The Dark Design (29 page)

“So I sure as hell don’t want to tell you to turn right and have you think I’m telling you to spin her and catch me off guard. You could have us twenty feet deep in the ground before I could take to the ’chute! Okay, what is the matter with your ears?”

“I don’t know,” Peter said miserably. “Maybe it’s wax. Wax builds up in my ears. It’s a family trait, sir. I have to have the wax blown out every six months.”

“I’ll blow out more than wax out of another place than your ears, mister! Didn’t the doctor check out your ears? Sure he did! So don’t tell me it’s wax! You just don’t want to hear me! And why? God knows why! Or maybe you hate me so much you don’t care if you die just so you take me with you? Is that it?”

Peter would not have been surprised to see the lieutenant foaming at the mouth.

“No, sir.”

“No, sir, what?”

“No, sir, to any of that.”

“You mean you’re denying everything? You did turn left when I said turn right, didn’t you? Don’t tell me I’m a liar!”

“No, sir.”

The lieutenant paused, then said, “Why are you smiling, Frigate?”

“I didn’t know I was,” Peter said. That was true. He was really in mental and physical distress. So why had he smiled?

“You’re crazy, Frigate!” the lieutenant shouted. A captain, standing behind him, frowned. But he made no move to interfere.

“I don’t want to see you again, Frigate, until you have a written testimonial from a doctor that your ears are okay. Do you hear that?”

Peter nodded.

“Yes, sir, I hear you.”

“You’re grounded until I get that report. But I want it at flight time, tomorrow, when I take you up again, God help me!”

“Yes, sir,” Peter said and almost saluted. That would have been another excuse for the instructor to ream him out. Saluting was not done in the flight room.

He looked back as he checked in his parachute. The captain and the lieutenant were talking earnestly. What were they saying about him? That he ought to be washed out?

Maybe he should be. He really couldn’t hear his instructor. Only half of the lieutenant’s frenzied gabble came through intelligibly on the tubes. It wasn’t because of wax. Or the high altitude. Or anything physically wrong with his hearing.

It would be years later before he knew that he just did not want to hear the lieutenant.

“He was right,” Peter said.

“Who was right?” Eve said. She was sitting up in bed, leaning on one arm, looking down at him. Her body was covered with thick varicolored towels tabbed together, and the hood still shrouded her face.

Peter sat up and stretched. The inside of the hut was dark; the drums and bugles along the bank sounded faintly. Nearby, a neighbor was banging on his fish-skin-and-bamboo drum as if he were trying to wake up the whole world.

“Nothing.”

“You were groaning and mumbling.”

“Earth is always with us,” he said, and he left her to figure that out for herself. With him he took the thunder mug to the neighborhood deposit hut which was about a hundred paces away. There he greeted a score of men and women, all on the same task. They dumped the contents of the pots into a large bamboo wagon. After breakfast, this would be hauled out of the building by a team of men into the foothills to the base of a mountain. There the excrement would be treated to make potassium for black gunpowder. Frigate worked two days a month there and four days on the sentinel towers.

A grailstone was just on the other side of the hill on which their hut stood. Usually, he and Eve took their grails to it. This morning, however, he wanted to talk to the crew of the boat that had arrived during the night. Eve would not object if he went by himself, since she had to finish stringing necklaces of hornfish vertebrae, varicolored helical bones in demand as ornaments. She and Frigate traded them for tobacco and liquor and flints. Frigate also made boomerangs and, occasionally, dugouts and canoes.

Frigate carried his grail with his left hand and his yew-wood flint-tipped spear in the other. A fish-skin belt around his waist held a sheath containing a chert axe. A quiver of arrows, flint tipped and fletched with thin, carved bones, was slung over one shoulder. A bow of yew, wrapped in bamboo paper, was strapped to the quiver to protect it from the early-morning moisture.

The little state of which he was a citizen, Ruritania, was not at war or under threat of war. The law requiring that all have their weapons handy was a hangover from the old days of turbulence. Obsolete laws had almost as hard a time dying here as on Earth. Social inertia was everywhere, though its resistance to change varied from state to state.

Frigate walked among the huts spread out over the plain. Hundreds, covered like him from foot to head against the chill, joined him. About a half-hour after the sun rose, they began to shed their cloths. While eating breakfast, Frigate looked for new faces. There were fifteen, all from the newly arrived schooner, the
Razzle Dazzle.
They sat in a group, eating and talking to those interested in the newcomers. Peter sat down by them to watch and listen.

The captain, Martin Farrington, also known as the Frisco Kid, was a muscular man of medium height. His handsome face looked Irish. His hair was reddish-bronze and curly; his eyes, large and deep blue; his chin, strong. He talked energetically, smiling often, cracking jokes. His Esperanto was fluent but not perfect, and it was evident that he preferred English.

The first mate, Tom Rider, also known as Tex, stood about 5.08 centimeters or 2 inches shorter than Frigate’s 1.8 meters or 6 feet.

He was what the pulp magazine writers of Frigate’s youth called “ruggedly handsome.” Not as muscular as the captain, he moved quickly though gracefully with a confidence that Frigate envied. His dark hair was straight and if his tanned skin had been two shades browner, he could have passed for an Onondaga Indian. His Esperanto was perfect, but, like Farrington, he was pleased to find some English-speakers in the crowd. His voice was a pleasant baritone which combined a Southwestern drawl with a Midwestern pronunciation.

Frigate learned much about the crew just by listening to their uninhibited account of themselves. They were the usual motley collection met on the larger boats that wandered up and down The River. The captain’s woman was a nineteenth-century South American Caucasian; the first mate’s, a citizen of the Roman city of Aphrodita of the second century
A.D.
Frigate remembered that its ruins had been discovered by archaeologists in Turkey sometime around the 1970s.

Two of the crew were Arabs. One was Nur el-Musafir (The Traveler). The other had been the wife of a captain of a South Arabian ship which had traded with the southwest African empire of Monomotapa in the twelfth century
A.D.

The Chinese crewman had ended his Earthly life by drowning when Kubla Khan’s invasion fleet was destroyed by a storm en route to Japan.

There were two eighteenth-centurians, Edmund Tresillian, a Cornishman who lost a leg in 1759 during the capture of Hood’s
Vestal
of the French
Bellona
off Cape Finisterre. Pensionless, and with a wife and seven children, he was reduced to begging. Caught stealing a purse, he died in prison of a fever while waiting for his trial. The second man, “Red” Cozens, had been a midshipman on the
Wager,
a rebuilt Indiaman merchant accompanying Admiral Anson’s flotilla on its voyage around the world. It had been wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. After innumerable sufferings and hardships, part of its crew had gotten to civilization, where the Spanish government of Chile imprisoned them for a while. However, poor Cozens had been shot and killed by a Captain Cheap a few days after the wreck in the mistaken belief that he was a mutineer.

John Byron, the poet’s grandfather, also a midshipman then, had criticized Cheap for this in
The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron (Commodore in a Late EXPEDITION round the WORLD) Containing An Account of the Great Distresses Suffered by Himself and His Companions on the Coast of Patagonia, from the Year 1740, till their Arrival in England, 1746
, etc., London, 1768.

Frigate had owned a first edition of this book, in which he had found a description of an animal encountered by Byron which had to be a giant sloth.

He would have liked to have run across Byron. The little man had to have been incredibly tough to survive his experiences. Later, he had become an admiral, nicknamed “Foul Weather Jack” by his sailors. Just about every time he put out to sea, his fleet was hit by a bad storm.

Other interesting crew members were a late-twentieth-century Rhode Island millionaire and yachtsman; an eighteenth-century Turk, a bos’n’s mate who had died of syphilis, a common sailor’s disease then; and Abigail Rice, Earthly wife of an early-nineteenth-century second mate on a New Bedford whaler. Binns, the yachtsman, and Mustafa, the Turk, were obviously in love with each other.

As Peter would find out later, Cozens, Tresillian, and Chang shared Abigail Rice. This made Frigate wonder what she had been doing while her husband was spending two or three years chasing whales. Perhaps nothing she shouldn’t have been doing. Perhaps she had been so sexually starved on Earth that she had exploded here.

And then there was Umslopogaas. Pogaas for short. He was a Swazi, son of a king of that South African nation which had been enemies of the great Zulu people. He had lived during the expansion of the British and the Boers and the conquests of the bloody military genius, Shaka. On Earth, he had killed twelve warriors in duels; here, at least fifty.

He would have been unnoticed by history, despite his fighting prowess, if he had not happened to be attached in his old age to the mission of Sir Theophilus Shepstone. With Shepstone was a young man, H. Rider Haggard, who had been much attracted by the stately figure and the tall stories of the old Swazi. Haggard was to immortalize Umslopogaas in three novels,
Nada the Lily, She and Allen,
and
Allan Quatermain.
However, he made the Swazi a Zulu, which must have disturbed his model.

Now Pogaas lounged near the ship, leaning on a long-handled war-axe of flint. He was tall and slim and his legs were extraordinarily long. His features were not Negroid but Hamitic, thin lipped, hawk nosed, and high cheekboned. He seemed friendly enough, but there was something about his bearing that told all but the most insensitive that he was not to be trifled with. He was also the only person on the crew who did not help handle the ship. His specialty was fighting.

Frigate was tickled pink when he discovered the identity of this man. Imagine that! Umslopogaas!

After talking to various crew members, Frigate went back to a spot near the two officers. From what he heard, they were in no hurry to get to any particular place. The captain did, however, comment that he would like to get to the headwaters of The River someday. Which was, to say, in a hundred years or so.

Frigate finally spoke up, asking the captain and Rider about their Terrestrial origins. Farrington said he’d been born in California, but he gave no birthdate or place. Rider said he’d been born in Pennsylvania in 1880. Yes, he had spent a lot of time, most of his life, in fact, in the West.

Frigate swore softly. He had thought the two looked familiar. However, they wore their hair longer than on Earth and the lack of Terrestrial clothes gave them a different appearance. What Rider needed was a big white ten-gallon hat and a flashy pseudo-Western coat and breeches and a pair of ornamented cowboy’s boots. And a horse to sit upon.

As a child, Frigate had seen him in just such garments and on a horse. That had been during a parade preceding a circus—Sells and Floto? Never mind. Frigate had stood with his father on Adams Street, just south of the courthouse, and waited eagerly for his favorite Western film hero to ride by. And so the hero had, but, being drunk, he had fallen off his horse. Unhurt, he had swung into the saddle again, riding off to the mingled laughter and cheers of the crowd. He must have sobered up after that, for he gave a great demonstration of riding and roping in the Wild West Show following the main events.

At that time, Frigate regarded drunkards as moral lepers and thus should have been completely disillusioned about Rider. But his worship of Rider was so intense that he was willing to forgive him. What a little prig he’d been!

Frigate was well acquainted with Farrington’s portrait since he’d seen it so many times in biographies and on the back of dust jackets. Frigate had begun reading his works at the age of ten, and when he was fifty-seven he had contributed a foreword to a collection of Farrington’s fantasies and science fiction.

For some reason, both his heroes were traveling under false names. He, Peter Frigate, was not going to expose them—not unless he had to. No, he wouldn’t do it even then, but if he were forced to threaten them with exposure, he would do so. He’d do almost anything to get aboard the
Razzle Dazzle.

After a while, the Frisco Kid announced that he and Tex would now interview anyone who’d like to sign on as a deckhand. Two folding chairs were set upon the end of the dock, and the “employment” line formed in front of the seated officers. Frigate immediately got into the line. Three men and a woman were ahead of him. This gave him a chance to listen to the questioning and to decide what he would tell his prospective employers.