Poul Anderson: New America

Nor was the forest gloomy. That appearance had merely been due to contrast. Pupils expanded, the human eye saw a kind of gentle brightness which brought out infinite tones and shadings of foliage, then faded away into mysterious cathedral distances.

Cathedral? Danny had seen pictures and read descriptions from Earth. He’d always thought of a big church as hushed. If so, that didn’t qualify this wilderness, which hummed and sang and gurgled —breezes in the leaves, wings and paws, eager streams, a call, a carol. Where was the brooding cruelty he remembered?

Maybe the difference was that he wasn’t lost; he had both a friend and a gun at his side. Or maybe his dread had not been so deep-rooted after all; maybe, even what he had feared was not the thing in itself, but only memories and bad dreams which for some years had plagued a child who no longer existed.

The trail was easy, broad, beaten almost into a pavement. He scarcely felt the considerable load on his back. His feet moved themselves, they carried him afloat, until he must stop to let a panting O’Malley catch up.

Higher oxygen intake, of course. What an appetite he was building, and wouldn’t dinner taste good? What separated him from his chief, besides age, was that for him this atmosphere was natural. Not that he was some kind of mutant: no such nonsense. If that had been the case, he couldn’t have stood the highlands. But his genes did put him at the far end of a distribution curve with respect to certain biochemical details.

I don’t have to like this country, he told himself. It’s just that, well, Mother used to say we should always listen to the other fellow twice.

When they camped, he had no need to follow O’Malley into sleep immediately after eating. He lay in his bag, watched, listened, breathed. They had established themselves off the trail, though in sight of it. The man’s decision proved right, because a herd of the pathmaking animals came by.

Danny grabbed for his rifle. The plan was to do pothunting, wild meat being abundant. Rustumite life didn’t have all the nutrients that humans required, but supplemental pills weighed a lot less than even freeze-dried rations—

He let the weapon sink, unused. It wouldn’t be possible to carry off more than a fraction of one of those bodies; and it would be a mortal sin to waste so towering-horned a splendor.

After a while he slept. He fell back into a tomb silence of trees and trees, where the spearfowl hovered on high. He woke strangling on a scream. Although he soon mastered the terror, for the rest of his journey to the wreck he walked amidst ghastliness.

The last several kilometers went slowly. Not only did compass, metal detector, and blaze marks guide the travelers off the game path, while a starless night had fallen, but many patches were less thickly wooded than elsewhere, thus more heavily brushcovered. None were sufficiently big or clear for a safe landing. O’Malley showed Danny how to wield the machetes they carried, and the boy got a savage pleasure from it. Take that, you devil! Take that! When they reached the goal, he too could barely stay on his feet long enough to make camp, and this time his rest was not broken.

Later they studied the situation. The slender shape of the car lay crumpled and canted between massive trees. Flashbeams picked out a torn-off wing still caught among the limbs above. There went a deep, changeable pulsing through the odorous warmth. It came from the south, where the ground sloped evenly, almost like a ramp, four or five kilometers to the sea.

Danny had studied aerial photographs taken from the rescue car. In his troubled state, he had not until now given them much thought. Now he asked, “Sir, uh, why’d you head inland, you and Mr. Herskowitz? Why not just out onto the beach to get picked up?”

“Haven’t got a beach here,” O’Malley explained. “I know; went and looked. The bush continues right to the edge of a whacking great salt marsh, flooded at high tide and otherwise mucky. Wheels or pontoons would too damn likely stick fast in that gumbo. If you waited for flood, you’d find the water churned, mean and tricky, way out to the reefs at the bay mouth—nothing that a pilot would want to risk his car on, let alone his carcass.”

“I see.” Danny pondered a while. “And with Mr. Herskowitz injured, you couldn’t swim out to where it’d be safe to meet you…. But can’t we raft this stuff to calm water, you and me?”

“Go see for yourself, come morning, and tell me.”

Danny had to force himself to do so. Alone again in the wilderness! But O’Malley still slept, and would want to start work immediately upon awakening. This might be Danny’s one chance to scout a quicker way of getting the cursed job done.

He set teeth and fists, and loped through the thin fog of sunrise.

At the coast he found what O’Malley had described. Of the two moons, Raksh alone raised significant tides; but those could rise to several times the deep-sea height of Earth’s. (Earth, pictures, stories, legends, unattainable, one tiny star at night and otherwise never real.) Nor was the pull of the sun negligible.

From a treetop he squinted across a sheet of glistening mud. Beyond it, the incoming waters brawled gunmetal, white-streaked, furious. Rocks reared amidst spume and thunder. The low light picked out traces of cross-currents, rips, sinister eddies where sharpness lurked already submerged. Afar, the bay widened out in a chop of waves and finally reached a line of skerries whereon breakers exploded in steady rage. Past these, the Gulf of Ardashir glimmered more peaceful.

No doubt at slack water and ebb the passage would be less dangerous than now. But nothing would be guaranteed. Certainly two men couldn’t row a sizeable, heavily laden raft or hull through such chaos. And who’d want to spend the fuel and cargo space to bring a motorboat here, or even an outboard motor? The potential gain in salvage wasn’t worth the risk of losing still another of Rustum’s scarce machines.

Nor was there any use reconnoitering elsewhere. The photographs had shown that eastward and westward, kilometer after kilometer, the coastline was worse yet: cliffs, bluffs, and banks where the savage erosive forces of this atmosphere had crumbled land away.

Above, the sky arched colorless, except where the sun made it brilliant or patches where the upper clouds had drifted apart for a while. Those showed so blue that homesickness grabbed Danny by the throat.

He made his way back. Since he’d gotten a proper rest, again the country did not seem out and out demonic. But Lord, how he wanted to leave!

O’Malley was up, had the teakettle on a fire and was climbing about the wreck making more detailed investigations. “Satisfied?” he called. “Okay, you can rustle us some breakfast. Did you enjoy the view?”

“Terrible,” Danny grumbled.

“Oh? I thought it was kind of impressive, even beautiful in its way. But frustrating, I admit. As frustrating as wanting to scratch my head in my helmet.

“—I’m afraid we’ll accomplish less than I hoped.”

Danny’s heart leaped to think they might simply make a few trips between here and the bus, backpacking data tapes and small instruments. The voice dashed him:

“It’s bound to be such slow going at best, you see, especially when I’m as handicapped as I am. We won’t finish our wagon in a hurry. Look how much work space we’ll have to clear before we can start carpentering.” They had toted in lightweight wheels and brackets, as well as tools for building the rest of the vehicle from local timber and cannibalized metal. “Then it’ll be harder cutting a road back to our game trail than I guessed from what I remembered. And the uphill gradient is stiffer, too. We’ll spend some days pushing and hauling our loot along.”