I heard them lamenting their loss, but there was nothing they could do. Soon, I thought, their laments would turn to radio appeals for help, but they could not summon their leader, nor could they use their boat to escape. They were trapped, and I had just begun to play.
“How’s Stephen?” I asked Jackie, “Giving you grief? You’d like me to kick his head in?”
“He’s real quiet.” Jackie gazed wide-eyed at the flame-lit scenery. It had taken me the best part of a half hour to climb back up the escarpment, yet still the burning trawler was shuddering the water with the red reflections of its flames. The boat had gone aground close to the wooded promontory where she now slowly burned down to her waterline and from where her death streaked the black sea with bands of red fire and cast deep shadows into the settlement’s courtyard and into the tumbled rocks by the beach and into the woods above the burning boat. It was still raining and the flames gave a dark crimson sheen to the spreading puddles that made such a misery of the settlement’s vegetable gardens.
I now wanted to add to that misery. I had used one stick of dynamite on the boat, I needed another later in the night, which left me with four sticks, which I now made into a single bundle tied with a strip of green cloth I had cut from Stephen’s trousers. “Getting cold, are you?” I asked him.
He made an odd guttural noise from inside his gag. He was shivering. The flames, though burning over half a mile away, were just strong enough to reflect off his eyeballs. He watched me cut three of the four fuses off their sticks, then I fashioned the three into one long fuse which I spliced onto the fourth. I hoped that I had quadrupled the time between lighting the fuse and the resultant bang of the bomb with which I planned to attack the old earthern dam. I doubted whether the bomb would be powerful enough to destroy the dam, but, with luck, it would do enough damage to the spillway to make the settlement an even more uncomfortable place to live, and discomfort was the major weapon I was using to drive von Rellsteb’s followers out to where the world might hold them accountable for their actions.
When the bomb was finished, Jackie and I slithered down from the rocks to the path beside the dam. I left her crouched by a pale boulder, while I walked along the paved pathway which ran across the dam’s top.
The dam’s purpose was not to conserve water, for water was the one commodity that was never scarce in this land, but rather to save the fields from perpetual flooding by diverting the escarpment’s watershed westward instead of eastward. The dam also served as a gigantic header tank for the settlement, for which simple purpose it had no need of complicated sluicegates or turbines. Instead of such refinements I suspected that the dam simply leached its water into pipes buried deeply enough in the earthen wall to make sure that they were never blocked by ice in the wintertime. Some of the pipes would feed the conduits that irrigated the vegetable plots while others went to the house.
To make sure that the reservoir never overflowed to cascade an unwanted rush of water down to the settlement, there was a spillway at the western end of the reservoir which drained the lake’s excess water into the island’s inner tangle of wetlands. The whole nineteenth-century arrangement was a low-technology water control system of admirable simplicity and efficiency. It was also, I suspected, fairly resistant to sabotage.
That resistance was provided by the dam itself which was a massive wall of earth, doubtless reinforced with buried boulders that helped protect the pipes. I suspected I could not reach those pipes, so instead I planned to lower the sill of the dam.
The sill was ten feet wide and had a central pathway which was paved, but the paving stones were old, moss-covered, cracked, and uneven, and it was no trouble to lever one whole slab free. Then, using my knife, I clawed and scratched and dug my way down into the dam’s sill. I dug like a dog, desperately scrabbling soil aside as I delved ever deeper into the cold, damp and hard-packed mix of shingle and soil. The burning trawler gave just enough ambient light to let me see what I was doing.
When I had excavated as far as my arms could reach, I put the bomb into my newly made burrow, then, taking care to leave the fuse exposed, I swept loose soil and shingle over the bundled dynamite. Finally, leaving a space just large enough for my hand and a match, I pulled the flagstone back over the half-filled hole.
“Are you ready?” I called to Jackie.
“Go for it!” she shouted back, and I reflected that for a girl who went loose-kneed at the sight of a gun she was remarkably sanguine about dynamite.
I glanced toward the settlement. The trawler’s flames were at last losing their battle with the deluge of rain and sea, but just enough flickering light remained to show me the house and its encircling wings. I could see no flashlights there, indicating that the Genesis people, knowing their fishing boat was lost, had withdrawn once more into the protection of the buildings where, doubtless, they were frantically and helplessly trying to reach von Rellsteb on the radio.
So now was the perfect time to feed their panic.
I struck a match in the space I had left under the stone. The flame struggled, then caught, and I touched it to the stub of fuse that suddenly hissed and spat sparks at my knuckles. The fire darted into the loose soil and I hoped to God that there was enough oxygen to keep the fuse burning right down to the old explosives.
I ran. Jackie reached a hand toward me and I threw myself down behind her rock and put an arm about her. “Hold tight,” I said in unnecessary warning, then the fire bit into the explosives and the settlement’s troubled night became a whole lot worse.
The dying light of the burning trawler was just sufficient to show us what happened. At first I thought the whole energy of the explosive had been wasted into a one-hundred-foot column of flame which belched straight into the sky like an incandescent geyser. Smoke boiled after the spear of flame, then, magically, the smoke seemed to evaporate, leaving nothing except the memory of that startling stab of fire that had pierced the wet sky and momentarily blinded us both.
“Damn,” I said softly, thinking that the bomb had failed.
I heard splashes as lumps of soil and scraps of stone pattered down into the reservoir to break the complex geometric design of the radiating ripples that had been generated by the explosive percussion in the dam.
“Damn,” I said again, because I had just used four sticks of dynamite to achieve nothing more than pretty patterns on a lake.
“No! Listen!” Jackie said excitedly.
I listened and, above the sound of wind and rain, I heard an odd grinding noise which became yet louder and louder, and which seemed to come from the very heart of the mountain beneath us, and which suddenly turned into a titanic belch that, in turn, gave birth to an obscenely vast bubble which shattered the black surface of the reservoir hard by the sill itself.
Then, extraordinarily, it seemed as though the hard-packed soil at the very center of the dam was being turned into a shivering and gleaming liquid. Jackie and I, huddled together in the rain, watched as the apparently solid wall began to quiver and glisten as the water infiltrated the bomb-loosened mass of earth. For a second a smooth, shining, fire-touched lip of water trembled and glittered at the outer edge of the liquefying dam, then the whole vast agglomeration collapsed.
The bomb had done better than I had ever dared anticipate. I had hoped that the explosion might bite a chunk out of the dam’s sill, and that the consequent erosion of the spilling water would do the real damage by widening my small fissure into a gaping breach, but instead the whole construction now seemed to shatter and collapse over the escarpment’s edge in a single thunderous avalanche of earth, rocks, and water.