Chapter 31
“Up into the ship!” shouted Sanchez.
“Why?” asked Grimes stupidly.
“Because the control car is going to hit first, you fool!”
Su Lin was already mounting the short ladder. Grimes followed her. Sanchez followed him. They reached the catwalk that ran fore and aft between the gas cells, these containers wrinkled now, collapsing upon themselves. There was no place else to run. The vertical ladder that gave access to the outside of the envelope was blocked by fold upon fold of limp fabric.
The lights were still burning, running from the emergency power cells. They gave some small comfort. The three members of Fat Susie’s crew huddled together in their cave of wrinkled cloth, blocked now at either end, waiting for the crash.
“It can’t be long now,” said Sanchez at last.
His voice was oddly high, almost a soprano.
He’s scared, thought Grimes. I didn’t think that he’d be the type to show such fear . . .
He said philosophically, “What goes up has to come down, I suppose.”
His own voice was high and squeaky, even in his own ears.
The helium, he thought. There’s a lot of it in the atmosphere we’re breathing. It’s making us sound like refugees from the papal choir . . .
“She was a good little ship,” said Sanchez regretfully. “I’d like to get the bastards who did this to her.”
“I’d like to get the bastards,” said Grimes, “who did this to us. Did you see the markings on the other dirigible before she backed away?”
“I did,” announced Su Lin, her voice faint, almost as inaudible as a bat’s sonar squeak. “I did. It was the Army ship that we saw at the Lopez plantation. It was no more Citizen Marat than I am.”
“You’re the wrong sex in any case,” quipped Sanchez,
There was no doubt about that, thought Grimes. He was acutely aware of the girl’s nudity pressed against him.
He said, changing the subject, “I wonder what premiums Lloyd’s would charge to insure the life of a Liberian governor?” He was about to add. “Especially one who travels by airship . . .” when Fat Susie struck.
It was an amazingly gentle contact. The catwalk lifted beneath their feet, throwing them together but not violently. From somewhere beneath them there came the sound of a muffled crash. And then there was silence, broken only by the sound of their breathing and the hiss of escaping helium.
The lights did not go out but their illumination was dimmed by the layers of fabric through which it had to shine.
They were huddled together, the three of them, in a sort of cave, the walls and ceiling of which were formed by the fabric of collapsed gas cells. Luckily air was getting in from somewhere. At the same time the helium was getting out. Their voices were reverting to normal timbre.
“Where’s that fancy lighter of yours, Su Lin?” asked Grimes. “We can use it to burn our way out.”
“Unluckily,” she told him tartly, “I don’t have any pockets in my birthday suit. The lighter’s where I left it when I turned in. On my bunkside table.”
“And the door to your cabin,” said Sanchez thoughtfully, “should be right behind where you are standing now . . .”
Wriggling, squirming, they managed to turn around. Su Lin’s body, Grimes realized, was slippery with perspiration. So was Sanchez’s, on the other side of him. They were facing a featureless wall of limp fabric. They tried to lift it up and clear, but it was anchored somehow at its lower edge. They tried to pull it down, then to pull it sideways. Grimes was almost envying the nudity of his companions. His own clothing was becoming soaked. He could feel the sweat puddling in his shoes.
During their struggles with that impenetrable curtain Su Lin’s hip was pressing heavily against his right side. There was something hard in his pocket of which he became painfully conscious. His pipe, of course. His pipe—and the old-fashioned matches that he preferred to other means of ignition.
“Raoul,” he asked. “This fabric . . . Is it flammable?”
“Of course not.”
“Will it melt, if heat’s applied?”
“I don’t know. I just fly airships. I don’t build them.”
“Then there’s only one way to find out. Su Lin, can you shift a bit to your right? A bit more . . .”
“Normally I should appreciate this,” grumbled Sanchez, against whom the girl was now pushing.
Grimes got the box of matches, after a struggle, out of his pocket. It felt damp to his touch. Had his perspiration made them useless? He got one of them out of the box, struck it. It fizzled sadly and went out. He dropped it, extracted a second one. He was careful not to touch either its head or the striking surface with his fingers. This one did burn, but unenthusiastically. The oxygen content of the air in their little cave must, thought Grimes, be getting low, depleted by their consumption of it during their exertions.
Carefully, carefully he brought the feeble flame into light contact with the fabric. It began to smoke and bubble. A vile, acrid stench assailed their nostrils. The match went out. Grimes let it fall, got a third one from the box. By the time that it had burned away there was a small hole with fused edge, just large enough for Su Lin to get her index finger into. She tried to tug downwards but achieved nothing.
Grimes used seven more matches to enlarge the hole in an upward direction. (There were now only three left; he should have put a full box in his pocket before going on watch.) He could, now, get his right hand into the vertical slit. He pulled, sideways, with all the strength that he was able to exert in this confined space. The fabric was stubborn—but there was room, now, for Sanchez to get his left hand into the hole to join the struggle.
Suddenly there was a ripping noise. Slowly, slowly the rent was enlarging while the two men panted from their combined effort. Luckily fresh air, in appreciable quantities, was getting in now.
They paused, to breathe deeply.
Between them the girl said. “Give me a hand, you two. I think I can squirm through . . .”
She did that. With her gone there was room for Grimes and Sanchez to move with much greater ease. They could hear her scuffling progress on the other side of the curtain. They heard her grunt with effort. Was something jamming the door to her cabin? They heard, faintly, what they hoped was a sigh of relief.
At last she was back.
“Stand clear!” she called. “Stand clear!”
The jet of flame—not as long as when the lighter had been used as a weapon but still as glaringly incandescent—swept downwards, and then up. It went out.
She said, “Come in. This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”
The ship—what was left of her—was theirs again.
They gained access to their cabins.
Sanchez and Su Lin got dressed, then they and Grimes sat in the little wardroom with stiff drinks. They felt that they deserved them but were careful not to overindulge. Grimes wanted to take a torch to go outside to assess the damage but the others vetoed the suggestion.
“We’re still alive,” Su Lin told him. “If we go outside the ship, at night, we very soon shan’t be. This is the Unclaimed Territory. Remember?”
“And as for viewing the wreck,” said Sanchez, “that can wait until daylight. One thing is certain—Fat Susie will never fly again.”
“Mphm,” grunted Grimes, filling and lighting his pipe. Then, “What time is sunup, Raoul?”
The pilot looked at his watch, just a timekeeper without any fancy functions.
“About an hour,” he said. Then, with a wry grin, “Where has the night gone to?”
“I’ll make some tea,” said Su Lin briskly.
She got up from the settee, went from the wardroom into the adjoining galley. After a brief absence she returned.
“Raoul,” she said, “there’s no fresh water . . .”
Sanchez got up and went back with her into the airship’s kitchen. They returned, eventually, to the wardroom. Their faces were grave.
“Commodore,” said the pilot, “there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that this was a crash that we shall be able to walk away from. The bad news is that we owe our soft landing to the fact that we lost considerable mass during our descent. Our fresh water tanks must have been holed.”
“If our luck holds,” said Su Lin, “we might find that we’re not too far from a stream . . .”
“And that the stream doesn’t harbor any life forms big enough to be a serious menace to us,” Sanchez said.
“Meanwhile,” the girl went on, “we have beer, and table wines, and lolly water. Even if there’s no water handy it’ll be at least a week before we die of thirst.”
“You’re a pair of cheerful bastards,” grumbled Grimes. . “Don’t complain,” the girl told him severely. “We’re alive. There’s no reason at all why we shouldn’t stay that way.”
“I’m surprised,” said Grimes, “that Major Flattery didn’t stick around to make sure that we were all very dead.”
“I was myself—but, thinking it over, I can see why he just made us crash, here, and then flew off,” said the girl. “I can see what the official .story will be. Steering gear failure and a midair collision, contributed to by the bad airmanship of the vessel sustaining major damage. Flattery’s own ship was damaged too, so much so that he could not make an immediate search for survivors—if any . . . In the fullness of time a proper search will be organized—but everybody will be quite sure either that we were all killed at once by the crash or, shortly afterwards, by the local flora and fauna. . . . .”
“Why should Flattery make a report at all?” asked Grimes, “except to his boss. Colonel Bardon . . . As far as the rest of Liberia is concerned Governor Grimes will be enjoying himself flying hither and yon about his domain. Eventually there will be a public urinal or something to be ceremoniously opened and people will start to ask, ‘Where is the Governor?’ And Lopez Sahib will have been the last person to have seen me, and he will say that Fat Susie was last sighted proceeding east—whereas we were proceeding north. . . .”
“And years from now,” said the girl, “when the Unclaimed Territory is opened up for exploitation, somebody will find what’s left of Fat Susie and what’s left of us. If anything.”
“And I shall be blamed, posthumously,” Sanchez said. “Pilot error. That’s what they’ll say.”
“And what they’ll say about me,” contributed Grimes, “is that my famous luck finally ran out . . .”
They all laughed, enjoying, briefly, their indulgence in gallows humor.
Then Grimes asked, “Could we make our way back to civilization by foot?”
“Not if we’re where I think we are—where I’m reasonably sure that we are—we couldn’t. Not even if we had weapons. Did you bring any private pocket artillery with you, Commodore?”
“No.”
“Su Lin?”
“Only my all-purpose lighter. And there are some quite useful knives in the galley—not that they’d be much use against the local predators. And you, Raoul?”
“There’s a laser torch in the workshop. Normally it runs off the mains, although it has a power cell. But the power cell has a limited life.”
“We could recharge—or could we?—from the power cells that are supplying juice for the emergency lights,” said Grimes.
“And they, too, aren’t exactly everlasting,” Sanchez told him.
“Even so, once the sun is up they should be recharging themselves.”
“Yes. Of course. Assuming that things weren’t too badly damaged by the collision and the crash. As soon as it’s light we’ll go outside and see just how well off—or badly off—we are.”