“My head—I’ve hurt my head,” she said groggily.
“Just a bruise,” he reassured her. “Drink some of this water and you’ll soon feel better. Lie back. Everything’s over for the moment and you can rest.”
“Ihjel’s dead!” Lea said with sudden shocked memory. “They’ve killed him! What’s happened?” she tensed, tried to rise, and he pressed her back gently.
“I’ll tell you everything. Just don’t try to get up yet. There was an ambush and they killed Vion and the driver of the sand car, as well as Ihjel. Three men did it and they’re all dead now too. I don’t think there are any more around, but if there are I’ll hear them coming. We’re just going to wait a few minutes until you feel better, then we’re getting out of here in the car.”
“Bring the ship down!” There was a thin note of hysteria in her voice. “We can’t stay here alone. We don’t know where to go or what to do. With Ihjel dead, the whole thing’s spoiled. We have to get out…”
There are some things that can’t sound gentle, no matter how gently they are said. This was one of them. “I’m sorry, Lea, but the ship is out of our reach right now. Ihjel was killed with an ion gun and it fused the control unit into a solid lump. We must take the car and get to the city. We’ll do it now. See if you can stand up—I’ll help you.”
She rose, not saying anything, and as they walked towards the car a single, reddish moon cleared the hills behind them. In its light Brion saw a dark line bisecting the rear panel of the sand car. He stopped abruptly. “What’s the matter?” Lea asked.
The unlocked engine cover could have only one significance and he pushed it open, knowing in advance what he would see. The attackers had been very thorough and fast. In the short time available to them they had killed the driver and the car as well. Ruddy light shone on torn wires, ripped out connections. Repair would be impossible.
“I think well have to walk,” he told her, trying to keep the gloom out of his voice. “This spot is roughly a hundred and fifty kilometres from the city of Hovedstad, where we have to go. We should be able to—”
“We’re going to die. We can’t walk anywhere. This whole planet is a death trap. Let’s get back in the ship!” The shrillness of hysteria was at the edge of her voice, as well as a subtle slurring of sounds.
Brion didn’t try to reason with her or bother to explain. She had a concussion from the blow, that much was obvious. He had her sit and rest while he made what preparations he could for the long walk.
Clothing first. With each passing minute the desert air was growing colder as the day’s heat ebbed away. Lea was beginning to shiver, and he took some heavier clothing from her charred bag and made her pull it on over her light tunic. There was little else that was worth carrying—the canteen from the car and a first-aid kit he found in one of the compartments. There were no maps and no radio. Navigation was obviously done by compass on this almost featureless desert. The car was equipped with an electrically operated gyrocompass, of no use to him now. But he did use it to check the direction of Hovedstad, as he remembered it from the map, and found it lined up perfectly with the tracks the car had cut into the sand. It had come directly from the city. They could find their way by back-tracking.
Time was slipping away. He would have liked to bury Ihjel and the men from the car, but the night hours were too valuable to be wasted. The best he could do was put the three corpses in the car, for protection from the Disan animals. He locked the door and threw the key as far as he could into the blackness. Lea had slipped into a restless sleep and he carefully shook her awake.
“Come,” Brion said. “We have a little walking to do.”
VII
With the cool air and firmly packed sand under foot, walking should have been easy. Lea spoiled that. The concussion seemed to have temporarily cut off the reasoning part of her brain, leaving a direct connection to her vocal cords. As she stumbled along, only half conscious, she mumbled all of her darkest fears that were better left unvoiced. Occasionally, there was relevancy in her complaints. They would lose their way, never find the city, die of thirst, freezing, heat or hunger. Interspersed and entwined with these were fears from her past that still floated, submerged in the timeless ocean of her subconscious. Some Brion could understand, though he tried not to listen. Fears of losing credits, not getting the highest grade, falling behind, a woman alone in a world of men, leaving school, being lost, trampled among the nameless hordes that struggled for survival in the crowded city-states of Earth.
There were other things he was afraid of that made no sense to a man of Anvhar. Who were the alkians that seemed to trouble her? Or what was cancer? Daydle and haydle? Who was Manstan, whose name kept coming up, over and over, each time accompanied by a little moan?
Brion stopped and picked her up in both arms. With a sigh she settled against the hard width of his chest and was instantly asleep. Even with the additional weight he made better time now, and he stretched to his fastest, kilometre-consuming stride to make good use of these best hours.
Somewhere on a stretch of gravel and shelving rock he lost the track of the sand car. He wasted no time looking for it. By carefully watching the glistening stars rise and set he had made a good estimate of the geographic north. Dis didn’t seem to have a pole star; however, a boxlike constellation turned slowly around the invisible point of the pole. Keeping this positioned in line with his right shoulder guided him on the westerly course he needed.
When his arms began to grow tired he lowered Lea gently to the ground; she didn’t wake. Stretching for an instant, before taking up his burden again, Brion was struck by the terrible loneliness of the desert. His breath made a vanishing mist against the stars; all else was darkness and silence. How distant he was from his home, his people, his planet! Even the constellations of the night sky were different. He was used to solitude, but this was a loneliness that touched some deep-buried instinct. A shiver that wasn’t from the desert cold touched lightly along his spine, prickling at the hairs on his neck.
It was time to go on. He shrugged the disquieting sensations off and carefully tied Lea into the jacket he had been wearing. Slung like a pack on his back, it made the walking easier. The gravel gave way to sliding dunes of sand that seemed to continue to infinity. It was a painful, slipping climb to the top of each one, then an equally difficult descent to the black-pooled hollow at the foot of the next.
With the first lightening of the sky in the east he stopped, breath rasping in his chest, to mark his direction before the stars faded. One line scratched in the sand pointed due north, a second pointed out the course they should follow. When they were aligned to his satisfaction he washed his mouth out with a single swallow of water and sat on the sand next to the still form of the girl.
Gold fingers of fire searched across the sky, wiping out the stars. It was magnificent; Brion forgot his fatigue in appreciation. There should be some way of preserving it. A quatrain would be best. Short enough to be remembered, yet requiring attention and skill to compact everything into it. He had scored high with his quatrains in the Twenties. This would be a special one. Taind, his poetry mentor, would have to get a copy.
“What are you mumbling about?” Lea asked, looking up at the craggy blackness of his profile against the reddening sky.
“Poem,” he said. “Shim. Just a minute.”
It was too much for Lea, coming after the tension and dangers of the night. She began to laugh, laughing even harder when he scowled at her. Only when she heard the tinge of growing hysteria did she make an attempt to break off the laughter. The sun cleared the horizon, washing a sudden warmth over them. Lea gasped.
“Your throat’s been cut! You’re bleeding to death!”
“Not really,” he said, touching his fingertips lightly against the blood-clotted wound that circled his neck. “Just superficial.”
Depression sat on him as he suddenly remembered the battle and death of the previous night. Lea didn’t notice his face; she was b
usy digging in the pack he had thrown down. He had to use his fingers to massage and force away the grimace of pain that twisted his mouth. Memory was more painful than the wound. How easily he had killed! Three men. How close to the surface of the civilized man the animal dwelled! In countless matches he had used those holds, always drawing back from the exertion of the full killing power. They were part of a game, part of the Twenties. Yet when his friend had been killed he had become a killer himself. He believed in non-violence and the sanctity of life—until the first test, when he had killed without hesitation. More ironic was the fact he really felt no guilt, even now. Shock at the change, yes. But no more than that.
“Lift your chin,” Lea said, brandishing the antiseptic applicator she had found in the medicine kit. He lifted his chin obligingly and the liquid drew a cool, burning line across his neck. Antibio pills would do a lot more good, since the wound was completely clotted by now, but he didn’t speak his thoughts aloud. For the moment Lea had forgotten herself in taking care of him. He put some of the antiseptic on her scalp bruise and she squeaked, pulling back. They both swallowed the pills.
“That sun is hot already,” Lea said, peeling off her heavy clothing. “Let’s find a nice cool cave or an air-cooled saloon to crawl into for the day.”
“I don’t think there are any here. Just sand. We have to walk—”
“I know we have to walk,” she interrupted. “There’s no need for a lecture about it You’re as seriously cubical as the Bank of Terra. Relax. Count ten and start again.” Lea was making empty talk while she listened to the memory of hysteria tittering at the fringes of her brain.
“No time for that. We have to keep going.” Brion climbed slowly to his feet after stowing everything in the pack. When he sighted along his marker at the western horizon he saw nothing to mark their course, only the marching dunes. He helped Lea to her feet and began walking slowly towards them.
“Just hold on a second,” Lea called after him. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“In that direction,” he said, pointing. “I hoped there would be some landmarks, but there aren’t. Well have to keep on by dead reckoning. The sun will keep us pretty well on course. If we aren’t there by night the stars will be a better guide.”
“All this on an empty stomach? How about breakfast? I’m hungry—and thirsty.”
“No food.” He shook the canteen that gurgled emptily. It had been only partly filled when he found it “The water’s low and well need it later.”
“I need it now,” she said shortly. “My mouth tastes like an unemptied ashtray and I’m dry as paper.”
“Just a single swallow,” he said after the briefest hesitation. “This is all we have.”
Lea sipped at it with her eyes closed in appreciation. Then he sealed the top and returned it to the pack without taking any himself. They were sweating as they started up the first dune.
The desert was barren of life; they were the only things moving under that merciless sun. Their shadows pointed the way ahead of them, and as the shadows shortened the heat rose. It had an intensity Lea had never experienced before, a physical weight that pushed at her with a searing hand. Her clothing was sodden with perspiration, and it trickled burning into her eyes. The light and heat made it hard to see, and she leaned on the immovable strength of Brion’s arm. He walked on steadily, apparently ignoring the heat and discomfort.
“I wonder if those things are edible—or store water?” Brion’s voice was a harsh rasp. Lea blinked and squinted at the leathery shape on the summit of the dune. Plant or animal, it was hard to tell. It was the size of a man’s head, wrinkled and grey as dried-out leather, knobbed with thick spikes. Brion pushed it up with his toe and they had a brief glimpse of a white roundness, like a shiny taproot, going down into the dune. Then the thing contracted, pulling itself lower into the sand. At the same instant something thin and sharp lashed out through a fold in the skin, striking at Brion’s boot and withdrawing. There was a scratch on the hard plastic, beaded with drops of green liquid.
“Its Probably poison,” he said, digging his toe into the sand. “This thing is too mean to fool with—without a good reason. Let’s keep going.”
It was before noon when Lea fell down. She really wanted to go on, but her body wouldn’t obey. The thin soles of her shoes were no protection against the burning sand and her feet were lumps of raw pain. Heat hammered down, poured up from the sand and swirled her in an oven of pain. The air she gasped in was molten metal that dried and cracked her mouth. Each pulse of her heart throbbed blood to the wound in her scalp until it seemed her skull would burst with the agony. She had stripped down to the short tunic—in spite of Brion’s insistence that she keep her body protected from the sun—and that clung to her, soaked with sweat. She tore at it in a desperate effort to breathe. There was no escape from the unending heat.
Though the baked sand burned torture into her knees and hands, she couldn’t rise. It took all her strength not to fall further. Her eyes closed and everything swirled in immense circles.
Brion, blinking through slitted eyes, saw her go down. He lifted her, and carried her again as he had the night before. The hot touch of her body shocked his bare arms. Her skin was flushed pink. The tunic was torn open and one pointed breast rose and fell unevenly with the irregularity of her breathing. Wiping his palm free of sweat and sand, he touched her skin and felt the ominous hot dryness.
Heat-shock, all the symptoms. Dry, flushed skin, the ragged breathing. Her temperature rising quickly as her body stopped fighting the heat and succumbed.
There was nothing he could do here to protect her from the heat. He measured a tiny portion of the remaining water into her mouth and she swallowed convulsively. Her thin clothing was little protection from the sun. He could only take her in his arms and keep on towards the horizon. An outcropping of rock threw a tiny patch of shade and he walked towards it.
The ground here, shielded from the direct rays of the sun, felt almost cool by contrast. Lea opened her eyes when he put her down, peering up at him through a haze of pain. She wanted to apologize to him for her weakness, but no words came from the dried membrane of her throat. His body above her seemed to swim back and forth in the heat waves, swaying like a tree in a high wind.
Shock drove her eyes open, cleared her mind for an instant. He really was swaying. Suddenly she realized how much she had come to depend on the unending solidity of his strength—and now it was failing. All over his body the corded muscles contracted in ridges, striving to keep him erect. She saw his mouth pulled open by the taut cords of his neck, and the gaping, silent scream was more terrible than any sound. Then she herself screamed as his eyes rolled back, leaving only the empty white of the eyeballs staring terribly at her. He went over, back, down, like a felled tree, thudding heavily on the sand. Unconscious or dead, she couldn’t tell. She pulled limply at his leg, but couldn’t drag his immense weight into the shade.
Brion lay on his back in the sun, sweating. Lea saw this and knew that he was still alive. Yet what was happening? She groped for memory in the red haze of her mind, but could remember nothing from her medical studies that would explain this. On every square inch of his body the sweat glands seethed with sudden activity. From every pore oozed great globules of oily liquid, far thicker than normal perspiration. Brion’s arms rippled with motion and Lea gaped, horrified as the hairs there writhed and stirred as though endowed with separate life. His chest rose and fell rapidly, deep, gasping breaths racking his body. Lea could only stare through the dim redness of unreality and wonder if she was going mad before she died.
A coughing fit broke the rhythm of his rasping breath, and when it was over his breathing was easier. The perspiration still covered his body, the individual beads touching and forming tiny streams that trickled down his body and vanished in the sand. He stirred and rolled onto his side, facing her. His eyes were open and normal now as he smiled.
“Didn’t mean to frighten you. It caug
ht me suddenly coming at the wrong season and everything. It was a bit of a jar to my system. I’ll get you some water now—there’s still a bit left.”
“What happened? When you looked like that, when you fell…”
“Take two swallows, no more,” he said, holding the open canteen to her mouth. “Just summer change, that’s all. It happens to us every year on Anvhar—only not that violently, of course. In the winter our bodies store a layer of fat under the skin for insulation, and sweating almost ceases completely. There are a lot of internal changes too. When the weather warms up the process is reversed. The fat is metabolized and the sweat glands enlarge and begin working overtime as the body prepares for two months of hard work, heat and little sleep. I guess the heat here triggered off the summer change early.”
“You mean—you’ve adapted to this terrible planet?”
“Just about. Though it does feel a little warm. I’ll need a lot more water soon, so we can’t remain here. Do you think you can stand the sun if I carry you?”
“No, but I won’t feel any better staying here.” She was light-headed, scarcely aware of what she said. “Keep going, I guess. Keep going.”
As soon as she was out of the shadow of the rock the sunlight burst over her again in a wave of hot pain. She fell unconscious at once. Brion picked her up and staggered forward. After a few yards, he began to feel the pull of the sand. He knew he was reaching the end of his strength. He went more slowly and each dune seemed a bit higher than the one before. Giant, sand-scoured rocks pushed through the dunes here and he had to stumble around them. At the base of the largest of these monoliths was a straggling clump of knotted vegetation. He passed it by—then stopped as something tried to penetrate his heat-crazed mind. What was it? A difference. Something about these plants that he hadn’t noticed in any of the others he had passed during the day.
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