The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (77 page)

Caroline carefully inventoried the ship while her sunburn healed. It would take a lot of planning and a lot of time to do what she had to do; it would probably take years. But she didn't have any shortage of
those
.
She knew small boats could be sailed great distances; several folks had crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in tiny yachts no more than three or four meters in length. But those craft were heavy for their size and would need to be built where they could be launched. Whatever she built she would have to carry the pieces through the ship and somehow assemble them in one of the areas where a crack gave access to the sea.
She could build a raft, but she needed something that could be sailed or rowed with little effort. She figured that if she could manage to average ten kilometers per hour, it would take her about two years if the planet was comparable in size to the Earth.
There was a surprising abundance of raw materials. Besides the huge larder, there were workshops and batteries and motors and one room completely filled with empty cylinders which would make admirable floats. There were six space suits. There were tubes of goop which turned out to be some kind of super adhesive. There were saws and drills which ran without apparent power sources and never seemed to get weak. There were all sorts of electrical test equipment and measuring devices.
Caroline could imagine how a lot of this stuff would be used to repair the computer in the middle of the ship, but that wasn't her plan. She kept coming back to the empty cylinders, which were each about a meter in diameter and about a meter long. They were heavy, but she could handle them with some difficulty. They were big and they floated; she had to figure out how to use them.
But a simple raft wouldn't cut it. She couldn't trust the super power packs to last long enough to propel her across an entire world, and she couldn't row or sail a raft.
She found a small handheld device which proved to be an incredibly efficient welding machine.
She thought about it for weeks, and finally came up with a way to do it. She would build an outrigger canoe.

The easiest place to build and launch her boat turned out to be the room where she had first entered the ship. Working steadily, she hustled the big cylinders down there. She would alternate them, sealed floats with cylinders that had been cut to make storage compartments, until the craft was nearly twenty meters long. Then it would be quite heavy, but she would build it in the water. She found chain and simply moored the incomplete portion of her boat to the spaceship.
Cutting and pounding and re-welding, she formed two cylinders into tapered cones for the bow and stern so her boat would slip easily through the water. She made the outrigger from a single piece of ten-centimeter diameter pipe. Because of its length, she couldn't carry it through the ship; she had to seal it off where she found it and drop it into the sea from a height of nearly thirty meters. Then she had to dive in after it, and guide it back to the construction area from the outside. She was careful to make sure she did this just after sunset, so she wouldn't be caught out in the open. Her sunburn still hadn't completely healed.
In the center of her boat she included three half-cylinders where she would sit and row. Behind these she attached the mast. She had found sail material, some kind of tough plastic sheet that didn't deteriorate even when she left a piece of it hanging outside during the brief day. She had to cut it with the same machine that she used on the metal cylinders.
She cut the Captain's chair loose and mounted it in her open cockpit. She mounted an arrangement of movable shades which she could quickly hinge up and hide behind when the Sun was up. She fabricated long oars and welded them onto hinged oarlocks so she could not lose them -- they were metal and would not float. She paid a lot of attention to the handles of these oars and the comfort of her seat. She would spend a lot of time working them.
One of the most difficult tasks was attaching the outrigger and its spars to the main hull. This had to be done outside, and was really a two-person job at minimum. The Sun nearly caught her unfinished, but she made it with bare minutes to spare. The next day she began stocking the compartments with food -- enough food for two years -- and tools, including the welder and cutter, and cable to rig the sail, and many other things which she had carefully thought out. Fully provisioned, she calculated that the boat must weigh a couple of metric tons.
But that didn't matter. Once it was moving, it would glide easily through the water even on its one-woman-power propulsion system.
Finally, eighty-six days after she entered the dark ship, she prepared to leave it. She would conduct one circuit of the island, pacing herself, and also conducting an important measurement. As she sailed off, she noted how much of the ship remained visible compared to how much of the mesa remained visible at various distances. Calculating carefully in her head, she determined that her journey would be about six thousand kilometers. Lawrence's planet was quite a bit smaller than the Earth.
Then she pointed the bow north and began to row.