At the landing-stage I cupped my hands: 'Ahoy, there! Who is it?'
The flaming danger-signal burned out in the cold sea. The boat was too far away for me to catch the answer. Instead, another Very light flared, tattooing Johaar's skin with blood and birthmarks.
Again the hail. Koeltas heard; Rhennin swore while he waited for me to translate.
'It's Captain Longstaff. He says, come quickly, for God's sake, come quickly!'
Rhennin yelled. 'Longstaff! Stop firing those bloody lights! Come close, damn you, come close!'
The outboard circled aimlessly, like a ship with a torpedo in her rudder.
Koeltas clicked off the Remington's safety catch.
Johaar said, 'He asks, is it safe?'
These broken, high-pitched and hysterical incoherencies from the normally staid master of the Mazy Zed sounded unreal.
'Come close, blast you!' roared Rhennin.
'Felix, Koeltas says Longstaff says the 'tween-decks men are all dead — sorters, engineers, galley staff. The deck crew seems all right, but there's been a hell of a panic. Some of them have taken to the boats — one overturned and sank. A couple of men have been drowned. The others are up the rigging, on top of the gantry, on the roof of the living quarters…'
'Longstaff! Longstaff! Come here!'
His reply was another Very light. I spotted the captain at the tiller, staring straight ahead of him, like one of those dead figures in lifeboats during the war. Then he wrenched his arm over, as if he had come to a decision, and the outboard headed out to sea. We never saw Captain Longstaff again.
We held a hurried conference. Nothing would persuade Koeltas and Johaar to return with us to the Mazy Zed. The attempt at sea-bed mining off Mercury was over. Rhennin had shrugged angrily when I had called it Shelborne's victory. He decided to signal the tug and tow the Mazy Zed back to Luderitz — a day or two's run if the south-wester wasn't too strong. He seemed to take it for granted that I would go along too. He was startled when I told him that I had no intention of doing so. I still intended to break Shelborne's secret wide open. I was a freelance and not bound to the Mazy Zed, I went on. If I cared to throw my life away on a wild-goose chase in the Namib, that was my affair. At my vehemence, he smiled and shook me strongly by the hand. He was back on my side. The hell with Shelborne! He'd send the tug back after she had towed the Mazy Zed to Luderitz to pick me up in good time before Shelborne returned. I could have anything I wanted from the Mazy Zed for the journey. Koeltas and Johaar, torn between staying on Mercury and the unknown terror of the Bells, decided to come with me, although they refused to venture near the Mazy Zed. Half her crew dead! And every man of my own crew gone. In our mood, we had no hesitation in agreeing to Koeltas's request to keep the Remington in case Shelborne should return unexpectedly.
Rhennin and I set off for the Mazy Zed, lost in thought. It was clear to me that the deadly guardian of the fountainhead centred on the Glory Hole. The seabed gas I had found and the jellyfish screen — these had served only to mask the darker secret killer. Whatever it was, it was clear that Shelborne did not wield it — he could not, being away now — although he knew what it was. It was also intermittent in its lethal strikes. Did Shelborne know at what intervals it would attack, and is that why he left us so confidently to go to Walvis Bay with Mary, knowing we would be dead when he returned? Outflank — the word burned in my mind. I would outflank the Glory Hole and find the secret where I was now convinced he, too, had discovered it — at Strandloper's Water. I could not wait to set off.
The Mazy Zed's strong pulse was dead when we rounded the seal promontory. A corpse floated past, face upwards. Except for the oil-burning riding lights, the Mazy Zed was in darkness. Rhennin took command and signalled the tug, which was about sixty miles away. We battened down every opening and hatchway with the help of some of the braver members of the crew we enticed away from their positions aloft. Superficially, there was nothing to show that the million-dollar Mazy Zed had become a floating coffin.
I had hoped to stock our march from the Mazy Zed's supplies, but there was woefully little that was not below in the 'tween-decks morgue, where it would have been death to venture.
At first light next day Johaar, Koeltas and I went ashore from Mercury to the mainland, carefully skirting Bob Sheriff's wreck. Unaccountably, there was no fog and the sun was bright as we climbed in single file, myself leading, the low hills which backed the bay.
Ahead lay the Namib, white as the venom of a mamba.
15
Ancient land barrier!
Sand and sky merged at a distant line of stark, saw-edged peaks, pale cobalt in a vast cyclorama, a line robbed of all decisiveness by the white glare of the sky. Deeply keeled, serried lines of enormous dunes, some of them a thousand feet high, ran north-eastwards in an eccentric, rock-ribbed agglomeration. Barrier it was, for the north was different terrain from the south. The dunes went no farther than the demarcation; on the other side stretched a vast, gravelly plain shot through with razor-edged outcrops — broken, corroded, ripped. Under the vertical eye-glare of the sun the enclaves and divides of the dunes were indistinguishable from their doppelganger shadows, eaten away as canker devours the pearly-white mouth of the puff-adder. I stood incredulous at this nakedness bankrupt of all life, with a lineal pedigree of two hundred million years without the bastardy of one flower, one fully-grown tree, or the crudest prototype of man, a quite unmitigated infinitude of sand. It was absolute, like space; primal as man's killer-instinct; an inexorable as a countdown.
I pointed to the line of mushroom-lipped blowholes, which climbed out of the quicksands into firmer country beyond. That is our route.'
'Jesus!' exclaimed Koeltas. 'I never leave the sea again!'
Johaar kicked a bare foot into the ankle-deep sand. 'Five miles a day, maybe, through this stuff. We want plenty water.'
I carried two of Shelborne's canteens. Johaar had roped to his belt a half-gallon wine jar I had found on the Mazy Zed's deck and Koeltas had two empty brandy bottles in the pockets of his faithful oilskin. The water from Shelborne's room condensers was insipid but there was none available from the Mazy Zed as the tanks were in the sealed-off living quarters. Koeltas carried the Remington and I the short Bernadelli VB automatic as well as Rhennin's superlative Hensoldt Diasport binoculars, pocket-sized and amazingly powerful. Looking at the emptiness before me, I felt a fellow-feeling with Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who had carried the same make of glasses into space. I had commandeered haversacks and some tinned food from Shelborne's larder. The dead buck which covered the beach would have stocked an army, but we dared not venture near.
Koeltas and I had cut out the toes of our veldskoens in 'sandtrapper' tradition to get rid of the sand. Ordinary boots are useless, since the abrasive action of the sand strips the stitching in days. Koeltas wore his greasy skipper's cap and I a big sombrero from Shelbome's slop-chest: Johaar was in a guano-worker's hat.
I had plotted our route beforehand to the Uri-Hauchab mountains, the complex vaguely shown on the map, and now I checked my bearings with a small boat's compass. I had also set the time limit as four days: a little over a pint of water each per day. My first objective, if I could find nothing at the coast to solve the problem of ingress to the Glory Hole, was Strandloper's Water. The immediate interior seemed to offer nothing but signs of death. Farther inland — well, I told myself, Shelborne had lived for a year in it, and there must be water.