be!”
“We were startin’ to wonder…” Gilbert said.
Chapelle gave him a warning look.
“You have my most sincere apologies, Mr. Laaney,” Lieutenant Bekiaa-Sab-At said. “We watched them as closely as we could, but we only saw the eyes above water that they let us see. We had no idea any were that close to you. You continued to work, so we assumed you were safe.”
Laney snatched Gilbert’s tobacco pouch and furrowed his brow. “That’s the weird thing,” he said. “First one o’ them buggers came driftin’ into view, why, I was tempted to be a touch nervous. I hollered some, but I knew you’d never hear me over the compressor, so I waved the torch at ’em a little. They stopped, but didn’t go away.”
“There more than one?” Moe asked in his clipped English. He’d joined the group, as had half the crew who’d been working nearby.
Suddenly conscious that he was the center of attention, Laney nodded grandly. “D’rectly, there was swarms of ’em, just floatin’ around me!”
“Why didn’t you yank on your line?” asked Ben Mallory, who’d been drawn from his inspection of one of the damaged aircraft crates, aft.
“Yeah!” chorused others.
“We’d have pulled you up,” assured Monk, looking at Gilbert.
“Well… that’s the weird part. There they was, an’ there I was, just lookin’ at each other. Ugly bastards too, bobbin’ there in the gloom. God knows what they thought o’ me in the suit. Anyway, when they didn’t eat me right off, I… I just got this funny feelin’ they weren’t going to. Don’t know why.” The suit was off his shoulders now, exposing his wet, hairy chest. He shrugged. “Maybe it was sorta like when a dog comes runnin’ up to you. Sometimes you can just tell if he wants you to pet him or if he wants to eat yer hand.”
“No dog’d ever bite you, Laney,” Gilbert jabbed. “Might as well chew arsenic.”
Laney rolled his eyes. “Two words, two syllables, mouse brain: Piss. Off.” He looked at Chapelle. “So I went back to work. I guess, compared to them flashies that nearly got me that time, I got this feelin ’ these critters could Think, you know? After that, it came to me that they could’a ate me before I ever even saw ’em, so they must’a decided not to.” He shook his head. “Then came the weird part.”
“You just said the other part was the weird part,” Isak said accusingly.
Laney scowled. “It was, goddamn it! I’m tellin’ this, so shove off! It was all weird, but it got even weirder, see? There I was, surrounded by giant ‘toady-gators.’… Hey, that sounds pretty good! Toady-gators! Anyway, still surrounded by toady-gators, I finished up that second plate and signaled for you to move me an’ lower down the last one…” He stopped and glared at Isak again. “It just hit me. You did hear That signal!”
“That time it made sense,” Isak replied defensively. “You used the signal you said you’d use. The first time I figgered you was bangin’ on barnacles ’er somethin’.”
“I just said there weren’t any barnacles!”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Chief Laney-” Chapelle prodded.
“Yeah, well, I was havin’ some trouble with that last plate. The curve was pretty good,” he said, complimenting the ’Cats who’d formed it, “but it wanted to hang sorta bad. I couldn’t tack the top and hold it against the bottom, if you know what I mean. Needed two fellas down there.”
“Only the one suit,” Chapelle reminded him.
“I know. But it was okay! Them toads must’a figgered out what I was tryin’ ta do, and seen I couldn’t do it by myself!” He stopped and shook his head again. “Couple of ’em helped me! Damned if they didn’t!”
“You’re telling me these creatures-the same ones we fought a pitched battle against just a couple of nights ago-actually helped you patch this ship? Patch the very hole they probably used to get in and out?” Chapelle demanded.
Laney was nodding. “The last part of it, anyway. Not even the little ones could’a squirmed through there by then, but yeah, they did. Pushed in on the bottom while I tacked the top, then kept holdin’ it while I ran a short bead on the bottom.” He looked around defensively. “I just got this feelin ’, ya know? That they knew what I was up to and had decided to help.”
For a moment, except for the gentle whoosh of the boiler and the cries from the nearby jungle, there was utter silence on Santa Catalina.
“Well,” Chapelle said at last, quietly, glancing over the side at the eyes in the water, “do you have confidence in your repairs, Chief Laney?”
“As much confidence as a fella can ever have in a weld, and an underwater weld at that,” he said, hedging. “Goddamn welded ships crack up and sink all the time, you know.”
“It’ll have to do until we can get her in the dry dock back home,” Russ said. “We’ll drill holes at the seams and use bolts too-if you don’t mind going back in the water.”
Laney deflated just a little, but nodded. “They didn’t eat me last time. I guess they don’t mean to. Them just bein’ around probably keeps other things away. I’ll go.”
“You be sure an’ tell ’em hi’dy for me, will ya?” Isak said with a snicker.
“I will,” Laney grumbled. “Matter of fact, no reason you can’t go next time. It’ll just be slidin’ bolts through some holes and backin’ ’em up. The suit’s no big deal. You can say ‘hi’dy’ right to ’em. Who knows, maybe you’ll get a date.”
Isak eased a step closer to Gilbert. That was what always happened whenever he tried to be friendly, talk to folks outside his “clan.” Inevitably, things escalated to a point where they started expecting him to do things. “You go, Dean,” he said, his voice subconsciously regressing to its flat, reedy, monosyllabic norm. “They’re your friends. You need friends.”
By that evening, with the assistance of the “portable” steam-powered generators from Chief Electrician’s Mate Rodriguez’s growing concern in Baalkpan, and the combination of his crude electric motors and the sophisticated Lemurian pumps, tons of brackish, ill-smelling water had already gushed out of the aft hold. Laney’s patch leaked, but seemed to be holding well enough. Myriad bizarre creatures slithered or skittered in the emerging silt accumulated in the ship. The workers down there, occasionally tightening Laney’s bolts or shoveling mucky silt toward a hose that reliquefied it so it could be sucked from the bilge, were constantly on alert for squirmy things. At one point, Isak emitted a most unmanly shriek, but then went after something that looked like a horseshoe crab with long, wickedly curved and articulated downwardstabbing forelegs, or “jabbers,” as he later called them. It had come marching directly at him out of the gloom, and probably spurred by his own initial terror, he relentlessly pursued the thing with a wrecking bar long after it reconsidered its attack. He never found it.
At about 2100, Santa Catalina began to groan. She’d been glued to the bottom for so long, her sudden buoyancy was stressing her old bones as she tried to break the suction. Chapelle had everything they could spare thrown over the side-empty or damaged crates, chairs, beds. He insisted they save the springs out of the mattresses, but they were cut up and the dank, mildewed fabric and stuffing went. A lot of the once submerged crates in the hold contained spare engines for the P-40s. Many of the engines were probably ruined, but they could salvage parts and the steel was good. The crates around them went. Paneling was torn from the officers’ and passengers’ staterooms and went into the swamp. Most was too rotten to save anyway. Santa Catalina was Cramp made, in 1913, and everyone but Gilbert was surprised to learn she wasn’t a coal burner. If she had been, Chapelle might have lightened her still more by transferring much of her remaining fuel to the barges alongside. The expedition, with the additional help of the rest of the squadron still anchored downstream, could have cut wood for her proposed voyage to Baalkpan. As it was, the ship had only about three hundred tons of fuel, and that was somewhat suspect. She could never make it to Baalkpan without a refill. It struck Chapelle that she never would have made it out of Tjilatjap with her original crew-back in their “old” world-and he felt a wave of sadness for their futile sacrifice. He transmitted the need for fuel oil from either Baalkpan, Aryaal, or First Fleet.
Considering her heavy cargo, Russ finally decided to pump out the ship’s ballast. He knew he was running a risk, because with so many crates on deck, the ship might be top-heavy, but they had to break her hold on the bottom. After that, they still had to get her through the shallow swamp and closer to Tjilatjap without a tug, or anything but her own dubious, neglected power plant. He was afraid he’d have to lighten ship still more, and so he had Ben designate the crates most likely to have allowed the most corrosion to their contents. Even the worstcorroded plane was a treasure, but if they had to toss a few to save the rest, so be it.
