Three Survived: A Science Fiction Novel Read online

  “What about what?”

  “We’re choosing a leader for this little expedition.”

  Dombey shrugged. “Don’t matter none to me. But I’m gettin’ pretty hungry. We goin’ to be doin’ much more talkin’?”

  CHAPTER 7

  AN HOUR LATER, Rand crouched over a tangled mass of wires and coils, scratching his head in puzzlement. Leswick stood above him with a mild expression of curiosity on his face. Dombey was munching on a greenish, nearly transparent piece of fruit that he had pulled down from a tree.

  Rand was tinkering desperately with the equipment he had taken out of the lifeship. He was trying to turn a radar set into a peak-detector in a hurry, and he was having a hard time.

  The factory that had made the lifeship must really be old-fashioned, he thought in annoyance. Instead of using printed circuits and plug-in units for the radar set, the designers of the equipment had used dozens of separate components.

  Rand had never seen anything like that before, except in science museums. It was practically prehistoric, as electronics gear went. It made his job ten times as hard as it should have been.

  But rules were rules. He knew he could come up with the device he needed, sooner or later. He just had to be patient and go one step at a time.

  “What seems to be the trouble?” Leswick asked.

  “You won’t understand if I tell you,” Rand snapped.

  He felt tense and uncomfortable. The sun was fiercely hot. And there was no shade around the lifeship, because so many trees had been knocked down. He was getting sunburned fast. But he stuck to his work.

  He added an extra capacitor. “That might do it,” he said, and stood back.

  Mystified, Leswick peered at the confusing and confused-looking network of resistors, condensers, and crystal diodes. “How can you tell one thing from another?” he asked. “How do you know what you’re doing in there?”

  “It’s something you learn through sweat and toil, friend. Sweat and toil. Two words you probably haven’t synthesized into your philosophy yet.” Rand slid the copper-shielded case closed with a twitch of his pliers. He picked up the instrument carefully and carried it back inside the ship. Carefully he wired it to the power source and turned it on. It began to hum gently.

  So far so good, he thought. We’ll use our wits and we’ll make out okay. Just call me — Robinson Caruso, was that his name? The fellow that lived on the island.

  He began to tune the detector.

  Fifteen minutes later he stepped out of the ship.

  He was dripping wet with perspiration and he carried a scribbled-on sheet of paper. He had to look around for a moment before he found the other two.

  Dombey had collected an enormous heap of the pale green fruits. He was squatting over them and eating them in big mouthfuls. He appeared to be enjoying them.

  Leswick, meanwhile, was on the far side of the ship, leaning against the scaly gray side of an uprooted tree. The Metaphysical Synthesist seemed deep in thought. He looked at least ten million miles away.

  “I’ve found the beacon,” Rand announced loudly. “The detector picked up its signal!”

  Leswick snapped out of his dreamy trance. “Is it far from here?”

  Rand held up the crude map that he had drawn. “It’s about four hundred miles due east. Unless I made a mistake in figuring and it’s even farther. We’ll keep checking the reading as we travel. The detector will work off a battery.”

  “Four hundred miles! But that’s —”

  “I know, professor. We aren’t going to get there in one afternoon. And so far as I know it’s all jungle between here and there. Hot, sticky jungle, full of strange beasts and other nuisances.” Rand yawned and wiped away some sweat. “Hey, Tarzan, throw me one of those fruits, will you?”

  “Here, boss.” Dombey scooped up one of the fruits in his gigantic hand and tossed it to Rand.

  He caught it and looked it over. It was pointed at both ends and plump in the middle. Its skin was thin and such a pale green that he could see right through it to the core. Rand shrugged and took a bite.

  The fruit was watery and didn’t have much taste. Eating it was a little like biting into an unripe tomato. But at least it was cool and wet, and Rand had the feeling that it might be healthy to eat. He finished it in four more bites and spat out the core, a small hard red seed.

  “Not bad,” he commented. “Nothing great, but I think it’ll be useful. Professor, suppose you stop daydreaming and start gathering as many of these as you can reach. They may not grow along our route, and we’re going to need every safe kind of food we can find.”

  Leswick nodded and walked over to one of the trees that grew the pale green fruits. He started to pick them. Good, Rand thought. If the philosopher would do his share of the work, they’d stand a much better chance of making it safely through the jungle to the beacon.

  “Tarzan, you come here with me,” Rand said. “I want to unload the ship before nightfall. We’ll drag out of it everything we can possibly use.”

  He and Dombey went into the ship.

  Rand wondered if Dombey and Leswick would ever realize how lucky they were that he was a trained engineer. They couldn’t possibly have survived this long without him.

  Dombey, of course, wouldn’t stop to think about that. The poor dope was happy to be alive, but he didn’t spend much time thinking about such things. Or anything.

  Leswick, though, ought to recognize his good luck. He’d be a dead man without me by now, Rand thought. What good was a professor of Metaphysical Synthesis on a jungle planet?

  Leswick had said that his special field of study was savage tribes. Well, there might be savage tribes here. But how would he deal with them? He seemed able only to deal with situations in books.

  Rand had looked into the book Leswick had brought along. It was full of chapters about cultural arcs and tribal war-patterns and other high-sounding things. There were solid pages of mathematical equations, too. But could Leswick translate any of that into useful knowledge? Rand didn’t think so.

  Then he shook his head. He told himself that he had no business thinking such things. He had been lucky, too. Lucky that he had been born clever, and not dull-witted like Dombey. Lucky that he had chosen to study engineering, and not something that wouldn’t do him any good in a tough situation like this.

  But it wasn’t right to keep congratulating himself for his own good luck. He told himself to cut it out. If I pat myself on the back much harder, he thought, I’ll sprain my shoulder.

  “Grab hold of this, Tarzan,” he called. “Let’s haul it outside.”

  “Sure, boss, sure.” Dombey reached up easily and broke loose a long strip of metal from the cabin wall. That would be useful, Rand knew.

  Dombey picked up the heavy piece of metal, grunted, and carried it out of the ship by himself. When he came back in, he grinned, scratched the thick stubble on his cheek, and spat out a mouthful of fruit. He rubbed his stomach happily and belched.

  “You know what, boss? Them fruits is pretty good, but I could go for a little beef, now. Something to drink, maybe, too.”

  “You know what, Tarzan? So could I. But let’s finish clearing the ship first.”

  They worked until it got dark. By then they had ripped out of the ship just about everything that might come in handy in the weeks ahead.

  The darkness was spooky and weird. This planet had no moon, and the jungle turned black and frightening after sundown.

  Strange noises came out of the distance. Birds made a rasping, harsh chirping sound. Something far away made a loud mooing noise, over and over and over. Another animal made a sound that was midway between the neighing of a horse and the screeching of an owl. It wasn’t the kind of sound that made you feel cheerful about spending a night on the planet called Tuesday.

  Leswick and Dombey gathered twigs and logs and built a fire near the ship. Meanwhile Rand checked out the survival kit to see how much food and medicine they had. Not much, he disco
vered.

  The fire became a hot, lively blaze. It would help to keep the jungle animals away, Rand figured. Maybe they had never seen fire before. In any case, they wouldn’t come close. Especially since the lifeship’s rough landing had knocked a big opening in the jungle. The animals wouldn’t want to cross that clearing of burned and flattened trees.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Rand called, when the fire was lit.

  They squatted by the fire and had a simple meal. Food tablets out of the survival kit, and some of the green fruits Dombey had discovered. Then they went inside the ship to sleep.

  This would be the last time they would be sleeping indoors for many weeks. After tonight, they’d be out in the open, sleeping in the jungle.

  Rand stretched out on one of the acceleration couches. Dombey, next to him, was already asleep. Leswick was sitting up crosslegged, reading his big book by flashlight. Rand looked sourly at him.

  “Why don’t you save your eyesight, Leswick? Do your homework some other time!”

  “It’s an extremely fascinating book,” Leswick said. “You ought to read it yourself.”

  Rand laughed. “Yeah. Maybe I will, some year or other. But not right away.”

  He closed his eyes. But the light of Leswick’s flashlight bothered him. After a few minutes Rand said, “Leswick, do you mind putting out that light? I can’t sleep.”

  “If you’ll only let me finish this chapter —”

  “The chapter might be a hundred pages long. Put out the light, Leswick.”

  “But —”

  “Put out the light.”

  Leswick made a clucking sound of annoyance. But he switched the flashlight off.

  “Thank you,” Rand said.

  He wrapped his arms around his head and waited for sleep to take him.

  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.