Part 3 (2/2)

”Let go!” she screamed then. ”You'll pull me into the water! I'll drown!”

Kickaha was tempted to do just that. He was afraid, however, that the obvious would occur to her. If she could sustain alt.i.tude enough while Antiope dropped so that her head was even with Kickaha, Antiope could then use her beak on him. And then the two birds could reverse position and get to Anana.

He threw himself backward, turned over, twice straightened out, and entered the water cleanly, head-down. He came up just in time to see the end of Anana's dive. They were about 250 yards from the nearest of five anch.o.r.ed galleys. A mile and a half down the river, torches moved toward them; beneath them, helmets threw off splinters of fire and oars rose and dipped.

The eagles were across the river now and climbing, black against the moonlight.

Kickaha called to Anana, and they swam toward the nearest boat. His clothes and the knives pulled at him, so he shed the clothes and dropped the larger knife into the depths. Anana did the same. Kickaha did not like losing the garments or the knife, but the experiences of the last forty-eight hours and the shortage of food had drained his energy.

They reached the boat finally and clung to the anchor chain while they sucked in air, unable to control the loud sobbing. No one appeared to investigate on the decks of the s.h.i.+p. If there was a watchman, he was sleeping.

The patrol boat was coming swiftly in their direction. Kickaha did not think, however, that he and Anana could be seen yet. He told her what they must do. Having caught up with his breathing, he dived down and under the hull. He turned when he thought he was halfway across and swam along the longitudinal axis toward the rear. Every few strokes, he felt upward. He came up under the overhanging p.o.o.p with no success. Anana, who had explored the bottom of the front half, met him at the anchor chain. She reported failure, too.

He panted as he talked. ”There's a good chance none of these five boats have secret chambers for the smugglers. In fact, we could go through a hundred and perhaps find nothing. Meanwhile, that patrol is getting closer.”

”Perhaps we should try the land route,” she said.

”Only if we can't find the hidden chambers,” he said. ”On land, we haven't much chance.”

He swam around the boat to the next one and there repeated his search along the keel. This boat and a third proved to have solid bottoms. By then, though he could not see it, Kickaha knew that the patrol boat was getting close.

Suddenly, from the other side of the boat, something like an elephant gun seemed to explode. There was a second boom, and then the screams of eagles and men.

Though he could see nothing, he knew what had happened: the green eagles had returned to kill Kickaha. Not seeing, they had decided to take revenge on the nearest humans for their long cap- tivity. So they had plunged out of the night sky onto the men in the boat. The booms had been their wings suddenly opening to check their fall. Now, they must be in the boat and tearing with beak and talon.

There were splashes. More screams. Then silence.

A sound of triumph, like an elephant's bugling, then a flapping of giant wings. Kickaha and Anana dived under the fourth boat, and they combined hiding from the eagles with their search.

Kickaha, coming up under the p.o.o.p, heard the wings but could not see the birds. He waited in the shadow of the p.o.o.p until he saw them rising out and away from the next boat. They could be giving up their hunt for him or they could be intending to plunge down out of the skies again. Anana was not in sight. She was gone so long that Kickaha knew she had either found what they were looking for or had drowned. Or had taken off by herself.

He swam along under the forepart of the boat, and presently his hand went past the lip of a well cut from the keel. He rose, opening his eyes, and saw a glimmer of darkest gray above. Then he was through the surface and in a square chamber lit by a small lamp. He blinked and saw Anana on all fours, knife in hand, staring down at him from a shelf. The shelf was two feet above the water and ran entirely around the chamber.

Beside her knife hand was the black hair of a man. Kickaha came up onto the shelf. The man was a Tishquetmoac, and he was sleeping soundly.

Anana smiled and said, ”He was sleeping when I came out of the water. A good thing, too, because he could have speared me before I knew what was going on. So I hit him in the neck to make sure he continued sleeping.”

The shelf went in about four feet and was bare except for some furs, blankets, a barrel with the cartograph for gin on it, and some wooden metal-bound caskets that contained food-he hoped. The bareness meant that the smuggled goods had been removed, so there wouldn't be any influx of swimmers to take the contraband.

The smoke from the lamp rose toward a number of small holes in the ceiling and upper wall. Kickaha, placing his cheek near some of them, felt a slight movement of air. He was sure that the light could not be seen, by anyone on the deck immediately above, but he would have to make sure.

He said to Anana, ”There are any number of boats equipped with these chambers. Sometimes the captains know about them; sometimes they don't.”

He pointed at the man, ”We'll question him later.” He tied the man's ankles and turned him over to bind his hands behind him. Then, though he wanted to lie down and sleep, he went back into the water. He came up near the anchor chain, which he climbed. His prowlings on the galley revealed no watchmen, and he got a good idea of the construction of the s.h.i.+p. Moreover, he found some sticks of dried meat and biscuits wrapped in waterproof intestines. There were no eagles in sight, and the patrol boat had drifted so far away that he could not see bodies-if there were any-in it.

When he returned to the chamber, he found the man conscious.

Petotoc said that he was hiding there because he was wanted by the police-he would not say what the charge was. He did not know about the invasion. It was evident that he did not believe Kicka-ha's story.

Kickaha spoke to the woman. ”We must have been seen by enough people so that the search for us in the city will be off. They'll be looking for us in the old city, the farms, the countryside, and they'll be searching every boat, too. Then, when they can't find us, they may let normal life resume. And this boat may set out for wherever it's going.”

Kickaha asked Petotoc where he could get enough food to last the three of them for a month. Anana's eyes opened, and she said, ”Live a month in this damp, stinking hole?”

”If you want to live at all,” Kickaha said. ”I sincerely hope we won't be here that long, but I like to have reserves for an emergency.”

”I'll go mad,” she said.

”How old are you?” he said. ”About ten thousand, at least, right? And you haven't learned the proper mental att.i.tudes to get through situations like this in all that time?”

”I never expected to be in such a situation,” she snarled.

Kickaha smiled. ”Something new after ten millennia, huh? You should be happy to be free of boredom.”

Unexpectedly, she laughed. She said, ”I am tired and edgy. But you are right. It is better to be scared to death than to be bored to death. And what has happened ...”

She spread her palms out to indicate speech-lessness.

Kickaha, acting on Petotoc's information, went topside again. He lowered a small boat, rowed ash.o.r.e, and broke into a small warehouse. He filled the boat with food and rowed back to the s.h.i.+p. Here he tied the rowboat to the anchor and then swam under to get Anana. The many dives and swims, hampered by carrying food in nets, wore them out even more. By the end of their labors, they were so tired they could barely pull themselves up onto the shelf in the chamber. Kickaha let the rowboat loose so it could drift away, and then he made his final dive.

Snaking with cold and exhaustion, he wanted desperately to sleep, but he did not dare leave the smuggler unguarded. Anana suggested that they solve that problem by killing Petotoc. The prisoner was listening, but he did not understand, since they were talking in the speech of the Lords. He did see her draw her finger across her throat though, and then he knew what they were discussing. He turned pale under his dark pigment.

”I won't do that unless it's necessary,” Kickaha said. ”Besides, even if he's .dead, we still have to keep a guard. What if other smugglers come in? We can't be caught sleeping. Clatatol and her bunch were able to resist the temptation of the reward-although I'm not sure they could have held out much longer-but others may not be so n.o.ble.”

He took first watch and only kept awake by dipping water and throwing it in his face, by talking to Petotoc, by pacing savagely back and forth on the shelf. When he thought two hours had pa.s.sed, he roused her with slaps and water. After getting her promise that she would not succ.u.mb to sleep, he closed his eyes. This happened twice more, and then he was awakened the third time. But now he was not to stand guard.

She had placed her hand over his mouth and was whispering into his ear. ”Be quiet! You were snoring! There are men aboard.”

He lay for a long while listening to the thumps of feet, the shouts and talking, the banging and knocking as cargo was moved about and bulkheads and decks were knocked on to check for hollow compartments.

After ! ,200 seconds, each of which Kickaha had silently counted off, the search party moved on. Again, he and Anana tried to overtake their lost sleep in turns.

VII.

WHEN THE TIME came that they both felt refreshed enough to stay awake at the same time, he asked her how she had gotten into this situation.

”The Black Sellers,” she said. She held up her right hand. A ring with a deep black metal band and a large dark-green jewel was on the middle finger.

”I gave the smugglers all my jewels except this,” she said. ”I refused to part with that; I said I'd have to be killed first. For a moment, I thought they would kill me for it.

”Let me see, how to begin? The Black Bellers were originally an artificial form of life created by the Lord scientists about ten thousand years ago. The scientists created the Bellers during their quest for a true immortality.

”A Beller is bell-shaped, black, of indestructible material. Even if one were attached to a hydrogen bomb, the Beller would survive the fission. Or a Beller could be shot into the heart of a star, and it would go unscathed for a billion years.

”Now, the scientists had originally constructed the Beller so that it was purely automatic. It had no mind of its own; it was a device only. When placed on a man's head, it detected the man's skin poten- tial and automatically extruded two extremely thin but rigid needles. These bored through the skull and into the brain.

”Through the needles, the Beller could discharge the contents of a man's mind, that is, it could uncoil the chains of giant protein molecules composing memory. And it could dissociate the complex neural patterns of the conscious and unconscious mind.”

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