"Well, suppose I take a party down now and start cutting?" the mate asked.
"Not yet. Wait till Abe gets back and we see what he found upstream. There may be something better up there."
Tom, who had been poking around in the converters, said:
"I think we can forget about the engines. This is a machine-shop job. We need parts, and we haven't anything to make them out of or with."
That was about what I'd thought. Tom knew more about lift-and-drive engines than I'd ever learn, and I was willing to take his opinion as confirmation of my own.
"Tom, take a look at this mess," I said. "See if you can help us with it."
He came over, looked at what we were working on, and said, "You need a magnifier for this. Wait till I see something." Then he went over to one of the lockers, rummaged in it, and found a pair of binoculars. He came over to us again, sat down, and began to take them apart. As soon as he had the two big objective lenses out, we had two fairly good magnifying glasses.
That was a big help, but being able to see what had to be done was one thing, and having tools to do it was another. So he found a sewing kit and a piece of emery stone, and started making little screwdrivers out of needles.
After a while, Abe Clifford and Piet Dumont and the other man returned and made a beeline for the heater and the coffeepot. After Abe was warmed a little, he said:
"There's a little waterfall about half a mile up. It isn't too hard to get up over it, and above, the ground levels off into a big bowl-shaped depression that looks as if it had been a lake bottom, once. The wind isn't so bad up there, and this whole lake bottom or whatever it is is grown up with trees. It would be a good place to make a camp, if it wasn't so far from the boat."