Not if we're going to try to work on the boat, I thought. And packing
Dominic, with his broken leg, down over that waterfall was something I
didn't want to try, either. I didn't say anything. Wait till we got
back to the boat. It was too cold and windy here to argue, and
besides, we didn't know what Abe and his party might have found
upstream.
12
CASTAWAYS WORKING
We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back,
I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off the
engine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at the
ruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, not
just relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was even
more crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsium
shielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piled
in the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at the
converters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in a
hopeless mess.
There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesário Vieira had
found a small portable radio that wasn't in too bad condition, and had
it apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work of
anybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he was
doing. It wasn't much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolute
limit of its range, at least for sending.
"Is this all we have?" I asked, looking at it. It was the same type as
the one I carried on the job, camouflaged in a camera case, except
that it wouldn't record.
"There's the regular boat radio, but it's smashed up pretty badly. I
was thinking we could do something about cannibalizing one radio out
of parts from both of them."
We use a lot of radio equipment on the _Times_, and I do a good bit of
work on it. I started taking the big set apart and then remembered the
receiver for the locator and got at that, too. The trouble was that
most of the stuff in all the sets had been miniaturized to a point
where watchmaker's tools would have been pretty large for working on
them, and all we had was a general-repair kit that was just about fine
enough for gunsmithing.
While we were fooling around with the radios, Ramón Llewellyn was
telling the others what we found up the other branch of the fjord. Joe
Kivelson shook his head over it.
"That's too far from the boat. We can't trudge back and forth to work
on the engines. We could cut firewood down there and float it up with
the lifters, and I think that's a good idea about using slabs of the
soft wood to build a hut. But let's build the hut right here."
"Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?" the mate
asked.
"Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream.
There may be something better up there."
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
"I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job.
We need parts, and we haven't anything to make them out of or with."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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