He covered the ashes with twice the amount of newspaper he had intended to use, and doused every ball of paper liberally with kerosene. Should he light the fire first or wait until he had the carbine in his hand?
The latter seemed safer. He got the carbine and pushed off its safety, clamped it under one arm, then struck a match and tossed it into the fireplace.
The tiny tongue of yellow flame grew to a conflagration in a second or two. There was a metallic clank before something black crashed down into the fire and sprang at him like a cat.
“Stop!” He swung the butt of the Sako at her. “Stop, or I'll shoot!”
A hand from nowhere gripped his ankle. He kicked free, and a second woman rolled from beneath the bunk Brook had slept in—the one he had made up for Jan. Awkwardly, he clubbed the forearm of the woman who had dropped from the chimney with the carbine barrel, kicked at her knee and missed. “Get out! Get out, both of you, or I swear to God—”
They rushed at him not quite as one, the taller first, the smaller brandishing his rifle. Hands snatched at the carbine, nearly jerking it from his grasp; for a moment, he wrestled the taller woman for it.
The sound of the shot was deafening in the closed cabin. The carbine leaped in his hands.
He found that he was staring into her soot-smeared brown face; it crumpled like his newspapers, her eyes squinting, her mouth twisted in a grimace of pain.
The woman behind her screamed and turned away, dropping his rifle and clutching her thigh. Blood seeped from between her fingers.
The taller woman took a step toward him—an involuntary step, perhaps, as her reflexes sought to keep her from falling. She fell forward, the crumpled face smacking the worn boards of the cabin floor, and lay motionless.
The other woman was kneeling, still trying to hold back her blood. She looked at Emery, a look of mingled despair and mute appeal.
“I won't,” he said.
He was still holding the carbine that had shot her. It belonged to someone else, and its owner presumably valued it; but none of that seemed to matter anymore. He threw it aside. “That's why I quit hunting deer,” he told her almost casually. “I gut-shot a buck and trailed him six miles. When I found him, he looked at me like that.”
The big plastic leaf bags he used to carry his garbage to the dump were under the sink. He pulled down quilt, blankets, and sheet, and spread two bags over the rumpled bunk that had been Brook's, scooped her up, and stretched her on them. “You shot me, and now I've shot you. I didn't mean to. Maybe you didn't either—I'd like to think so, anyway.”
With his hunting knife, he cut away the sooty cloth around her wound. The skin at the back of her thigh was unbroken, but beneath it he could feel the hard outline of the bullet. “I'm going to cut there and take that out,” he told her. “It should be pretty easy, but we'll have to sterilize the knife and the needle-nosed pliers first.”
He gave her the rest of his surgical gauze to hold against her wound, and tried to fill his largest cooking pot with water from the sink. “I should have remembered the pump was off,” he admitted to her ruefully, and went outside to fill the pot with clean snow.
“I'm going to wash your wound and bandage it before I get the bullet out.” He spoke slowly and distinctly as he stepped back in and shut the door, hoping that she understood at least a part of what he was saying. “First, I have to get this water hot enough that I'll be cleaning it, not infecting it.” He put the pot of snow on the stove and turned down the burner under his stew.
“Let's see what happened here.” He knelt beside the dead woman and examined the ragged, blood-soaked tear at the back of her jacket, then wiped his fingers. It took an effort of will to roll her over; but he did it, keeping his eyes off her face. The hole the bullet had left in the front of the jacket was so small and obscure that he had to verify it by poking his pen through it before he was satisfied.
He stood again, reached into his mackinaw to push the pen into his shirt pocket, and found the fragments of white metal he had taken from the ziggurat. For a moment, he looked from them to the newspapers still blazing in the fireplace. “I'm going to lay some kindling on the fire. Getting chilled won't help you. It could even kill you.” Belatedly, he drew up her sheet, the blankets, and the quilt.
“You're not going to die. Are you afraid you will?” He had a feeling that if he talked to her enough, she would begin to understand; that was how children learned to speak, surely. “I'm not going to kill you, and neither is that wound in your leg, or at least I don't think so.”
She replied, and he saw that she was trying to smile. He pointed to the dead woman and to her, and shook his head, then arranged kindling on the burning newspapers. The water in his biggest pot was scarcely warm, but the Irish stew was hot. He filled a bowl, and gave it to her with a spoon; she sat up to eat, keeping her left hand under the covers to press the pad of gauze to her leg.
The Voylestown telephone directory provided a home number for Doctor Ormond. Emery pressed it in.
“Hello.”
“Doctor Ormond? This is Emery Bainbridge.”
“Right. Ralph Merton told me about you. I'll try to get out there just as quick as I can.”
“This is about another matter, Doctor. I'm afraid we've had a gun go off by accident.”
A slight gasp came over the wire as Ormond drew breath. “Someone was hit. Is it bad?”
“Both of us were. I hope not too badly, though. We had a loaded rifle—my hunting rifle—standing against the wall. We were nervous, you understand. We still are. Some people—these people—I'm sorry.” In the midst of the fabrication, Brook's death had taken Emery by the throat.
“I know your son's dead, Mister Bainbridge. Ralph told me. He was murdered?”
“Yes, with an ax. My ax. You'll see him, of course. I apologize, Doctor. I don't usually lose control.”
“Perfectly normal and healthy, Mister Bainbridge. You don't have to tell me about the shooting if you don't want to. I'm a doctor, not a policeman.”
“My rifle fell over and discharged,” Emery said. “The bullet creased my side—I don't think that's too bad—and hit…” Looking at the wounded woman, he ransacked his memory for a suitable name. “Hit Tamar in the leg. I should explain that Tamar's an exchange student who's been staying with us.” Tamar had been Solomon's sister, and King Solomon's mines had been somewhere around the Horn of Africa. “She's from Aden. She speaks very little English, I'm afraid. I know first aid, and I'm doing all I can, but I thought I ought to call you.”
“She's conscious?”
“Oh, yes. She's sitting up and eating right now. The bullet hit the outer part of her thigh. I think it missed the bone. It's still in her leg. It didn't exit.”
“This just happened?”
“Ten minutes ago, perhaps.”
“Don't give her any more food, she may vomit. Give her water. There's no intestinal wound? No wound in the abdomen?”
“No, in her thigh as I said. About eight inches above the knee.”
“Then let her have water, as much as she wants. Has she lost much blood?”
Emery glanced at the dead woman. It would be necessary to account for the stains of her blood as well as Tamar's. “It's not easy to estimate, but I'd say at least a pint. It could be a little more.”
“I see, I see.” Ormond sounded relieved. “I'd give her a transfusion if I had her in the hospital, Mister Bainbridge, but she may not really need one. At least, not badly. How much would you say she weighs?”
He tried to remember the effort involved in lifting her. He had been excited, of course—high on adrenaline. “Between ninety and a hundred pounds, at a guess.”
Ormond grunted. “Small. Small bones? Height?”
“Yes, very small. My wife calls her petite.” The lie had come easily, unlooked for. “I'd say she's about five foot one. Delicate.”
“What about you, Mister Bainbridge? Have you lost much blood?”
“Less than half as much a
s she has, I'd say.”
“I see. The question is whether your intestine has been perforated—”
“Not unless it's a lot closer to the skin than I think it is, Doctor. It's just a crease, as I say. I was sitting down, she was standing up. The bullet creased my side and went into her leg.”
“I'd wait a bit, just the same, before I ate or drank anything, Mister Bainbridge. You haven't eaten or drunk since it happened?”
“No,” Emery lied.
“Good. Wait a bit. Can you call me back in two hours?”
“Certainly. Thank you, Doctor.”
“I'll be here, unless there's an emergency here in town, someplace I can get to. If I'm not here, my wife will answer the phone. Have you called the police?”
“Not about this. It's an accident, not a police matter.”
“I'm required to report any gunshot wounds I treat. You may want to report it yourself first.”
“All right, I can tell the officer who investigates my son's death.”
“That's up to you, but I'll have to report it. Is there anything else?”
“I don't think so.”
“Do you have any antibiotics? A few capsules left from an old prescription?”
“I don't think so.”
“Look. If you find anything you think might be helpful, call me back immediately. Otherwise, in two hours.”
“Right. Thank you, Doctor.” Emery hung up.
The snow water was boiling on the stove. He turned off the burner, noting that the potful of packed snow had become less than a quarter of a pot of water. “As soon as that cools off a little, I'm going to wash your wound and put a proper bandage on it,” he said.
She smiled shyly.
“You're from Aden. It's in Yemen, I believe. Your name is Tamar. Can you say Tamar?” He spoke slowly, mouthing the sounds. “Ta-mar. You say it.” He pointed to her.
“Teye-mahr.” She smiled again, not quite so frightened.
“Very good! You'd speak Arabic, I suppose, but I've got a few books here, and if I can dig up a more obscure language for you, we'll use it—too many people know Arabic. I wish that you could tell me,” he hesitated, “where you really come from. Or when you come from. Because that's what I've been thinking. That's crazy, isn't it?”
She nodded, though it seemed to him she had not understood.
“You were up in space in that thing. In the ziggurat.” He laid splits of wood on the blazing kindling. “I've been thinking about that, too, and you just about had to be. How many were there in your crew?”
Sensing her incomprehension, he pointed to the dead woman, then to the living one, and held up three fingers. “This many? Three? Wait a minute.”
He found a blank page in his journal and drew the ziggurat with three stick figures beside it. “This many?” He offered her his journal and the pen.
She shook her head and pointed to her leg with her free hand.
“Yes, of course. You'll need both hands.”
He cleaned her wound as thoroughly as he could with Q-Tips and the steaming snow-water, and contrived a dressing from a clean undershirt and the remaining tape. “Now we've got to get the bullet out. I think we ought to for your sake anyway—it will have carried cloth into the wound, maybe even tissue from the other woman.”
Breaking the plastic of a disposable razor furnished him with a small but extremely sharp blade. “I'd planned to use the pen blade of my jackknife,” he explained as he helped her roll over, “but this will be better.”
He cut away what remained of her trouser leg. “It's going to hurt. I wish I had something to give you.”
Two shallow incisions revealed an edge of the mushroomed carbine bullet. He fished the pliers out of the hot water with a fork, gripped the ragged lead in them, and worked the bullet free. Rather to his surprise, she bit her pillow and did not cry out.
“Here it is.” He held the bullet where she could see it. “It went through your friend's breastbone, and I think it must have gotten her heart. Then it was deflected downward, most likely by a rib, and hit you. If it hadn't been deflected, it might have missed you altogether. Or killed you. Lie still, please.” He put his hand on her back and felt her shrink from his touch. “I want to mop away the blood and look at that with the flashlight. If this fragmented at all, it didn't fragment much. But if it did, we want to get all of the pieces out, and anything else that doesn't belong.” Unable to stop himself, he added, “You're afraid, aren't you? All of you were. Afraid of me, and of Brook too. Probably afraid of all males.”
He found fibers in the wound that had probably come from her trousers and extracted them one by one, tore strips from a second undershirt, and tied a folded pad made of what remained of it to the new wound at the back of her thigh. “This is what we had to do before they had tape,” he confided as he tightened the last knot. “Wind cloth around the wounded leg or whatever it was. That's why we call them wounds. If you were wounded, you got bandages wound around you—all right, you can turn back over now.” He helped her.
The flames were leaping high in the fieldstone fireplace. He took the metal fragments out of his shirt pocket and showed them to her, then pointed toward it.
She shook her head emphatically.
“Do you mean they won't burn, or they will?” He grinned. “I think you mean they will. Let's see.”
He tossed the smallest sliver from the ladder into the fire. After a second or two, there was a burst of brilliant light and puff of white smoke. “Magnesium. I thought so.”
He moved his chair next to the bunk in which she lay and sat down. “Magnesium's strong and very light, but it burns. They use it in flashbulbs. Your ziggurat, your lander or space station or whatever it is, will burn with a flame hot enough to destroy just about anything, and I'm going to burn it tomorrow morning. It's a terrible waste and I hate to do it, but that's what I'm going to do. You don't understand any of this, do you, Tamar?” He got his journal and drew fire and smoke coming from the ziggurat.
She studied the drawing, her face thoughtful, then nodded.
“I'm glad you didn't throw a fit about that,” he told her. “I was afraid you would, but maybe you were under orders not to disturb things back here any more than you could help.”
When she did not react to that, he took another leaf bag from under the sink; to his satisfaction, it was large enough to contain the dead woman. “I had to do that before she got stiff,” he explained to the living one. “She'll stiffen up in an hour or so. It's probably better if we don't have to look at her, anyway.”
Tamar made a quick gesture he did not comprehend, folded her hands, and shut her eyes.
“Tomorrow, before the storm lets up, I'm going to drag her back to your space station and burn it.” He was talking mostly for his own benefit, to clarify his thoughts. “That's probably a crime, but it's what I'm going to do. You do what you've got to.” He picked up the Sako carbine. “I'm going to clean this and leave it in the other cabin on the way, and throw away the bullet. As far as the sheriff's concerned, my gun shot us both by accident. If I have to, I'll say you bit my face while I was tending your wound. But I won't be able to shave there anyhow, and by the time they get here my beard may cover it.”
She motioned toward his journal and pen, and when he gave them to her produced a creditable sketch of the third woman.
“Gone,” he said. “She's dead too. I'd stuck my thumbs in her eyes—she tried to kill me—and she ran. She must have fallen through the hole in the floor. The water down there was pretty shallow, so she would've hit hard. I think she drowned.”
Tamar pointed to the leaf bag that held the dead woman, then sketched her with equal facility, finishing by crossing out the sketch.
Emery crossed out the women in the ziggurat as well, and returned the journal and the pen to Tamar. “You'll have to live the rest of your life here, I'm afraid, unless they send somebody for you. I don't expect you to like it—not many of us do—but you'll have to do the best you c
an, just like the rest of us.”
Suddenly excited, she pointed to the tiny face of the lion on his pen and hummed, waving the pen like a conductor's baton. It took him a minute or more to identify the tune.
It was “God Save the Queen.”
Later, when she was asleep, he telephoned an experimental physicist. “David,” he asked softly, “do you remember your old boss? Emery Bainbridge?”
David did.
“I've got something here I want to tell you about, David. First, though, I've got to say I can't tell you where I got it. That's confidential—top secret. You've got to accept that. I won't ever be able to tell you. Okay?”
It was.
“This thing is a little dish. It looks almost like an ashtray.” There was a penny in the clutter on the table; he picked it up. “I'm going to drop a penny into it. Listen.”
The penny fell with a clink.
“After a while, that penny will disappear, David. Right now it looks just a little misted, like it had been outside in the cold, and there was condensation on it.”
Emery moved the dish closer to the kerosene lantern. “Now the penny is starting to look sort of silvery. I think most of the copper's gone, and what I'm seeing is the zinc underneath. You can barely make out Lincoln's face.”
David spoke.
“I've tried that. Even if you hold the dish upside down and shake it, the penny—or whatever it is—won't fall out, and I'm not about to reach in and try to pull it out.”
The crackling voice in the receiver sounded louder than Emery's own.
“I wish you could, David. It's not much bigger than the end of a pencil now, and shrinking quickly. Hold on—
“There. It's gone. I think the dish must boil off atoms or molecules by some cold process. That's the only explanation I've come up with. I suppose we could check that by analyzing samples of air above it, but I don't have the equipment here.
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