Three Survived

Chapter 8

Sleep didn’t seem to want him, though. Hours passed, and Rand stayed awake.

Listening.

Thinking.

Worrying.

The jungle sounds echoed through the night. Howls and wails and chirps and screams and roars of fifty different kinds split the air. Booming, bellowing, hissing noises could be heard. It was like trying to sleep in the middle of a zoo.

The animals weren’t coming close to the ship. Not yet. The fire kept them at a distance—for now.

But soon the three Earthmen would be far from the ship, sleeping out in the open. How much good would a fire do them then? How long would it be before the jungle beasts got curious?

The jungle beasts weren’t Rand’s only worry. This planet had intelligent native life. The chartbook said so—but the chartbook didn’t go into details. What kind of natives? Cannibals? Headhunters? Or creatures so strange and alien that they couldn’t be described?

The lifeship’s survival kit included a Thorson thought-converter. That was a device that automatically translated languages into terms that could be understood anywhere. The converter would allow him to speak with Tuesday’s natives. But it didn’t guarantee that they’d give him a friendly, peaceful reception.

Rand tossed uneasily for hours, wondering how they were going to deal with all the problems ahead. This was going to be a test of their skill, toughness, and energy. He felt that he would have what it took to get through the jungle alive.

But how about Dombey? Toughness and energy, yes, but no brains.

How about Leswick? No toughness, no energy, and, as far as Rand could see, no skill.

Rand knew that even his own abilities as an engineer could get them only so far and no farther. When a man is facing a deadly jungle beast about to spring, it doesn’t matter how good an engineer he is. That man is in trouble. Even cleverness has its limits.

Thoughts like these kept Rand awake almost until morning. At last he slipped into a light doze. Right away, it seemed, the sun came up and woke him.

Blinding rays of sunlight came slanting into the ship, through the broken places in the cabin wall. Rand groaned. He tried to hide from the morning brightness, without any luck.

He sat up, yawned, and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. He was surprised to find himself alone in the ship. Stumbling to the open hatch, he looked out.

“Good morning,” Leswick said. “We’ve been waiting for you. It’s breakfast time.”

The smell of roasting meat drifted toward Rand.

Dombey was standing by the fire. He had rigged a spit out of two green forked sticks set upright in the ground, with a third stick laid across them. An animal about the size of a large dog was on the spit, getting cooked. Leswick sat to one side, his big book on his lap.

“How long have you two been up?” Rand asked.

“About an hour,” said Leswick. “You looked like you needed the sleep, though.”

That’s for sure, Rand thought.

He pointed to the animal on the spit. “What’s that?”

Leswick said, “It came creeping close to the ship around dawn. Dombey moved fast and caught it with his hands. Then he decided to cook it for breakfast.”

Dombey looked up and grinned proudly. “You said you could go for a little beef, boss. Right?”

Rand took a close look at the animal. It was a kind of lizard, he guessed. It had a long scaly tail and six legs with ugly sharp claws.

He wasn’t exactly in the habit of eating lizard steaks for breakfast. But he wasn’t exactly in the habit of getting shipwrecked on strange planets, either. And that sizzling meat smelled awfully good.

It tasted awfully good, too. The three men polished the animal off, down to the bones. The flavor was more like chicken than like steak, it turned out. For dessert they had the green fruits.

“Okay,” Rand said. “Feast time is over. Now we get down to some work.”

It was a busy morning for everybody. Rand put together a water purifier, using equipment he found in the ship. Leswick ripped the covers off the acceleration couches and stapled them along the sides to make sleeping bags. Dombey hammered some strips of metal lining from the cabin wall into crude pots, pans, and dishes.

The sun grew blistering hot in the clearing. The men tried to keep to the shade while they worked, but it wasn’t easy. Now and then animals peered at them from the underbrush. They didn’t dare to come close, though.

By now the men had taken out of the ship just about anything of any value. Everything was arranged in the clearing. Rand looked their supplies over and said, “We’re better off than I thought. We’ve got plenty of gear. There’s only one big thing missing.”

“Which is?” Leswick asked.

“Weapons. We’re setting out absolutely unarmed across an unknown jungle planet. That’s not so good.”

Dombey said, “Well, boss, I got this here knife—”

He showed it. It was a small jackknife that might be all right for skinning animals, but not much else.

Rand shook his head. “We need something a little more powerful at long range. Like a rifle, or maybe a blaster gun. But there’s nothing like that in our survival kit, and we can’t put a gun together out of what we have. So we’ll just have to hope we’re lucky about what we run into in the forest.”

“We could carve boomerangs,” Leswick suggested.

“What’s a boomerang?” Rand asked.

“A curved throwing stick, used by hunters of an ancient tribe in Australia, on Earth. There’s a discussion about it in my book. A properly aimed boomerang can kill an animal hundreds of yards away. Wait—I’ll show you—”

For a moment Rand almost took the notion seriously. He looked at the page Leswick showed him and read what it said about the boomerang. Then he scowled in disgust. This was just the sort of dumb impractical idea you could expect from Leswick. A throwing stick!

“I’m not sure if I understand this,” Rand said, “because whoever wrote this book of yours seems to think it’s evil to use three short words if ten long ones will do. But it appears to say here that carving boomerangs is an extremely difficult art that takes years of practice. You have to use just the right wood, and cut it at just the right angle. And then you need to spend a couple of years learning to throw the things.” He shut the book with a slam and handed it back to Leswick. “I’m afraid we don’t have the time. You have any other clever ideas?”

“I was just trying to be helpful,” said Leswick.

They would have to get along without weapons, Rand told himself. It didn’t matter. Somehow their luck would hold out. They would get to the beacon alive.

Somehow.

Dombey said, “I want to show you something, boss. Found it while you were sleeping.”

The big man walked off toward one side of the clearing and into the jungle. Rand followed him. When they had gone about fifty feet Dombey stopped and pointed.

“See that? We got ourselves a road!”

The jetmonkey was right. A path about six feet wide ran through the jungle! Someone—or something—had cut back the shrubbery and hacked away the vines. The path was clearly marked, as if it got pretty heavy traffic. Best of all, it ran due east. Rand had calculated that the rescue beacon lay in that direction.

“Good going,” Rand said. “That’ll save us a lot of hard work, if it really keeps running to the east. I wasn’t looking forward to chopping a hole in that jungle.”

Rand and Dombey returned to the clearing. They were ready to leave, now. Rand looked around. Three or four scrawny bird-like things had already moved into the stripped-down lifeship. They had long purple necks, big bulging eyes, and tails like pieces of striped rope. They strutted around the ship, fluttering their long feathery wings and squawking.

“It’s all yours,” Rand said to the bird-creatures. Before long, he knew, the jungle would move in and hide the scene of their landing. Vines would wrap themselves around the ship and bury it.

He turned to Dombey and Leswick. “It’s getting toward noon. I think we’ve done all we can here. Let’s load up and get ourselves going.”

He strapped as much as possible to Dombey’s broad back. The jetmonkey didn’t complain as Rand loaded the baggage on. Once or twice he grunted.

“That too much for you?” Rand asked.

“I can manage,” Dombey said. He took a few staggering steps to prove it.

“Your turn,” Rand said to Leswick.

The philosopher didn’t object. Rand strapped the bundled-up sleeping bags on his back, and added a load of fruit. Then he hoisted the rest of their gear onto his own back, and Leswick lashed it in place.

Rand was carrying the detector that would lead them to the distant beacon.

“Onward and upward,” Rand said. “Let’s march!”