Wake of the Perdido Star by Gene Hackman

Author:Gene Hackman
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-08-03T07:00:00+00:00

For the week it took Jack to recuperate from his dive, he watched the labors of Mentor and Coop as they used their carving skills to set the brass parts into the stocks they had already started. Much of the first day they brought the barrels and mechanisms to his bed, to get his assurance they were assembling the parts correctly. He had little to say; the parts fit together well and Coop was adept at preparing the resting pad for the barrels. The men were better carpenters than he.

Jack felt strangely despondent. His mood wasn’t helped on the third day when an accident occurred. Quince decided, as Jack had expected, to raise the deep bell. It needed to be aired, and design flaws corrected in the resting platforms. And, their main diver had “diver’s rheumytism,” according to Mentor. Paul, though not sure it was rheumatism, believed it true that Jack had some kind of diving ailment.

Besides, they had salvaged the most needed items. Several of the men, Jack noticed, were now wearing shoes. His own boots from his kit were lying at the foot of his bed. They had been soaked in fresh water and well greased with animal fat.

They figured raising the bell to be an easy task. Hell, if it wasn’t weighted down, it should come up on its own. Shram and two of the shallow-water team dove down to cut the lines from the biggest weights. After only two cuts, the bell started to move. But once it started, it gained momentum at a speed none of the men expected. Rael, a young native diver who had been practicing breathing from the bell, was snagged by a piece of the barrel rigging halfway up and dragged to the surface at great speed. Jack watched in amazement as the huge barrel hit the surface, half of its height actually clearing the water.

Rael was thrown free. The men helped him to shore, where he suddenly started to reel, his knees jerking.

“He fainted and never woke up,” Paul told Jack an hour later.

“But why, damn it?” Jack lamented. “He wasn’t down but a minute. He can’t have any diver’s disease and there was all that blood frothin’ out of the poor bugger’s mouth. What the hell happened?”

They never were sure. After much agonizing, Paul’s best guess was that for some reason the young man couldn’t release the air in his lungs when he was pulled up so fast—they literally blew up in his chest. Why it didn’t happen when other people came up fast, he couldn’t say.

It seemed that every triumph in this diving game came with a price of pain or death. Rael’s fatal accident deeply disturbed Jack, as he was developing an increasing sense of kinship with the Belaurans, particularly the young men who shared his diving adventures. Why Rael? Strong, bright-eyed, a young warrior with an easy laugh and ready courage. What a waste. Jack dearly hoped the gains from their underwater travails would justify such a tragic loss.

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