The Edge of the Sea

Algis Budrys

• Publisher: Start Publishing LLC
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781649740601
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Ciencia ficción

Dan Henry discovered the derelict on the open seas and that meant by law of salvage it belonged to him. But when the previous owners showed up to claim it he was going to have a hard time pressing his claim. Algis Budrys was the Hugo and Nebula award nominated author of Rogue Moon and Michaelmas.

The Overseas Highway, two narrow white lanes on yellowed concrete piers, lay close to the shallow water, passed over the key, and went on.

All afternoon the sea had been rising. Long, greasy-faced green swells came in from the Atlantic Ocean and broke on the rocks with a sudden upsurge of surf. At midday, the water had been far down among the coral heads. Now it was in the tumbled limestone blocks and concrete prisms that had been dumped there to build up the key. In a little while it would be washing its spume over the highway itself, and it might well go farther, with the increasing wind.

It was dark with twilight, and darker with clouds thick as oil smoke covering the sun over the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf was stirring, too, and bayous were flooding in Louisiana. But it was over the Atlantic that the hurricane was spinning. It was the broad, deep, deadly ocean that the tide and wind were pushing down through the gloom on to the side of the key where Dan Henry was struggling grimly, his massive back and shoulders naked and running with spray.

His eyes were red-rimmed with salt and his hide was slashed shallowly in a dozen places where he had lost his balance on the stones and fallen. He had been lurching through the surf all afternoon, working to save what he had seen, leaden and encrusted, rolling ponderously at the edge of the water. His shirt, the seat covers from his car—the fan-belt, too—and what few scraps of rope and wire had been in the trunk, all had gone for him to twist into an incredible rag of a hawser.

The men who built the Overseas Highway on the old railroad right-of-way had built up the little key, but it was still no more than a hundred feet in diameter. If the thing trapped on the rocks had chosen any other islet to wash against, there would have been a reasonable chance of saving it. But there was no one living here, and nothing to use for tools or anchors. The thing was rolling and grinding against the rocks, too heavy to float but too bulky to resist the push of storm-driven water. There were bright silver gouges on its metal flanks, and in a little while it would break up or break free, and be lost either way. The rope—the stubborn, futile rope passed around the two struts at its nose and wrapped around the great concrete block it was now butting at with brute persistence—was as much use as though Dan Henry had been a spider and tried to hold this thing in a hurriedly created web. But he had had to try, and he was trying now in another way. He jammed the soles of his feet against one concrete block and pushed his shoulders against another. With his belly ridged and his thighs bulging, his face contorted and his hands clenched, he was trying to push another massive piece of stone into place behind the plunging metal thing, though his blood might erupt from his veins and the muscles tear open his flesh.

The thing was as thick through as a hogshead, and as long as two men. There was a thick-lipped, scarred opening a foot across at one end, where the body rounded sharply in a hemispherical compound curve. There were three stumpy fins rooted in the curve, their tips not extending beyond the bulge of the body, and two struts at the blunt nose like horns on a snail but bent forward so that the entire thing might have been fired out of a monstrous cannon or launched from the tubes of some unimaginable submarine. There were no visible openings, no boltheads, no seams. The entire thing might have been cast of a piece—might have been solid, except for the tube in the stern—and though barnacles clung to it and moss stained it, though the rocks gouged it and other blows had left their older scars on its pitted surface, still the thing was not visibly damaged.

Dan Henry strained at the rock, and sand grated minutely at its base. But the world turned red behind his eyes, and his muscles writhed into knots, and his breath burned his chest with the fury of fire. The sea broke against him and ran into his nose and mouth. The wind moaned, and the water hissed through the rocks, crashing as it came and gurgling as it drew back. The thing groaned and grated with each sluggish move. The day grew steadily darker.

Dan Henry had sto...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• The Edge of the Sea