Upon a Sea of Stars (73 page)

“You’d be surprised . . .” Grimes swore then, briefly and vividly. The sharp edge in the wickerwork of which the airship’s car was constructed had nicked his wrist quite painfully. He grunted, “But in fiction it’s usually much easier . . .”

He worked on, sawing away with his bound hands, even though his wrists were slippery with blood. He was afraid that one of the airship’s crew would come into the cabin to look at the prisoners, but the four Esquelians in the control room at the forward end of the gondola seemed fully occupied with navigation and, presumably, the two who were aft were devoting all their time to the engine of the thing.

Hell! That rope was tough—tougher than the edge against which he was rubbing it, tougher than his skin. Not being able to see what he was doing made it worse. He began to wonder if the first result that he would achieve would be the slitting of an artery. He had never heard of that happening to a fictional hero; but there has to be a first time for everything. Sonya whispered, very real concern in her voice, “John! You’re only hurting yourself! Stop it, before you do yourself some real damage!”

“It’s dogged as does it!” he replied.

“John! It’s not as though they’re going to kill us. We’re more value to them alive than dead!”

“Could be,” he admitted. “But I’ve heard too many stories about samples from the bodies of kidnap victims being sent to their potential ransomers to speed up negotiations. Our furry friends strike me as being just the kind of businessmen who’d stoop to such a practice!”

“After the way in which they slaughtered the crew of the steamboat,” put in Farrell, “I’m inclined to agree with the Commodore.”

“The vote is two against one,” said Grimes. And then the rope parted.

He brought his hands slowly round in front of him. There was a lamp in the cabin, a dim, incandescent bulb, and by its feeble light he could see that his wrists were in a mess. But the blood was dripping slowly, not spurting. He was in no immediate danger of bleeding to death. And he could work his fingers, although it seemed a long time before repeated flexings and wrigglings rendered them capable of use.

He started on the rope about his ankles then. He muttered something about Chinese bowlines, Portuguese pig knots and unseamanlike bastards in general. He complained, “I can’t find an end to work on.” Then, with an attempt at humor, “Somebody must have cut it off!”

“Talking of cutting . . .” Sonya’s voice had a sharp edge to it. “Talking of cutting, if you can get your paws on to the heel of one of my shoes . . .”

Yes, of course,
thought Grimes. Sonya was in uniform, and the uniform of a Survey Service officer contained quite a few concealed weapons. Sophisticated captors would soon have found these, but the Esquelians, to whom clothing was strange, had yet to learn the strange uses to which it could be put. Without overmuch contortion Grimes was able to get his hand around the heel of his wife’s left shoe. He twisted, pulled—and was armed with a short but useful knife. To slash through his remaining bonds was a matter of seconds.

The Esquelian came through into the cabin from forward just as Grimes was getting shakily to his feet. He was wearing a belt, and from this belt depended a holster. He was quick neither on the draw nor the uptake, but the Commodore was half crippled by impeded circulation to his ankles and feet. The native got his pistol—a clumsy revolver—out before Grimes was on him. He fired two shots, each of them too close for comfort, one of them almost parting the Commodore’s close-cropped hair.

Grimes’s intention—he told himself afterward—had been to disable only, to disarm. It was unfortunate, perhaps, that the airship at that moment dived steeply. The Earthman plunged forward in a staggering run, the knife held before him, stabbing deep into the furry chest. The Esquelian screamed shrilly as a disgustingly warm fluid gushed from his body over Grimes’s hands, tumbled to the deck. As he fell, Grimes snatched the pistol. He was more at home with firearms than with bladed weapons.

Surprisingly it fitted his hand as though made for him—but there is parallel evolution of artifacts as well as of life forms. Holding it, almost stumbling over the body of the dead native, Grimes continued his forward progress, coming into the control cabin. It was light in there, wide windows admitting the morning twilight. Gibbering, the three Esquelians deserted their controls. One of them had a pistol, the other two snatched knives from a handy rack. Grimes fired, coldly and deliberately. The one with the revolver was his first target, then the nearer of the knife wielders, then his mate. At this range, even with an unfamiliar weapon with a stiff action, a man who in his younger days had been a small arms specialist could hardly miss. Grimes did not, even though he had to shoot one of the airmen twice, even though the last convulsive stab of a broad-bladed knife missed his foot by a millimeter.

He did not know whether or not the gun that he had been using was empty; he did not bother to check. Stooping, he quickly snatched up the one dropped by the dead pilot. It had never been fired. He turned, ran back into the cabin. He was just in time. One of the engineers was just about to bring a heavy spanner crashing down on Sonya’s head but was thrown back by the heavy slug that smashed his own skull.

Saying nothing, Grimes carried on aft. The other engineer was dead already, killed by the first wild shot of the encounter. Grimes thought at first that the loud dripping noise was being made by his blood. But it was not. It came from the fuel tank, which had been pierced by a stray bullet. Before Grimes could do anything about it, the steam turbine ground to a halt.

The sun was up. It was a fine morning, calm insofar as those in the disabled airship were concerned, although the whitecaps on the sea were evidence of a strong breeze. To port was the coastline: rugged cliffs, orange beaches, blue-green vegetation inland, a sizable city far to the south’ard. It was receding quite rapidly as the aircraft, broadside on to the offshore wind, scudded to leeward.

The bodies of the airmen had been dragged into the cabin in which the Terrans had been imprisoned. Farrell and Sonya had wanted to throw them overside, but Grimes had talked them out of it. From his historical researches he knew something—not much, but something—about the handling of lighter-than-air flying machines. Until he had familiarized himself with the controls of this brute, he had no intention of dumping ballast.

He had succeeded in fixing the ship’s position. In the control room there was a binnacle, and there were sight vanes on the compass. There were charts, and presumably the one that had been in use at the time of the escape was the one that covered this section of coast. The compass was strange; it was divided into 400 degrees, not 360. The latitude and longitude divisions on the chart were strange, too, but it wasn’t hard to work out that the Esquelians worked on 100 minutes to a degree, 100 degrees to a right angle. There was a certain lack of logic involved—human beings, with their five-fingered hands, have a passion for reckoning things in twelves. The Esquelians, six-fingered, seemed to prefer reckoning by tens. Even so, compass, sight vanes and charts were a fine example of the parallel evolution of artifacts.

There was the compass rose, showing the variation (Grimes assumed) between True North and Magnetic North. There was that city to the south. There were two prominent mountain peaks, the mountains being shown by what were obviously contour lines. Grimes laid off his cross bearings, using a roller, ruler and a crayon. The cocked hat was a very small one. After fifteen minutes he did it again. The line between the two fixes coincided with the estimated wind direction. And where would that take them?

Transferring the position to a small scale chart presented no problems. Neither did extending the course line. The only trouble was that it missed the fly speck that represented Drarg Island by at least twenty miles, regarding one minute on the latitude scale as being a mile. Sonya, recruited in her linguistic capacity, confirmed that the (to Grimes) meaningless squiggles alongside the dot on the chart did translate to “Drarg.”

The trouble was that the unlucky shot that had immobilized the airship’s engines had also immobilized her generator. There were batteries—but they were flat. (During a revolution quite important matters tend to be neglected.) The radio telephone was, in consequence, quite useless. Had there been power it would have been possible to raise the party on the island, to get them to send the pinnace to pick them up when the aircraft was ditched, or, even, to tow them in.

“At least we’re drifting away from the land,” said Farrell, looking on the bright side. “I don’t think that we should be too popular if we came down ashore.” He added, rather petulantly, “Apart from anything else, my orders were that there was to be no intervention . . .” He implied that all the killing had been quite unnecessary.

“Self-defense,” Grimes told him. “Not intervention. But if you ever make it back to Lindisfame Base, James, you can tell the Admiral that it was the wicked Rim Worlders who played hell with a big stick.”

“We’re all in this, Commodore,” said Farrell stiffly. “And this expedition is under
my
command, after all.”

“This is no time for inessentials,” snapped Sonya. She straightened up from the chart, which she had been studying. “As I see it, they’ll sight us from the island, and assume that we’re just one of the rebel patrol craft. They might try to intercept us, trying to find out what’s happened to us. On the other hand . . .”

“On the other hand,” contributed Farrell, “my bright Exec does everything by the book. He’ll insist on getting direct orders from Lindisfarne before he does
anything
.”

“How does this thing work?” asked Sonya. “Can you
do
anything, John? The way that you were talking earlier you conveyed the impression that you knew something about airships.”

Grimes prowled through the control compartment like a big cat in a small cupboard. He complained, “If I had power, I could get someplace. This wheel here, abaft the binnacle, is obviously for steering. This other wheel, with what looks like a crude altimeter above it, will be for the altitude coxswain. The first actuates a vertical steering surface, the rudder. The second actuates the horizontal control surfaces, for aerodynamic lift. . .”

“I thought that in an airship you dumped ballast or valved gas if you wanted to go up or down, “said Sonya.

“You can do that, too.” Grimes indicated toggled cords that ran down into the control room from above. “These, I
think
, open valves if you pull them. So we can come down.” He added grimly, “And we’ve plenty of ballast to throw out if we want to get upstairs in a hurry.”

“Then what’s all the bellyaching about?” asked Farrell. “We can control our altitude by either of two ways, and we can steer. If the rudder’s not working we can soon fix it.”

Grimes looked at him coldly. “Commander Farrell,” he said at last, “there is one helluva difference between a free balloon and a dirigible balloon. This brute, with no propulsive power, is a free balloon.” He paused while he sought for and found an analogy. “She’s like a surface ship, broken down, drifting wherever wind and current take her. The surface ship is part of the current if she has neither sails nor engines. A balloon is part of the wind. We can wiggle our rudder as much as we like and it will have no effect whatsoever . . .” Once again he tried to find a seamanlike analogy—and found something more important. He whispered, “Riverhead . . .”

“Riverhead?”
echoed Farrell. “What’s that, Commodore?”

“Shut up, James,” murmured Sonya. “Let the man think.”

Grimes was thinking, and remembering. During his spell of command of
Sonya Winneck
, on Aquarius, he had been faced with an occasional knotty problem. One such had been the delivery of a consignment of earth-moving machinery to Riverhead, a new port miles inland—equipment which was to be used for the excavation of a swinging basin off the wharfage. The channel was deep enough—but at its upper end it was not as wide as
Sonya Winneck
was long. However, everything had been arranged nicely. Grimes was to come alongside, discharge his cargo and then, with the aid of a tug, proceed stern first down river until he had room to swing in Carradine’s Reach. Unfortunately the tug had suffered a major breakdown so that
Sonya Winneck
, if she waited for the repairs to be completed, would be at least ten days, idle, alongside at the new wharf.

Grimes had decided not to wait and had successfully dredged down river on the ebb.

He said slowly, “Yes, I think we could dredge . . .”

“Dredge?”
asked Farrell.

Grimes decided that he would explain. People obey orders much more cheerfully when they know that what they are being told to do makes sense. He said, “Yes, I’ve done it before, but in a surface ship. I had to proceed five miles down a narrow channel, stern first . . .”

“But you had engines?”

“Yes, I had engines, but I didn’t use them. I couldn’t use them. Very few surface ships, only specialized vessels, will steer when going astern. The rudder, you see, must be in the screw race. Y’ou must have that motion of water past and around the rudder from forward to aft . . .

“The dredging technique is simple enough. You put an anchor on the bottom, not enough chain out so that it holds, but just enough so that it acts as a drag, keeping your head up into the current. You’re still drifting
with
the current, of course, but not as fast. So the water is sliding past your rudder in the right direction, from forward, so you can steer after a fashion.”

“It works?”

“Yes,” said Sonya. “It works all right But with all the ear bashing I got before and after I was inclined to think that John was the only man who’d ever made it work.”

“You can do it here?” asked Farrell.

“I think so. It’s worth trying.”

The hand winch was aft, in the engine compartment. To dismount it would have taken too much time, so Grimes had the rope fall run off it, brought forward and coiled down in the control room. To its end he made fast four large canvas buckets; what they had been used for he did not know, nor ever did know, but they formed an ideal drogue. Farrell, using the spanner that had been the dead engineer’s weapon, smashed outward the forward window. It was glass, and not heavy enough to offer much resistance. Grimes told him to make sure that there were no jagged pieces left on the sill to cut the dragline. Then, carefully, he lowered his cluster of buckets down toward the water. The line was not long enough to reach.