A Question Of Time, Fred Saberhagen [best fiction books to read .TXT] 📗

and pouring efforts for which all four of their hands were needed, Camilla went running back, again and again, eventually drain all of the kerosene from the storage drum into their pot and can. Jake was cutting the wire that he’d found, and closely inspecting the slab of limestone that guarded Tyrrell’s refuge, picking out the places where he wanted to put the dynamite. He thought two sticks should do it.

      As soon as they had done all that they could do with kerosene, Jake started hand-drilling the holes for the explosive. In his left hand he gripped the drill, a simple hand tool shaped like a long chisel with a steel shank and a star-shaped cutting end. With his right arm he swung one of the middle-sized hammers from the workshop. Dust and fine chips spouted from under the biting end of the drill with every blow, and after each blow Jake rotated the cutter slightly.

      The drill, driven by no more than human muscle, sank into the rock with painful slowness, a small fraction of an inch with every blow. The workshop boasted a few electric tools, but there was no way to get power to any of them back here.

      Camilla stood by him, watching for the most part in silence, and stinking, as he did, of kerosene. Their clothes were wet with the stuff. All either of them needed was for someone to strike a match.

      “What can I do to help?” she pleaded.

      “Nothing, right now.”

      The smell of kerosene saturated the air. Jake could imagine the puddle of it that must lie back in among the rocks all evaporating, dissipating into the atmosphere before they were ready to put a flame to it. He told himself such thoughts were foolishness, and labored on.

      At last, the first of his hand-drilled holes was deep enough. Thank God it was only limestone that he was trying to drill, and not granite, nor the strange black Vishnu schist.

      Camilla asked again: “What can I do?”

      “Okay. Here, you hold the drill.”

      Now, starting the second hole, he could use a bigger hammer, and grip it with both fists. The work went faster. Once he hit the drill only a glancing blow, and it leaped free of Camilla’s grip to clang with what seemed awful loudness on the rocks. She screamed at Jake to be careful what he was doing, not to hit her arms.

      At last they had drilled the holes. Putting the dynamite and blasting caps in place was not all that difficult, but the job had its tricky aspects. Really, Jake knew very little about this, only what he had picked up before he came to the Deep Canyon, watching the experts employed by the CCC.

      He was tamping a blasting cap and its attached wire in on top of the first charge, when Camilla said suddenly: “I have to see him dead, Jake, it won’t be enough to just think he’s probably burned up back in there. If I don’t see him with my own eyes today, I’ll die waiting for it to get dark tonight—not knowing if he’s really dead, or if he’s coming out after us.”

      Jake grunted and went on working.

      Finally the dynamite was set, tamped into both of the drilled holes with wire and blasting caps in place.

      Jake was ready to set it off. There was no reason to delay.

      He had set up the blasting machine in what he thought would be a sheltered place, behind a huge rock a hundred feet from Tyrrell’s sanctuary. He attached the wires to the machine and raised the handle to deliver a jolt of electricity when Camilla clutched at his arm.

       “What was that?” she demanded in a whisper.

      As soon as she called his attention to the sound he could hear it, sure enough. It was an inhuman or half-human sound, and Jake was sure that it came from the direction of Tyrrell’s little cave. It reminded Jake of the time when as a child he’d come across a car dying with its foot caught in a rat trap.

      There was no use waiting.

      “Here goes nothing,” Jake muttered to himself. Camilla, seeing what he was about to do, crouched down.

      Jake said: “Put your head down…”

      He leaned his weight on the handle, heard the armature whirr, an instant generator inside the machine. He’d put everything together right, because a hundred feet away the blast went off, two charges ripping the atmosphere in the same heartbeat. In the open air, dynamite always made less noise than Jake expected.

      He was on his feet at once, jumping out from behind his sheltering boulder and running toward Tyrrell’s sanctuary through the small rock fragments falling back to earth. A dozen strides and Jake skidded to a halt, seeing with fierce despair that the explosion had not shattered the barrier rock. Only perhaps a tenth of the obstruction had been removed; the deep recess was every bit as inaccessible as before.

      Camilla joined him, saying nothing. The sight of failure wasn’t the most immediately sickening thing for Jake. Worse than that was the noise now coming from the little cave. There was no longer any doubt that Tyrrell was really there, just where Camilla had kept saying that he had to be.

      There was fire back there, behind the rock, what must be a miniature lake of kerosene going up quickly in black stinking smoke. Kerosene was burning, but not only kerosene. There was something else.

      It had taken the screaming, a horrible inhuman sound, a little while to get started. But there was no doubt about it now.

      “Jake! Jake, what do we do now?”

      He stared at the insufficiently broken barrier rock, trying to visualize where its weak points must lie. He had been wrong before, but there was nothing to do now but keep trying. “Get more dynamite. We’ll have to blast again. Hurry!”

      Camilla ran off at once. Jake stayed behind, planning where to drill the next set of blasting holes. If there would be time to drill them before the sun went down. The first