When we got back to camp, everybody who wasn’t crippled and had enough clothes to get away from the heater came out and helped. First, we got a fire started—there was a small arc torch, and we needed that to get the dense hardwood burning—and then we began building a hut against the boat. Everybody worked on that but Dominic Silverstein. Even Abe and Cesário knocked off work on the radio, and Joe Kivelson and the man with the broken wrist gave us a little one-handed help. By this time, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down thicker. We made snow shovels out of the hard outer bark, although they broke in use pretty often, and banked snow up against the hut. I lost track of how long we worked, but finally we had a place we could all get into, with a fireplace, and it was as warm and comfortable as the inside of the boat.
We had to keep cutting wood, though. Before long it would be too cold to work up in the woods, or even go back and forth between the woods and the camp. The snow finally stopped, and then the sky began to clear and we could see stars. That didn’t make us happy at all. As long as the sky was clouded and the snow was falling, some of the heat that had been stored during the long day was being conserved. Now it was all radiating away into space.
The stream froze completely, even the waterfall. In a way, that was a help; we could slide wood down over it, and some of the billets would slide a couple of hundred yards downstream. But the cold was getting to us. We only had a few men working at woodcutting—Cesário, and old Piet Dumont, and Abe Clifford and I, because we were the smallest and could wear bigger men’s parkas and overpants over our own. But as long as any of us could pile on enough clothing and waddle out of the hut, we didn’t dare stop. If the firewood ran out, we’d all freeze stiff in no time at all.
Abe Clifford got the radio working, at last. It was a peculiar job as ever was, but he thought it would have a range of about five hundred miles. Somebody kept at it all the time, calling Mayday. I think it was Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn’t have anything to do with the day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, m’aidez, meaning “help me.” I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn’t too optimistic about him.
Cesário and Abe and I were up at the waterfall, picking up loads of firewood—we weren’t bothering, now, with anything but the hard and slow-burning cores—and had just gotten two of them hooked onto the lifters. I straightened for a moment and looked around. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and two of Fenris’s three moons were making everything as bright as day. The glisten of the snow and the frozen waterfall in the double moonlight was beautiful.
I turned to Cesário. “See what all you’ll miss, if you take your next reincarnation off Fenris,” I said. “This, and the long sunsets and sunrises, and—”
Before I could list any more sights unique to our planet, the 7 mm machine gun, down at the boat, began hammering; a short burst, and then another, and another and another.
The Beacon Light
We all said, “Shooting!” and, “The machine gun!” as though we had to tell each other what it was.
“Something’s attacking them,” Cesário guessed.
“Oh, there isn’t anything to attack them now,” Abe said. “All the critters are dug in for the winter. I’ll bet they’re just using it to chop wood with.”
That could be; a few short bursts would knock off all the soft wood from one of those big billets and expose the hard core. Only why didn’t they use the cutter? It was at the boat now.
“We better go see what it is,” Cesário insisted. “It might be trouble.”
None of us was armed; we’d never thought we’d need weapons. There are quite a few Fenrisian land animals, all creepers or crawlers, that are dangerous, but they spend the extreme hot and cold periods in burrows, in almost cataleptic sleep. It occurred to me that something might have burrowed among the rocks near the camp and been roused by the heat of the fire.
We hadn’t carried a floodlight with us—there was no need for one in the moonlight. Of the two at camp, one was pointed up the ravine toward us, and the other into the air. We began yelling as soon as we caught sight of them, not wanting to be dusted over lightly with 7 mm’s before anybody recognized us. As soon as the men at the camp heard us, the shooting stopped and they started shouting to us. Then we could distinguish words.
“Come on in! We made contact!”
We pushed into the hut, where everybody was crowded around the underhatch of the boat, which was now the side door. Abe shoved through, and I shoved in after him. Newsman’s conditioned reflex; get to where the story is. I even caught myself saying, “Press,” as I shoved past Abdullah Monnahan.
“What happened?” I asked, as soon as I was inside. I saw Joe Kivelson getting up from the radio and making place for Abe. “Who did you contact?”
“The Mahatma; Helldiver,” he said. “Signal’s faint, but plain; they’re trying to make a directional fix on us. There are about a dozen ships out looking for us: Helldiver, Pequod, Bulldog, Dirty Gertie …” He went on naming them.
“How did they find out?” I wanted to know. “Somebody pick up our Mayday while we were cruising submerged?”
Abe Clifford was
