Solo looked amused. “I would bet there are at least a half-dozen knives within ten feet of where you are sitting.”
“Show me one.”
Adam Solo began scraping at the loose dirt near his feet with one boot. When it seemed soft enough, he began digging with his hands. In a moment he pulled up a shard of a flint blade. He laid it aside and kept digging. Pieces of flint, a broken arrowhead and an intact arrowhead were revealed as the hole got wider and deeper.
After another minute he said, “Aha,” and pulled a flint blade from the dirt. It was perhaps three inches long, and both sides were edged. There was no handle.
“A knife.”
Rip inspected the blade, turned it over repeatedly in his hands and held it so the fire illuminated it. Solo rose and walked to the Viking ship. In a moment he was back with a sword. It was short, broad and covered with rust. “I can scrape this rust off, and we can sharpen this on a stone. It’ll cut wood and butcher game and, if need be, cut people.”
Adam Solo slashed the air with it. The weapon seemed to fit his hand, Charley noted with a start.
Solo gave the sword to Rip, butt first. “Now, if you will loan me your rifle?”
Rip passed it to him. “It’s loaded.”
Solo inspected it as carefully as Rip had the flint blade. “Twenty-five thirty-five. Obsolete caliber.” He flashed Rip a grin. “But adequate.” He stood and adjusted his coat. “I’ll go see what I can find.”
Adam Solo walked around the fire and headed for the opening in the rocks.
Charley Pine said, “A week in a freezing cave hideout! Robbers Roost. And they say civilization is moving right along.”
“Didn’t you ever go to Scout camp?” Rip teased.
Charley didn’t look amused. She said to Egg, “How long before the U.S. government finds us?”
“Two or three days. The heat of the fire leaking from this cave will show on infrared sensors.”
“Uncle Egg, we need a plan.” Charley wasn’t smiling. “After Solo gets rescued by his buddies and flies off into infinity, we are going to be stuck here with six billion people who think we have the formula for eternal life and won’t give it to them.”
“The formula is in the saucer’s computer,” Egg admitted, “and you are right. I won’t give it to them.”
“Six billion crazy people,” Charley said. “You are going to have to give them the formula or we are going to have to get the hell off this rock while the getting is good.”
“Go with Solo, you mean.”
“Uncle Egg, you can’t resist a tidal wave.”
Egg added another dead limb to the fire. They sat staring into the fire, thinking their own thoughts.
Rip broke the silence. “Who wants to go fishing?”
“I’m saving fishing for my old age,” Egg replied. “So I’ll have something to look forward to.”
“I caught my fish at Scout camp,” Charley said dryly. “That was enough.”
“No sense of adventure,” Rip grumped. He put his fishing pole together, checked the reel and line and hook, then made a little ball of bread and impaled it on the hook.
He walked to the edge of the water lapping at the dirt and cast the hook and bread in.
“You can’t catch a fish in here,” Charley objected. “You’ll have to go outside.”
The words were no more out of her mouth than something big hit the hook and the line bent and started ripping off the reel. Rip laughed and played the fish.
Charley Pine was watching Rip fight the fish and didn’t see Uncle Egg enter the saucer and close the hatch.
Adam Solo walked north along the shore of the bay. To his right the escarpment that held the cave was gradually getting lower, becoming first a hill, then just a swell in the land, then petering out altogether.
The shoreline curved around to the east. Solo paralleled it, walking through low birches and scrub covered by several inches of snow. The air was below freezing. A light snow, almost a visible mist, was sifting down on the westerly breeze. Visibility in this gray world was no more than two hundred yards.
In just a few days, Solo knew, the bay would begin to freeze along the shore, and the ice would march out into the bay, sealing the water from the snow and wind. Winter was on its way — not the winter of the temperate zone farther south, but a subarctic winter. Fortunately the snow was not accumulating much just now. He pulled his hat down hard on his head, turned his coat collar up and buttoned the top button.
He walked deeper into the forest, looking for tracks. He kept the rifle balanced under his right armpit with the barrel down and his hands in his coat pockets. His feet would be wet within an hour or so — if he didn’t find anything he would have to turn back. If he got lucky with a caribou, he could make good boots and gloves, even a hat that covered the back of his neck and kept snow from going down his coat.
All these things he had learned the hard way, once upon a time. When he was much younger.
He tried to recall how the land lay, but the memory was old and the forest no longer looked the same. Trees had grown old and died in the intervening centuries; beavers had altered the streams; meadows now existed where once creeks had flowed through gullies.
Solo was standing behind an alder, looking across an old beaver meadow, when he saw movement. Just caught it out of the corner of his eye.
Without turning his head, Adam Solo searched with his eyes and saw the flash of white moving through the brush on the other side of the meadow. He stood frozen, watching.
A bear. A white bear. With two cubs. They were heading north. When the ice froze on the bay, they could get out on it in search of their favorite prey, seals.
Solo made no move to lift the rifle. First, he didn’t have a bullet heavy enough to stop a polar bear unless he made a perfect, lucky shot, and there were three of them. Killing two and wounding the third would be as fatal as missing with the first shot.
The large adult paused and sniffed the breeze. Fortunately the gentle wind was in Solo’s face, not behind him.
She turned her head and visually searched downwind. She looked right at Solo and didn’t see him. She wouldn’t, unless he moved.
The Vikings had thought the white bears enchanted and were frightened of them. He remembered the bears and the contagious fear. With only shields, swords and battle axes, the Vikings lost many bear encounters, which meant the bears ate some of them. The bears had never met a creature they couldn’t kill and eat. Standing now with an inadequate rifle and no other weapon, Adam Solo felt the fear again. He stood as still as he possibly could, trying to minimize the white cloud caused by his exhalations.
Today, thankfully, the white bear and her cubs moseyed on north along the creek until they were out of sight. Solo waited for several minutes, listening to the silence, the whisper of the wind.
He heard something, just a suggestion of a sound, then a breathing in and out. The hairs on the back of his neck and arms prickled. He turned slowly.
Turned, and there stood a bear on its hind legs, just a few feet from him, its black eyes in its expressionless white face looking down upon him.
Instinctively Solo dropped to the ground, bringing up the rifle. As the bear lunged he was under it, with the rifle coming up, thumbing back the hammer. He jabbed the barrel toward the descending head as he pulled the trigger.
9
After Solo left the cave to hunt, Egg Cantrell wriggled his way into the saucer and turned on the power. Then, carefully, he donned a headset and arranged it just so on his balding dome.
He knew what he wanted — Solo’s memories of the Viking ship — and the computer provided it almost instantaneously. It was as if Egg remembered the event himself.
The ship was riding a heavy sea; he was wet and cold; the wind was howling and rain blew sideways. He shouted at the crew, gestured to row harder to maintain steerageway downwind, and felt the ship respond sluggishly as the oars bit into the foaming sea.