"Clever," Dean said, clapping his hands.

Now they could make out what Ryan assumed was probably the mainland, though it was difficult to see and it could easily have been another, larger island. J.B. hadn't bothered to use his minisextant, assuming that they probably knew more or less where they were.

"Good half mile," Jak stated, squinting toward the mist-shrouded horizon.

"Could swim that easy, Dad."

Ryan laid his hand on the boy's shoulder. "You always have to remember the people with you, son.

Mebbe you could swim it. But you don't know what the currents are like. Might be a powerful undertow out there."

"An underload? What's that?"

Ryan answered him. "Undertow. Kind of whirlpool that you sometimes can't see but it can suck down the strongest swimmer, Dean."

The boy looked disappointed that the "underload" wasn't a real creature.

Ryan continued. "Even if you could swim it, then what about everyone else in the group? Think Abe could make it? Or Doc? Mildred?"

"Or me?" Ryan asked. "I reckon I'm a fair swimmer, but that's a long way."

"Guess so. Does that mean we have to go back to make another jump?"

"Let's carry on around the rest of the island and see what we can see. Might find something." Ryan

grinned at the look of dismay on his young son's face. "Trader always said that a man who made his decision without having all the facts was setting one foot in his grave."

THEY COULD SEE the other five picking their way very slowly over the treacherous rocks, about three hundred yards ahead of them. Between them lay a small bay, about one hundred paces across, filled with banks of torn seaweed and a jumble of driftwood.

"Hey," Dean yelled, pointing at the timber. His shout scared away a pair of sea otters that had been exploring in the cove. "Make a raft, Dad?"

"Mebbe," Ryan said. "Mebbe."

THEY WERE REUNITED as they stood on the only patch of beach on the whole island, a strip of shingle barely twenty feet long, dotted with empty mussel shells.

"Nothing around this way," J.B. reported, staring out across the ocean. "Looks like our only chance of getting off to the mainland is to build some kind of raft."

"How about sharks?" Mildred asked.

Everyone considered that, looking in silence at the featureless expanse of water.

"Don't see any sign of anything." Trader spit into the pebbles. "Nothing to be scared about, lady."

"Point about being scared of a great white, Trader, is that you don't see it until it comes up from

underneath and bites you in two."

"Yeah, all right. But if we can make a good raft, it should be safe enough."

"Plenty of wood." Abe shaded his eyes against the sun. "What do we tie it together with?"

"Can see ropes and stuff," Jak said, pointing to a straggling coil of orange hemp.

Ryan looked around at the rest of the group. "We going to try for this?"

Doc raised his cane. "I have to register a still, small voice of calm. I mean, of dissent. My memories of

occasions when we have taken to the water is that they have almost always been tainted with the proximity to disaster."

It was true.

"Just walking through a quiet wood on a summer day can get you chilled," Trader said. "Try and avoid a risk, and you run smack into another one."

Doc nodded. "I can't refute the veracity of that, my old companion. Indeed, it puts me in mind of the legend of the fabled ruler of classical times. A soothsayer told him"

"A what?" Abe asked.

"Soothsayer. Shaman. Wise man. Prophet. A doomie. A seer on the future."

"Oh, sure. Sorry."

Doc carried on. "Thiswiseman warned the king that he had dreamed and had received a warning that the king's only son, a merry little chap of some eight winters, would meet his ending at the handsthe claws, of a lion. Well, the father was horrified. Such omens often came true. He built a wondrous palace, with barred windows and stout doors, filling it with armed men. So that no lion could possibly reach his son, who was forbidden ever to leave the palace."

"So, there was no way that a lion could chill him, Doc?" Dean asked.

"Right, dear boy. But his son was curious, having heard the rumors from the servants. He asked his father what a lion looked like. So the king purchased a huge painting of a fearsome lion, crouched over its prey.

The picture was in a massive, ornate golden frame and was hung in the boy's bedroom where he often stood and admired it."

"I know this," Krysty said. "I'm sure Uncle Tyas McCann told me the fable when I was a little girl back in Harmony ville." She saw the look on Doc's face. "Sorry to interrupt. Go on."

"Very well. One day the lad was staring raptly at the painting when there was a mighty thrumming sound, like a bowstring being drawn back. A sharp crack, and the cord supporting the picture snapped through. The painting fell on the poor little prince and crushed his skull like a Kerry pippin."

"So, the father didn't manage to save him and the omen was true," Dean said. "Hey, hot piping story, Doc. You got any more like that?"

Ryan interrupted. "Yeah, Dean, it was a real good story. And I know for a fact that Doc's got himself several hundred more adventures."

"All of 'em the same," Mildred muttered.

Ryan carried on. "But we'll hear some more of them at a better time. Right now we have to go in and get some timber out of the sea, along with that rope. And get started on building ourselves a good raft."

"THAT SMELL REALLY SEEPS into your heart," Krysty said. "Gets so you don't want to draw in a full breath."

"Yeah." They were all soaked to the skin from the battle to retrieve their raft-building materials from the stubborn, weed-bound bay.

The dark green coils were up to a hundred feet long, and they had suckers that attached themselves to the lengths of driftwood that were needed to construct their ramshackle craft. It was impossible to tear them loose, and every bit had to be cut away by hand, using knives, hacking through the coarse lengths of weed, some of them thicker than a man's wrist.

"Mebbe a jump would be easier," Abe panted.

"Like wrestling with a shack full of drunk stickies," Trader said, sitting down in the shingle to take a breather.

"I reckon we could have used this creeper stuff instead of ropes to tie the raft together." J.B. took off his fedora to wipe sweat from his forehead.

"Soon be dark." Jak was trying to restore an edge to one of the short throwing knives, rubbing the steel against the flat side of a smooth stone.

Ryan glanced up at the sun, seeing to his surprise that it had already started its final plunge out over the western border of the ocean. The shadows had lengthened, and the air had become noticeably colder.

The raft was taking shape, but there was no possible way that it would be finished before night came swooping in.

"We could go back up to the redoubt," he suggested, "or build a fire down here. Not much danger. We haven't seen any kind of life that can threaten us."

"Steep climb," Trader said. "Have to say that this is harder work than I'd figured it would be."

"Stay here with a fire?" Nobody raised an objection. He turned to Dean and Abe. "We'll carry on until the light goes. You two start collecting some of the drier wood from higher up among the rocks. Get it piled ready for a fire."

J.B. BROUGHT OUT ONE of the self-lights that he always carried to get the flames started. Dean had found a vast bundle of dried seaweed that he'd hauled across the rocks, using that as the base. Abe piled some of the smaller pieces of dry driftwood that he'd picked out from the higher rocks, placing them carefully among the crackling, yellowed weed. Then both of them had hauled some larger hunks of wood and stacked them on top.

With the sun well down and the light almost gone, Ryan called a halt to the raft-building, ordering everyone to the party to scavenge for more wood to try to keep the fire going during the chill of the night ahead.

Trader queried the need. "Island isn't inhabited, Ryan, and I don't think seals are going to give us much trouble. Unless you figure there's some sort of marine stickies swimming around out yonder, just waiting their chance to creepy-crawl in and haul one of us off to their undersea caverns?"

Ryan ignored the heavy-handed attempt at sarcasm. "You and me've seen stranger things than that in our life, Trader. And it wouldn't be impossible for someone on the mainland, on the coast, to see the light of the fire and come out in their boats to investigate."

"If they did, we could steal their boats," Dean said.

"Raft's nearly finished," J.B. protested. "Not having all that work for nothing."

"Post a watch?" Jak asked. "There's fog coming offshore. Doubt they'd see fire."

"Better not to take a chance," Trader insisted, unexpectedly changing tack. "With nine of us, it'll only be a short while each on lookout."

THE FLAMES BURNED BRIGHT, the golden smoke circling on the thermals, mingling with the thick mist that had descended over the California coast, bringing with it the strongest smell yet of rotting eggs.

Everyone was tired from working waist-deep in the icy water, battling with the ropes of weed and the sodden wood that lay tangled together in the bay. After a snack from the supplies they'd brought from the redoubt, everyone lay in a rough circle around the fire, readying themselves for sleep.

Dean was first on watch.

RYAN WAS AWAKENED by a shake of the shoulder from Krysty. He sat up immediately, the SIG-Sauer miraculously cocked and ready in his fist.

"What?"

She kissed him on the mouth, sliding her warm tongue between his teeth. She kneeled, smiling at him, hair seeming to be ablaze in the glow of the fire, which everyone had kept burning brightly during their turns on watch.

"Nothing, lover. Just that it's three in the morning. You're on guard." She lay down as he stood, tugging the collar of his coat around him against the chill night air. "Oh, and we're nearly out of wood."

"Doesn't matter much." He looked up at the great vault above them, trying to pierce the blanket of mist.

"Dawn can't be too far away. Not worth hunting around for more wood. It'll mostly be wet anyway." He yawned. "See or hear anything?"

"Seals. Heard great whales moving a couple of times. Far off, but you know how sound carries at night. They were heading south. A pod of them, I think. Most amazingly mournful, moving sound. Thought I heard something moving in among that Sargasso Sea of weed in the cove, but I think it was probably just the waves, or a fish. Or something."

"Something?" he whispered. "I'll keep a triple careful lookout for that 'something,' lover."

"Do that. Kiss before leaving."

Ryan stooped down, brushing his lips against her cold cheek, straightening and walking past the glowing embers of the fire. He picked up some half-burned pieces of wood and lobbed them into the heart of the flames.

RYAN WALKED SLOWLY up and down for a few minutes, right at the limit of the water. The mass of weed jammed into the bay stopped the big ocean breakers, and the waves barely rippled onto the shingle. The mist had dropped visibility to less than a hundred yards. He peered out to where the mainland, if their guesses were correct, was waiting.

The raft, almost complete, lay like a tumbled cabin, odd-shaped spars and lengths of timber all bound together with the uncoiled orange rope.

Ryan looked at it, silhouetted against the dying fire, where a large balk of timber finally collapsed in on itself, sending a cascade of tiny sparks soaring skyward into the fog, like brilliant rubies.

In the stillness, he turned from the island and looked back across the cove. What had Krysty called it? A Sargasso Sea? Ryan had a vague feeling he'd heard the name before, perhaps in some old predark mag, a vast bed of weed that floated somewhere in the center of the Lantic Ocean, trapping even big, powerful ships in its clammy grasp and sentencing their helpless crews to a miserable death by starvation.

There was just enough light from a waning moon, filtering through the bank of swirling mist, for him to make out the strange writhing movement of the various chunks of flotsam and jetsam amid the clinging weeds, the sea beneath pushing and pulling below the surface.

Ryan stared more carefully into the gloom, trying to decide whether he'd possibly seen the "something" that Krysty thought she might have spotted. But the odd motion that had caught his eye wasn't repeated.

He walked away, trying to move quietly to avoid disturbing his sleeping companions. He sat by the fire, his right hand resting on the butt of the SIG-Sauer in its holster. Somewhere above him was the redoubt, with the mat-trans unit, which set him to wondering about the strange rumors of Orientals suddenly appearing here and there in Deathlands.

His attention was suddenly distracted.

Chapter Ten.