"Leave me, Sim. Go ahead!" The rain filled her mouth. There was water
everywhere. "It's no use. Go on without me."
He stood there, cold and powerless, his thoughts sagging, the flame of
hope blinking out. All the world was blackness, cold falling sheathes
of water, and despair.
"We'll walk, then," he said. "And keep walking, and resting."
They walked for fifty yards, easily, slowly, like children out for a
stroll. The gully ahead of them filled with water that went sliding
away with a swift wet sound, toward the horizon.
Sim cried out. Tugging at Lyte he raced forward. "A new channel," he
said, pointing. "Each day the rain cuts a new channel. Here, Lyte!" He
leaned over the flood waters.
He dived in, taking her with him.
The flood swept them like bits of wood. They fought to stay upright,
the water got into their mouths, their noses. The land swept by on both
sides of them. Clutching Lyte's fingers with insane strength, Sim felt
himself hurled end over end, saw flicks of lightning on high, and a new
fierce hope was born in him. They could no longer run, well, then they
would let the water do the running for them.
With a speed that dashed them against rocks, split open their
shoulders, abraded their legs, the new, brief river carried them. "This
way!" Sim shouted over a salvo of thunder and steered frantically
toward the opposite side of the gully. The mountain where the ship
lay was just ahead. They must not pass it by. They fought in the
transporting liquid and were slammed against the far side. Sim leaped
up, caught at an overhanging rock, locked Lyte in his legs, and drew
himself hand over hand upward.
As quickly as it had come, the storm was gone. The lightning faded. The
rain ceased. The clouds melted and fell away over the sky. The wind
whispered into silence.
"The ship!" Lyte lay upon the ground. "The ship, Sim. This is the
mountain of the ship!"
Now the cold came. The killing cold.
They forced themselves drunkenly up the mountain. The cold slid along
their limbs, got into their arteries like a chemical and slowed them.
Ahead of them, with a fresh-washed sheen, lay the ship. It was a dream.
Sim could not believe that they were actually so near it. Two hundred
yards. One hundred and seventy yards. Gods, but it was cold.
[Illustration: _Ahead of them lay the ship. Sim could not believe they
were so near._]
The ground became covered with ice. They slipped and fell again and
again. Behind them the river was frozen into a blue-white snake of cold
solidity. A few last drops of rain from somewhere came down as hard
pellets.
Sim fell against the bulk of the ship. He was actually touching it.
Touching it! He heard Lyte whimpering in her constricted throat. This
was the metal, the ship. How many others had touched it in the long
days? He and Lyte had made it!
He touched it lovingly. Then, as cold as the air, his veins were
chilled.
Where was the entrance?
You run, you swim, you almost drown, you curse, you sweat, you work,
you reach a mountain, you go up it, you hammer on metal, you shout with
relief, you reach the ship, and then--you can't find the entrance.
* * * * *
He fought to keep himself from breaking down. Slowly, he told himself,
but not too slowly, go around the ship. The metal slid under his
searching hands, so cold that his hands, sweating, almost froze to it.
Now, far around to the side. Lyte moved with him. The cold held them
like a fist. It began to squeeze.
The entrance.
Metal. Cold, immutable metal. A thin line of opening at the sealing
point. Throwing all caution aside, he beat at it. He felt his stomach
seething with cold. His fingers were numb, his eyes were half frozen in
their sockets. He began to beat and search and scream against the metal
door. "Open up! Open up!" He staggered.
The air-lock sighed. With a whispering of metal on rubber beddings, the
door swung softly sidewise and vanished back.
He saw Lyte run forward, clutch at her throat, and drop inside a small
shiny chamber. He shuffled after her, blankly.
The air-lock door sealed shut behind him.
He could not breathe. His heart began to slow, to stop.
They were trapped inside the ship now, and something was happening. He
sank down to his knees and choked for air.
The ship he had come to for salvation was now slowing his pulse,
darkening his brain, poisoning him. With a starved, faint kind of
expiring terror, he realized that he was dying.
Blackness.
* * * * *
He had a dim sense of time passing, of thinking, struggling, to make
his heart go quick, quick.... To make his eyes focus. But the fluid in
his body lagged quietly through his settling veins and he heard his
temple pulses thud, pause, thud, pause and thud again with lulling
intermissions.
He could not move, not a hand or leg or finger. It was an effort to
lift the tonnage of his eyelashes. He could not shift his face even, to
see Lyte lying beside him.
From a distance came her irregular breathing. It was like the sound a
wounded bird makes with his dry, unraveled pinions. She was so close he
could almost feel the heat of her; yet she seemed a long way removed.
I'm getting cold! he thought. Is this death? This slowing of blood, of
my heart, this cooling of my body, this drowsy thinking of thoughts?
Staring at the ship's ceiling he traced its intricate system of tubes
and machines. The knowledge, the purpose of the ship, its actions,
seeped into him. He began to understand in a kind of revealing
lassitude just what these things were his eyes rested upon. Slow. Slow.
There was an instrument with a gleaming white dial.
Its purpose?
He drudged away at the problem, like a man underwater.
People had used the dial. Touched it. People had repaired it.
Installed it. People had dreamed of it before the building, before
the installing, before the repairing and touching and using. The
dial contained memory of use and manufacture, its very shape was a
dream-memory telling Sim why and for what it had been built. Given
time, looking at anything, he could draw from it the knowledge he
desired. Some dim part of him reached out, dissected the contents of
things, analyzed them.
This dial measured time!
Millions of days of time!
But how could that be? Sim's eyes dilated, hot and glittering. Where
were humans who needed such an instrument?
Blood thrummed and beat behind his eyes. He closed them.
Panic came to him. The day was passing. I am lying here, he thought,
and my life slips away. I cannot move. My youth is passing. How long
before I can move?
Through a kind of porthole he saw the night pass, the day come, the day
pass, and again another night. Stars danced frostily.
I will lie here for four or five days, wrinkling and withering, he
thought. This ship will not let me move. How much better if I had
stayed in my home cliff, lived, enjoyed this short life. What good has
it done to come here? I'm missing all the twilights and dawns. I'll
never touch Lyte, though she's here at my side.
Delirium. His mind floated up. His thoughts whirled through the metal
ship. He smelled the razor sharp smell of joined metal. He heard the
hull contract with night, relax with day.
Dawn.
Already--another dawn!
Today I would have been mature. His jaw clenched. I must get up. I must
move. I must enjoy my time of maturity.
But he didn't move. He felt his blood pump sleepily from chamber to red
chamber in his heart, on down and around through his dead body, to be
purified by his folding and unfolding lungs. Then the circuit once more.
The ship grew warm. From somewhere a machine clicked. Automatically the
temperature cooled. A controlled gust of air flushed the room.
Night again. And then another day.
He lay and saw four days of his life pass.
He did not try to fight. It was no use. His life was over.
He didn't want to turn his head now. He didn't want to see Lyte with
her face like his tortured mother's--eyelids like gray ash flakes, eyes
like beaten, sanded metal, cheeks like eroded stones. He didn't want to
see a throat like parched thongs of yellow grass, hands the pattern of
smoke risen from a fire, breasts like desiccated rinds and hair stubbly
and unshorn as moist gray weeds!
And himself? How did _he_ look? Was his jaw sunken, the flesh of his
eyes pitted, his brow lined and age-scarred?
* * * * *
His strength began to return. He felt his heart beating so slow that it
was amazing. One hundred beats a minute. Impossible. He felt so cool,
so thoughtful, so easy.
His head fell over to one side. He stared at Lyte. He shouted in
surprise.
She was young and fair.
She was looking at him, too weak to say anything. Her eyes were like
tiny silver medals, her throat curved like the arm of a child. Her hair
was blue fire eating at her scalp, fed by the slender life of her body.
Four days had passed and still she was young ... no, younger than when
they had entered the ship. She was still adolescent.
He could not believe it.