ably different from
anything analogous on normal planets. They aren't tall, the biggest
not more than fifteen feet high, but they are from six to eight feet
thick, with all the branches at the top, sprouting out in all
directions and reminding me of pictures of Medusa. The outside bark is
a hard shell, which grows during the beginning of our four hot
seasons a year. Under that will be more bark, soft and spongy, and
this gets more and more dense toward the middle; and then comes the
hardwood core, which may be as much as two feet thick.

"One thing, we have firewood," Murell said, looking at them.

"What'll we cut it with; our knives?" I wanted to know.

"Oh, we have a sonocutter on the boat," Ramon Llewellyn said. "We can
chop these things into thousand-pound chunks and float them to camp
with the lifters. We could soak the spongy stuff on the outside with
water and let it freeze, and build a hut out of it, too." He looked
around, as far as the light penetrated the driving snow. "This
wouldn't be a bad place to camp."

Not if we're going to try to work on the boat, I thought. And packing
Dominic, with his broken leg, down over that waterfall was something I
didn't want to try, either. I didn't say anything. Wait till we got
back to the boat. It was too cold and windy here to argue, and
besides, we didn't know what Abe and his party might have found
upstream.

12

CASTAWAYS WORKING

We had been away from the boat for about two hours; when we got back,
I saw that Abdullah and his helpers had gotten the deck plates off the
engine well and used them to build a more substantial barricade at the
ruptured stern. The heater was going and the boat was warm inside, not
just relatively to the outside, but actually comfortable. It was even
more crowded, however, because there was a ton of collapsium
shielding, in four sections, and the generator and power unit, piled
in the middle. Abdullah and Tom and Hans Cronje were looking at the
converters, which to my not very knowing eye seemed to be in a
hopeless mess.

There was some more work going on up at the front. Cesario Vieira had
found a small portable radio that wasn't in too bad condition, and had
it apart. I thought he was doing about the most effective work of
anybody, and waded over the pile of engine parts to see what he was
doing. It wasn't much of a radio. A hundred miles was the absolute
limit of its range, at least for sending.

"Is this all we have?