"But I know the route."
"I can read a map as well as you can."
Scyth opened his eyes wearily, but with a trace of bitter humor he
managed to say, "You take care--of one another--and I'll drive!"
Then Scyth passed out cold.
* * * * *
Four hours' drive into the foothills, far from the lights of
civilization, Dusty found the big spacecraft. It was parked in a small
valley and it was colored so that only a man who knew what he was
seeking and where it was would have found it.
On the way Scyth babbled about the drive and how to run the big ship.
Happily, Scyth's periods of delirium were easy to separate from his
periods of lucidity, for when Scyth began to babble he talked cynically
about the stupidity of taking four hours to travel less than a couple
of hundred miles when they could cover light-years in the matter of
minutes. Then he would become quite rational and tell Dusty how to
recognize the beacons as they came into sight, and where the charts
were. He had to get back to Marandis, and he told Dusty the way.
Then his mind would wander a bit and Scyth would chuckle quietly
over something entirely removed from spacemanship. Then would come a
discussion of the levers that must be turned and the meters that must
be watched; how to turn the correct knob or to push the proper pedal.
He spoke of cautions, too. They must not turn on the space drive until
the ship had warmed for a certain length of time (which the menslator
interpreted to Dusty as a vague quantity of minutes. To be safe, Dusty
would wait twice that long) and then Scyth would lapse again.
But as the drive went on, Scyth's periods of lucidity waned. His
moments of babbling dropped too; and between them both came longer and
longer periods of dead silence and heavy breathing.
Yet by the time Dusty drove his car underneath one tailfin, he had a
fair idea of how to run the spacecraft.