Part 19 (1/2)
Rodrick was working detection instruments. ”Nothing larger than a rabbit down there,” he said, when the life-sign monitors showed nothing.
”Should we head home now?”
Rodrick checked his watch. ”I haven't seen the western continents. ”
”You're the boss,” Clay said.
Rodrick checked the maps and gave the correct lat.i.tude and longitude readings to Clay. Once again the rockets fired, and when the vast land area was below their bow, the far western ocean behind them, Rodrick got a quick impression of the size of the continent. Then Clay was going down and down and doing a fast survey run at Mach three toward the east across the thick body of the continent.
”Clay,” Rodrick said musingly, ”there's enough land area on Omega to make a good life for all of Earth's surplus population and not even make a dent in it. ” ”Now that we know we don't have to cruise at sublight before activating the Shaw Drive, we could make several trips a year, sir.”
”As fast as we could load 'em and unload 'em,” Rodrick said.
”All we need is rhenium.”
”All we need is rhenium,” Rodrick agreed, but he added, in his mind,and some sane people left on Earth .
There would be one more requirement, too. There would have to be men and women to come after the first generation of settlers. There was going to be a severe generation gap, because Clay was an exception, one of the few teenagers in the group. It would be a long wait for the babies born during the trip and the ones being conceived and born now to mature.
Rodrick had liked Clay from the first time he ever saw the boy, when Clay had stood up to authority-after having had the guts to stow away-and said, flatly, that he would not let anyone do away with the small dog he'd smuggled aboard. Rodrick had watched Clay go through one of those growth spurts, and now he was man-tall, if still teenager thin. Rodrick felt a closeness to and a responsibility for all of the people of the colony, but he had a special interest in Clay. It had been almost like watching the son he did not yet have mature past childhood and childish things and begin to take on the appearance and, in Clay's case, some of the responsibilities, of manhood.
”Clay,” Rodrick said, ”have you given any thought to what place you'd like to have in our community?”
”Yes, sir. I've thought a lot about it,” Clay answered. ”People keep trying to pump science into my brain, but it doesn't seem to take. I do all right on mechanics and math, though, and I do love flying. I'd like to be a scout, sir.”
Rodrick smiled. ”You have a feel for it. You've got some time to make a final decision, and we're all going to have to be sort of jacks-of-all-trades for a while, but if that's what you want, I'll have Jack Purdy start you on some training.”
Clay said, beaming, ”Thank you, sir!”
”And if you ever have any problems, Clay, need someone to talk with, my door will always be open to you.”
”I appreciate that, sir.”
The scout streaked through the thin, upper air at three times the speed of sound. The jungle was below them, cut here and there by wide, lazy rivers.
When the scout blasted over one particular southerly flowing river, it was too high to be seen with the naked eye. At first Theresita Pulaski thought that the sound she heard was thunder, but it had been too sharp, too attenuated. The sky was clear. She leaped to her feet on her raft and shaded her eyes with one hand to scan the sky. She'd heard that sound too often to mistake it. There was an aircraft up there.
She was not, after all, alone.
”You! Whoever you are! I am here!” she shrieked, although she knew that her voice would not beheard.
Nothing was left of Theresita's uniform but the thickest seams of her tunic and the waistband of her skirt.
Her shoes were still wearable, and for that she was grateful. There was no reason to be modest, there on that great, brown jungle river, and there were times when she drifted totally in the nude, lying in the shade of her lean-to with her head cus.h.i.+oned on leaves.
Her thoughts and memories were her only company, and she'd taken to talking aloud. Somehow the sound of a human voice, even that of her own, did something to bring that green, damp, often roaring jungle down to manageable size.
She had not heard another aircraft. Several times she'd seen river dragons, as she had come to think of the huge underwater serpents. Once one had leaped after a fleeing fish quite close by the raft, close enough to splash her when it fell back with the fish in its mouth, but so far none of them had threatened her. And on sh.o.r.e one day, when she was experimenting with making clothing from the big, tough leaves of the low-growing plants of the jungle floor, she had witnessed a frightening battle between one of the tanklike tree crashers and a creature out of prehistory, a thing as huge and as deadly as tyrannosaurus rex himself. Although the battering creature knocked the bigger, taller, more agile creature off its feet several times, the outcome was preordained. The long neck of the killer would lance down, and sparks would actually fly as tooth met scale, but each tremendous blow of the huge head, driven by a thick, powerful neck, cost the tanklike creature scales and flesh until, finally, Theresita watched as the predator ripped and tore with tooth and claw to expose the white meat and eat a bathtub-sized portion, leaving the rest.
She ate some of the white meat herself and became violently ill, vomiting throughout the night as her raft drifted southward. She was weak and very thirsty the next morning. There were times, when she hadn't been able to steer the raft toward the bank, that she'd had to drink the river water, and although it had a muddy taste, it hadn't hurt her.
There was a sameness about her existence that gradually deadened her senses and drove her to spend the long, sweaty, steamy hours lying on her back and remembering every incident of her life, every conversation, every word. She would tell herself aloud that there was no way she could remember when she was four years old, back in Poland, but she did, and her memory was, at times, so accurate that she wondered if she were already insane. And then one morning she said, ”Theresita, there are low mountains off to the right.”
”It can't be,” she answered herself, ”I am actually dead, and have gone to h.e.l.l, the h.e.l.l of the Christians, perhaps.”
”Don't be an idiot, Theresita. Your eyes are not lying. The jungle rises there; you can see a horizon.
There, over the trees. Hills. Wooded, green, jungle still, but hills. And the river is moving faster, you've known that for days.”
And a day later: ”Theresita, the river is narrowing. The banks are high over there. Look, you can see mud and reddish earth where the bank has given way.”
The low mountains were closer. They paralleled the river to the west, and on a very clear day she thought she could see, far in the distance, mountains of great height. But then the inevitable, swift, hard-hitting thundershower blotted out her view and peppered her naked body with rain. She used the rain to wash, catching it in her hands, rubbing her bronzed body briskly. The character of the jungle itself was changing: The canopy was not as densely matted, and here and there a giant tree found freedom for its topmost branches and actually towered over the canopy. The showers that had kept her thoroughly wet for weeks and weeks had become much less frequent, and as the days pa.s.sed and the river ran between high banks covered with profuse growths of vines and flowers, she began to see trees along the bank. And it was not as hot. She knew that she had traveled an incredible distance, something on the order of three thousand miles on the river.
Another mighty river joined the one she'd come to think of as her own, and the stream widened again, so that in midcurrent, the banks were a full mile away on either side. She awoke one morning and was thrilled to see an area of lushly gra.s.sed plains studded with huge, spreading trees. Theresita began to use her sweeps to bring the raft to ground on a sandy beach, wanting to set foot on that gra.s.sy, beautiful land, to be able to walk for the first time in months without pus.h.i.+ng herself through rank undergrowth.
She wore only a skirted arrangement of big, flexible leaves and a halter strung from a length of raveled cloth, the last of the waistband of her skirt, hanging around her neck. The Slavic darkness of her skin had been baked by the sun into a golden, tawny brown.
”d.a.m.ned jungle,” she said, turning to look back up the river where, in the distance, the low-hanging clouds on the horizon spoke of the steaming, sweaty, always sodden h.e.l.l shed endured for so long.
”But what do we eat?” she asked herself.
The jungle's fruit and nuts had been her sustenance. They had made for a healthy diet, for she felt as fit as she had ever felt in her life, and the calisthenics she'd done during the long, boring hours on the raft had toned her muscles to an athletic hardness. She was as slim as a girl of eighteen, but with the flaring hips and b.r.e.a.s.t.s of a woman.
Dry! She was dry, and it felt wonderful. She walked a few hundred yards from the river through knee-deep, lush purplish-green gra.s.s. A small animal was startled out of a gra.s.sy nest at her feet and went leaping away on long rear legs, clearing the tall gra.s.s now and again to twist its rodentlike head to get its bearings. After her one attempt to eat flesh, the meat of the battering beast, she had no desire to try other animal flesh, but in the absence of the jungle fruit, she thought she might have no other option.
When she walked up a long slope, however, and gained the crest of the rise, she saw reddish-gold berries growing on low vines clinging to rocks. The berries were delicious. She cautiously ate a few and waited for some adverse reaction. When they did not make her ill, she gobbled double handfuls, then went back to the raft to st.i.tch together four of the large jungle leaves to form a carrier. She picked enough berries to last a couple of days and put them into the carrier.
The view from the ridge was pleasant. Rolling, gra.s.sy plains extended far and away toward the mountains in the distance, and there were definitely, on the far horizon, taller mountains with snow-covered peaks. To the east the view was of rolling plains.
Since she had no desire to spend the rest of her life alone in the jungle, Theresita had two choices: one, to stick with the river, which would have to run into an ocean somewhere, with sh.o.r.eline creatures and shallow waters; two, to strike out overland, either toward the mountains or the rolling plains. Since water was more regularly required than food for survival, she chose, quite naturally, to stick with the river.
The tall gra.s.s made her bed aboard the raft much more comfortable. She slept with the raft tied up to the bank and cast off next morning with her larder still stocked with the thin-sh.e.l.led nuts, a couple of fruits,and the carrier of berries. The river water was drinkable, even more so than back in the jungle-when she put her hand into the river now, she could see it through two feet of the clearer water.
Just in case she had to try animal flesh, she spent most of the day fas.h.i.+oning long throwing spears, using the battering beast's scales for the spearheads. She saw the first gra.s.s-eating animals that day, goat-sized antelopes with silver-colored horns. Late in the day, when she took advantage of having drifted near the sh.o.r.e to ground the raft and search for more berries, she witnessed a kill as tawny-green animals as big as any Earth lion brought down one of the steer-sized gra.s.s eaters within a hundred yards of the riverbank and hissed and spat at each other while they gorged on the meat. She cast off. She didn't want to have to face one of those predators, with their long legs, tufted ears, and enough stamina and speed to chase down the gra.s.s eater.
The next morning, two things awakened her. First, she had started conserving the few remaining nuts, so she was hungry. Second, there was a difference in the motion of the raft. The river had narrowed considerably, and the constricted flow pushed through with a speed that pleased her. She didn't know where she might be going, except possibly to the sea, but she'd been drifting at a snail's pace for so long that the new speed of the current excited her, gave her a feeling of being on the verge of something different. From being pleased, she quickly felt concerned. To the west, the mountains were nearer.
Weather on the planet would surely follow the rules. If, as she suspected, the clouds were bled of their moisture as they tried to cross that range of high mountains, the result would be semiarid or desert conditions. If there was a desert ahead of her, and if it extended even a fraction as far as the jungle had extended, she'd never survive crossing it unless she could find a source of food.
The current was moving even faster now, the banks constricted by the ridges to the south and rolling hills to the north. She couldn't work her way toward sh.o.r.e. Abruptly the river turned again, and the stream began to cut its way through ever more rocky and ever more arid land. It was growing late when she began to hear the sound of low thunder, steady, frightening, for she was caught by the swift current, unable to maneuver the clumsy raft to one bank or the other.
Steadily the low thunder grew louder, and she realized that the stream, less than a quarter of a mile wide, was rus.h.i.+ng through a gorge with barren, rocky cliffs rising fifty to a hundred feet on both sides.
”Well, Theresita,” she said, ”you're in for it. Nothing to do but ride it out.”
She took what precautions she could. She tied her ax, spear, and bow and arrows into a bundle and lashed it to her back with her remaining lengths of vine, then ate the last of the nutmeats and the berries.
No need to waste food if that thunder came from what she was afraid it was coming from.