Poul Anderson - The Man Who Counts

“A floating object — six times as long as our longest canoe — like ice, and yet not like ice—” The admiral shook his gray-furred head. Slowly, he put dry tinder in the bottom of his firemaker. But it was with needless violence that he drove the piston down into the little hardwood cylinder. Removing the rod again, he tilted fire out into the bowl of his pipe, and drew deeply.

“The most highly polished rock crystal might look a bit like that stuff, sir,” offered Delp. “But not so bright. Not with such a shimmer.”

“And there are animals scurrying about on it?”

“Three of them, sir. About our size, or a little bigger, but wingless and tailless. Yet not just animals either… I think… they seem to wear clothes and — I don’t think the shining thing was ever intended as a boat, though. It rides abominably, and appears to be settling.”

“If it’s not a boat, and not a log washed off some beach,” said T’heonax “then where, pray tell, is it from? The Deeps?”

“Hardly, captain,” said Delp irritably. “If that were so, the creatures on it would be fish or sea mammals or — well, adapted for swimming, anyway. They’re not. They look like typical flightless land forms, except for having only four limbs.”

“So they fell from the sky, I presume?” sneered T’heonax.

“I wouldn’t be at all surprised,” said Delp in a very low voice. “There isn’t any other direction left.”

T’heonax sat up on his haunches, mouth falling open. But his father only nodded.

“Very good,” murmured Syranax. “I’m pleased to see a little imagination around here.”

“But where did they fly from? ” exploded T’heonax.

“Perhaps our enemies of Lannach would have some account of it” said the admiral. “They cover a great deal more of the world every year than we do in many generations; they meet a hundred other barbarian flocks down in the tropics, and exchange news.”

“And females,” said T’heonax. He spoke in that mixture of primly disapproving voice and lickerish overtones with which the entire Fleet regarded the habits of the migrators.

“Never mind that,” snapped Delp.

T’heonax bristled. “You deckswabber’s whelp, do you dare—”

“Shut up!” roared Syranax.

After a pause, he went on: “I’ll have inquiries made among our prisoners. Meanwhile we had better send a fast canoe to pick up these beings before that object they’re on founders.”

“They may be dangerous,” warned T’heonax.

“Exactly,” said his father. “If so, they’re better in our hands than if, say, the Lannach’honai should find them and make an alliance. Delp, take the Nemnis, with a reliable crew, and crowd sail on her. And bring along that fellow we captured from Lannach, what’s his name, the professional linguist—”

“Tolk?” The executive stumbled over the unfamiliar pronunciation.

“Yes. Maybe he can talk to them. Send scouts back to report to me, but stand well off the main Fleet until you’re sure that the creatures are harmless to us. Also till I’ve allayed whatever superstitious fears about sea demons there are in the lower classes. Be polite if you can, get rough if you must. We can always apologize later… or toss the bodies overboard. Now, jump!”

Delp jumped.

Desolation walled him in.

Even from this low, on the rolling, pitching hull of the murdered skycruiser, Eric Wace could see an immensity of horizon. He thought that the sheer size of that ring, where frost-pale heaven met the gray which was cloud and storm-scud and great marching waves, was enough to terrify a man. The likelihood of death had been faced before, on Earth, by many of his forebears; but Earth’s horizon was not so remote.

Never mind that he was a hundred-odd light-years from his own sun. Such distances were too big to be understood: they became mere numbers, and did not frighten one who reckoned the pseudo-speed of a secondary-drive spaceship in parsecs per week.

Even the ten thousand kilometers of open ocean to this world’s lone human settlement, the trading post, was only another number. Later, if he lived, Wace would spend an agonized time wondering how to get a message across that emptiness, but at present he was too occupied with keeping alive.

But the breadth of the planet was something he could see. It had not struck him before, in his eighteen-month stay; but then he had been insulated, psychologically as well as physically, by an unconquerable machine technology. Now he stood alone on a sinking vessel, and it was twice as far to look across chill waves to the world’s rim as it had been on Earth.

The skycruiser rolled under a savage impact. Wace lost his footing and slipped across curved metal plates. Frantic, he clawed for the light cable which lashed cases of food to the navigation turret. If he went over the side, his boots and clothes would pull him under like a stone. He caught it in time and strained to a halt… The disappointed wave slapped his face, a wet salt hand.

Shaking with cold, Wace finished tucking the last box into place and crawled back toward the entry hatch. It was a miserable little emergency door, but the glazed promenade deck, on which his passengers had strolled while the cruiser’s gravbeams bore her through the sky, was awash, its ornate bronze portal submerged.

Water had filled the smashed engine compartment when they ditched. Since then it had been seeping around twisted bulkheads and strained hull plates, until the whole thing was about ready for a last long dive to the sea bottom.

Wind passed icy fingers through his drenched hair and tried to hold open the hatch when he wanted to close it after him. He had a struggle against the gale… Gale? Hell, no! It had only the velocity of a stiffish breeze — but with six times the atmospheric pressure of Earth behind it, that breeze struck like a Terrestrial storm. Damn PLC 2987165II! Damn the PL itself, and damn Nicholas van Rijn, and most particularly damn Eric Wace for being fool enough to work for the Company!

Briefly, while he fought the hatch, Wace looked out over the coaming as if to find rescue. He glimpsed only a reddish sun, and great cloud-banks dirty with storm in the north, and a few specks which were probably natives.

Satan fry those natives on a slow griddle, that they did not come to help! Or at least go decently away while the humans drowned, instead of hanging up there in the sky to gloat!

“Is all in order?”

Wace closed the hatch, dogged it fast, and came down the ladder. At its foot, he had to brace himself against the heavy rolling. He could still hear waves beat on the hull, and the wind-yowl.

“Yes, my lady,” he said. “As much as it’ll ever be.”

“Which isn’t much, not?” Lady Sandra Tamarin played her flashlight over him. Behind it, she was only another shadow in the darkness of the dead vessel. “But you look a saturated rat, my friend. Come, we have at least fresh clothes for you.”

Wace nodded and shrugged out of his wet jacket and kicked off the squelching boots. He would have frozen up there without them — it couldn’t be over five degrees C — but they seemed to have blotted up half the ocean. His teeth clapped in his head as he followed her down the corridor.

He was a tall young man of North American stock, ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, with bluntly squared-off features above a well-muscled body. He had begun as a warehouse apprentice at the age of twelve, back on Earth, and now he was the Solar Spice Liquors Company’s factor for the entire planet known as Diomedes. It wasn’t exactly a meteoric rise — Van Rijn’s policy was to promote according to results, which meant that a quick mind, a quick gun, and an eye firmly held to the main chance were favored. But it had been a good solid career, with a future of posts on less isolated and unpleasant worlds, ultimately an executive position back Home and — and what was the use, if alien waters were to eat him in a few hours more?