There was a bustling. Ginny stood close by Horn. She said in a low tone, almost a whisper, "I'm so glad you're here! Now everything will be all right."
"I wish I were as confident," he told her. "But I'm glad I'm here, too."
He watched the preparations for a move. The castaways gathered up bundles of foodstuffs. There were other bundles, larger and probably heavier than the food. Horn said, "How many weapons? Where are they?"
Ginny shivered a little. "There's one blast rifle usable. The others - it's so damp here. The dew made them get hot. A - short circuit?"
Horn made a bitter, inarticulate sound. A blast rifle dropped in water will be shorted out, but a blast rifle with the safety left off in damp air will gradually lose its charge. It had not occurred to any of these people, that a weapon's safety might exist for another reason than preventing accidental discharges. A blast weapon has to be kept on safety when not in use. It has to be! Sheer ineptitude had practically disarmed the castaways.
Horn inspected the one weapon not made useless. Its safety was on. One weapon against the fully armed crew of the Theban! It did not look good. Now the whole party was loaded down for moving. The cadaverous passenger carried less than any of the rest. Horn curtly ordered him to exchange burdens with one of the women. He protested that his health did not let him overexert himself.
"Then you'll stay here," said Horn gently, "and enjoy your death." He ran his eyes over the other loads. "What's this stuff that isn't food?" he demanded. But he knew.
The Danae's captain said, "That's currency. Forty million credits in cash. The most valuable part of the Danae's cargo. It is my duty to try to save all I can from the wreck of my ship."
"Which isn't wrecked," said Horn. "But I wish you'd left this money outside the spaceboats up by the beacon, for the Theban's crew to find. It would have done most of the job we face."
The captain said reproachfully, "But they'd have gone away with it. It's what they're after!"
"They'd have started killing each other over it," said Horn, grimly. "We wouldn't have so many of them to deal with."
"But you don't propose -"
"To give it to them? The devil, no! Not now! We need all the weapons we can get!"
The party was ready to move. Horn led the way, with the one working blast rifle. Ginny walked beside him. Her expression was one of joyful, absolute confidence. It apparently didn't occur to her that with Horn on hand anything could possibly go wrong.
It was a strange journey. They waded into the slowly, slowly rising water till presently they came to where a game trail joined the one they followed. They backtracked on it, approaching the beacon and the Theban. Always, before they came to solid ground, they found another flooded game trail leading partly in the direction they wished. They moved in a succession of zigzags, going three or four feet sideways for every foot of advance around the ridge of higher ground they meant to reach presently.
They plodded on for hours. It was exhausting. Once they came to a hillock which at the moment was an island. Horn allowed them to rest here. A hunting party from the Theban wasn't likely to wade to it to find the signs of their pausing. They ate, frugally. The Danae's captain drew Horn aside.
"I understand how you got here," he said uneasily, "because of your fiancee. But isn't there someone who - knows where you are and will try to find you and us?"
"Only the gang on the Theban," said Horn.
The captain of the Danae almost looked distressed. "When you found us, I had so much hope...."
"We're not too badly off," said Horn. "We've food for a few days, and there's the Theban with more food aboard, and shelter when the rains come, and there's not too much more tinkering to be done to make her safe for a journey to Formalhaut."
"The rainy season!" said the captain. "Before we abandoned ship I looked up Carola in the space lane directory. It isn't really inhabitable. It's four-fifths ocean and most of the rest swamp." His tone took on traces of agitation. "It has a hundred and ten feet of rainfall a year! And as I compute it, the rainy season is about to begin."
"Then we'd better take the Theban," said Horn, "if only for shelter."
"But how?"
"We'll manage," said Horn shortly. "For one thing, since it's a bit chancy, I want to attract the attention of a passing ship."
"Impossible! The boats had communicators of limited range, but they're smashed."
"The beacon isn't of limited range," said Horn irritably. He had plans, and was trying to believe that they were sound. It was annoying to have the Danae's captain point out obstacles to all he intended to do. "The beacon's long-range. And I've designs on it."
"But the ship is there!" protested thecaptain. "You say it can't go away. The men in it will murder us; they've every reason to do so. And we aren't armed to defend ourselves!"
Horn frowned. It did not seem to him that in addition to thinking for all the castaways, plus the Danae's captain, and planning for the future, he should be required also to console the captain.
"Where," asked Horn, "did you get the idea that we aren't armed? We've got a weapon that's worth a thousand blast rifles. It's the deadliest weapon in the galaxy. And we've got it, and they haven't." Then he said annoyedly, "Come along! Let's rouse these people. We've got to carry on and try to get to solid ground far enough away before sunset."
"But," protested the captain helplessly, "what weapon have we got?"
"We," said Horn as patiently as he could, "have forty million credits in interstellar currency. Try to find a more deadly weapon than that!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE was only one use of weapons that day, though by the laws of probability there should have been more. That one was after sunset, and Horn wasn't directly involved.
From a time near noon onwards, Horn led the Danae's passengers and crew along crisscrossing jungle trails flooded to a greater or lesser depth. Sometimes the water was thigh deep on the adults of the group, and the children had to be held above water. They seemed to enjoy the whole experience. Sometimes it barely reached an adult's ankle. But at all times the footprints they left behind them were underwater and invisible. Most of the time the prints were not even deep. The water had risen too recently to have made the soil real mud.
In their journeying they saw few wild things, none actually on the game trails they followed. Twice they did see animals resembling muskrats, swimming sturdily where the water was deep. Those creatures eventually climbed treetrunks and were lost to sight overhead. And more than once Horn saw lumps, not clearly distinguishable but certainly not parts of the trees and lianas on which they appeared. He did not see any of them closely enough to be certain, but they were a greenish grey and he believed them to be more of the octopuslike things he had seen crushing a tiny deer.
He made a guess that they dwelt aground in the dry seasons, preying on ground animals, and that when floodtime approached they climbed trees and lay in wait for the tree dwellers. The swimming animals also suggested an ecological system adapted to periodic floodings. Several times during the castaways' journey, too, he heard rumblings at the very bottom limit of audibility. All sound goes down in pitch with distance, and this might well be thunder of intolerable volume, reduced to mere pulsations of the air by the distance it had travelled.
But in the clearing the Theban's crew was then still engaged in the destruction of the spaceboats. Carcasses of the fascinated beasts killed the night before littered the ground. Some of them had had to be dragged away from where they'd fallen, to allow work to continue on the lifeboats being pulled to pieces in the search for treasure.