fellow, Mr. Cane. But a loyal one.
Well
. It was intended by those rogues in the junta that we should make for C-3, where the Second Academy’s Guild has a Spotting Station, of course. But I’m afraid that wouldn’t do. No, sir, it wouldn’t do at all.”
The cool wind was like a long drink of clean water. Cane thought of clean water, water that hadn’t been used, reused, refined, distilled, redistilled, aerated — the works — a hundred times. There might be a spring somewhere. Or, he could dig in the sand and see if — but not now. He was tired, suddenly. Infinitely tired. But not too tired to wonder how they could have made a journey of such an impossible length.
G-27!
How could they conceivably have made it to such a distant sector?
“Why not, sir?”
There were many reasons, Rond explained, still drawing in the sand. For one thing, as his first officer must know, relations between their own Guild and the Second Academy’s Guild weren’t too good at the present time. Their Guild wouldn’t like its men to have to appeal to the other one for assistance. Furthermore, the Spotting Station was on a Dead World, and had a complement of only three men. An additional eight would have made it impossible for them to hold out till Relief — they would have to appeal for immediate supplies, and this, of course, would be embarrassing….
And so, rather than be embarrassed, Jory thought, his anger almost lost at the man’s infinite effrontery — and infinite courage —
“Besides, you see, there was no reason to believe that the mutineers mightn’t have changed their minds. And they could — and in such a case probably would — find us waiting for them there on C-3. Whereas, you know,
here —
”
It made sense. It did make sense. “But … sir … the distance …?”
“There was enough fuel. Barely enough, but — as you see — enough.”
Jory shook his head, impatiently.
“I meant food. We must have gone ten times past the break point. You can only regenerate so many times before there’s nothing more to reclaim from the wastes, you know.”
Captain Rond scratched out his drawings, tossed the stick away. “You’re thinking in terms of normal metabolism,” he said. “Ours wasn’t normal. We were on double-slow NH.”
The full picture came as abruptly to Jory Cane’s mind as the sudden smell of smoke again. Of course men under narcohypnosis had a slower metabolism — under slow NH, even more so. But slow NH was dangerous in the extreme, almost never used, and then only briefly. And as for
double-
slow — !
“I thought,” he said, slowly, “that to put men on double-slow without permission wasn’t allowed. And I don’t remember having given mine.”
“You didn’t,” said Captain Rond, almost cheerfully. “There was no time to gain. I made the decision. Obviously the right one. I know what you are thinking,
He saved a pettyboat and lost a ship
, but — ”
Sharp on the “but” came a shout. Half the men were on their feet, the others had fallen on hands and knees in trying to rise. Hands were pointing, waving, gesturing toward the main shore. Duston came running, stumbling. “Something in the bosky over there, Captain! Something moved — I saw it — moved in the bushes!”
The sun was dipping into the water. The counter-coast looked blue and dim. Jory peered, but saw nothing which might not have been the breeze. “An animal?” he suggested.
“No, sir. Not an animal.”
That persistent tinge of smoke, coming and going on the edges of his perception …
was
it a lightning-struck tree?
“A man?”
Duston shook his head. “No, no man. It was too small for a man.” He turned, looked again. His heavy face showed, not so much alarm, as suspicion. Puzzlement.
Rond got briskly to his feet, brushed off sand. “Crammer, you will take the first watch. Draw a weapon from the First Officer. I will relieve you in two hours. We had better see about food. Then, perhaps, sleep. Real sleep.”
Just before Jory lay down he heard Rond say, “
‘The rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity’ —
remember that, Cane. It’s from George Eliot, a twentieth-century poet, in case pre-Technic Lit is no longer being taught at the Academy.”
Somewhat later, before real sleep came rolling in like a fog, Jory heard, or thought he heard, Duston mutter once again: “It was too small for a man.”
T
HE SUN ROSE NEXT DAY A PALE ORANGE-YELLOW IN
the clear air. The scent-lures on the fishing tackle in the emergency gear had brought in a catch of a half-dozen creatures rather more like trilobites than fish, each the size of a man’s arm. Pieces of Allen’s Paper were affixed to parts of one, cut up for the test; they waited the required half-hour and then, the paper having remained uncolored, they grilled and ate the lot.
Captain Rond cleared his throat, gestured to the men to dispose of the remains of the meal. Jory did not envy the man’s position. Rond’s career was, time-wise, half over. To have had his ship stolen from him (and from the Guild) might well mean it was entirely over — unless he was willing, for his pension’s sake, to take some obscure post at reduced pay. On the other hand, should he come well out of it — get the ship back, for example — he might actually come out ahead — which was unlikely.
Jory’s own status was equivocal. On the one hand, the Guild Directorate could hardly blame a first officer for a mutiny, and Rond was not the type to try shifting the blame onto him. If they made a bad return, one costly or embarrassing, say, then he would share in Rond’s disgrace — and without the hope of a half-pay post. Not that he’d be likely to take one. A good return, in which he figured well, would be to his own credit, also. An ordinary one? Ordinary from the distant viewpoint of the Directorate, that was … well … they’d watch him carefully from that time on. And any question which might come up would find his name remembered. “Cane? Isn’t that the Cane who was in the
Persephone?
” And that would be that.
As if the Captain had been reading his mind, this was the precise point at which Rond chose to begin in talking, now, to the men.
“You have separated yourselves from the boys,” he said. “I will recommend you for double pay dating from the mutiny and until we sign in aboard a Guild ship or other installation. I will further recommend that you all be advanced two places in rank, and — while I cannot promise — I should think a special service bonus very likely, too.”
One of the men said, judiciously, “Well … I don’t think I’ll spend mine just yet.” A chuckle ran through the little group. Jory looked at the man who’d spoken. “Storm,” they called him, but he didn’t know if it was his real name or a nickname. A young man, with a pleasant and mildly ugly face. He knew little enough about any of the men — a first officer wouldn’t. But he was certainly going to get to know more about them, that was sure. And they, about him.
Rond smiled faintly. “It would be foolish of me to minimize the dangers and difficulties of our position,” he said. “We are on a world all but unknown to the worlds we know, and about the only thing known about it previously was that it was here … and had a breathable atmosphere. Those two things were enough to convince me that I had the one thing we immediately needed — a place of refuge. A starting-point for the long road back. Our position is not only a hard one, it is a classic one. We are castaways. Other loyal members of mutinous ships have been murdered, or sent off in pettyboats which could not conceivably have brought them to any place of safety. We are fortunate.”
He told them of groups which had made it back safely. Some, they had heard of …
Neptune VI, Anti-gone, Dancer, Guildsman II
. Others were new to them, although not all of these had been involved in mutiny — Leading Officer Shohet and ten men, when the
Jeremias
crashed on Hyperion
beta;
the four crewmen and two passengers of the
Bonavita
, disabled in magnetic storms between the Lace Pattern and the Rim, under the leadership of Dr. Oliphant; and, of course, the legendary but nonetheless actual exploits of the Six Stewards of Centauri. “Although I don’t expect it will take
us
twenty years, nor are we burdened with the ship’s treasury, as they were,” he commented.