Earthworks (4 page)

I meant to hear him out, but I could not help laughing. I turned to Di, who was grinning too.

“He’s a wonder, Di! That’s what I call a clever man. The food on the
Trieste Tub
is lousy, and Thunder bird builds a big structure out of it. Come off it, Doc; you’re madder than we are!”

“Don’t tell me that just because the food’s bad this old boat isn’t haunted!” Di said.

“Hear me out, hear me out,” Thunderpeck protested. But Di jumped to his feet, waving his arms in excitement.

“It’s that corpse in the starboard locker!” he said. “That’s what’s plaguing us! Come on, Cap, let’s leave the old doctor to his theories and get that bloody corpse overboard!”

He ran down the deck, his speckled cheeks flaming. I followed, excited, yet even then worried — supposing Di changed suddenly into the Figure. But he remained encased in blue tights and white vest, and we made it to the locker in which I had shut the dead man, the corpse who had played postman for me.

“Listen to the old flies buzz in there!” Di cried. He hammered on the door, laughing as he did so. “Come out, come out, whoever you are, you with the holes in your eyes! Time for a swim.”

We pulled open the door and the body flubbed out towards us.

“Get this harness off him and pull the anti-gravity set off,” I said. “We don’t want to lose that.”

“No, switch it off and pitch the lot over the side.”

“No, save the unit, Di — it’s worth something!”

“No, pitch the lot over the side.”

We began to struggle, with the body stiff and stupid between us. Thunderpeck came up and added to our troubles. He was all for keeping the body in a deep freeze unit and giving it a decent burning when we got ashore. It was a silly little set-to. We were all over-excited, and the sight of Di’s rash-covered face maddened me.

At last I exerted my rank, and got them to switch off the unit and remove it from the body. When out of operation, the mechanism was enormously heavy, and the straps that secured it in place were soaked with sea water and difficult to undo. Eventually we had the job done. I saw the unit had “Made in Nigeria” stamped on it; a lot of advanced research was in progress there. The
Trieste Star
had come from the shipbuilders of Port Harcourt.

Di stood back, feeling his face, as Thunderpeck and I took up the body and carried it towards the rail. He made one last protest.

“Over the side with the devil!” I cried. “He means bad luck for us.”

We slung him over the rail and let him go. He went swinging down, down into the brown water churning against our sides. Brown! I looked up and saw our position. The sun slanted low over the sea, casting our shadow far out ahead of us across the water. Reefs showed all round us, sometimes raising a tooth above the breaking waves, sometimes submerged in foam. All the ocean was white with foam and brown with sand. Only as I looked aft could I see calm blue water.

“We’re going aground!” Thunderpeck cried. His great rococo face twisted as he ran forward, shouting, and climbed the cling-ladder up to the bridge.

“Come down! The autopilot’s on! We’re okay!” I shouted.

In the old days, this coast had claimed many a sound ship. But the reefs had largely been blasted to make way for the freighters that called increasingly as soil manufactory boomed; and the automatic devices of the ship, with their thousand eyes unsleeping in the hull, sweeping constantly ahead, ensured that no ship ever ran aground these days. For all that, I understood Thunderpeck’s panic. It was certainly unnerving suddenly to see the reefs all round us.

His fear calmed me. I was after him, not heeding Di’s shouts from behind.

When I got to the bridge, Thunderpeck was bending over the instruments.

“Stand away! I’m in control here!” I told him.

He made no attempt to move. He turned too late as I went at him. He was fooling with the autocaptain. I brought in a bunched right fist straight as a piston into his solar plexus. Groaning, he crumpled and fell on to his knees.

At once I was sorry. Old Thunderpeck was my friend. But the controls were mine, my pets, the tokens that I was a man with a function. I started to tell him that, shouting to make him hear over his noises. He was bellowing angrily for breath. Red in the face, he looked up and said something I couldn’t hear. The intercom buzzed.

“Captain,” I said in it.

“Abdul, Cap. Di’s here. Say, did Doc tell you — we’re fitting the navigator back on, so I switched off the autocaptain while we were doing it to avoid overload. Doc said that we — ”

“You switched the autocaptain off — my God!”

Then I understood why Thunderpeck had suddenly meddled with the controls. They’d been looking after things while I was sleeping and had not thought to fill me in on details... And had forgotten some of the details themselves...

I looked for’ard. The water ahead of us was combed with white. There was no sign of a safe passage. On the horizon was a smudge that might have been land or a protruding reef. There was one thing only to be done — close off power and then take a course slow astern, working on manual.

Before I could lay a finger on the control board, a low grinding welled up from within the ship. The deck trembled beneath my feet. We had grazed a reef!

Already it was too late to think of retreat.

There is another thing that has only just occurred to me. I did indeed spend years feeling guilty at my betrayal of Jess the Traveller, and as a kid I was long enough bothered with the thought that I ought to have done something, anything, to save

March Jordill. Yet old Thunderpeck suffered more then either of them, I would guess, on my account, and I never worried for a moment about what happened to him. Avoid it as you will, there must be something special about a man like me: I don’t mean just that I can read and write so well, but that I ruined the lives of so many persons near to me.

The urge of destruction must always have been in me. If so, it never burnt brighter than when the
Trieste Star
scraped that reef off the African shore.

This was the coast of ill legend. I knew what a legion of ships and men had perished here. Many had struck the reefs and broken up, while their crews were unable to make the hazardous passage to shore. I acted almost without another thought.

I pulled the manual hard over to Full Speed Ahead.

They were great old ships, the nuclear freighters of the Star Line! You can’t tell me that the GEMs will ever mean the same to a man. The
Trieste Star
responded at once to her controls. The sea churned and we thrust forward. That deep discontented rumble slid along the ship and died away.

Lights and alarms lit on the control boards. The double hull had been pierced in two places, along number six and seven holds and in number three. I had a momentary picture of the angry waters pouring in. I closed the watertight doors in the third hold; holds six and seven contained ballast, and the doors would not shut. The pumps had come on automatically, but the relevant dials showed that they were not keeping the level of the water down.

I stared ahead. Thunderpeck was picking himself up from the deck now; I brushed him aside. There looked to be a narrow channel ahead, between clearly defined bars of rock. I clutched at the manual, tipping it gently, guiding us through. Already we were picking up speed; in our half-empty condition, we were capable of making 38½ knots.

Exhilaration filled me like the wind in sails.

“We’ll drive her to shore if we break her back doing it!” I shouted.

“Slow up while you’ve got the chance, you crazy loon!” Thunderpeck called. But I was not slowing. Nor was it simply that I felt that here was a case where the safest course was the seemingly wildest one; once I had come to an intellectual decision, madness filled me, the joyous madness of destruction. Under me was one of the world’s most expensive pieces of machinery, and I was going to drive it to disaster. The world should see how I cared for its wares!

Perhaps the doctor read something of this in my face. He went and stood at the window, gripping the rail and staring out. The three members of the crew, Di with his mottled face, Abdul limping in his leg iron, Alan clutching a blanket about him, climbed out of the fo’c’sle and stood with their hair streaming in the wind, peering forward in a sort of remote horror.

Once I looked back. Another man stood at a misty wheel behind me, his face dark and veiled, as if yet to be created. It was my
doppelgänger!
The Figure! A thrill of fear took a plunge to my heart. I dared not look back a second time. But the fiery intelligence of those eyes fixed on my shoulder-blades lent extra fuel to my excitement.

At that period I was most sick.

Below the green water ahead, dark shapes lay. We plunged over them. Skumpsby rushed to the rail, peering down, and rock slid beneath our hull. We roared on. Brilliant surf burst ahead. I set her to port, and the wake foamed out behind us as we made towards a break in the line of waves. An alarm bell began to shrill. I cut it dead.

Land was visible on the horizon now, the yellow land and brown that forms this most inhospitable corner of Africa. Ahead to starboard I glimpsed a tower, but did not dare to look again. I held to the manual and willed the ship forward to destruction with all my being. Justine, you should have been with us!

Ahead of us, plunging over the waves, flew the dark wing of our shadow. I felt another wing above us. We travelled in the shadow of greater powers than we knew. We are bound to achieve what self-knowledge we can; it is a point of honour, of intelligence, of courage; but always in the rambling house of our understanding is one chamber unexplored, one undiscovered stairway leading straight down to the infernal regions. From there came the dark powers and sped with us!

The break in the waves ahead was narrower than I had judged. I saw the water slice across serrated teeth of coral, and I yelled at the full extent of my lungs. We ploughed through with enormous noise.

A terrible sight! Curling up over the side of the ship, a great ribbon of metal! The wrench flung me off my feet. I climbed back to the manual. Thunderpeck sprawled on the deck. Outside, the three crew had been flung down.

The reef had slit us open as if the hull were tinfoil! And I laughed.

We were through the danger for the moment, and with the twin screws still unharmed. The madness was in my head as I pressed for still more power. I cut in the alarms again and let them all ring for the sheer joy of it. We were developing a list to port, the side on which we had been raked open.

Almost I was beyond reading the dials, but I saw now that we headed for shallow water. We were through the reefs — there was nothing but the beach, swinging up ahead. I cut power. We dived on with no appreciable loss of speed. I pulled down the siren and let her blast, as the steam from the overdriven turbines came out on the note of “A”.

Alan Bator was running across the deck. He climbed the rail, leapt forward awkwardly, and dived down into the sea. I cheered as he went. His head swept astern.

The list to port became more noticeable; we were letting in water fast. The white beach loomed ahead like a solid breaker. Beyond it I could see dunes, stony and unwelcoming, stretching into the heart of the land. Coming off it was the hot breath of Africa.

“Ahhhhh!” I yelled.

We struck.

Under the sand there must have been coral or rock. I had not expected such a jar — had, in my exhilaration, expected nothing. I clutched madly at the manual as the ship seemed to fold up round me.

Chapter Three

Doctor Thunderpeck, Abdul Demone and I launched one of the inflatable boats and climbed down on to it. There was no sign of Di Skumpsby, nor did we ever discover what happened to him. He must have been flung overboard and drowned when we struck.

We carried provisions and piled them about us on the little raft. Underneath us, the green water heaved like a giant sleeping. And I was still full of a sort of sick pleasure; for the whole adventure was real, not an illusion. To that I added a rider: whatever reality was, this was it; I did not deny that there might be a greater reality, to which life itself was a fake, a shadow show for creatures beyond our imagining.

Straining towards the shore, I had a sensation then — and I call it sensation rather than reflection because it moved so powerfully through me that my skin tingled — which came back to me more than once in the jumble of crises that followed our setting foot on Africa’s shore: and comes back to me now, still strongly. I thought all new experiences were welcome to me less for their own sake than because they gave me an opportunity to work deeper into myself.

Obscurely though forcibly, this struck me as a wrong attitude to life. What if it was wrong? Where would it lead me?

The dark was drawing in, but I overrode the protests of my two companions and insisted that we went ashore. The sun was setting as we lowered ourselves for the last time over the side of the great stranded ship; twilight settled in as we pulled the raft ashore and looked about us. On one side lay the sea, black though the sound of breakers suggested a liveliness it did not show. On the other side was the desert, beaten and broken. Farther along the coast, where I had glimpsed the tower, a light burned, shimmering in the heat.