Polymath (12 page)

“I think they were downright stupid,” Baffin said. “In fact I told them so. I mean, if they were afraid to put down anywhere but on bare ground, they might at least have picked a smooth patch of desert somewhere, with a good clean aquifer under it. It was courting disaster to choose a little rocky plateau so far above sea level.”

Aggereth stood up, shrugging into his pack. He said harshly, “It’s a bit academic, isn’t it? Talking about the rights and wrongs of their decision, I mean! After all, we’re on our way to rob their grave.”

“You’re right,” Lex agreed. “OK, let’s move.”

Through the enclosing tunnel of vegetation they moved steadily onward. Lex frowned on seeing how dense the plants were right to the bank and overhanging it. He had allowed an extra day for the return trip, but it was beginning to look as though that had been a grave under-estimate. Either they’d have to be content with a mere inspection of the other party’s site, instead of a thorough search for salvageable items, or they’d have to stretch out
their rations for the additional day. Coming back they would not be climbing as they were now—they had reached steeper going—but traveling downhill would be no advantage if they were forced to chop a path at every step.

Animals moved in the undergrowth; occasionally things moved on branches spanning the river, with a scratching of clawed feet. Once flicked up his gun and let go a single flaming bolt, and a creature with six symmetrically distributed legs and a pincushion body fell ahead of them. From the middle of its underside hung a long elastic tentacle tipped with a gummy ball. Lodette confirmed his spur-of-the-moment deduction that it must be a snare for prey, though she doubted whether it would harm a man unless the sticky ball was poisonous. No one was inclined to put that to the test.

They had agreed to make the best possible distance this first day. Accordingly they did not halt promptly at sun-set, but continued with handlights. But the strain of scrambling over the loose rock that here filled the river-bed, often climbing more than walking, grew too much.

“Enough’s enough,” Lex said finally. “Let’s clear a campsite, shall we? This looks like as good a spot as any. Baffin, burn the vegetation back a bit. The rest of you stand aside—we don’t want to scorch you.”

The others obeyed. With scything blasts of their guns Lex and Baffin shriveled the cover for a distance of fifty yards on all sides. The stench was foul, but lasted only a few minutes.

They made a fire of dry roots and heated soup to drink, then worked out a watch-rota and settled, exhausted, on their bedrolls. Except for an occasional animal cry, it was very quiet. Lex, who had ceded the first watch to Minty, thought as he lay down that one might almost call it peaceful.

But suddenly Minty let out an exclamation. Roused from the brink of slumber, everyone sat up in alarm.

“Water!” she cried, playing her handlight on the ground. “Look!”

Brownish trickles were coursing over the pebbles and mud. Aggereth climbed feverishly to his feet.

“If that’s the river coming back, we have to get out of here fast! We might drown!”

“But it’s not, and we won’t,” Lex said, after a careful study of the flow. “It’s the first effects of that storm ahead.

We’ll be OK so long as we don’t lie down on the lowest parts of the riverbed, even if they are the smoothest.”

With a snort of annoyance Lodette, who had picked a flat expanse of dried mud that must have represented the site of a late puddle, moved her gear to a safer spot.

“Think I should contact Elbing?” Aykin said. “So they’re ready for this when it reaches them? A little rainwater would be better than nothing.”

Lex shook his head. “It won’t get as far as the coast. It’ll be absorbed by the dry ground.”

“Are you sure?”

On the point of saying—snappishly because he was tired—“Of course I am!” Lex hesitated. With a stir of surprise he realized:
Yes, I am sure. Because I’m beginning to get the feel of this planet. Like that creature with the sticky ball underneath. I never saw anything like it before. But I knew somehow what it had to be
.

Amazing. He gave Aykin a crooked grin. “Yes, because if I wasn’t I’d move my bed, wouldn’t I? Now get some rest.”

He was right. By morning only a few damp patches acknowledged the rain as they continued doggedly upriver. Now it was definitely “up”; they came to long rapids and little sharp falls, and they began to see clear sky overhead for a hundred yards at a time as the vegetation thinned. While breakfasting they had spoken with Elbing, who told them Jerode had intended to talk to them this morning but was still asleep after a disturbed night. Ornelle had had another bout of hysteria, and someone in the single women’s house had filled Delvia’s bed with blisterweed, causing a tremendous row.

It took one person to set the example, Lex thought as he picked his way over treacherous pebbles, and there they all were behaving like children. Damn Naline!

At midday they were in striking distance of their goal. They occasionally glimpsed the highest rocks in the neighborhood of the plateau, and once Lex saw a gleam of sunlight reflected on what might—or might not—be the hull of the starship. But they had not yet come to the blockage in the river, and everyone was now staring ahead, rather than looking constantly to all sides, as though expecting momently to see the dam. He had to remind them to keep up a proper lookout.

Then he sighted a flat-topped boulder, almost cubical
and thirty feet on a side, half sunk in the soft ground at a bend. It would make a good place to break for the noon rest. Gratefully everyone scrambled up the smaller rocks around it to lay their burdens down on its flat top.

Aykin rigged the radio. Munching his ration of synthesizer cake, Lex heard Elbing acknowledge the call through the usual daytime mush of solar static, and ask for him because Jerode wanted to have a word.

“Doc,” Lex said, “how are things going?”

“Badly,” was the short reply. “Have you located that landslide yet? It’s hot again down here today, and we need that water back urgently. The stink of our sewage alone is enough to drive you crazy.”

“No, we haven’t found it,” Lex admitted wryly. “And we’re almost in sight of the plateau. It must be right up where we suspected, close to the other landing-site. We may reach the place this afternoon if all goes well, but it may not be until tomorrow that we can tackle the blockage.”

“Do your utmost,” Jerode said. “Lack of water is just compounding a situation that’s explosive enough without it. I’ve saved the sight of Naline’s right eye, but her left needs a new cornea and I can’t do anything about it with the resources I have. Should have started an organ-bank last winter instead of burying our bodies intact, I guess, but there was just so damned much else to do…. Did Elbing tell you what happened to Delvia last night?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’m inclined to accept Delvia’s version of the background, but the fact stands, most of the other women are hostile to her, and Nanseltine came to me this morning all puffed up because a gang of them appealed to him to get her put on trial. I’ve no idea what sort of offense she could be charged with—I don’t think there’s one in the Unified Galactic Code—but that won’t stop them. They’ll invent something.” Disgust clearly came over in his voice, despite the interference. “And of course too damned many people are standing around wringing their hands. The whole of Cheffy’s crew, to start with.”

Lex bit his lip. He saw Baffin frown, and Minty and Aykin exchange worried glances. On the off-chance that they might have constructive ideas, he looked an invitation at them.

“That Manager Nanseltine!” said Minty, and spat over the edge of the rock on which they were grouped.

“Not so much him as his wife,” Zanice corrected in her quiet voice. “I know. The doc has sent me around to answer their calls—for a scratched finger or a bruised shin, they take to their beds, and they think every little headache is due to some fatal disease. I’ve seen how their setup operates. If there was any hope of getting them involved in something that useful, I’d say Lex should recruit them to his salvage team and quietly tip the boat over a mile from shore.”

Baffin chuckled.

“No suggestions from this end, Doc,” Lex said to the radio. “We’ll just go find that blockage and let you know how soon the flow is likely to resume. OK?”

“Make it soon, please. Someone will be standing by here night and day.” A pause; then, faintly as though picked up by accident, “What does
he
want?… Oh, tell him I’ll be out in a moment!”

A sigh, and more loudly: “Lex, Rothers is after me now. I’ll have to go. Do your best for all our sakes, and get back as quickly as you can.”

They were very silent as they finished their food and gathered their equipment to move on. The blue-white sunlight felt suddenly oppressive and cold.

Baffin was leading on the next stretch, with Lex bringing up the rear. Now the vegetation had thinned to mere scrub, there was less need for watchfulness, but they could progress no faster because every few hundred yards was a dry falls, a wall of friable rock six, ten, or twenty feet high, up which they had to clamber on exiguous toeholds.

Encountering one of these, about eight feet high, Baffin prepared to do as usual. He poised himself before it, flexed his lean legs, and sprang up to get his arms and the upper part of his body over the brow. He hung there for a second, staring at something out of sight of the rest of the party, and then instead of levering himself up and over he fell back with a gasp.

“What is it?” Lex snapped.

“We’ve found our blockage all right,” Baffin said, wiping his forehead. “Take a look for yourself.”

Lex pulled himself up the rocks, swung his legs to the higher level, and stood up. Shading his eyes, he stared at what had so astonished Baffin. From here on, the river’s course was straight toward the crags that fringed
the plateau. A couple of hundred yards ahead, just about where he had imagined a landslide might occur, there was a wall. It not only blocked the riverbed, but extended a considerable distance either side, joining with natural slopes to form a continuous barrier. At its foot were highpiled heavy rocks; at intervals it was braced by wooden posts, and between the latter were what Lex judged to be hurdles of woven branches made watertight by plastering them with leaves and clay.

He was still gazing at it when Baffin scrambled up beside him and turned to help the others follow.

“What is it?” Minty called from below.

“It’s a dam,” Lex said harshly. He went on studying it. At the sides of the riverbed there were two extra-sturdy posts, and the hurdles between them seemed not to be fixed in place, but only lashed, so that they constituted a makeshift sluice-gate.

But—! He took a pace forward out of sheer surprise. A glance to right and left showed him the approximate level the pent-up water would eventually reach. Making the most generous possible allowance for the strength of those posts and hurdles, this dam was simply not going to last!

Now they were all up beside him, exclaiming in amazement. Aykin was putting their common thought into words when the soft-spoken interruption came.

“This thing is man-made! That means—”

“Stand quite still, all of you.”

They froze. From among the rocks where he had been crouching a man in a tattered gray shirt and brown breeches rose into view. He was burned teak-brown by the sun and his eyes were narrowed against the glare. But he held an energy gun, and it didn’t waver.

“We were expecting you,” he said conversationally. “Been monitoring your radio as you came upriver. All right, go and take their guns!” he added more loudly, and other men as sunburned as he emerged from their hiding-places.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Baffin burst out. “You don’t have any right to hold us up like—like robbers!”

“You weren’t going to break down our dam?” the man said. “You weren’t going to take away our chief natural resource?”

“Do as he says, Baffin,” Lex ordered. He tossed his own gun to the ground.

“But—!”

“Do as he says,” Lex repeated firmly. Fuming, they complied.

“Very sensible,” the first of the ambushers approved. To his companions he rapped, “Hurry up, there!”

“I believe we met last year,” Lex went on. “Cardevant—isn’t that your name?”

“Correct.” The sunburned man peered at him. “Oh, yes. I recall you came up with Captain Arbogast. Tried to talk us into going along with your defeatist policy, abandon everything up here and taking orders from you instead. I seem to recognize that man next to you, too.” He gave a sour grin and holstered his gun; his companions were now in possession of all the newcomers’ weapons.

“What do you think of it, hm?” he added, jerking his thumb at the dam. “Isn’t that something? That’s our reservoir, back of there!”

“Calling us robbers!” Minty cried. “When you’ve stolen our whole river from us!”

“Oh, you can have the spillage back when the reservoir is full.”

“Sooner than that,” Lex said calmly.

“Oh, you’re very cocksure, aren’t you? It’ll be a long time, I tell you.” He laughed. “And like I said, we’ve been listening to your base calling up. Just a short while back, didn’t your doctor complain your sewage is stinking?”

“What’s that got to do with it? The water will come back to us of its own accord. I’d say—hmm…. Well, I’d need to see the other side of the dam to be sure, but I estimate it’ll break in three days, maybe less.”

As though he had been struck in the belly, Cardevant snapped his teeth together and drew his breath in with a hiss. “You cheap little defeatist bastard! I’m not going to stand here listening to your sneers!”

He whirled, gesturing to his companions. “Get them moving!” he barked. “Take ’em up and show ‘em to Captain Gomes!”

By the time they were hustled in front of Captain Gomes Lex was feeling actually ill. The amount of effort that had been expended here was unbelievable. And the decision to expend it was incontestably insane.

The river, whose source was among the unexplored mountains beyond this plateau, was now flooding into the basin behind the dam. It was plain how it had been built. The sides had been erected first, then piles of rocks had been dropped into the water for the builders to stand on while they drove the uprights, and then the hurdles had been lowered into place, lashed, finally coated with mud and leaves. It must have taken the combined labor of a hundred or more people working like slaves to erect such a large structure in so short a time. And it was definitely going to fail soon.