Dark Ararat - Brian Stableford [142]
The basket was still swinging, and its soft fabric felt far less reassuring than Matthew could have wished, but he had watched enough loads go down to know that he and Dulcie were not nearly heavy enough to test its strength.
Meanwhile, Ike and Lynn were managing to stay free of climbing worms, even though the total number of visible worms was still increasing. The various heaps of unshipped cargo and disassembled boat were not as fortunate; they had been overrun. There were too many piles of boxes and equipment, and the piles were too awkwardly spaced, for two humans with chain saws to stand much chance of defending them.
It was not yet obvious that the worms posed any danger at all to people, or to the tough fabric of the boat’s hull, but the avidity of the flood was unmistakable, and Matthew could not doubt that they were bent on consuming something.
Nor was that any longer the whole of the rapidly developing problem; before the basket was halfway through its descent he saw the first of the larger creatures following in the wake of the worms. There were “killer anemones” among them—large ones, though none so large as to qualify as super killer anemones by his yardstick—but there were other animal-analogues too: froglike forms and things that might have passed for monkey-analogues had they not been scaly and rubber-limbed. For days they had been trying without success to catch more than a glimpse of creatures like these, and now they were being subjected to a veritable plague of them.
Matthew wondered, briefly, if the chain saws were actually making things worse, by bringing about such a rapid increase in the supply of ready-chopped foodstuffs. It seemed only too plausible—but the thought had not yet occurred to Lynn or Ike.
There was now something to shoot at, if the rifle could only be aimed properly—but Dulcie Gherardesca still held it, and she had not yet attempted to aim it. The basket was still swaying, and she probably would not have been able to shoot straight enough to guarantee that she would not hit Lynn or Ike, who were now moving apart, swinging their chain saws as they went.
Then the cable jammed, and the basket’s descent was abruptly halted.
Dulcie managed to keep hold of the gun, and Matthew managed to keep hold of the control box, but they both had considerable difficulty keeping their feet, and would certainly have fallen had the basket’s elastic sides not bulked so high about them.
Matthew immediately began pumping the control button with his thumb. The groaning of the motor told him that the machine was trying hard to obey the signal, but it was a stupid machine without any robotic ingenuity at all. The basket only moved from side to side, turning about its axis as it swung.
Lynn Gwyer’s chain saw ran out of fuel and died.
Any hope that this might have been a good thing vanished within an instant. She was already surrounded by a living carpet. While she was still on the move with the saw going full blast the worms had made little attempt to swarm up her ankles and calves, and the newcomers had seemed far more interested in the liberally shed blood of the worms than in her, but there was nothing to intimidate them now. The confusion seething around her was so utter and so awful that Matthew could not blame her in the least for what she did next.
She was less than five meters from what seemed to be a calm refuge, almost perfectly placid and apparently clear. Once she had dropped the chain saw it only required four long leaping strides to carry her to the river’s bank, and a headlong dive to carry her over.
She met the water gracefully enough, her arms extended before her.
She must have known that there would be an undertow, because she knew perfectly well that the water cascading