"Mijok-man.... Mijok, why didn't I have you in Anthropology IA fifteen
years ago? We'd've cleaned up the joint." Mijok knew laughter; his
booming in response to Wright's tone and smile could mean nothing
else. But Wright staggered and was breathing hard. Dorothy whispered,
"Paul--"
It could not be pushed aside any more--the pain separate from the
smart of his shoulder, tightness in the eyeballs, chill, nausea. "The
air--"
Wright's knees buckled. Sears had dropped the rifle and was helping
him to the lifeboat, Paul watching the action in a daze of stupidity.
Wright's eyes had gone empty.... Paul was uncertain how he himself
came to be sitting on the ground. Dorothy's face was somewhere; he
touched it. Her brown cheek was fire-hot, and she was trying to speak.
"Paul--take care of you--always--"
The face of Mijok was there too--red vapor turning black.
5
Paul Mason stared into blue calm: airy motion of branches against the
sky, a mystery remembered from long ago, in a place called New
Hampshire. Those years were not dead: secretly the mind had brought
them here. _What a small journey! Less than five light-years: on a
star map you could hardly represent it with the shortest of lines...._
He was without pain, and cool. Time? Why, that amiable thud of a heart
in a firm, familiar body (his own, surely?), that was indicating time.
The boy in New Hampshire, after sprawling on his lazy back and
discovering the miracle of sky--hadn't he tried to paint it, even
then? Messed about with his uncle's palette, creating a daub that
had--oh, something, a little something. _Very well. Once upon a time
there was a painter named Paul Mason_.... Dorothy....
"You're back--oh, darling! No, Paul, don't sit up fast or your head'll
hurt. Mine did." Now she was curling into the hollow of his arm,
laughing and weeping. "You're back...."
A thin old man sat cross-legged on gray moss. Paul asked him, "How
long?"
Christopher Wright smiled, twisting and teasing the skin of his gaunt
throat, gray with a thick beard stubble. "A day and a night, the nurse
says. You know--the nurse? You were kissing her a moment ago. It's
early morning again, Paul. She was never quite unconscious, she
claims. I recovered an hour ago. No ill effects. It knocked out the
others at nightfall--predictable. They were exposed to Lucifer's air
thirteen hours later than we were." Paul saw them now, lying on beds
of the gray--moss? And where he and Dorothy clung to each other was
the same pleasant stuff--dry, spongy, with an odor like clover hay.
"Beds by courtesy of Mijok." Wright nodded toward the gray giant, who
had also brought moss for himself and now sprawled belly down,
breathing silently, the bulge between his shoulder blades lightly
rising and falling. Mijok's face was on his arm, turned away toward
the purple shadow of forest.