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.
“I can manage,” Dombey said. He took a few staggering steps to prove it.
“Your turn,” Rand said to Leswick.
The philosopher didn’t object. Rand strapped the bundled-up sleeping bags on his back, and added a load of fruit. Then he hoisted the rest of their gear onto his own back, and Leswick lashed it in place.
Rand was carrying the detector that would lead them to the distant beacon.
“Onward and upward,” Rand said. “Let’s march!”
Chapter 9
Rand checked his detector and his compass and set out to the east—toward the rescue beacon. Leswick fell in behind him, and Dombey brought up the rear.
They marched silently for nearly an hour. The path they were following took a twisting route through the jungle, and sometimes it swerved toward the south or north. Once it even seemed to double back on itself and head west. Despite all the curves and turns, though, it still went mainly toward the east. It was a well worn path, lined with stamped-down leaves and twigs.
Rand wondered how long it would be before they met the people who had made the path.
The jungle was tropical, heavy with fog and warm mist. Humming yellow-winged insects circled their heads, and they marched forward through clouds of red gnats. The borders of the path were lined with tall, narrow trees that had scaly bark.
The trees shot up straight for hundreds of feet. They had no branches at all close to the ground. High above the jungle floor they sprouted long branches that bore thick, heavy leaves. Each leaf was the size of a man. The tops of the trees were close together, forming a green canopy.