Five minutes.
I am halfway back to the stretcher when I hear a noise further up the
beach. Unmistakable. Shingle under a booted foot.
I stand frozen in mid-stride. I turned the light out after launching
the boat but my eyes have not recovered yet; it is murkily black. Even
my white suit is only the faintest degree paler than my surroundings.
Silence for a couple of minutes. I stand still. But it can't have gone
away. What happens when the hopper comes? They will see whoever it is
on the infrared vision screen. They won't come--
Footsteps again. Several.
Then the clouds part and one of those superfluous little moons shines
straight through the gap.
The bay is not like the stereo the colonel showed because that was
taken in winter; now the snow is melted, leaving bare shingle and mud
and a tumble of rocks; more desolate than the snow. Fifty feet off is
a man.
He is huddled up in a mass of garments but his head is bare, rising
out of a hood which he has pushed back, maybe so as to listen better;
he looks young, hardly older than me. He is holding a long thin object
which I never saw before, but it must be a weapon of some sort.
This is the end of it. All the evidence of faking is destroyed; except
M'Clare and me. Even if I use the Andite he has seen me--and that
leaves M'Clare.
[Illustration]
I am standing here on one foot like a dancer in a jammed movie,
waiting for Time to start again or the world to end--
Like the little figure in the dance-instruction kit Dad got when I was
seven, when you switched her off in the middle.
* * * * *