by Anthology
“Look!” Rosa called. Warren stared out into the hills and valleys of water in motion, following her gesture. A gray cylinder floated ten yards from the raft.
The Swarmer was dribbling out the last drops from its lymphatic glands, and Warren knew that to get more would take both of them, hacking and sawing their way through the muscular hide, pressing the flesh for fluid. It wasn’t worth the trouble of forcing Rosa into cooperation.
He secured the cans and rolled the Swarmer over the side. Spray splashed into his face. His attention was focused on the cylinder and he did the job routinely for what seemed like the thousandth time, although it probably was somewhere in the twenties. Almost one for every day, he thought.
“Pull it in,” he ordered, moving back to the center of the raft. Rosa peered out at him from her shelter, uncomprehending.
He snorted in frustration. Perhaps he should slap her into awareness, like the time before. But the cylinder was drifting slowly away.
He moved gracefully to the tree limb and started unlashing it. His fingers were puffy from constant contact with water and the strips of bark slipped out of them.
In a moment Warren had it free and was walking at a crouch toward the raft edge nearest the cylinder. He noted automatically that no slight ripples disturbed the surface, no green shapes flitted in the deeps below.
It looked safe, just like the times before. If the Skimmers were laying a trap for him, they were taking their time about springing it.
He stopped a foot short of the edge and balanced himself against the swell. The gray tube bobbed sluggishly in the trough of a wave and drifted away a bit more.
Warren breathed deeply, curled his toes reflexively for balance, and leaned against the pitch of the deck, extending his arms out until his muscles popped. The limb was short at least a yard. He couldn’t reach the tube.
He swayed back, relaxing, and tried again.
Still short. And the gap had widened by a foot.
Warren closed his eyes against the biting afternoon glare and felt his leg muscles weaken. He mustn’t allow himself to get depressed.
If he let go, just once, he would be sucked into the same endless caverns Rosa was wandering. No, he had to hold on.
Warren turned and walked back to the shelter. He realized now how badly he’d wanted that tube, how much he’d looked forward to it.
He might have been able to understand this one. The second message had been a real improvement over the first. There had even been three English words in that one. So this third . . .
“Ah! Ah!” Rosa grunted, nudging him. She gestured frantically, clawing the air.
Warren jerked his head around and searched where the tube had been. A dark blue form leaped out of the water near it. It was a little larger than a Swarmer and it skipped lightly over the greenish foam of a wave.
Before Warren could move or even recognize the Skimmer, it ploughed into the water near the tube and submerged. An instant later it shot out again in an explosion of spray, caught the tube and threw it into the air with a smooth jerk of its head.
Warren brought the limb around, but the Skimmer had turned with startling abruptness and was speeding away. It disappeared into the slope of a wave like green marble and thrashed through. In a moment it was lost in the endlessly changing topography of the southern Pacific.
Rosa gave a dazed cry, but Warren ignored her and scrambled to the edge of the raft. The tube was only a few yards away and he quickly fished it in, noting in the back of his mind that the woman was cowering in the shelter, mumbling to herself.
He carried the slick organic cylinder back to the center of the raft. He handled it carefully, looking for anything that might be different about this one.
It separated easily at the middle and came apart with a small moist pop. Inside was the same rolled sheet. He spread it on the deck.
CONSQUE KOPF AMN SOLID. DA ØLEN SMALL
YOUTH SCHLECT UNS. DERINGER CHANGE DA.
UNS B WSW. SAGEN ARBEIT BEI MOUTH.
CIRCLE STEIN NONGO.
Warren stared down at the thin parchmentlike scroll for a long time. Coming this close to the raft was—for a Skimmer—an incredibly brave act.
They must be getting desperate. Whatever it was they wanted him to know, time must be running out for them.
This would be the last message, he knew. And, shaking his head, almost crying with frustration, he saw that it made no more sense than the first one.
When he woke up in the water the Manamix was going down. Long fingers of tropical lightning curled beneath black clouds and he could see the ship taking water heavily to starboard.
It tilted steadily like a giant land animal caught in the endless net of the Swarmers’ spinning. The long green strands licked up the sides and over the deck. They were strong and flexible lines of organic chain molecules, spun out from their belly pouches by the thousands of Swarmers who now gathered around the bows. Biologists thought the strands must be used in the mating process, but why they should be of such length no one knew. Those, together with the holes already punched in the side by suicidal Swarmers in groups of three or four, could sink any light vessel.
The Manamix was shipping water dangerously. Warren knew the jets would never get out here, five hundred miles off the west coast of South America, in a driving, splintering storm. They would never arrive, as the Captain had said, to drop the canisters of poison that would stop the Swarmers. The Manamix had run out of the chemicals days ago, and now the ship wallowed in the swell and aboard the lights were going off and people were screaming.
The picture fixed in his mind. The Manamix was frozen as it slid over into its black grave, some orange running lights still winking. Lightning crackled and reflected in a thousand shattered mirrors of the sea. Stench of salt, biting cold, a hail of rain that blinded him. Then the thump of the empty lifeboat against a drifting box nearby and he began to move, to fight again against the current.
The rest was impersonal, as though it had happened to someone else. He climbed into the lifeboat and began paddling it away from the Manamix and the Swarmers. He sighted Rosa in the dim light and managed to pull the woman aboard. She was a journalist he’d met before on the Manamix.
She was covering the Swarmers for a wire service and wanted to take the run up the South American coast, in hopes they’d get to see a Swarm. The aliens had nearly driven man from the oceans within the last year, and the Manamix was one of the few freighter lines still running in the Pacific. She’d tried to get some opinions from Warren over drinks in the lounge, but he was an engineer and didn’t know any more about the Swarmer landings than she did.
They drifted all night. The two lay in the bottom of the boat, trying not to make any noise, because if the Swarm found it and thought it was occupied, their bone foreheads would smash the side in minutes.
As it turned out, the lifeboat began to sink without help from the aliens. It must have been damaged coming over the side of the Manamix. Seepage Warren found in the night turned into a steady stream by the time the warm dawn broke over them.
In the first light they could make out other refuse from the Manamix drifting nearby. There were uprooted trees as well, probably carried out to sea by the storm that had rushed down on the Manamix just as the Swarmers struck.
Warren risked his life and went into the water to collect it. He knew the Swarmers were savage and mindless. He’d read an article that said they were just the youngest forms and the Skimmers were an advanced minority. Swarmers obviously couldn’t have built the ships that dropped into Earth’s atmosphere and seeded the oceans five years ago.
But young or not, they would kill him instantly if they found him in the water.
Laboriously, for three days they paddled and collected, cut and built and lashed. They broke up the lifeboat and used it for decking over the logs and planking they could find. A coil of wire provided lashing. An aluminum railing could be pounded into adequate nails.
Rosa held up well,
at first. They never saw any other survivors of the Manamix. Elementary navigation told Warren they were drifting almost precisely due west; if they could hold on,’ a search pattern might eventually find them.
One night, feeling a curious liberation from his past, he took Rosa with a power and confidence that surprised him. He was sure he would survive.
He used some of the lifeboat’s rations for bait and caught a few fish. After some experimentation he made a bow and arrow accurate enough to shoot fish on the surface, but the bait and line were faster.
Then the water began to run out. Rosa kept their stores under the plywood shelter, and at seven days Warren found the water was almost gone. She had been drinking far more than her share.
“I had to,” she said, backing away from him. “I can’t stand it out here. I get so thirsty. And the sun, it’s too hot, I just . . .”
He hit her a few times, short, brutal chops. But there was no satisfaction in it. She had taken their water and it was gone. After an hour of depression, with Rosa cringing away from him at the far end of the raft, he began to think again.
There was a strange freedom in him which came to the surface when he was working on the problem. In the cool, orderly processes of his intellect he found a kind of rest.
He squatted on a level plank and automatically rocked with the swell, but inside, where he lived, the world wasn’t just the gurgle and rush of waves, the bleaching raw edge of sun and wind. Inside, there were the books and the diagrams.
More, there were bits and pieces of things he’d known, and now a chance to put them together.
Chemistry. Warren rigged a distilling apparatus using two tin cans. He cut a small slit in the rubber stopper of a water bottle and lowered it into the sea on a long fishing line.
He vaguely remembered—or did he imagine?—that the deeper water was colder. If he pulled a sealed can of it up from twenty feet below, and let it sit inside a second can in the sun, perhaps it would steam like a champagne bucket. Then the evaporated water would condense on the side of the first can, as salt-free moisture.
He tried it again and again. It never worked. But he was trying, he was thinking, he was holding onto himself. That was enough.
Nine days out the water was gone. Rosa cried and called him filthy names. She bit her shoulder in a rage but didn’t seem to notice it.
The next day the sea was more turbulent. Water poured over the deck, washing them continually so it was impossible to sleep or even rest. In the late afternoon Warren discovered small jelly seahorses about the size of a dime riding in the sea foam that lapped over the raft. He stared at them and tried to remember what he’d learned of biology.
He knew if they started drinking anything with a high salt content the end would come with stunning swiftness. But he had to take a chance.
Warren kicked and talked the woman into helping him collect a handful of the seahorses. He put a few on his tongue, tentatively, and waited until they melted. They were salty and fishy to the taste, but seemed less salty than sea water. The cool moisture from a full handful brought them both relief, and they gathered them in eagerly until darkness fell.
Day eleven was intolerable.
Warren sat with closed eyes, carefully working through the clear, logical hallways of his mind. The temptation to drink sea water was festering in him, boiling into the clean and neat compartment where he was trying to live.
He had to keep running over the chain of logic to keep himself convinced.
If he drank sea water, he would take in a certain quantity of dissolved salt. But his body needed very little salt, and it had to get rid of any salt it absorbed above this small amount. The work of secreting extra salt is done by the kidneys, which remove from the blood all waste products in the form of urine.
For this the kidneys need water. At least a pint a day.
He made it into a chant and said it over and over. The waves danced and billowed before him. Their dried rations lay heavy and dead in his stomach. He focused on the chant.
Drink a pint of sea water a day. That gives about ten cubic inches of salt-free water.
But the kidneys need more than ten cubic inches to process the salt in the pint.
The kidneys react. They take water from the body tissue.
The body dries up. The tongue turns black.
Nausea. Fever. Death.
Later, Warren guessed that he sat there most of the day, reciting the logic to himself, polishing it down to a few key words, making it perfect.
The thump under the deck brought him out of it. Rosa stirred. Warren knew suddenly, intuitively, what it was. A Swarmer had found them.
He moved smoothly, concentrating. Here was another problem to be solved.
The thumping continued, working across the raft. They were different from the playful knocks the dolphins made.
The Swarmer broke water five yards from the raft and turned belly-over once, goggling at them with a bulging eye. Rosa threw up her hands in terror and the Swarmer, which had started to dive again, stopped and circled around the raft, following her awkward scuttling.
Coolly, Warren shot.
Hauling in the wounded alien, battering it to stillness with a club, gutting it and watching the thin, pale yellow fluid ooze from the tissues into the cans—he did these things alone, working in absolute concentration, and never noticed Rosa. He didn’t hear her whimpering, stumbling approach as he lifted a can to his lips.
He caught the cool, slightly acrid taste of the fluid for an instant. And then she struck the can from his hands and it clattered on the deck, spilling the precious juices across the boards.
His punch drove her to her knees. “Why? What . . .”
“Wrong,” she stuttered out. “Ugly, bad.” She shook her head, blinking. “They’re not . . . not normal. Can’t eat . . .”
“You want to drink, don’t you?”
“Na . . . yeah, but not that. Maybe a little, I . . .”
He looked at her coldly and she moved away. The Swarmer was dripping its precious fluids out onto the planking and Warren rushed to prop cans under it. He drank the first can, and the second. Rosa sat on the other side of the raft and whimpered.
The third can he set down halfway between them, and after a moment Rosa came over and sipped it slowly. The taste was bland, not very salty, and remarkably like stale beer.
After that they came to an unspoken agreement. Rosa would help lure the Swarmer if it came near the raft, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—gut it and extract the watery pouches of fin-fluid, the blood or the eyes. Warren had to do that.
While Rosa sat dreamily swaying at the center of their rectangular island, humming and singing to herself, coiling deeper into her own private retreats from sun and salt, Warren worked and thought.
He studied the Swarmer body, finding the soft pulpy spots where it was vulnerable to an arrow, tracing its circulatory system and the delicate flow of muscles that moved it. Almost every day now they heard the shuddering bang of a Swarmer under the raft, and always it eventually surfaced and was killed.
They seemed to have none of the wary, vicious predatory instincts the Swarms had shown near land. Perhaps the lone Swarmers out here were scouts for the Swarmer schools that swept the oceans, and were not trained—or bred—to attack.
Warren experimented, practiced, tried new things. He cut up the cloth and made small bags to hold the richer parts of the Swarmer carcass, and then chewed it until every precious drop of the brackish, warm fluid was squeezed out. It nearly made him sick, and after several days, when his body’s reserves of water had been built up again, he twisted pieces of the flesh in the cloth and got nearly the same amount.
On Day Twenty-one Rosa sighted the capsule. Her cry awakened Warren from a vague, shifting sleep under the lean-to.
Darting away in the distance was the first Skimmer they’d sighted. The Skimmers were an enigma to the biologists who studied the aliens. There were not many of them, and they operated independently of
the Swarms. Only one or two had been killed, in the first months when the aliens were breeding explosively through the oceans—since then, the lean blue forms stayed well out of range of ordinary weapons.
But they didn’t control the Swarms, either. Skimmers had been attacked by Swarmers within sight of several ships. They maneuvered intelligently and fought well, but Skimmers lacked the thick frontal bone structure of the Swarmers, and they didn’t display such blind ferocity.
Warren fished in the gray tube and turned it over in his hands. The smooth surface of plasticlike organic substance was obviously machined—or was it? Could it have been grown, perfect and symmetrical? The alien ships that dumped eggs into Earth’s oceans were obviously the product of an industrial culture. But how could the Swarmers or Skimmers have made them, without maniples?
The thin slick scroll inside was indecipherable.
SECHTON XXMENAPU DE AN SW BY W ABLE. SAGON
MXXIL VESSE L ANSAGEN MANNIA WIR UNS??FTH
ASDMNø5B ERTY EARTHN PROFUILEN. CO
KALLEN KNOPTFT.
Warren studied it and turned the combinations of letters over in his mind endlessly. It was no code, because some of the words were clearly English or something else close to German.
VESSE L must be VESSEL. And ANSAGEN-to say, to announce? Warren wished he had more than a dim memory of his college language courses.
The message was in clear, cold typeface like a newspaper, and somehow was impressed onto the sheet without showing any slight indentation on the back. A photographic process, perhaps.
It gave him something to focus on through the long bleaching days of waiting, of trying to ignore the salt itch in his growing beard and all over his skin, of listening to the quiet whisper of waves and the endless weaving chant that Rosa had taken up.
She shrieked in terror whenever a Swarmer approached in the distance now, but Warren guessed that, on some level, she knew they were relatively safe until the raft neared a Swarm. The scouting Swarmers might see them, but apparently they couldn’t remember the raft’s location well enough to bring a full school of the aliens back to attack.
