There was a bellow of thunder almost overhead. It was like the crack of doom above the treetops. It rolled and rumbled and reverberated. Horn looked up and said wryly, "I'm afraid we're going to get it. I hoped the rain would hold off a day or two more. But it's not far to the camp."
He mended his pace a little. Here the water was not quite up to his knees and offered less impediment to walking. The booming of the thunder went on, going down perceptibly in pitch as the farthest of the rumblings arrived at Horn's cars.
Far, far away there was a roaring sound, deep-toned and steady. Horn stared up at the sky again. He could see it only in patches, but a good half was still clearest blue, like the skies on all oxygen-atmosphere plants. The rest was dark. A cloudbank moved across the sky, with writhing fingers of vapour reaching on before it. The clouds were thick beyond conception, and grey instead of white, almost to their edges. They darkened as they advanced, and halfway to the horizon they were very nearly black.
The faraway roaring sound grew nearer. It was rain drumming on scores of square miles of jungle roof. Horn shook his head. 'The feeble attempt at a shelter in the clearing would be of no use against a downpour amounting to six or seven inches of rain in an hour. But he hastened. The Danae's captain strode dignifiedly in his wake.
There were small jungle noises about them as they reached the edge of the water. They went along the game trail whose flooded part they had been following. There were more jungle noises. Horn saw something small climbing swiftly up a tree, saw a burrow beside the trail, broken open from below. Something that had lived underground was aware that the rains were here. It had come out of its habitation to take refuge among the branches overhead. All the ground creatures seemed to be climbing. The two men came to the tiny clear space they and the other castaways had made two days earlier. Ginny smiled brightly at Horn. The women, including Ginny, were working feverishly to enlarge and improve the shelter. Ginny said confidently, "It looks like rain!" The stout businessman brought more foliage to be added to the shelter's thatch. The younger of the Danae's officers aided him. The hypochondriac passenger huddled in the most protected corner of what had so far been built. The four spacemen from the Danae sat stolidly still. If ordered by somebody, they would probably have worked also, but without orders they simply sat. The two children were more active. Horn ran his eyes over the group. "Where's the little man?" he demanded. "The Theban's engineer?" A crash of thunder came at the instant. It was literally deafening. When it ended, one of the four crewmen said stolidly that the engineer had gone down the game trail an hour before. He'd carried something with him. Horn said sharply, "One of these?" He pointed to the parcels, not unlike food packages in appearance, which contained the shipment of interstellar currency. The crewman nodded. The little engineer had suffered from lack of his bottles. Among the castaways there was nothing to help him. So, desperately seeking relief from anguish, he'd taken some of the currency to get himself a welcome and a bottle on the ship. And, being what he was, he wouldn't intend to, but he couldn't refuse to guide Larsen's men to the hiding place of the castaways and the money shipment. The roaring in the distance became louder. It drowned out the sound of Horn's voice as he called wrathfully, "Everybody up! Everybody up! We've got to move! He's gone back to the Theban to make a deal to sell us out for drinks. Everybody up!" The roaring of the onward-sweeping rain became louder still. Horn furiously roused the Danae's crewmen, and loaded them. They looked questioningly at the captain, and submitted to be burdened. The Danae's junior officer took his full share of foodstuffs and money. Ginny went to the women. In the manner of females, they gave the children foliage to use as partial - very partial - shelter from the coming downpour. The stout businessman took up his load. They started off. The hypochondriac wrung his hands. To go marching off, with rain approaching.... There were a few drops of rain overhead. Then bigger raindrops, the size of pebbles, hit the nearer topmost leaves. Then with a rush, a rattling, and a booming sound, the rain arrived. Horn finished wrapping cloths about the safeties of the two blasters the castaways now possessed. The most modern of blast weapons shared a drawback that only flintlock rifles of centuries earlier had been subject to. They had to be protected from wet. Even with safeties on, a sufficiently heavy rain could make them heat up through a high-resistance layer of moisture. Horn carried one weapon. He'd given Ginny the other. He trusted Ginny to use her brains, whereas he had seen no evidence of such an ability among the others. The rain beat down overhead. The air filled with a fine mist of spatterings. For minutes, though, and long enough for the party to get in motion, there was only a thin semidrizzle at the ground level. The castaways moved away from their hiding place. They had previously gone from one spot to another along trails that were flooded, submerged; now Horn led them away from the swamp. He led them inland, uphill.
Then the rain broke through the jungle roof. It came flowing down treetrunks in glistening, rippling layers. It flowed down branches to their lowest point and then poured like compact streams from hoses. It ran into the trail they tramped. In minutes the sodden bare soil was half an inch deep in running water. And more rain kept coming down.
To march in such saturation was like walking under a waterfall. Garments filled with water to the limit of their capacity to absorb. The burdens the fugitives carried were made heavier by water. The trail surface became slippery, and it was difficult to keep one's balance.
A woman slipped and fell, and Horn helped her to her feet. A child fell down, and Ginny lifted it. The child grinned. Walking in the rain is a pleasure of childhood which few parents will allow. The two children enjoyed being castaways. No one else did.
The journey through this downpour was exhausting. The water fell at close to ten inches per hour. Movement was seemingly meaningless and altogether unpleasant. Streams of water descended as if thousands of faucets had been turned on above the castaways' heads, and there was nothing to do but blunder on below them. Leaves dropped steady, threadlike trickles. Splashings formed water droplets so small that they did not fall but floated in the air between the treetrunks. And the trail became a stream a full inch in depth, and then two inches, and then three.
The Danae's castaways could not have been seen from a hundred feet away. If there had been anyone to watch their progress, Horn would have been seen first, heavily burdened and with streams of water pouring from his elbows, his chin, and the corners of the pack he carried. He'd have seemed to approach through a film of falling water, with a torrent falling on him full blast. Ginny came close behind; then the stout businessman, doggedly trudging with more than his share of the castaways' few possessions. Then came the two women and their children, and then the four crewmen of the Danae, burdened and somehow squat in appearance, marching deliberately under spoutings and streamings of water. After them the Danae's captain. After him the hypochondriac and the Danae's mate. The passenger tried hopelessly to dodge the falling water. He was convinced that he was catching his death of cold.
The air was full of sound. There were splashings, but only nearby. The drummings of rain upon leaves made a monotonous uproar which blotted out all others. The jungle was deeply shadowed, as if in late twilight. But from time to time monstrous and malevolent lightning flashed. There were occasions when lightning flashes followed each other in such rapid succession that the people, marching in the downpour seemed to move jerkily, mechanically, as if they were clumsily made robots or hastily made vision animation. The thunder bellowed. It was useless to try to talk. One could only bend one's head against the downpour and walk, and slip, and walk and slip again.